XVIII.
Even though she obviously knew the answer, Marianne Engel made a great show of asking me what day it was.
“Good Friday,” I answered.
“Follow me.” We climbed into her car and it was not a half-hour before I realized exactly where we were headed: to the hills where I’d crashed. When we arrived, there was nothing to indicate that the accident had ever occurred. The trees no longer looked as if they housed a dark troop of mercenaries sent to destroy me. The wooden posts had been replaced, restrung with new metal cable, and were now weathered enough to be indistinguishable from the rest. There were no tire tracks and no upturned dirt; it was just another curve. When I asked how she knew the exact site, Marianne Engel just smiled and let Bougatsa out of the backseat. He jumped around excitedly, and she had to scold him when he got dangerously close to the road’s edge.
She pulled a small leather bag from the car trunk and took me by the hand to the boundary between road and cliff. Here I saw the first indication that my accident had, indeed, happened. There was a still-scorched area at the base of the gully, a small black circle not unlike the period you’ll find at the end of this sentence, right beside the creek that had saved my life.
Motorists whizzed by, no doubt wondering what we were looking at. “Let’s go down,” she said, leading me past the new wooden posts. Bougatsa ran ahead of us, happily finding a path to the bottom that we could follow, and off to one side I saw a broken wedge of red plastic, a turn signal cover that had been ripped from a car. My car. My stomach tightened.
As we climbed down, there were dozens of rocky slots into which I could wedge my orthopedic shoes, but it was difficult to keep my balance. I tried to command my legs to react the way they would have before the accident, but it was not possible: my rebuilt knee was too feeble. When I told Marianne Engel I couldn’t make it down, she refused to accept that. She placed herself directly in front of me, her legs wedged against the slope, so that I could place my hands on her back. This provided enough resistance that I could make it to the bottom, and not claim otherwise.
When we reached the scorched area, I noticed a few small tufts of grass within it, just starting to grow.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just never expected to come back, that’s all.”
“It is good to return to the locations of one’s sufferings.”
“You’re wrong.” I could remember it all: the eruption of glass; the steering column as it flew past me; the hiss of the engine settling; the tires spinning to a stop; the flash of blue flame across the car roof; the way the flames looked as they jumped into existence; the smell of my hair burning; and my flesh starting to bubble and pop. I could remember everything that changed me from a man into what I had become.
“It doesn’t matter if you agree. One cannot become whole by ignoring one’s misfortunes.” Marianne Engel unfastened her bag, pulled out an iron candlestick that she claimed had been made by Francesco, and crammed a candle into its open mouth. She handed me a pack of matches and asked me to light it. “But it is also important to celebrate this year that you have lived.”
I pointed out that it was not actually the one-year anniversary: while it was true that my accident had occurred on Good Friday, obviously that holiday fell on a different date each year.
“You should not regard time in such literal terms,” Marianne Engel said with a kiss to my plexiglass face. “What does a single day matter in the vastness of eternity?”
“I thought every day mattered,” I said. “Especially the ones when you almost die.”
It would have sounded more dramatic, I think, if at that exact moment Bougatsa had not jumped into the air beside us to snap wildly at some bug buzzing around his head.
“But you didn’t,” Marianne Engel said. “Tell me, was your life good before the accident?”
“Not really.”
“Then beginning again should be a gift to be embraced.”
She believed sincerely that I was starting over, and I suppose I was: but not entirely, and I felt a twinge of shame at what I was doing with the cash I was advancing from the credit card Jack had set up for me.
A few days later, Marianne Engel was out of the fortress, walking Bougatsa, when I decided to proceed with a secret mission. I put a long gray raincoat over my pressure garments and, though I was not supposed to, removed my mask and mouth retractor. I donned a hat and sunglasses, turned up my collar with criminally gloved hands, and looked in the mirror to see the very caricature of a sexual deviant looking back at me. I supposed it was perfect, considering where I was headed.
“The nearest porno shop.” My voice, revving like a rusted motor, made the taxi driver size me up in the rearview mirror. He seemed to have some second thoughts about taking the invisible man on a field trip, but they were dispelled when I held up my credit card. The driver put the car into motion and we passed the front of St. Romanus, where Father Shanahan was changing the white plastic sign to read: “Was Your Friday As Good As It Could Have Been?”
When we arrived at the Triple-XXX Velvet Palace, I asked the driver to wait. He nodded; he had seen me hobble into the car and knew that I couldn’t run far. Entering the shop was like coming home. There were the familiar smells of latex, leather, and lube. To my right was a collection of anal probes and giant rubber cocks, and to my left was an assortment of French maid and Japanese schoolgirl outfits. Magazines lined the walls, but I was interested in the videos at the back. Scanning the covers, I soon saw one of my own:
Back in the belfry, I slid the movie into the player. There was the warm blue glow of the television screen followed by the logo of my old production company. The plot, as in most pornos, left something to be desired; even to me-writer, actor, director, and producer-it was muddled. The film opens with a woman, Annie, who’s getting a medical check-up. When she has difficulty putting on her hospital gown, she asks the nurse for help and, as so often happens, hot lesbian sex ensues. The doctor (me) happens upon these shenanigans and, with nary a worry about ethics violations or venereal diseases, decides the proper treatment for Annie is unprotected anal sex.
I thought of the day of the shoot. The catering came from Sun Lee’s Chinese Take-Out, just down the street, and the delivery arrived late. Boyce Burgess worked the camera and Irdman Dickson did the sound and, despite the fact that we were shooting at one in the afternoon, Irdman was plastered. As the director, I would’ve reprimanded him if I had not been blasted on cocaine. In fact, if you carefully scrutinize the film, you can see a small gold spoon on my necklace bouncing out of my doctor’s coat as I rear-end Annie over the examining table. Because of Irdman’s drunkenness, the sound was particularly bad and, in some places, is completely unintelligible. Occasionally a line is audible: something about taking Annie’s temperature with “my big fat thermometer.” It’s probably for the best that most of the dialogue was lost.
This opening scene is, regrettably, the cleverest part of the film. From this point forward, the story becomes exponentially more ludicrous. One of my lovers is a psychiatrist, who continually prattles about my hostility towards women as I spank her. Meanwhile, Annie becomes a hypochondriac/nymphomaniac who believes that her allergy to cats is best treated with liberal doses of penis.
All this would seem laughable if not for the way I looked. My hair bounced with each thrust of my pelvis, and my skin shone beautifully as sweat crept down my neck onto my chest. The muscles of my arms flexed as I spanked my silly-stern mistress, letting her out and reeling her back in. My smile strained the corners of my
