The Gargoyle

XI.

Next to my bed, on the small table, I found a glass lily the morning following Vicky’s story. I was at a loss to explain how it had gotten there, as Marianne Engel had left the hospital well before I fell asleep. When I asked the nurses whether any of them had left the glass lily, they all swore that they had not. Furthermore, Maddy firmly held that no one had passed by the nurses’ station during the night. Which meant that either the nurses were lying, or Marianne Engel had sneaked back in under the cover of darkness.

The second question about the glass lily was: what did it represent?

Why, you might be asking, do I assume that it had any meaning at all? Some things, blown-glass objects among them, are simply pleasing to look at. (And need I remind you that real flowers were not allowed in the burn unit?) Nevertheless, I was certain that it did have meaning; the more time I spent with Marianne Engel, the more certain I became that all things are inexplicably connected.

“Well,” Dr. Edwards said, “a little mystery is not always a bad thing. It forces a person to have faith.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re religious, Nan. I don’t think I could stand it.”

“My religion, or lack of it, is none of your business. You have your life, like last night’s big feast, and I have my life.” There was a touch of-jealousy, anger, disdain? what?-in her voice.

It was odd that Nan would resent a meal she herself had authorized. Ever the opportunist, I saw this as an opening to ask a question that had been bothering me: yes, I knew that hypermetabolism required me to take in an inordinate number of calories, but what was the real reason she had authorized Marianne Engel to bring meals for me?

“Everybody needs to eat,” Nan said simply.

Her answer, of course, was not an answer. So I asked again. Nan, as she sometimes did, took a moment to weigh the benefits against the drawbacks of speaking the truth. I liked it when she did this. True to form, she didn’t lie. “I allow these meals for a number of reasons. First, it is good for you to take in as much nourishment as possible. I’m doing it for the nurses, too, because you’re a nicer person after Ms. Engel visits. But most of all, I’m doing it because I’ve never met anyone who needs a friend as badly as you do.”

It must have felt good for Nan to get that off her chest. I asked what she thought about Marianne Engel helping with my physical therapy, and she admitted exactly what I suspected, that she did not like the idea very much.

“You worry I’m going to come to start depending on her too much,” I said, “and that she’ll let me down.”

“Doesn’t that worry you, too?”

“Yes,” I answered.

Since Nan had chosen to tell me the truth, the least I could do was reply in kind.

Everything seemed to be progressing more or less exactly as it should. Now that I actually had a desire to improve my body and was working to do so, I could feel myself becoming stronger. ARE YOU SURE? But preparation for the real world included the mental as well as the physical.

Maddy put me in a wheelchair and pushed me into a common area with four other burn patients. A man stood at the podium in a dress shirt and tie: Lance Whitmore was a former patient who had survived burns that were almost (but not quite) as bad as mine. His damage was less visible-only the right side of his jaw and neck revealed that he had been burned-but he said he had extensive keloid scarring on his torso that he could show us at the end of the lecture, should we desire to see what we could expect a few years into our recoveries. I didn’t; it was enough to deal with the present day.

Lance’s presence was intended to be both inspirational and informative. He’d been on the outside for three years and he was ready to pass along some hints for a successful transition, just like an AA speaker.

“Look up the word insult in the dictionary,” Lance began, “and you’ll find a number of definitions. In the medical sense, the word refers to harm brought to the body from an outside force, which in our case was fire. Of course, there’s also the more common meaning, and you’re going to get your share of insults-both intentional and not-when you leave this place. People don’t quite know what to make of us.”

Lance’s speech went as one might expect: he talked about the “challenges” and “opportunities” he’d faced, and what he’d done to reclaim his life. When he was finished, he opened the floor to discussion.

The first question was from a female patient who’d been scratching herself through the entire talk. She wanted to know if her “damn donor sites” would always itch “so damn much.”

“The itching will eventually go away. I promise.” There was a general murmur of relief through the group. Even I, who had vowed to remain quiet, let out a thankful sigh. “There’s nothing you can do but tough it out, unfortunately, but I always found it helpful to remember what Winston Churchill once said.”

“‘We shall never surrender’?” suggested the itchy female.

“Well, yeah,” laughed Lance, “but I was thinking about ‘If you’re going through Hell…keep going.’”

Another patient asked, “What’s it like when you go out in public?”

“It’s really hard, especially the first couple of times. Most people pretend they can’t see you, but they whisper. Some will mock you openly, usually young men. The interesting thing is that a lot of people think that if you’re burnt, you must’ve done something to deserve it. The teaching of the ages, right? Fire as a sign of divine retribution. It’s difficult for people to face something as illogical as us-burned, but alive-so we must have done something wrong, or otherwise they’d have to accept that it could happen to them.” He paused. “Who here thinks their burns are some kind of punishment?”

We looked at each other before one patient tentatively raised his hand, followed by a second. I was not going to raise my arm, no matter how long Lance waited.

“It’s completely normal,” he assured us. “Why me? I asked the question every day but never got an answer. I lived a good life. I went to church, paid my taxes, volunteered on weekends with a boys’ club. I was, and am, a good person. So-why-me?” Pause. “There is no reason. A moment of bad luck, with lifelong consequences.”

Another patient asked, “Do people ask about your burn?”

“Children, because they haven’t learned tact. Some adults do, too, and to be honest I appreciate it. Every single person you meet for the rest of your life will be wondering about it, so sometimes it’s good to get it out of the way so you can move onto other things.”

A timid hand went up. “What about sex?”

“I like it.” Lance’s delivery of the line earned some laughs, and I guessed that he had given this speech often enough to perfect his answers to the questions that always came. “It’ll be different for everyone. Your skin was a pretty amazing part of the experience, right? The largest organ of the body, a surface area of about three square meters, and that’s a lot of possibility for pleasure. Now we’ve lost a lot of our nerve endings, and that really sucks.”

