Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

When we reached the scorched area, I noticed a few small tufts of grass within it, just starting to grow. Someday this area will be green and healthy again, I thought.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just never expected to come back, that’s all.”

“It is good to return to the locations of one’s sufferings.”

“You’re wrong.” I could remember it all: the eruption of glass; the steering column as it flew past me; the hiss of the engine settling; the tires spinning to a stop; the flash of blue flame across the car roof; the way the flames looked as they jumped into existence; the smell of my hair burning; and my flesh starting to bubble and pop. I could remember everything that changed me from a man into what I had become.

“It doesn’t matter if you agree. One cannot become whole by ignoring one’s misfortunes.” Marianne Engel unfastened her bag, pulled out an iron candlestick that she claimed had been made by Francesco, and crammed a candle into its open mouth. She handed me a pack of matches and asked me to light it. “But it is also important to celebrate this year that you have lived.”

I pointed out that it was not actually the one-year anniversary: while it was true that my accident had occurred on Good Friday, obviously that holiday fell on a different date each year.

“You should not regard time in such literal terms,” Marianne Engel said with a kiss to my plexiglass face. “What does a single day matter in the vastness of eternity?”

“I thought every day mattered,” I said. “Especially the ones when you almost die.”

It would have sounded more dramatic, I think, if at that exact moment Bougatsa had not jumped into the air beside us to snap wildly at some bug buzzing around his head.

“But you didn’t,” Marianne Engel said. “Tell me, was your life good before the accident?”

“Not really.”

“Then beginning again should be a gift to be embraced.”

She believed sincerely that I was starting over, and I suppose I was: but not entirely, and I felt a twinge of shame at what I was doing with the cash I was advancing from the credit card Jack had set up for me.

A few days later, Marianne Engel was out of the fortress, walking Bougatsa, when I decided to proceed with a secret mission. I put a long gray raincoat over my pressure garments and, though I was not supposed to, removed my mask and mouth retractor. I donned a hat and sunglasses, turned up my collar with criminally gloved hands, and looked in the mirror to see the very caricature of a sexual deviant looking back at me. I supposed it was perfect, considering where I was headed.

“The nearest porno shop.” My voice, revving like a rusted motor, made the taxi driver size me up in the rearview mirror. He seemed to have some second thoughts about taking the invisible man on a field trip, but they were dispelled when I held up my credit card. The driver put the car into motion and we passed the front of St. Romanus, where Father Shanahan was changing the white plastic sign to read: “Was Your Friday As Good As It Could Have Been?”

When we arrived at the Triple-XXX Velvet Palace, I asked the driver to wait. He nodded; he had seen me hobble into the car and knew that I couldn’t run far. Entering the shop was like coming home. There were the familiar smells of latex, leather, and lube. To my right was a collection of anal probes and giant rubber cocks, and to my left was an assortment of French maid and Japanese schoolgirl outfits. Magazines lined the walls, but I was interested in the videos at the back. Scanning the covers, I soon saw one of my own: Doctor Giving Bone, I Presume. (I’ve always considered this one of my more amusing titles.) I laid it down in front of the balding, bespectacled clerk. “Excellent choice,” he said in a completely unenthusiastic voice.

Back in the belfry, I slid the movie into the player. There was the warm blue glow of the television screen followed by the logo of my old production company. The plot, as in most pornos, left something to be desired; even to me-writer, actor, director, and producer-it was muddled. The film opens with a woman, Annie, who’s getting a medical check-up. When she has difficulty putting on her hospital gown, she asks the nurse for help and, as so often happens, hot lesbian sex ensues. The doctor (me) happens upon these shenanigans and, with nary a worry about ethics violations or venereal diseases, decides the proper treatment for Annie is unprotected anal sex.

I thought of the day of the shoot. The catering came from Sun Lee’s Chinese Take-Out, just down the street, and the delivery arrived late. Boyce Burgess worked the camera and Irdman Dickson did the sound and, despite the fact that we were shooting at one in the afternoon, Irdman was plastered. As the director, I would’ve reprimanded him if I had not been blasted on cocaine. In fact, if you carefully scrutinize the film, you can see a small gold spoon on my necklace bouncing out of my doctor’s coat as I rear-end Annie over the examining table. Because of Irdman’s drunkenness, the sound was particularly bad and, in some places, is completely unintelligible. Occasionally a line is audible: something about taking Annie’s temperature with “my big fat thermometer.” It’s probably for the best that most of the dialogue was lost.

This opening scene is, regrettably, the cleverest part of the film. From this point forward, the story becomes exponentially more ludicrous. One of my lovers is a psychiatrist, who continually prattles about my hostility towards women as I spank her. Meanwhile, Annie becomes a hypochondriac/nymphomaniac who believes that her allergy to cats is best treated with liberal doses of penis.

All this would seem laughable if not for the way I looked. My hair bounced with each thrust of my pelvis, and my skin shone beautifully as sweat crept down my neck onto my chest. The muscles of my arms flexed as I spanked my silly-stern mistress, letting her out and reeling her back in. My smile strained the corners of my retractorless mouth and my face tensed in wonderful anticipation as I neared orgasm.

I had to turn the video off: it sickened me to see the princely boy I’d been, compared with the wretched thing that I’d become. It sickened me to see, forever captured on film, the sweat on my smooth skin. I, who can no longer perspire. Is this how Fred Astaire felt as an old man unable to dance? Footage of one’s athletic youth is a kind of tyranny in old age; such footage has doomed Fred Astaire and me.

When I hit the eject button, the tape came whirring from the machine like a tongue sticking out at me. I took it down to the fireplace in the living room, where I placed it on a pile of torn newspaper. Taking a match to it, I watched the flames jump up to engulf the cassette.

That was the last time I ever looked at one of my old films.

Sayuri was coming once or twice a week, always smiling as she put me through my increasingly difficult paces. The results could not be denied: my body was starting to uncurl its contracted muscles, my back beginning to change from a question mark to an exclamation point. An emphasis of the therapy was on fighting my body’s desire to move along the path of least resistance by using the strongest muscles instead of the correct ones. Sayuri concentrated on getting me to move with the proper technique and walked alongside me with a hand on each side of my torso, forcing me to keep my head up. She corrected the swing of my arms, enabling my balance to improve, and was constantly reminding me to put equal weight on both feet. This was especially difficult going up and down stairs.

Kinetic basics mastered, we set out on walks of greater speed and longer distance. Bougatsa demanded to come along as well, running around in yapping circles. Sayuri threw a ball for him to chase, but this was mainly to get him out of the way so she could pay proper attention to me. When we returned home, we used the exercise equipment Marianne Engel had bought for me. There was a weight bench, a Nautilus machine, and a stationary bike for conditioning. Sayuri took it upon herself to incorporate each into my rehabilitation.