“Excellent. You come help.” Sayuri pulled a white sheet off a nearby table; underneath were all the materials necessary for the job. Little circles of cloth were placed over my eyes, and small tubes were put into my nostrils so that I could breathe. The students applied the first squirts of GelTrate into their hands and began spreading it around my face. “This is the same material that’s used to take dental impressions. It’s good to remember that, because no one likes that stuff. Be gentle when applying it.”
The intern’s fingers were tentative, compared with Sayuri’s, but she praised him anyway, and then she asked a few others to “step forward and give it a go.” The feeling of so many hands touching me was overwhelming. Sayuri kept explaining as they worked, “It’s important that we get the natural shape of the head, the cheekbones, around the eyes…. Remember to be gentle….”
After the GelTrate came a neck splint to hold me steady as the interns laid the strips of plaster into place. Sayuri instructed them on the proper angles, occasionally smoothing out a mistake but mostly just reminding them to take care. “This is not only skin, it’s burnt skin. Remember that.”
When the plaster was finally in place, we had to wait for it to harden. Sayuri used this time to answer questions on my recovery; with my head covered in plaster, I was unable to add anything to the conversation. In a whisper, so as not to disturb the students, Marianne Engel suggested that she could read me the final canto of Inferno. The offer pleased me greatly; I wanted to hear her voice in the darkness.
She began:
“On march the banners of the King of Hell,”
my Master said. “Toward us. Look straight ahead:
can you make him out at the core of the frozen shell?”
Satan, the King of Hell, trapped in a frozen shell in the very bowels of the Inferno: how fitting an image, I mused, as I lay wrapped in my own shell of plaster. Dante’s master was Virgil, leading him ever forwards, while my guide was Marianne Engel. She slipped twice into the Italian, catching herself and laughing before reverting to English. In the background were the muffled voices of the interns, still learning about the tribulations of burn treatment. When Sayuri decided it was time to remove the mask, I could feel her fingers peeling away the plaster. Just as I was reintroduced to the room’s light, Marianne Engel read Dante’s final line softly into my better ear:
…And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.
“Only wear short-sleeved white cotton shirts,” Dr. Edwards said, “and run them through the laundry cycle a few extra times with only water. Soap residue is horrible for healing skin.”
I was scheduled to leave the hospital; I had made such good progress that I was being released in mid-February, almost two months earlier than expected. Nan pointed towards the thick book of rehabilitation instructions in Marianne Engel’s hands. “The tub needs to be sterilized before every bath, and chemicals added to the water. The list of chemicals is in the book. We’ll give you enough for the first week, but then you’ll have to buy your own. There’s also a list of appropriate soaps. Don’t forget to apply the salves after bathing, and then apply new bandages. Your pressure garments will be ready in about a month, but until then it’s still bandages. Oh, and if you used cologne or deodorant before the accident, they’re absolutely forbidden now.”
“Anything else?” asked Marianne Engel.
Nan thought for a moment. “Be careful of insects. A sting can result in a nasty infection. There aren’t any insects in your house, are there?”
“Of course not,” Marianne Engel said, before adding, “but one of my friends was stung by a wasp once and was mistaken for dead. It was horrible.”
There was a pause in the conversation as both Dr. Edwards and I tried to figure out what Marianne Engel was talking about. We looked at each other and came to an unspoken agreement that to ask would be futile, so Nan simply commented that anaphylactic shock is certainly common in such cases and continued her instructions on my care. She reminded me to pay as much attention to hidden damage as to that which was readily apparent. Skin is the organ that regulates body temperature, releasing excess heat through sweat on a hot day or during exercise, and my body had lost much of that ability. Because of the damage to my sweat glands and pores, my brain would face severe challenges in managing the nervous and endocrine controls. Theoretically, my body could revolt and fry itself from the inside out; if I didn’t take care, I might become my own spontaneous human combustion.
“We’ve kept things at a good temperature for you here in your room,” Dr. Edwards said, “but you’ll probably have to play with the air conditioning to find what works. You do have air conditioning, don’t you, Marianne?”
