Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

While it is true that outside the library I have lived a life of wickedness, inside it I’ve always been as devoted to knowledge as a saint to his Bible.

Burns, I learned, are also rated according to how many layers of skin are damaged. Superficial (first-degree) burns involve only the epidermis, the top layer. Partial thickness (second-degree) burns involve the epidermis and the second layer, the corium. Deep partial thickness burns are very severe second-degree burns. And then there are full thickness (third-degree) burns, which involve all skin layers and result in permanent scarring.

Severe cases-such as mine-usually feature a combination of burn thicknesses, because no one is turning the spit to ensure even roasting. For example, my right hand is completely undamaged. It experienced superficial burns and the only treatment was a common hand lotion.

My partial thickness burns are primarily located on my lower legs beneath the knees and around my buttocks. The skin curled up like the pages of a burning manuscript, and took a few months to heal. Today the skin’s not perfect, but hell, it ain’t so bad. I can still feel my ass when I sit.

Full thickness burns are like the steak your old man forgot on the barbecue when he got drunk. These burns destroy; this tissue will not heal. The scar is white, or black, or red; it’s a hard dry wound, hairless forever because the follicles have been cooked out. Strangely enough, third-degree burns are in one way better than second-degree ones: they don’t hurt at all, because the nerve endings have been cooked dumb.

Burns to the hands, head, neck, chest, ears, face, feet, and perineal region command special attention. These areas rate the highest scores in the Rule of Nines; an inch of burnt head trumps an inch of burnt back. Unfortunately, these are the areas where my full thickness burns are concentrated, so I came up snake eyes on that one.

There is some debate in the medical community over whether there is actually such a thing as a fourth-degree burn, but this is simply a bunch of healthy doctors sitting in a conference hall arguing semantics. These fourth-degree burns, if you accept the nomenclature, tunnel themselves right down into the bones and tendons. I had such burns as well; as if it weren’t enough that a floorboard severed all the toes from my left foot, these so-called fourth-degree burns took three toes from my right foot, and a finger and a half from my left hand. And, alas, one more body part.

You will recall that I spilled bourbon onto my pants moments before the accident, and the timing could not have been worse. In effect, my lap was soaked with an accelerant that caused the area to burn with increased intensity. My penis was like a candle sticking out of my body and burned accordingly, leaving me with a seared wick where the shaft once had been. Unsalvageable, it was removed shortly after my admission in a procedure known as a penectomy.

When I asked what had been done with the remains of my manhood, the nurse informed me that they had been disposed of as medical waste. As if it would somehow make me feel better, she went on to explain that the doctors left my scrotum and testicles attached. Too much to take everything, one supposes, kit and caboodle.

The Graces died in a meth lab explosion, nine years after I first arrived in their trailer. It was not surprising: is there a worse idea than addicts cooking their drug in a confined space, with ingredients that include lantern fuel, paint thinner, and rubbing alcohol?

I was not particularly disheartened. On the day of their funeral, I went to talk with the librarians about the biography of Galileo Galilei that I’d been reading-because, in fact, my geometry teacher had piqued my interest in the scientist.

While any schoolboy can tell you about Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the Inquisition, the truth of his life was more complicated than that. It was never his intention to be a “bad” Catholic, and when ordered not to teach the idea of a heliocentric universe, Galileo complied for many years. His daughter Virginia entered a convent under the lovely name of Sister Maria Celeste, while his daughter Livia took the habit under the equally extraterrestrial moniker of Sister Arcangela. There is something poetically fitting in this because-even though his name is now used as conversational shorthand to signify science oppressed by religion-Galileo’s life twinned religion and science. It is said that when Tommaso Caccini, a young Dominican priest, became the first to publicly denounce Galileo’s support of the Copernican theory, he ended his sermon with a verse from the Acts of the Apostles: Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? What Caccini did not suspect, however, was that if Galileo was gazing up at the sky, he was just as likely to be praying as to be charting astronomical movement.

At the age of twenty-four, Galileo auditioned for a university teaching position by delivering two lectures on the physics of Dante’s Inferno. Most modern thinkers would consider this wonderfully whimsical, but in Galileo’s day the study of Dantean cosmography was a hot topic. (Not coincidentally, the lectures were at the Florentine Academy, in the poet’s hometown.) The presentations were a great success and helped Galileo to secure his position as a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa.

It was not until later that Galileo came to realize the position he’d argued in the lectures was incorrect and his contention that the cone-shaped structure of Hell was scale-invariant, meaning it could increase in size without a loss of integrity or strength, was not true. If Hell actually existed in the Earth’s interior, the immensity of the cavity would cause the roof (the earth’s mantle) to collapse unless the walls of Hell were much thicker than he had originally argued. So Galileo set to work on the nature of scaling laws and, late in life, published his discoveries in Two New Sciences, whose principles helped establish modern physics-a science that now exists in part because Galileo realized he made a mistake in his application of natural laws to a supernatural location.

But if Hell were a real place, there is little doubt that Debi and Dwayne Michael Grace would be there now.

I was unconscious for almost seven weeks, wrapped in my deadflesh body bag. My coma was first caused by shock but then the doctors decided to keep me in it, medically immobilized, while the healing commenced.

I didn’t have to consciously deal with the collapse of my circulation system, nor did I have to consider my kidney damage. I was oblivious to the shutdown of my bowels. I knew nothing about the ulcers that made me vomit blood or of how the nurses had to scramble to make sure I didn’t asphyxiate when this occurred. I didn’t have to fret about the infections that might set in after each emergency surgery or skin graft. I was not notified that my hair follicles had been incinerated or that my sweat glands had been destroyed. I wasn’t awake when they suctioned the soot from my lungs-a treatment which, by the way, is called pulmonary toilet.

My vocal cords had sustained extensive damage from smoke inhalation, and a tracheotomy was performed so my larynx could start to heal without the irritation of a tube pressing against it. Nothing more could be done. Another part of my body that received little attention in the earliest stages was my right leg, which was severely broken. The doctors had to wait for my condition to stabilize before they could begin the operations to rebuild my shattered femur and busted knee. Keeping me alive took precedence over retaining a pretty voice or limp-free walk.