The Gargoyle (17 page)

There was a snake tattooed along the full length of her right leg, in exactly the same spot where the dragon had been embroidered on her pants. It twisted around her, just the way biblical representations invariably have the snake wrapped around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Marianne Engel was facing me, and I could see the body of the snake first appear at the knee, crawling upwards and wrapping itself twice around the thigh, with its diamond head coming to rest at her pelvis, angled in towards her vagina.

Her eyes were fixed upon me. She pulled off her Beethoven shirt, though it was a struggle to get it over her hair, until she was standing in the middle of my room entirely nude, save the arrowhead necklace that dangled around her throat.

There had been moments in the burn ward that I had felt the pangs of arousal. Maddy had done her best to tease me with her lilting ass, and sometimes she even twisted her head around to check if it was having an effect. But this was the first time that I found myself fully sexually aroused. Mentally, at least; I still produced the hormones that direct blood to produce an erection, I just didn’t have anywhere into which that blood could rush. I imagined it collecting there, making my groin blush.

There was another cross, much larger than the one on the back of her neck, drawn on her stomach. It was Celtic in shape, its four arms meeting in a round joint at the center. The entire thing was enclosed in an oval, longer in height than width, covering the area from the top of her pelvic bone to the bottom of her rib cage. Three large block letters—“IHS”—were scripted directly above the oval’s upper curve.

On her left breast was a large tattoo of the Sacred Heart, bright red and encircled with a crown of thorns. The heart was engulfed in yellow flames that burned upwards, towards her shoulder.

She came to my bed, so that I might study the details of her well-inked body, and she told me to touch the name of Christ. I did, and goose pimples spread across her skin under my good hand.

She turned so that she was sitting on the edge of my bed with her back to me. Angel wings extended from her upper shoulders to her buttocks, where the pointed tips came to rest. The wings filled the entirety of her back and I could not help but lift my hand towards them. It was as if I felt I had the right to touch her skin, as if it were mine to touch. It took a moment before I realized this was not—could not be—the case, and my arm paused in midair. It hung there unsure until Marianne Engel said, without turning around: “I want you to touch me.”

So I reached the rest of the way, and I traced my fingers along the lines of her inky plumage. They were a combination of bold and intensely delicate strokes, detailed with such skill that you’d swear they were downy. Now the flesh of her back quivered, and my heart did the same.

After a few moments, she looked shyly over her shoulder. She smiled—nervously, excitedly—and I broke my fingertip contact. She got up and began putting her clothes back on. We did not speak. When she was dressed, she left the room.

There are no conclusive studies on the best time to remove casts from burn patients, as muscle atrophy inevitably complicates matters. In the end, Dr. Edwards had to go with her gut in choosing a day to remove the mechaspider from my leg.

The removal brought great glee to Sayuri, who had been itching to get me out of bed. She smacked her hands together twice with a great dramatic flourish. “Are you ready? Are you
genki
? It’s time!”

Maddy and Beth were there to help, dressed in blue gowns and big yellow gloves. They stretched out my muscles for a few minutes before pedaling my feet to lessen the stiffness in my legs. Then each nurse looped an arm behind my back to lift me into a standing position, and held me while the dizziness dispelled. Gradually, they loosened their grips until I was supporting my own weight.

For the first time since the accident, I was standing. Sayuri called out the seconds that passed with a too-loud voice—“…six…seven…eight!”—before my legs turned from uncooked to cooked spaghetti. All in a moment, blood rushed down my body as if remembering how gravity works, and gushed from my donor sites. My leg bandages blushed, embarrassed by their ineffectiveness; the moment of my swooning had arrived.

The women laid me back into the bed and cheered my efforts. When my mind calmed from its vertical lift, I saw that Dr. Edwards was standing in the doorway with a delighted smile.

Before the attempt, I would have said—in my best macho, smart-ass manner—that the results wouldn’t matter much. Standing was too stupid to be even a child’s game. If you allowed yourself to care about standing, who knew what you’d care about next? Although I didn’t want to feel good about the cheers, they sounded genuine. The women were proud of me and, against my better judgment, I was proud of myself as well.

Instead of brushing my accomplishment off, I became a grinning idiot. I thanked everyone for their help and my only regret was that Marianne Engel hadn’t been there to see it.

I expected to sleep soundly that evening, but I did not. With sleep came the nastiness.

