The Gargoyle

XVIII.

Even though she obviously knew the answer, Marianne Engel made a great show of asking me what day it was.

“Good Friday,” I answered.

“Follow me.” We climbed into her car and it was not a half-hour before I realized exactly where we were headed: to the hills where I’d crashed. When we arrived, there was nothing to indicate that the accident had ever occurred. The trees no longer looked as if they housed a dark troop of mercenaries sent to destroy me. The wooden posts had been replaced, restrung with new metal cable, and were now weathered enough to be indistinguishable from the rest. There were no tire tracks and no upturned dirt; it was just another curve. When I asked how she knew the exact site, Marianne Engel just smiled and let Bougatsa out of the backseat. He jumped around excitedly, and she had to scold him when he got dangerously close to the road’s edge.

She pulled a small leather bag from the car trunk and took me by the hand to the boundary between road and cliff. Here I saw the first indication that my accident had, indeed, happened. There was a still-scorched area at the base of the gully, a small black circle not unlike the period you’ll find at the end of this sentence, right beside the creek that had saved my life.

Motorists whizzed by, no doubt wondering what we were looking at. “Let’s go down,” she said, leading me past the new wooden posts. Bougatsa ran ahead of us, happily finding a path to the bottom that we could follow, and off to one side I saw a broken wedge of red plastic, a turn signal cover that had been ripped from a car. My car. My stomach tightened.

As we climbed down, there were dozens of rocky slots into which I could wedge my orthopedic shoes, but it was difficult to keep my balance. I tried to command my legs to react the way they would have before the accident, but it was not possible: my rebuilt knee was too feeble. When I told Marianne Engel I couldn’t make it down, she refused to accept that. She placed herself directly in front of me, her legs wedged against the slope, so that I could place my hands on her back. This provided enough resistance that I could make it to the bottom, and not claim otherwise.

When we reached the scorched area, I noticed a few small tufts of grass within it, just starting to grow. Someday this area will be green and healthy again, I thought.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I just never expected to come back, that’s all.”

“It is good to return to the locations of one’s sufferings.”

“You’re wrong.” I could remember it all: the eruption of glass; the steering column as it flew past me; the hiss of the engine settling; the tires spinning to a stop; the flash of blue flame across the car roof; the way the flames looked as they jumped into existence; the smell of my hair burning; and my flesh starting to bubble and pop. I could remember everything that changed me from a man into what I had become.

“It doesn’t matter if you agree. One cannot become whole by ignoring one’s misfortunes.” Marianne Engel unfastened her bag, pulled out an iron candlestick that she claimed had been made by Francesco, and crammed a candle into its open mouth. She handed me a pack of matches and asked me to light it. “But it is also important to celebrate this year that you have lived.”

I pointed out that it was not actually the one-year anniversary: while it was true that my accident had occurred on Good Friday, obviously that holiday fell on a different date each year.

“You should not regard time in such literal terms,” Marianne Engel said with a kiss to my plexiglass face. “What does a single day matter in the vastness of eternity?”

“I thought every day mattered,” I said. “Especially the ones when you almost die.”

It would have sounded more dramatic, I think, if at that exact moment Bougatsa had not jumped into the air beside us to snap wildly at some bug buzzing around his head.

“But you didn’t,” Marianne Engel said. “Tell me, was your life good before the accident?”

“Not really.”

“Then beginning again should be a gift to be embraced.”

She believed sincerely that I was starting over, and I suppose I was: but not entirely, and I felt a twinge of shame at what I was doing with the cash I was advancing from the credit card Jack had set up for me.

A few days later, Marianne Engel was out of the fortress, walking Bougatsa, when I decided to proceed with a secret mission. I put a long gray raincoat over my pressure garments and, though I was not supposed to, removed my mask and mouth retractor. I donned a hat and sunglasses, turned up my collar with criminally gloved hands, and looked in the mirror to see the very caricature of a sexual deviant looking back at me. I supposed it was perfect, considering where I was headed.

“The nearest porno shop.” My voice, revving like a rusted motor, made the taxi driver size me up in the rearview mirror. He seemed to have some second thoughts about taking the invisible man on a field trip, but they were dispelled when I held up my credit card. The driver put the car into motion and we passed the front of St. Romanus, where Father Shanahan was changing the white plastic sign to read: “Was Your Friday As Good As It Could Have Been?”

