Toshiaki and Ayako’s union was the product of omiai, an arranged marriage. If not a union brimming with love, it was at least functional, as evidenced by the three children. Toshiaki worked hard hours at the office, followed by drinking and karaoke; Ayako ran the home, looking after the household finances and making sure that there was food waiting for her husband when he came home intoxicated and sung-out. They fulfilled the requirements necessary to be classified as a normal Japanese family, and all Toshiaki and Ayako wished for their children was that they meet the same requirements.
The first son, Ichiro—a name which, incidentally, means First Son—attended a good university. Therefore, he got a good job with a good salary at a good company after graduation; that’s how these things work. In fact, Ichiro didn’t even need to apply himself to his schoolwork after he’d been accepted, because simply attending the right university was the important thing; learning, less so. After he got his good job, he worked for a few years before he married a good Japanese girl from a good family at a good age. Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty-five, because that’s when she turns into a “Christmas cake.” Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty-fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf. Ichiro’s wife was twenty-three, so she was still well before her expiration date. Toshiaki and Ayako were pleased; Ichiro would inherit the family house and would tend to the parents’ graves after they died.
Sayuri’s sister, Chinatsu—a lovely name, meaning A Thousand Summers—also went to a good university, then got a job as an office lady for a few years, and got married at the age of twenty-four and a half. Just in time. She quit her job and embarked upon babymaking. Again, the parents were pleased.
Then it was the turn of their youngest daughter, the somewhat troublesome Sayuri. (Her name means Small Lily. If nothing else, the Japanese are expert namers.)
Sayuri was some years younger than Chinatsu. Her parents would never have gone so far as to call her an accident, but they would, on occasion, let slip that she was “not planned.” Her parents would also, if pressed, admit that unplanned things can be problematic but, on the other hand, if two children were good then a third child must be one third better. So never let it be said that Sayuri’s parents regretted her birth. However, Sayuri’s math skills were advanced enough to tell her that adding one to two actually increases the amount by half, not one-third.
Ichiro and Chinatsu had both walked the appropriate path and had done what was expected. The pattern had been firmly established, folded neatly and put away like a fine kimono; this pattern of proper behavior was practically a family heirloom to be handed down. All Sayuri had to do, to continue the perfection of her parents’ lives, was imitate the examples of her older siblings. But this, unfortunately, was the very last thing she wanted to do. If she did, she reasoned, she would be doomed to spend not only her childhood but her entire life in her family’s dirty bathwater.
The problem was that Sayuri was unsure about what she did want to do, so she kept her mouth shut and bided her time. She worked hard enough at her high school studies, but when her parents had their backs turned, she spent all her extra time studying English. Unbeknownst to them, an Australian woman named Maggie tutored her on Tuesday nights when Sayuri’s parents thought she was at volleyball practice. Sayuri went to the movies each Saturday, not for entertainment but to learn to speak like Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon, and (unfortunately) Woody Allen. On Sunday afternoons, she went to the local museum to hunt American tourists and when she cornered one, she’d ask him whether he would speak with her for five minutes so she might practice her English. Invariably the tourist agreed, because who could refuse such cute enthusiasm? Meanwhile, Sayuri dutifully filled out applications for the correct Japanese universities and was accepted into one of them. Her parents were happy. Now Sayuri only had to graduate, work a few years as an office lady, and get off the shelf by twenty-five.
Right after her high school graduation, Sayuri visited the Australian embassy with Maggie to pick up a work visa. One week later, Sayuri called her parents long distance from the Sydney airport. Needless to say, they were less than pleased, not only with her rash and disrespectful actions but because she had not even had the courage to say goodbye before she left the country.
In truth, it was not a lack of courage that had dictated Sayuri’s actions, but an excess of it. If she’d tried to reason with her parents, they never would have let her go. It would have been an argument that Sayuri could not win but one that she was unwilling to lose, so she simply did what she had to do to start a life on her own terms. At first Sayuri’s parents thought she was joking—she couldn’t really be calling them from Australia, could she? She couldn’t really be planning to stay, could she? When they finally accepted the truth, they threatened and cajoled her. Sayuri hung up, because nothing would have changed if she’d stayed on the line.
She spent a year in Australia, moving from one job to another: waiting tables, painting houses, picking fruit, tutoring people in Japanese, and so on. All the while her tan deepened, her smile widened, and her English improved. The biggest problem with Western countries was that she often had to shop in the children’s section to find clothes that fit her, as she was small even for a Japanese woman. (This was why she was destined to spend her life abroad looking like a child’s doll.) Sayuri called her parents once a month—always from a different pay phone—to let them know that she was all right and to listen politely as they begged her to return. Sometimes, Ichiro lent the weight of his oldest-son voice to the argument. Sayuri ignored his commands as well.
