Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

That night I dreamt that Sayuri had stood me up and then abruptly let me go. My tumbledown body crumpled; I could feel the snake of my spine coil and twist. YOU THINK YOU CAN STAND ON YOUR OWN?Nan threw darts at my neutralized bulk while the nurses high-fived my failure. I looked under the skeleton bed. There were flames, a thousand candles. I wanted to reach out to extinguish them but it was as if someone had disconnected the muscles in my arms, rendering me a stringless puppet. The flames made angry smiling faces at me and their blazing cloven tongues licked the sheets on the skeleton bed, sparking them like a burning shroud. Bones crashed down around me, rattling furiously like a collapsing scaffold.

The medical staff continued laughing. One of them announced in a harsh German voice: “Alles brennt, wenn die Flamme nur heib genug ist. Die Welt ist nichts als ein Schmelztiegel.”Apparently in dreams, I am like Marianne Engel in real life: multilingual. Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.

I was trapped under the bones as the shroud continued burning. The faces in the flames kept smiling their hateful smiles, their treacherous tongues licking, licking, licking. I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.I heard the whiz of arrows. I felt them hit my hands, and I felt them hit my feet.

I dreamed a long, long time of burning and when it finally ended and I awoke, the hovering effect created by the air flotation bed confused me. It took a few moments before I became certain about which side of consciousness I lay on.

I told Marianne Engel about my success in standing for eight seconds on the first day I tried, and my even greater success in standing for thirteen seconds on the second. She attempted to give proper respect to my achievements, but it was apparent that she was distracted by something.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hmm? No, no, nothing is pinching me.” She ran her fingers over the very noticeable bump, which had been growing larger by the day, on my shoulder. “What’s this?”

“It’s called tissue expansion.”

I explained that under the skin was a small silicone balloon, and every day the doctors were injecting a little more salt water into it. As the balloon inflated my skin stretched with it, just as when a person puts on weight. Eventually, the balloon would be drained and I’d be left with a flap of extra skin, which would then be transplanted from my shoulder to a recipient site on my neck.

“How fascinating. I wish I could’ve done something like that for you the first time.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She touched the bump again, and smiled. “Do you know, that growth makes me think of the boils that come with the Black Plague.”

“What?”

“I have this friend…” Her words trailed off, and she lost her thoughts in the air. For a few minutes she sat, staring into space, but rather than being still, her hands fluttered more than they did when she was flipping unlit cigarettes or touching her necklace. They looked as if they wanted to open up and release a story that she was withholding from me.

Eventually, she nodded in the direction of my bedside table. On it was the stack of psychology books that she always had made a pointed effort of not asking about. “You’re studying up on me,” she said. “Should I rent one of your porn films to understand you better?”

This-though I thought I’d not indicated it to her in any way-was something I hoped she would never do. I asked her to promise that she would never view one of my films.

“I have told you that I don’t care,” she said. “Are you ashamed?”

I assured her I wasn’t; I just didn’t want her to watch them. This was the truth, but not all of it: I didn’t want her to watch them because I didn’t want her to see what I had been, and compare it with what I had become. I didn’t want her to see my handsomeness, my smooth skin, my toned body, and then have to look upon the hideousness blotted across the bed in front of her. I realized this was unreasonable, and that of course she knew there was a time when I was unburned, but I didn’t want it to become more real to her. If she could accept me as I was, perhaps it was only because she had no point of comparison.

Marianne Engel went to my window and stared out it for a moment, before she turned and blurted, “I hate leaving you, and I wish I could always be at your bedside. I need you to understand that it’s beyond my control when I get my instructions.”

This was one of the rare instances in which I understood exactly what was going on inside her: she had a secret that she wanted to share, but knew it was the kind of secret that most people could not understand. It was vital to say it aloud, but she was worried that it would sound absurd. Like, for example, explaining that you have a snake living in your spine.

“When I’m about to work, I sleep on the stone,” Marianne Engel began, with a deep breath, “for twelve hours at least, but usually more. It’s preparation. When I lie on the stone, I can feel it. I can feel all of it, everything inside. It’s…warm. My body sinks into the contours and then I feel weightless, like I’m floating. I sort of-lose the ability to move. But it’s wonderful; it’s the opposite of numbness. It’s more like being so aware, so hyperaware, that I can’t move because it’s so overwhelming.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, “when you say you can feel what’s inside the stone?”

“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole. When I have enough information, I begin. My body wakes but there is no sense of time, there’s nothing but the work. Days pass before I realize that I haven’t slept and I’ve barely eaten. It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time, which has been collecting for eons and all at once has come sliding down the mountain. The gargoyles have always been in the stone but, at this precise instant, it becomes unbearable for them to remain. They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone, and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment. I’m the only one who can do it, because I understand their languages and I’m the only one who can give them the hearts necessary to begin their new lives.”

She paused and seemed to be waiting for me to say something, anything-but how does one respond to proclamations such as these? Because she wanted a prompt and I wanted her to continue talking, I said it sounded like an extremely creative process.

“No, it’s the opposite. I’m a vessel that water is poured into and splashes out of. It’s a circle, a flowing circle between God and the gargoyles and me, because that is what God is-a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the entire time I’m carving, the gargoyle’s voice becomes louder and louder. I work as fast as I can because I want the voice to stop, but it keeps urging me on, demanding that I help it achieve its freedom. The voice goes silent only when I’m finished, and then I’m so exhausted that it’s my turn to sleep. So that’s why I disappear for five or six days at a time. It takes that long to free a gargoyle and then recover myself. I have no say in when a gargoyle will be ready, and I cannot refuse. So forgive my disappearances, because I have no choice.”

Okay, fine. At least now I knew what she was doing with the multiple hearts she thought were in her chest. They were going into the statues she carved.