“I’ll get it installed as soon as possible.”
“Good. Any final questions?”
I asked how much morphine they would provide. (I was certain that the bitchsnake wouldn’t slither out of my spine as I exited the hospital.)
“A month’s worth,” Nan answered, “but be careful. A little pain now is better than going through life as an addict. Do I make myself understood?”
“Of course,” I said. But I was THIRSTY thinking about my next delicious dose.
Now that the treatment instructions were completed, I was placed into a wheelchair, in keeping with hospital policy, and Nan pushed me to the front door. Marianne Engel didn’t even protest that she should be the one pushing; perhaps she thought that Dr. Edwards needed to do it for her patients, as a ritual to let them go.
At the front entrance, I stood up while Nan gave a final warning. “People think that when a burn patient goes home, the worst part’s over. Really, what happens is that you lose the hospital’s everyday support system. But we’re still here, so don’t hesitate to call if you need anything at all.”
Unlike Howard, I did not have a contingent of friends, family, and ex-fiancées to see me off. But I could hardly complain; unlike Thérèse, I was leaving alive. The hospital staff and Marianne Engel gathered around for a hearty exchange of “Thank you”s and “Good luck”s. Connie gave me a hug, Beth gave me a strong handshake, and while Maddy was not there, I’m sure that if she had been, she would have shaken her ass. Sayuri promised to come over soon to continue my gait training, and apologized for Gregor’s absence at my farewell. An emergency with one of his patients, she explained.
I expected Nan to extend her hand, but she did not. She hugged Marianne Engel, telling her to look after me. Then she kissed me on my cheek and told me to look after Marianne Engel as well.
They let schizophrenics drive? Apparently so. Marianne Engel owned a ’70s muscle car, which was the last vehicle I would have imagined for her; therefore, it was perfect. She bragged that it had once belonged to the winner of the Medicine Hat Beauty Pageant, 1967.
YOU CAN’T EVEN BE IN A CAR WITH HER . . .
During the last moments before I was committed to the hospital, I was being extracted from a smoldering car wreck. Now here I was, first thing upon discharge, getting into a vehicle. I knew I couldn’t walk but I wished there was another way to go.
. . . WITHOUT WONDERING IF SHE SHOULD BE DRIVING.
The engine turned over like a grouchy bear yawning his way out of hibernation. The ancient eight-track was busted and so, to keep herself amused as she drove, Marianne Engel sang. At first, Edith Piaf flew out of her mouth like a beautifully wrecked little sparrow; after this, she sang herself “so long” in the Leonard Cohen song.
At a traffic light, we pulled up alongside a couple in an old Ford truck. The woman in the passenger seat saw me—I was still in bandages, and would be until the pressure garments were ready—and she bleated out a little scream before swiveling her head back to the road in an effort to pretend that her reaction had never happened.
The woman had looked at us and thought Marianne Engel was the normal one.
NEITHER OF YOU IS NORMAL.
This was what it was going to be like, and I guess I should have been prepared. But I wasn’t.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the first building I saw when we turned onto Lemuria Drive was a church. St. Romanus of Condat was a large structure trying hard to look more respectable than it really was. It didn’t look as if it had been mistreated, but rather as if the money had simply run out. The paint was peeling, the bricks were chipped, and the cracks in the windows were covered with transparent packing tape. There was a sign beside the concrete walkway leading to the front doors, proclaiming in black letters on a white plastic background that Father Shanahan invited everyone to Sunday Mass. Behind St. Romanus was a crumbling graveyard with row upon row of weathered gray slabs that poked out of the ground like Alka-Seltzer tablets dropped on edge. The brown grass was like uncut hair and remembrance flowers were decaying upon the plots. A few of the larger gravestones depicted angels carrying the dead heavenward. I asked Marianne Engel whether she had sculpted any of these. No, she said, she didn’t do that kind of work.
