Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

… BETWEEN LOSERS.

On Christmas morning, Marianne Engel appeared in my room with a sack of presents and a silver briefcase that she immediately slid under my bed. We passed a few hours, speaking as we often did about everything/nothing, while she fed me mandarin oranges and marzipan. As usual, she made her regular trips outside to smoke cigarettes, but I noticed that sometimes when she came back, she didn’t have the telltale smell of fresh smoke upon her. When I asked her if she had something else going on, she shook her head no. Her smile, however, betrayed her.

In the early afternoon, Sayuri and Gregor arrived, followed by Connie, who’d just finished her rounds. Dr. Edwards never worked on Christmas Day, and Maddy and Beth had both booked the day off to spend with their families. With no one left to arrive, Marianne Engel dragged her sack out of the corner and we began to exchange gifts.

The nurses had pitched in to buy me some books on subjects that had recently taken my interest, such as the inner workings of medieval German monasteries and the writings of Heinrich Seuse and Meister Eckhart.

“You aren’t easy to buy for, that’s for sure. I had to go to three different bookshops,” Connie said. As soon as she realized this might sound like a complaint, she hastily added, “Not that I minded, of course!”

Gregor gave me a stationery set, as I’d confided to him that I’d been working on some writing in recent weeks, and Sayuri gave me some lavender ice cream that I happily shared with everyone. Marianne Engel seemed to enjoy it the most, and was tickled by the fact that it turned her tongue purple.

To the nurses I gave compact discs by their favorite artists. While this was not particularly personal, I didn’t know much about their nonhospital lives. To Sayuri, I gave the gift that I’d asked Gregor to pick up on my behalf: two tickets for an upcoming Akira Kurosawa film festival.

“I got the idea when Dr. Hnatiuk was telling me about it. He loves Kurosawa, you know.”

Marianne Engel looked at me, raising an accusatory eyebrow, because subtle I’m not.

Next came my gift to Gregor, as picked up by Sayuri: coupons for a dinner for two at a Russian restaurant with the highly unoriginal name of Rasputin’s. I asked Sayuri whether she’d ever eaten authentic Russian food, and she answered that she had not. It was now I who raised an eyebrow in the direction of Gregor. When they thanked me for their gifts, I grumbled that “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any fucking presents.” No one seemed to understand what I was talking about, which only proves that more people should read Louisa May Alcott.

Next, Marianne Engel gave her gifts. The nurses got day passes to a spa, which Connie tucked away with the CDs. Sayuri received an intricate blown-glass Buddhist temple, while Gregor received a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. They were impressed with the handmade quality of the items, and Marianne Engel boasted that the gifts were the work of two of her friends.

As for Marianne Engel and I, we had already decided to exchange our gifts later, in private. And maybe I was the only one who’d noticed, but apparently Sayuri and Gregor had also come to the same understanding.

After a while, Gregor said, “Are we ready to move along?” Everyone looked at Marianne Engel, who nodded. Christmas truly was a time for miracles, if the medical staff was looking to the schizophrenic to provide guidance. Sayuri put me into a wheelchair and Gregor pushed me down the hall, and when I asked where we were going, no one would answer directly. Soon I figured out that we were heading to the cafeteria. Perhaps there was some sort of Christmas function, a hired Santa or volunteer carolers, although the fact that I’d heard nothing about it struck me as odd. After so many months in the hospital, very little escaped my attention.

When the doors of the cafeteria slid open, I was battered by the smell of every food in the world. Against the far wall, a small task force of caterers was tending to a series of heavily laden tables. Thirty or forty people were milling around the room, under red crepe streamers that hung from the roof, and a few of them gestured in our direction. At first, I thought they were all pointing at my appearance but when the caterers waved to Marianne Engel, I realized that she was the center of attention, not I. The patients started ambling towards us: an old man with a cough, a curly-haired woman with bandages on her arms, a handsome boy with a limp. Bringing up the rear was a preteen girl with no hair, a fistful of balloons, and a cheering section of relatives.

Everyone thanked Marianne Engel for what she’d done; at this point, I still didn’t know what that was. After Gregor pushed me to the catering tables and helped me out of the wheelchair, he explained that she had arranged and funded the entire party. This, in accordance with her general lack of restraint, was no small undertaking. Even having seen the outsized dinners that she brought to my room, I could scarcely comprehend what was available.

Turkey, ham, roast goose, chicken, meat dumplings, curried goat, boar, venison, meatloaf, carp (carp? who eats carp?), cod, haddock, lutefish, shellfish, cold cuts, a dozen types of sausage, roasted eggs, oxtail soup, meat broths, onion soup, more cheeses than you could shake a cow’s udder at, brown beans, gungo peas, onions, pickles, rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweeter potatoes, sweetest potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, squash, pumpkin, basmati, white rice, brown rice, wild rice, tame rice, antipasto, stuffing, assorted breads, bagels, buns, cheese scones, green salad, Caesar salad, bean salad, pasta salad, jellied salad, whipped-cream-and-apple salad, spaghetti, fettuccini, macaroni, rigatoni, cannelloni, tortellini, guglielmo marconi (just checking to see if you’re still reading), bananas, apples, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, blueberries, mixed nuts, mincemeat pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas bread, coconut shortbread, pecan pie, chocolates, chocolate logs, chocolate frogs, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, fudge, sugar, spice, everything nice, epiphany cake, fruitcake, gingerbread men, Torte Vigilia di Natale, snips, snails, puppydog tails, cranberry punch, eggnog, milk, grape juice, apple juice, orange juice, soft drinks, coffee, tea, you say to-may-to juice, I say to-mah-to juice, and bottled water.

Everyone in the hospital must have filled up their plates once, twice, thrice, and Marianne Engel charmed each guest with her grace and eccentricity. It didn’t hurt that she had slipped into an elf costume and looked astoundingly cute. Music played and people talked merrily to each other, everyone partaking in the spirit of the event. Patients who otherwise would never have met were speaking at length, probably comparing illnesses. Coughs were drowned out by laughs, and there were squeals of delight from the children, who each received a gift from under the plastic Christmas tree. Apparently Marianne Engel couldn’t obtain permission for a genuine pine, but an artificial one was more than good enough. If flowers might kill a man, just imagine what a conifer could do.

For this one afternoon, I was a hospital celebrity, as the word spread that it was my friend who’d done all this. An old man came to talk with me with such a large grin on his face that it was a shock when he mentioned that his wife of sixty years had recently died. When I told him I was sorry to hear it, he shook his head and clasped his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I’ll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don’t ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.”