Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

She spent a year in Australia, moving from one job to another: waiting tables, painting houses, picking fruit, tutoring people in Japanese, and so on. All the while her tan deepened, her smile widened, and her English improved. The biggest problem with Western countries was that she often had to shop in the children’s section to find clothes that fit her, as she was small even for a Japanese woman. (This was why she was destined to spend her life abroad looking like a child’s doll.) Sayuri called her parents once a month-always from a different pay phone-to let them know that she was all right and to listen politely as they begged her to return. Sometimes, Ichiro lent the weight of his oldest-son voice to the argument. Sayuri ignored his commands as well.

When Sayuri’s visa ran out, she returned to Japan. Her mother cried and her father yelled, even though a part of him admired what she had done. Sayuri informed them that she was going to attend an American university to study for a degree. Over the next year, she worked three part-time jobs, passed the necessary English-language proficiency exams, and got accepted by the department of physical therapy at the University of Michigan. When it was time to leave once more, her mother cried another Japanese river. The father, however, had by this point accepted the ridiculous ideas of his youngest daughter. When Toshiaki offered to cover some of the tuition, Sa-yuri hugged him long and hard. He didn’t quite know what to do about that, so he stood as ramrod straight as he could.

Sayuri completed her degree with honors and accepted a job in the hospital where she would, eventually, meet me. Long before I came along, she had paid back every yen her father had given her for her education.

Dr. Hnatiuk came by my room every few days to pass along a new psychology book. I was starting to like him. It’s not easy for me to pinpoint when my feelings turned, as there was no moment of revelation in which I exclaimed: “Hey, the chipmunk’s not so bad after all.” He crept up on me. The most important thing was that he stopped trying to relate to me in a doctor-patient capacity, and simply let the conversation flow naturally. There was also the fact that he liked the gargoyle statue that Marianne Engel had given me, while Beth had called it a “horrible little thing.” What really sold me on Gregor, however, was that despite his milquetoast exterior, he was a passionate man who cared deeply about his job. One afternoon he spoke at length about how lawyers have, in his opinion, been the biggest enemy of psychiatric care over the last half century. He told me how they fought for the rights of the patient-which was good-but to the point that a patient who was eating his own excrement could no longer be held for observation. “Leave it to the lawyers to turn shit into health food.”

As the weeks passed, a physical change occurred in Gregor. He lost his tasseled loafers and ill-advised corduroys and began wearing clothes that almost seemed to fit properly. Even if they couldn’t be considered quite “stylish,” they were at least passable. He’d been exercising to the point that the glow in his cheeks no longer looked as if it came from climbing a flight of stairs too quickly, and he was losing some of the excess fat from around his midsection.

Gregor never asked why I was reading psychology books, but he was willing to answer every question I had about schizophrenia. Although I had never mentioned her name in any of our discussions, one day I let it slip (not quite accidentally) that I was doing my research because I feared that a friend of mine SHE’S NOT YOUR FRIENDmight be suffering from the condition. SHE’S JUST A CRAZY WOMAN.

“I know,” Gregor said. “Marianne Engel.”

Gregor seemed satisfied to have proven himself a step ahead of me, but I assumed he’d been consulted when Dr. Edwards tried to convince me not to encourage her visits. Gregor had actually treated her several times, he said, the last being when she had been admitted for “talking to ghosts” in public. SEE?I asked why he’d never told me before this. He cited the Hippocratic oath, and added that he’d say no more about her than he already had.

“Furthermore,” he added, “I will neither confirm nor deny a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”

Gregor also pointed out that he never mentioned the content of our conversations to anyone. I told him that he was free to repeat whatever he wanted, because I was not his patient. To this, he countered that we were still in a hospital where I was a patient and he was a doctor, so he considered this reason enough for confidentiality. I voiced my opinion that psychiatrists were generally useless and that I really didn’t care what they (meaning he ) thought about me.

“Oh, it might be true that many of us could do better,” Gregor conceded, “but we have our moments. For example, out of your many personality flaws, I can diagnose your largest.”

“And what’s that?”

“You think you’re smarter than everyone else.”

With the exception of the periods when she disappeared for almost a week at a time, Marianne Engel was now coming to the burn ward almost every day. She started helping with my exercise sessions, placing her hands underneath the pad of my foot on the intact leg and providing resistance as I pushed like a one-legged bicyclist.

“I talked to Dr. Edwards,” she said. “She’s given me permission to bring you some food.”

Since she was now talking to my doctor, I asked whether she would give me permission to discuss her case with one of the doctors who had treated her. Specifically, Dr. Hnatiuk.

She answered that she didn’t want me discussing her case with anyone, and was offended that I would even ask. Of all people, she said, I should know that she was not crazy.

There was a moment of awkward silence between us, until Marianne Engel snapped it in half by saying, “Paracelsus wrote a recipe for a burn salve that included boar fat, worms from a hanged man’s skull, and part of a mummy. The whole stew was roasted.” She then proceeded to educate me about the history of skin grafting, from its beginnings with the ancient Hindus through to the present times. I pulled up one of the bandages on my legs to show her my current grafts, which included some black skin. Because a mesher had been used to cut the skin into a net so it could stretch over a larger area, the resulting pattern resembled a distorted chessboard.

“If ever you were a racist,” she said, running her fingers over the game board of my body, “this would certainly be a hair in your soup.”

Her fingers were gentle lingering over the wasteland. They moved across my torso and towards my neck, pausing at the shoulders to follow the curves. “What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”

“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?”

It was difficult, sometimes, to know whether Marianne Engel was actually looking for an answer, or just teasing me. “Are you serious?”

“It makes me think of us,” she continued. “It makes me want to sew myself to you like skin.”

I cleared my throat.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that my body is marked too?”

I had some idea what she was talking about. When she wore T-shirts it was impossible not to notice the tattoos of Latin phrases that circled her upper biceps. On the left arm was the phrase Certum est quia impossibile est. I asked what it meant, and she said that it translated as “It is certain because it is impossible.” On her right arm was the phrase Quod me nutrit, me destruit. This, she said, meant, “That which nourishes me also destroys me.”