Her house, on the next lot over from St. Romanus, was actually more like a fortress: a great stone stronghold that looked as if it could withstand a siege by Huns. She could see that I was impressed into a stupor by the solidness of the place, and explained that she couldn’t imagine living in a building that wouldn’t stand against the passage of time.
As she helped me out of the car, I asked whether it ever bothered her that she lived next to a graveyard. She just shrugged and suggested that I be careful of the cobblestones on the path, because some of them were loose. A gnarled excuse for a tree stood over a wheelbarrow serving as a planter, its rusty front wheel disappearing into the earth. There was a mailbox that allowed letters to be inserted into the gaping mouth of a dragon.
At the side of the house were two massive oak doors on great steel hinges that opened into her basement workshop, specifically installed to receive her stone slabs. “A lot of the renovations were tax writeoffs. That’s what Jack told me, anyway.” YOU DIDN’T FORGET ABOUT JACK, DID YOU?
A creamy brown dog came running out of the backyard, the famous Bougatsa. Marianne Engel bent down to massage his big stupid head, bending his ears back. “Boogie!” It only took a moment to decide that this pooch confirmed everything I disliked about dogs. It was obtuse in the way only a dog can be, a retarded tongue slopping from side to side, its head bobbing around like a plastic hula dancer on the dashboard of a pimp’s car.
I BET JACK IS A NORMAL MAN, WITH LOTS TO OFFER.
“How about we sing the nice man a song?” Marianne Engel produced a groan such as a chain-smoking Sasquatch might make, and Bougatsa joined in, trying to mimic it. I already knew that she could sing well, so it was clear she sang this way only to play with the dog. Now, my ears are fleshy little stubs, somewhat like dried apricots that stick out from my closed fist of a head. The right ear is mostly deaf but the left ear remains sensitive enough to know how truly awful they sounded. The upward tilt of their heads suggested that they could imagine high notes floating above them, waiting to be jumped up on. They missed. No wonder Marianne Engel lived next to a graveyard: who but the dead could put up with her?
LIKE A JOB. Reptilian bitch. LIKE A FUTURE.
As they caterwauled, I drank in the oddity of her home. The windowsills were of heavy wood, and the windows of such thick-leaded glass that an errant baseball would probably have bounced off. The stone blocks looked as if men with hairy arms and fat bellies had lifted them into place, one by one, and then whacked them into position with heavy mallets. Green tentacles of ivy climbed the walls towards the most striking aspect of the entire place: the carved monstrosities that lined the gutters. As a way to get Marianne Engel to stop yodeling, I pointed out that you didn’t see many gargoyles on private residences.
“If you did, I’d be rich. They’re good promotion, even got me an article in the paper. Besides, I’ve got more of the little guys than I know what to do with.”
The fiends gazed down, their oversized eyes bulging in my direction no matter the little steps I took to the right or the left. Their twisted bodies mesmerized me: the upper body of a man disappeared into a fishtail without quite turning him into a proper merman; an ape’s torso lurched out of a horse’s haunches; the head of a bull jutted from the body of a winged lion. A snake grew out of a bat. A woman’s face spat an angry mouthful of frogs. In every body, disparate beasts coexisted; it was difficult to determine where one ended and the next began, and it was impossible to know which beasts—or which parts of which beasts—were good and which bad.
“We need them up there,” Marianne Engel said.
“For what?”
“To keep away the evil spirits.” She took me by the hand to lead me through the front door. I asked why she didn’t have a drawbridge and a moat. Zoning regulations, she explained.
I expected that the interior would be all velvet tapestries and thrones, but there were vast expanses of emptiness. Square wooden pillars held up the roof, and the floor consisted of wide planks. She placed her jacket on an iron coatrack just inside the door and said, noticing my interest in the wood, “The beams are cedar and the rafters are fir.”
She started my tour of the house in the living room, which was painted bright red. There was a great fireplace with an interlaced pattern of angels and demons around its stony mouth. There were two armchairs, with a grand rug between, which looked as if they were awaiting regents to sit in them and have serious conversations.
