The Gargoyle Read online

  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.

  Of course, there are other considerations in rating a burn. Age, for example. The very old and the very young are less likely to survive, but if the young do survive, they have a much greater capacity to regenerate. So, they’ve got that going for them. Which is nice. One must also consider the type of burn: scalds from boiling liquids; electrical burns from live wires; or chemical burns, be they acid or alkali. I ordered up only thermal burns from the menu, those strictly from flames.

  What, you may wonder, actually happens to living flesh in a fire? Cells consist mostly of liquid, which can boil and cause the cell walls to explode. This is not good. In a second scenario, the cell’s protein cooks up just like an egg in a frying pan, changing from a thin liquid into something gooey and white. If this happens, all metabolic activity of the cell ceases. So even though the heat was not sufficient to kill the cell outright, the loss of ability to deliver oxygen ensures the tissue will die soon enough. The difference is slow capitulation rather than immediate immolation.

  With Grandma gone, I went to live with Debi and Dwayne Michael Grace—an aunt and uncle, the quintessence of trash, who were annoyed with me from the moment I arrived. They did, however, like the government checks sent for my upkeep. It made scoring dope considerably easier.

  In my time with the graceless Graces, I relocated from one trailer park to another until my guardians found an all-night party that grew into a three-year methamphetamine festival. They were well ahead of their time: crystal meth was not nearly as popular in those days as it is now. If there was no pipe available with which to smoke it, a hollowed-out lightbulb was used, and sometimes the run on bulbs was such that we lived entirely in the dark. The drugs never seemed to run out, though. The Graces, flashing smiles like smashed keyboards, would hand over their every penny to the dealer.

  One of our neighbors traded the use of her daughter, a few years younger than me, for the equivalent in drugs. In case you’re wondering, the street value of an eight-year-old is $35, or at least it was when I was a kid. When the mother became savage-eyed and withdrawn, the young girl would come to cry fearfully in my tiny room, anticipating an impending sale. Last I heard, her mother had cleaned up, lost addiction, and found God. Last I heard, the girl (now adult) was a pregnant heroin addict.

  For the most part my childhood was not agreeable, but I was never sexually auctioned so my guardians might crank up. Still, a man should be able to say better things about his youth than that.

  The only way I was able to survive that shitty world was to imagine better ones, so I read everything I could get my hands on. By my early teens, I was spending so many hours in the library that the librarians brought extra sandwiches for me. I have such fond memories of these women, who would recommend books and then talk to me for hours about what I had learned.

  Long before I discovered the desire for drugs that would occupy my adulthood, my basic nature had already been established as compulsive. My first, and most lasting, addiction has always been to the obsessive study of any matter that took hold of my curiosity.

  Although I was never much for school, this was not because I believed education an inferior pursuit. Far from it: my problem was always that school interfered with matters more fascinating. The courses were designed to teach practical information but, because I understood the core concepts so quickly, they could not hold my interest. I was always distracted by the esoterica that might appear in a textbook’s footnote or a teacher’s offhand remark. For example: if my geometry teacher mentioned something about Galileo giving lectures on the physical structure of Hell, it became impossible for me to refocus my interest when he returned to talking about the sides of a parallelogram. I would skip the next three classes to visit the library, reading everything I could on Galileo, and when I returned to the school I would fail the next math test because it did not include any questions about the Inquisition.

  This passion for self-directed learning has remained, which should already be apparent in my depiction of burn treatment. The subject has such personal relevance it would be impossible for me not to learn as much as I could about it. My studies do not stop there: research on Engelthal monastery, for reasons that will become apparent, has also commanded a great many hours of my time.

  While it is true that outside the library I have lived a life of wickedness, inside it I’ve always been as devoted to knowledge as a saint to his Bible.

  Burns, I learned, are also rated according to how many layers of skin are damaged. Superficial (first-degree) burns involve only the epidermis, the top layer. Partial thickness (second-degree) burns involve the epidermis and the second layer, the corium. Deep partial thickness burns are very severe second-degree burns. And then there are full thickness (third-degree) burns, which involve all skin layers and result in permanent scarring.

  Severe cases—such as mine—usually feature a combination of burn thicknesses, because no one is turning the spit to ensure even roasting. For example, my right hand is completely undamaged. It experienced superficial burns and the only treatment was a common hand lotion.

  My partial thickness burns are primarily located on my lower legs beneath the knees and around my buttocks. The skin curled up like the pages of a burning manuscript, and took a few months to heal. Today the skin’s not perfect, but hell, it ain’t so bad. I can still feel my ass when I sit.

