When I begged to know whether we got married, Marianne Engel said, “You’ll have to wait and see.”
I returned often to the hospital for more reconstructive surgeries. By this point, these were mostly cosmetic: attempts to make me look, rather than work, better. I asked Nan how much longer my resurfacings would continue, and she answered that she didn’t know. I asked how much better I would look in the end, and she answered that it varied from patient to patient.
It was always my feeling that, as much as Marianne Engel cared for me, my absences from the fortress were welcome as breaks during which she could work uninterrupted. It was common for me to take a cab back after a few days in the hospital to find her stretched exhausted on her bed, still covered in stone dust, and I’d peek into the basement to see a new monster leering up at me. Then I would check the bowls of water and food I had left out for Bougatsa before leaving and they were always empty; I suspected he consumed everything the moment I stepped out the door, but there was nothing I could do about that. All in all, these trips to the hospital worked out well, because her carving in my absence meant we had more time together when I was there.
But there were still times when she was carving and I was not in the hospital, and I was becoming better at looking after myself-and her. While she still managed to pull herself away from her work long enough to bathe me, I could tell that she resented it: the further into her statue she was, the harder she’d scrub at my body. When she finished, she would retreat into the basement and I would bring her food. “You know, you’d be able to carve better-and
“It’s not only a matter of getting the gargoyle out. It’s also a matter of honing my spirit.”
“What does that mean?”
“The world pampers the body with food and material comforts,” she said. “They appease the flesh but are enemies of the spirit. Abstinence is a bridle that gives the spirit a chance in the eternal quarrel with the body.”
It was another argument in which logic was a stranger; therefore, it was another argument that I was destined to lose. So I emptied her ashtrays, refilled her water bottles, and left a plate of cut fruit that I knew would still be untouched the next time I came down.
Marianne Engel’s raptures always played themselves out after a few days. She would apologize for her time away, but I knew I didn’t have much to complain about, really, as she usually had only one-two, at most-of these sessions each month. They paid well, including all my bills, and the rest of the time she was devoted to me: anyone whose spouse has a nine-to-five job would tell me to quit whining.
Besides, each work session was the perfect opportunity for me to call up old acquaintances and arrange for the delivery of the extra morphine I was buying with cash advances from my credit card.
The other customers in the supermarket tried not to look at us, but they failed. Marianne Engel waved at a slack-jawed grandmother, who scurried off as if she’d been caught doing something immoral but still could not prevent herself from looking back over her shoulder twice.
Intellectually I understood the fascination with me, but emotionally I hated it. My anonymity is forever lost, because I am now outstanding in the most literal sense of the word. The fact that my body was hidden behind plexiglass and pressure garments only made me, in a way, all the more compelling. As in any good horror movie, the thing you must imagine is scarier than the thing you actually see.
I heard a mother in aisle eight tell her child not to stare. The boy, five or six, curled his little body behind the safety of her leg but his eyes never left me. The mother said, “I’m sorry. He’s, umm, curious and, ah, too friendly…”
“You shouldn’t apologize for that! You can’t be
“Billy.”
“Is that short for William?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a good name.” Marianne Engel nodded in my direction. “William, do you think my friend is scary?”
“A little bit,” Billy whispered.
“He’s actually not that bad once you get to know him.”
I wondered whom Marianne Engel was making most uncomfortable-Billy, Billy’s mother, or me-and I said that we had to get going. I had forgotten the effect my croak had on people hearing it for the first time. After Billy was finished recoiling, he asked with a mixture of curiosity and awe, “What’s wrong with you?”
The mother scolded him, explaining that this question wasn’t very polite. I dismissed it with a wave of my hand, but Marianne Engel asked if she wasn’t just a little bit curious about the very same thing. Billy’s mother fumbled a mouthful of words until two fell out. “Well, sure…”
“Of course you are. Look at him! William is only asking the question that everyone’s thinking.” Marianne Engel rubbed the boy’s hair, so that he would know he wasn’t being criticized.
“He’s only in kindergarten,” the mother said.
“I was burned in a fire.” I only wanted to get the conversation over with, so we could move on, but Billy had another question:
“Yes.” I suppressed my natural urge to warn the boy not to play with matches. “I was in the hospital for a long time.”
“Wow,” Billy said, “you must be real happy you’re not there anymore.”
The mother pulled the boy’s hand hard enough that he could not ignore her. “We really do have to go.” She never looked back, but Billy turned and waved as she dragged him down the aisle.
When we left the supermarket, Marianne Engel emptied all her extra change into the hands of the beggars loitering outside. All the while she was talking about the half-finished statues in her workshop because, apparently, her Three Masters had recently informed her that she needed to complete them.
I was holding up well until we reached the car, but while I was getting in, I banged a large portion of my burned skin into the passenger door. My body immediately reacted to my mistake by sending intense jolts of pain skittering from one nerve cluster to the next, and the spinebitchsnake started snapping at the base of my skull as if it were a field mouse to be swallowed whole. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU! My hands started to shake from an immediate thirst for morphine and I begged Marianne Engel to administer an injection as quickly as possible. She took the equipment from my kit (I never left home without it) and plugged a syringe into me.
Morphine is like a religious zealot on a mission; it searches for body parts to convert, offering milk-and- honeyed dreams to flow sluggishly through your veins. The snake became mired in the syrup and slowed into nonmovement, but I knew she’d be back. The snake always came back.
When was the last time that my blood had been free of contaminants? In my early twenties, I supposed.
Marianne Engel paced around our place for days with a coffee and a cigarette, berating herself for not being able to properly clear her physical instrument and receive new instructions. Eventually she accepted that the time really was upon her to complete the unfinished statues that had been collecting in her workshop. “Can’t put it off forever, I guess. The Masters say so.”
When she worked on these statues, she was not possessed with daimonic energy as she was when starting one from scratch. She would come upstairs to help with my exercises or take a walk with Bougatsa. When she cleaned me in the mornings, I didn’t feel like an intruder on her real work. The difference, she explained, came not from herself but from the grotesques. Having stopped partway through the process once already, they now understood that there was more time available than they had originally believed. “They’ve learned that no matter