The patient who had asked the question sighed heavily, but Lance held up his hand to indicate that he still had a few more things to say. “Skin is the dividing line between people, where you end and others begin. But in sex, all that changes. If skin is a fence that divides people, sex is the gate that opens your body to the other person.”

Never again would I have that option, not with anyone. Not with Marianne Engel.

Lance cleared his throat. “I’m lucky: my wife stayed with me. In fact, the burn brought us closer together emotionally, and that’s translated into our sexual activity as well. It forced me to become a better lover, because I’ve had to become more, umm, creative. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

“What was hardest for you, after your release?”

“That’s a tough one, but I think it was wearing the pressure garments twenty-three hours a day. They’re amazing, you know, for limiting the scarring but-Jesus Christ!-it’s like being buried alive. You look forward to your bath, even though it hurts, just to get out of the damn thing.” Lance held my eyes for a moment, and I had the feeling that he was speaking to me specifically. “I wore mine for the first ten months after release but for some of you it’ll be a year, or longer.”

He continued, “It’s only after you get out of here that you’ll finally realize that a burn lasts forever. It’s a continual event, one that constantly reinvents itself. You’ll swoop from incredible highs when you’re just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you’ve accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.”

Lance looked a little embarrassed, as if he’d talked himself into an area where he didn’t want to go. He moved his gaze around the room, engaging all eyes for a few moments, before beginning the big wind-up. “Modern burn treatment is incredible, and the doctors are amazing, and I’m so thankful to be alive. But none of that is enough. Your skin was the emblem of your identity, the image that you presented to the world. But it was never who you really are. Being burned doesn’t make you any less-or more-human. It only makes you burnt. So you’re in a unique position to understand what most people never will, that skin is the clothing but not the essence of a person. Society pays lip service to the idea that beauty is only skin deep, but who understands like we do?

“Some day soon,” Lance said, “you’ll walk out of here and have to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?”

TWO VERY POOR CHOICES.

Gregor brought an assortment of goodies to wish me a happy Halloween. Because we are men, we didn’t mention our previous conversation, and the candy was his way of saying that we should pick up where we’d left off before our spat. If the place hadn’t been a hospital, I’m certain he would have brought a six-pack of beer.

The evening proved to be a breakthrough in our friendship. Gregor told me a somewhat embarrassing story about his very worst Halloween, when he’d dressed-in a misguided effort to impress a medical student he fancied-as a human liver. He’d gone to great lengths to make his costume as realistic as possible, including a rubber hose that was supposed to approximate the hepatic tube, which he hooked to a hidden bag of vodka in the organ’s left lobe. His rationale was that he could take sips throughout the evening, whenever his nervousness with the woman became too much. (For perhaps the first time in history, a man filtered alcohol out of his liver to put into his body.) Unfortunately, his shyness was so great that he soon became completely drunk. At the end of the evening, Gregor and his date found themselves in the loft of an artist who made a living imitating the works of Jackson Pollock. The story ended with Gregor paying the artist several hundred dollars after vomiting onto one of his canvases, although I don’t know how it could have made any difference to the work.

I tried to one-up Gregor with my most embarrassing Christmas story, of a failed attempt at seducing a department store elf who was married to a steroid-abusing Santa. Gregor responded with a yuletide tale of his own, in which he accidentally shot his mother with the BB gun he’d received after months of swearing that safety would be his primary concern. In the end, we somehow decided to share the single most embarrassing stories of our childhoods, holidays or not. I went first.

As a normal young boy I discovered it was pleasurable to stroke my penis, but as I was living with my addict aunt and addict uncle at the time, I had no one with whom to discuss my biological discovery.

I had a vague understanding, from eavesdropping on the meth-smoking adults, that there were such things as venereal diseases. You certainly did not want to contract one, as nasty things would happen to your jigger if you did. (Aunt Debi, when she found herself unable to avoid referring to my penis, always called it a jigger.) I also knew that venereal diseases were passed in the fluids that resulted from sexual acts. I could have done some research, I suppose, but I knew the librarians too well to risk being caught looking through such books. Besides, it was all pretty straightforward: since there was venereal disease in ejaculate and I was now capable of ejaculating, I would have to be careful not to infect myself. So I reviewed my options.

I could stop masturbating. But it felt too good.

I could cover my stomach with a towel to catch the offending fluid. But the towels were too large to hide and too difficult to clean discreetly.

I could masturbate into a sock. But all my socks were of a loose cotton weave, through which seepage threatened to enter the pores of my skin.

I could masturbate into zip-lock sandwich bags. Yes: not only was this approach medically sound, but also it offered an unusual level of convenience. Clearly, this was the way to go.

Before long I had a large collection of brimming Baggies under my bed, but I couldn’t simply bundle them up with our regular trash-what if someone discovered them, or if a scrounging dog spread the salty bags across the front lawn? So I decided the best option was to place them in another family’s garbage can; the farther away from our trailer, the better.

The ideal location would be the rich area of town, removed from the trailer park both in distance and social standing. What I failed to consider, however, is that moneyed folk react suspiciously to young boys sneaking around their trash bins. Before long a police car arrived and I was standing in front of two burly officers trying to explain my surreptitious actions.

I desperately wanted not to betray the true nature of my mission, but the police demanded that I hand over the shopping bag in my possession. I begged them to let me go, stating there was nothing in the bag but “my lunch.” When they took the package by force, they found forty little parcels of an unknown white substance and demanded to know exactly what kind of liquid narcotic I was dealing.

