Читать книгу The Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson - Страница 7
ОглавлениеLet me begin with a description of her hair—because, really, it would be impossible to start with anything else. Her hair was like Tartarean vines that grow in the night, reaching up from a place so dark that the sun is only a rumor. It spread wildly everywhere, dark curls so cascadingly alluring that they looked as if they would swallow your hand if you were lucky enough to run your fingers through them. Her hair was so outlandish that even now, years later, I am compelled to create these ridiculous metaphors, which I know I’ll regret in the morning.
Her eyes, also, are going to force me to embarrass myself. They burned like the green hearts of jealous lovers who accuse each other at midnight. No, I’m wrong, they were not green: they were blue. Ocean waves tossed around her irises, like an unexpected storm ready to steal a sailor from his wife. No, wait … maybe her eyes were green: mood eyes, perhaps, like the bejeweled rings that purportedly change color according to one’s frame of mind.
She appeared in the burn ward door dressed in a light green hospital gown, with those unsolvable eyes and that riotously entangled hair, and I waited for the gasp that inevitably came whenever someone saw me for the first time. I waited for her to cover her mouth with her hand, in shock and dismay. She disappointed me by only smiling.
“You’ve been burned. Again.”
Generally I make it a rule not to respond to bizarre proclamations by strangers, but, honestly, in this case my silence was because I didn’t want her to hear my broken toilet of a voice. My throat was healing, but my ear (the one that still worked) was not yet used to the corrupted quality. I wanted her to know only the voice I had had before, the one that could talk a woman into bed.
In the face of my silence, she spoke again. “This is the third time you’ve been burned.”
I steeled my courage and corrected her. “Once.”
A look of confusion crossed her face. “Maybe you’re not you.”
She moved towards my bed, her eyes never breaking contact with mine, and drew shut the thick plastic curtains around us so that our privacy was assured. She leaned in, within inches of my face, studying me. Nobody had ever looked at me like this, not before the burn and certainly not since. Her eyes, dancing between the blue and the green, had dark bags underneath them, as though she had not slept in weeks. When her lips were almost touching mine, she whispered a word. “Engelthal.”
No doubt, reader, you have at some point in your life been face-to-face with an insane person. You can sense the madness immediately, usually even before the person says anything at all, but this nonsensical word clinched it for me. Meeting lunatics is not really that notable, as the world abounds with them; what interested me more was my reaction. Usually upon such a meeting, you only want to get away. If you’re walking on the street you avert your eyes and quicken your step, but in the burn ward the only recourse I had was to ring the nurse’s call button. But I did not do this. My only response to this possibly dangerous situation was nonresponse. So who was less rational, the wild-haired woman or me?
She took a step back. “You don’t remember.”
“No.” Whatever she thought I should be remembering, clearly I was not.
“That will make it more interesting,” she said. “Are you aware that they’re trying to poison my hearts?”
“No,” I answered again, but I was interested in where such a comment might lead. “Are they?”
“Yes. I can’t let them, because I have my penance to complete.” She looked around, as if she were worried about being overheard. “How were you burned this time?”
I could form a number of short sentences in a row, as long as I remembered to pause and breathe, so I told her a few quick details about my accident—when, where, how long ago. Then I asked her name.
“You know my name.” She kept reaching to her chest as if she were expecting to find something there, which was obviously miss ing. Her movements reminded me of the way I had always stroked my birth-scar.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“They took away my necklace. They said it could be used to harm someone,” she answered. “A young girl died here recently.”
I thought about Thérèse. “How did you know?”
“Oh, I know some things about the dead”—she laughed—“but I suppose we’re lucky.”
“How so?”
“We’ve outlived a seven-year-old. We’ve outlived her a hundred-fold.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have a dog named Bougatsa.” Her fingers, now hanging at her sides, were twitching. “He’ll like you.”
“I don’t like dogs.”
“You will.”
“They don’t like me.”
“Oh. Because you’re so tough and mean, right?”
Was she really mocking a burn victim?
“What does the name mean?” I asked. “Bougatsa?”
“It’s filling in Greek pastry, and my dog’s exactly that color. Maybe I could bring him for a visit.”
“Dogs aren’t allowed here.” Breath. “Even flowers can kill me.”
“Ha! Don’t try to sell me for dumb. You know you’ve worse things to fear than a dog.” She placed her hand lightly upon my chest, with gentleness. I shivered, not only at the touch but also at the gleam in her eye. “You’re sorely tempted to kill yourself and I can’t say that I blame you. But there is a time and a place for such things, and this is not it.”
