The Gargoyle

V.

How do I best present the medieval life that Marianne Engel claimed was hers, when-of course-she no more lived in the fourteenth century than I did? The challenge lies not only in her story’s inherent lack of truth, but also in the fact that I can no longer continue to write solely in my own voice: I now must consider hers. I have attempted to re-create the Engelthal story exactly as she spoke it, but if my rendering of her voice is sometimes flawed, please forgive me. I have done my best.

The tale also brought forth the question of just how crazy Marianne Engel actually was. Did she really believe she had been raised in a medieval monastery, or was she simply trying to entertain a burn patient? When I tried to get her to admit that she was making it all up, she looked at me as if I were the insane one and, since I wanted her to keep coming back, I could hardly insist she had it backwards. In the end, I decided I would let her keep telling the story until the facts tripped her up.

I was not the only one musing on the state of my visitor’s sanity. Dr. Edwards paid me a visit with the unambiguous goal of discouraging further visits from this new woman in my life. The conversation opened with a warning about the physical risks that came with Marianne Engel; as she was sneaking in when the nurses weren’t looking and was disregarding the rules about gowns for visitors, who knew what germs she might be bringing? I conceded the point but countered that it certainly could not harm my recovery to have something-someone-to look forward to seeing.

“That may be, but you need to focus on your recovery, and not deal with…” Nan took a moment to compose a politic phrasing. “…Other issues that won’t help you get better.”

She was very quick, I suggested, to tell me what I needed.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve seen what extra stress can do to a patient.”

I asked whether her concern arose because my visitor was an occasional psychiatric patient at the hospital, and Nan affirmed the fact did not play in Marianne Engel’s favor. However, she was also quick to add that this would not, or could not, be used to keep Marianne Engel away; as she had been judged competent to live in society, thus she was also competent to visit a hospital. Still, I could see that Nan might use her influence to make it as difficult as possible.

“I’ll tell you what,” I proposed, “if you allow her to keep coming, I’ll work harder with Sayuri.”

“You should be doing that anyway.”

“But I’m not,” I said, “and you should take what you can get.”

Nan must have judged that she would not be getting a better deal than the one I was offering, because she accepted. However, she could not stop herself from adding, “I don’t have to like it.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You just have to leave her alone.”

It was not long after the meeting with Dr. Edwards that Connie arrived with an orderly to take me to a private room, away from the other burn patients. I asked her what was going on-surely this was a mistake. No, she assured me, I was supposed to get my own room, on Dr. Edwards’ orders, although she didn’t know why. She told me that I should just enjoy the privacy while it lasted because if it was a mistake, it would be sorted out soon enough. Rather than taking me out of the skeleton bed, they simply wheeled the whole contraption down the hall and into a smaller, but beautifully empty, room.

Empty, that is, until Sayuri arrived to demonstrate an exercise that she wanted me to start doing daily. “Dr. Edwards tells me that you are excited about working harder,” she said as she laid a board lengthwise on my bed, tilted up and away from me. This board had a groove cut into it, into which she placed a two-pound silver ball. I was to push the ball up the board until it reached the top, and then gently support it as it rolled back down to the bottom. Repeat.

I used to haul hundreds of pounds of camera equipment around bedrooms on every movie shoot, and now I was relegated to pushing a ball up a wooden plank. Worse yet, even this simple task took all my concentration. I could see my bandaged face reflected in the curved silver, and the farther away I would push the ball, the farther away my reflection would move. Sayuri commended me for each success. “Perfect!” When we were finished, she effortlessly whisked away the ball as if it was-well, as if it was a two-pound ball. This tiny Japanese woman pissed me off by being stronger than I, and then pissed me off further by bowing slightly when she left my room.

When Dr. Edwards next came to my bedside, I asked about the private room. How, I quizzed, could I possibly rate such an extravagance? It was not as though I was being rewarded for good behavior, or for the hard work that I had just started and needed to continue.

Nan was running a study that she hoped to publish, she claimed, about the effects of private versus shared rooms in the treatment of burn patients. She was hoping that my case might provide some insight into patients who are switched during the process, and it was a happy accident that a room had become available. I asked if this meant I might be switched back into the shared ward at some point, and she said that she wasn’t sure yet.

