When Francesco finally found his voice, after several stunned minutes, he said, “You must walk through the gates alone.”
I shook Francesco’s hand. It felt such an insufficient gesture, and I told him that I didn’t know how to thank him.
“It is I,” Francesco answered, “who must thank you. It was not only for Marianna that I took this task; it was also repayment.”
“For what?”
“My father was an archer named Niccolò, who was killed while serving in a German condotta. But his friend Benedetto escaped with the help of two German archers, and he brought my father’s crossbow to Firenze.” Francesco, at this point, clasped my hands in his. “That bow was all I ever knew of my father.”
“My copy of Inferno belonged to your father?”
“Yes. He would want you to have it.” Francesco bowed deeply. “Grazie.”
The Rebellious Angels dared not stop me as I walked through the gates. I knew what I was supposed to find next: the Sixth Circle, the home of the Heretics, littered with graves and tombs ringed with fire. But the moment I walked through the gates, I found myself no longer in Francesco’s Inferno. Instead, I emerged on a cliff overlooking an ocean. When I spun around to look behind me, the gates of Dis had disappeared.
Gulls cut over the water with happy squawks. The grass was tinged with cool dew and I could feel every blade tickle the skin of my feet. I was now entirely naked, my skin fully healed; the clothing that I had been wearing was gone, and I no longer had my coin necklace. It was dawn, the breeze cooled me, and I felt wonderfully alive.
Perhaps two hundred feet away on the cliff, a solitary figure stood motionless, looking out over the ocean. Of course I knew who it was. As I drew closer, I saw that she appeared to be in her mid-forties but that there was something infinitely older in her expression, as she squinted over the miles of water. Her hair was pinned to the back of her head, and her shawl was draped over her shoulders, held tightly closed at her bosom. Her dress was worn at the hem and there was dirt on her boots. I spoke her name. “Vicky.”
“Yes.” Her eyes never wavered from their nautical discipline.
“Do you see him?”
“I see him everywhere.”
I looked out towards the horizon. There were no boats on the ocean. There was only the long, lonely expanse of water.
I asked, gently, “Do you think Tom is coming back?”
“Do you think that’s why I stand here?”
“I don’t know.”
A strand of hair unwound from the pin at the back of Vicky’s head. She tucked it back into place. “Of course it is.”
The breeze rustled her dress against her legs. Waves crashed over the rocks below us. For a long time, we did not say a word. I was thinking that I must be nearing the end of my Hellish journey. This is the final ghost. We stood there, commanding that lonely post at the edge of the world, each waiting for something over which we had no power.
“You don’t have the burning arrow,” Vicky said, finally. She was correct. I had left it behind at the gates of Dis, plugged into the ground as my makeshift altar. Perhaps it was burning still, a testament to the fact that I had been there. “It’s no matter. You won’t need it here.”
“What do I do next?”
“Maybe it’s your time to wait too.” She dug the heels of her boots firmly into the ground and set her shoulders more stiffly against the sea breeze. “Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.”
In this moment, I was allowed to glance into the grand nothingness of her existence: she really would stand forever, awaiting Tom’s return. As far as I could tell, she hadn’t even noticed my nakedness. I doubted that she noticed anything other than the promise of the water that stretched in front of her.
“This is not my place,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’ll head inland.”
She didn’t take her eyes off the sea. “Good luck.”
There was something about the way she wished me luck that I didn’t understand—until I took my first steps. I felt the ground tremble as if something were happening behind me, under me, all around me. I momentarily wondered whether it was the return of Michael, until I saw that the edge of the cliff was shifting. Afraid that it would collapse beneath me, I bolted. There was the tremendous crack of rock breaking away and I churned my legs as quickly as I could. When I looked over my shoulder, I expected to see the cliff falling away behind me.
But the cliff had not fallen away. Its edge was following me, always the same distance behind despite the fact that I was now running. I felt the familiar swish in my spine. I AM HERE.
My first thought was that I might have been running in place, on a sort of soil treadmill, but this was not the case. When I say the edge of the cliff was following me, I mean that literally. The stone constantly changed its shape to stalk me, keeping pace so that I never moved any farther from the precipice. When I veered to one side, the cliff circled like a well-trained sheepdog. THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I ran for as long as I could, darting this way and that, but the cliff was unrelenting. It doesn’t matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere. YOU CANNOT LEAVE. Soon I recognized that I was not in any immediate danger. If the cliff were going to swallow me, it would have done so already. I headed back to where Vicky was standing.
“I tried to leave once too,” she said, “and the cliff followed me.”
“That’s why you stand here?”
“No.”
I looked over the edge of the cliff, to see that at its bottom were rocks that could shred a person.
“If you jump,” Vicky whispered, as if worried that the very stone under our feet would overhear, “you’ll lose the skin that you have regrown and be put back in your burnt body.”
“But this is only a hallucination. None of this is real.”
She shrugged. “Is that what you learned from the Archangel’s smile?”
YOU SHOULD JUMP.
