Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

“I don’t get it,” I confessed.

She laughed. “Well, that’s only because you haven’t seen me carve yet.”

Then Marianne Engel did this one small thing. She touched my face.

It’s a tiny thing, to have your face touched. Isn’t it? But think again about the burnt and unbeloved beasts of the world. Think about the people whose skin cannot remember affection. Her fingers moved gently over my disaster, reaching under the bandages to touch the remains of my face. Her fingers traveled lovingly across my bandaged cheek, making the arduous journey to my lips. They rested softly there, for only a moment. I closed my charred eyelids, little scars reconnecting at the places where weeks before they had been sewn shut. My heart danced clumsily in the cavern of my chest and, all the while, my sealed pores were working overtime, not sweating.

“What does my face feel like?”

“Like the desert after a windstorm.”

I had an overwhelming urge to tell her that I was beautiful before the accident, but I didn’t. What would be the point? And then, I reached out with my good hand to touch her cheek. She didn’t pull back: no. Not even in the least.

“There are good things happening,” Marianne Engel whispered, before she stood up to go into the corners of my room to speak with her invisible Three Masters. It was apparent, even in Latin, that she was asking for permission to do something. “Jube, Domine benedicere.”

When she returned to my bedside, her smile indicated that her request had been granted. “Would you like to see my other tattoos?”

I nodded, and she began by sweeping at the unruly mess of her hair, pulling it up so the back of her neck was exposed. A small cross was inked there, an intertwining of three braided ropes without end. She asked me to touch it. I did. I ran my fingers over its height, then its width; literally making the sign of the cross, on her skin.

She took off her shoes. Around her left ankle was the tattooed chain of a beaded rosary, inked so the cross lay across the bridge of her foot. This way, she said, she’d always be prepared when she needed to do penance. But she was smiling, and it was clear that even she didn’t take this statement too seriously.

Next, she removed her pants-which I did not expect, because somehow the movies have conditioned me to think that women always undress from the top down. She was not wearing underwear, so she was left only in her white T-shirt with a picture of Beethoven drinking himself under a table. (The caption? “Beethoven’s Ninth.”)

There was a snake tattooed along the full length of her right leg, in exactly the same spot where the dragon had been embroidered on her pants. It twisted around her, just the way biblical representations invariably have the snake wrapped around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Marianne Engel was facing me, and I could see the body of the snake first appear at the knee, crawling upwards and wrapping itself twice around the thigh, with its diamond head coming to rest at her pelvis, angled in towards her vagina.

Her eyes were fixed upon me. She pulled off her Beethoven shirt, though it was a struggle to get it over her hair, until she was standing in the middle of my room entirely nude, save the arrowhead necklace that dangled around her throat.

There had been moments in the burn ward that I had felt the pangs of arousal. Maddy had done her best to tease me with her lilting ass, and sometimes she even twisted her head around to check if it was having an effect. But this was the first time that I found myself fully sexually aroused. Mentally, at least; I still produced the hormones that direct blood to produce an erection, I just didn’t have anywhere into which that blood could rush. I imagined it collecting there, making my groin blush.

There was another cross, much larger than the one on the back of her neck, drawn on her stomach. It was Celtic in shape, its four arms meeting in a round joint at the center. The entire thing was enclosed in an oval, longer in height than width, covering the area from the top of her pelvic bone to the bottom of her rib cage. Three large block letters-“IHS”-were scripted directly above the oval’s upper curve.

On her left breast was a large tattoo of the Sacred Heart, bright red and encircled with a crown of thorns. The heart was engulfed in yellow flames that burned upwards, towards her shoulder.

She came to my bed, so that I might study the details of her well-inked body, and she told me to touch the name of Christ. I did, and goose pimples spread across her skin under my good hand.

She turned so that she was sitting on the edge of my bed with her back to me. Angel wings extended from her upper shoulders to her buttocks, where the pointed tips came to rest. The wings filled the entirety of her back and I could not help but lift my hand towards them. It was as if I felt I had the right to touch her skin, as if it were mine to touch. It took a moment before I realized this was not-could not be-the case, and my arm paused in midair. It hung there unsure until Marianne Engel said, without turning around: “I want you to touch me.”

So I reached the rest of the way, and I traced my fingers along the lines of her inky plumage. They were a combination of bold and intensely delicate strokes, detailed with such skill that you’d swear they were downy. Now the flesh of her back quivered, and my heart did the same.

After a few moments, she looked shyly over her shoulder. She smiled-nervously, excitedly-and I broke my fingertip contact. She got up and began putting her clothes back on. We did not speak. When she was dressed, she left the room.

There are no conclusive studies on the best time to remove casts from burn patients, as muscle atrophy inevitably complicates matters. In the end, Dr. Edwards had to go with her gut in choosing a day to remove the mechaspider from my leg.

The removal brought great glee to Sayuri, who had been itching to get me out of bed. She smacked her hands together twice with a great dramatic flourish. “Are you ready? Are you genki ? It’s time!”

Maddy and Beth were there to help, dressed in blue gowns and big yellow gloves. They stretched out my muscles for a few minutes before pedaling my feet to lessen the stiffness in my legs. Then each nurse looped an arm behind my back to lift me into a standing position, and held me while the dizziness dispelled. Gradually, they loosened their grips until I was supporting my own weight.

For the first time since the accident, I was standing. Sayuri called out the seconds that passed with a too-loud voice-“…six…seven…eight!”-before my legs turned from uncooked to cooked spaghetti. All in a moment, blood rushed down my body as if remembering how gravity works, and gushed from my donor sites. My leg bandages blushed, embarrassed by their ineffectiveness; the moment of my swooning had arrived.

The women laid me back into the bed and cheered my efforts. When my mind calmed from its vertical lift, I saw that Dr. Edwards was standing in the doorway with a delighted smile.

Before the attempt, I would have said-in my best macho, smart-ass manner-that the results wouldn’t matter much. Standing was too stupid to be even a child’s game. If you allowed yourself to care about standing, who knew what you’d care about next? Although I didn’t want to feel good about the cheers, they sounded genuine. The women were proud of me and, against my better judgment, I was proud of myself as well.

Instead of brushing my accomplishment off, I became a grinning idiot. I thanked everyone for their help and my only regret was that Marianne Engel hadn’t been there to see it.

I expected to sleep soundly that evening, but I did not. With sleep came the nastiness.