I assured her I would happily be her isolated little guinea pig for as long as she wanted, but added: “Are you sure there’s no more to the story?”

She considered, and decided to speak a further truth-one that I had already guessed: “It is all well and good that you’ll continue to accept visits from Ms. Engel, but I see no reason to subject the other patients to her as well.”

I said that I respected her concern for others, and she nodded. When it was clear that neither of us had anything more to say, she nodded a second time and promptly left the room.

Visits with Marianne Engel were more enjoyable now that it was just the two of us, with no plastic curtain necessary, and since the doctors had stopped trying to force her to wear protective gowns. In part, her regular wardrobe was accepted because I was becoming healthier and the need for gowns was not as great, but, perhaps more important, it was because the medical staff had tired of having arguments with her. Marianne Engel was a visitor of whom they didn’t altogether approve but for whose visits I had fought, so I suppose they decided that any risk was mine to take.

Now that we had more privacy, my talks with Marianne Engel grew more varied: how to cook vegetarian lasagna; what carnival games are played in Hamburg; the beautiful melancholy of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor; the settlement habits of West Coast Indians; why people sing in rock bands; the merits of Canadian literature as contrasted with Russian literature; how harsh winter climates shape personality; the history of European prostitution; why men are fascinated by the concept of “Heavyweight Champion of the World!” the conversations that might occur between a Jehovah’s Witness and an archaeologist; and how long chewing gum remains fresh in the mouth. My years of library visits served me well.

I asked about her Three Masters, and teasingly inquired whether such protectors were common for medieval nuns. She seriously answered that they were not but that, in fact, Heinrich Seuse also had Three Masters whose consent he needed to gain (with the same Latin prayer that she used) when he wished to speak.

My response was the obvious one: “Are yours and his the same?”

“No.” Seuse’s first master was St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans, who would grant permission to speak only if the time and place were proper. The second master, St. Arsenius, would allow a conversation only if it did not promote attachment to material things. The third, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, would allow Seuse to speak only if doing so would not cause him to become disturbed emotionally.

“And your masters?”

She answered that hers were Meister Eckhart, a prominent theologian who was active during the time of Sister Marianne’s youth; Mechthild von Magdeburg, the spiritual leader of the Beguines, the order that had established Engelthal; and Father Sunder, of whom she had already spoken.

When our conversation finally came around to my career in pornography, it hardly seemed like an exotic topic at all; it was just one more subject in a long conversation that seemed to include everything. Still, she was curious about the work and asked many questions that I answered as well as I could. When I finished, I asked whether it bothered her, what I had done for a career.

“Not at all,” she answered, and reminded me that even St. Augustine had lived a life of pleasure before famously imploring the Lord to “make me chaste-but not yet.”

The difference, I pointed out, was that I was not going to find religion as a result of my past. Marianne Engel shrugged noncommittally. I couldn’t tell whether she thought that I was wrong and I would find God, or if she didn’t care. But the turn in our conversation had also brought forth the subject of chastity and I asked, tentatively, whether she knew what had happened to my penis in the fire.

“I have been informed by the medical staff,” she answered, “that it was lost.”

So she knew, but what did she think? “And…?”

“And it is a pity.”

Yes, a pity, indeed. “I thought you didn’t like talking to doctors.”

“It was important enough to learn about your wounds that I couldn’t avoid it.”

That was the end of that day’s discussion about my missing penis; already more than I had intended to say.

Each time she visited, Marianne Engel was more elaborately dressed than the time before, blooming into a new woman. Her wrists jangled with bracelets from the world over: Aztec, Mayan, Tonka Toy, Ojibwa. She wore plastic rings on her fingers, yellow elephants named Duke Elliphant and Ellaphant Gerald. Her sneakers were covered in sequins that made me think of a fluttering school of tropical fish. When she left my room for a cigarette, she would hold out the edges of her purple dress in a curtsey. I asked what caused the change in her fashion sense and she answered that since everyone thought she was crazy, she might as well dress the part.

It was interesting: this was her first humorous comment regarding her own mental state. I thought it might be the opening I’d been waiting for, and I asked her-pointing out that she had already discussed my burns with my doctor-with what condition she had been diagnosed. She shut down the topic by stating that the doctors simply didn’t understand her particular brand of charm.