Why would she say such a thing? I needed to change the subject. “You look good for seven hundred years old.”
“You don’t,” she said, looking down the length of my body. It was the first time that anyone had made a joke about my burns. “So, what do you think I should do with my hearts?”
“I think …” I paused momentarily, to make her think I was carefully considering the issue, when really I was preparing for the length of the next sentence. “I think you should give them to their rightful owners.”
Her eyes opened wide, as if I had inserted a key into a secret lock, and it made me wonder whether I had just pushed the wrong button on the insanity panel. But, just as quickly, her elated look was replaced by one of suspicion. She moved to one corner of my bed, where she intoned something in another language. “Jube, Domine benedicere.” Latin? A short conversation followed, with her talking into the thin air, in a language that I couldn’t understand, waiting for responses I couldn’t hear. After the first imaginary conversation was completed, she bowed deeply and walked to a second corner of the bed to repeat the performance. And then, a third corner. She concluded each conversation the same way she started it—“Jube, Domine benedicere”—and she returned to her original position, with the look of suspicion gone.
“My Three Masters confirmed that it really is you. It is for you that I’ve been perfecting my final heart.”
The very act of saying this clearly caused great emotion to well up inside of her. She looked on the verge of tears as she said, “I’ve been waiting such a long time.”
Just then Beth drew open the curtains. She seemed shocked to find that I had a visitor after so many weeks without, but her surprise quickly turned to concern when she noted the gleam of insane happiness in the woman’s eyes. Then Beth registered that while my visitor was clad in a gown, it wasn’t the visitor’s shade of green but the lighter shade of a patient, and that she had the color-coded bracelet that indicated a psychiatric patient. Beth, professional as always, did not engage my visitor directly but refused to leave me alone with her. She called an orderly immediately to “escort” the woman back to the psych ward.
I felt that I had nothing to fear and, in fact, that it was nice to have a little wildness injected into an atmosphere so oppressively sterile. In the few minutes before the orderly arrived, the woman and I continued talking, calmly, while Beth stood in a far corner with a watchful eye. My visitor whispered so that she would not be overheard. “We have a common acquaintance.”
“I doubt that.”
“You only saw her once, in a crowd. She can’t speak,” she said, leaning in closer, “but she gave you a clue.”
“A clue?”
“‘Haven’t you ever wondered where your scar really came from?’” My visitor reached up to her chest and I thought that she was going to point to the spot where my scar was on my body, but she was only reaching in vain for her missing necklace.
How could this woman guess precisely the words of the note that had been passed to me at the air show? Still, I am a rational man—this was a strange coincidence, nothing more. To prove it, I tried a little misdirection: “My entire body is a scar.”
“Not your burns. The scar that you were born with, the one over your heart.”
At this very moment, the orderly arrived and began the process of cajoling the woman to leave. Beth helped, using her body to deflect my visitor towards the door.
My voice was not yet strong but I raised it as much as I could. “How did you know?”
The woman turned back towards me, ignoring the arms pulling at her elbows. “The problem with people like us is that we don’t die properly.”
With that, the orderly took her from the room.
♦ ♦ ♦
There is a logical explanation for everything; therefore, there was a logical explanation for the woman’s knowledge of my scar.
First explanation: lucky guess.
Second explanation: a joke was being played on me by a friend, someone who thought it would be funny to send in an actress playing a psychotic woman with intimate knowledge of my life. The problems with this hypothesis were that I’d never told any of my friends about the Asian woman at the airfield, and that I no longer had any friends left to play tricks on me.
Third explanation: this woman liked my pornographic films and knew about the scar on my chest. It was a well-documented celluloid fact, as I’d never bothered with makeup to cover it. (Too much sweat in my genre.) Except that I was registered in the hospital not under my porn name but under my real one, and given the way I looked it would have been impossible to recognize me as the man I once had been.
Final explanation: this woman loved my pornographic films and was a stalker who had tracked down my now-defunct production company. Someone, probably my bastard lawyer, had informed her of my accident and pointed her in the direction of the burn ward.
But if she was an obsessed fan, why didn’t she mention my former career? And if she had come looking for the actor that she’d seen, how could she have seemed so pleased to meet the new me? And, finally, while much about the woman’s behavior was odd, there was certainly nothing to suggest a hardcore porn addiction. Trust me, I’ve seen enough perverts in my life to pick them out of any crowd.