Afraid of being questioned at the local police station while they ran a chemical analysis on the milky fluid, I confessed that I was walking around with zip-locked sandwich bags filled with my own semen.

The officers didn’t believe me, at first, but as the details of my story piled up, they stood in stunned silence-until they began to laugh. Needless to say, I was unimpressed with their reaction to my health crisis. When their amusement subsided, the officers deposited my junk in the nearest trash can and drove me home.

In our newfound spirit of male bonding, Gregor boasted that he had a story that could equal mine, if not better it.

As a lad, Gregor was likewise uneducated, although I give him full marks for never believing that he could infect himself with an STD. When he discovered self-pleasure, his thoughts ran somewhat like this: If masturbating with a dry fist is this enjoyable, what would it feel like to use something that better approximated a vagina?

So Gregor began his experiments. He tried liquid soap in the shower until he discovered the harsh reality of soap burn. His next attempt involved hand lotion, which worked well until his father began to question the boy’s unusual commitment to supple skin. Eventually Gregor, who had a creative mind and a kitchen with a fully stocked fruit bowl, began to speculate on the possibilities afforded by a banana peel. Had not nature itself designed the peel specifically to house a fleshy cylinder?

The peel had an unfortunate tendency to rip during the act but, not to be defeated, Gregor decided to shore up this natural weakness with duct tape. This worked well, but he was faced with the same predicament that had stymied me: disposal of the evidence.

He decided upon flushing the remains down the toilet, but the fourth peel caused the pipes to back up. When Gregor’s father discovered the clog, he naturally set to work with the plunger. Gregor hid in his bedroom, praying feverishly to God to send the peels down the tube instead of back up. If you help me, Lord, I will never masturbate into a fruit skin again. When Gregor’s father was unable to unplug the pipes, the local plumber was called in, bringing a toilet snake and the potential for disaster.

God answered Gregor’s prayers. The incriminating fruit did indeed go down, and the plumber’s only comment was that Gregor’s mother might consider adding more fiber to the family diet. Gregor kept his promise to the Lord by abandoning his fruit-abusing ways forever-or so he assured me, at my hospital bedside.

We were laughing at ourselves and promising to keep each other’s secrets safe when Marianne Engel entered the room, wrapped in a mummy’s bandages, her blue/green eyes beaming out from between the white strips on her face, her dark hair cascading down her back. She was obviously not expecting to encounter a psychiatrist in my room, much less one who had treated her in the past. It stopped her un/dead in her tracks, as if three thousand (or seven hundred) years of rigor mortis had set in all at once. Gregor, recognizing her unmistakable hair and eyes, spoke first. “Marianne, it’s wonderful to see you again. How are you?”

“I’m fine.” The words came tersely. Perhaps she was afraid her costume would put her right back in the loony bin, as wandering through the burn ward in bandages was whimsical at best and a bad joke at worst.

In an effort to put her at ease, Gregor said, “Halloween’s my favorite holiday, even more than Christmas. Your costume is great.” He paused to give her the chance to respond but she didn’t, so he continued, “It’s very appealing for psychiatrists, you know. Seeing everyone’s costume is kind of a peek into their deepest fantasies. Me, I’m going to dress up as a murderous Bolshevik.”

Marianne Engel was pulling nervously at the bandages twisted around her waist. Gregor saw that his attempts at conversation were going nowhere, so he politely excused himself and headed out the door.

She loosened up after he left, feeding me chocolate bars and telling ghost stories-the traditional kind, not those which featured her personal acquaintances. She told the famous story of the two young kids who, after hearing a radio announcement about a hook-handed escapee from a nearby insane asylum, speed away from Lovers’ Lane only to find a severed hook hanging from the door handle when they arrive home; the story of the young female hitchhiker picked up and delivered home only to forget her coat which, when returned by the driver to the house a few days later, brings forward the revelation that the hitchhiker died ten years earlier, along the same stretch of road where she’d been picked up; the story of the man who sits at his kitchen table working on a jigsaw puzzle, which, as it comes into focus, reveals a picture of him sitting at his kitchen table completing the jigsaw puzzle, with the last piece revealing a hideous face looking in through the window; the story of the young babysitter who gets increasingly disturbing phone calls alerting her to the danger to the child she is looking after until, upon calling the operator for a call-trace, she is told that the call is coming from inside the house; and so forth.

While talking, Marianne Engel covered her head with an extra bedsheet and lit her face from the underside with a flashlight she’d borrowed from the nurse’s desk. It was all so hokey that it became charming. She stayed well past the end of visiting hours-the nurses had long since stopped trying to enforce the rules with respect to Marianne Engel-and at midnight, she seemed perturbed by the lack of a grandfather clock to count out the dozen (or perhaps thirteen) strokes.

The last thing she said, before leaving in the early hours of the morning, was “Just wait until Halloween next year. We’re going to go to a wonderful party…”

The harvesting of my skin was occurring less often. Surgeries still marked my days, which was only to be expected, but my suicidal daydreams were now almost completely gone and I had become Sayuri’s star pupil. I could lie and say this was because of my strong sense of character, and that I was determined to keep my deal with Nan. I could lie and say I was doing it for myself. I could lie and say I was doing it because I’d seen the light. But mostly I was doing it to impress Marianne Engel.

HOW CUTE. My bitchsnake flicked its tail and tongue, cheerfully caressing me at both ends. I WONDER WHAT IT WILL BE LIKE WHEN YOU LEAVE THE HOSPITAL?

I’d graduated to shuffling a few steps at a time, using an aluminum walker. I felt foolish, but Sayuri assured me that I’d soon be moving up to canes that wrapped around the forearms.

