My body was wrapped in layers of wet cloth, to lower my fever. I was back in her bed, in our home, and her hand was resting on my cheek. She told me that it was over and I told her that I had been in Hell. She said that it sure looked that way, and handed me a cup of tea. I felt as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “How long was I…?”
“Three days, but nothing is better than having suffered. It is a short hardship that ends in joy.” Same old Marianne Engel.
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
She steadied my hand on the cup, as it was shaking badly. “How do you feel?”
“Like a brand plucked out of the fire.”
She smiled. “Zechariah 3:2.”
I checked my body: my skin had returned to its damaged state; my face had tightened; my lips had receded; fingers were missing; my knee was stiff; the hair on my forearms was gone and there were only wisps on my head.
My hand, just as it always had, went to my chest. Where I expected to find my angel coin, I found nothing, despite the fact that it had not been off my body since Marianne Engel had given it to me almost fourteen months earlier.
“Your coin served its purpose,” she said.
I checked in the sheets, under the bed, all around, but my neck chain was nowhere to be found. Marianne Engel must have removed it during my withdrawal. I told myself it was only a strange coincidence that she had done so while I was hallucinating about handing it over to Charon.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll replace your necklace with a better one.”
I felt better than I had in years, even before the accident, by simple virtue of an undrugged mind and veins not sluggish with narcotic syrup. This is not to say that I never felt a twinge of desire rising for the old drug-I did; the habit had been with me too long-but it was different. I could do without morphine; I wanted to do without it. I looked forward to my sessions with Sayuri and progressed faster with my exercises.
But best of all, the bitchsnake really was gone.
I was better able to look after myself than at any time since my accident, and Marianne Engel returned to her carving. She took up exactly where she’d left off, resuming an immediately unhealthy velocity. All I could do was to clean her ashtrays and try to curb her intake of coffee on the spoon. I brought her bowls of fruit that became still lifes rather than meals, and when she finished a statue, only to collapse onto the next block of stone, I washed her body. I promised myself that if she approached physical collapse again, I would do anything and everything necessary to stop her. I promised myself.
From February nineteenth to the twenty-first, she pulled statue 16 out of the stone. On the twenty-second, she slept and absorbed; from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth, she extracted number 15. She took a day of rest and then she worked until the first day of March, producing number 14. One does not need to be a mathematician to realize that this brought her past the halfway point of the final twenty-seven hearts: thirteen more hearts and she would be finished. Thirteen more hearts until she thought she would die.
Her return to carving seemed to affect even Bougatsa, who lacked his usual bounce. When we came back from our daily walks, he would eat a huge bowl of food before settling lethargically to drool on my orthopedic shoes.
In early March, I had a routine checkup with Dr. Edwards. We reviewed my charts and talked about a minor surgery that was scheduled for the end of the month. She seemed genuinely pleased. “You’ve been out of the hospital for over a year and things couldn’t be going any better.”
I kept my mouth shut about the fact that Marianne Engel was, at that very moment, stretched out on new stone, readying herself. Lucky 13 was calling.
“You know,” Nan added, “it just goes to show how wrong a doctor can be. There was a point when I thought you had given up, and then you became one of our hardest-working patients. And when you left, I was certain that Marianne wouldn’t be able to look after you.”
Marianne Engel produced statues 13, 12, and 11 (an old woman with donkey ears; a horned demon with its sloppy tongue hanging out; and a lion’s head with elephant tusks), taking only a few hours off during the process. She had already lost the weight she’d gained after Christmas, and her speech was becoming confused again. Statue 10 came into existence around March twentieth.
I was scheduled to enter the hospital for surgery on the twenty-sixth. Before I went in, I needed to decide what to do with Bougatsa. Not only did I doubt Marianne Engel’s ability to look after him when she could not even look after herself, but also the dog, perhaps in an example of animal empathy, was losing weight. I wondered whether I could use this to induce enough guilt to get her out of the basement, and decided to give it a try.
I made her stop carving long enough to explain that if she chose sculpting over Bougatsa’s care, I would have to place him in a kennel. (This was not only a bargaining tactic, but also the truth.) Marianne Engel took a look at me, and a look at Bougatsa, and she shrugged. Then she returned to her work on statue 9.
There was a large puddle of shit on the floor. It was not mine.
In all the time I’d lived in the fortress, Bougatsa had never once relieved himself inside. I am somewhat loath to write a detailed description of the stool, but two things need mentioning. First, the stool was more liquid than solid. Second, it contained leafy remains.
The only plant in the house was the one that Jack had brought. (Perhaps there had been others before my time, but they had become casualties of Marianne Engel’s negligence while carving.) When I inspected it, it was quickly apparent that Bougatsa had been making a meal of its leaves. Most were gone, and the ones that remained all had jagged edges in the shape of teeth marks.
I tracked the dog down and found him stretched out in the study, breathing shallowly. When I swept my hand along his side to comfort him, fur came off in my fingers. His ribs were a story of starvation and I was shocked: not strictly at his thinness, but because I didn’t understand how it could be possible. In recent weeks, Bougatsa had been eating much more than usual; in fact, he never seemed to stop eating.
I headed into the basement to inform Marianne Engel that her dog was seriously ill, because I wanted to shame her into coming with me to the veterinary clinic. But it didn’t work out quite like that. She was hunched over a beast whose eyes seemed to be issuing a stern warning to keep away. I spoke anyway. “There’s something wrong with Bougatsa. He’s sick.”
She looked up at me, as if she had heard some mysterious clatter coming from an area of the room that was supposed to be empty. Blood was flowing from one of her wrists where the chisel had gone wrong, and streaks of red were painted across her forehead where she’d wiped it. “What?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I am a thorn prick on Christ’s temple.”
“No,” I said, pointing. “Your wrist.”
“Oh.” She looked at it, and some blood flowed into her open palm. “It’s like a rose.”
“Did you hear me? Bougatsa is sick.”
She tried to pull a strand of her hair away from her breast, where it was awkwardly pasted with sweat and
