I Cried to Dream Again

Caliban is not so readily evoked because of his low, feral nature, or to his pretensions as a would-be rapist. Characters such as these are common enough, a major motif without whom literature would barely exist. A part of the fabric, without which the tartan would have no plaid.

No. Caliban is brought to mind so readily because he was ugly, and it is this singular deviation from physical form that so ensures his longevity.

But was he a monster? Because if Caliban was a monster, then I, by definition, am the greatest monster of them all.

If all my wishes were engravings, if the words of them were carved in stone, they would graffiti the Rockies, the Carpathians, the Alps, and the Himalayas. But my first wish, my first cursive grooves into the looming limestone, would be that they had not closed down the freak shows.

I doubt you were expecting that last remark. What reasonable person could imagine such a thing, let alone express it in words? What internalised monster would enjoy such a spectacle in this modern age? This exploitation of life’s unwilling unfortunates for such mawkish financial imperatives?

But you are not a freak, are you. And so you stride along the righteous road, whistling your tunes, not caring to see who, or what, lies by the wayside. Virtue, it appears to you, must exact its own punishments in order to attain the higher ground. The dwarfs must return to their Wendy houses, isn’t that so?

You will think me cruel, but I assure you I am not. It takes courage to face this world when God has so ill-equipped you for the journey.

I fondly imagine myself in the caravans of a travelling show, observing the rolling scenery as we camp from place to place. To observe the realities of geography with my own eyes, and not vicariously through the two-dimensional, windless, odourless panorama of my flat-screen.

I would be the monster-in-chief, of course. The main draw, the Grand Poobah of the parade. People would have to pass the line of bearded ladies, the fat ladies, the conjoined twins, the multi-limbed and those without. The elastic men, the Tom Thumbs, the quadrupeds, the whole twisted and contorted gamut of outrageous spectacle, before they came to me with their handkerchiefs over their delicate nostrils, for I am told I come with an odour.

You think that sounds dreadful? Quite appalling? Of course, you would never dream of it, of parting with your money to look upon the likes of me. And yet what have you really done?

Let me tell you what you have done.

You have deprived me of my tribe. You have left me without kith, without companionship. You have consigned me to the dark.

You will never understand that, because God forbid that you should ever be me.

When I dream, which is rarely, I am always a normal man. It is not some treasured memory of the past, but my own brain, struggling as it is beneath the sheer weight of my skull, which has not received the memo. It is not aware of that single aberration of DNA, this minute tweak, this dropped stitch, this air bubble in the machine, this tiny, tiny thing that has made such a grandiose monster of me - and so in its infinite kindness, it follows the blueprint of my generations: of the tall, handsome people who sired me. The culmination of millennia that will not be entirely erased by a simple design fault.

It won’t surprise you to know that one of my wishes, engraved upon those majestic ranges, would be that I could dream more. Those unconscious hours, those rare moments of deep sleep, are the happiest moments of my life.

To wake from them, my unhappiest.

You must surely think that my first wish would be to change what I am, but I can no more imagine myself as someone else than you yourself could. Beyond that, wishes are pertinent to those who make them, and if it were not me, then it must be some other innocent whose soul is plucked for torture.

I could not countenace it.

There is no cure for what ails me. There are no preventative measures my parents could have taken to avoid having me. It is not hereditary. There is no forewarning. The mutation is nothing more than a mindless and random act of molecular violence. I am one in a million, it is said.

But I am much rarer than that. The world would not accommodate one in a million of me.

I was perfectly normal when I was born, a much anticipated baby boy. I am in possession of several photographs taken during those carefree days, my parents healthy and smiling, holding me tenderly, gazing at my face, marvelling at my perfection. At my perfect digits.

Six months later, when the tumours began to grow, they left me beneath a pier in a Moses basket. They must have known they would be prosecuted for child abandonment, but I suppose they figured it was better to do a little time for that than to spend any further time with me. And I also suspect that they salved their conscience by leaving me to fate. That I might either be found or pulled into the rolling waves was a choice they left entirely to God. Smart move.

I am the Elephant Man. I am even more grotesque than he. In essence, my cells do not behave in the time-honoured custom of all present matter. They do not die and then disappear, but die and remain, like a revenant. New cells must settle on the corpses of the old, causing tumours and disfigurement. It is equal to a medieval chapel during the plague years, where the fresh bodies piled on top of the dead until the earth erupted beneath its unholy burden.

There is no remedy. They can cut me, excise me and bandage me, and in my younger years I allowed it, in those years when my youth afforded some sleeping sense of vanity, when I could still detect a clear blue eye and the promise of good looks beneath. But vanity, for people like me, is the cruellest of sins, the one without validation. For they can take the tumours away, but they will only return. And they made me pay for that first indignity by returning larger and more pervasive than ever before, like a spurned lover who will not relent. A stalker of the living flesh.

Parts of me are untouched, those being my buttocks and my genitals. What sad irony that, because of my misshapen hands, I cannot grasp the one feeling, sentient part of my body. They are the hands of a wet leper, calloused and missing in so many parts. My feet suffer a similar fate. I can no longer walk upon them. My spine is the perfect ’S’ shape. What little claim I have to hair is settled on rocky outcrops. It was once a tawny brown. It is now grey. I can still see, a comfort at least, but I never look upon myself beyond the inevitable reflection caught in electric light. I horrify myself, so God help the little children.

