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 f
or 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 prede
stined 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.”
VI.
If there was one thing that Graziana knew for certain, it was that her beloved Francesco was a good man. He was a blacksmith in their hometown of Firenze and he toiled at his craft, always trying to forge a better horseshoe or a stronger sword. Sometimes he lost track of the hours and stopped only when Graziana appeared in the door of his shop to suggest that he pay a little less attention to his fire and more attention to his wife. She joked that he must have done something very bad in his past life to be preparing so diligently for Hell. He would laugh, promising to come right away, and Graziana would laugh, too. She knew that Hell was the last place her husband would end up.
Francesco would never be known as “the finest sword maker in all of Italy” or “the great metal worker of Firenze,” but this didn’t matter to him. He wanted to be a good tradesman, a dependable blacksmith with honest prices, but his real desire was to be a great husband. He crafted beautiful gifts for Graziana in his metal shop—candleholders, cutlery, and the most wondrous jewelry. He always claimed that his greatest achievements as a metal worker were the wedding rings that he had forged for himself and Graziana. In one room of their home, there was a collection of metal toys for the baby they were attempting to conceive. He dreamed of the day that he would be the loving father to her children.
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