I supposed I would just have to ask her when she came again, because somehow I knew that she would. When I informed my nurses that I would welcome any future visits from the woman in the psychiatric ward, they all smiled strangely at me. How sad, they must have thought, that I looked forward to visits from a madwoman. But this did not deter me, and I even asked Beth to find out the woman’s name. She refused to do any such thing, so I asked Connie. She also said it was against hospital policy to divulge the specifics of another patient. To this, I suggested that it would be “very, very mean” if Connie did not help me learn the name of the only person who had visited me in so long. As she wanted more than anything else to be kind, Connie soon came back with the information I’d requested.
The woman’s name was Marianne Engel.
♦ ♦ ♦
I was taller before the accident. The fire contracted me like beef jerky during the curing process. I had once been as lean and adorable as a third-century Greek boy, with buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt, my stomach was divided into symmetrical pads, and my arms were sleekly muscular. But it was my face that was my coat-of-arms. I had cheekbones that would have been at home in Verlaine’s wet dreams. My eyes were dark and deep enough for a small spelunking club to make a day expedition of them. A gay man once told me how much he yearned to let the plum of his penis rest softly upon my bottom lip. I laughed at him but secretly regarded it as a wonderful compliment.
Since my accident, I’ve tried to lose my vanity, but I still struggle with it. I remember the past, when my face was perfect, and when the wind would lift my hair so that it looked like the soft under-feathers of a bird’s wing. I remember when women turned on the streets to smile at me, wondering what it might be like to own my beauty for even one shining moment.
If you accept the description of the beast that I am now, you should also accept the description of the beauty that I was. And since meeting Marianne Engel, I had felt that loss—especially at the empty juncture between my legs—all the more acutely.
♦ ♦ ♦
She again graced my doorway about ten days later, dressed in a cloak that appeared to be of the finest medieval cut. This is not me having a little fun at your expense; she really was wearing just such a thing. The hood hung over her face and her eyes shone like aquamarine in a mine. She drew a finger to her lips, warning me to be quiet, and moved to my bedside stealthily. I wanted to laugh but I could tell that this, for her, was serious business. As soon as she was at my side, she pulled shut the curtains so that we might, again, have our privacy. She needn’t have worried, because at that time there were only two other patients in the ward and one was out of the room for rehabilitation exercises and the other was snoring.
Behind the plastic barrier, she felt safe to pull back her hood—just a bit, not all the way off—and I could see that the bags had disappeared from under her eyes. She looked much sharper than she had during our first meeting, and there was the strong smell of tobacco upon her. I wondered if she’d actually been able to sneak by the nurses, or if they’d simply let her pass. By the fact she was again without the proper visitor’s gown, I suspected she had entered without their knowledge. She kept her hands at the corners of her hood, as if ready to draw it back up over her head at a moment’s notice.
“I don’t want them to know that I’m here.”
“The doctors?”
Marianne Engel nodded. I told her that she didn’t have much to fear, that they were good people.
“You don’t know much about doctors.” She reached inside her neckline and pulled out a leather strand with an arrowhead dangling from it. “Look, I got my necklace back.” She lifted it up over her head and held it out, above my chest, so that the arrowhead hung like a magical amulet dowsing for my heart. “May I?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but nodded anyway.
Marianne Engel lowered her hand, slackening the leather so that the arrowhead came to rest on my chest. “How does it feel?”
“Like it belongs there.”
“It does.”
“How did you know about the scar on my chest?”
“Don’t rush. Explaining things like that takes time.” She lifted her necklace from my chest and returned it to her own. “For now, may I tell you a story about a dragon?”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Once upon a time, there was a dragon named La Gargouille who lived in France, close to the River Seine. La Gargouille was a quite ordinary dragon with green scales, a long neck, sharp claws, and little wings that couldn’t possibly support flight but did anyway. Like most dragons, he could breathe fire, spout gallons of water, and rip up large trees with his talons.
“The residents of the nearby town, Rouen, hated the dragon and lived in fear. But what could they do? He was much more powerful than they, so each year they made a sacrifice in the hope that he’d be appeased. La Gargouille preferred virgin girls, as dragons are wont to do, but the villagers tended to offer criminals. In any case, people were eaten, which made it a generally appalling situation.
“This continued for decades. Finally, around A.D. 600 a priest named Romanus came to the city. He’d heard about La Gargouille and wanted to try his hand at subduing the beast. If the people would build a church, Romanus offered, and if every villager agreed to be baptized, he would dispatch the dragon. The villagers, no fools, thought this was a good deal. What did they have to lose, other than the dragon?
