I was aware that I was invading something intensely personal; something about the scene was more vulnerable than her nudity. I felt as if I were interrupting a private conversation, and I knew I should leave immediately.

I climbed back up to the main floor and decided to sleep in the study because it was cooler than the belfry. I placed towels on the leather couch because I still shed skin, and lay down. I administered another generous shot of morphine, because one man’s poison is another man’s warm milk. There were no more dreams of holocausts that night.

I awoke to find Marianne Engel, wearing a white robe, standing over me. We talked for a few minutes before she bundled me off to the washroom, where a bath had already been drawn with the proper chemicals added and a thermometer hung over the tub’s edge. “Take off your clothes.”

I had managed to avoid bathing practice with her at the hospital through a combination of luck and deceit, but my luck had run out. My benefactor was now demanding to see my exposed body, so I played the only card left in my deck: I told her that my nakedness in front of her would make me feel self-conscious, and asked whether she could understand that. She told me she could, but it didn’t change the fact that I needed to be washed. I told her that she needed to respect my privacy. She laughed and told me about an especially vivid dream she’d had the night before in which I’d stood in the middle of her workshop, looking upon her nude body.

I could hardly talk my way out of that. The best I could do was cut a new deal: I agreed to allow her to bathe me if she’d fix me with more dope first. Compromise accepted. Soon I stood unclothed, looking as if I were made out of rubber that hadn’t set properly in the mold, while she searched my abominable body for an appropriate morphine-hungry vein.

THIS IS WHERE SHE SEES YOU FOR YOUR LACK.

Her hand rested on my hip and my left arm was presented for the drugs, but my right arm hung strategically in front of my groin.

She prepared the needle, placed the tip where it might enter, and asked, “Is this a good place?” SHE CAN ENTER YOU… I nodded. The needle penetrated and I wasn’t even thinking about the morphine that was coming; I was only thinking … BUT YOUCAN’T ENTER HER that I had to make sure I did not move my right arm.

“Into the tub,” she said. But I was unable to climb into it without moving my right arm. So I just stood there, concealing the blank space between my hips.

“I will help you wash each day,” she said gently. “It’ll be difficult to keep hiding it.”

There is nothing to hide, I thought.

“I already know it is missing.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I will be repulsed,” continued Marianne Engel, “or my feelings will change.”

Finally I spoke. “Yes.”

“You are mistaken.”

I dropped my arm as if challenging her, as if I expected her reaction to prove her words wrong. I wanted her to recoil at the closed scar where one could imagine that my body had been cut open, the penis pushed in, and the slit sewn shut. I wanted her to recoil at the sight of my lonely scrotum, which looked for all the world like a tumbleweed on the abandoned street of a ghost town.

But she did not pull back; instead, she kneeled in front of my naked body, and leaned in. Her head even with my groin, she narrowed her eyes and studied the faint scratch-lines of stitches, long since pulled out, that closed up the place where my penis had been. She lifted her hand and pulled it back, but not in revulsion: she seemed to be acting on the instinct that my body was hers to touch before realizing that it was not, not in this century at least. So she looked up at me and requested permission.

I cleared my throat, once, twice, and then nodded weakly.

Marianne Engel reached out again, and this time her fingertips grazed my crinkled wasteland. I could not feel the touch at all, because the scarring was too dense, too complete; I only knew her fingertips were upon me because I could see them there.

“Stop now,” I said.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” Third clearing of my throat. “Haven’t you seen enough?”

SHE’S SEEN NOTHING.

She removed her fingers and stood. She looked directly into my eyes with hers, green this day, and they worked the way they sometimes did, unsettling me. “I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”

“You do,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Do you really believe,” she asked, “that I ever loved you because of your body?”

“I don’t…” Fourth, fifth; damn my throat. “I guess not.” And to show that I meant it, I climbed into the bath without any more argument.

The tub was a massive thing with lion’s paws for feet, and soon Marianne Engel was scrubbing away the dead outer layers of my skin. It was a painful process, so she distracted me-and demonstrated she was ready to move on in our conversation-by asking why I’d had so much trouble sleeping. I explained that the heat was a bit much, causing bad dreams. Then I asked why she’d been stretched out on the stone. “Instructions?”

“I thought a grotesque was ready,” she admitted, “but I was wrong.”

“You once told me that you carve as fast as you can to get the grotesque out of the stone, but the basement is full of half-finished work.”

“Sometimes we get halfway through the process before they realize that they aren’t ready. So we pause for a little while.” She cupped some water into her hands and showered my head. “When I get the call again, I’ll finish them.”

“What if,” I asked, “you were to refuse to carve when they called?”

“I couldn’t do that. My carving pleases God.”

“How do you know?”

She pressed the sponge harder into an area of my skin that did not want to give. “Because God gave me ears that can hear the voices in the stone.”

“How does that work, exactly?”

She stumbled over her words; for all her language skills, she could not articulate precisely what she wanted to say.

“I just empty myself. I used to be so anxious to receive God’s instructions that I couldn’t. Now I clear myself, and that’s when the gargoyles can most easily talk to me. If I’m not empty, I bring my own ideas, and they’re always wrong. It’s much easier for the gargoyles, you see, because they’ve been emptying themselves for a million years. In the rock, He entered them and informed them. Then they inform me of God’s plan for us. I have to”-she paused for a good five seconds-“I have to empty myself of potency to become as close as I can to pure act. But only God is pure act.”

I will not pretend that I understood this perfectly, but here is my best interpretation: God acted upon the “buried gargoyles” (meaning the gargoyles still encased in stone) by informing them of the shapes they should assume. The buried gargoyles acted upon Marianne Engel, instructing her how to realize these shapes. Marianne Engel then became the agent of action, chipping away the stone. In this way, she allowed the gargoyles to realize the shapes God intended for them. The now unburied gargoyles (the finished carvings) were therefore a realization of God’s instructions. They were not Marianne Engel’s creations, because she wasn’t the sculptor; God was. She was only the tool in His hand.

She kept scrubbing hard on my body the entire time that she was explaining. When she was finished, I could see the chips of my skin floating in the bathwater.

It was not long before a work crew arrived to install air conditioning and I found myself able to sleep comfortably in the belfry. I assembled a few shelves in the room-one for books, and one for the small stone grotesque and the glass lily that I’d received in the hospital. There was a desk in one corner, which I equipped with the stationery set that Gregor had given me. In another corner were the television and video player that Marianne Engel had bought for me, despite her own aversion to these too-modern items.