My head is so enormous I can barely sleep, so I spend my days in a blinkered haze of lethargy. I drift off to comforting voices on the television. I read avidly. I consume lives in order to satiate the animal hungers of my own.

There is no one uglier than I.

I am the alpha and the omega.

I can speak, but I am difficult to understand. I can hear, but you must be loud and eloquent. People cannot be subtitled. Not in real life. It takes a patient soul, and I believe that they are the rarest souls of all. They have made me an enormous keyboard, so that my fat, ponderous index finger can type. In this way I leave messages for my carers, who visit me three times a day in my purpose built, secluded shed. A ward of the state. A piteous creature, enslaved like Caliban but, unlike him, unfit for immortality. I was not written. I was not conceived. There is no imagination, however lively, that would bring me into being.

My carers wear face masks to ameliorate the smell of my putrescent flesh. I, of course, am immune to it. Smell is the least descriptive of the senses because it cannot be imagined. It is a uniquely first-hand experience. I lost my sense of it many years ago, but I did once dare to ask a crude ingenue, who could not disguise her revulsion for me, exactly what I smelled like. She said I smelled like an open bag of rotting food. She did not come again, not at my behest, but clearly at hers.

I rather admired her spirit.

But there is one I adore. She comes every day, unless she has leave. She is called Blessing, a name that breaks the heart and thus makes it lighter. She is Nigerian. Her cheeks are plump, her voice is throaty and lyrical. Her wide-eyed gaze does not take in the pity of me. Her wonderful lips do not turn down at the sight of me. Her nose, her perfect nose, does not quiver at the smell of me. She doesn’t wear a mask. She is a woman of earnest, Godly conviction. She, above all else, understands me to be a human being. I would have left the freak show for her. She says things like, ‘Where have you been today?’

And I shuffle out a laugh because, of course …

How I would love to go out. She wheels me into the garden, where she grows flowers and vegetables. I have provided her with an allotment, and in return, Blessing gives me everything. I love her. Truly I do. And although my own sense of smell has been corrupted, I believe that I can smell her. She smells of jasmine and sponge cake, of roasting coffee beans and clean laundry. She smells of contentment and propriety. She smells of Methodist chapels and Sunday best.

She smells of everything I have ever liked the idea of. She has a husband and three fine children. She shows me photos of them, clean, smiling, happy. And my tear ducts, hidden beneath mounds of flesh, still find their way, like the trickle that makes a canyon.

I am dying, of course. The tumours do not limit themselves to my external appearance, but form within my very veins. They form within my aorta, my gullet, my voice box, my colon, my everything. Having endured a miserable life, the process of my dying will be no immediate compensation. It will be profoundly terrifying.

And so I asked her. And she said no at once. She said that God would never allow her to take a human soul, whatever the circumstance. And I was angry with her, because in that moment, the one person I thought would understand put her faith in a profound idea, and not a profound actuality. There are times when people must act in accordance with the ground beneath their feet and not the spirit in the sky.

But she did not see it that way at all.

She told me that God would take me, and love me just as He always has. That He would cast me into a new existence, where I am unburdened, and where I might love and be loved in return. Where I might walk amongst men, and not cower in the shadows. Where I might profit in the next life from all I have learned in this.

But I have learned nothing in this life. How could I?

In the next life I would not be Caliban, but Prospero. That was not her allusion, but mine. Blessing had little time for Shakespeare.

But still I was angry with her.

I know what you’re thinking. Not all of you, but most of you.

But you would be wrong. No one chooses to be a monster. They are merely defined by their grotesqueness; the witches, the trolls, the ogres and the Calibans. Dracula bucks the trend, but he was fetid all the same. He smelled like me, of that I’m sure.

You think I did away with Blessing. You believe that my feelings of love for her are sinister. How could a monster like me love a woman like that without rank sentiment, something as twisted as my spine, something that demands acknowledgement, the ultimate vessel, the holy grail of all my spite. The ultimate symbol of it. You believe that Blessing was the victim of each unfulfilled moment of my extraordinary, pointless, hopeless existence. You believe that my love for her was romantic, because monsters are gothic, are they not? That is the prism through which you judge me.

It is what you think.

You think I have done something to Blessing because she would not do as I asked. But it was an act of cowardice to even ask her glorious soul in the first place, and I was shamed by it.

You wonder why I write this unless there is a crashing denouement. You wonder why you are wasting your time if I am not the monster you assume me to be. You are still waiting for that last line, aren’t you?

As I type this, one ponderous, malformed finger at a time, Blessing is in the garden, marvelling at her towering sweet peas. She has spoken to her husband and she has spoken to her God. It seems, after consideration, that they have reached an agreement. A concordat. I now have new growths in my throat. I will die tomorrow, if not today, and the doctors will stay away until I am dead, and of some subsequent use to them on the autopsy table.

The weight of my head, the pain of my spine, the endless marathon of agony has convinced her that her God, on this occasion, was in error. And she is prepared to forgive Him.

When she returns from the garden, she has promised me a very large rum. She says it will glow until it burns, and in the pretty glow of the burning, I shall find my peace. She tells me that the medics won’t mind it, that there is not a soul she knows who would condemn her for it. I either die now, with Blessing by my side singing her gospel, or I shall die tonight in solitude and anguish.

She is fearless.

Are you still waiting? Then I put it to you that you do not understand the nature of the beast.

There are monsters everywhere.

And none of them look like me.