The Gargoyle (11 page)

“Realizing that he could not dispatch the priest with a burst of fire, La Gargouille lunged towards the man. Romanus lifted the cross and held it staunchly in front of the beast, which found it could go no further, as if an invisible hand were pushing it back. No matter which way the creature turned, the priest mirrored the action, and La Gargouille could move no closer to his tormentor. Cross in one hand and Bible in the other, Romanus continued to read with simple faith; each verse was like an arrow under the dragon’s scales, and each chapter like a lance in its side.

“La Gargouille had never experienced anything like this in all its years, and began a retreat. It looked from side to side but Romanus used the cross to drive the beast directly back. Once the dragon was trapped inside its cave, the priest continued with unrelenting verse until the creature slumped defeated to its knees. The concluding act was when Romanus closed the Bible and blew out the candle; the ceremony was complete and the beast made docile.

“With no fight left in it, La Gargouille bowed its head and allowed Romanus to slip his vestments over its neck. The priest then used his cross to twist this leash tightly shut, and lead the defeated dragon back into town.

“The only way to kill a dragon is to burn it at the stake, everyone knew, and so this was done. La Gargouille cried in agony but to the villagers it sounded like sweet music. The shrieking continued until the very end because La Gargouille’s head and neck wouldn’t burn—the dragon’s ability to breathe fire had tempered these areas against heat. But eventually the beast did die, and the villagers were freed from their great curse.

“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.