One thing that helped immensely was a pair of orthopedic shoes that had been designed specifically for me. The first pair made my feet ache so the expert cobbled together a second pair that worked out the problems. The greatest advantage of the shoes, however, was mental rather than physical. Shoes are a great equalizer for a man with lost toes: they are like leather disguises that make one’s ruined feet look normal.

I had to admit that Sayuri knew precisely what she was doing. In the beginning my exercises had a heavy emphasis on stretching to regain my lost range of motion. Then we moved to Thera-Bands, elastic straps used for resistance, before switching to a simple weight-training program. The weights grew larger with each week that passed, and sometimes I even asked Sayuri if I could do a few more lifts than were demanded by my routine.

Now that I could take a few steps out of the bed, I started shuffling off to my washroom when I needed to relieve myself. One would imagine this to be a great step forward in the feeling of self-reliance but it was a psychological blow to discover I could no longer pee while standing up. I found this state of affairs unreasonably emasculating.

I was nearing the eight-month mark of my hospitalization, and Christmas was coming. Marianne Engel did what she could, putting up wreaths, playing Handel, and lamenting the fact that she wasn’t allowed to light Advent candles in the burn ward.

On the evening of December sixth, Marianne Engel lifted my new orthopedic shoes onto the windowsill and explained that on this night St. Nicholas left treats in the shoes of children. When I said that we had never practiced this tradition in the trailer park, she reminded me that the world did not begin and end with my personal experiences. Fair enough. When I pointed out that I was no longer a child, she just shushed me. “In the eyes of God, we’re all children.”

When Connie took down my shoes the next morning-“What the heck are these doing here?”-she found them stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

I was touched by the incident, more than I would have expected. My reaction was not so much to the gift of money itself, but to the thought that Marianne Engel had put into my situation. The holidays left me in a quandary: how could I pay for any Christmas gifts? While it was true that I had a small amount of money hidden in a bank account under a false name, I had no way to access it. Probably, in fact, I would never be able to withdraw the money, even when I got out, for the false identification I had used to set up the account bore a photo that no longer matched my face.

Marianne Engel had realized what I needed and, rather than forcing me to ask for cash or do without, found a way to deliver it to me in a charming manner. A gift! From St. Nicholas! And so my dilemma was solved. Almost. I still had to find a way to get the presents from a store to my bedside, but I had a plan for that.

I requested that Gregor drop by at the end of one of my exercise sessions with Sayuri. When both were there, I began: “Feel free to say no, but the two of you could really help me out. I hope you can do some shopping for me.”

Gregor asked why I needed both of them. Because I wanted to give each of them a gift, I explained, and I could hardly ask them to buy their own. Sayuri would purchase my gift for Gregor, and Gregor could buy my gift for Sayuri. The remainder of the gifts, they could shop for together.

“No worries,” Sayuri said. “I love Christmas shopping.”

Hearing this, Gregor also quickly agreed. I gave each an envelope that included what I wanted them to buy, on my behalf, for the other. As they left the room Gregor glanced back at me, a strange little smile on his face.

Marianne Engel had not yet finished reading Inferno to me. In part, it was going so slowly because she never read too much in a single sitting, preferring to savor the beauty of the writing, but also because she kept slipping into Italian. I never had the heart to stop her when she did this because she was so deep into the story and, besides, the Italian sounded wonderful from her mouth. At the end of the canto, I would have to point out that I had understood nothing, and the next day she would repeat the section, usually making it all the way through in English.

Voltaire wrote that Dante was a madman who had many commentators, and whose reputation would continue to grow mostly because almost no one actually reads the Commedia. I suggest the reason that so few people read Dante is because no one actually needs to. In the Western world, Inferno is everyone’s idea of Hell; as literature, only the Bible is more deeply woven into society’s collective consciousness.

“Did you know,” Marianne Engel asked, “that Dante’s Hell was based upon The Flowing Light of the Godhead, by Mechthild von Magdeburg?”

“One of your Three Masters, right?”

“Yes,” she answered.

I admitted that, not surprisingly, I knew very little (in truth: nothing) about this woman, so Marianne Engel proceeded to educate me. Mechthild was born in Saxony near the start of the thirteenth century and as a child experienced daily visits from no less a figure than the Holy Ghost itself. At twenty she became a Beguine at Magdeburg, living a dutiful life of prayer and mortification; interestingly, as she increased the severity of her self-punishment, her visions became correspondingly more frequent. When she described them to her confessor, he became certain of their divine origins and impelled Mechthild to write them down.

Das flieЯende Licht der Gottheit, as the masterwork is known in German, influenced countless writers who followed, including Meister Eckhart and Christina Ebner. It is also clear that Dante Alighieri read the Latin translation, and many scholars are convinced he used Mechthild’s ordering of the afterlife as the conceptual basis for the Divine Comedy: Heaven at the top, Purgatory directly below, and Hell at the bottom. In the very abyss of Mechthild’s Hell, Satan is chained by his own sins while anguish, plague, and ruin flow from his burning heart and mouth. This sounds suspiciously similar to Dante’s Satan, a three-faced beast trapped in a block of ice at the lowest center of Hell chewing at a frothy trio of sinners (Judas, Cassius, and Brutus) whose pus flows from his three mouths for all eternity.

“There are those who believe,” said Marianne Engel, “that the ‘Matilda’ Dante encounters in Purgatorio is in fact Mechthild.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked.

“I believe,” she answered with a slight smile, “that in his work, Dante often wrote in appearances by those who influenced him.”

As she read me the tale of Dante’s journey, I found it deeply familiar and I loved it despite (or perhaps because of?) my burn ward surroundings. There was something comforting in having Marianne Engel read it to me, and in the way she curled her fingers into mine as she did. I marveled at the twisting mix of our glorious and ghastly hands, and I wanted her reading of the story to never end-perhaps because I was afraid that when it did, she would no longer continue to lead me, hand in hand, though my own Hell.