  Full thickness burns are like the steak your old man forgot on the barbecue when he got drunk. These burns destroy; this tissue will not heal. The scar is white, or black, or red; it’s a hard dry wound, hairless forever because the follicles have been cooked out. Strangely enough, third-degree burns are in one way better than second-degree ones: they don’t hurt at all, because the nerve endings have been cooked dumb.

  Burns to the hands, head, neck, chest, ears, face, feet, and perineal region command special attention. These areas rate the highest scores in the Rule of Nines; an inch of burnt head trumps an inch of burnt back. Unfortunately, these are the areas where my full thickness burns are concentrated, so I came up snake eyes on that one.

  There is some debate in the medical community over whether there is actually such a thing as a fourth-degree burn, but this is simply a bunch of healthy doctors sitting in a conference hall arguing semantics. These fourth-degree burns, if you accept the nomenclature, tunnel themselves right down into the bones and tendons. I had such burns as well; as if it weren’t enough that a floorboard severed all the toes from my left foot, these so-called fourth-degree burns took three toes from my right foot, and a finger and a half from my left hand. And, alas, one more body part.

  You will recall that I spi
lled bourbon onto my pants moments before the accident, and the timing could not have been worse. In effect, my lap was soaked with an accelerant that caused the area to burn with increased intensity. My penis was like a candle sticking out of my body and burned accordingly, leaving me with a seared wick where the shaft once had been. Unsalvageable, it was removed shortly after my admission in a procedure known as a penectomy.

  When I asked what had been done with the remains of my manhood, the nurse informed me that they had been disposed of as medical waste. As if it would somehow make me feel better, she went on to explain that the doctors left my scrotum and testicles attached. Too much to take everything, one supposes, kit and caboodle.

  The Graces died in a meth lab explosion, nine years after I first arrived in their trailer. It was not surprising: is there a worse idea than addicts cooking their drug in a confined space, with ingredients that include lantern fuel, paint thinner, and rubbing alcohol?

  I was not particularly disheartened. On the day of their funeral, I went to talk with the librarians about the biography of Galileo Galilei that I’d been reading—because, in fact, my geometry teacher had piqued my interest in the scientist.

  While any schoolboy can tell you about Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the Inquisition, the truth of his life was more complicated than that. It was never his intention to be a “bad” Catholic, and when ordered not to teach the idea of a heliocentric universe, Galileo complied for many years. His daughter Virginia entered a convent under the lovely name of Sister Maria Celeste, while his daughter Livia took the habit under the equally extraterrestrial moniker of Sister Arcangela. There is something poetically fitting in this because—even though his name is now used as conversational shorthand to signify science oppressed by religion—Galileo’s life twinned religion and science. It is said that when Tommaso Caccini, a young Dominican priest, became the first to publicly denounce Galileo’s support of the Copernican theory, he ended his sermon with a verse from the Acts of the Apostles: Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? What Caccini did not suspect, however, was that if Galileo was gazing up at the sky, he was just as likely to be praying as to be charting astronomical movement.

  At the age of twenty-four, Galileo auditioned for a university teaching position by delivering two lectures on the physics of Dante’s Inferno. Most modern thinkers would consider this wonderfully whimsical, but in Galileo’s day the study of Dantean cosmography was a hot topic. (Not coincidentally, the lectures were at the Florentine Academy, in the poet’s hometown.) The presentations were a great success and helped Galileo to secure his position as a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa.

  It was not until later that Galileo came to realize the position he’d argued in the lectures was incorrect and his contention that the cone-shaped structure of Hell was scale-invariant, meaning it could increase in size without a loss of integrity or strength, was not true. If Hell actually existed in the Earth’s interior, the immensity of the cavity would cause the roof (the earth’s mantle) to collapse unless the walls of Hell were much thicker than he had originally argued. So Galileo set to work on the nature of scaling laws and, late in life, published his discoveries in Two New Sciences, whose principles helped establish modern physics—a science that now exists in part because Galileo realized he made a mistake in his application of natural laws to a supernatural location.

  But if Hell were a real place, there is little doubt that Debi and Dwayne Michael Grace would be there now.

  I was unconscious for almost seven weeks, wrapped in my deadflesh body bag. My coma was first caused by shock but then the doctors decided to keep me in it, medically immobilized, while the healing commenced.

  I didn’t have to consciously deal with the collapse of my circulation system, nor did I have to consider my kidney damage. I was oblivious to the shutdown of my bowels. I knew nothing about the ulcers that made me vomit blood or of how the nurses had to scramble to make sure I didn’t asphyxiate when this occurred. I didn’t have to fret about the infections that might set in after each emergency surgery or skin graft. I was not notified that my hair follicles had been incinerated or that my sweat glands had been destroyed. I wasn’t awake when they suctioned the soot from my lungs—a treatment which, by the way, is called pulmonary toilet.

