The Gargoyle

II.

Light spread across the insides of my eyelids and I awoke to the snake slowly swimming up my spinal cord, swallowing it with her disjointed jaw. There was the flick flick flick of her tongue as she hissed, I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT . The voice was feminine-this is how I knew it was a she-and her tongue tickled each vertebra as she searched her way towards the top of my spine. When she reached it, she licked at the undersocket of my skull, and then twisted a few times to let me know that she’d nestled in. Her scales chafed my internal organs and my liver was bruised by her casually wandering tail.

I was lying upon an air flotation bed that reduced friction and facilitated healing; my bandages lightly fluttered in the upward draft. On each side of the bed was a railing, painted white like bleached bones, so that I could not fall, or force myself, out. I soon named this bed the skeleton’s belly and I lay in the wind that rushed through its rib cage, while its very bones prevented me from wandering off to find a new graveyard.

I was off the ventilator but there were still enough tubes sticking out of me that I looked like a pincushion doll. The tubes twisted in circles around, around, around, and I thought of Minos presiding at the entrance to Hell, directing sinners to their final destinations by curling his tail around their bodies. For every coil of the tail, that’s one ring deeper into Hell. So I counted my lovely tubes, in simple curiosity: how deep was the grim sorter of the dark and the foul going to send me?

The nurse seemed happy to find me awake. “Dr. Edwards modified your drugs to bring you out of your coma. I’ll get her now.”

I tried to speak, but it felt as though someone had inserted a Coke bottle in my throat and stomped; I had crushed glass where my vocal cords had been. The nurse shushed me and answered the questions that she knew I’d be asking if I were able. I was in a hospital, a burn unit, she said. There had been an accident. I was very lucky. The doctors had worked hard. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was finally able to rasp, “How-long?”

“Almost two months.” She granted me a pity smile and turned on her heel to get the doctor.

I examined the skeleton’s ribs. There were a few places where the shiny white paint had been peeled back by restless fingers. These patches had been painted over, of course, but the minor excavations were still visible. Down through the layers of paint, my thoughts wandered. How often do they paint these beds? For every patient? For every six, every dozen? How many before me have lain here?

I wanted to cry but my tear ducts had been burned shut.

There was not much to do but drift in and out of consciousness. The morphine dripped and the snake inhabited each inch of my spine, continuing to flick at the base of my skull with her wicked tongue. Lick and kiss, drip drip drip dropped the drugs, hiss hiss hiss spoke the snake. The sibilant sermons of the snake as she discoursed upon the disposition of my sinner’s soul seemed ceaseless. There was clack and clatter of footfalls in the hall, a thousand people coming to pay their respects to the dying. Rooms reverberated with the drone of soap operas. Anxious families whispered about worst-case scenarios.

I couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of my situation and wondered about things like when I might be able to get back to my film work, or how much this little trip to the hospital would cost me. I hadn’t yet grasped that I might never return to work, and that this trip would cost me everything. It was only over the following weeks, as the doctors explained the grisly particulars of what had happened to my body, and what would continue to happen, that I came to understand.

My body’s swelling had decreased and my head had shrunk to almost human proportions. My face felt vile under the fingertips of my unburned hand. My legs were raised and taped to supports, and I was swaddled in thick dressings that restricted movement so that I would not tear at my grafts. I looked at my wrecked right leg and saw an amazing set of pins stabbing into my flesh. Burn victims cannot have casts made of fiberglass-too irritating by far-so mechanical spiders were growing out of me.

There were three primary nurses in the burn ward: Connie, Maddy, and Beth. They provided not only physical ministrations but also keep-your-chin-up speeches, telling me that they believed in me, so I had to believe in myself too. I’m sure that Connie believed the rubbish that was exiting her mouth, but I sensed that Maddy and Beth were closer to grocery clerks parroting “Have a nice day.” Each worked an eight-hour shift; altogether they made a day.

Beth worked the afternoons and was responsible for my daily massage, pulling gently on my joints and rubbing my muscles. Even these modest manipulations brought intense pain, all the way through the morphine. “If we don’t do this, the skin will tighten and you won’t be able to move your joints at all. We’ve been doing this all through your coma.” Her explanation did not make it hurt any less. “Contracture is a huge problem. If you could see your remaining toes, you’d see the splints on them. Can you push against my hand?”

I tried to push but couldn’t tell if I succeeded or not; the sensation-actually, the lack of it-was simply too confusing. I could no longer tell where my body ended.

Dr. Nan Edwards, my main physician and the head of the burn ward, explained that she had been operating regularly during my coma, cutting off damaged skin and wrapping me in various replacements. In addition to homografts (the skin from human cadavers) I’d had autografts, skin from undamaged areas of my body, and porcine heterografts, skin from pigs. One cannot help but wonder whether Jews or Muslims would receive the same treatment.

“It was really touch-and-go because your lungs were so badly injured. We had to keep raising the level of oxygen in your respirator, which is never a good sign,” Dr. Edwards said. “But you pulled through. You must have something pretty good ahead.”

What an idiot. I hadn’t fought for my life, I hadn’t realized that I was in a coma, and I certainly hadn’t struggled to come out of it. Never once in my time in the blackness had it registered that I needed to return to the world.

