about schizophrenia. Although I had never mentioned her name in any of our discussions, one day I let it slip (not quite accidentally) that I was doing my research because I feared that a friend of mine SHE’S NOT YOUR FRIEND might be suffering from the condition. SHE’S JUST A CRAZY WOMAN.
“I know,” Gregor said. “Marianne Engel.”
Gregor seemed satisfied to have proven himself a step ahead of me, but I assumed he’d been consulted when Dr. Edwards tried to convince me not to encourage her visits. Gregor had actually treated her several times, he said, the last being when she had been admitted for “talking to ghosts” in public. SEE? I asked why he’d never told me before this. He cited the Hippocratic oath, and added that he’d say no more about her than he already had.
“Furthermore,” he added, “I will neither confirm nor deny a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”
Gregor also pointed out that he never mentioned the content of our conversations to anyone. I told him that he was free to repeat whatever he wanted, because I was not his patient. To this, he countered that we were still in a hospital where I was a patient and he was a doctor, so he considered this reason enough for confidentiality. I voiced my opinion that psychiatrists were generally useless and that I really didn’t care what they (meaning
“Oh, it might be true that many of us could do better,” Gregor conceded, “but we have our moments. For example, out of your many personality flaws, I can diagnose your largest.”
“And what’s that?”
“You think you’re smarter than everyone else.”
With the exception of the periods when she disappeared for almost a week at a time, Marianne Engel was now coming to the burn ward almost every day. She started helping with my exercise sessions, placing her hands underneath the pad of my foot on the intact leg and providing resistance as I pushed like a one-legged bicyclist.
“I talked to Dr. Edwards,” she said. “She’s given me permission to bring you some food.”
Since she was now talking to my doctor, I asked whether she would give me permission to discuss her case with one of the doctors who had treated her. Specifically, Dr. Hnatiuk.
She answered that she didn’t want me discussing her case with anyone, and was offended that I would even ask. Of all people, she said, I should know that she was not crazy.
There was a moment of awkward silence between us, until Marianne Engel snapped it in half by saying, “Paracelsus wrote a recipe for a burn salve that included boar fat, worms from a hanged man’s skull, and part of a mummy. The whole stew was roasted.” She then proceeded to educate me about the history of skin grafting, from its beginnings with the ancient Hindus through to the present times. I pulled up one of the bandages on my legs to show her my current grafts, which included some black skin. Because a mesher had been used to cut the skin into a net so it could stretch over a larger area, the resulting pattern resembled a distorted chessboard.
“If ever you were a racist,” she said, running her fingers over the game board of my body, “this would certainly be a hair in your soup.”
Her fingers were gentle lingering over the wasteland. They moved across my torso and towards my neck, pausing at the shoulders to follow the curves. “What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”
“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?”
It was difficult, sometimes, to know whether Marianne Engel was actually looking for an answer, or just teasing me. “Are you serious?”
“It makes me think of us,” she continued. “It makes me want to sew myself to you like skin.”
I cleared my throat.
“Did you know,” she asked, “that my body is marked too?”
I had some idea what she was talking about. When she wore T-shirts it was impossible not to notice the tattoos of Latin phrases that circled her upper biceps. On the left arm was the phrase
“I don’t get it,” I confessed.
She laughed. “Well, that’s only because you haven’t seen me carve yet.”
Then Marianne Engel did this one small thing. She touched my face.
It’s a tiny thing, to have your face touched. Isn’t it? But think again about the burnt and unbeloved beasts of the world. Think about the people whose skin cannot remember affection. Her fingers moved gently over my disaster, reaching under the bandages to touch the remains of my face. Her fingers traveled lovingly across my bandaged cheek, making the arduous journey to my lips. They rested softly there, for only a moment. I closed my charred eyelids, little scars reconnecting at the places where weeks before they had been sewn shut. My heart danced clumsily in the cavern of my chest and, all the while, my sealed pores were working overtime, not sweating.
“What does my face feel like?”
“Like the desert after a windstorm.”
I had an overwhelming urge to tell her that I was beautiful before the accident, but I didn’t. What would be the point? And then, I reached out with my good hand to touch her cheek. She didn’t pull back: no. Not even in the least.
“There are good things happening,” Marianne Engel whispered, before she stood up to go into the corners of my room to speak with her invisible Three Masters. It was apparent, even in Latin, that she was asking for permission to do something.
When she returned to my bedside, her smile indicated that her request had been granted. “Would you like to see my other tattoos?”
I nodded, and she began by sweeping at the unruly mess of her hair, pulling it up so the back of her neck was exposed. A small cross was inked there, an intertwining of three braided ropes without end. She asked me to touch it. I did. I ran my fingers over its height, then its width; literally making the sign of the cross, on her skin.
She took off her shoes. Around her left ankle was the tattooed chain of a beaded rosary, inked so the cross lay across the bridge of her foot. This way, she said, she’d always be prepared when she needed to do penance. But she was smiling, and it was clear that even she didn’t take this statement too seriously.
Next, she removed her pants-which I did not expect, because somehow the movies have conditioned me to think that women always undress from the top down. She was not wearing underwear, so she was left only in her white T-shirt with a picture of Beethoven drinking himself under a table. (The caption? “Beethoven’s Ninth.”)
There was a snake tattooed along the full length of her right leg, in exactly the same spot where the dragon had been embroidered on her pants. It twisted around her, just the way biblical representations invariably have the snake wrapped around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Marianne Engel was facing me, and I could see the body of the snake first appear at the knee, crawling upwards and wrapping itself twice around the thigh, with its diamond head coming to rest at her pelvis, angled in towards her vagina.
Her eyes were fixed upon me. She pulled off her Beethoven shirt, though it was a struggle to get it over her hair, until she was standing in the middle of my room entirely nude, save the arrowhead necklace that dangled around her throat.
There had been moments in the burn ward that I had felt the pangs of arousal. Maddy had done her best to tease me with her lilting ass, and sometimes she even twisted her head around to check if it was having an effect. But this was the first time that I found myself fully sexually aroused. Mentally, at least; I still produced the hormones that direct blood to produce an erection, I just didn’t have anywhere into which that blood could rush. I imagined it collecting there, making my groin blush.
There was another cross, much larger than the one on the back of her neck, drawn on her stomach. It was Celtic in shape, its four arms meeting in a round joint at the center. The entire thing was enclosed in an oval, longer in height than width, covering the area from the top of her pelvic bone to the bottom of her rib cage. Three
