Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

“How would it work?” I asked. “What would I have to do?”

“You wouldn’t have to do anything,” she answered. “You would just have to sit there.”

The reply made me think of our conversation after she forced me to apologize to Sayuri, when she had said that I would need to “do nothing” to prove my love to her. I didn’t understand what she had meant, but if this was what she had been talking about, how could I turn her down? “Okay, I’ll do it.”

“It’ll be nice to work from life for a change,” she said. “I’ll finally get to put the form into the stone, instead of pulling it out.”

She started to remove her clothing and I asked what she was doing. She always carved nude, she said, and was not about to change now; did I have a problem with that? I answered that I didn’t, but I really wasn’t so sure. There was something about her unclothed body that affected me, the ex-porn actor and prodigious seducer of women, in a way I could not quite comprehend. There was something so raw and disarming about her nudity…

But I could not tell her what to do in her own home. As soon as she was undressed, she pulled the pressure garments from my body and ran her fingers over the folds of my burned flesh, as though her fingers were memorizing a path. “I love that your scars are so red. Did you know that gargoyles used to be painted in bright colors to help their features to stand out?”

She walked over to one of her creatures and ran her fingers over it, just as she had been touching me moments earlier. As I watched her hands move, I imagined how a river runs perfectly over a stone for a thousand years. She pointed out the deeply carved lines under the eyes of one of her beasts. “See how the features are undercut to emphasize shadows, to create depth? The parishioners looking up at the gargoyle, they can’t even see these details.”

“So why do it?”

“We work also for the eyes of God.”

Being carved made me feel more naked than any porno, and that first sitting was made bearable only by its shortness. I could take off my pressure garments for only fifteen minutes at a time, a limit that Marianne Engel always respected. It didn’t matter that the work would progress slowly; I was confident that we would have years to complete me.

At the end of each session she would show me the progress she’d made and we would talk about whatever was on our minds. On one occasion she mentioned casually, while stubbing out a cigarette, “Don’t forget that we’ve got a Halloween party coming up.”

This was the first I had heard about it, I said.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Last year in the burn ward I promised we’d go, remember?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“A year is not a long time, but I’ll make you a deal. Would you agree to go if I told you another story?”

“About what?” I asked.

“I think you’ll really like this one,” she said. “It’s about Sigurðr, my Viking friend.”

Of all the places in which a boy might find himself orphaned, ninth-century Iceland was among the worst. Sigurðr Sigurрsson’s parents had arrived with the first wave of Norse immigrants and decided the land had a strange beauty that would be suitable for raising a family. But when Sigurðr was only nine, his father disappeared on an ice floe and, not long after, his mother went to sleep never to wake up. The boy took over the family land and resolved to make his way in life, but he failed: he was just too young, and soon found himself scavenging a living from the dead whales that washed up on the shores.

In truth, it was not a bad skill to possess: the flesh was used for food, the blubber for lamps, and the bones for any number of household items. All these things, Sigurðr could trade to support himself. Still, he felt there was something missing from his existence; even as a child, he knew it was not enough to carve a life out of the carcasses of the dead, and he longed to be strong and valiant.

So, when not cutting apart beached whales, Sigurðr dove. On the edge of a fjord, with the entire ocean stretched in front of him, he would take a moment as the world around him seemed to disappear. Then his legs would push him up into the air and there would be a moment of brief weightlessness when the battle between sky and sea was deadlocked, and Sigurðr would-just for this one beautiful moment-imagine himself floating near Valhalla.

But the sea always won, and the boy would cut the air like a dropped knife. The water rushed up to meet him, and when he sliced through the transparent surface he felt as if he’d come home. Down he would go, searching for the bottom, before emerging from the ocean with the feeling that he’d been cleansed. But the feeling never lasted.

When he played with the other boys, because there was still a little time for this, he always felt one step removed from them. He liked to wrestle and run just as they did, and he even enjoyed drawing a little blood in a sporting contest, but there came a time when all the other young men found young women with whom to wrestle. Sigurðr, poor Sigurðr, remained content to wrestle only with the boys, and soon people started to wonder why he didn’t seem to have the slightest interest in taking a wife.

Sigurðr took to spending his evenings in the local tavern in an attempt to display his manliness, but try as he might to keep his eyes fixed on the breasts of the waitress, his gaze would invariably wander to the hairy knuckles of the bartender. From there, his eyes would go to the strong curve of Hцрbroddr’s buttocks and then, always, they would settle upon one man, a little older, named Einarr Einarsson.

Einarr was a block of granite disguised as flesh, with a massive chest and thick forearms that could tame a man-or so Sigurðr liked to imagine. Einarr’s eyes reminded Sigurðr of the icy water into which he dove, and his flaming hair was like the passion in the younger man’s heart. Einarr was by trade a carpenter, but he was also a Viking.

The two men had a passing acquaintance, inevitable given the sparse population, but little contact until the evening that Sigurðr summoned his courage and headed over to talk. He stuck out his chest farther than usual, lowered the timber of his voice, and laughed only his most masculine laugh. Still, it did not take long for Einarr to see that it was not a man who sat before him, but a lost boy.

There was something about Sigurðr, so pitiful and yet so hopeful, that touched Einarr’s better impulses. He knew the boy had lost his parents, and he had seen him wandering the shores with bags of dead whale. Rather than dismiss the boy, he listened, and when Sigurðr said embarrassing things-and there were plenty-Einarr simply nodded. He saw no need to insult someone whose life was already difficult enough.

That evening in the bar was the first of many. Their relationship was a strange fit, but somehow a good one, because Einarr appreciated that aspect of Sigurðr’s character which his Viking companions lacked. The young man, though not particularly intelligent, had moments in which he longed for something better. Sigurðr did not want to destroy, he wanted to create-but he didn’t know how. He often spoke about how wonderful it must be for Einarr to build things from wood. While Einarr only grunted, inside he agreed-it was a good thing that he did for a living-and he also thought that perhaps this boy could do better for himself, if only he had a little guidance.

Soon Einarr proposed that Sigurðr assist him in the carpentry shop, and the offer was accepted with excitement. It would not be an apprenticeship, per se, because there was never any suggestion that Sigurðr would eventually set out on his own, but it would be a fine way to fill out his days. Sigurðr’s heart was beating more quickly than usual the first time he arrived at Einarr’s longhouse.