Dr. Edwards said, “If not for the advances in burn treatment made during the Vietnam War…” Her voice trailed off, as if it were better for me to fill in the blanks and realize what a lucky age I was living in.

How I wished that my voice worked. I would have told her that I wished this had happened in the fourteenth century, when there would have been no hope for me.

I began my career as a porno actor specializing in heterosexual sex with multiple female partners in a short period of time, without ever losing my erection. But please don’t think of me as one-dimensional; as an artist, I was always looking for a new challenge. With conscientious practice, I increased my portfolio to include cunnilingus, anilingus, threesomes, foursomes, moresomes. Homosexuality was not for me, although I always rather admired the men who could drill both ways. I wasn’t particularly interested in SM, even though I did make some films with light bondage motifs. I was not disposed towards any film promoting pedophiliac leanings. Ghastly stuff, although I must admit that Humbert Humbert makes me giggle. Scatology was strictly out, as nowhere in my psyche do I harbor the desire to shit on someone and even less do I have the inclination to be shat upon. And if I am a snob for not participating in films that involve sex with animals, then so be it: I am a snob.

I lay in my bed, intensely aware of the sensation of breathing. Compared with how I breathed before the accident, it was so…What is the best word? “Labored” is not quite right. “Oppressed” is better and is as close as I can come. My oppressed breathing was due in part to my damaged face, in part to the tubes twisting down my throat, and in part to my mask of bandages. Sometimes I imagined that the air was afraid to enter my body.

I peeked under my body bandages, curious to see what was left of me. The birth scar that had spent its entire life above my heart was no longer lonely. In fact, I could hardly even find it anymore, so snugly was it nestled in the gnarled mess of my chest. Each day a procession of nurses, doctors, and therapists waltzed into my room to ply me with their ointments and salves, massaging the Pompeian red landslide of my skin. “Passive stretching,” they would tell me, “is extremely important.” Passive stretching, I would think, hurts like hell.

I buzzered the nurses relentlessly, begging for extra morphine to satiate the snake, only to be told that it was not yet time. I demanded, pleaded, bargained, and cried; they insisted that they-fuck them-had my best interests at heart. Too much medication would prevent my internal organs from working properly. Too much medication would make me dependent. Too much medication would, somehow, make things worse.

A snake lived inside me. I was enclosed in a skeleton’s rib cage. The Vietnam War, apparently, had existed for my benefit. My fingers and toes had been lopped off, and I had recently learned that while doctors might be able to perform a phalloplasty, to build a new penis out of tissue taken from my arm or leg, I’d never be able to achieve an erection again.

In what way, I wondered, could more morphine possibly make things worse?

When the nurses got tired of my pleas for more dope, they told me they were sending in a psychiatrist. The blue gown he wore over his clothing, for the protection of the burn patients, did not quite fit properly and I could hear his corduroys rubbing at the thighs as he walked. He had a balding dome, wore an unkempt goatee in an unsuccessful effort to distract from his double chin, and sported the puffy cheeks of a man whose entire diet came from vending machines. His animal equivalent would have been a chipmunk with a glandular problem, and he extended his paw like he was my new best friend. “I’m Gregor Hnatiuk.”

“No thanks.”

Gregor smiled widely. “Not even going to give me a chance?”

I told him to write down whatever he wanted on the evaluation form and we could pretend that we’d made an effort. Normally, I would have had some fun with him-told him that I’d breast-fed too long and missed my mommy, or that aliens had abducted me-but my throat couldn’t handle the strain of speaking so many words in a row. Still, I got the point across that I had little interest in whatever treatment he thought he could provide.

Gregor sat down and settled his clipboard like a schoolboy trying to hide an erection. He assured me that he only wanted to help, then actually used his fingers to air-quote the fact that he was not there to “get inside” my head. When he was a child, the neighborhood bullies must have beaten him incessantly.

I did manage to get a few final words out: “More painkillers.” He said he couldn’t give me them, so I told him to go away. He told me that I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to, but he would share some methods for creative visualization to cope with the pain. I took his suggestion to heart and creatively visualized that he’d left the room.

“Close your eyes and think about a place you want to go,” he said. “This place can be a memory, or a destination that you want to visit in the future. Any place that makes you happy.”

Sweet Jesus.

Dr. Edwards had warned me that the first time I was conscious during a dйbridement session would be painful beyond the ability of the morphine to alleviate, even with an increased dosage. But all I heard was “increased dosage,” and it brought a smile to my face, although no one could see it under the bandages.

The extra dope started to take effect shortly before I was to be moved, and I was floating on a beautiful high when I heard Dr. Edwards’ clipped footsteps, from sensible shoes, coming at me from down the hall before she arrived.

Dr. Edwards was, in every way, average looking. Neither pretty nor ugly, she could fix her face to look adequately pleasing but she rarely bothered. Her hair could have had more body if she’d brushed it out each morning, but she usually just pulled it back, perhaps out of practical concerns, as it is hardly advisable for loose strands to fall into burn wounds. She was slightly overweight and if one were to make a guess, it would be a good bet that at some point she’d simply grown tired of counting calories. She looked as if she had grown into her commonness and accepted it; or perhaps she’d decided that, since she was working among burn survivors, too much attention to her appearance might even be an insult.