“So Romanus went to the Seine, taking with him a bell, a Bible, a candle, and a cross. He lit the candle and placed it on the ground, then opened the Bible before calling out to La Gargouille. The beast emerged from his cave with no real concern; he was a dragon, after all, so what did he have to fear from a mere human? If anything, such a visitor was nothing more than fresh meat.
“As soon as the dragon appeared, Romanus rang the bell—as if announcing a death—and began to read aloud the words of the Lord.
“The dragon snorted little puffs of smoke when he heard the sound, as if it amused him, until he realized that he could not have exhaled fire if he had wanted. There was a pain in his lungs which, after a few more moments, began to feel deflated and drained of breath.
“Realizing that he could not dispatch the priest with a burst of fire, La Gargouille lunged towards the man. Romanus lifted the cross and held it staunchly in front of the beast, which found it could go no further, as if an invisible hand were pushing it back. No matter which way the creature turned, the priest mirrored the action, and La Gargouille could move no closer to his tormentor. Cross in one hand and Bible in the other, Romanus continued to read with simple faith; each verse was like an arrow under the dragon’s scales, and each chapter like a lance in its side.
“La Gargouille had never experienced anything like this in all its years, and began a retreat. It looked from side to side but Romanus used the cross to drive the beast directly back. Once the dragon was trapped inside its cave, the priest continued with unrelenting verse until the creature slumped defeated to its knees. The concluding act was when Romanus closed the Bible and blew out the candle; the ceremony was complete and the beast made docile.
“With no fight left in it, La Gargouille bowed its head and allowed Romanus to slip his vestments over its neck. The priest then used his cross to twist this leash tightly shut, and lead the defeated dragon back into town.
“The only way to kill a dragon is to burn it at the stake, everyone knew, and so this was done. La Gargouille cried in agony but to the villagers it sounded like sweet music. The shrieking continued until the very end because La Gargouille’s head and neck wouldn’t burn—the dragon’s ability to breathe fire had tempered these areas against heat. But eventually the beast did die, and the villagers were freed from their great curse.
“The townspeople were honorable and fulfilled their end of the bargain. Each and every one submitted to baptism, and they built the church. La Gargouille’s unburned head was mounted upon it and, for centuries to come, served as the original model for chimeras and gargoyles.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Marianne Engel became completely involved in telling the story, allowing me the opportunity to observe her a little more closely. Her eyes, on this day blue, stopped darting around looking for doctors. She stared so intently, so directly, at me that it made me feel bashful. It was sensual and unnerving.
She was not what anyone would call a classical beauty. Her teeth were perhaps a little too small for her mouth, but I’ve always found microdontia rather sexy. I suppose her eyebrows might be too bushy for some men but, to be frank, those men are idiots. The only acceptable point of contention would be her nose, which was not too large, mind you, but certainly not delicate. A small bump on the bridge indicated that there had been a break at one time, but I thought it gave her character. A case could be made that her nostrils were slightly too flared, but any reasonable judge would have thrown that case out of court.
Her skin was pale, as if she did not get out in the sun often. She seemed closer to thin than fat, although her cloak made it difficult to imagine the dimensions of her curves. She was taller than most women, but not tall enough to push at the outer edges that defined the norm. Agreeably tall, one might say. How old was she? Hard to say, exactly, but she looked in her late thirties.
Long after she stopped talking, I realized that I was still staring at her and she was smiling back, not offended but pleased. I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “Did you make that up?”
“No, it’s an old legend.” She laughed. “I have no ability for making up stories, but I do know history. For example, did you know Jeanne d’Arc was burned at Rouen and her ashes thrown into the Seine?”
“I didn’t, no.”
“It pleases me to think that her body is still part of the water.”
We talked more, about a number of things. Then Dr. Edwards, whose footsteps I recognized, entered the room on her regular rounds and pulled open the curtain.
“Oh!” she said, surprised to find a visitor. “Is this a bad time?”
Marianne Engel pulled her hood into place and bolted, almost becoming tangled in the plastic curtain as she pushed her way past Dr. Edwards. On her way out, she looked back at me and implored, “Don’t tell!”
♦ ♦ ♦
In the days that followed Marianne Engel’s visit, Nan began using an electric dermatome to harvest my own good skin and relocate it to the damaged areas. She told me that this was a step forward in my treatment, but it didn’t feel like one. The good skin still had working nerves, so each harvest literally ripped the covering from my body, leaving behind sites that were open wounds. It took about two weeks for each donor area to replenish itself before the procedure could be repeated. I was growing new skin only to have it removed again; I was a dermis farm, and the dermatome was the threshing machine.