When Sayuri’s visa ran out, she returned to Japan. Her mother cried and her father yelled, even though a part of him admired what she had done. Sayuri informed them that she was going to attend an American university to study for a degree. Over the next year, she worked three part-time jobs, passed the necessary English-language proficiency exams, and got accepted by the department of physical therapy at the University of Michigan. When it was time to leave once more, her mother cried another Japanese river. The father, however, had by this point accepted the ridiculous ideas of his youngest daughter. When Toshiaki offered to cover some of the tuition, Sa-yuri hugged him long and hard. He didn’t quite know what to do about that, so he stood as ramrod straight as he could.
Sayuri completed her degree with honors and accepted a job in the hospital where she would, eventually, meet me. Long before I came along, she had paid back every yen her father had given her for her education.
Dr. Hnatiuk came by my room every few days to pass along a new psychology book. I was starting to like him. It’s not easy for me to pinpoint when my feelings turned, as there was no moment of revelation in which I exclaimed: “Hey, the chipmunk’s not so bad after all.” He crept up on me. The most important thing was that he stopped trying to relate to me in a doctor–patient capacity, and simply let the conversation flow naturally. There was also the fact that he liked the gargoyle statue that Marianne Engel had given me, while Beth had called it a “horrible little thing.” What really sold me on Gregor, however, was that despite his milquetoast exterior, he was a passionate man who cared deeply about his job. One afternoon he spoke at length about how lawyers have, in his opinion, been the biggest enemy of psychiatric care over the last half century. He told me how they fought for the rights of the patient—which was good—but to the point that a patient who was eating his own excrement could no longer be held for observation. “Leave it to the lawyers to turn shit into health food.”
As the weeks passed, a physical change occurred in Gregor. He lost his tasseled loafers and ill-advised corduroys and began wearing clothes that almost seemed to fit properly. Even if they couldn’t be considered quite “stylish,” they were at least passable. He’d been exercising to the point that the glow in his cheeks no longer looked as if it came from climbing a flight of stairs too quickly, and he was losing some of the excess fat from around his mids
ection.
Gregor never asked why I was reading psychology books, but he was willing to answer every question I had about schizophrenia. Although I had never mentioned her name in any of our discussions, one day I let it slip (not quite accidentally) that I was doing my research because I feared that a friend of mine SHE’S NOT YOUR FRIEND might be suffering from the condition. SHE’S JUST A CRAZY WOMAN.
“I know,” Gregor said. “Marianne Engel.”
Gregor seemed satisfied to have proven himself a step ahead of me, but I assumed he’d been consulted when Dr. Edwards tried to convince me not to encourage her visits. Gregor had actually treated her several times, he said, the last being when she had been admitted for “talking to ghosts” in public. SEE? I asked why he’d never told me before this. He cited the Hippocratic oath, and added that he’d say no more about her than he already had.
“Furthermore,” he added, “I will neither confirm nor deny a diagnosis of schizophrenia.”
Gregor also pointed out that he never mentioned the content of our conversations to anyone. I told him that he was free to repeat whatever he wanted, because I was not his patient. To this, he countered that we were still in a hospital where I was a patient and he was a doctor, so he considered this reason enough for confidentiality. I voiced my opinion that psychiatrists were generally useless and that I really didn’t care what they (meaning he) thought about me.
“Oh, it might be true that many of us could do better,” Gregor conceded, “but we have our moments. For example, out of your many personality flaws, I can diagnose your largest.”
“And what’s that?”
“You think you’re smarter than everyone else.”
With the exception of the periods when she disappeared for almost a week at a time, Marianne Engel was now coming to the burn ward almost every day. She started helping with my exercise sessions, placing her hands underneath the pad of my foot on the intact leg and providing resistance as I pushed like a one-legged bicyclist.
“I talked to Dr. Edwards,” she said. “She’s given me permission to bring you some food.”
Since she was now talking to my doctor, I asked whether she would give me permission to discuss her case with one of the doctors who had treated her. Specifically, Dr. Hnatiuk.
She answered that she didn’t want me discussing her case with anyone, and was offended that I would even ask. Of all people, she said, I should know that she was not crazy.
There was a moment of awkward silence between us, until Marianne Engel snapped it in half by saying, “Paracelsus wrote a recipe for a burn salve that included boar fat, worms from a hanged man’s skull, and part of a mummy. The whole stew was roasted.” She then proceeded to educate me about the history of skin grafting, from its beginnings with the ancient Hindus through to the present times. I pulled up one of the bandages on my legs to show her my current grafts, which included some black skin. Because a mesher had been used to cut the skin into a net so it could stretch over a larger area, the resulting pattern resembled a distorted chessboard.
“If ever you were a racist,” she said, running her fingers over the game board of my body, “this would certainly be a hair in your soup.”
Her fingers were gentle lingering over the wasteland. They moved across my torso and towards my neck, pausing at the shoulders to follow the curves. “What is it like to wear another person’s skin?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I said. “It hurts.”
“Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?”
It was difficult, sometimes, to know whether Marianne Engel was actually looking for an answer, or just teasing me. “Are you serious?”