Dr. Edwards gestured to the orderly she’d brought with her, a ruddy chunk of a man whose muscles flexed when he reached out for me. Together, they transferred me from my bed to a stretcher. I squealed like a stuck pig, learning in a moment just how much my body had grown to accept its stillness.

The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human. The dйbridement room, I could not help but notice, was in the farthest room of this farthest wing. By the time my session was finished, I realized this was so the other burn patients couldn’t hear the screams.

The orderly laid me out on a slanted steel table where warm water, with medical agents added to balance my body chemistry, flowed across the slick surface. Dr. Edwards removed my bandages to expose the bloody pulp of my body. They echoed with flat thuds as she dropped them into a metal bucket. As she washed me, there was disgust in the down-turned edges of her mouth and unhappiness in her fingertips. The water flowing over me swirled pink. Then dark pink, light red, dark red. The murky water eddied around the little chunks of my flesh that looked like fish entrails on a cutting board.

All this was but a prelude to the main event.

Dйbridement is the ripping apart of a person, the cutting away of as much as can possibly be endured. Technically, it is removal of dead or contaminated tissue from a wound so that healthy skin may grow in its place. The word itself comes intact from the French noun dйbridement, which literally means “unbridling.” The etymology is easy to construct: the removal of contaminated tissue from the body-the removal of constricting matter-evokes the image of taking the bridle off a horse, as the bridle itself is a constriction. The dйbrided person shall be set free of the contaminant, as it were.

So much of my skin was damaged that removing the putrefying tissue meant more or less scrubbing away everything. My blood squirted up onto Dr. Edwards, leaving streams of red across her gowned chest, as she used a razorlike apparatus to take the dermis off my body, not unlike the way a vegetable peeler removes the skin from food.

Dr. Edwards made long-No, that’s too formal. Our situation made us more intimate than the cruelest of lovers, so why not use her given name? Nan made long swooping passes over my back. I could hear the blade as it slid along my body, disengaging the skin. The only way she’d know that she’d reached the good tissue was to actually slice into it. If I screamed in pain, she had burrowed deeply enough to find functioning nerve endings. As Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Nan deposited the thin sheets of my flesh in the same metal bucket that held my dirty bandages. It was like seeing myself disappear, the flags of my existence being blown away a millimeter at a time. The pain, mixed with the morphine, caused the most interesting images to flash through my mind: Senator Joe McCarthy bellowing “Better dead than red” a carpenter assembling the crosses upon which the crucified would be nailed; dissection in biology class, with eighth-grade scalpels cutting into frog stomachs.

Once I was fully dйbrided, the exposed sites needed to be covered with grafts, be they cadaver or pig. It never mattered much, because my body rejected them all. This was expected, as the grafts were never meant to be permanent; they were there mostly to prevent infection.

During my stay in the hospital, I was skinned alive over and over. In many ways dйbridement is more overwhelming than the original burning because, whereas the accident came as a surprise, I always knew when a dйbridement was scheduled. I would lie in the skeleton’s belly and dread each future sweep of the knife, previewing it a hundred times in my imagination for each actual occurrence.

The dispensing of morphine was self-regulated-to “empower” me, they said-and I worked that button furiously. But there was a goddamn block on the overall amount so I couldn’t overdose myself: so much for empowerment.

By the time I was twenty-three, I’d acted in more than a hundred pornos, of varying quality. Most of the early ones are primitive but there are a few, from the later years, that I consider genuinely decent work.

Pornography is like any other job: you start with lower-end companies but, as your rйsumй improves, you move up. In the beginning, I worked with directors who were only a step above amateurs-but, then again, so was I, not yet having embraced the fact that sex, cinematic or otherwise, was not about jackhammering away until orgasm.

I learned sex the way anyone does, by doing; for once the library was useless. Practice, not theory, taught me that a performer cannot race to climax without disappointing the viewer-but neither can he fuck indefinitely without becoming boring, and this was the balance that must be achieved. Likewise, I learned there is no standard set of maneuvers, and that readjustments can only be properly made when listening to the commands of the other’s body.

I do not wish to brag, but the increase in my proficiency was admirable. Others noticed: demand for my services grew, my directors became more reputable, the women with whom I worked more talented, and my payments increased. My reputation, for performance and dedication, became known both to consumers and to those in the industry.

Eventually, I was no longer satisfied to work only one side of the camera and asked for other production responsibilities. The overworked crews were happy for the assistance; I would help set up the lighting equipment while asking the cameramen how they knew where the shadows would fall. I would watch how the directors set the scene and, by this point, I had performed often enough that I could occasionally make a good suggestion. If the producer ran into a problem-an actress canceling at the last moment or a camera breaking down-I had enough friends in the industry that after a few quick calls, I could often solve it.

Before long, I branched into the role of writer, as much as one can claim to write a porn film. The writer can establish a situation, but when it comes to the action, he can only write SEX SCENE HERE. Different performers do different things: some refuse to do anal, some refuse to do girl-on-girl, and so forth, and because you’re never really sure in advance which performer is going to do which scene, you can’t get too specific. Final decisions are always made on the set.

