Her eyes, also, are going to force me to embarrass myself. They burned like the green hearts of jealous lovers who accuse each other at midnight. No, I’m wrong, they were not green: they were blue. Ocean waves tossed around her irises, like an unexpected storm ready to steal a sailor from his wife. No, wait…maybe her eyes were green: mood eyes, perhaps, like the bejeweled rings that purportedly change color according to one’s frame of mind.
She appeared in the burn ward door dressed in a light green hospital gown, with those unsolvable eyes and that riotously entangled hair, and I waited for the gasp that inevitably came whenever someone saw me for the first time. I waited for her to cover her mouth with her hand, in shock and dismay. She disappointed me by only smiling.
“You’ve been burned. Again.”
Generally I make it a rule not to respond to bizarre proclamations by strangers, but, honestly, in this case my silence was because I didn’t want her to hear my broken toilet of a voice. My throat was healing, but my ear (the one that still worked) was not yet used to the corrupted quality. I wanted her to know only the voice I had had before, the one that could talk a woman into bed.
In the face of my silence, she spoke again. “This is the third time you’ve been burned.”
I steeled my courage and corrected her. “Once.”
A look of confusion crossed her face. “Maybe you’re not you.”
She moved towards my bed, her eyes never breaking contact with mine, and drew shut the thick plastic curtains around us so that our privacy was assured. She leaned in, within inches of my face, studying me. Nobody had ever looked at me like this, not before the burn and certainly not since. Her eyes, dancing between the blue and the green, had dark bags underneath them, as though she had not slept in weeks. When her lips were almost touching mine, she whispered a word. “Engelthal.”
No doubt, reader, you have at some point in your life been face-to-face with an insane person. You can sense the madness immediately, usually even before the person says anything at all, but this nonsensical word clinched it for me. Meeting lunatics is not really that notable, as the world abounds with them; what interested me more was my reaction. Usually upon such a meeting, you only want to get away. If you’re walking on the street you avert your eyes and quicken your step, but in the burn ward the only recourse I had was to ring the nurse’s call button. But I did not do this. My only response to this possibly dangerous situation was nonresponse. So who was less rational, the wild-haired woman or me?
She took a step back. “You don’t remember.”
“No.” Whatever she thought I should be remembering, clearly I was not.
“That will make it more interesting,” she said. “Are you aware that they’re trying to poison my hearts?”
“No,” I answered again, but I was interested in where such a comment might lead. “Are they?”
“Yes. I can’t let them, because I have my penance to complete.” She looked around, as if she were worried about being overheard. “How were you burned this time?”
I could form a number of short sentences in a row, as long as I remembered to pause and breathe, so I told her a few quick details about my accident—when, where, how long ago. Then I asked her name.
“You know my name.” She kept reaching to her chest as if she were expecting to find something there, which was obviously missing. Her movements reminded me of the way I had always stroked my birth-scar.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“They took away my necklace. They said it could be used to harm someone,” she answered. “A young girl died here recently.”
I thought about Thérèse. “How did you know?”
“Oh, I know some things about the dead”—she laughed—“but I suppose we’re lucky.”
“How so?”
“We’ve outlived a seven-year-old. We’ve outlived her a hundredfold.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have a dog named Bougatsa.” Her fingers, now hanging at her sides, were twitching. “He’ll like you.”
“I don’t like dogs.”
“You will.”
“They don’t like me.”
“Oh. Because you’re so tough and mean, right?”
Was she really mocking a burn victim?
“What does the name mean?” I asked. “Bougatsa?”
“It’s filling in Greek pastry, and my dog’s exactly that color. Maybe I could bring him for a visit.”
“Dogs aren’t allowed here.” Breath. “Even flowers can kill me.”
“Ha! Don’t try to sell me for dumb. You know you’ve worse things to fear than a dog.” She placed her hand lightly upon my chest, with gentleness. I shivered, not only at the touch but also at the gleam in her eye. “You’re sorely tempted to kill yourself and I can’t say that I blame you. But there is a time and a place for such things, and this is not it.”
Why would she say such a thing? I needed to change the subject. “You look good for seven hundred years old.”
“You don’t,” she said, looking down the length of my body. It was the first time that anyone had made a joke about my burns. “So, what do you think I should do with my hearts?”
“I think…” I paused momentarily, to make her think I was carefully considering the issue, when really I was preparing for the length of the next sentence. “I think you should give them to their rightful owners.”
Her eyes opened wide, as if I had inserted a key into a secret lock, and it made me wonder whether I had just pushed the wrong button on the insanity panel. But, just as quickly, her elated look was replaced by one of suspicion. She moved to one corner of my bed, where she intoned something in another language. “Jube, Domine benedicere.” Latin? A short conversation followed, with her talking into the thin air, in a language that I couldn’t understand, waiting for responses I couldn’t hear. After the first imaginary conversation was completed, she bowed deeply and walked to a second corner of the bed to repeat the performance. And then, a third corner. She concluded each conversation the same way she started it—“Jube, Domine benedicere”—and she returned to her original position, with the look of suspicion gone.