She reached into her rucksack and pulled out a small leather-bound book. She wanted to start reading it aloud to me, she said. The Inferno, by Dante. An interesting choice for the burn ward, I commented, and added that despite my love of literature, this was one classic that I had never read.

She smiled as if she knew something that I did not. She had a very strong feeling, she said, that I would find the story not only to my liking, but very familiar.

Marianne Engel was telling a story of her life that dated back to the fourteenth century. Now, if she could do this, surely the reader will excuse me for providing some information on Sayuri’s life that I did not yet have at this point of my hospital convalescence. In defense of my jump out of the timeline, I will plead that Ms. Mizumoto told me all this later in our acquaintanceship-and at least her story is true.

Sayuri was the third child, the second daughter, of Toshiaki and Ayako Mizumoto. Her birth position was most unfortunate, because it meant that as a child she was the fifth person to bathe each night. It is tradition that Japanese family members share a single tub of bathwater and, although they rinse before getting in, the water darkens with each bather. The father goes first, and then the male members from oldest to youngest. Only then will the women bathe, again from oldest to youngest. This meant that the father, the older brother, the mother, and the older sister all used the bathwater before Sayuri. Throughout her entire childhood, she was forced every night to soak in the accumulated filth of her entire family.

Toshiaki and Ayako’s union was the product of omiai, an arranged marriage. If not a union brimming with love, it was at least functional, as evidenced by the three children. Toshiaki worked hard hours at the office, followed by drinking and karaoke; Ayako ran the home, looking after the household finances and making sure that there was food waiting for her husband when he came home intoxicated and sung-out. They fulfilled the requirements necessary to be classified as a normal Japanese family, and all Toshiaki and Ayako wished for their children was that they meet the same requirements.

The first son, Ichiro-a name which, incidentally, means First Son-attended a good university. Therefore, he got a good job with a good salary at a good company after graduation; that’s how these things work. In fact, Ichiro didn’t even need to apply himself to his schoolwork after he’d been accepted, because simply attending the right university was the important thing; learning, less so. After he got his good job, he worked for a few years before he married a good Japanese girl from a good family at a good age. Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty-five, because that’s when she turns into a “Christmas cake.” Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty-fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf. Ichiro’s wife was twenty-three, so she was still well before her expiration date. Toshiaki and Ayako were pleased; Ichiro would inherit the family house and would tend to the parents’ graves after they died.

Sayuri’s sister, Chinatsu-a lovely name, meaning A Thousand Summers-also went to a good university, then got a job as an office lady for a few years, and got married at the age of twenty-four and a half. Just in time. She quit her job and embarked upon babymaking. Again, the parents were pleased.

Then it was the turn of their youngest daughter, the somewhat troublesome Sayuri. (Her name means Small Lily. If nothing else, the Japanese are expert namers.)

Sayuri was some years younger than Chinatsu. Her parents would never have gone so far as to call her an accident, but they would, on occasion, let slip that she was “not planned.” Her parents would also, if pressed, admit that unplanned things can be problematic but, on the other hand, if two children were good then a third child must be one third better. So never let it be said that Sayuri’s parents regretted her birth. However, Sayuri’s math skills were advanced enough to tell her that adding one to two actually increases the amount by half, not one-third.

Ichiro and Chinatsu had both walked the appropriate path and had done what was expected. The pattern had been firmly established, folded neatly and put away like a fine kimono; this pattern of proper behavior was practically a family heirloom to be handed down. All Sayuri had to do, to continue the perfection of her parents’ lives, was imitate the examples of her older siblings. But this, unfortunately, was the very last thing she wanted to do. If she did, she reasoned, she would be doomed to spend not only her childhood but her entire life in her family’s dirty bathwater.