Despite a coke habit that grew so severe giant white mosquitoes came for early morning visits, I was not an unintelligent young man. I was aware of the financial advantages of porn-no matter the economy, there’s always a market-but there was more to it than this. I liked to write and act, and viewed my work to be a satisfaction of my artistic urges at least as much as it was a matter of commerce. After directing a few films, I figured out that the real money wasn’t in acting in someone else’s films but in getting others to act in mine. So I formed my own production company at a relatively young age and became a “successful executive in the movie business with a substantial income.”

At times, I found this to be a better way to introduce myself than as a pornographer.

Naturally I wasn’t the only victim in the burn unit. Sufferers came and went. Some finished their treatments and moved on, while others died. To illustrate: one patient was Thйrиse, a completely precious child with blond hair and sapphire eyes.

To look at Thйrиse, you wouldn’t have even known that she’d been burned, because she wore her destruction inside. Thйrиse had experienced an allergic reaction-not unlike a chemical fire in her lungs-to antibiotics administered to alleviate asthma attacks. I overheard one doctor explain it to an intern: “For her, it was like taking a big gulp of Agent Orange.”

Thйrиse’s mother, wearing a dark green gown that marked her as a visitor, brought in many overflowing arrangements of plastic flowers. (Real flowers, which carry bacteria by the million, could be agents of our death.) The mother was devout and always telling the little girl that each earthly occurrence was a part of God’s Grand Design. “We can’t know why things happen, only that God has a tremendous plan for each of us. His reasons are just, though we might not be able to understand them.” Personally, I believe it’s a poor idea to tell a seven-year-old girl that God’s tremendous plan is to incinerate her lungs.

Howard was another patient in the ward. He’d been burned long before I arrived, in a house fire after his Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother fell asleep with a lit cigarette between her fingers. She didn’t survive but he did, and now he was working diligently on every aspect of his rehabilitation. He used the walkers, he arm-curled his small silver dumbbells, and he walked ten steps one day and twelve the next. He beamed with each achievement, constantly telling me that he would “beat this thing” and “get his life back.” These proclamations only intensified after his fiancйe informed him that they’d no longer be getting married.

When he was discharged, Howard’s entire family and a dozen friends (including the ex-fiancйe) came to the burn unit to celebrate. They brought a cake and everyone told him how great he looked and how proud they were. Howard talked about this being “the first day of the rest of his life.” It was a big fucking show, even the way they dramatically packed up his stuff. Howard shuffled over to my bed and took my good hand. “I told you I’d beat this thing. I told you. You can do it, too!” He winked in an effort to inspire me but, because of the skin contracture around his eyes, it only made me think of a housefly struggling to get out of a toilet bowl.

As he exited the room, his mother and father on each side of him, he didn’t turn around to take a final look at the burn ward that had been his home for so many months; I could tell he was determined never to look back.

It is, I suppose, a heartwarming story of human triumph: determination, the love of family and friends, and positive thinking! But, really, who was he kidding? Howard’s ex-fiancйe was rightfully gone-who would (could) love a goblin? Would he ever have sex again? Would he go through life with his parents holding his arms to balance him as if he were forever two years old? Where, I ask, is the victory in that?

Howard had worked much harder than I intended to. I’d listened to him talk about how he was going to get better. I’d listened to everyone say how good he looked when, in fact, he looked like the monster that any sane person would cross the street to avoid. I wanted to scream when he took my hand, because even I didn’t want to be touched by him. He disgusted me, this thing, my brother.

My reaction had little to do with him, really; it sprang from the realization that no matter what I did, I would never be the same. I could exercise every day, I could endure a thousand surgeries, and I’d still be a blister of a human being. There is no cure for what I am. That’s what I took from Howard’s great achievement. That’s what I understood as I lay in the skeleton’s belly with the snake swallowing my spine. HE’S JUST LIKE YOU, she hissed, BUT WITH A BETTER SOUL.

The worse realization: even if I could have gone back to what I’d been before the accident, how much better would that have been? Yes, I’d been handsome. Yes, I’d had money and a career but (let’s not mince words) I’d been a coke-addled pornographer. I was told that my friends, who had laughed at my jokes when I was sharing drugs at the side of my pool, came to visit while I was in my coma-but each looked at me for less than a minute before walking out, never to return. One glance was enough to convince them that our days of sniffing at spoons were finished forever.

After I woke, the only person who made a real effort was Candee Kisses, a sweet girl who ended up in porn only because the universe is an unjust place. At seventeen, she had become tired of her stepfather raping her; she was willing to do anything to get out from under him. So she did. She should’ve been living on a farm somewhere, married to a hardworking guy named Jack or Paul or Bill, instead of making her living by sucking cock in front of the camera.

Candee came a few times, bringing little gifts and trying to cheer me up by telling me how fortunate I was to still be alive, but mostly she just cried. Maybe it was because of how I looked; more likely, it was because of her own life. After three visits, I made her swear that she wouldn’t come back. She kept her promise. Now here’s the funny thing: I knew her for over five years, I had sex with her, and I had heard her stories about her stepfather, but I didn’t know her real name. Perhaps there are just some things you leave behind when you choose a new life.

When Howard and his parents disappeared through the burn ward door, I lost my veil of control. My chest started to lurch as anger and self-pity all came up like vomit, and my damaged throat allowed my breaths to be expelled only as long reedy gasps.