  My vocal cords had sustained extensive damage from smoke inhalation, and a tracheotomy was performed so my larynx could start to heal without the irritation of a tube pressing against it. Nothing more could be done. Another part of my body that received little attention in the earliest stages was my right leg, which was severely broken. The doctors had to wait for my condition to stabilize before they could begin the operations to rebuild my shattered femur and busted knee. Keeping me alive took precedence over retaining a pretty voice or limp-free walk.

  During the coma, atrophy of the muscles couldn’t be avoided. There was my lack of movement and the fact that with large portions of my skin eradicated, my body was eating itself. It consumed the protein within, spending a tremendous amount of energy just trying to maintain a constant temperature. The heat shield was not enough, so my body ceased delivering blood to the extremities. The body’s concern is for the center, the outskirts be damned, and I stopped producing urine and became toxic. As my body contracted, my heart expanded: not from love, but from stress.

  I was covered with maggots, a treatment used more frequently in the past but which has recently come back into medical vogue. The bugs ate away at the necrotic flesh, becoming fat on my decay, while leaving the living flesh intact. The doctors sewed my eyelids shut to protect my eyes and all that I required was for someone to cover them with coins. Then, I would have been complete.

  I have one happy memory from my time with the Graces: happy, yet marked with a most curious occurrence.

  The air show was on a hot day in mid-August at a nearby airfield. The planes did not excite me—but the skydivers, with their parachutes open to the heavens and the colored streams of smoke that trailed behind them! The falling from sky to earth, a Hephaestian plummet slowed only by fluttering swells of silk, seemed like a miracle. The skydivers operated their magic levers, circling large white bull’s-eyes stenciled on the ground, invariably hitting their marks, dead center. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

  At one point, an Asian woman moved behind me. I felt her before I saw her; it was as if my skin jumped just from her presence. When I turned around, there she was, standing with a tiny smile. I was young and I had no idea whether she was Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese; she just had Asian skin color and eyes and she was barely as tall as I, although I was only ten years old. She wore a dark robe of a simple material that made me think that she must belong to some sort of religious order. Her attire was completely out of the ordinary but no one in the crowd seemed to notice, and she was completely bald.

  I wanted to give my attention back to the skydivers, but I couldn’t. Not with her behind me. A few moments passed, with me trying not to look at her again, before I could no longer stop myself. All the other people had their faces turned up into the sky but she was looking directly at me.

  “What do you want?” My voice was steady; I simply wanted an answer. She said nothing but continued to smile.

  “Can’t you speak?” I asked. She shook her head, then held out a note. I hesitated before taking it.

  It read: Haven’t you ever wondered where your scar really came from?

  When I looked back up, she was gone. All I saw was the crowd of upturned faces.

  I read the note again, not believing she could know of my imperfection. It was on my chest, hidden under my shirt, and I was certain I’d never seen this woman before. But even if I had somehow improbably forgotten a previous encounter with a tiny bald Asian woman in a robe, there was no chance I would have shown her my scar.

  I started to weave through the crowd, looking for any trace of her—a robe slipping through the masses; the back of her head—but there was not
hing.

  I put the note into my pocket, taking it out a few more times during the day to assure myself that it was real. Dwayne Michael Grace must have been feeling unusually generous, because he bought me cotton candy from the concession stand. Then Debi hugged me, and it was almost like we were a family. After the show, we attended an exhibition of lit paper lanterns floating down a nearby river, a display that was quite beautiful and unlike anything I had ever seen before.

  When we got home late that evening, the note had disappeared from my pocket even though I had been extra careful.

  I dreamt incessantly in my coma. Images reeled into each other, competing for the center ring of the circus.

  I dreamt of a farmwoman heating bathwater. I dreamt of the blood from my mother’s womb. I dreamt of the flabby arms of my dying grandmother, pushing me up into the blue blue sky. I dreamt about Buddhist temples near cool rushing rivers. I dreamt of the little girl who was sold by her mother for meth. I dreamt of the twisted furnace of my car. I dreamt of a Viking warship. I dreamt of an ironworker’s anvil. I dreamt of a sculptor’s hands working furious chisels on stone. I dreamt of flaming arrows bursting out of the sky, I dreamt of raining fire. I dreamt of glass exploding everywhere. I dreamt of a delirious angel frozen in water.

  But most of all, I dreamt of the gargoyles waiting to be born.

  It was after the incident at the airfield that stroking the birth scar on my chest became a habitual action. I never noticed I was doing it, but others did. Dwayne hated it, slapping my hand away from my chest while telling me to “quit playing with yourself.” Then he’d smoke more drugs, making it difficult to take his criticism seriously.