The Gargoyle

Next to my bed, on the small table, I found a glass lily the morning following Vicky’s story. I was at a loss to explain how it had gotten there, as Marianne Engel had left the hospital well before I fell asleep. When I asked the nurses whether any of them had left the glass lily, they all swore that they had not. Furthermore, Maddy firmly held that no one had passed by the nurses’ station during the night. Which meant that either the nurses were lying, or Marianne Engel had sneaked back in under the cover of darkness.

The second question about the glass lily was: what did it represent?

Why, you might be asking, do I assume that it had any meaning at all? Some things, blown-glass objects among them, are simply pleasing to look at. (And need I remind you that real flowers were not allowed in the burn unit?) Nevertheless, I was certain that it did have meaning; the more time I spent with Marianne Engel, the more certain I became that all things are inexplicably connected.

“Well,” Dr. Edwards said, “a little mystery is not always a bad thing. It forces a person to have faith.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re religious, Nan. I don’t think I could stand it.”

“My religion, or lack of it, is none of your business. You have your life, like last night’s big feast, and I have my life.” There was a touch of-jealousy, anger, disdain? what?-in her voice.

It was odd that Nan would resent a meal she herself had authorized. Ever the opportunist, I saw this as an opening to ask a question that had been bothering me: yes, I knew that hypermetabolism required me to take in an inordinate number of calories, but what was the real reason she had authorized Marianne Engel to bring meals for me?

“Everybody needs to eat,” Nan said simply.

Her answer, of course, was not an answer. So I asked again. Nan, as she sometimes did, took a moment to weigh the benefits against the drawbacks of speaking the truth. I liked it when she did this. True to form, she didn’t lie. “I allow these meals for a number of reasons. First, it is good for you to take in as much nourishment as possible. I’m doing it for the nurses, too, because you’re a nicer person after Ms. Engel visits. But most of all, I’m doing it because I’ve never met anyone who needs a friend as badly as you do.”

It must have felt good for Nan to get that off her chest. I asked what she thought about Marianne Engel helping with my physical therapy, and she admitted exactly what I suspected, that she did not like the idea very much.

“You worry I’m going to come to start depending on her too much,” I said, “and that she’ll let me down.”

“Doesn’t that worry you, too?”

“Yes,” I answered.

Since Nan had chosen to tell me the truth, the least I could do was reply in kind.

· · ·

Everything seemed to be progressing more or less exactly as it should. Now that I actually had a desire to improve my body and was working to do so, I could feel myself becoming stronger. ARE YOU SURE? But preparation for the real world included the mental as well as the physical.

Maddy put me in a wheelchair and pushed me into a common area with four other burn patients. A man stood at the podium in a dress shirt and tie: Lance Whitmore was a former patient who had survived burns that were almost (but not quite) as bad as mine. His damage was less visible-only the right side of his jaw and neck revealed that he had been burned-but he said he had extensive keloid scarring on his torso that he could show us at the end of the lecture, should we desire to see what we could expect a few years into our recoveries. I didn’t; it was enough to deal with the present day.

Lance’s presence was intended to be both inspirational and informative. He’d been on the outside for three years and he was ready to pass along some hints for a successful transition, just like an AA speaker.

“Look up the word insult in the dictionary,” Lance began, “and you’ll find a number of definitions. In the medical sense, the word refers to harm brought to the body from an outside force, which in our case was fire. Of course, there’s also the more common meaning, and you’re going to get your share of insults-both intentional and not-when you leave this place. People don’t quite know what to make of us.”

Lance’s speech went as one might expect: he talked about the “challenges” and “opportunities” he’d faced, and what he’d done to reclaim his life. When he was finished, he opened the floor to discussion.

The first question was from a female patient who’d been scratching herself through the entire talk. She wanted to know if her “damn donor sites” would always itch “so damn much.”

“The itching will eventually go away. I promise.” There was a general murmur of relief through the group. Even I, who had vowed to remain quiet, let out a thankful sigh. “There’s nothing you can do but tough it out, unfortunately, but I always found it helpful to remember what Winston Churchill once said.”

“‘We shall never surrender’?” suggested the itchy female.

“Well, yeah,” laughed Lance, “but I was thinking about ‘If you’re going through Hell…keep going.’”

Another patient asked, “What’s it like when you go out in public?”

“It’s really hard, especially the first couple of times. Most people pretend they can’t see you, but they whisper. Some will mock you openly, usually young men. The interesting thing is that a lot of people think that if you’re burnt, you must’ve done something to deserve it. The teaching of the ages, right? Fire as a sign of divine retribution. It’s difficult for people to face something as illogical as us-burned, but alive-so we must have done something wrong, or otherwise they’d have to accept that it could happen to them.” He paused. “Who here thinks their burns are some kind of punishment?”

We looked at each other before one patient tentatively raised his hand, followed by a second. I was not going to raise my arm, no matter how long Lance waited.

“It’s completely normal,” he assured us. “Why me? I asked the question every day but never got an answer. I lived a good life. I went to church, paid my taxes, volunteered on weekends with a boys’ club. I was, and am, a good person. So-why-me?” Pause. “There is no reason. A moment of bad luck, with lifelong consequences.”

Another patient asked, “Do people ask about your burn?”

“Children, because they haven’t learned tact. Some adults do, too, and to be honest I appreciate it. Every single person you meet for the rest of your life will be wondering about it, so sometimes it’s good to get it out of the way so you can move onto other things.”

A timid hand went up. “What about sex?”

“I like it.” Lance’s delivery of the line earned some laughs, and I guessed that he had given this speech often enough to perfect his answers to the questions that always came. “It’ll be different for everyone. Your skin was a pretty amazing part of the experience, right? The largest organ of the body, a surface area of about three square meters, and that’s a lot of possibility for pleasure. Now we’ve lost a lot of our nerve endings, and that really sucks.”

The patient who had asked the question sighed heavily, but Lance held up his hand to indicate that he still had a few more things to say. “Skin is the dividing line between people, where you end and others begin. But in sex, all that changes. If skin is a fence that divides people, sex is the gate that opens your body to the other person.”

Never again would I have that option, not with anyone. Not with Marianne Engel.

Lance cleared his throat. “I’m lucky: my wife stayed with me. In fact, the burn brought us closer together emotionally, and that’s translated into our sexual activity as well. It forced me to become a better lover, because I’ve had to become more, umm, creative. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

“What was hardest for you, after your release?”

“That’s a tough one, but I think it was wearing the pressure garments twenty-three hours a day. They’re amazing, you know, for limiting the scarring but-Jesus Christ!-it’s like being buried alive. You look forward to your bath, even though it hurts, just to get out of the damn thing.” Lance held my eyes for a moment, and I had the feeling that he was speaking to me specifically. “I wore mine for the first ten months after release but for some of you it’ll be a year, or longer.”

He continued, “It’s only after you get out of here that you’ll finally realize that a burn lasts forever. It’s a continual event, one that constantly reinvents itself. You’ll swoop from incredible highs when you’re just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you’ve accepted who you