After each harvest, I was smothered with creams and wrapped in loose bandages. A few days later, one of the nurses, usually Beth, would do the first dressing change after the procedure. Nan would stand off to the side checking the percentage of the graft that had adhered—the “take”—and a rough estimate was used to gauge whether the procedure was a success or failure. A take of eighty-five percent was good; anything below this would cause Nan to make a clicking sound with her tongue. Less than sixty percent meant she needed to perform another patch job.
Even when the skin did take, the absence of oil glands in the transplanted tissue resulted in extreme dryness. “Ants beneath the skin” is not only too clichéd a description of how it felt, but also not graphic enough. Lumberjack termites brandishing little chainsaws, maybe; or fiddler crabs wearing hairshirts and fiberglass shoes; or a legion of baby rats dragging tiny barbed-wire plows. Tap-dancing, subepidermal cockroaches wearing soccer cleats and cowboy spurs? Perhaps.
♦ ♦ ♦
I waited days for Marianne Engel to reappear.
I thought about her too much, and thinking stole time that could otherwise have been allotted to fearing débridement or formulating suicide plans. When my stomach started to ache, I wondered if I was actually missing her, this woman I barely knew. Was this longing? I honestly didn’t know, as the only times I’d ever felt anything like this were when the town’s cocaine pipeline had run dry.
As it turned out, the sensation in my stomach was not longing. My nervous intestines soon flamenco-danced themselves into sizzling pain. My bowels became chili pepper hot and there were snapping castanets in my anus. Nan poked at my abdomen and asked whether it hurt. I told her it was the site of the goddamned Spanish Civil War. Soon other doctors popped up in my room, in white-frocked rows that made me think of Flanders Fields. They performed scans, they took X rays, and they murmured things like “Interesting” and “Hmmm.” (No matter how interesting something actually is, a doctor should never, ever, say “Interesting” or “Hmmm” in front of a patient.) Soon enough, this murmuration of physicians determined that I had severe pancreatitis, which had caused much of the tissue in my pancreas to die.
Pancreatic necrosis comes in two types: sterile or infected. Mine was infected. Without immediate surgery, there was a good chance that I would not survive. So the doctors told me that I had little choice but to lose, as quickly as possible, a man-sized portion of my pancreas. Why not, I shrugged. Within five hours of my diagnosis, I was wheeled into an operating room, where the anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from ten. I made it only to six.
Burn patients cannot use regular anesthesia and what we are given instead—ketamine anesthesia—often causes delusions. For once, I had a most pleasing hallucination, an unexpected bonus in an otherwise woeful experience. I was looking over the ocean, a lovely English woman at my side, and what could be better for a burn victim than a dream of water?
♦ ♦ ♦
I awoke to learn that half my pancreas had been removed. For good measure, the surgeon also took out a handful of nearby intestinal tissue that had also been damaged. I guess he decided that since he was in there already, he might as well grab everything he could. Piece by piece, I was becoming medical waste. Who knows, maybe someday the doctors will strip-mine me into complete nothingness.
Marianne Engel was in a chair in the corner of my room, reading, wearing something drab. After a few moments of my eyes adjusting, I could see that it was a visitor’s gown. When she realized I was awake, she came towards me, the cover of her book proclaiming Non Omnis Moriar.
“Why are you here?” I was hoping for an answer that would stroke my considerable ego.
“I came to see your suffering.”
“What?”
“I envy it.”
Forget her mental illness: it’s impossible for a burn victim to abide a person who says that she envies his suffering. I fought through my anesthetic fog to mount as angry an attack as I could muster. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was not pleasant.
When she understood how her words had offended me, she tried to explain. “I envy all suffering, because suffering is necessary to become spiritually beautiful. It brings one closer to Christ. Those who suffer are the elect of God.”
“So why don’t you set yourself on fire,” I spat, “and see how beautiful you become?”
“I am far too weak,” she answered, not seeming to register my sarcasm. “I’m afraid not only of the flames, but of dying before my suffering becomes complete.”
The braindope pulled me back into the darkness. I was glad to be removed from this conversation.
♦ ♦ ♦
The exact nature of Marianne Engel’s illness was still unclear but when she suggested that “those who suffer are the elect of God,” my best guess became schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics often have a particularly difficult time with religion, and some doctors suggest this relates to the age of onset: the condition most commonly develops between seventeen and twenty-five, a period when many people are first confronting their religious beliefs. Schizophrenics often have intense periods of heightened awareness—or outright delusions, such as auditory hallucinations—that can lead them to believe they’ve been specifically chosen by God. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that they often have trouble understanding that the symbolism of religion is metaphoric.
