The Gargoyle (5 page)

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 S&M, 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.