When I presented Marianne Engel my theory that no one needs to read Inferno to know its representation of Hell, she was quick to correct me. “While that may be true for most people, you know it so well because I read you my German translation.”

“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t seen that coming. “When did you translate it?”

“I suppose about ten or twenty years after Dante finished writing it. It took me quite a while. I’m pretty sure I was Inferno’s first translator, but you can never be positive about these things.”

“And when did you read it to me?” I asked.

“When you were recovering from your first burn.”

Inferno was first published in A.D. 1314. If Marianne Engel completed her translation twenty years later, the year would have been approximately 1334. Given her earlier claim that she was born in the year 1300, this would put her in her mid-thirties at the time.

As I detail these numbers, I’m not forgetting that this is ludicrous and could not have actually occurred. I’m simply pointing out that, at least, the impossible things were occurring in a possible timeline. This is what I find rather amazing about her mental state: her wild statements were held together by internal consistency.

Because I didn’t live in the Middle Ages, I needed to do a lot of research during the writing of this book to check what she said, or what I remember her saying, against facts. The interesting thing is that all the events she claimed were true could have happened exactly as she described them, had she not been talking about ancient events in the first person.

Despite being under the control of the Church, Engelthal was a democratic institution whose prioress was elected. All daily activities were outlined in the Orders of the Constitution. Marianne Engel’s descriptions of the architecture, the prayers, the books studied, and the rituals for eating were accurate. Christina Ebner was in that monastery and she did write The Sister-book of Engelthal and Revelations. Friedrich Sunder was a local priest, the confessor to the nuns, and he did write Gnaden-vita. There was a book called The Vita of Sister Gertrud of Engelthal, written with the help of a Brother Heinrich and Cunrat Fridrich.

While there is no record of Heinrich Seuse having visited Engelthal, there is also no way to prove that he did not do so. If he did come during the early 1320s, as Marianne Engel claimed, this was when he was traveling from StraЯburg to Kцln to study under Meister Eckhart. So who’s to say he didn’t visit the monastery that was widely regarded as the foremost center of German mysticism?

Still. No matter how perfectly she constructed her timelines or researched German religious figures, Marianne Engel was either schizophrenic or manic depressive, or both. I cannot forget this. Creating and managing imaginary universes is the province of such people: it’s not only what they do, it’s who they are. And there were some seeming discrepancies in Marianne Engel’s account; for example, there is no record of a Sister Marianne in any of the extant writings from Engelthal, nor is there any mention of Die Gertrud Bibel, and I tried to use these omissions to force Marianne Engel into admitting her story was not true.

“You are studious, aren’t you?” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s a reason you can’t find information on me or on Gertrud’s Bible. We’ll get to it, I promise.”

Goodwill carolers dropped in to sing about silent nights, holy nights. A Sally Ann Santa brought cookies and books. Decorations went up along the hallways.

How strange it was to be looking forward to the holiday season. Traditionally, I’d hated Christmas; it always left a taste in my mouth akin to moldy fruitcake. (By this, I do not mean an elderly Japanese spinster.) In my childhood, I’d had a succession of Christmases when the Graces spent the money originally intended for my presents on methamphetamine; in my adulthood, Christmas meant fucking a woman who was wearing a red felt hat.

I still had my exercise sessions, my regular medical procedures, but the most interesting event was to be a meeting of the important women of my life: Nan, Sayuri, and Marianne Engel. I had no clue as to its agenda and, strangely, no one wanted to tell me. In my ego-centric little heart, I imagined it might be a surprise party. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Sayuri arrived first. I’ve mentioned before that she always seemed to carry her tiny body behind a gigantic smile, but on this day only the tiny body was present. When I asked whether everything was okay, she answered unpersuasively that it was. Rather than push the subject, I asked whether she’d bought my gift for Gregor yet. She replied that she had and in this, at least, I believed her. I was going to ask a few more questions when Marianne Engel and Nan entered the room like horses jockeying for position. Marianne Engel looked directly at me and stated: “When you get out of here, you’re coming with me.”

“Not so fast,” Nan said sharply, before turning her attention on me. “As you know, you’ll probably be released in a few months-”

“-and then you’re coming to live in my house.” The impatience in Marianne Engel’s voice betrayed that she thought this meeting was unnecessary.

“Calm down.” Nan held up her hand while shooting Marianne Engel an exasperated look. “That’s not your decision to make.”

“He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Nan countered, “I’ve already arranged for a place in Phoenix Hall.”

“He doesn’t want to live there.” Which was true, I didn’t, but Dr. Edwards had long been recommending it because of its highly trained workers, job placement programs, and proper medical supplies. In addition, it had counselors, not to mention other burn patients who would be facing the same challenges as I.

“I work with the patients at Phoenix,” Sayuri said, “so if you go there, we can continue your gait training.”

“I’ll hire you,” Marianne Engel said. “Money isn’t a problem. You can do it at my house.”

This suggestion made Sayuri look towards Dr. Edwards uneasily. “I don’t know hospital policy on that.”

Nan replied that beyond policy issues, Phoenix Hall had a host of professionals, all ready to offer their expertise. Marianne Engel reiterated that she was willing to provide whatever I needed. “If Mizumoto san is too busy, we’ll hire someone else. But we’d prefer to have her, because we like her.”

She wheeled around to look directly at me, and finally asked what I wanted. “Do you want to go to this Phoenix place?”

“No.”

“Do you want to come to my house?”

“Yes.”