Christianity is based upon the idea that Jesus died for the sins of all mankind: to redeem us, Christ was tortured and nailed to a cross. A schizophrenic, attempting to understand the story, might reason thus: Jesus is the beloved Son of God, and Jesus endured incredible suffering, so those who endure the most pain are God’s most beloved.
There is a long tradition of devout believers who feel that suffering brings one closer to the Savior, but a human face is always better than a general theory. For this reason, allow me to present the life of one Heinrich Seuse, German religious mystic. Born in 1295, Seuse would become one of the most important religious figures of the time, known as the Minnesänger—the “singer of courtly love”—because of the poetic quality of his writings.
Seuse entered the Dominican house in Konstanz at age thirteen and, by his own account, was completely unexceptional for the first five years of his religious life. At eighteen, however, he experienced a sudden illumination—a feeling of heavenly delight so intense he was unsure whether his soul was separated from his body. He considered this event so important that it was with this that he begins his life story, The Life of the Servant.
Some scholars claim that The Life of the Servant is the first autobiography in the German language, while others argue it’s not an autobiography at all. Much of the actual writing appears to have been done by Elsbeth Stagel, a young woman from the convent of Töss, who was the most favored of Seuse’s spiritual daughters. She apparently documented many of their conversations to use as the basis of the Life without Seuse’s knowledge, and when he discovered what she’d done, he burned part of the manuscript before a “message from God” instructed him to preserve what remained. No one knows how much of the Life was written by Stagel and how much by Seuse.
The Life is a fascinating narrative, and provides wonderful details of the visions Seuse received throughout his life: God showed him representations of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and departed souls appeared to him to give updates on their afterlives. Good stuff, and terrifically dramatic! But the most striking writing in the Life is Seuse’s—or Stagel’s—descriptions of his self-inflicted tortures.
As an adherent of the belief that bodily comfort makes one spiritually weak, Seuse claimed he did not go into a heated room for twenty-five years and that he refrained from drinking water until his tongue cracked from the dryness, after which it took a full year to heal. He restricted his intake of food—eating once a day and never meat, fish, or eggs—and once had a vision in which his desire for an apple was stronger than his desire for Eternal Wisdom, so to punish himself he went two years without consuming any fruit. (One wonders whether he could not simply have recognized the moral of the story and continued to eat actual—as opposed to metaphorically forbidden—fruit.)
On his lower body, Seuse wore an undergarment that had one hundred and fifty sharpened brass nails pointed inwards, at his skin. On his upper body, he wore a hairshirt with an iron chain, and under that a wooden cross the size of a man’s outstretched hand and studded with thirty more brass nails. With this fastened between his shoulder blades, every movement—especially kneeling to pray—forced the nails to dig into his flesh, and later he would rub vinegar into his wounds. Seuse wore this spiked cross for eight years before God intervened in a vision, forbidding him to continue.
He wore these punishing garments even when he slept—upon an old door. When he lay down he shackled himself with rings of leather because if his hands were free, he could use them to swat away the rats that gnawed at him during the night. Sometimes he broke the restraints in his sleep, so he started wearing leather gloves covered in more sharpened brass tacks that would slice up his skin as effectively as if he’d run a cheese grater over it. Seuse kept these habits for sixteen years until another vision from God instructed him to throw these sleeping aids into a nearby river.
Rather than bring Seuse relief at being forbidden to keep punishing himself, these divine interventions bothered him greatly. When a nun asked how he was doing, Seuse replied that things were going quite badly because it had been a month since he’d known pain and he was afraid that God had forgotten him.
Such physical torments, Seuse realized, were only a beginning; they didn’t allow for a tangible sign of his great love for the Lord. To remedy this, he opened his robes one evening and used a sharpened stylus to carve the letters IHS into the flesh above his heart. (If that’s Greek to you, don’t worry: IHS is the abbreviated name of Christ in the Greek language.) Blood poured out of his ripped flesh but he claimed he barely felt the pain, such was his ecstasy. The scarified letters never vanished and he wore the wound in secret until the end of his life; it soothed him in times of struggle, he claimed, to know that the very name of Christ moved with each beat of his heart.
Seuse died in 1366 after a long life which, one can only surmise, must have seemed even longer than it actually was.
I find it interesting that Seuse had his “illumination” at age eighteen, just when schizophrenia most commonly manifests. If you were a schizophrenic, you could do worse than religious life in fourteenth-century Germany. In the Age of Mysticism, your visions would not be feared but revered. If you beat yourself senseless, you were not self-destructive but emulating Christ. If you heard voices, you had direct communication with God.
