Vyvyan liked the couch. It wasn't long enough for him to lie on without placing the soles of his galoshes on the rug and crooking his knees upward, but this strange posture didn't seem to annoy or cramp him. And getting his head below mine did reduce my unease.
"The burn mask," I said.
He slipped it off. Sitting behind him, I could see only a dense curtain of greasy hair, its blackness like record vinyl and the veins of frost within it like scratches. The head was a phrenologist's wet dream, an oblate globe of bumps and declivities and ridges.
"I should look at you. Otherwise, your gesture means nothing."
"No. Refrain. It was no accident that you sat behind me. Begin you now my therapy. We have a tortuous path to traverse."
I let him have his way. Frankenstein in hand, I began asking questions, and we devoted the session to a detailed reconstruction of Vyvyan's life from the last paragraph of the "novel" to his arrival in Atlanta in the early 1970s and his employment by CargoCo Unlimited in May, 1975. A century and a half in hibernation, in an ice cave on the shore of a Norwegian island within the Arctic Circle, account for the greatest span of this time. Then, a lightning storm awoke him. I could recount his alleged post-hibernation travels, including episodes in the American Northwest when startled trappers or wildlife photographers mistook him for a bigfoot, or his harrowing adventures in the Sun Belt states, where concealment was even harder--but all that he said simply reinforced the Frankenstein delusion.
"Vyvyan, your story suggests that you've bought into a myth that negates your personhood. It relieves you of the need to take charge of your own life."
"Is the hour allotted to my therapy nearly spent?"
I checked my watch. "Yeah, I'm afraid it is."
"Do you ready yourself, then, to behold the visage that descends from and mercilessly drives this 'myth'!"
Vyvyan reared up from the couch. Straddling it backward in an awkward stoop, he looked straight down into my eyes. I gaped. His eyes I'd already seen, but his naked face was a horror. His flesh was tissue-thin. The muscles, veins, ligaments, and bones under it shone through the mottled tissue like props behind a theater scrim. They all seemed to be ceaselessly moving. Equally alarming, Vyvyan's complexion was hideously pied. His chin was the color of uncooked liver. His lips were a moist black; his cheeks either a dull gray or the pale, pebbly yellow of chicken flesh. It was a face seemingly assembled from transparent lumps of feces-toned, blood-perfused, and fat-slimed Play-Doh. One Victor Frankenstein had conducted an insane scavenger hunt to find the needed parts. Vyvyan's head, presumably like the remainder of his body, was the three-dimensional anatomical equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle; a biological hodgepodge.
I made a bleak noise and glanced away.
"I am the very wretch whom I do swear to be. Do you believe me? Do you acknowledge aught that I have told you?"
"Yes," I said, eyes averted: the only word I could get out.
)