Marianne Engel turned her attention back to Dr. Edwards. “There. Discussion finished.”

It might have been prudent to claim that I needed time to think. After all, I had just chosen Marianne Engel over the doctor who’d been expertly guiding my recovery for months. My hasty answer was, to say the least, illogical.

If there was one thing I could be certain about, however, it was that everyone in the room truly had my best interests at heart. I hadn’t known that Marianne Engel and Nan had been arguing about my living arrangements for weeks; since I saw both of them almost daily, this could only have occurred if they were working together to hide it in order to keep my stress level as low as possible.

“There’s still plenty of time to make an informed decision,” Nan said, indicating that this discussion was anything but finished. It was not lost on anyone how heavily she stressed the word informed.

There were practical concerns that I could not ignore in regard to living with Marianne Engel. One was that, although she said she had plenty of money, she probably couldn’t afford me.

Housing a burn patient is incredibly expensive. Beyond my treatment costs-Sayuri’s fees, medical supplies, exercise equipment-there would be regular living expenses. Food. Clothes. Entertainment. Utilities. She would have to pay the costs of my life not only as a patient, but as a man as well. While there might be government programs or charities that would contribute to my care, I doubted Marianne Engel would ask for their assistance; her personality being what it was, I expected pride, paperwork, and privacy issues would prevent her from even looking into it. She claimed to have the resources to support me, but I could hardly accept this as fact-a shoeful of hundred-dollar bills was not enough to convince me of her fortune. Was this money as much a fantasy as most other aspects of her life? Was I to believe that she had been saving her pennies for seven hundred years?

Not only was living with her fiscally questionable, it was also morally suspect. As the basis of the offer was her belief that her “last heart” was for me, I would clearly be taking advantage, under false pretenses, of a confused woman. As the sane one, not only did I know better, I was obligated to act upon the fact that I knew better. And in any case, why should I put myself in the position of depending upon a mentally ill woman whom I hardly knew? Although my circumstances had changed and I was less physically able than previously, I had been on my own since my teens. Before that, even: as guardians, the Graces had been competent only at guarding their drug stashes. For all intents and purposes, I had looked after myself since I was six years old.

So I had been mistaken in accepting Marianne Engel’s offer, and Nan had been correct. I would reverse my rash decision and enter Phoenix Hall after all.

When Gregor came by that afternoon to drop off Sayuri’s present, he congratulated me on my decision to move in with Marianne Engel. When I informed him that I’d changed my mind, he backtracked and said that I had made the only logical decision. “I think your progress has been fantastic under the guidance of Dr. Edwards. I hold her in the highest esteem.”

I knew Gregor well enough to recognize when he was not saying all that he was thinking. This was one of those times. “But…?”

Gregor looked to the left, and then to the right, to ensure that no one was around to overhear him. “But even monkeys fall from trees.”

I had no idea what this meant, so Gregor explained: Even experts make mistakes. “While Dr. Edwards is your physician, and a good one, I don’t think you should underestimate Marianne’s effect on your recovery, either. She comes every day, she helps with your exercises, and it’s obvious that she cares deeply about you. God knows why. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

HE THINKS YOUR NUTJOB GIRLFRIEND IS SERIOUS ABOUT YOU.

Shut up, fuck. I corrected Gregor. “She’s delusional.”

“Go ahead and deny it,” he said, “but it’s obvious.”

THAT’S SO CUTE.

I wasn’t going to bother arguing the point; I didn’t feel up to that. “What would you do?”

“I’d be worried about living with Marianne, too,” he said, “but you’re no prize, either. If you can put up with each other, I think you should do it.”

“Even if she is fond of me-and I’m not saying that she is-I’m not really sure how I feel about her.” I paused. “I don’t know.”

“If you don’t accept her invitation, you’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever met,” Gregor said. “In addition to being a lousy liar.”

When you lie in a hospital bed long enough, you start a mental catalogue of all human contact. I touched Gregor on the back of his hand, the first time we’d ever touched, and said, “Thank you for bringing Sayuri’s present.”

A TOUCHING MOMENT…

I buzzed the nurse to ask for more morphine.

… BETWEEN LOSERS.

On Christmas morning, Marianne Engel appeared in my room with a sack of presents and a silver briefcase that she immediately slid under my bed. We passed a few hours, speaking as we often did about everything/nothing, while she fed me mandarin oranges and marzipan. As usual, she made her regular trips outside to smoke cigarettes, but I noticed that sometimes when she came back, she didn’t have the telltale smell of fresh smoke upon her. When I asked her if she had something else going on, she shook her head no. Her smile, however, betrayed her.

In the early afternoon, Sayuri and Gregor arrived, followed by Connie, who’d just finished her rounds. Dr. Edwards never worked on Christmas Day, and Maddy and Beth had both booked the day off to spend with their families. With no one left to arrive, Marianne Engel dragged her sack out of the corner and we began to exchange gifts.

The nurses had pitched in to buy me some books on subjects that had recently taken my interest, such as the inner workings of medieval German monasteries and the writings of Heinrich Seuse and Meister Eckhart.

“You aren’t easy to buy for, that’s for sure. I had to go to three different bookshops,” Connie said. As soon as she realized this might sound like a complaint, she hastily added, “Not that I minded, of course!”

Gregor gave me a stationery set, as I’d confided to him that I’d been working on some writing in recent weeks, and Sayuri gave me some lavender ice cream that I happily shared with everyone. Marianne Engel seemed to enjoy it the most, and was tickled by the fact that it turned her tongue purple.

To the nurses I gave compact discs by their favorite artists. While this was not particularly personal, I didn’t know much about their nonhospital lives. To Sayuri, I gave the gift that I’d asked Gregor to pick up on my behalf: two tickets for an upcoming Akira Kurosawa film festival.

