I desperately wanted not to betray the true nature of my mission, but the police demanded that I hand over the shopping bag in my possession. I begged them to let me go, stating there was nothing in the bag but “my lunch.” When they took the package by force, they found forty little parcels of an unknown white substance and demanded to know exactly what kind of liquid narcotic I was dealing.
Afraid of being questioned at the local police station while they ran a chemical analysis on the milky fluid, I confessed that I was walking around with zip-locked sandwich bags filled with my own semen.
The officers didn’t believe me, at first, but as the details of my story piled up, they stood in stunned silence—until they began to laugh. Needless to say, I was unimpressed with their reaction to my health crisis. When their amusement subsided, the officers deposited my junk in the nearest trash can and drove me home.
In our newfound spirit of male bonding, Gregor boasted that he had a story that could equal mine, if not better it.
As a lad, Gregor was likewise uneducated, although I give him full marks for never believing that he could infect himself with an STD. When he discovered self-pleasure, his thoughts ran somewhat like this: If masturbating with a dry fist is this enjoyable, what would it feel like to use something that better approximated a vagina?
So Gregor began his experiments. He tried liquid soap in the shower until he discovered the harsh reality of soap burn. His next attempt involved hand lotion, which worked well until his father began to question the boy’s unusual commitment to supple skin. Eventually Gregor, who had a creative mind and a kitchen with a fully stocked fruit bowl, began to speculate on the possibilities afforded by a banana peel. Had not nature itself designed the peel specifically to house a fleshy cylinder?
The peel had an unfortunate tendency to rip during the act but, not to be defeated, Gregor decided to shore up this natural weakness with duct tape. This worked well, but he was faced with the same predicament that had stymied me: disposal of the evidence.
He decided upon flushing the remains down the toilet, but the fourth peel caused the pipes to back up. When Gregor’s father discovered the clog, he naturally set to work with the plunger. Gregor hid in his bedroom, praying feverishly to God to send the peels down the tube instead of back up. If you help me, Lord, I will never masturbate into a fruit skin again. When Gregor’s father was unable to unplug the pipes, the local plumber was called in, bringing a toilet snake and the potential for disaster.
God answered Gregor’s prayers. The incriminating fruit did indeed go down, and the plumber’s only comment was that Gregor’s mother might consider adding more fiber to the family diet. Gregor kept his promise to the Lord by abandoning his fruit-abusing ways forever—or so he assured me, at my hospital bedside.
We were laughing at ourselves and promising to keep each other’s secrets safe when Marianne Engel entered the room, wrapped in a mummy’s bandages, her blue/green eyes beaming out from between the white strips on her face, her dark hair cascading down her back. She was obviously not expecting to encounter a psychiatrist in my room, much less one who had treated her in the past. It stopped her un/dead in her tracks, as if three thousand (or seven hundred) years of rigor mortis had set in all at once. Gregor, recognizing her unmistakable hair and eyes, spoke first. “Marianne, it’s wonderful to see you again. How are you?”
“I’m fine.” The words came tersely. Perhaps she was afraid her costume would put her right back in the loony bin, as wandering through the burn ward in bandages was whimsical at best and a bad joke at worst.
In an effort to put her at ease, Gregor said, “Halloween’s my favorite holiday, even more than Christmas. Your costume is great.” He paused to give her the chance to respond but she didn’t, so he continued, “It’s very appealing for psychiatrists, you know. Seeing everyone’s costume is kind of a peek into their deepest fantasies. Me, I’m going to dress up as a murderous Bolshevik.”
Marianne Engel was pulling nervously at the bandages twisted around her waist. Gregor saw that his attempts at conversation were going nowhere, so he politely excused himself and headed out the door.
She loosened up after he left, feeding me chocolate bars and telling ghost stories—the traditional kind, not those which featured her personal acquaintances. She told the famous story of the two young kids who, after hearing a radio announcement about a hook-handed escapee from a nearby insane asylum, speed away from Lovers’ Lane only to find a severed hook hanging from the door handle when they arrive home; the story of the young female hitchhiker picked up and delivered home only to forget her coat which, when returned by the driver to the house a few days later, brings forward the revelation that the hitchhiker died ten years earlier, along the same stretch of road where she’d been picked up; the story of the man who sits at his kitchen table working on a jigsaw puzzle, which, as it comes into focus, reveals a picture of him sitting at his kitchen table completing the jigsaw puzzle, with the last piece revealing a hideous face looking in through the window; the story of the young babysitter who gets increasingly disturbing phone calls alerting her to the danger to the child she is looking after until, upon calling the operator for a call-trace, she is told that the call is coming from inside the house; and so forth.
While talking, Marianne Engel covered her head with an extra bedsheet and lit her face from the underside with a flashlight she’d borrowed from the nurse’s desk. It was all so hokey that it became charming. She stayed well past the end of visiting hours—the nurses had long since stopped trying to enforce the rules with respect to Marianne Engel—and at midnight, she seemed perturbed by the lack of a grandfather clock to count out the dozen (or perhaps thirteen) strokes.
The last thing she said, before leaving in the early hours of the morning, was “Just wait until Halloween next year. We’re going to go to a wonderful party….”