Why would the snake tell me to jump? To cause me pain. That was in the interest of the snake, because the bitch thrived on my pain. I touched my skin where the nerve endings had once been incinerated.
If I jump, I thought, I lose this. I lose my nerves and my hair and my health and my beauty. My fingers and penis will recede again. My face will become weathered granite. My lips will wither, and my voice will be ground back into sharp ugly bits. I’ll become the gargoyle again, but this time by my own choice.
YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A GARGOYLE, BRANDED IN HELL BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN.
I asked Vicky what would happen if I stayed on the cliff.
I WAS NOT PUT IN YOUR SPINE AFTER YOUR ACCIDENT. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.
“I think,” Vicky answered, “that Marianne Engel will come for you.”
SHE IS NOT COMING FOR YOU.
“Why do you think that?”
Vicky answered, “Sometimes love outlasts even death.”
HOW COULD SHE LOVE ONE SUCH AS YOU?
I looked into the thrashing tide below us, crashing over the rocks. YOU SHOULD JUMP. Perhaps Vicky is right. Perhaps this is a test of my patience. YOU SHOULD END. Marianne Engel came to me in the hospital when I needed her most, and she will come for me now. Right?
BUT THIS IS NOT EVEN YOUR HELL. YOURS IS YET TO COME.
Hell is a choice.
I THOUGHT YOU DIDN’T BELIEVE IN HELL.
“Vicky,” I asked, “am I dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you dead?”
“Not as long as I wait for Tom.”
I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO REALLY KNOWS YOU.
Sunlight sparkled on the waves. The entire ocean stretched out in front of me.
YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BELIEVE WE ARE DIFFERENT . . .
I looked down and—though I can’t explain why I felt it so strongly—I was certain about what I had to do next.
. . . BUT YOU CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT ME.
A calm
entered my body. As my fear left me, it entered the snake. Because the serpent knew that I’d made a decision that was good for me, bad for it.
YOU ARE ME.
I turned to Vicky and asked, “Shall I give your regards to Marianne Engel?”
“Please do.”
THIS IS A MISTAKE.
My legs pushed me up into the air. As I leapt towards the sun, I felt the snake rip backwards out of my body. As I moved forward, the snake could not. It left through my asshole, fittingly enough, yanked out like an anchor plunging from a boat.
There was a brief weightlessness; a balancing point between air and the water waiting below. How strange, I thought, how like the moment between sleeping and falling when everything is beautifully surreal and nothing is corporeal. How like floating towards completion. There was a moment of perfect suspended weightlessness at the top of the arc. Just for this one beautiful moment, I imagined myself moving into the sky forever.
But, as it always does, the battle of gravity won. I was sucked perfectly down and cut the air like a dropped knife, the rush of the water coming up to meet me. Even as I was falling, I knew I was doing the correct thing. I closed my eyes and thought about Marianne Engel.
Contact, and the calm sheen of water opened to envelop me. As I cut the surface, I felt as if I’d come home and I—
XXX.
—looked up into the eyes of Marianne Engel.
My body was wrapped in layers of wet cloth, to lower my fever. I was back in her bed, in our home, and her hand was resting on my cheek. She told me that it was over and I told her that I had been in Hell. She said that it sure looked that way, and handed me a cup of tea. I felt as if I hadn’t had a drink in years. “How long was I…?”
“Three days, but nothing is better than having suffered. It is a short hardship that ends in joy.” Same old Marianne Engel.
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
She steadied my hand on the cup, as it was shaking badly. “How do you feel?”
“Like a brand plucked out of the fire.”
She smiled. “Zechariah 3:2.”
I checked my body: my skin had returned to its damaged state; my face had tightened; my lips had receded; fingers were missing; my knee was stiff; the hair on my forearms was gone and there were only wisps on my head.
My hand, just as it always had, went to my chest. Where I expected to find my angel coin, I found nothing, despite the fact that it had not been off my body since Marianne Engel had given it to me almost fourteen months earlier.
“Your coin served its purpose,” she said.
I checked in the sheets, under the bed, all around, but my neck chain was nowhere to be found. Marianne Engel must have removed it during my withdrawal. I told myself it was only a strange coincidence that she had done so while I was hallucinating about handing it over to Charon.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll replace your necklace with a better one.”
I felt better than I had in years, even before the accident, by simple virtue of an undrugged mind and veins not sluggish with narcotic syrup. This is not to say that I never felt a twinge of desire rising for the old drug—I did; the habit had been with me too long—but it was different. I could do without morphine; I wanted to do without it. I looked forward to my sessions with Sayuri and progressed faster with my exercises.
But best of all, the bitchsnake really was gone.
I was better able to look after myself than at any time since my accident, and Marianne Engel returned to her carving. She took up exactly where she’d left off, resuming an immediately unhealthy velocity. All I could do was to clean her ashtrays and try to curb her intake of coffee on the spoon. I brought her bowls of fruit that became still lifes rather than meals, and when she finished a statue, only to collapse onto the next block of stone, I washed her body. I promised myself that if she approached physical collapse again, I would do anything and everything necessary to stop her. I promised myself.