But for all this, there is one event in the life of Heinrich Seuse that I find particularly interesting, although it is something I have never been able to verify in my library research.
Marianne Engel insisted that, once upon a time, she met him.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I woke again, Marianne Engel was gone, but she had left behind a gift on the nightstand, a small stone gargoyle.
I turned the little fiend over in my hands. About six inches high, the gargoyle looked like a semi-human dumpling, cooked the color of a melancholic rain cloud. His potbelly drooped on crossed legs, his elbows were propped on his knees, and his chin rested upon three-fingered hands. His back sprouted short thick wings, presumably for show rather than flight. A blocky head was perched on his slumped shoulders like a boulder waiting to be pushed from the top of a cliff. He had enormous eyes that loomed underneath a Neanderthal brow, and a mouthful of uneven teeth. The gargoyle seemed to be trying hard to scowl, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. His expression was sweet and sad and somehow all too human, like that of a forlorn man who has spent his entire life dragging himself from one tiny accident to another until the cumulative effect has crushed him under the weight of words he can no longer speak.
My physical condition improved markedly in the days after the surgery. The garbage scow that is my stomach learned to float again, although it could no longer carry as full a load as it once did. My right leg, with its mangled knee and blasted hip, was also beginning to mend, and the doctors promised that they would soon remove the mechanical spider cast. Each day, I seemed to lie in the skeleton bed a little less awkwardly.
Nan poked me and wrote little messages to herself on my chart. She always remained professional, but I found myself calling her Nan more often than Dr. Edwards. I don’t know if she disliked this familiarity but she never asked me to stop. I suppose this emboldened me and in a moment of curiosity I asked her whether she was married. She hesitated and thought about answering, but in the end decided against it.
♦ ♦ ♦
The seat beside the skeleton bed remained empty, save for the visits from the nurses and Nan. One Marianneless day became two Marianneless days, two became three, five Marianneless days, until they formed a Marianneless week. I wanted to ask her about the little gargoyle, why she had given it to me, what it meant.
I was reading a lot, mostly lawyer mysteries that I didn’t actually enjoy. I needed something to replace them, so I requested of Nan that she loan me some textbooks on abnormal psychology. “You must have something on schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar disorder, anything like that?”
“It’s not my area of expertise,” she replied. “Besides, you should be reading about burns.”
Nan had already brought a number of books on burn recovery that sat untouched on my bedside table. I was not reading them simply because they were what I should be reading. We made a deal: for every psychology book she brought, I’d read one of the burn books. Nan considered this a victory and insisted that I read one of her books first.
After I had, Gregor arrived at my room, his corduroy thighs rubbing together, with a psychology text in his hands. He handed it over and said that Dr. Edwards had asked him to deliver it, from the private collection in his office.
“The place isn’t driving you nuts, is it?” The way he chuckled to himself, I wondered if he’d been thinking that up all the way from the psychiatric ward. When I asked him whether psychiatrists were really supposed to refer to patients as nuts, he dabbed a bead of sweat from his brow with a tartan handkerchief, and didn’t answer. Instead, he asked why I was so interested in schizophrenia and manic depression.
“None of your business,” I said.
Gregor opened his mouth as if to say something more, but instead he just smiled and tapped my little gargoyle once on the head. “I like this,” he said, before padding his way out of my room in his tasseled loafers.
♦ ♦ ♦
The following day, a very small Asian woman, who upon first glance looked more like a doll than a real person, entered my room.
Please don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m attempting to further the stereotype that all Asian women resemble china dolls. That’s not the kind of doll I have in mind. This woman had a broad face, a flat nose, and a most amazing smile. (I’ve always hated people who can smile widely without looking stupid.) Her cheeks were like ripe apples, which, when taken with the striped shirt and denim overalls under her gown, created an overall effect of an Oriental Raggedy Ann.
“Hi! My name is Sayuri Mizumoto. I’m pleased to meet you.” She thrust her hand into mine for a hearty shake. And while I might not write that every time she spoke, she did so with a large grin, please take it as a given from this point forward.
“What kind of name is Sayuri?”
“A beautiful one,” she answered with a touch of Australian in her accent. “Now sit up.”
I asked why she expected me to do what she told me.
“Because I’m your new physical therapist and now you’re going to sit up.”