“I got the idea when Dr. Hnatiuk was telling me about it. He loves Kurosawa, you know.”

Marianne Engel looked at me, raising an accusatory eyebrow, because subtle I’m not.

Next came my gift to Gregor, as picked up by Sayuri: coupons for a dinner for two at a Russian restaurant with the highly unoriginal name of Rasputin’s. I asked Sayuri whether she’d ever eaten authentic Russian food, and she answered that she had not. It was now I who raised an eyebrow in the direction of Gregor. When they thanked me for their gifts, I grumbled that “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any fucking presents.” No one seemed to understand what I was talking about, which only proves that more people should read Louisa May Alcott.

Next, Marianne Engel gave her gifts. The nurses got day passes to a spa, which Connie tucked away with the CDs. Sayuri received an intricate blown-glass Buddhist temple, while Gregor received a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. They were impressed with the handmade quality of the items, and Marianne Engel boasted that the gifts were the work of two of her friends.

As for Marianne Engel and I, we had already decided to exchange our gifts later, in private. And maybe I was the only one who’d noticed, but apparently Sayuri and Gregor had also come to the same understanding.

After a while, Gregor said, “Are we ready to move along?” Everyone looked at Marianne Engel, who nodded. Christmas truly was a time for miracles, if the medical staff was looking to the schizophrenic to provide guidance. Sayuri put me into a wheelchair and Gregor pushed me down the hall, and when I asked where we were going, no one would answer directly. Soon I figured out that we were heading to the cafeteria. Perhaps there was some sort of Christmas function, a hired Santa or volunteer carolers, although the fact that I’d heard nothing about it struck me as odd. After so many months in the hospital, very little escaped my attention.

When the doors of the cafeteria slid open, I was battered by the smell of every food in the world. Against the far wall, a small task force of caterers was tending to a series of heavily laden tables. Thirty or forty people were milling around the room, under red crepe streamers that hung from the roof, and a few of them gestured in our direction. At first, I thought they were all pointing at my appearance but when the caterers waved to Marianne Engel, I realized that she was the center of attention, not I. The patients started ambling towards us: an old man with a cough, a curly-haired woman with bandages on her arms, a handsome boy with a limp. Bringing up the rear was a preteen girl with no hair, a fistful of balloons, and a cheering section of relatives.

Everyone thanked Marianne Engel for what she’d done; at this point, I still didn’t know what that was. After Gregor pushed me to the catering tables and helped me out of the wheelchair, he explained that she had arranged and funded the entire party. This, in accordance with her general lack of restraint, was no small undertaking. Even having seen the outsized dinners that she brought to my room, I could scarcely comprehend what was available.

Turkey, ham, roast goose, chicken, meat dumplings, curried goat, boar, venison, meatloaf, carp (carp? who eats carp?), cod, haddock, lutefish, shellfish, cold cuts, a dozen types of sausage, roasted eggs, oxtail soup, meat broths, onion soup, more cheeses than you could shake a cow’s udder at, brown beans, gungo peas, onions, pickles, rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweeter potatoes, sweetest potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, squash, pumpkin, basmati, white rice, brown rice, wild rice, tame rice, antipasto, stuffing, assorted breads, bagels, buns, cheese scones, green salad, Caesar salad, bean salad, pasta salad, jellied salad, whipped-cream-and-apple salad, spaghetti, fettuccini, macaroni, rigatoni, cannelloni, tortellini, guglielmo marconi (just checking to see if you’re still reading), bananas, apples, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, mixed nuts, mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas bread, coconut shortbread, pecan pie, chocolates, chocolate logs, chocolate frogs, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, fudge, sugar, spice, everything nice, epiphany cake, fruitcake, gingerbread men, Torte Vigilia di Natale, snips, snails, puppydog tails, cranberry punch, eggnog, milk, grape juice, apple juice, orange juice, soft drinks, coffee, tea, you say to-may-to juice, I say to-mah-to juice, and bottled water.

Everyone in the hospital must have filled up their plates once, twice, thrice, and Marianne Engel charmed each guest with her grace and eccentricity. It didn’t hurt that she had slipped into an elf costume and looked astoundingly cute. Music played and people talked merrily to each other, everyone partaking in the spirit of the event. Patients who otherwise would never have met were speaking at length, probably comparing illnesses. Coughs were drowned out by laughs, and there were squeals of delight from the children, who each received a gift from under the plastic Christmas tree. Apparently Marianne Engel couldn’t obtain permission for a genuine pine, but an artificial one was more than good enough. If flowers might kill a man, just imagine what a conifer could do.

For this one afternoon, I was a hospital celebrity, as the word spread that it was my friend who’d done all this. An old man came to talk with me with such a large grin on his face that it was a shock when he mentioned that his wife of sixty years had recently died. When I told him I was sorry to hear it, he shook his head and clasped his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I’ll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don’t ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.”

During the party, a feeling of strange relief had come over me. From our first meeting, Marianne Engel had shown such irrational affection towards me that I expected it to disappear as abruptly as it had started. Relationships fall apart, that’s their nature. We’ve all seen it a thousand times, even between couples who we were certain were “going to make it.”

I once knew a woman who liked to imagine Love in the guise of a sturdy dog, one that would always chase down the stick after it was thrown and return with his ears flopping around happily. Completely loyal, completely unconditional. And I laughed at her, because even I knew that love is not like that. Love is a delicate thing that needs to be cosseted and protected. Love is not robust and love is not unyielding. Love can crumble under a few harsh words, or be tossed away with a handful of careless actions. Love isn’t a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur.