“It makes me think of us,” she continued. “It makes me want to sew myself to you like skin.”
I cleared my throat.
“Did you know,” she asked, “that my body is marked too?”
I had some idea what she was talking about. When she wore T-shirts it was impossible not to notice the tattoos of Latin phrases that circled her upper biceps. On the left arm was the phrase Certum est quia impossibile est. I asked what it meant, and she said that it translated as “It is certain because it is impossible.” On her right arm was the phrase Quod me nutrit, me destruit. This, she said, meant, “That which nourishes me also destroys me.”
“I don’t get it,” I confessed.
She laughed. “Well, that’s only because you haven’t seen me carve yet.”
Then Marianne Engel did this one small thing. She touched my face.
It’s a tiny thing, to have your face touched. Isn’t it? But think again about the burnt and unbeloved beasts of the world. Think about the people whose skin cannot remember affection. Her fingers moved gently over my disaster, reaching under the bandages to touch the remains of my face. Her fingers traveled lovingly across my bandaged cheek, making the arduous journey to my lips. They rested softly there, for only a moment. I closed my charred eyelids, little scars reconnecting at the places where weeks before they had been sewn shut. My heart danced clumsily in the cavern of my chest and, all the while, my sealed pores were working overtime, not sweating.
“What does my face feel like?”
“Like the desert after a windstorm.”
I had an overwhelming urge to tell her that I was beautiful before the accident, but I didn’t. What would be the point? And then, I reached out with my good hand to touch her cheek. She didn’t pull back: no. Not even in the least.
“There are good things happening,” Marianne Engel whispered, before she stood up to go into the corners of my room to speak with her invisible Three Masters. It was apparent, even in Latin, that she was asking for permission to do something. “Jube, Domine benedicere.”
When she returned to my bedside, her smile indicated that her request had been granted. “Would you like to see my other tattoos?”
I nodded, and she began by sweeping at the unruly mess of her hair, pulling it up so the back of her neck was exposed. A small cross was inked there, an intertwining of three braided ropes without end. She asked me to touch it. I did. I ran my fingers over its height, then its width; literally making the sign of the cross, on her skin.
She took off her shoes. Around her left ankle was the tattooed chain of a beaded rosary, inked so the cross lay across the bridge of her foot. This way, she said, she’d always be prepared when she needed to do penance. But she was smiling, and it was clear that even she didn’t take this statement too seriously.
Next, she removed her pants—which I did not expect, because somehow the movies have conditioned me to think that women always undress from the top down. She was not wearing underwear, so she was left only in her white T-shirt with a picture of Beethoven drinking himself under a table. (The caption? “Beethoven’s Ninth.”)
There was a snake tattooed along the full length of her right leg, in exactly the same spot where the dragon had been embroidered on her pants. It twisted around her, just the way biblical representations invariably have the snake wrapped around the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Marianne Engel was facing me, and I could see the body of the snake first appear at the knee, crawling upwards and wrapping itself twice around the thigh, with its diamond head coming to rest at her pelvis, angled in towards her vagina.
Her eyes were fixed upon me. She pulled off her Beethoven shirt, though it was a struggle to get it over her hair, until she was standing in the middle of my room entirely nude, save the arrowhead necklace that dangled around her throat.
There had been moments in the burn ward that I had felt the pangs of arousal. Maddy had done her best to tease me with her lilting ass, and sometimes she even twisted her head around to check if it was having an effect. But this was the first time that I found myself fully sexually aroused. Mentally, at least; I still produced the hormones that direct blood to produce an erection, I just didn’t have anywhere into which that blood could rush. I imagined it collecting there, making my groin blush
.
There was another cross, much larger than the one on the back of her neck, drawn on her stomach. It was Celtic in shape, its four arms meeting in a round joint at the center. The entire thing was enclosed in an oval, longer in height than width, covering the area from the top of her pelvic bone to the bottom of her rib cage. Three large block letters—“IHS”—were scripted directly above the oval’s upper curve.
On her left breast was a large tattoo of the Sacred Heart, bright red and encircled with a crown of thorns. The heart was engulfed in yellow flames that burned upwards, towards her shoulder.
She came to my bed, so that I might study the details of her well-inked body, and she told me to touch the name of Christ. I did, and goose pimples spread across her skin under my good hand.
She turned so that she was sitting on the edge of my bed with her back to me. Angel wings extended from her upper shoulders to her buttocks, where the pointed tips came to rest. The wings filled the entirety of her back and I could not help but lift my hand towards them. It was as if I felt I had the right to touch her skin, as if it were mine to touch. It took a moment before I realized this was not—could not be—the case, and my arm paused in midair. It hung there unsure until Marianne Engel said, without turning around: “I want you to touch me.”
So I reached the rest of the way, and I traced my fingers along the lines of her inky plumage. They were a combination of bold and intensely delicate strokes, detailed with such skill that you’d swear they were downy. Now the flesh of her back quivered, and my heart did the same.