Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

“I was burned in a fire.” I only wanted to get the conversation over with, so we could move on, but Billy had another question: “Did it hurt?”

“Yes.” I suppressed my natural urge to warn the boy not to play with matches. “I was in the hospital for a long time.”

“Wow,” Billy said, “you must be real happy you’re not there anymore.”

The mother pulled the boy’s hand hard enough that he could not ignore her. “We really do have to go.” She never looked back, but Billy turned and waved as she dragged him down the aisle.

When we left the supermarket, Marianne Engel emptied all her extra change into the hands of the beggars loitering outside. All the while she was talking about the half-finished statues in her workshop because, apparently, her Three Masters had recently informed her that she needed to complete them.

I was holding up well until we reached the car, but while I was getting in, I banged a large portion of my burned skin into the passenger door. My body immediately reacted to my mistake by sending intense jolts of pain skittering from one nerve cluster to the next, and the spinebitchsnake started snapping at the base of my skull as if it were a field mouse to be swallowed whole. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU!My hands started to shake from an immediate thirst for morphine and I begged Marianne Engel to administer an injection as quickly as possible. She took the equipment from my kit (I never left home without it) and plugged a syringe into me.

Morphine is like a religious zealot on a mission; it searches for body parts to convert, offering milk-and-honeyed dreams to flow sluggishly through your veins. The snake became mired in the syrup and slowed into nonmovement, but I knew she’d be back. The snake always came back.

When was the last time that my blood had been free of contaminants? In my early twenties, I supposed.

Marianne Engel paced around our place for days with a coffee and a cigarette, berating herself for not being able to properly clear her physical instrument and receive new instructions. Eventually she accepted that the time really was upon her to complete the unfinished statues that had been collecting in her workshop. “Can’t put it off forever, I guess. The Masters say so.”

When she worked on these statues, she was not possessed with daimonic energy as she was when starting one from scratch. She would come upstairs to help with my exercises or take a walk with Bougatsa. When she cleaned me in the mornings, I didn’t feel like an intruder on her real work. The difference, she explained, came not from herself but from the grotesques. Having stopped partway through the process once already, they now understood that there was more time available than they had originally believed. “They’ve learned that no matter what I do to them, they’re still going to be stone. They know they don’t have to yell at me to get what they want.”

Over the course of a few weeks, she finished off a few of her lingering pieces. The bird’s head, which had been sitting on human shoulders with everything below remaining untouched, was given a male torso and goat’s haunches. The uncompleted sea-savage clawing its way out of a granite ocean got the rest of its body, as well as foam on the crests of the waves. Trucks came to pick up these statues and take them to Jack’s gallery for sale, because cigarettes and pressure garments do not pay for themselves.

It was a bit of a surprise when, after a few weeks, Marianne Engel asked me to accompany her into the workshop, the one area of the house that was unequivocally hers. She puttered around for a few moments, not saying anything, not looking at me, trying hard to come across as casual. It was such a contrast to all the times I’d seen her immersed in her working rapture. She took the broom and swept a few rock crumbs into a corner, then blurted, “I hope you aren’t mad.”

She walked over to a block of stone that was covered with a white sheet. I hadn’t given it much thought; amid all her other eccentricities, concealing a piece of artwork until it was finished seemed positively sane. I could see a somewhat human silhouette beneath the contours of the sheet, making me think of a child dressed up as a Halloween ghost. When she pulled away the cover, she said, “I’ve been doing you.”

There was a half-completed statue of me. No, not half-more accurately, it was just the outline of my body. None of the detailing was done, but it was impossible not to recognize the vague perimeters of my bulk: the shoulders were properly hunched; the spine had a serpentine curl; the head looked correct, in the wrongness of its dimensions when compared to the rest of the body. It was like looking at myself in the mirror, in the morning, before my eyes had really opened. I stammered that I was not angry that she’d been “doing me,” but confused. Why?

“God is acting through me,” she said, quite seriously, before laughing so that I’d know she was joking. I laughed, too, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

“I want you to sit for me, but think about it before committing,” she said, indicating the half-finished gargoyles all around her. “I don’t want you to suffer the same fate as these ones.”

I nodded-to indicate that I’d think about it, not that I agreed-and we headed back up the stairs. I concentrated on climbing with correct form, but when I looked back over my shoulder at the stone figure in the corner, I couldn’t help but think I really needed to work on my posture.

Jack came barging through the front door, straining under the weight of a leafy plant, which she slammed into a corner of the living room. “Last time I was here, I noticed you have no plants. Isn’t anything alive in here?” Jack looked at me, then added, “Good Lord, you haven’t got any better looking, have you?” She swung her attention quickly in the direction of Marianne Engel, who had been watching her entrance with amusement. “And you, I’ve got a couple of private buyers looking for originals. They’re not crazy about anything at the shop, so they want to know if you’re working on anything new. I told them you’re always working on something new.”

“Good homes?” Marianne Engel asked.

“Yes, they’re good homes.” Jack sighed. “I always find good homes, and your little beasties will be well looked after. Even though they’re only bloody stone. You know that, don’t you? Oh, and Princeton needs some repair work done.”

Marianne Engel shook her head. “Not interested in travel right now.”

“Right. Too busy looking after Crispy, here,” Jack said. “Christ, Marianne, it’s a great paycheck and you’re going to let it pass you by. When art meets charity, it’s bound to be a fuckup.”

Marianne Engel gave Jack a big hug, saying a few words in my defense, but mostly she just giggled at Jack’s bluster. This only made Jack angrier. “Remember when you brought Bougatsa home?” she said. “He was a stray, too.”

In our supposed previous life, I’d given Marianne Engel a stone angel that I had carved-the one that sat on her bookshelf-while in this life she’d given me a stone grotesque that she had carved. The symmetry is much like the reversal of our jobs: back then, she had been the one who worked with books and I had been the one who worked with stone.

That observation is academic, I suppose, but my reaction to the idea of her carving me was entirely visceral. It’s flattering when an artist wants to do you, of course, but it also made me feel awkward to contemplate that my hideousness would be so permanently captured. For the first time, I understood the fear savages have, that cameras will capture their souls along with their images.