leaving you, and I wish I could always be at your bedside. I need you to understand that it’s beyond my control when I get my instructions.”
This was one of the rare instances in which I understood exactly what was going on inside her: she had a secret that she wanted to share, but knew it was the kind of secret that most people could not understand. It was vital to say it aloud, but she was worried that it would sound absurd. Like, for example, explaining that you have a snake living in your spine.
“When I’m about to work, I sleep on the stone,” Marianne Engel began, with a deep breath, “for twelve hours at least, but usually more. It’s preparation. When I lie on the stone, I can feel it. I can feel
“What do you mean,” I asked, “when you say you can feel what’s inside the stone?”
“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole. When I have enough information, I begin. My body wakes but there is no sense of time, there’s nothing but the work. Days pass before I realize that I haven’t slept and I’ve barely eaten. It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time, which has been collecting for eons and all at once has come sliding down the mountain. The gargoyles have always been in the stone but, at this precise instant, it becomes unbearable for them to remain. They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone, and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment. I’m the only one who can do it, because I understand their languages and I’m the only one who can give them the hearts necessary to begin their new lives.”
She paused and seemed to be waiting for me to say something, anything-but how does one respond to proclamations such as these? Because she wanted a prompt and I wanted her to continue talking, I said it sounded like an extremely creative process.
“No, it’s the opposite. I’m a vessel that water is poured into and splashes out of. It’s a circle, a flowing circle between God and the gargoyles and me, because that is what God is-a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the entire time I’m carving, the gargoyle’s voice becomes louder and louder. I work as fast as I can because I want the voice to stop, but it keeps urging me on, demanding that I help it achieve its freedom. The voice goes silent only when I’m finished, and then I’m so exhausted that it’s my turn to sleep. So that’s why I disappear for five or six days at a time. It takes that long to free a gargoyle and then recover myself. I have no say in when a gargoyle will be ready, and I cannot refuse. So forgive my disappearances, because I have no choice.”
Okay, fine. At least now I knew what she was doing with the multiple hearts she thought were in her chest. They were going into the statues she carved.
I had been certain that Marianne Engel was schizophrenic, but given her description of her work habits I now had to consider that she might be manic-depressive instead. Evidence was mounting in that direction: when I first met her, she was fatigued and darkly attired; now she was bright in both dress and personality. Schizophrenics tend to eschew talking, sometimes remaining completely silent for hours on end, but Marianne Engel was just the opposite. And there was the nature of her work. Many manic-depressives achieve fame in the arts because the condition itself provides the fervor necessary to create something monumental. Which, of course, was exactly what Marianne Engel did: create monuments. If her account of her carving habits was not a description of a manic at work, I can’t imagine what is.
But there was also so much evidence for schizophrenia. She described the voices that came out of the stone, giving her instructions. She saw herself as a channel of the Divine, and her work as a circle of communication between God, the gargoyles, and herself. This is not to mention her Engelthal “past” and her belief that
Statistics could argue for either condition. Schizophrenia tends to affect men more often than women, but more than eighty percent of schizophrenics smoke heavily, and Marianne Engel was constantly popping out of the burn ward for a nicotine hit. And while speaking to me, she always had that unnerving stare, which kept her eyes locked upon mine: this only started to make sense after I read in one of Gregor’s books that schizophrenics rarely blink.
Refusal to take one’s medication is common to both conditions, but for different reasons. A manic- depressive is likely to refuse her meds because in her high she becomes convinced that a low is no longer possible, or she is so addicted to the high that the low becomes simply the price that must be paid. Schizophrenics, on the other hand, tend to refuse medication because they believe they’re being poisoned-a claim that Marianne Engel had made on more than one occasion.
Many doctors are now convinced that the two conditions co-exist far more often than commonly diagnosed, so maybe both diagnoses applied.
In the hours I spent leafing through mental health texts in an effort to understand her better, I came to understand myself better as well-and I was not altogether pleased with what I learned.
I was constantly measuring her pain against my own, telling myself that she couldn’t possibly understand my physical anguish while I
Marianne Engel arrived the next day in a simple white dress with open-toed sandals, and she might have passed for a woman from a seaside village on the Mediterranean. She appeared with two food hampers, one blue and one white, and I could tell they were heavy from the way she lugged them into the room. Bent over as she was, the arrowhead on her necklace bobbed in and out of the V-neck of her dress like a lure on a fishing line. “I’m finally going to live up to my promise to feed you.”
I’ll take a moment to explain why Dr. Edwards would allow a visitor to bring food into the burn ward. In addition to the psychological benefits of a picnic (as it were), there was also a physical one. With my healing came a condition known as hypermetabolism: a body that normally requires two thousand calories a day can consume seven thousand after a severe burn. Despite the nasogastric tube that constantly delivered nourishment directly into my stomach, I was still not getting enough and I was allowed, even encouraged, to eat extra food.
Marianne Engel had previously brought me snacks, but it was obvious that this meal was far more substantial. She opened the hampers-one for hot items and the other, packed with ice, for cool-and started to lay out the food. There was a freshly baked round of focaccia, still smelling of wood smoke, and bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She danced a swirl of black across the surface of the yellow, and then dipped a chunk of the focaccia into the leoparded liquid. She said the familiar prayer before she lifted the bread to my mouth:
She’d also brought cheeses: Camembert, Gouda, blue, Iranian goat. She asked my favorite and when I picked the goat, she smiled broadly. Next, some steaming wraps that looked like crepes but had a most bawdy smell. Gorgonzola pancakes were not for everyone, she explained, but she hoped I liked them. I did. There were cantaloupe balls wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, the fruity orange peeking through the meaty pink.
She continued to excavate the hampers. Bastardly plump green olives, fat with red pimiento stuffing, lounged contentedly in a yellow bowl. A plateful of tomatoes soaked in black vinegar with snowy nuggets of bocconcini. Sheaves of pita and cups brimming with hummus and tzatziki. Oysters, crabs, and scallops drowning a wonderful death in a marinara ocean; little wedges of lemon balanced on the plate’s edge like life preservers waiting to be thrown in. Pork sausages with peppercorn rims. Dolmathes, trying hard to be swarthy and macho in