When we arrived at the Triple-XXX Velvet Palace, I asked the driver to wait. He nodded; he had seen me hobble into the car and knew that I couldn’t run far. Entering the shop was like coming home. There were the familiar smells of latex, leather, and lube. To my right was a collection of anal probes and giant rubber cocks, and to my left was an assortment of French maid and Japanese schoolgirl outfits. Magazines lined the walls, but I was interested in the videos at the back. Scanning the covers, I soon saw one of my own: Doctor Giving Bone, I Presume. (I’ve always considered this one of my more amusing titles.) I laid it down in front of the balding, bespectacled clerk. “Excellent choice,” he said in a completely unenthusiastic voice.

Back in the belfry, I slid the movie into the player. There was the warm blue glow of the television screen followed by the logo of my old production company. The plot, as in most pornos, left something to be desired; even to me-writer, actor, director, and producer-it was muddled. The film opens with a woman, Annie, who’s getting a medical check-up. When she has difficulty putting on her hospital gown, she asks the nurse for help and, as so often happens, hot lesbian sex ensues. The doctor (me) happens upon these shenanigans and, with nary a worry about ethics violations or venereal diseases, decides the proper treatment for Annie is unprotected anal sex.

I thought of the day of the shoot. The catering came from Sun Lee’s Chinese Take-Out, just down the street, and the delivery arrived late. Boyce Burgess worked the camera and Irdman Dickson did the sound and, despite the fact that we were shooting at one in the afternoon, Irdman was plastered. As the director, I would’ve reprimanded him if I had not been blasted on cocaine. In fact, if you carefully scrutinize the film, you can see a small gold spoon on my necklace bouncing out of my doctor’s coat as I rear-end Annie over the examining table. Because of Irdman’s drunkenness, the sound was particularly bad and, in some places, is completely unintelligible. Occasionally a line is audible: something about taking Annie’s temperature with “my big fat thermometer.” It’s probably for the best that most of the dialogue was lost.

This opening scene is, regrettably, the cleverest part of the film. From this point forward, the story becomes exponentially more ludicrous. One of my lovers is a psychiatrist, who continually prattles about my hostility towards women as I spank her. Meanwhile, Annie becomes a hypochondriac/nymphomaniac who believes that her allergy to cats is best treated with liberal doses of penis.

All this would seem laughable if not for the way I looked. My hair bounced with each thrust of my pelvis, and my skin shone beautifully as sweat crept down my neck onto my chest. The muscles of my arms flexed as I spanked my silly-stern mistress, letting her out and reeling her back in. My smile strained the corners of my retractorless mouth and my face tensed in wonderful anticipation as I neared orgasm.

I had to turn the video off: it sickened me to see the princely boy I’d been, compared with the wretched thing that I’d become. It sickened me to see, forever captured on film, the sweat on my smooth skin. I, who can no longer perspire. Is this how Fred Astaire felt as an old man unable to dance? Footage of one’s athletic youth is a kind of tyranny in old age; such footage has doomed Fred Astaire and me.

When I hit the eject button, the tape came whirring from the machine like a tongue sticking out at me. I took it down to the fireplace in the living room, where I placed it on a pile of torn newspaper. Taking a match to it, I watched the flames jump up to engulf the cassette.

That was the last time I ever looked at one of my old films.

Sayuri was coming once or twice a week, always smiling as she put me through my increasingly difficult paces. The results could not be denied: my body was starting to uncurl its contracted muscles, my back beginning to change from a question mark to an exclamation point. An emphasis of the therapy was on fighting my body’s desire to move along the path of least resistance by using the strongest muscles instead of the correct ones. Sayuri concentrated on getting me to move with the proper technique and walked alongside me with a hand on each side of my torso, forcing me to keep my head up. She corrected the swing of my arms, enabling my balance to improve, and was constantly reminding me to put equal weight on both feet. This was especially difficult going up and down stairs.

Kinetic basics mastered, we set out on walks of greater speed and longer distance. Bougatsa demanded to come along as well, running around in yapping circles. Sayuri threw a ball for him to chase, but this was mainly to get him out of the way so she could pay proper attention to me. When we returned home, we used the exercise equipment Marianne Engel had bought for me. There was a weight bench, a Nautilus machine, and a stationary bike for conditioning. Sayuri took it upon herself to incorporate each into my rehabilitation.

She always checked my garments during her visits, and occasionally found something that needed modification. As the scars on my face healed under the constant pressure, the mask needed to be adjusted. Sayuri would sand it down accordingly, and a few times even took it to the hospital to be reshaped. Once, the mask came back having been altered incorrectly; when I pointed this out to Sayuri, she muttered to herself in Japanese: “Saru mo ki kara ochiru.” When I asked what that meant, she answered, “‘Even monkeys fall from trees.’ It means-”

I cut her off. “-that even experts make mistakes. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

When she asked where, I told her she should ask her boyfriend. I must say, I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who could turn such an adorable shade of red as Sayuri.

