The Gargoyle (26 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One of your Three Masters, right?”

“Yes,” she answered.

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

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

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

“Is that what you think?” I asked.

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

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