The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson

  “The townspeople were honorable and fulfilled their end of the bargain. Each and every one submitted to baptism, and they built the church. La Gargouille’s unburned head was mounted upon it and, for centuries to come, served as the original model for chimeras and gargoyles.”

  Marianne Engel became completely involved in telling the story, allowing me the opportunity to observe her a little more closely. Her eyes, on this day blue, stopped darting around looking for doctors. She stared so intently, so directly, at me that it made me feel bashful. It was sensual and unnerving.

  She was not what anyone would call a classical beauty. Her teeth were perhaps a little too small for her mouth, but I’ve always found microdontia rather sexy. I suppose her eyebrows might be too bushy for some men but, to be frank, those men are idiots. The only acceptable point of contention would be her nose, which was not too large, mind you, but certainly not delicate. A small bump on the bridge indicated that there had been a break at one time, but I thought it gave her character. A case could be made that her nostrils were slightly too flared, but any reasonable judge would have thrown that case out of court.

  Her skin was pale, as if she did not get out in the sun often. She seemed closer to thin than fat, although her cloak made it difficult to imagine the dimensions of her curves. She was taller than most women, but not tall enough to push at the outer edges that defined the norm. Agreeably tall, one might say. How old was she? Hard to say, exactly, but she looked in her late thirties.

  Long after she stopped talking, I realized that I was still staring at her and she was smiling back, not offended but pleased. I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “Did you make that up?”

  “No, it’s an old legend.” She laughed. “I have no ability for making up stories, but I do know history. For example, did you know Jeanne d’Arc was burned at Rouen and her ashes thrown into the Seine?”

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “It pleases me to think that her body is still part of the water.”

  We talked more, about a number of things. Then Dr. Edwards, whose footsteps I recognized, entered the room on her regular rounds and pulled open the curtain.

  “Oh!” she said, surprised to find a visitor. “Is this a bad time?”

  Marianne Engel pulled her hood into place and bolted, almost becoming tangled in the plastic curtain as she pushed her way past Dr. Edwards. On her way out, she looked back at me and implored, “Don’t tell!”

  In the days that followed Marianne Engel’s visit, Nan began using an electric dermatome to harvest my own good skin and relocate it to the damaged areas. She told me that this was a step forward in my treatment, but it didn’t feel like one. The good skin still had working nerves, so each harvest literally ripped the covering from my body, leaving behind sites that were open wounds. It took about two weeks for each donor area to replenish itself before the procedure could be repeated. I was growing new skin only to have it removed again; I was a dermis farm, and the dermatome was the threshing machine.

  After each harvest, I was smothered with creams and wrapped in loose bandages. A few days later, one of the nurses, usually Beth, would do the first dressing change after the procedure. Nan would stand off to the side checking the percentage of the graft that had adhered—the “take”—and a rough estimate was used to gauge whether the procedure was a success or failure. A take of eighty-five percent was good; anything below this would cause Nan to make a clicking sound with her tongue. Less than sixty percent meant she needed to perform another patch job.

  Even when the skin did take, the absence of oil glands in the transplanted tissue resulted in extreme dryness. “Ants beneath the skin” is not only too clichéd a description of how it felt, but also not graphic enough. Lumberjack termites brandishing little chainsaws, maybe; or fiddler crabs wearing hairshirts and fiberglass shoes; or a legion of baby rats dragging tiny barbed-wire plows. Tap-dancing, subepidermal cockroaches wearing soccer cleats and cowboy spurs? Perhaps.

  I waited days for Marianne Engel to reappear.

  I thought about her too much, and thinking stole time that could otherwise have been allotted to fearing débridement or formulating suicide plans. When my stomach started to ache, I wondered if I was actually missing her, this woman I barely knew. Was this longing? I honestly didn’t know, as the only times I’d ever felt anything like this were when the town’s cocaine pipeline had run dry.

  As it turned out, the sensation in my stomach was not longing. My nervous intestines soon flamenco-danced themselves into sizzling pain. My bowels became chili pepper hot and there were snapping castanets in my anus. Nan poked at my abdomen and asked whether it hurt. I told her it was the site of the goddamned Spanish Civil War. Soon other doctors popped up in my room, in white-frocked rows that made me think of Flanders Fields. They performed scans, they took X rays, and they murmured things like “Interesting” and “Hmmm.” (No matter how interesting something actually is, a doctor should never, ever, say “Interesting” or “Hmmm” in front of a patient.) Soon enough, this murmuration of physicians determined that I had severe pancreatitis, which had caused much of the tissue in my pancreas to die.

  Pancreatic necrosis comes in two types: sterile or infected. Mine was infected. Without immediate surgery, there was a good chance that I would not survive. So the doctors told me that I had little choice but to lose, as quickly as possible, a man-sized portion of my pancreas. Why not, I shrugged. Within five hours of my diagnosis, I was wheeled into an operating room, where the anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from ten. I made it only to six.