“You don’t even know—”
“I’ve spoken with Dr. Edwards, and you can do it!” There was a strange combination of cheer and proclamation in the way that she told me I could do it! She placed her hands underneath my back and widened her stance to help me. She warned me that I would probably feel a little dizzy when the blood rushed to my head, and I protested that I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea.
“Sure it is,” she cheered. “Three, two, one, go!”
Up I went; she was pretty strong for a doll. For a moment I was fine, her hands steadying me. Then the vertigo hit and the room began to turn in strange circles. Sayuri moved a hand to the back of my neck to keep my head from lolling around. “You’re doing great! Steady.”
When she lowered me back down, she commented, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was fucking awful.”
“Shock!” She lifted her hand to her open mouth in mock horror. “You really are like they said. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune?”
♦ ♦ ♦
When I opened my eyes after an afternoon nap, Marianne Engel was standing above me, the curtains shut. On my bedside chair hung one of the visitor’s gowns; she had worn it into the room, I discovered later, to appease the nurse who had caught her sneaking in, and then promptly removed it. So she was in her street clothing: a billowy white shirt tucked into her faded jeans with a belt of small silver disks. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders, down her back. Her face was calm and her eyes were bright—green, definitely green. An embroidered dragon lived on her right pant leg.
Finally I knew that I’d been correct in guessing that Marianne Engel’s figure was pleasing. The dragon seemed to think so also, for it crawled upwards from ankle to hip, twisting around and caressing her thigh. Each scale was a colored sequin; the ruby eyes were bulbous fake jewels. The tongue twisted outwards in playful licks across her buttocks. The claws, black stitches, dug into the delicious meat of her leg. “I like your pants,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“I was busy,” she answered. “The pants were a gift.”
“Doing what? From whom?”
“Working, but then I got sick for a bit.” She pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. “Jack gave me the pants.”
“Sorry to hear you were under the weather. Who’s Jack?”
“I’m recovering. Jealous?”
“Glad to hear it. You’re not hiding from the doctors today?”
“Nope. Jealous?”
“Of Jack?” I pshawed her. “So you’re getting on with them?”
“Wouldn’t go that far. Don’t want to talk about it.”
“The doctors or Jack?”
“Doctors,” she answered. “You want to talk about Jack?”
“Of course not. Your private life is private, right?”
“The relationship is complicated.”
“With Jack?”
“With doctors.” Marianne Engel drummed her fingertips on her pantdragon’s bejeweled eyes. “But Dr. Edwards seems okay, I guess.”
“Yeah. So you’re all healed from your, whatever, sickness?”
“Exhaustion, mostly.” She tilted her head to one side. “Tell me about your accident.”
“I was stoned, and I drove off a cliff.”
“He who eats fire, shits sparks.”
I indicated the little statue on the bedside table. “I like the gar goyle.”
“Not a gargoyle. It’s a grotesque.”
“You say oyster, I say erster.”
“I ain’t gonna to stop eating ersters,” Marianne Engel replied, “but that’s a grotesque. A gargoyle’s a waterspout.”
“Everyone calls these things gargoyles.”
“Everyone’s wrong.” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack and, after not lighting it, began to roll it between her thumb and forefinger. “Gargoyles throw water from the walls of cathedrals so the foundations don’t wash away. The Germans call them Wasserspeier. Do you remember that?”
“Remember what?”
“‘Water spitter.’ That’s the literal translation.”
“Why do you know so much about them?”
“Grotesques or languages?”
“Both.”
“Grotesques are what I do,” Marianne Engel answered. “Lan guages are a hobby.”
“What do you mean, you ‘do’ grotesques?”
“I carve.” She nodded towards the stunted monster in my hand. “I did that.”
“My psychiatrist likes it.”
“Which shrink?”
“Dr. Hnatiuk.”
“He’s better than most.”
I was slightly surprised. “You know him?”
“I know most of them.”
“Tell me about your carving.”
“I became interested while watching you do it.” Her other hand was now fidgeting with her arrowhead necklace.
“I don’t carve.”
“You did.”
“No, I never have,” I insisted. “Tell me why you like carving.”
“It’s backwards art. You end up with less than what you started with.” She paused. “It’s too bad you can’t remember carving. I still have something you did.”
“What?”
“My Morgengabe.” Marianne Engel looked at me intently, as if waiting for a nonexistent memory to enter my mind. When she saw that none was coming, she shrugged and leaned back into her chair. “Jack’s my manager.”
A professional acquaintance. Good. “Tell me about him.”
“I think I’ll keep you guessing.” She was definitely in fine spirits on this day. “How about I tell you a story?”
“About what, this time?”
“About me.”