The problem was that Sayuri was unsure about what she did want to do, so she kept her mouth shut and bided her time. She worked hard enough at her high school studies, but when her parents had their backs turned, she spent all her extra time studying English. Unbeknownst to them, an Australian woman named Maggie tutored her on Tuesday nights when Sayuri’s parents thought she was at volleyball practice. Sayuri went to the movies each Saturday, not for entertainment but to learn to speak like Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon, and (unfortunately) Woody Allen. On Sunday afternoons, she went to the local museum to hunt American tourists and when she cornered one, she’d ask him whether he would speak with her for five minutes so she might practice her English. Invariably the tourist agreed, because who could refuse such cute enthusiasm? Meanwhile, Sayuri dutifully filled out applications for the correct Japanese universities and was accepted into one of them. Her parents were happy. Now Sayuri only had to graduate, work a few years as an office lady, and get off the shelf by twenty-five.

Right after her high school graduation, Sayuri visited the Australian embassy with Maggie to pick up a work visa. One week later, Sayuri called her parents long distance from the Sydney airport. Needless to say, they were less than pleased, not only with her rash and disrespectful actions but because she had not even had the courage to say goodbye before she left the country.

In truth, it was not a lack of courage that had dictated Sayuri’s actions, but an excess of it. If she’d tried to reason with her parents, they never would have let her go. It would have been an argument that Sayuri could not win but one that she was unwilling to lose, so she simply did what she had to do to start a life on her own terms. At first Sayuri’s parents thought she was joking-she couldn’t really be calling them from Australia, could she? She couldn’t really be planning to stay, could she? When they finally accepted the truth, they threatened and cajoled her. Sayuri hung up, because nothing would have changed if she’d stayed on the line.

She spent a year in Australia, moving from one job to another: waiting tables, painting houses, picking fruit, tutoring people in Japanese, and so on. All the while her tan deepened, her smile widened, and her English improved. The biggest problem with Western countries was that she often had to shop in the children’s section to find clothes that fit her, as she was small even for a Japanese woman. (This was why she was destined to spend her life abroad looking like a child’s doll.) Sayuri called her parents once a month-always from a different pay phone-to let them know that she was all right and to listen politely as they begged her to return. Sometimes, Ichiro lent the weight of his oldest-son voice to the argument. Sayuri ignored his commands as well.

When Sayuri’s visa ran out, she returned to Japan. Her mother cried and her father yelled, even though a part of him admired what she had done. Sayuri informed them that she was going to attend an American university to study for a degree. Over the next year, she worked three part-time jobs, passed the necessary English-language proficiency exams, and got accepted by the department of physical therapy at the University of Michigan. When it was time to leave once more, her mother cried another Japanese river. The father, however, had by this point accepted the ridiculous ideas of his youngest daughter. When Toshiaki offered to cover some of the tuition, Sa-yuri hugged him long and hard. He didn’t quite know what to do about that, so he stood as ramrod straight as he could.

Sayuri completed her degree with honors and accepted a job in the hospital where she would, eventually, meet me. Long before I came along, she had paid back every yen her father had given her for her education.

Dr. Hnatiuk came by my room every few days to pass along a new psychology book. I was starting to like him. It’s not easy for me to pinpoint when my feelings turned, as there was no moment of revelation in which I exclaimed: “Hey, the chipmunk’s not so bad after all.” He crept up on me. The most important thing was that he stopped trying to relate to me in a doctor-patient capacity, and simply let the conversation flow naturally. There was also the fact that he liked the gargoyle statue that Marianne Engel had given me, while Beth had called it a “horrible little thing.” What really sold me on Gregor, however, was that despite his milquetoast exterior, he was a passionate man who cared deeply about his job. One afternoon he spoke at length about how lawyers have, in his opinion, been the biggest enemy of psychiatric care over the last half century. He told me how they fought for the rights of the patient-which was good-but to the point that a patient who was eating his own excrement could no longer be held for observation. “Leave it to the lawyers to turn shit into health food.”

As the weeks passed, a physical change occurred in Gregor. He lost his tasseled loafers and ill-advised corduroys and began wearing clothes that almost seemed to fit properly. Even if they couldn’t be considered quite “stylish,” they were at least passable. He’d been exercising to the point that the glow in his cheeks no longer looked as if it came from climbing a flight of stairs too quickly, and he was losing some of the excess fat from around his midsection.

Gregor never asked why I was reading psychology books, but he was willing to answer every question I had about schizophrenia. Although I had never mentioned her name in any of our discussions, one day I let it slip (not quite accidentally) that I was doing my research because I feared that a friend of mine SHE’S NOT YOUR FRIEND might be suffering from the condition. SHE’S JUST A CRAZY WOMAN.