  Burn patients cannot use regular anesthesia and what we are given instead—ketamine anesthesia—often causes delusions. For once, I had a most pleasing hallucination, an unexpected bonus in an otherwise woeful experience. I was looking over the ocean, a lovely English woman at my side, and what could be better for a burn victim than a dream of water?

  I awoke to learn that half my pancreas had been removed. For good measure, the surgeon also took out a handful of nearby intestinal tissue that had also been damaged. I guess he decided that since he was in there already, he might as well grab everything he could. Piece by piece, I was becoming medical waste. Who knows, maybe someday the doctors will strip-mine me into complete nothingness.

  Marianne Engel was in a chair in the corner of my room, reading, wearing something drab. After a few moments of my eyes adjusting, I could see that it was a visitor’s gown. When she realized I was awake, she came towards me, the cover of her book proclaiming Non Omnis Moriar.

  “Why are you here?” I was hoping for an answer that would stroke my considerable ego.

  “I came to see your suffering.”

  “What?”

  “I envy it.”

  Forget her mental illness: it’s impossible for a burn victim to abide a person who says that she envies his suffering. I fought through my anesthetic fog to mount as angry an attack as I could muster. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was not pleasant.

  When she understood how her words had offended me, she tried to explain. “I envy all suffering, because suffering is necessary to become spiritually beautiful. It brings one closer to Christ. Those who suffer are the elect of God.”

  “So why don’t you set yourself on fire,” I spat, “and see how beautiful you become?”

  “I am far too weak,” she answered, not seeming to register my sarcasm. “I’m afraid not only of the flames, but of dying before my suffering becomes complete.”

  The braindope pulled me back into the darkness. I was glad to be removed from this conversation.

  The exact nature of Marianne Engel’s illness was still unclear but when she suggested that “those who suffer are the elect of God,” my best guess became schizophrenia.

  Schizophrenics often have a particularly difficult time with religion, and some doctors suggest this relates to the age of onset: the condition most commonly develops between seventeen and twenty-five, a period when many peopl
e are first confronting their religious beliefs. Schizophrenics often have intense periods of heightened awareness—or outright delusions, such as auditory hallucinations—that can lead them to believe they’ve been specifically chosen by God. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that they often have trouble understanding that the symbolism of religion is metaphoric.

  Christianity is based upon the idea that Jesus died for the sins of all mankind: to redeem us, Christ was tortured and nailed to a cross. A schizophrenic, attempting to understand the story, might reason thus: Jesus is the beloved Son of God, and Jesus endured incredible suffering, so those who endure the most pain are God’s most beloved.

  There is a long tradition of devout believers who feel that suffering brings one closer to the Savior, but a human face is always better than a general theory. For this reason, allow me to present the life of one Heinrich Seuse, German religious mystic. Born in 1295, Seuse would become one of the most important religious figures of the time, known as the Minnesänger—the “singer of courtly love”—because of the poetic quality of his writings.

  Seuse entered the Dominican house in Konstanz at age thirteen and, by his own account, was completely unexceptional for the first five years of his religious life. At eighteen, however, he experienced a sudden illumination—a feeling of heavenly delight so intense he was unsure whether his soul was separated from his body. He considered this event so important that it was with this that he begins his life story, The Life of the Servant.

  Some scholars claim that The Life of the Servant is the first autobiography in the German language, while others argue it’s not an autobiography at all. Much of the actual writing appears to have been done by Elsbeth Stagel, a young woman from the convent of Töss, who was the most favored of Seuse’s spiritual daughters. She apparently documented many of their conversations to use as the basis of the Life without Seuse’s knowledge, and when he discovered what she’d done, he burned part of the manuscript before a “message from God” instructed him to preserve what remained. No one knows how much of the Life was written by Stagel and how much by Seuse.

  The Life is a fascinating narrative, and provides wonderful details of the visions Seuse received throughout his life: God showed him representations of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and departed souls appeared to him to give updates on their afterlives. Good stuff, and terrifically dramatic! But the most striking writing in the Life is Seuse’s—or Stagel’s—descriptions of his self-inflicted tortures.

  As an adherent of the belief that bodily comfort makes one spiritually weak, Seuse claimed he did not go into a heated room for twenty-five years and that he refrained from drinking water until his tongue cracked from the dryness, after which it took a full year to heal. He restricted his intake of food—eating once a day and never meat, fish, or eggs—and once had a vision in which his desire for an apple was stronger than his desire for Eternal Wisdom, so to punish himself he went two years without consuming any fruit. (One wonders whether he could not simply have recognized the moral of the story and continued to eat actual—as opposed to metaphorically forbidden—fruit.)

  On his lower body, Seuse wore an undergarment that had one hundred and fifty sharpened brass nails pointed inwards, at his skin. On his upper body, he wore a hairshirt with an iron chain, and under that a wooden cross the size of a man’s outstretched hand and studded with thirty more brass nails. With this fastened between his shoulder blades, every movement—especially kneeling to pray—forced the nails to dig into his flesh, and later he would rub vinegar into his wounds. Seuse wore this spiked cross for eight years before God intervened in a vision, forbidding him to continue.