Yes, that’s exactly what love is: a tiny, jittery primate with eyes that are permanently peeled open in fear. For those of you who cannot quite picture a pygmy mouse lemur, imagine a miniature Don Knotts or Steve Buscemi wearing a fur coat. Imagine the cutest animal that you can, after it has been squeezed so hard that all its stuffing has been pushed up into an oversized head and its eyes are now popping out in overflow. The lemur looks so vulnerable that one cannot help but worry that a predator might swoop in at any instant to snatch it away.

Marianne Engel’s love for me seemed built on so flimsy a premise that I assumed it would come apart the moment we stepped through the hospital doors. How could a love based on a fictional past survive into an actual future? It was impossible. That kind of love was a thing to be snatched up and crushed in the jaws of real life.

That was my fear, but this Christmas Day had shown me that Marianne Engel’s love was not feeble. It was strapping, it was muscular, it was massive. I thought that it could fill only my room in the burn ward, but it filled the entire hospital. More important, her love was not reserved only for me; it was shared generously with strangers-people she didn’t think were friends from the fourteenth century.

All my life I had heard foolish stories about love: that the more you give away, the more you have. This had always struck me as nothing more than a violation of basic mathematical principles. But watching Marianne Engel share her love so widely awakened in me the weirdest of romantic feelings: the opposite of jealousy.

It comforted me that love was her soul’s natural condition and not an aberration built on fantasies. Her love was not a lemur, an animal so named because Portuguese explorers in Madagascar noted large shining eyes peering out of the forest when they sat around their campfires. Convinced that these eyes belonged to the spirits of their departed companions, they christened the animals with the Latin word meaning “spirits of the dead.”

When the last turkey leg had been eaten, Marianne Engel thanked each caterer and passed out envelopes that contained “just a little something extra for working on the holidays.” While she was wheeling me back to my room, she claimed that this was the best Christmas she’d ever had. I pointed out that that was quite a claim, given that she’d had seven hundred.

After she helped me into bed, Marianne Engel sat with a satisfied thud. I observed that the party must have cost her a fortune; she dismissed this with a wave of her hand and pulled the silver briefcase from under my bed. “Open it.”

The briefcase was fat with sleeves of bills, fifties and hundreds. In my days of pornography and drugs, I’d seen the occasional satchel of cash, but nothing like this. I spun the numbers around my skull, trying to come up with a rough estimate. It was difficult to do the math-I was still too stunned by the fact of the money-so Marianne Engel saved me the trouble. “Two hundred thousand.”

Two hundred thousand dollars. Which she’d left sitting under the bed all day. Which anyone could have walked away with. I called her stupid; she laughed and replied that against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain. And really, she asked, who would look under a hospital bed on Christmas Day for a briefcase of money?

“You think I can’t afford you.” She stated it as if there were no possibility that she might be wrong. She wasn’t. When I nodded, she said, “I’m ready for my present now.”

Over the previous weeks I’d fashioned dozens of versions of the same little speech, like a high school boy plotting how to ask his favorite girl to a dance, but now that the moment was upon me, I felt only uncertainty. Timidity. Embarrassment. I wanted to be suave but, just like that high school boy, I was struck dumb. It was too late to escape, and I knew that my gifts-there were three-were too personal. Too stupid. My hours of labor had been to no avail: what prideful delusions had convinced me to make these gifts? She’d think them childish; she’d think me too forward, or not forward enough. I wished for lightning bolts to blitz my room, to pierce the bedside table where my silly little offerings were hidden in a drawer.

I had written three poems for her. The spinesnake laughed at the sheer arrogance of my efforts.

All my life, I had written poetry, but I’d never shown it to anyone. I hid my writing, and hid myself within the writing that I kept hidden-only a man unable to handle the actual world would create another one in which to hide. Sometimes when I realize that I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted, a wave of discomfort shudders down my back, as if another man were standing too close to me at the public urinals.

Sometimes I feel there is something profoundly unmanly about any writing, but poetry is the worst of all. When I was gripped by fits of cocaine paranoia, I would burn my poetry journals and watch the burning pages peel off one another in layers, the flames spitting little gray flakes into the air. As my ashen words swirled into the heavens, it pleased me to know that my inner self was once again safe: a team of the FBI’s best forensic scientists couldn’t put my emotions back together again. The beauty of keeping my truest emotions hidden in my writing was that I could incinerate them at a moment’s notice.

Speaking a woman into bed was safe, because my words disappeared with the vapor of my spoken breath; writing a poem for a woman was fashioning a weapon that she could later use to assault me. Giving away one’s writing meant that it would be out there in the universe forever, ready to come back to wreak vengeance at any moment.

So I’d blown it. It was Christmas Day, I was stuck in the skeleton bed, I owed Marianne Engel a present, and I had no backup gift. I had only the childish scrawls that blackened the pages’ white purity. My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.

My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.

But I had no choice, so I reached into the desk drawer and-LOSER-screwed my pale imitation of courage to an imaginary sticking place. I pulled out the three single sheets of paper, closed my eyes, and held the poems in Marianne Engel’s direction, hoping they wouldn’t rot in my hands.

“Read them to me,” she said.

I protested that I couldn’t. These were poems, and my voice was a deal at the crossroads gone horribly wrong. A fiery hellhound had broken into my throat and left behind a busted guitar with rusty strings. My voice was-is-majestically unfit for poetry.

“Read them to me.”

Now it is years later. You have this book in your hands, so obviously I’ve overcome my fear about giving away written words. But the three poems I read to Marianne Engel on that Christmas Day will not be included in the pages of this story. You already have enough incriminating evidence against me.

When I finished, she crawled into my bed. “That was lovely. Thank you. Now I’ll tell you how we first met.”