The Gargoyle (62 page)

“I tried to leave once too,” she said, “and the cliff followed me.”

“That’s why you stand here?”

“No.”

I looked over the edge of the cliff, to see that at its bottom were rocks that could shred a person.

“If you jump,” Vicky whispered, as if worried that the very stone under our feet would overhear, “you’ll lose the skin that you have regrown and be put back in your burnt body.”

“But this is only a hallucination. None of this is real.”

She shrugged. “Is that what you learned from the Archangel’s smile?”

YOU SHOULD JUMP.

Why would the snake tell me to jump? To cause me pain. That was in the interest of the snake, because the bitch thrived on my pain. I touched my skin where the nerve endings had once been incinerated.

If I jump,
I thought,
I lose this. I lose my nerves and my hair and my health and my beauty. My fingers and penis will recede again. My face will become weathered granite. My lips will wither, and my voice will be ground back into sharp ugly bits. I’ll become the gargoyle again, but this time by my own choice.

YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A GARGOYLE, BRANDED IN HELL BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN.

I asked Vicky what would happen if I stayed on the cliff.

I WAS NOT PUT IN YOUR SPINE AFTER YOUR ACCIDENT. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.

“I think,” Vicky answered, “that Marianne Engel will come for you.”

SHE IS NOT COMING FOR YOU.

“Why do you think that?”

Vicky answered, “Sometimes love outlasts even death.”

HOW COULD SHE LOVE ONE SUCH AS YOU?

I looked into the thrashing tide below us, crashing over the rocks.
YOU SHOULD JUMP.
Perhaps Vicky is right. Perhaps this is a test of my patience.
YOU SHOULD END.
Marianne Engel came to me in the hospital when I needed her most, and she will come for me now. Right?

BUT THIS IS NOT EVEN YOUR HELL. YOURS IS YET TO COME.

Hell is a choice.

I THOUGHT YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN HELL.

“Vicky,” I asked, “am I dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you dead?”

“Not as long as I wait for Tom.”

I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO REALLY KNOWS YOU.

Sunlight sparkled on the waves. The entire ocean stretched out in front of me.

YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BELIEVE WE ARE DIFFERENT . . .

I looked down and—though I can’t explain why I felt it so strongly—I was certain about what I had to do next.

. . . BUT YOU CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT ME.

A calm entered my body. As my fear left me, it entered the snake. Because the serpent knew that I’d made a decision that was good for me, bad for it.

YOU ARE ME.

I turned to Vicky and asked, “Shall I give your regards to Marianne Engel?”

“Please do.”

THIS IS A MISTAKE.

My legs pushed me up into the air. As I leapt towards the sun, I felt the snake rip backwards out of my body. As I moved forward, the snake could not. It left through my asshole, fittingly enough, yanked out like an anchor plunging from a boat.

There was a brief weightlessness; a balancing point between air and the water waiting below.
How strange,
I thought,
how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion.
There was a moment of perfect suspended weightlessness at the top of the arc. Just for this one beautiful moment, I imagined myself moving into the sky forever.

But, as it always does, the battle of gravity won. I was sucked perfectly down and cut the air like a dropped knife, the rush of the water coming up to meet me. Even as I was falling, I knew I was doing the correct thing. I closed my eyes and thought about Marianne Engel.

Contact, and the calm sheen of water opened to envelop me. As I cut the surface, I felt as if I’d come home and I—

—looked up into the eyes of Marianne Engel.

My body was wrapped in layers of wet cloth, to lower my fever. I was back in her bed, in our home, and her hand was resting on my cheek. She told me that it was over and I told her that I had been in Hell. She said that it sure looked that way, and handed me a cup of tea. I felt as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “How long was I…?”

“Three days, but nothing is better than having suffered. It is a short hardship that ends in joy.” Same old Marianne Engel.

“Let’s agree to disagree.”

She steadied my hand on the cup, as it was shaking badly. “How do you feel?”

“Like a brand plucked out of the fire.”

She smiled. “Zechariah 3:2.”

I checked my body: my skin had returned to its damaged state; my face had tightened; my lips had receded; fingers were missing; my knee was stiff; the hair on my forearms was gone and there were only wisps on my head.