Then the girl Thйrиse came to me. It was an incredible, torturous effort for her, and with each suck of air, I could hear her lungs rattle. She was exhausted by the time she reached my bed. She crawled up onto it and took my hand. Not my unburned right hand but my ravaged left one with its finger and a half missing, and she held it as if it were normal. It hurt so much to be touched there and, although I was thankful for the touch despite the pain, I implored her to get away.

“No,” she answered.

My chest was still jumping involuntarily. “Can’t you see what I am?”

“Yes,” she replied. “You’re just like me.”

Her large blue eyes, radiant through the pain, never left my damaged face.

“Leave,” I commanded.

She said she needed to rest a bit before she returned to her own bed, before adding, “You’re beautiful in God’s eyes, you know.”

Her eyes closed and I watched her face as exhaustion pulled her into sleep. Then my own eyes drifted shut, momentarily.

The nurses soon woke me up. Thйrиse was there in my bed, her hand still in mine, not breathing.

It only takes an instant.

Okay, I admit it: I tried the creative visualization that Gregor had suggested.

I slowed my breathing and concentrated on making my body feel heavy, beginning with my two remaining toes: heavy, heavy. Then my feet, then my ankles. Next I thought about my heavy calves, my heavy knees, and my heavy thighs. All the way up, torso, chest, neck, head…concentrating on my breathing: in, out, in, out, steady, calm…

This is when I started thinking about vaginas. I suppose this was natural, as I’d been inside hundreds. There are those men who would have you believe that all women feel the same, but obviously these men have not been with many women. Each vagina has its own texture, its own depth and moistness: each has its own personality. That’s a fact.

I was very good at sex. It was a hobby as well as a profession. Outside of office hours, my passion was to find women who were the opposite of those with whom I filmed. If you work at a French restaurant, do you want to eat escargot on your day off? Hardly. You’ll step out for something at the neighborhood diner. If you work in television production, you end your day by reading books. And, as a professional fucker of silicone creamgirls, I found it enjoyable to try other types of women. With careful words, not sincerely felt but spoken as if they were, I could lay out the most majestic dreams and well-planned kismet. With this gift of speech, I presented myself with 1001 women, from Scheherazade to Southside Selma.

Intercourse before the camera provides little satisfaction because the set is dressed, the check is in the mail, and where’s the romance? But the feeling I got from taking-from winning-women who were not in the game was an entirely different thing. Satisfaction lay with housewives, policewomen, and secretaries. Book editors. Cowgirls. Track athletes, fisherwomen, tree planters, feminist writers, pro wrestlers, artists, waitresses, bank tellers, Sunday school teachers, dressmakers, and civil servants. Your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. I’d say anything to possess a woman, if even for an hour. I pretended to be left-wing, right-wing, artistic, manly, sensitive, commanding, shy, rich, poor, Catholic, Muslim (only once), pro-choice, pro-life, homophobic, gay (fag hags put out), cynical, wildly optimistic, a Buddhist monk, and a Lutheran minister. Whatever the situation required.

I remember a woman named Michelle. My sex with her was the closest I ever came to perfection in intercourse. She was a waitress with a slight potbelly, who smelled faintly of fried eggs and gravy and sported a scar where her appendix had been removed. I’d watched her and her husband have a furious dispute outside her greasy spoon. The husband left and she sat down on a park bench, determined not to cry. I went over and soon we were talking, soon she was laughing, soon we were back at my place. We had some cocaine and we laughed a little more and then we started to playfully punch each other’s shoulders. When we started to fuck, first there was urgency, and then there was surprise at how good it felt, and then there was moaning. She started to laugh again and so did I, and then she started to cry; she cried all the way through-not from sorrow, but from release.

We went for hours. It seemed that we wandered a precipice where every nerve was awake. She told me about everything that transpired in (and out of) her marriage bed. She told me that she was afraid that she’d never actually loved her husband. She told me about her fantasies of her husband’s sister and how she touched herself in public when she thought-but wasn’t sure-that no one was looking, and she told me that she stole small things from the corner store because it made her horny. She told me that she believed in God and that she liked thinking about Him watching her do these things. I told her that she had been a very busy girl. We never stopped fucking and I found myself crying, too, at the rawness of it all.

My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I’m unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person. Mostly I’m glad that I found such physical connection, if only once, but I certainly wish it had been with someone whom I’ve seen since.

Perhaps I was clearly and persistently in the wrong in my many sexual transactions. But, then again, perhaps not. Please consider that I provided considerable comfort to many downhearted women. What does it matter if Wanda Whatshername believed I was a recently divorced, misunderstood painter? Her husband was more interested in drinking beer with the boys than in taking her dancing, so it probably did her a world of good to fuck a stranger. The key to the whole endeavor was that I was able to fold myself instantly into the shape of each woman’s fantasy. To do this, to decode a person so that you can provide her with what she wants and needs, is an art, and I was a fuck artist.

The women didn’t want the real me, and they didn’t want love. They wanted a carnal short story, one that they had already been heating up in the dew of their thighs, to disclose at their book clubs. I was just a physical body-a most singular beauty, too-with which they could realize their true desires.

This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we’re fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That’s perfection. And while I can’t speak for women, I imagine that they-whether they admit it or not-want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.