“I know,” Gregor said. “Marianne Engel.”

Gregor seemed satisfied to have proven himself a step ahead of me, but I assumed he’d been consulted when Dr. Edwards tried to convince me not to encourage her visits. Gregor had actually treated her several times, he said, the last being when she had been admitted for “talking to ghosts” in public. SEE? I asked why he’d never told me before this. He cited the Hippocratic oath, and added that he’d say no more about her than he already had.

“Furthermore,” he added, “I will neither confirm nor deny a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”

Gregor also pointed out that he never mentioned the content of our conversations to anyone. I told him that he was free to repeat whatever he wanted, because I was not his patient. To this, he countered that we were still in a hospital where I was a patient and he was a doctor, so he considered this reason enough for confidentiality. I voiced my opinion that psychiatrists were generally useless and that I really didn’t care what they (meaning he) thought about me.

“Oh, it might be true that many of us could do better,” Gregor conceded, “but we have our moments. For example, out of your many personality flaws, I can diagnose your largest.”

“And what’s that?”

“You think you’re smarter than everyone else.”

With the exception of the periods when she disappeared for almost a week at a time, Marianne Engel was now coming to the burn ward almost every day. She started helping with my exercise sessions, placing her hands underneath the pad of my foot on the intact leg and providing resistance as I pushed like a one-legged bicyclist.

“I talked to Dr. Edwards,” she said. “She’s given me permission to bring you some food.”

Since she was now talking to my doctor, I asked whether she would give me permission to discuss her case with one of the doctors who had treated her. Specifically, Dr. Hnatiuk.

She answered that she didn’t want me discussing her case with anyone, and was offended that I would even ask. Of all people, she said, I should know that she was not crazy.

There was a moment of awkward silence between us, until Marianne Engel snapped it in half by saying, “Paracelsus wrote a recipe for a burn salve that included boar fat, worms from a hanged man’s skull, and part of a mummy. The whole stew was roasted.” She then proceeded to educate me about the history of skin grafting, from its beginnings with the ancient Hindus through to the present times. I pulled up one of the bandages on my legs to show her my current grafts, which included some black skin. Because a mesher had been used to cut the skin into a net so it could stretch over a larger area, the resulting pattern resembled a distorted chessboard.

“If ever you were a racist,” she said, running her fingers over the game board of my body, “this would certainly be a hair in your soup.”

Her fingers were gentle lingering over the wasteland. They moved across my torso and towards my neck, pausing at the shoulders to follow the curves. “What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”

“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?”

It was difficult, sometimes, to know whether Marianne Engel was actually looking for an answer, or just teasing me. “Are you serious?”

“It makes me think of us,” she continued. “It makes me want to sew myself to you like skin.”

I cleared my throat.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that my body is marked too?”

I had some idea what she was talking about. When she wore T-shirts it was impossible not to notice the tattoos of Latin phrases that circled her upper biceps. On the left arm was the phrase Certum est quia impossibile est. I asked what it meant, and she said that it translated as “It is certain because it is impossible.” On her right arm was the phrase Quod me nutrit, me destruit. This, she said, meant, “That which nourishes me also destroys me.”

“I don’t get it,” I confessed.

She laughed. “Well, that’s only because you haven’t seen me carve yet.”

Then Marianne Engel did this one small thing. She touched my face.

It’s a tiny thing, to have your face touched. Isn’t it? But think again about the burnt and unbeloved beasts of the world. Think about the people whose skin cannot remember affection. Her fingers moved gently over my disaster, reaching under the bandages to touch the remains of my face. Her fingers traveled lovingly across my bandaged cheek, making the arduous journey to my lips. They rested softly there, for only a moment. I closed my charred eyelids, little scars reconnecting at the places where weeks before they had been sewn shut. My heart danced clumsily in the cavern of my chest and, all the while, my sealed pores were working overtime, not sweating.

“What does my face feel like?”

“Like the desert after a windstorm.”

I had an overwhelming urge to tell her that I was beautiful before the accident, but I didn’t. What would be the point? And then, I reached out with my good hand to touch her cheek. She didn’t pull back: no. Not even in the least.