“My Three Masters confirmed that it really is you. It is for you that I’ve been perfecting my final heart.”
The very act of saying this clearly caused great emotion to well up inside of her. She looked on the verge of tears as she said, “I’ve been waiting such a long time.”
Just then Beth drew open the curtains. She seemed shocked to find that I had a visitor after so many weeks without, but her surprise quickly turned to concern when she noted the gleam of insane happiness in the woman’s eyes. Then Beth registered that while my visitor was clad in a gown, it wasn’t the visitor’s shade of green but the lighter shade of a patient, and that she had the color-coded bracelet that indicated a psychiatric patient. Beth, professional as always, did not engage my visitor directly but refused to leave me alone with her. She called an orderly immediately to “escort” the woman back to the psych ward.
I felt that I had nothing to fear and, in fact, that it was nice to have a little wildness injected into an atmosphere so oppressively sterile. In the few minutes before the orderly arrived, the woman and I continued talking, calmly, while Beth stood in a far corner with a watchful eye. My visitor whispered so that she would not be overheard. “We have a common acquaintance.”
“I doubt that.”
“You only saw her once, in a crowd. She can’t speak,” she said, leaning in closer, “but she gave you a clue.”
“A clue?”
“‘Haven’t you ever wondered where your scar really came from?’” My visitor reached up to her chest and I thought that she was going to point to the spot where my scar was on my body, but she was only reaching in vain for her missing necklace.
How could this woman guess precisely the words of the note that had been passed to me at the air show? Still, I am a rational man—this was a strange coincidence, not
hing more. To prove it, I tried a little misdirection: “My entire body is a scar.”
“Not your burns. The scar that you were born with, the one over your heart.”
At this very moment, the orderly arrived and began the process of cajoling the woman to leave. Beth helped, using her body to deflect my visitor towards the door.
My voice was not yet strong but I raised it as much as I could. “How did you know?”
The woman turned back towards me, ignoring the arms pulling at her elbows. “The problem with people like us is that we don’t die properly.”
With that, the orderly took her from the room.
There is a logical explanation for everything; therefore, there was a logical explanation for the woman’s knowledge of my scar.
First explanation: lucky guess.
Second explanation: a joke was being played on me by a friend, someone who thought it would be funny to send in an actress playing a psychotic woman with intimate knowledge of my life. The problems with this hypothesis were that I’d never told any of my friends about the Asian woman at the airfield, and that I no longer had any friends left to play tricks on me.
Third explanation: this woman liked my pornographic films and knew about the scar on my chest. It was a well-documented celluloid fact, as I’d never bothered with makeup to cover it. (Too much sweat in my genre.) Except that I was registered in the hospital not under my porn name but under my real one, and given the way I looked it would have been impossible to recognize me as the man I once had been.
Final explanation: this woman loved my pornographic films and was a stalker who had tracked down my now-defunct production company. Someone, probably my bastard lawyer, had informed her of my accident and pointed her in the direction of the burn ward.
But if she was an obsessed fan, why didn’t she mention my former career? And if she had come looking for the actor that she’d seen, how could she have seemed so pleased to meet the new me? And, finally, while much about the woman’s behavior was odd, there was certainly nothing to suggest a hardcore porn addiction. Trust me, I’ve seen enough perverts in my life to pick them out of any crowd.
I supposed I would just have to ask her when she came again, because somehow I knew that she would. When I informed my nurses that I would welcome any future visits from the woman in the psychiatric ward, they all smiled strangely at me. How sad, they must have thought, that I looked forward to visits from a madwoman. But this did not deter me, and I even asked Beth to find out the woman’s name. She refused to do any such thing, so I asked Connie. She also said it was against hospital policy to divulge the specifics of another patient. To this, I suggested that it would be “very, very mean” if Connie did not help me learn the name of the only person who had visited me in so long. As she wanted more than anything else to be kind, Connie soon came back with the information I’d requested.
The woman’s name was Marianne Engel.
I was taller before the accident. The fire contracted me like beef jerky during the curing process. I had once been as lean and adorable as a third-century Greek boy, with buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt, my stomach was divided into symmetrical pads, and my arms were sleekly muscular. But it was my face that was my coat-of-arms. I had cheekbones that would have been at home in Verlaine’s wet dreams. My eyes were dark and deep enough for a small spelunking club to make a day expedition of them. A gay man once told me how much he yearned to let the plum of his penis rest softly upon my bottom lip. I laughed at him but secretly regarded it as a wonderful compliment.
Since my accident, I’ve tried to lose my vanity, but I still struggle with it. I remember the past, when my face was perfect, and when the wind would lift my hair so that it looked like the soft under-feathers of a bird’s wing. I remember when women turned on the streets to smile at me, wondering what it might be like to own my beauty for even one shining moment.
If you accept the description of the beast that I am now, you should also accept the description of the beauty that I was. And since meeting Marianne Engel, I had felt that loss—especially at the empty juncture between my legs—all the more acutely.
