The Gargoyle (2 page)

The most difficult thing about writing, I’m discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It’s deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I’m constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point during my thirty-five years of life before that. Why not start with: “I was born in the year 19——, in the city of———”?

Then again, why should I even confine the beginning to the time frame of my life? Perhaps I should start in Nürnberg in the early thirteenth century, where a woman with the most unfortunate name of Adelheit Rotter retreated from a life that she thought was sinful to become a Beguine—women who, though not officially associated with the Church, were inspired to live an impoverished life in imitation of Christ. Over time Rotter attracted a legion of followers and, in 1240, they moved to a dairy farm at Engelschalksdorf near Swinach, where a benefactor named Ulrich II von Königstein allowed them to live provided they did chores. They erected a building in 1243 and, the following year, established it as a monastery with the election of their first prioress.

When Ulrich died without a male heir, he bequeathed his entire estate to the Beguines. In return he requested that the monastery provide burial places for his relations and that they pray, in perpetuity, for the Königstein family. In a show of good sense he directed that the place be named Engelthal, or “Valley of the Angels,” rather than Swinach—“Place of the Pigs.” But it was Ulrich’s final provision that would have the greatest impact on my life: he mandated that the monastery establish a scriptorium.

Eyes open on a red and blue spin of lightning. A blitzkrieg of voices, noises. A metal rod pierces the side of the car, jaws it apart. Uniforms. Christ, I’m in Hell and they wear uniforms. One man shouts. Another says in a soothing voice: “We’ll get you out. Don’t worry.” He wears a badge. “You’re gonna be all right,” he promises through his mustache. “What’s your name?” Can’t remember. Another paramedic yells to someone I can’t see. He recoils at the sight of me. Are they supposed to do that? Blackness.

Eyes open. I’m strapped to a spine board. A voice, “Three, two, one, lift.” The sky rushes towards me and then away from me. “In,” says the voice. A metallic clack as the stretcher snaps into place. Coffin, why no lid?
Too antiseptic for Hell, and could the roof of Heaven really be made of gray metal?
Blackness.

Eyes open. Weightless again. Charon wears a blue polyester-cotton blend. An ambulance siren bounces off a concrete Acheron. An IV has been inserted into my body—everywhere? I’m covered with a gel blanket. Wet, wet. Blackness.

Eyes open. The thud of wheels like a shopping cart on concrete. The damn voice says “Go!” The sky mocks me, passes me by, then a plaster-white ceiling. Double doors slither open. “OR Four!” Blackness.

Eyes open. Gaping maw of a snake, lunging at me, laughing, speaking:
I AM COMING . . .
The serpent tries to engulf my head. No, not a snake, an oxygen mask.
. . . AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I’m falling backwards gas mask blackness.

Eyes unveil. Burning hands, burning feet, fire everywhere, but I am in the middle of a blizzard. A German forest, and a river is near. A woman on a ridge with a crossbow. My chest feels as if it’s been hit. I hear the hiss as my heart gives out. I try to speak but croak instead, and a nurse tells me to rest, that everything will be okay, everything will be okay. Blackness.

A voice floats above me. “Sleep. Just sleep.”

Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It’s rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only released the monster—a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.

While a small burn results in a blister filled with plasma, burns such as mine result in the loss of enormous quantities of liquid. In my first twenty-four hospital hours, the doctors pumped six gallons of isotonic liquid into me to counteract the loss of body fluids. I bathed in the liquid as it flowed out of my scorched body as fast as it was pumped in, and I was something akin to the desert during a flash flood.

This too-quick exchange of fluid resulted in an imbalance in my blood chemistry, and my immune system staggered under the strain, a problem that would become ever more dangerous in the following weeks when the primary threat of death was from sepsis. Even for a burn victim who seems to be doing well long after his accident, infection can pull him out of the game at a moment’s notice. The body’s defenses are just barely functioning, exactly when they are needed most.

My razed outer layers were glazed with a bloody residue of charred tissue called eschar, the Hiroshima of the body. Just as you cannot call a pile of cracked concrete blocks a “building” after the bomb has detonated, neither could you have called my outer layer “skin” after the accident. I was an emergency state unto myself, silver ion and sulfadiazine creams spread over the remains of me. Over that, bandages were laid to rest upon the devastation.

I was aware of none of this, and only learned it later from the doctors. At the time, I lay comatose, with a machine clicking off the sluggish metronome of my heart. Fluids and electrolytes and antibiotics and morphine were administered through a series of tubes (IV tube, jejunostomy tube, endotracheal tube, nasogastric tube, urinary tube, truly a tube for every occasion!). A heat shield kept my body warm enough to survive, a ventilator did my breathing, and I collected enough blood transfusions to shame Keith Richards.

The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by débriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. They brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I’ve never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.

There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.

The first six years of my life.

My father was gone before I was born. He was evidently a most captivating good-time Charlie, quick with his dick and quicker to split. My mother, abandoned by this nameless lothario, died in childbirth as I surfed into this world on a torrent of her blood. The nurse who was grasping my greasy newborn body slipped in a puddle of it as she attempted to leave the delivery room, or so I was told. My grandmother first viewed me as I was whisked past her in the arms of a red-on-white Rorschach test of a nurse.

The delivery went wrong for me, as well. I was never told exactly what happened but somehow my body was cut from stomach to chest, leaving behind a long scar—maybe it was an errant scalpel as they tried to save my mother. I simply don’t know. As I grew, the scar remained the same size until eventually it was only a few inches long, centered on the left side of my chest where a romantic might draw the heart.

I lived with my grandmother until I was six. Her bitterness towards me, as the cause of her daughter’s death, was obvious. I think she was not a bad person but rather someone who never expected to be predeceased by her own daughter, nor to be charged, so late in life, with the care of another infant.

My grandmother didn’t beat me; she fed me well; she arranged all the necessary vaccinations. She just didn’t like me. She died on one of the rare days that we were having fun, while she was pushing me on a playground swing. I went up into the air and stretched my legs towards the sun. I came back towards the earth expecting her hands to catch me. Instead, I sailed past her doubled-over body. As I swung by her again on the forward trajectory, she’d collapsed onto her elbows. Then she sprawled facedown in the playground mud. I ran to a nearby house to alert the adults, and then sat on the monkey bars as the ambulance came too late. As the paramedics lifted her, my grandmother’s corpulent arms swung like bat wings with the life squeezed out of them.

From the moment I arrived at the hospital, I stopped being a person and became an actuarial chart. After weighing me, the doctors pulled out the calculators to punch up the extent of my burn and calculate the odds of my survival. Not good.

How did they do all this? As in any proper fairy tale, there’s a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines. The percentage of burn is determined and marked on a chart not unlike a voodoo map of the human body, divided into sections based upon multiples of nine. The arms are “worth” 9 percent of the total body surface; the head is worth 9 percent; each whole leg is worth 18 percent; and the torso, front and back, is worth 36 percent. Hence: the Rule of Nines.