“There are good things happening,” Marianne Engel whispered, before she stood up to go into the corners of my room to speak with her invisible Three Masters. It was apparent, even in Latin, that she was asking for permission to do something. “Jube, Domine benedicere.”

When she returned to my bedside, her smile indicated that her request had been granted. “Would you like to see my other tattoos?”

I nodded, and she began by sweeping at the unruly mess of her hair, pulling it up so the back of her neck was exposed. A small cross was inked there, an intertwining of three braided ropes without end. She asked me to touch it. I did. I ran my fingers over its height, then its width; literally making the sign of the cross, on her skin.

She took off her shoes. Around her left ankle was the tattooed chain of a beaded rosary, inked so the cross lay across the bridge of her foot. This way, she said, she’d always be prepared when she needed to do penance. But she was smiling, and it was clear that even she didn’t take this statement too seriously.

Next, she removed her pants-which I did not expect, because somehow the movies have conditioned me to think that women always undress from the top down. She was not wearing underwear, so she was left only in her white T-shirt with a picture of Beethoven drinking himself under a table. (The caption? “Beethoven’s Ninth.”)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong?”

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

“It’s called tissue expansion.”

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

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

“What?”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She paused and seemed to be waiting for me to say something, anything-but how does one respond to proclamations such as these? Because she wanted a prompt and I wanted her to continue talking, I said it sounded like an extremely creative process.

“No, it’s the opposite. I’m a vessel that water is poured into and splashes out of. It’s a circle, a flowing circle between God and the gargoyles and me, because that is what God is-a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the entire time I’m carving, the gargoyle’s voice becomes louder and louder. I work as fast as I can because I want the voice to stop, but it keeps urging me on, demanding that I help it achieve its freedom. The voice goes silent only when I’m finished, and then I’m so exhausted that it’s my turn to sleep. So that’s why I disappear for five or six days at a time. It takes that long to free a gargoyle and then recover myself. I have no say in when a gargoyle will be ready, and I cannot refuse. So forgive my disappearances, because I have no choice.”

Okay, fine. At least now I knew what she was doing with the multiple hearts she thought were in her chest. They were going into the statues she carved.

I had been certain that Marianne Engel was schizophrenic, but given her description of her work habits I now had to consider that she might be manic-depressive instead. Evidence was mounting in that direction: when I first met her, she was fatigued and darkly attired; now she was bright in both dress and personality. Schizophrenics tend to eschew talking, sometimes remaining completely silent for hours on end, but Marianne Engel was just the opposite. And there was the nature of her work. Many manic-depressives achieve fame in the arts because the condition itself provides the fervor necessary to create something monumental. Which, of course, was exactly what Marianne Engel did: create monuments. If her account of her carving habits was not a description of a manic at work, I can’t imagine what is.

But there was also so much evidence for schizophrenia. She described the voices that came out of the stone, giving her instructions. She saw herself as a channel of the Divine, and her work as a circle of communication between God, the gargoyles, and herself. This is not to mention her Engelthal “past” and her belief that Inferno was appropriate reading material for the burn ward. In short, there was very little in her life that was not touched in some way by Christianity, and, as previously noted, schizophrenics are often preoccupied with religion.

Statistics could argue for either condition. Schizophrenia tends to affect men more often than women, but more than eighty percent of schizophrenics smoke heavily, and Marianne Engel was constantly popping out of the burn ward for a nicotine hit. And while speaking to me, she always had that unnerving stare, which kept her eyes locked upon mine: this only started to make sense after I read in one of Gregor’s books that schizophrenics rarely blink.

Refusal to take one’s medication is common to both conditions, but for different reasons. A manic-depressive is likely to refuse her meds because in her high she becomes convinced that a low is no longer possible, or she is so addicted to the high that the low becomes simply the price that must be paid. Schizophrenics, on the other hand, tend to refuse medication because they believe they’re being poisoned-a claim that Marianne Engel had made on more than one occasion.

Many doctors are now convinced that the two conditions co-exist far more often than commonly diagnosed, so maybe both diagnoses applied.

In the hours I spent leafing through mental health texts in an effort to understand her better, I came to understand myself better as well-and I was not altogether pleased with what I learned.