  He wore these punishing garments even when he slept—upon an old door. When he lay down he shackled himself with rings of leather because if his hands were free, he could use them to swat away the rats that gnawed at him during the night. Sometimes he broke the restraints in his sleep, so he started wearing leather gloves covered in more sharpened brass tacks that would slice up his skin as effectively as if he’d run a cheese grater over it. Seuse kept these habits for sixteen years until another vision from God instructed him to throw these sleeping aids into a nearby river.

  Rather than bring Seuse relief at being forbidden to keep punishing himself, these divine interventions bothered him greatly. When a nun asked how he was doing, Seuse replied that things were going quite badly because it had been a month since he’d known pain and he was afraid that God had forgotten him.

  Such physical torments, Seuse realized, were only a beginning; they didn’t allow for a tangible sign of his great love for the Lord. To remedy this, he opened his robes one evening and used a sharpened stylus to carve the letters IHS into the flesh above his heart. (If that’s Greek to you, don’t worry: IHS is the abbreviated name of Christ in the Greek language.) Blood poured out of his ripped flesh but he claimed he barely felt the pain, such was his ecstasy. The scarified letters never vanished and he wore the wound in secret until the end of his life; it soothed him in times of struggle, he claimed, to know that the very name of Christ moved with each beat of his heart.

  Seuse died in 1366 after a long life which, one can only surmise, must have seemed even longer than it actually was.

  I find it interesting that Seuse had his “illumination” at age eighteen, just when schizophrenia most commonly manifests. If you were a schizophrenic, you could do worse than religious life in fourteenth-century Germany. In the Age of Mysticism, your visions would not be feared but revered. If you beat yourself senseless, you were not self-destructive but emulating Christ. If you heard voices, you had direct communication with God.

  But for all this, there is one event in the life of Heinrich Seuse that I find particularly interesting, although it is something I have never been able to verify in my library research.

  Marianne Engel insisted that, once upon a time, she met him.

  When I woke again, Marianne Engel was gone, but she had left behind a gift on the nightstand, a small stone gargoyle.

  I turned the little fiend over in my hands. About six inches high, the gargoyle looked like a semi-human dumpling, cooked the color of a melancholic rain cloud. His potbelly drooped on crossed legs, his elbows were propped on his knees, and his chin rested upon three-fingered hands. His back sprouted short thick wings, presumably for show rather than flight. A blocky head was perched on his slumped shoulders like a boulder waiting to be pushed from the top of a cliff. He had enormous eyes that loomed underneath a Neanderthal brow, and a mouthful of uneven teeth. The gargoyle seemed to be trying hard to scowl, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. His expression was sweet and sad and somehow all too human, like that of a forlorn man who has spent his entire life dragging himself from one tiny accident to another until the cumulative effect has crushed him under the weight of words he can no longer speak.

  My physical condition improved markedly in the days after the surgery. The garbage scow that is my stomach learned to float again, although it could no longer carry as full a load as it once did. My right leg, with its mangled knee and blasted hip, was also beginning to mend, and the doctors promised that they would soon remove the mechanical spider cast. Each day, I seemed to lie in the skeleton bed a little less awkwardly.

  Nan poked me and wrote little messages to herself on my chart. She always remained professional, but I found myself calling her Nan more often than Dr. Edwards. I don’t know if she disliked this familiarity but she never asked me to stop. I suppose this emboldened me and in a moment of curiosity I asked her whether she was married. She hesitated and thought about answering, but in the end decided against it.

  The seat beside the skeleton bed remained empty, save for the visits from the nurses and Nan. One Marianneless day became two Marianneless days, two became three, five Marianneless days, until they formed a Marianneless week. I wanted to ask her about the little gargoyle, why she had given it to me, what it meant.

  I was reading a lot, mostly lawyer mysteries that I didn’t act
ually enjoy. I needed something to replace them, so I requested of Nan that she loan me some textbooks on abnormal psychology. “You must have something on schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar disorder, anything like that?”

  “It’s not my area of expertise,” she replied. “Besides, you should be reading about burns.”

  Nan had already brought a number of books on burn recovery that sat untouched on my bedside table. I was not reading them simply because they were what I should be reading. We made a deal: for every psychology book she brought, I’d read one of the burn books. Nan considered this a victory and insisted that I read one of her books first.

  After I had, Gregor arrived at my room, his corduroy thighs rubbing together, with a psychology text in his hands. He handed it over and said that Dr. Edwards had asked him to deliver it, from the private collection in his office.

  “The place isn’t driving you nuts, is it?” The way he chuckled to himself, I wondered if he’d been thinking that up all the way from the psychiatric ward. When I asked him whether psychiatrists were really supposed to refer to patients as nuts, he dabbed a bead of sweat from his brow with a tartan handkerchief, and didn’t answer. Instead, he asked why I was so interested in schizophrenia and manic depression.

  “None of your business,” I said.

  Gregor opened his mouth as if to say something more, but instead he just smiled and tapped my little gargoyle once on the head. “I like this,” he said, before padding his way out of my room in his tasseled loafers.