Belief in a better future is an amazing gift. We still had no money, but we started talking about eventually getting a new place. “A small house, maybe.” It gave us something to dream on and the dream was necessary because the loss in income was affecting all parts of our life, most noticeably our diet. Without the “charity” from the Beguines, we never would have made it.
Though our stomachs were empty, we’d walk around town and point out the houses that we’d move into. Someday.
“And when we do,” you said, “I will ask you to honor me by becoming my wife.”
XX.
Our past was paused here.
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 faster—if you’d just eat something once in a while.”
“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 too friendly!” Marianne Engel bent down to look the little guy in the eyes. “You’re cute. What’s your name?”
“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: “Did it hurt?”
“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 hel
p 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 what I do to them, they’re still going to be stone. They know they don’t have to yell at me to get what they want.”
Over the course of a few weeks, she finished off a few of her lingering pieces. The bird’s head, which had been sitting on human shoulders with everything below remaining untouched, was given a male torso and goat’s haunches. The uncompleted sea-savage clawing its way out of a granite ocean got the rest of its body, as well as foam on the crests of the waves. Trucks came to pick up these statues and take them to Jack’s gallery for sale, because cigarettes and pressure garments do not pay for themselves.
It was a bit of a surprise when, after a few weeks, Marianne Engel asked me to accompany her into the workshop, the one area of the house that was unequivocally hers. She puttered around for a few moments, not saying anything, not looking at me, trying hard to come across as casual. It was such a contrast to all the times I’d seen her immersed in her working rapture. She took the broom and swept a few rock crumbs into a corner, then blurted, “I hope you aren’t mad.”
She walked over to a block of stone that was covered with a white sheet. I hadn’t given it much thought; amid all her other eccentricities, concealing a piece of artwork until it was finished seemed positively sane. I could see a somewhat human silhouette beneath the contours of the sheet, making me think of a child dressed up as a Halloween ghost. When she pulled away the cover, she said, “I’ve been doing you.”
There was a half-completed statue of me. No, not half—more accurately, it was just the outline of my body. None of the detailing was done, but it was impossible not to recognize the vague perimeters of my bulk: the shoulders were properly hunched; the spine had a serpentine curl; the head looked correct, in the wrongness of its dimensions when compared to the rest of the body. It was like looking at myself in the mirror, in the morning, before my eyes had really opened. I stammered that I was not angry that she’d been “doing me,” but confused. Why?
“God is acting through me,” she said, quite seriously, before laughing so that I’d know she was joking. I laughed, too, but it didn’t sound very convincing.
“I want you to sit for me, but think about it before committing,” she said, indicating the half-finished gargoyles all around her. “I don’t want you to suffer the same fate as these ones.”
I nodded—to indicate that I’d think about it, not that I agreed—and we headed back up the stairs. I concentrated on climbing with correct form, but when I looked back over my shoulder at the stone figure in the corner, I couldn’t help but think I really needed to work on my posture.
Jack came barging through the front door, straining under the weight of a leafy plant, which she slammed into a corner of the living room. “Last time I was here, I noticed you have no plants. Isn’t anything alive in here?” Jack looked at me, then added, “Good Lord, you haven’t got any better looking, have you?” She swung her attention quickly in the direction of Marianne Engel, who had been watching her entrance with amusement. “And you, I’ve got a couple of private buyers looking for originals. They’re not crazy about anything at the shop, so they want to know if you’re working on anything new. I told them you’re always working on something new.”
“Good homes?” Marianne Engel asked.
“Yes, they’re good homes.” Jack sighed. “I always find good homes, and your little beasties will be well looked after. Even though they’re only bloody stone. You know that, don’t you? Oh, and Princeton needs some repair work done.”
Marianne Engel shook her head. “Not interested in travel right now.”
“Right. Too busy looking after Crispy, here,” Jack said. “Christ, Marianne, it’s a great paycheck and you’re going to let it pass you by. When art meets charity, it’s bound to be a fuckup.”
Marianne Engel gave Jack a big hug, saying a few words in my defense, but mostly she just giggled at Jack’s bluster. This only made Jack angrier. “Remember when you brought Bougatsa home?” she said. “He was a stray, too.”
In our supposed previous life, I’d given Marianne Engel a stone angel that I had carved—the one that sat on her bookshelf—while in this life she’d given me a stone grotesque that she had carved. The symmetry is much like the reversal of our jobs: back then, she had been the one who worked with books and I had been the one who worked with stone.