From February nineteenth to the twenty-first, she pulled statue 16 out of the stone. On the twenty-second, she slept and absorbed; from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth, she extracted number 15. She took a day of rest and then she worked until the first day of March, producing number 14. One does not need to be a mathematician to realize that this brought her past the halfway point of the final twenty-seven hearts: thirteen more hearts and she would be finished. Thirteen more hearts until she thought she would die.
Her return to carving seemed to affect even Bougatsa, who lacked his usual bounce. When we came back from our daily walks, he would eat a huge bowl of food before settling lethargically to drool on my orthopedic shoes.
In early March, I had a routine checkup with Dr. Edwards. We reviewed my charts and talked about a minor surgery that was scheduled for the end of the month. She seemed genuinely pleased. “You’ve been out of the hospital for over a year and things couldn’t be going any better.”
I kept my mouth shut about the fact that Marianne Engel was, at that very moment, stretched out on new stone, readying herself. Lucky 13 was calling.
“You know,” Nan added, “it just goes to show how wrong a doctor can be. There was a point when I thought you had given up, and then you became one of our hardest-working patients. And when you left, I was certain that Marianne wouldn’t be able to look after you.”
Marianne Engel produced statues 13, 12, and 11 (an old woman with donkey ears; a horned demon with its sloppy tongue hanging out; and a lion’s head with elephant tusks), taking only a few hours off during the process. She had already lost the weight she’d gained after Christmas, and her speech was becoming confused again. Statue 10 came into existence around March twentieth.
I was scheduled to enter the hospital for surgery on the twenty-sixth. Before I went in, I needed to decide what to do with Bougatsa. Not only did I doubt Marianne Engel’s ability to look after him when she could not even look after herself, but also the dog, perhaps in an example of animal empathy, was losing weight. I wondered whether I could use this to induce enough guilt to get her out of the basement, and decided to give it a try.
I made her stop carving long enough to explain that if she chose sculpting over Bougatsa’s care, I would have to place him in a kennel. (This was not only a bargaining tactic, but also the truth.) Marianne Engel took a look at me, and a look at Bougatsa, and she shrugged. Then she returned to her work on statue 9.
There was a large puddle of shit on the floor. It was not mine.
In all the time I’d lived in the fortress, Bougatsa had never once relieved himself inside. I am somewhat loath to write a detailed description of the stool, but two things need mentioning. First, the stool was more liquid than solid. Second, it contained leafy remains.
The only plant in the house was the one that Jack had brought. (Perhaps there had been others before my time, but they had become casualties of Marianne Engel’s negligence while carving.) When I inspected it, it was quickly apparent that Bougatsa had been making a meal of its leaves. Most were gone, and the ones that remained all had jagged edges in the shape of teeth marks.
I tracked the dog down and found him stretched out in the study, breathing shallowly. When I swept my hand along his side to comfort him, fur came off in my fingers. His ribs were a story of starvation and I was shocked: not strictly at his thinness, but because I didn’t understand how it could be possible. In recent weeks, Bougatsa had been eating much more than usual; in fact, he never seemed to stop eating.
I headed into the basement to inform Marianne Engel that her dog was seriously ill, because I wanted to shame her into coming with me to the veterinary clinic. But it didn’t work out quite like that. She was hunched over a beast whose eyes seemed to be issuing a stern warning to keep away. I spoke anyway. “There’s something wrong with Bougatsa. He’s sick.”
She looked up at me, as if she had heard some mysterious clatter coming from an area of the room that was supposed to be empty. Blood was flowing from one of her wrists w
here the chisel had gone wrong, and streaks of red were painted across her forehead where she’d wiped it. “What?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I am a thorn prick on Christ’s temple.”
“No,” I said, pointing. “Your wrist.”
“Oh.” She looked at it, and some blood flowed into her open palm. “It’s like a rose.”
“Did you hear me? Bougatsa is sick.”
She tried to pull a strand of her hair away from her breast, where it was awkwardly pasted with sweat and stone dust, but her fingers couldn’t quite gauge the distance. She missed, over and over. “Then go to the infirmary.”
“You mean the vet?”
“Yes.” Drops of her blood fell into the rock chips at her feet. “Vet.”
“Let me look at that.” I reached towards her wrist.
Marianne Engel, with a sudden look of terror in her eyes, raised the chisel in my direction. Only once before had she threatened me with violence, when she’d thrown the jar of coffee at me in the belfry. At that time I was certain she meant to miss me but I could tell that if she lunged at me now, with the chisel, she would mean it. She looked as though she didn’t know where she was, or who I was; she looked as though she would do anything to defend her ability to keep working.
I took a step back, lifting my hands in the gesture people automatically make to show they mean no harm. “He’s your dog, Marianne. Don’t you want to come with us? With me and your dog, Bougatsa?”
The name seemed to stir her memory. The knots of her hunched shoulders released and she let out the breath she’d been holding. Most important, she lowered the chisel as the fear left her eyes.