City of Lost Dreams

CHAPTER FOUR In which I discuss what I have been up to for the past four hundred years.

Si meruit mortem, quid vita in corpore languet?

Si non, morte gravi cur graviora fero?

AEqua sunt poenae and crimen pendenda bilance?

Haec non, vulneribus fortius illud erit.

Hey, if I was meant to die, wouldn’t I have kicked it by now?

Wouldn’t death be easier than some of the crap I’ve put up with?

Who came up with the idea that ‘you get what you deserve’?

I’ve gotten seriously shafted, and no mistake.

I, Elizabeth Weston, wrote those lines. Without spell-check or a compubrain that does your taxes and watches your weight and reminds you when to wipe your arse. I wrote those lines using nothing but a quill pen, a pot of ink, and a piece of vellum that I hersed, scraped, pumiced, and limed myself from a calf named Mitzi. (You think you know suffering? What about life before dishwashers? Washing machines? Tampons? Vacuum cleaners? You have no idea. No idea!)

I wrote those lines before I knew what had been done to me.

But maybe I had always known.

As I’ve said, I had received the best education possible and I could speak the languages of many countries, and the language of math, of the spheres, of biology and chemistry as it was understood then. Of course, my understanding has changed over the years, the decades, the centuries. The language of alchemy has been dismissed and discredited, then picked up in egregious form and perverted beyond recognition. Geneticists, nanobiologists—nothing new under the sun! Philippine Welser lacked the proper equipment to develop her talent, but the ideas were all there. The desires behind alchemy are still with us. In us. The union of two into one. To change one thing into another. To understand the stars, and the stars in ourselves.

I have never stopped loving God. Each year God has become more perfect in my memory, more cherished. My old quarrels with God, the pain and anger I once felt, those have long vanished. God and I are One now. I might as well hate myself as hate God.

What had been done to me was the work of man—of one man—but I did come to understand that I was chosen for special work. I’ll get to that—be patient, it’s quite delicious. Let me stress that in the meantime I have felt God’s presence even in the worst of times.

When were the worst of times?

Well, the Reign of Terror was no picnic.

What would have happened if they had taken my head in Paris, as they did Charlotte Corday’s? Would my body have simply risen from the guillotine and stood upright, decapitated, and walked through the screaming mass of people? Would I have then become a kind of monster, a headless horsewoman? Or would my head have plunked into the waiting sack, and when tossed in some hole set about quietly regenerating a body, like a starfish with a severed limb? Both extremely fascinating possibilities.

In 1794—one of the greatest years of terror in the Great Terror—I had been alive for two hundred years and had become adept at managing things. As well as a woman could in those days, which involved trickery on a scale that was exhausting.

Through much of the late seventeenth century I had stayed hidden, in convents, where a surprising amount of thinking and experimenting could be done. Indeed, a convent was a kind of early think tank for women, since it was the preferred choice of intellectuals wanting to escape marriage. The food and the accommodations were less than five star—oh, the gruel that I have known—but the clothing was convenient. And although I had some very tempting opportunities, I did not indulge in any same-sex relationships during those years. I was not banging Hildegard in Bingen. I was a very private person, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t hide my age—or rather my lack of aging—for very long. Women are particularly observant of such things—you have no idea how many times I’ve been asked what my beauty secret is. Before Botox, I had to keep moving.

I did not seek love, or even affection, beyond the sustaining memory of my Portia, and I tried to keep marriage as a last resort, for the most desperate times only. But in 1747 I seized at what seemed like a golden opportunity. Charles was a homosexual, so he had no interest in forcing himself upon me. And he was an amateur botanist, so he had lab space in his castle in northern Ireland. He assured me that I would be able to continue my work, and in return my presence would provide certain protection for him and get his mother off his back. It was ideal. I could continue my work, and I would not be touched, nor forced to bear a child that would be born damaged.

Twenty years, that time. Twenty years of being able to work without interruption. I had long given up poetry in favor of pure scientific research.

And I had abandoned the quest for my stepfather’s book. What was my stepfather capable of that I was not? Had I not been the greatest poet of my age? Had I not been chosen to actually not have an age, but for all ages to be mine? Why should I not be as great an alchemist as any of them? There had to be more than one way to Fleece a sheep.

Why could I not raise the dead?

Yes, that was my plan. To raise the dead.

A good one, yes?

I had to prepare for complications. How to make the undead stay undead, for one. Suffice it to say, I had things to learn. And experiments to carry out. And I had to be ruthless in my pursuit.

