The Gargoyle (33 page)

The most striking thing about the collection was that there were two copies, side by side, of every foreign book: the original, and an English translation. Naturally, I asked Marianne Engel about this.

“The English versions are for you,” she said. “That way we can talk about them.”

“And the originals?”

“Why would I read translations?”

Marianne Engel reached among the books to withdraw two that were not professionally published, but handwritten on thick paper and bound with uneven stitching. The penmanship was her own and the text was, thankfully, in English rather than German. Christina Ebner’s
Revelations
and
The Gnaden-vita of Friedrich Sunder.

“I thought you might want to read these,” she said, “so I translated them.”

There was another item of interest on the bookshelf: a small stone angel whose wings reached heavenward. I inquired whether she had carved it but my question, so innocently asked, seemed to hurt her. She blinked a few times, as if trying to keep herself from crying, and puckered her mouth in an effort to calm her quivering lower lip. “You carved that for me,” she said with a cracking voice. “It was my
Morgengabe
.”

That concluded the tour of the main floor. Her workshop was in the basement, but I didn’t have the legs to go down. My first day out of the hospital had been long enough and, in truth, the freedom was overwhelming. I’d grown accustomed to knowing every inch of my surroundings and every minute of my schedule, but now I was confronted with endless new sensations. We passed the remainder of the afternoon sitting in the living room, talking, but she couldn’t seem to put back on her face the smile that had been wiped away by my question about the stone angel.

THIS WON’T LAST, YOU KNOW.
The snake swished its tail around my intestines.
YOU WILL CRUSH HER UNDER YOUR INSENSITIVITY.

In the early evening, I climbed the stairs to the upper floor with Marianne Engel walking behind to make sure I didn’t tumble. I was aching for a needle of morphine that would shut up the bitchsnake. I had a choice of two rooms: one was the visitor’s room, already made up, the other an atticlike recess that overlooked the graveyard behind St. Romanus. Marianne Engel was concerned that the odd shape of the room, wedged as it was in the corner of the roof, might be too oppressive after months in the hospital, but I instantly took a liking to it. “It’s like a belfry. It’s perfect.”

She fixed me with morphine that was sweeter than the desert’s first rainfall, and the snake slithered silently into her hole. I assumed I would sleep through until the next morning, but it didn’t work out that way. It was February and not yet warm outside, but for some reason it seemed ridiculously hot inside. Perhaps the effect was partially psychological, from the stress of sleeping in a new place for the first time in ten months.

My unbreathing skin revolted in the feverish night and I dreamed of concentration camps, of human ovens, of people with matchstick bodies. Their hunger was transforming them into something too thin to be human. Their eyes bulged and accused; they were hunting me with their stares. Someone said in German, “Alles brennt, wenn die Flamme nur heiß genug ist. Die Welt ist nichts als ein Schmelztiegel.”
Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.
It was the same phrase I’d heard in my hospital nightmare about the skeleton bed going up in a shrouded flame.

I awoke suddenly upright in my thin sheets, wishing I could sweat. I heard the snake chanting the word
HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST. HOLOCAUST.
The word, I am told, literally means “burning everything.” The belfry was cooking me; Dr. Edwards had been correct, we needed air conditioning.
I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
There could be no denying that the snake was persistent; it was like having a Jehovah’s Witness living in my spine.
I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I looked at Friedrich Sunder’s
Gnaden-vita
(which means “Mercy-life”) on my bedside table. I decided that I didn’t have it in me to do any reading, especially not something that challenging. I got up on uncooperative legs and, with a little persuasion, was able to point them in the direction of the master bedroom, from which—to my surprise—Marianne Engel was absent. I listened to the house. From below, I heard faint strains of classical music that I didn’t recognize but that, for some reason, made me think about field workers. I struggled down both flights of stairs, from belfry to main floor, then from main floor to basement workshop.

There were a hundred candles, a hundred dots of fire in the room. I did not like this. Rivers of lush red wax flowed down iron candleholders; little splashes blotted the stone floor like an upside-down canopy of ruby stars. I could make out the grand oak doors on one side of the room and a considerable wooden workbench on the other. Tools on hooks lined the wall, and a coffeemaker sat on a shelf next to the stereo that was playing the music. A push broom leaned against the wall near a pile of carelessly swept stone fragments. But these were the unimportant details.

Everywhere there were incomplete monsters. It was generally the bottom halves of the grotesques that remained unfinished, as if the hobgoblin mafia had given them the proverbial cement shoes. A half sea-savage was using her webbed hands to claw out of a granite ocean. The upper body of a terrified monkey burst out of a lion whose legs were not yet carved. A bird’s head sat on the shoulders of a human, but everything below the chest was untouched marble. The shimmer of the candlelight only amplified the beasts’ already exaggerated features.

The workshop was a symphony of unwholeness, with grotesques caught between existence and nonexistence. It was difficult to tell whether they were ecstatic or melancholic, fearful or fearless, soulful or soulless; perhaps they themselves didn’t know yet. There wasn’t even enough light to decide whether they were beautiful or disgusting. And in the midst of these rough gargoyles, Marianne Engel was sleeping upon a huge slab of stone, undressed except for the necklace whose arrowhead, resting in the valley of her breasts, moved slightly up and down with the rhythm of her breath. She was at home here, the nude one danced upon by the shadows and light, her hair twisted around her body like wings woven from black rope. She clung to her rock like moss waiting to absorb the rain, and I couldn’t remove my eyes from her glorious body. I didn’t want to stare; I just couldn’t force myself to stop.