That observation is academic, I suppose, but my reaction to the idea of her carving me was entirely visceral. It’s flattering when an artist wants to do you, of course, but it also made me feel awkward to contemplate that my hideousness would be so permanently captured. For the first time, I understood the fear savages have, that cameras will capture their souls along with their images.
“How would it work?” I asked. “What would I have to do?”
“You wouldn’t have to do anything,” she answered. “You would just have to sit there.”
The reply made me think of our conversation after she forced me to apologize to Sayuri, when she had said that I would need to “do nothing” to prove my love to her. I didn’t understand what she had meant, but if this was what she had been talking about, how could I turn her down? “Okay, I’ll do it.”
“It’ll be nice to work from life for a change,” she said. “I’ll finally get to put the form into the stone, instead of pulling it out.”
She started to remove her clothing and I asked what she was doing. She always carved nude, she said, and was not about to change now; did I have a problem with that? I answered that I didn’t, but I really wasn’t so sure. There was something about her unclothed body that affected me, the ex–porn actor and prodigious seducer of women, in a way I could not quite comprehend. There was something so raw and disarming about her nudity….
But I could not tell her what to do in her own home. As soon as she was undressed, she pulled the pressure garments from my body and ran her fingers over the folds of my burned flesh, as though her fingers were memorizing a path. “I love that your scars are so red. Did you know that gargoyles used to be painted in bright colors to help their features to stand out?”
She walked over to one of her creatures and ran her fingers over it, just as she had been touching me moments earlier. As I watched her hands move, I imagined how a river runs perfectly over a stone for a thousand years. She pointed out the deeply carved lines under the eyes of one of her beasts. “See how the features are undercut to emphasize shadows, to create depth? The parishioners looking up at the gargoyle, they can’t even see these details.”
“So why do it?”
“We work also for the eyes of God.”
Being carved made me feel more naked than any porno, and that first sitting was made bearable only by its shortness. I could take off my pressure garments for only fifteen minutes at a time, a limit that Marianne Engel always respected. It didn’t matter that the work would progress slowly; I was confident that we would have years to complete me.
At the end of each session she would show me the progress she’d made and we would talk about whatever was on our minds. On one occasion she mentioned casually, while stubbing out a cigarette, “Don’t forget that we’ve got a Halloween party coming up.”
This was the first I had heard about it, I said.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Last year in the burn ward I promised we’d go, remember?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“A year is not a long time, but I’ll make you a deal. Would you agree to go if I told you another story?”
“About what?” I asked.
“I think you’ll really like this one,” she said. “It’s about Sigurðr, my Viking friend.”
XXI.
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Of all the places in which a boy might find himself orphaned, ninth-century Iceland was among the worst. Sigurðr Sigurðsson’s parents had arrived with the first wave of Norse immigrants and decided the land had a strange beauty that would be suitable for raising a family. But when Sigurðr was only nine, his father disappeared on an ice floe and, not long after, his mother went to sleep never to wake up. The boy took over the family land and resolved to make his way in life, but he failed: he was just too young, and soon found himself scavenging a living from the dead whales that washed up on the shores.
In truth, it was not a bad skill to possess: the flesh was used for food, the blubber for lamps, and the bones for any number of household items. All these things, Sigurðr could trade to support himself. Still, he felt there was something missing from his existence; even as a child, he knew it was not enough to carve a life out of the carcasses of the dead, and he longed to be strong and valiant.
So, when not cutting apart beached whales, Sigurðr dove. On the edge of a fjord, with the entire ocean stretched in front of him, he would take a moment as the world around him seemed to disappear. Then his legs would push him up into the air and there would be a moment of brief weightlessness when the battle between sky and sea was deadlocked, and Sigurðr would—just for this one beautiful moment—imagine himself floating near Valhalla.
But the sea always won, and the boy would cut the air like a dropped knife. The water rushed up to meet him, and when he sliced through the transparent surface he felt as if he’d come home. Down he would go, searching for the bottom, before emerging from the ocean with the feeling that he’d been cleansed. But the feeling never lasted.
When he played with the other boys, because there was still a little time for this, he always felt one step removed from them. He liked to wrestle and run just as they did, and he even enjoyed drawing a little blood in a sporting contest, but there came a time when all the other young men found young women with whom to wrestle. Sigurðr, poor Sigurðr, remained content to wrestle only with the boys, and soon people started to wonder why he didn’t seem to have the slightest interest in taking a wife.