One aspect of the medieval story had been bothering me more than any other: the claim that Gertrud was producing a German version of the Bible. This was, remember, a full two centuries before Martin Luther began work on his famous translation. The Church vehemently disapproved of Luther’s work, so how could they have sanctioned Sister Gertrud?

I approached the problem as I always did, and the first surprise of my research was the discovery that by the time Die Luther Bibel appeared, there already existed numerous other German biblical translations; Luther’s was simply the first written with the language of the common man in mind. Previous versions had been literal translations rendered in obsolete idioms and were, for all intents and purposes, understandable only to readers who could also read the source Latin.

The earliest Germanic version of the Bible was a Gothic translation by Ulfilas in the fourth century, which predated the Latin Vulgate by decades. A remarkable man, Ulfilas needed to devise an entire alphabet to write his text and thus created much of contemporary German Christian vocabulary. Only one partial handwritten copy of this Bible, known as the Codex Argenteus or Silver Bible, still exists, at the University Library of Uppsala. After that there is a ninth-century manuscript from Fulda, which contains Old High German translations of the first four books of the New Testament, and a suggestion of a fuller, but unsanctioned, biblical translation from about 1260. Some passages from the Bible, such as the Lord’s Prayer, had long existed in German, but there is no compelling evidence that anyone had put together an entire German Bible at the time Gertrud was reputedly working on it-although it is said that shortly afterwards, in 1350, a complete New Testament surfaced in Augsburg.

So far, so good: it would seem the time was right at the start of the fourteenth century for someone to tackle the whole project, so why not Sister Gertrud of Engelthal?

There are plenty of reasons, actually, but perhaps none more compelling than Gertrud’s own intense piety-or at least, her attempts to appear pious. She would not have wanted to proceed in any manner that might be construed as sacrilegious, and few things were more heretical than producing an unsanctioned translation of the Bible. Before embarking on such an extraordinary task Gertrud would have needed permission from a higher authority, and such consent would have been nearly impossible to secure. But that is the crux of the matter-“nearly impossible” is not the same as “impossible.”

Engelthal’s prioress was an elderly woman; could senility have led her to permit a translation that any able-minded administrator would have rejected? Stranger things have been known to happen. However, this assumes that Gertrud’s permission came from within the Engelthal monastery, which is not necessarily the case. Perhaps she had stepped outside the gates to find a church official with his, or her, own agenda; one needs to remember that the Church was notoriously a web of conflicting backroom politics. Conceivably a superior might have authorized Gertrud’s work as a part of a larger scheme, and Gertrud might have been happy to overlook her position as a pawn so long as she was allowed her project. It would have been a most dubious arrangement, but it is always easier to skirt the rules when encouraged to do so by a higher-up.

This is all conjecture, of course. Why Gertrud thought she could progress with the project is a question with no clear answer, but I can forward another possibility: perhaps I have underestimated her desire to be remembered. Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver, and the idea of leaving behind an everlasting legacy can spur even the most cautious person to proceed recklessly. Possibly she convinced herself that she was doing nothing wrong even if she lacked full consent. She was working from the Latin Vulgate, after all, and her unwavering belief in the excellence of her translation may well have pushed her to gamble that, in the end, her Bible would be too good to warrant punishment. One can imagine her rationalizing that Die Gertrud Bibel’s very existence would excuse its secret genesis and, as the work was being completed towards the end of her life, perhaps she was simply willing to take the risk. What could the authorities do to an old woman who believed that her place in Heaven was already reserved?

When I finally asked Marianne Engel on whose authority Die Gertrud Bibel was being produced, I was hoping to get either a definitive answer or a clear contradiction that would disprove the story once and for all. But her answer was neither.

“I was so young I never thought to ask, and Gertrud never said. But she was always very secretive about it and none of the nuns were allowed to talk about the work outside of the scriptorium.”

“Wouldn’t they have rebelled,” I asked, “if they believed it wrong?”

“Perhaps they might have to answer in Heaven for what they had done,” she said, “but I think they were more scared of Gertrud and Agletrudis here on earth.”

Marianne Engel seemed quite pleased that I was so carefully considering these aspects of the story she had been telling, and it prompted her to ask whether I would like to hear more.

“Of course,” said I.