I was constantly measuring her pain against my own, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly understand my physical anguish while I did understand the nature of mental pain. And while many mental illnesses are treatable with the correct medication, there was no pill that would allow me to pass for normal. A medicated wack job could blend into the crowd but I would always stand out like a burnt thumb from the fist of humanity: this made me feel like the winner in a competition that didn’t really exist.

Marianne Engel arrived the next day in a simple white dress with open-toed sandals, and she might have passed for a woman from a seaside village on the Mediterranean. She appeared with two food hampers, one blue and one white, and I could tell they were heavy from the way she lugged them into the room. Bent over as she was, the arrowhead on her necklace bobbed in and out of the V-neck of her dress like a lure on a fishing line. “I’m finally going to live up to my promise to feed you.”

I’ll take a moment to explain why Dr. Edwards would allow a visitor to bring food into the burn ward. In addition to the psychological benefits of a picnic (as it were), there was also a physical one. With my healing came a condition known as hypermetabolism: a body that normally requires two thousand calories a day can consume seven thousand after a severe burn. Despite the nasogastric tube that constantly delivered nourishment directly into my stomach, I was still not getting enough and I was allowed, even encouraged, to eat extra food.

Marianne Engel had previously brought me snacks, but it was obvious that this meal was far more substantial. She opened the hampers-one for hot items and the other, packed with ice, for cool-and started to lay out the food. There was a freshly baked round of focaccia, still smelling of wood smoke, and bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She danced a swirl of black across the surface of the yellow, and then dipped a chunk of the focaccia into the leoparded liquid. She said the familiar prayer before she lifted the bread to my mouth: “Jube, Domine benedicere.”

She’d also brought cheeses: Camembert, Gouda, blue, Iranian goat. She asked my favorite and when I picked the goat, she smiled broadly. Next, some steaming wraps that looked like crepes but had a most bawdy smell. Gorgonzola pancakes were not for everyone, she explained, but she hoped I liked them. I did. There were cantaloupe balls wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, the fruity orange peeking through the meaty pink.

She continued to excavate the hampers. Bastardly plump green olives, fat with red pimiento stuffing, lounged contentedly in a yellow bowl. A plateful of tomatoes soaked in black vinegar with snowy nuggets of bocconcini. Sheaves of pita and cups brimming with hummus and tzatziki. Oysters, crabs, and scallops drowning a wonderful death in a marinara ocean; little wedges of lemon balanced on the plate’s edge like life preservers waiting to be thrown in. Pork sausages with peppercorn rims. Dolmathes, trying hard to be swarthy and macho in their little green suits, scented with sweet red wine. Thick rings of calamari. Souvlaki shared skewers with sweet buttered onions and braised peppers. There was a shoulder of lamb so well cooked it fell apart if you only looked at it while thinking about a fork, surrounded by a happy little family of roast potatoes.

I sat trapped under the culinary avalanche, unable to move for fear of tipping a plate over. “There’s no way we can eat all this.”

“Finishing isn’t the point.” She pulled a bottle out of the chilled hamper. “Besides, I’m sure the nurses will be happy to help with the leftovers. You won’t tell them I was drinking alcohol, will you? I like retsina because you can taste the earth in it.”

The nurses soon hovered around the door like a flock of hungry seagulls. I felt a strange manly pride, the one we get when being seen on a date with a beautiful woman. The nurses giggled and made a few comments before dispersing to their rounds. Marianne Engel lifted morsel after morsel to my lips. “Try this… You’re going to love it… Have more.”

We made a determined effort, but it was predestined that we’d never be able to finish the meal. When we gave up, she brought out a slim metal thermos and poured Greek coffee into two demitasses. It was so chuggingly thick that it took a good thirty seconds to pour out. Then she brought out the dessert: baklava so honey-dense that it oozed like a charitable beehive. Tricolor gelato, green white red. And of course bougatsa, her dog’s namesake-light brown pastry with custard between layers of phyllo.

“Would you like to hear a story?” Marianne Engel asked. “It’s got true love, brotherly devotion, and arrows that find the mark.”

“Is it about you again?”

“No, it’s about my good friend Francesco Corsellini.”