The harvesting of my skin was occurring less often. Surgeries still marked my days, which was only to be expected, but my suicidal daydreams were now almost completely gone and I had become Sayuri’s star pupil. I could lie and say this was because of my strong sense of character, and that I was determined to keep my deal with Nan. I could lie and say I was doing it for myself. I could lie and say I was doing it because I’d seen the light. But mostly I was doing it to impress Marianne Engel.
HOW CUTE. My bitchsnake flicked its tail and tongue, cheerfully caressing me at both ends. I WONDER WHAT IT WILL BE LIKE WHEN YOU LEAVE THE HOSPITAL?
I’d graduated to shuffling a few steps at a time, using an aluminum walker. I felt foolish, but Sayuri assured me that I’d soon be moving up to canes that wrapped around the forearms.
One thing that helped immensely was a pair of orthopedic shoes that had been designed specifically for me. The first pair made my feet ache so the expert cobbled together a second pair that worked out the problems. The greatest advantage of the shoes, however, was mental rather than physical. Shoes are a great equalizer for a man with lost toes: they are like leather disguises that make one’s ruined feet look normal.
I had to admit that Sayuri knew precisely what she was doing. In the beginning my exercises had a heavy emphasis on stretching to regain my lost range of motion. Then we moved to Thera-Bands, elastic straps used for resistance, before switching to a simple weight-training program. The weights grew larger with each week that passed, and sometimes I even asked Sayuri if I could do a few more lifts than were demanded by my routine.
Now that I could take a few steps out of the bed, I started shuffling off to my washroom when I needed to relieve myself. One would imagine this to be a great step forward in the feeling of self-reliance but it was a psychological blow to discover I could no longer pee while standing up. I found this state of affairs unreasonably emasculating.
I was nearing the eight-month mark of my hospitalization, and Christmas was coming. Marianne Engel did what she could, putting up wreaths, playing Handel, and lamenting the fact that she wasn’t allowed to light Ad
vent candles in the burn ward.
On the evening of December sixth, Marianne Engel lifted my new orthopedic shoes onto the windowsill and explained that on this night St. Nicholas left treats in the shoes of children. When I said that we had never practiced this tradition in the trailer park, she reminded me that the world did not begin and end with my personal experiences. Fair enough. When I pointed out that I was no longer a child, she just shushed me. “In the eyes of God, we’re all children.”
When Connie took down my shoes the next morning—“What the heck are these doing here?”—she found them stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.
I was touched by the incident, more than I would have expected. My reaction was not so much to the gift of money itself, but to the thought that Marianne Engel had put into my situation. The holidays left me in a quandary: how could I pay for any Christmas gifts? While it was true that I had a small amount of money hidden in a bank account under a false name, I had no way to access it. Probably, in fact, I would never be able to withdraw the money, even when I got out, for the false identification I had used to set up the account bore a photo that no longer matched my face.
Marianne Engel had realized what I needed and, rather than forcing me to ask for cash or do without, found a way to deliver it to me in a charming manner. A gift! From St. Nicholas! And so my dilemma was solved. Almost. I still had to find a way to get the presents from a store to my bedside, but I had a plan for that.
I requested that Gregor drop by at the end of one of my exercise sessions with Sayuri. When both were there, I began: “Feel free to say no, but the two of you could really help me out. I hope you can do some shopping for me.”
Gregor asked why I needed both of them. Because I wanted to give each of them a gift, I explained, and I could hardly ask them to buy their own. Sayuri would purchase my gift for Gregor, and Gregor could buy my gift for Sayuri. The remainder of the gifts, they could shop for together.
“No worries,” Sayuri said. “I love Christmas shopping.”
Hearing this, Gregor also quickly agreed. I gave each an envelope that included what I wanted them to buy, on my behalf, for the other. As they left the room Gregor glanced back at me, a strange little smile on his face.
Marianne Engel had not yet finished reading Inferno to me. In part, it was going so slowly because she never read too much in a single sitting, preferring to savor the beauty of the writing, but also because she kept slipping into Italian. I never had the heart to stop her when she did this because she was so deep into the story and, besides, the Italian sounded wonderful from her mouth. At the end of the canto, I would have to point out that I had understood nothing, and the next day she would repeat the section, usually making it all the way through in English.
Voltaire wrote that Dante was a madman who had many commentators, and whose reputation would continue to grow mostly because almost no one actually reads the Commedia. I suggest the reason that so few people read Dante is because no one actually needs to. In the Western world, Inferno is everyone’s idea of Hell; as literature, only the Bible is more deeply woven into society’s collective consciousness.
“Did you know,” Marianne Engel asked, “that Dante’s Hell was based upon The Flowing Light of the Godhead, by Mechthild von Magdeburg?”
“One of your Three Masters, right?”
“Yes,” she answered.
I admitted that, not surprisingly, I knew very little (in truth: nothing) about this woman, so Marianne Engel proceeded to educate me. Mechthild was born in Saxony near the start of the thirteenth century and as a child experienced daily visits from no less a figure than the Holy Ghost itself. At twenty she became a Beguine at Magdeburg, living a dutiful life of prayer and mortification; interestingly, as she increased the severity of her self-punishment, her visions became correspondingly more frequent. When she described them to her confessor, he became certain of their divine origins and impelled Mechthild to write them down.
Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, as the masterwork is known in German, influenced countless writers who followed, including Meister Eckhart and Christina Ebner. It is also clear that Dante Alighieri read the Latin translation, and many scholars are convinced he used Mechthild’s ordering of the afterlife as the conceptual basis for the Divine Comedy: Heaven at the top, Purgatory directly below, and Hell at the bottom. In the very abyss of Mechthild’s Hell, Satan is chained by his own sins while anguish, plague, and ruin flow from his burning heart and mouth. This sounds suspiciously similar to Dante’s Satan, a three-faced beast trapped in a block of ice at the lowest center of Hell chewing at a frothy trio of sinners (Judas, Cassius, and Brutus) whose pus flows from his three mouths for all eternity.
“There are those who believe,” said Marianne Engel, “that the ‘Matilda’ Dante encounters in Purgatorio is in fact Mechthild.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked.
“I believe,” she answered with a slight smile, “that in his work, Dante often wrote in appearances by those who influenced him.”
As she read me the tale of Dante’s journey, I found it deeply familiar and I loved it despite (or perhaps because of?) my burn ward surroundings. There was something comforting in having Marianne Engel read it to me, and in the way she curled her fingers into mine as she did. I marveled at the twisting mix of our glorious and ghastly hands, and I wanted her reading of the story to never end—perhaps because I was afraid that when it did, she would no longer continue to lead me, hand in hand, though my own Hell.
When I presented Marianne Engel my theory that no one needs to read Inferno to know its representation of Hell, she was quick to correct me. “While that may be true for most people, you know it so well because I read you my German translation.”
“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t seen that coming. “When did you translate it?”
“I suppose about ten or twenty years after Dante finished writing it. It took me quite a while. I’m pretty sure I was Inferno’s first translator, but you can never be positive about these things.”
“And when did you read it to me?” I asked.
“When you were recovering from your first burn.”
Inferno was first published in A.D. 1314. If Marianne Engel completed her translation twenty years later, the year would have been approximately 1334. Given her earlier claim that she was born in the year 1300, this would put her in her mid-thirties at the time.
As I detail these numbers, I’m not forgetting that this is ludicrous and could not have actually occurred. I’m simply pointing out that, at least, the impossible things were occurring in a possible timeline. This is what I find rather amazing about her mental state: her wild statements were held together by internal consistency.
Because I didn’t live in the Middle Ages, I needed to do a lot of research during the writing of this book to check what she said, or what I remember her saying, against facts. The interesting thing is that all the events she claimed were true could have happened exactly as she described them, had she not been talking about ancient events in the first person.
Despite being under the control of the Church, Engelthal was a democratic institution whose prioress was elected. All daily activities were outlined in the Orders of the Constitution. Marianne Engel’s descriptions of the architecture, the prayers, the books studied, and the rituals for eating were accurate. Christina Ebner was in that monastery and she did write The Sister-book of Engelthal and Revelations. Friedrich Sunder was a local priest, the confessor to the nuns, and he did write Gnaden-vita. There was a book called The Vita of Sister Gertrud of Engelthal, written with the help of a Brother Heinrich and Cunrat Fridrich.
While there is no record of Heinrich Seuse having visited Engelthal, there is also no way to prove that he did not do so. If he did come during the early 1320s, as Marianne Engel claimed, this was when he was traveling from Straßburg to Köln to study under Meister Eckhart. So who’s to say he didn’t visit the monastery that was widely regarded as the foremost center of German myst
icism?
Still. No matter how perfectly she constructed her timelines or researched German religious figures, Marianne Engel was either schizophrenic or manic depressive, or both. I cannot forget this. Creating and managing imaginary universes is the province of such people: it’s not only what they do, it’s who they are. And there were some seeming discrepancies in Marianne Engel’s account; for example, there is no record of a Sister Marianne in any of the extant writings from Engelthal, nor is there any mention of Die Gertrud Bibel, and I tried to use these omissions to force Marianne Engel into admitting her story was not true.
“You are studious, aren’t you?” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s a reason you can’t find information on me or on Gertrud’s Bible. We’ll get to it, I promise.”
Goodwill carolers dropped in to sing about silent nights, holy nights. A Sally Ann Santa brought cookies and books. Decorations went up along the hallways.
How strange it was to be looking forward to the holiday season. Traditionally, I’d hated Christmas; it always left a taste in my mouth akin to moldy fruitcake. (By this, I do not mean an elderly Japanese spinster.) In my childhood, I’d had a succession of Christmases when the Graces spent the money originally intended for my presents on methamphetamine; in my adulthood, Christmas meant fucking a woman who was wearing a red felt hat.
I still had my exercise sessions, my regular medical procedures, but the most interesting event was to be a meeting of the important women of my life: Nan, Sayuri, and Marianne Engel. I had no clue as to its agenda and, strangely, no one wanted to tell me. In my ego-centric little heart, I imagined it might be a surprise party. I couldn’t have been more wrong.