I was aware that I was invading something intensely personal; something about the scene was more vulnerable than her nudity. I felt as if I were interrupting a private conversation, and I knew I should leave immediately.

I climbed back up to the main floor and decided to sleep in the study because it was cooler than the belfry. I placed towels on the leather couch because I still shed skin, and lay down. I administered another generous shot of morphine, because one man’s poison is another man’s warm milk. There were no more dreams of holocausts that night.

I awoke to find Marianne Engel, wearing a white robe, standing over me. We talked for a few minutes before she bundled me off to the washroom, where a bath had already been drawn with the proper chemicals added and a thermometer hung over the tub’s edge. “Take off your clothes.”

I had managed to avoid bathing practice with her at the hospital through a combination of luck and deceit, but my luck had run out. My benefactor was now demanding to see my exposed body, so I played the only card left in my deck: I told her that my nakedness in front of her would make me feel self-conscious, and asked whether she could understand that. She told me she could, but it didn’t change the fact that I needed to be washed. I told her that she needed to respect my privacy. She laughed and told me about an especially vivid dream she’d had the night before in which I’d stood in the middle of her workshop, looking upon her nude body.

I could hardly talk my way out of that. The best I could do was cut a new deal: I agreed to allow her to bathe me if she’d fix me with more dope first. Compromise accepted. Soon I stood unclothed, looking as if I were made out of rubber that hadn’t set properly in the mold, while she searched my abominable body for an appropriate morphine-hungry vein.

THIS IS WHERE SHE SEES YOU FOR YOUR LACK.

Her hand rested on my hip and my left arm was presented for the drugs, but my right arm hung strategically in front of my groin.

She prepared the needle, placed the tip where it might enter, and asked, “Is this a good place?”
SHE CAN ENTER YOU . . .
I nodded. The needle penetrated and I wasn’t even thinking about the morphine that was coming; I was only thinking
. . . BUT YOU
CAN’T ENTER HER
that I had to make sure I did not move my right arm.

“Into the tub,” she said. But I was unable to climb into it without moving my right arm. So I just stood there, concealing the blank space between my hips.

“I will help you wash each day,” she said gently. “It’ll be difficult to keep hiding it.”

There is nothing to hide,
I thought.

“I already know it is missing.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I will be repulsed,” continued Marianne Engel, “or my feelings will change.”

Finally I spoke. “Yes.”

“You are mistaken.”

I dropped my arm as if challenging her, as if I expected her reaction to prove her words wrong. I wanted her to recoil at the closed scar where one could imagine that my body had been cut open, the penis pushed in, and the slit sewn shut. I wanted her to recoil at the sight of my lonely scrotum, which looked for all the world like a tumbleweed on the abandoned street of a ghost town.

But she did not pull back; instead, she kneeled in front of my naked body, and leaned in. Her head even with my groin, she narrowed her eyes and studied the faint scratch-lines of stitches, long since pulled out, that closed up the place where my penis had been. She lifted her hand and pulled it back, but not in revulsion: she seemed to be acting on the instinct that my body was hers to touch before realizing that it was not, not in this century at least. So she looked up at me and requested permission.

I cleared my throat, once, twice, and then nodded weakly.

Marianne Engel reached out again, and this time her fingertips grazed my crinkled wasteland. I could not feel the touch at all, because the scarring was too dense, too complete; I only knew her fingertips were upon me because I could see them there.

“Stop now,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” Third clearing of my throat. “Haven’t you seen enough?”

SHE’S SEEN NOTHING.

She removed her fingers and stood. She looked directly into my eyes with hers, green this day, and they worked the way they sometimes did, unsettling me. “I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“You do,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Do you really believe,” she asked, “that I ever loved you because of your body?”

“I don’t…” Fourth, fifth; damn my throat. “I guess not.” And to show that I meant it, I climbed into the bath without any more argument.

The tub was a massive thing with lion’s paws for feet, and soon Marianne Engel was scrubbing away the dead outer layers of my skin. It was a painful process, so she distracted me—and demonstrated she was ready to move on in our conversation—by asking why I’d had so much trouble sleeping. I explained that the heat was a bit much, causing bad dreams. Then I asked why she’d been stretched out on the stone. “Instructions?”

“I thought a grotesque was ready,” she admitted, “but I was wrong.”

“You once told me that you carve as fast as you can to get the grotesque out of the stone, but the basement is full of half-finished work.”

“Sometimes we get halfway through the process before they realize that they aren’t ready. So we pause for a little while.” She cupped some water into her hands and showered my head. “When I get the call again, I’ll finish them.”

“What if,” I asked, “you were to refuse to carve when they called?”

“I couldn’t do that. My carving pleases God.”

“How do you know?”

She pressed the sponge harder into an area of my skin that did not want to give. “Because God gave me ears that can hear the voices in the stone.”

“How does that work, exactly?”

She stumbled over her words; for all her language skills, she could not articulate precisely what she wanted to say.

“I just empty myself. I used to be so anxious to receive God’s instructions that I couldn’t. Now I clear myself, and that’s when the gargoyles can most easily talk to me. If I’m not empty, I bring my own ideas, and they’re always wrong. It’s much easier for the gargoyles, you see, because they’ve been emptying themselves for a million years. In the rock, He entered them and informed them. Then they inform me of God’s plan for us. I have to”—she paused for a good five seconds—“I have to empty myself of potency to become as close as I can to pure act. But only God is pure act.”