I made great strides that last year before Charles died and the accusations of murder and witchcraft ran me out of Ireland.

Earlier in the century I had trusted the wrong person in England with my money (despite the lessons of Tulip Mania the cretin still fell for the South Sea Bubble) and my finances were rocky. To complicate my situation I then . . . miscalculated during a brief stay in Scotland (Loch Ness gained one additional monster) and another hasty departure was necessary. I went to Austria, and that was where I met Franz Anton Mesmer.

Mesmer. I knew him for what he was, instantly. He was like my stepfather, Edward Kelley. Not in looks, for Mesmer had both his ears, and Kelley neither, thanks to a razor-sharp brush with the law. But like my stepfather, Mesmer was a man who had discovered something and knew that he had, but had not been able to understand the very thing he had uncovered. It was making him insane, like it had my stepfather, because their madness was so close to truth. It was the other side of the coin.

Mesmer believed that the body, like the heavens, was bound by an invisible, electric substance. And that this substance could be balanced using music. He believed in a harmonic spectrum of the body, the music of the spheres. Human beings could be tuned, but it took a Master Tuner. People thought he was a charlatan, but I immediately grasped the potential power of what he had stumbled upon. Right before the long-sought answer to a problem emerges from the tangle of my waking dreams, I often feel an intense physical vibration. I felt this in Mesmer’s presence. I felt it when I saw him cure a young girl of an infectious lung disease. Mesmer always insisted that his cures would only work on conditions of the nervous system, but I began to see the ways in which the nervous system could be brought to bear upon all injury, all disease. Even, perhaps, upon the dead.

I got Mesmer to take me on as a patient.

“Tell me of your family,” Mesmer asked, in our first interview. “You have a husband? Children?”

“I have loneliness,” I told him.

“Ah.” He nodded. “And how does this loneliness manifest itself? Headaches? Nausea? Nervousness? Fainting spells? Dizziness? Pain in your joints? Fever?”

“Regret,” I said. “It is an acid in my veins.”

Eventually I became his assistant, though he was quite paranoid and proprietorial of his methods. I learned to play his glass armonica, a series of glass plates on a spindle with a foot pedal to set them spinning. I even suggested some improvements for its design. Mesmer didn’t like that I played it so well. He accused me of sabotage, of stealing his secrets. This was a lie, though I did eventually steal his armonica. But he was long dead by that point, and it was just sitting in a museum in Vienna. Sometimes I think of him and play a little tune from “Annie Get Your Gun” on it in his honor: “Anything you can do—I can do better.” There, my dirty secret is out. I love show tunes.

Mesmer understood electricity and its role in the human body, and as I had come to see it, electricity must be the key to reanimation. (I mentioned this idea to Mary Shelley and she ran with it.) I learned a great deal from Mesmer before he was driven out of Vienna.

I went to France, too, but I felt I had milked the Mesmer cow dry and turned my mind in other directions. I had been in correspondence with Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze, wife and laboratory assistant of Antoine Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist. A smashing good paille-maille player, Marie was—the game that took the world by storm as “croquet.” The Serena Williams of her age. We passed many a happy hour. I helped her translate English documents to French, and vice versa, and worked with Lavoisier on the element nitrogen, even suggesting to him the name for it—“azote” or “lifeless” in Greek. Then came the Terror, and Lavoisier’s death. I went to Denmark.

The days, years, decades marched on. I moved from place to place, creating identities and then burning them as people began asking too many questions. I set up laboratories or worked in the laboratories of others. Mostly, of course, I had to work on animals. But opportunities did arise.

I made some important breakthroughs during World War II.

More decades passed. Science made huge leaps forward, and so did I. It became easier to work as a woman alone, to order the necessary equipment. I reached out to other women scientists from all nations and fields of knowledge—history, philosophy, astronomy, genetics, physics. I began to see possibilities beyond what I had imagined before. I do believe I have come full circle.

For this last stage it became necessary to employ an assistant for a specific task that I could not do myself. I went through a couple of interns before I got to Harriet, who has many qualities that make her particularly fit for the task and who has more or less kept it together throughout our association. I do not consider her addiction to be entirely my fault. Her mother is evidently quite the souse. These things are hereditary. been a great help to me and is a brilliant mind in her own right.

I do hope her novel is successful. It will be lovely to see my early work in the literary arts restored to fame. Perhaps some heartsick teen will sing one of my poems on YouTube and I will go viral.

But, darlings, trust me. You ain’t seen nothing yet.