The dining room had large paintings on the walls, mostly intense splashes of color across flowing shapes. They were more abstract than I’d expected; if someone had asked me to guess, I would have said that she’d have paintings with religious themes. But not so. There was an expansive oak table with a fresh display of purple flowers at the center, and candles in iron holders on either side. “Francesco made those. When you see metalwork in this house, you can assume that he did it.” I nodded my head: Sure, why not? Aren’t most homes furnished by Italian ghosts?
In the kitchen were a fat silver stove, an ancient refrigerator, and rows of copper pots hanging from the ceiling. Glass jars with pastas and spices lined the shelves, and sunflower-yellow paint kept the room relentlessly upbeat. Everything was in its place, and the only sign of disarray was an overflowing ashtray. Her house once again surprised me: not the ashtray, but the order.
Her study was dominated by a large wooden desk, which she claimed had once belonged to a king of Spain. I just nodded again: Sure, why not? Italian ghosts can’t do everything. Behind the desk was a very sturdy chair, and to its right side was a leather couch that looked as if it were waiting for one of Dr. Freud’s patients.
Bookshelves, heavy with serious volumes, lined three of the walls. Spenser, Milton, Donne, Blake, and the Venerable Bede represented the English. The German authors included Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Ulrich von Türheim, Walther von der Vogelweide, and Patrick Süskind. Russian books included The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, Mikhail Lermontov’s Demon, and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Spain supplied the masterpieces of St. Teresa of Ávila: The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. The Greeks were not going to allow themselves to be forgotten: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles took up most of the bottom shelf, as if they had long ago decided that bookshelves would be incomplete without everyone else standing on their shoulders. There was a half-wall of Latin volumes, but the only ones that caught my eye were Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Looking a little out of place, but not wanting to be left off the world stage, were a number of books from Asia. I couldn’t tell the Chinese characters from the Japanese, and often even the translated English title couldn’t give the book’s homeland away. Finally, there were copies of all the major religious texts: the Bible, the Talmud, the Qur’an, the four Vedas, and so on.
The most striking thing about the collection was that there were two copies, side by side, of every foreign book: the original, and an English translation. Naturally, I asked Marianne Engel about this.
&
nbsp; “The English versions are for you,” she said. “That way we can talk about them.”
“And the originals?”
“Why would I read translations?”
Marianne Engel reached among the books to withdraw two that were not professionally published, but handwritten on thick paper and bound with uneven stitching. The penmanship was her own and the text was, thankfully, in English rather than German. Christina Ebner’s Revelations and The Gnaden-vita of Friedrich Sunder.
“I thought you might want to read these,” she said, “so I translated them.”
There was another item of interest on the bookshelf: a small stone angel whose wings reached heavenward. I inquired whether she had carved it but my question, so innocently asked, seemed to hurt her. She blinked a few times, as if trying to keep herself from crying, and puckered her mouth in an effort to calm her quivering lower lip. “You carved that for me,” she said with a cracking voice. “It was my Morgengabe.”
That concluded the tour of the main floor. Her workshop was in the basement, but I didn’t have the legs to go down. My first day out of the hospital had been long enough and, in truth, the freedom was overwhelming. I’d grown accustomed to knowing every inch of my surroundings and every minute of my schedule, but now I was confronted with endless new sensations. We passed the remainder of the afternoon sitting in the living room, talking, but she couldn’t seem to put back on her face the smile that had been wiped away by my question about the stone angel.
THIS WON’T LAST, YOU KNOW. The snake swished its tail around my intestines. YOU WILL CRUSH HER UNDER YOUR INSENSITIVITY.
In the early evening, I climbed the stairs to the upper floor with Marianne Engel walking behind to make sure I didn’t tumble. I was aching for a needle of morphine that would shut up the bitchsnake. I had a choice of two rooms: one was the visitor’s room, already made up, the other an atticlike recess that overlooked the graveyard behind St. Romanus. Marianne Engel was concerned that the odd shape of the room, wedged as it was in the corner of the roof, might be too oppressive after months in the hospital, but I instantly took a liking to it. “It’s like a belfry. It’s perfect.”
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