All in all, what difference did my deceptions make? I didn’t have AIDS or herpes, and while it’s true that I’ve taken my share of needles in the ass, who hasn’t? A little penicillin goes a long way. But then again, it’s easy to fondly recall the days of minor genital infections after your penis has been removed.

Creative visualization is probably not for me.

Connie, of the morning shift, was the youngest, blondest, and cutest of my three nurses, and she checked my bandages when I awoke. Generally far too perky for my liking, she did have an adorable smile with just slightly crooked teeth and an always genuine “Good morning!” When I asked her once why she was always so gosh-darn nice-a difficult sentence but I got it out of my mouth-Connie answered that she “didn’t want to be mean.” There was great charm in the fact that she couldn’t even imagine why I’d bother to ask such a question in the first place. In her efforts to be unfailingly kind, it was rare that she came onto the shift without bringing me some small gift-a can of soda that she held while I sipped through a straw, or a newspaper article she would read aloud because she guessed it might interest me.

Beth, by not just a few years the oldest of the three nurses, massaged me in the afternoon. She was too thin and too serious about everything. Her hair was curly, at times even slightly unruly, but you could tell that she would never let it get away from her. Perhaps it was from too many years working burn units, but she refused to become even the slightest bit personal in her dealings.

Maddy, of the night shift, looked like she’d rather be in a bar teasing a horny frat boy. Not necessarily satisfying, but definitely teasing. Even while tending to us burn victims, she made certain that her hips moved suggestively under her white skirt. She had what I’d always called a lemming ass-that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of a cliff. She was a naughty, naughty girl and it crossed my mind that she might’ve become a nurse simply so she would have that whole bad-girl-in-nurse’s-outfit look working for her. She caught me staring at her once and said, “You were a real bastard before the accident, weren’t you?” It was more a statement than a question and she didn’t seem angry, just amused.

Thйrиse’s mother came by later in the week to pick up her daughter’s effects. She told me about the funeral; apparently the mayor had sent a “magnificent bouquet of lilies” and everyone sang prayers “with their voices raised to Heaven.” Then she lost her train of thought and looked longingly out the window at the park down the block, from which the voices of children playing baseball drifted up. She suddenly looked a dozen years older than the moment before, and when her trance broke she became terribly self-conscious that I’d seen it.

“Did Thй-” she started. “I understand that my daughter died in your bed. Did she…?”

“No,” I answered, “she didn’t suffer.”

“Why did she go…to you?”

“I don’t know. She told me God thinks I’m beautiful.”

The mother nodded, then burst into a sob that she tried to shove back into her mouth. “She was such a good girl. She deserved so much-”

The mother couldn’t finish her sentence. She turned her back to me and the more she tried to remain still, the more her shoulders lurched. When she was finally able to look at me again, she said, “The Good Lord never gives us anything that we can’t handle. You’ll be all right.”

She walked towards the door, then stopped. “‘Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?’” She straightened her back. “That’s Zechariah 3:2. The world is good.”

Then she tucked the plastic flowers under her arm and left.

Anyone who’s spent a long period in the hospital knows that one’s nose loses its discernment in the atmosphere of ammonia. During one dйbridement session with Nan I asked, “What do I smell like?”

She wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her white sleeve and I could tell that she was making the decision between telling me the truth or attempting something more pleasant. I knew her by this point: she’d choose the truth. She always did.

“Not as bad as you might think. It-I mean, you-your smell is musty and old. Like a house that everyone has left and no windows have been opened in a long time.”

Then she went back to work, scraping and refurbishing this house that the owner had deserted. I wanted to tell her not to bother, but I knew that Nan would just turn down the corners of her mouth and continue her work.

Unable to tend yourself in a hospital, strangers plague you: strangers who skin you alive; strangers who cannot possibly slather you in enough Eucerin to keep your itching in check; strangers who insist on calling you honey or darlin’ when the last thing in the world that you are is a honey or a darlin’ strangers who presume that plastering a smile like drywall across their obnoxious faces will bring you cheer; strangers who talk at you as if your brain were more fried than your body; strangers who are trying to feel good about themselves by “doing something for the less fortunate” strangers who weep simply because they have eyes that see; and strangers who want to weep but can’t, and thus become more afraid of themselves than of burnt you.

When I could stand no more television, I counted the holes of the perforated ceiling. I counted again to verify my findings. I memorized the stealth movement of the setting sun’s shadows crawling down the walls. I learned to tell whether each nurse was having a good or bad day by the click of her steps. Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets. The snake kept kissing the base of my skull, the bitch. I AM COMING. I was overwhelmed by whiteness and choking on antiseptic. I wanted to crawl through my urinary tube and drown in my piss.

As bad as it was, it became worse when Nan explained that at the end of my hospital stay-which would not come for many more months-I’d be placed in a halfway house for “reintegration” into society. Eventually, she said, I’d be able to look after most of my own needs and live on my own.

Seventeen years after release from one government home, I would find my way back into a different one-but at least when I was a penniless child, I had had my life ahead of me. At thirty-five I was a spent, struck match.

So I listened to the doctors and I nodded yeses when they told me about upcoming surgeries, but they might as well have been telling me about my upcoming trip to the city at the bottom of the sea. I signed consent forms; I signed away my house and all my personal possessions. A burn such as mine can easily cost half a million dollars to treat, and without much more effort can climb its way to more than a million.