She again graced my doorway about ten days later, dressed in a cloak that appeared to be of the finest medieval cut. This is not me having a little fun at your expense; she really was wearing just such a thing. The hood hung over her face and her eyes shone like aquamarine in a mine. She drew a finger to her lips, warning me to be quiet, and moved to my bedside stealthily. I wanted to laugh but I could tell that this, for her, was serious business. As soon as she was at my side, she pulled shut the curtains so that we might, again, have our privacy. She needn’t have worried, because at that time there were only two other patients in the ward and one was out of the room for rehabilitation exercises and the other was snoring.
Behind the plastic barrier, she felt safe to pull back her hood—just a bit, not all the way off—and I could see that the bags had disappeared from under her eyes. She looked much sharper than she had during our first meeting, and there was the strong smell of tobacco upon her. I wondered if she’d actually been able to sneak by the nurses, or if they’d simply let her pass. By the fact she was again without the proper visitor’s gown, I suspected she had entered without their knowledge. She kept her hands at the corners of her hood, as if ready to draw it back up over her head at a moment’s notice.
“I don’t want them to know that I’m here.”
“The doctors?”
Marianne Engel nodded. I told her that she didn’t have much to fear, that they were good people.
“You don’t know much about doctors.” She reached inside her neckline and pulled out a leather strand with an arrowhead dangling from it. “Look, I got my necklace back.” She lifted it up over her head and held it out, above my chest, so that the arrowhead hung like a magical amulet dowsing for my heart. “May I?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but nodded anyway.
Marianne Engel lowered her hand, slackening the leather so that the arrowhead came to rest on my chest. “How does it feel?”
“Like it belongs there.”
“It does.”
“How did you know about the scar on my chest?”
“Don’t rush. Explaining things like that takes time.” She lifted her necklace from my chest and returned it to her own. “For now, may I tell you a story about a dragon?”
“Once upon a time, there was a dragon named La Gargouille who lived in France, close to the River Seine. La Gargouille was a quite ordinary dragon with green scales, a long neck, sharp claws, and little wings that couldn’t possibly support flight but did anyway. Like most dragons, he could breathe fire, spout gallons of water, and rip up large trees with his talons.
“The residents of the nearby town, Rouen, hated the dragon and lived in fear. But what could they do? He was much more powerful than they, so each year they made a sacrifice in the hope that he’d be appeased. La Gargouille preferred virgin girls, as dragons are wont to do, but the villagers tended to offer criminals. In any case, people were eaten, which made it a generally appalling situation.
“This continued for decades. Finally, around A.D. 600 a priest named Romanus came to the city. He’d heard about La Gargouille and wanted to try his hand at subduing the beast. If the people would build a church, Romanus offered, and if every villager agreed to be baptized, he would dispatch the dragon. The villagers, no fools, thought this was a good deal. What did they have to lose, other than the dragon?
“So Romanus went to the Seine, taking with him a bell, a Bible, a candle, and a cross. He lit the candle and placed it on the ground, then opened the Bible before calling out to La Gargouille. The beast emerged from his cave with no real concern; he was a dragon, after all, so what did he have to fear from a mere human? If anything, such a visitor was nothing more than fresh meat.
“As soon as the dragon appeared, R
omanus rang the bell—as if announcing a death—and began to read aloud the words of the Lord.
“The dragon snorted little puffs of smoke when he heard the sound, as if it amused him, until he realized that he could not have exhaled fire if he had wanted. There was a pain in his lungs which, after a few more moments, began to feel deflated and drained of breath.
“Realizing that he could not dispatch the priest with a burst of fire, La Gargouille lunged towards the man. Romanus lifted the cross and held it staunchly in front of the beast, which found it could go no further, as if an invisible hand were pushing it back. No matter which way the creature turned, the priest mirrored the action, and La Gargouille could move no closer to his tormentor. Cross in one hand and Bible in the other, Romanus continued to read with simple faith; each verse was like an arrow under the dragon’s scales, and each chapter like a lance in its side.
“La Gargouille had never experienced anything like this in all its years, and began a retreat. It looked from side to side but Romanus used the cross to drive the beast directly back. Once the dragon was trapped inside its cave, the priest continued with unrelenting verse until the creature slumped defeated to its knees. The concluding act was when Romanus closed the Bible and blew out the candle; the ceremony was complete and the beast made docile.
“With no fight left in it, La Gargouille bowed its head and allowed Romanus to slip his vestments over its neck. The priest then used his cross to twist this leash tightly shut, and lead the defeated dragon back into town.
“The only way to kill a dragon is to burn it at the stake, everyone knew, and so this was done. La Gargouille cried in agony but to the villagers it sounded like sweet music. The shrieking continued until the very end because La Gargouille’s head and neck wouldn’t burn—the dragon’s ability to breathe fire had tempered these areas against heat. But eventually the beast did die, and the villagers were freed from their great curse.