It was not long after the meeting with Dr. Edwards that Connie arrived with an orderly to take me to a private room, away from the other burn patients. I asked her what was going on-surely this was a mistake. No, she assured me, I was supposed to get my own room, on Dr. Edwards’ orders, although she didn’t know why. She told me that I should just enjoy the privacy while it lasted because if it was a mistake, it would be sorted out soon enough. Rather than taking me out of the skeleton bed, they simply wheeled the whole contraption down the hall and into a smaller, but beautifully empty, room.
Empty, that is, until Sayuri arrived to demonstrate an exercise that she wanted me to start doing daily. “Dr. Edwards tells me that you are excited about working harder,” she said as she laid a board lengthwise on my bed, tilted up and away from me. This board had a groove cut into it, into which she placed a two-pound silver ball. I was to push the ball up the board until it reached the top, and then gently support it as it rolled back down to the bottom. Repeat.
I used to haul hundreds of pounds of camera equipment around bedrooms on every movie shoot, and now I was relegated to pushing a ball up a wooden plank. Worse yet, even this simple task took all my concentration. I could see my bandaged face reflected in the curved silver, and the farther away I would push the ball, the farther away my reflection would move. Sayuri commended me for each success. “Perfect!” When we were finished, she effortlessly whisked away the ball as if it was-well, as if it was a two-pound ball. This tiny Japanese woman pissed me off by being stronger than I, and then pissed me off further by bowing slightly when she left my room.
When Dr. Edwards next came to my bedside, I asked about the private room. How, I quizzed, could I possibly rate such an extravagance? It was not as though I was being rewarded for good behavior, or for the hard work that I had just started and needed to continue.
Nan was running a study that she hoped to publish, she claimed, about the effects of private versus shared rooms in the treatment of burn patients. She was hoping that my case might provide some insight into patients who are switched during the process, and it was a happy accident that a room had become available. I asked if this meant I might be switched back into the shared ward at some point, and she said that she wasn’t sure yet.
I assured her I would happily be her isolated little guinea pig for as long as she wanted, but added: “Are you sure there’s no more to the story?”
She considered, and decided to speak a further truth-one that I had already guessed: “It is all well and good that you’ll continue to accept visits from Ms. Engel, but I see no reason to subject the other patients to her as well.”
I said that I respected her concern for others, and she nodded. When it was clear that neither of us had anything more to say, she nodded a second time and promptly left the room.
Visits with Marianne Engel were more enjoyable now that it was just the two of us, with no plastic curtain necessary, and since the doctors had stopped trying to force her to wear protective gowns. In part, her regular wardrobe was accepted because I was becoming healthier and the need for gowns was not as great, but, perhaps more important, it was because the medical staff had tired of having arguments with her. Marianne Engel was a visitor of whom they didn’t altogether approve but for whose visits I had fought, so I suppose they decided that any risk was mine to take.
Now that we had more privacy, my talks with Marianne Engel grew more varied: how to cook vegetarian lasagna; what carnival games are played in Hamburg; the beautiful melancholy of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D Minor; the settlement habits of West Coast Indians; why people sing in rock bands; the merits of Canadian literature as contrasted with Russian literature; how harsh winter climates shape personality; the history of European prostitution; why men are fascinated by the concept of “Heavyweight Champion of the World!” the conversations that might occur between a Jehovah’s Witness and an archaeologist; and how long chewing gum remains fresh in the mouth. My years of library visits served me well.
I asked about her Three Masters, and teasingly inquired whether such protectors were common for medieval nuns. She seriously answered that they were not but that, in fact, Heinrich Seuse also had Three Masters whose consent he needed to gain (with the same Latin prayer that she used) when he wished to speak.
My response was the obvious one: “Are yours and his the same?”
“No.” Seuse’s first master was St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans, who would grant permission to speak only if the time and place were proper. The second master, St. Arsenius, would allow a conversation only if it did not promote attachment to material things. The third, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, would allow Seuse to speak only if doing so would not cause him to become disturbed emotionally.
“And your masters?”
She answered that hers were Meister Eckhart, a prominent theologian who was active during the time of Sister Marianne’s youth; Mechthild von Magdeburg, the spiritual leader of the Beguines, the order that had established Engelthal; and Father Sunder, of whom she had already spoken.
When our conversation finally came around to my career in pornography, it hardly seemed like an exotic topic at all; it was just one more subject in a long conversation that seemed to include everything. Still, she was curious about the work and asked many questions that I answered as well as I could. When I finished, I asked whether it bothered her, what I had done for a career.
“Not at all,” she answered, and reminded me that even St. Augustine had lived a life of pleasure before famously imploring the Lord to “make me chaste-but not yet.”
The difference, I pointed out, was that I was not going to find religion as a result of my past. Marianne Engel shrugged noncommittally. I couldn’t tell whether she thought that I was wrong and I would find God, or if she didn’t care. But the turn in our conversation had also brought forth the subject of chastity and I asked, tentatively, whether she knew what had happened to my penis in the fire.
“I have been informed by the medical staff,” she answered, “that it was lost.”
So she knew, but what did she think? “And…?”
“And it is a pity.”
Yes, a pity, indeed. “I thought you didn’t like talking to doctors.”
“It was important enough to learn about your wounds that I couldn’t avoid it.”
That was the end of that day’s discussion about my missing penis; already more than I had intended to say.
Each time she visited, Marianne Engel was more elaborately dressed than the time before, blooming into a new woman. Her wrists jangled with bracelets from the world over: Aztec, Mayan, Tonka Toy, Ojibwa. She wore plastic rings on her fingers, yellow elephants named Duke Elliphant and Ellaphant Gerald. Her sneakers were covered in sequins that made me think of a fluttering school of tropical fish. When she left my room for a cigarette, she would hold out the edges of her purple dress in a curtsey. I asked what caused the change in her fashion sense and she answered that since everyone thought she was crazy, she might as well dress the part.
It was interesting: this was her first humorous comment regarding her own mental state. I thought it might be the opening I’d been waiting for, and I asked her-pointing out that she had already discussed my burns with my doctor-with what condition she had been diagnosed. She shut down the topic by stating that the doctors simply didn’t understand her particular brand of charm.
She reached into her rucksack and pulled out a small leather-bound book. She wanted to start reading it aloud to me, she said.
She smiled as if she knew something that I did not. She had a very strong feeling, she said, that I would find the story not only to my liking, but very familiar.
Marianne Engel was telling a story of her life that dated back to the fourteenth century. Now, if she could do