My lawyer came to visit, uncomfortable in his gown. Unlike the other visitors, he had also decided to wear a surgical mask; it would be charitable to think this was for my protection, but it was more likely his own paranoia that he might catch something. In any case, I thought it appropriate: I could not look upon his masked face without thinking of a thief come to rob me.

He said a few words about how sorry he was about my accident; then, this formality dispensed with, he launched into an explanation of the serious trouble that my production company was experiencing. At the root, the problem was nonfulfillment of contracts to deliver new content to sales outlets; filming had ceased the moment I wasn’t around to run operations, but delivery commitments had already been signed. He ran through a number of options, but because I had never trained anyone to fulfill my duties if I was incapacitated, only one scenario was truly viable: bankruptcy. He didn’t want to bother me continually in my “difficult time,” he explained, so he had already prepared the documents enabling my creditors to seize and liquidate my assets. Of course, he had ensured that the bankruptcy filing fees would be paid up front.

I just signed everything he placed in front of me, in order to get him out of the room quicker. The irony was not lost upon me that after making all my money in the skin trade, I was now trading all my money for skin. The deed done and my company instantly folded, the lawyer didn’t know what to do other than say he was sorry one more time and exit the ward as quickly as possible.

And so my life went. When the doctors told me that I was improving, I did my best imitation of a smile. The nurses were proud of me as I squeezed the therapy ball with my burnt hand. They thought I was doing it to improve my strength, but I only wanted to shut them up. I was tired of Maddy’s teasing, Beth’s seriousness, and Connie’s optimism.

I lay patiently during the Eucerin rubs, each one a tour of duty. I would pray, in the foxhole of my mind, for the opportunity to desert. At one point, Nan nonchalantly stated that my wounds were a “classic challenge” for a doctor such as herself. I pointed out that I was not a problem to be solved. She stammered. “That’s not what I meant, I-I, uh…You’re right. I was out of line, and I’m truly sorry.”

I felt a brief sense of victory, but the funny thing was that I agreed with her completely: I was a problem to be solved, although we saw it from opposing angles. She saw my bandages as a larval cocoon from which I would emerge, while I saw them as a funeral shroud.

The bitchsnake of my spine kept swishing her tail around in my guts and churning out the sentence I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. I didn’t even care anymore. The snake was coming. So what? Just one more problem in an endless list. There was the Dachau of my face. There was my body, a real-life version of Dante’s Inferno, constantly threatening to collapse in upon itself. The mantle of my skin over the hollowed-out Hell of my soul could not continue to support its own weight; my integrity had been compromised in every way. One doctor, hearing about the loss of my penis, visited to explain the most recent developments in erectile prosthetics, should I get a rebuilt cock. Whereas once there were only rods on hinges that allowed the penis to stand up or hang limp, it was now possible to install sophisticated pumping systems.

Such technological advances were little consolation to a man once admired for his ability to maintain an erection for ungodly periods of time. How the mighty are fallen.

I would simply get well enough to be released and, within twenty-four hours of leaving the hospital, I would be dead. This was my promise to myself, and it was the only thing that kept me going.

I am an atheist.

I do not believe there is a God who will punish me for self-slaughter.

Because I lack religious belief, I have never considered my accident to be divine retribution for my “immoral” activities. I know exactly why my accident occurred. Because I was high, I had a hallucination of arrows coming at me. To avoid the imaginary arrows, I drove my car over the side of a real cliff. The gasoline in my tank only did what gasoline does, which is to ignite when introduced to sparks. When flames engulfed my body, my body started to burn according to the laws of thermodynamics and biology. There is no deeper meaning.

I understand that some people find God after misfortune, although this seems to me even more ridiculous than finding Him in good times. “God smote me. He must love me.” It’s like not wanting a romantic relationship until a member of the opposite sex punches you in the face. My “miraculous survival” will not change my opinion that Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long.

In the spirit of full disclosure, however, I should reveal something that many theists will insist must inform my disbelief in God. They will argue that I forgo the idea of Heaven because if I accepted it, I would have to admit that I am destined for Hell.

Because I have murdered someone.

There’s a gentle sigh which descends like billowing silk upon the soul that accepts its coming death. It’s a gentle pocket of air in the turbulence of everyday life. The silk of this feeling flutters-no, “flutters” is too active a word-the silk settles around you as if it has been drifting towards the earth forever and has finally found its target. The flag of defeat has been mercifully dropped and, in this action, the loss is not so bad. Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.

The hiss of the snake fades away and death touches lovingly, possessively: it’s a master who pets the head of the dog, or a parent who consoles the crying child. The hours begin to roll and the days scarcely separate themselves from the nights. Darkness swells like a beautiful, hushed tsunami, and the body craves calming lullabies and final psalms.

I can state this with authority: nothing compares with deciding to die. I had an excellent plan and it made me smile. It made me drift more lightly on my air flotation bed.

I was an unbeloved monster. No one would mourn my loss; for all intents and purposes, I was already gone. Who would miss me-the doctors who pretended to care? Nan did her best to say all the right things and showed a hopeful face, but she was kind enough not to lie. I lied to her, though, when I pretended that I wanted to heal. I was perfecting my plan, working on it as the nurses tended to my grossness, their tender hands skittering around my body like the most graceful of insects landing upon feces.