That night I dreamt that Sayuri had stood me up and then abruptly let me go. My tumbledown body crumpled; I could feel the snake of my spine coil and twist.
YOU THINK YOU CAN STAND ON YOUR OWN?
Nan threw darts at my neutralized bulk while the nurses high-fived my failure. I looked under the skeleton bed. There were flames, a thousand candles. I wanted to reach out to extinguish them but it was as if someone had disconnected the muscles in my arms, rendering me a stringless puppet. The flames made angry smiling faces at me and their blazing cloven tongues licked the sheets on the skeleton bed, sparking them like a burning shroud. Bones crashed down around me, rattling furiously like a collapsing scaffold.

The medical staff continued laughing. One of them announced in a harsh German voice:
“Alles brennt, wenn die Flamme nur heib genug ist. Die Welt ist nichts als ein Schmelztiegel.”
Apparently in dreams, I am like Marianne Engel in real life: multilingual.
Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.

I was trapped under the bones as the shroud continued burning. The faces in the flames kept smiling their hateful smiles, their treacherous tongues licking, licking, licking.
I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I heard the whiz of arrows. I felt them hit my hands, and I felt them hit my feet.

I dreamed a long, long time of burning and when it finally ended and I awoke, the hovering effect created by the air flotation bed confused me. It took a few moments before I became certain about which side of consciousness I lay on.

I told Marianne Engel about my success in standing for eight seconds on the first day I tried, and my even greater success in standing for thirteen seconds on the second. She attempted to give proper respect to my achievements, but it was apparent that she was distracted by something.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hmm? No, no, nothing is pinching me.” She ran her fingers over the very noticeable bump, which had been growing larger by the day, on my shoulder. “What’s this?”

“It’s called tissue expansion.”

I explained that under the skin was a small silicone balloon, and every day the doctors were injecting a little more salt water into it. As the balloon inflated my skin stretched with it, just as when a person puts on weight. Eventually, the balloon would be drained and I’d be left with a flap of extra skin, which would then be transplanted from my shoulder to a recipient site on my neck.

“How fascinating. I wish I could’ve done something like that for you the first time.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She touched the bump again, and smiled. “Do you know, that growth makes me think of the boils that come with the Black Plague.”

“What?”

“I have this friend….” Her words trailed off, and she lost her thoughts in the air. For a few minutes she sat, staring into space, but rather than being still, her hands fluttered more than they did when she was flipping unlit cigarettes or touching her necklace. They looked as if they wanted to open up and release a story that she was withholding from me.

Eventually, she nodded in the direction of my bedside table. On it was the stack of psychology books that she always had made a pointed effort of not asking about. “You’re studying up on me,” she said. “Should I rent one of your porn films to understand you better?”

This—though I thought I’d not indicated it to her in any way—was something I hoped she would never do. I asked her to promise that she would never view one of my films.

“I have told you that I don’t care,” she said. “Are you ashamed?”

I assured her I wasn’t; I just didn’t want her to watch them. This was the truth, but not all of it: I didn’t want her to watch them because I didn’t want her to see what I had been, and compare it with what I had become. I didn’t want her to see my handsomeness, my smooth skin, my toned body, and then have to look upon the hideousness blotted across the bed in front of her. I realized this was unreasonable, and that of course she knew there was a time when I was unburned, but I didn’t want it to become more real to her. If she could accept me as I was, perhaps it was only because she had no point of comparison.

Marianne Engel went to my window and stared out it for a moment, before she turned and blurted, “I hate leaving you, and I wish I could always be at your bedside. I need you to understand that it’s beyond my control when I get my instructions.”

This was one of the rare instances in which I understood exactly what was going on inside her: she had a secret that she wanted to share, but knew it was the kind of secret that most people could not understand. It was vital to say it aloud, but she was worried that it would sound absurd. Like, for example, explaining that you have a snake living in your spine.

“When I’m about to work, I sleep on the stone,” Marianne Engel began, with a deep breath, “for twelve hours at least, but usually more. It’s preparation. When I lie on the stone, I can feel it. I can feel
all
of it, everything inside. It’s…warm. My body sinks into the contours and then I feel weightless, like I’m floating. I sort of—lose the ability to move. But it’s wonderful; it’s the opposite of numbness. It’s more like being so aware, so hyperaware, that I can’t move because it’s so overwhelming.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, “when you say you can feel what’s inside the stone?”

“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole. When I have enough information, I begin. My body wakes but there is no sense of time, there’s nothing but the work. Days pass before I realize that I haven’t slept and I’ve barely eaten. It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time, which has been collecting for eons and all at once has come sliding down the mountain. The gargoyles have always been in the stone but, at this precise instant, it becomes unbearable for them to remain. They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone, and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment. I’m the only one who can do it, because I understand their languages and I’m the only one who can give them the hearts necessary to begin their new lives.”