My hand, just as it always had, went to my chest. Where I expected to find my angel coin, I found nothing, despite the fact that it had not been off my body since Marianne Engel had given it to me almost fourteen months earlier.

“Your coin served its purpose,” she said.

I checked in the sheets, under the bed, all around, but my neck chain was nowhere to be found. Marianne Engel must have removed it during my withdrawal. I told myself it was only a strange coincidence that she had done so while I was hallucinating about handing it over to Charon.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll replace your necklace with a better one.”

I felt better than I had in years, even before the accident, by simple virtue of an undrugged mind and veins not sluggish with narcotic syrup. This is not to say that I never felt a twinge of desire rising for the old drug—I did; the habit had been with me too long—but it was different. I could do without morphine; I wanted to do without it. I looked forward to my sessions with Sayuri and progressed faster with my exercises.

But best of all, the bitchsnake really was gone.

I was better able to look after myself than at any time since my accident, and Marianne Engel returned to her carving. She took up exactly where she’d left off, resuming an immediately unhealthy velocity. All I could do was to clean her ashtrays and try to curb her intake of coffee on the spoon. I brought her bowls of fruit that became still lifes rather than meals, and when she finished a statue, only to collapse onto the next block of stone, I washed her body. I promised myself that if she approached physical collapse again, I would do anything and everything necessary to stop her. I promised myself.

From February nineteenth to the twenty-first, she pulled statue
16
out of the stone. On the twenty-second, she slept and absorbed; from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth, she extracted number
15
. She took a day of rest and then she worked until the first day of March, producing number
14
. One does not need to be a mathematician to realize that this brought her past the halfway point of the final twenty-seven hearts: thirteen more hearts and she would be finished. Thirteen more hearts until she thought she would die.

Her return to carving seemed to affect even Bougatsa, who lacked his usual bounce. When we came back from our daily walks, he would eat a huge bowl of food before settling lethargically to drool on my orthopedic shoes.

In early March, I had a routine checkup with Dr. Edwards. We reviewed my charts and talked about a minor surgery that was scheduled for the end of the month. She seemed genuinely pleased. “You’ve been out of the hospital for over a year and things couldn’t be going any better.”

I kept my mouth shut about the fact that Marianne Engel was, at that very moment, stretched out on new stone, readying herself. Lucky
13
was calling.

“You know,” Nan added, “it just goes to show how wrong a doctor can be. There was a point when I thought you had given up, and then you became one of our hardest-working patients. And when you left, I was certain that Marianne wouldn’t be able to look after you.”

Marianne Engel produced statues
13
,
12
, and
11
(an old woman with donkey ears; a horned demon with its sloppy tongue hanging out; and a lion’s head with elephant tusks), taking only a few hours off during the process. She had already lost the weight she’d gained after Christmas, and her speech was becoming confused again. Statue
10
came into existence around March twentieth.

I was scheduled to enter the hospital for surgery on the twenty-sixth. Before I went in, I needed to decide what to do with Bougatsa. Not only did I doubt Marianne Engel’s ability to look after him when she could not even look after herself, but also the dog, perhaps in an example of animal empathy, was losing weight. I wondered whether I could use this to induce enough guilt to get her out of the basement, and decided to give it a try.

I made her stop carving long enough to explain that if she chose sculpting over Bougatsa’s care, I would have to place him in a kennel. (This was not only a bargaining tactic, but also the truth.) Marianne Engel took a look at me, and a look at Bougatsa, and she shrugged. Then she returned to her work on statue
9
.

There was a large puddle of shit on the floor. It was not mine.

In all the time I’d lived in the fortress, Bougatsa had never once relieved himself inside. I am somewhat loath to write a detailed description of the stool, but two things need mentioning. First, the stool was more liquid than solid. Second, it contained leafy remains.

The only plant in the house was the one that Jack had brought. (Perhaps there had been others before my time, but they had become casualties of Marianne Engel’s negligence while carving.) When I inspected it, it was quickly apparent that Bougatsa had been making a meal of its leaves. Most were gone, and the ones that remained all had jagged edges in the shape of teeth marks.