A suicide is not something you want to screw up. Especially if, like me, you’re already facing the prospect of spending your entire life looking like last week’s dim sum. The only way to make it worse would be to wind up brain dead or quadriplegic, which can happen if you miscalculate. So, let me repeat: a suicide is not something you want to screw up.

My plan would begin immediately upon release from the hospital, because in the burn ward they watched me too carefully. At the halfway house, there would be no locks or security guards. Why would there be? Those places are designed to put people back into society, not to secure them from it.

I still had a few thousand dollars stashed away in a bank account under a false name; this would be more than enough. I’d leave the halfway house, hobble down the street, find a bank and get this money. At a clothing shop, I’d buy a hooded coat so that I could move about undetected in the land of mortals. And then a most interesting scavenger hunt would commence.

Buying a shotgun would be easy. I’d already decided to approach Tod “Trash” White, a small-time fence who would gladly sell his grandmother for a buck. Moving a shotgun at a handsome profit would put a shit-eating grin on his pockmarked face, and he’d probably even throw in a few extra cartridges for good measure.

The other items would be even easier. Razor blades are available at any convenience store. Rope is found at the corner hardware depot. Sleeping pills at the local pharmacy. Scotch at the liquor mart.

After procuring my supplies, I’d check into a hotel. Once alone in my room, I’d take a few antihistamine tablets, although not for hay fever. I’d settle in to watch a few adult movies on the hotel’s blue channel, just for old times’ sake. Who knows, I might even see myself in a farewell performance.

While watching the movies, I’d crack open the hinge of the shotgun to insert a couple of cartridges. Next I’d fashion a noose, paying particular attention to the knot. The object is not to strangle, but to break the neck: a large, strong knot facilitates a clean break. Having constructed a splendid loop, I’d turn the noose over in my hands a few times to admire my work and pull at it proudly, because you know how men love to yank their knots.

I’d wander out onto the balcony with my gun and my noose. Sunset. I’d breathe in the evening air. Throw out my arms to embrace the city. Bring my fists back in and thump my chest twice. Feeling strong and manly, I’d fasten the rope securely to the balcony railing. I’d drop the noose over the side, making sure there was ample length for a nice little fall before a sharp, satisfying jerk. Then I’d reel the rope back in, wishing that I could do the same thing to the damn bitchsnake living in my spine.

I’d spin the lid off the pill container and remove five sleeping tablets, sailing them down my throat with a glass of Scotch. This cocktail would be followed with a few more of the same. It’s always nice to enjoy a drink while watching the sun go down. While ingesting these refreshing beverages, I’d remove a razor blade from its package and cut partway through the rope. This operation would involve a certain amount of educated guesswork, to cut the rope in a way that it would not immediately break with the jerk of my fall. I wanted it to hold me, at least for a while, when I reached the end of the line.

I’d have another glass of Scotch and another five sleeping pills. Now, here’s the reason that I took the antihistamine: sleeping pills can cause vomiting when taken in excess and antihistamine counteracts that effect, making sure the sleepy stuff stays down. Pretty smart, huh? Next, I’d take the weekly supply of morphine given to combat the painsnake and inject it in a single satisfying plunge of the syringe. To complete my toxic cocktail, I’d wash down the remainder of my sleeping pills with a final shot of Scotch. By now, you can see how my plan is coming together.

I’d put the noose around my neck, working quickly because I’d be getting dizzy, Miss Frizzy. I’d take another shiny new razor blade out of its package. See how it sparkles in the light, like the wink of an imaginary God! With a single deft stroke I’d slash my right wrist, deep and clean, and then I’d slash my left wrist in the same manner. This is important: I’d cut along the length of the veins instead of across them. People who cut across the wrists either don’t really want to die, or are too stupid to pull it off.

I’d sit on the edge of the balcony. With bloody hands, I’d lift the loaded shotgun and place the muzzle into my mouth. I’d carefully angle the barrel so that the blast would travel through the roof of my mouth and into the meaty gumbo of my brain. The advantage of a shotgun, as compared to a handgun, is that your aim doesn’t really matter. The hundred pellets will immediately spread out to rip your damn head right apart. This is a beautiful thing.

My body would be positioned, back to the city, so that the blast would send me over the edge of the balcony’s railing. As my brain was shredded, I’d fall, but this fall would be brought to an abrupt halt by the noose snapping my neck. For a while, I’d just hang there, feet bobbing. Actually, perhaps I’d jerk around spasmodically; it’s hard to say. My wrists would be flowing red and my skull would be a gooey gray-matter mess, something like Picasso’s very worst painting. What was left of my brain would start to starve for oxygen. My stomach would be brimming with Scotch and sleeping pills. My veins would run the happily morphined blood right out of the gashes of my wrists. Now, if I’d cut the rope just right, it would begin to unravel. The braided strands would spin away from each other and, in a few minutes, let go entirely. My body would fall twenty floors to the sidewalk below. Beautiful. Completion. Now that’s a suicide, so much better than a cry for help.

Anyway, that was my plan. Never has a man looked forward to his death more than I.