“Jacqueline,” I said, “you never did answer my original question.”

“Don’t call me that, fuck, and I can’t even remember your stupid question.”

“If you were doing anything this Christmas.”

“No, my mother died about ten years back and my kids don’t talk to me anymore.” She grabbed her coat and said it was time for her to leave. At the door, she added, “Don’t think we’re all buddy-buddy now. If it was my decision, you still wouldn’t have a credit card.”

“Understood,” I confirmed. “I hope this doesn’t sound bad, but I’m actually pretty glad that Marianne collapsed. At least she’ll have to take some time off.”

Jack snorted. “She’s not finished yet.”

When Marianne Engel woke, she proved Jack correct. She ate a huge breakfast, then descended into the basement, where she spent the next four days. All her movements were sluggish, as if someone had taken a film of her working and was running it at half speed. She simply lacked the energy to work faster.

IF YOU SLIPPED HER A LITTLE MORPHINE What?SHE WOULD FALL ASLEEP.

On the twentieth of December, Sayuri came for my final exercise session before the holidays. We tried our best to ignore the slow tap-tap-tapping of Marianne Engel’s lethargic tools.

“Gregor tells me that you’re going to meet his parents,” I said. “Big step.”

“He’s never done this before,” Sayuri said, “taking a girl to meet them.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“No drama for me, but I’m a bit nervous for him. I think he feels like he’s never good enough for his folks.”

“Does he think you’re going to disappoint them?” I asked incredulously.

“He’s more worried that they’ll think he’s not good enough for me.” Sayuri increased the resistance settings on my exercise bike and implored me to fight, fight, fight! “It’s ridiculous.”

“So, do you think he’s planning on…?” I tapped at her wedding finger, which was completely ring-free.

“No,” Sayuri responded quickly. She drew back her hand, but I could see on her face that she didn’t mind the idea of it. “He just wants me to see his hometown.”

There had been a change in the sound coming from the basement-the slow metronome of the hammer was missing. By this point in our living together, I knew Marianne Engel’s carving schedule well enough to realize she couldn’t possibly be finished with her current statue. “I should check on her.”

MORPHINE IS GOOD. Not for her.

I couldn’t see her when I started down the basement stairs. I called out, but there was no answer. Half a cigarette was smoldering in the ashtray. Then I saw her behind a mostly completed gargoyle, her arms splayed at awkward angles. Her fingers were still half closed around her hammer; her chisel had bounced a few feet away.

When I came around the rock, I saw that she was unconscious, with a large gash on her forehead. I presumed this was from falling headfirst into the stone as she passed out.

The hospital held Marianne Engel for four nights. Her head was stitched closed, and an IV pumped her arm with electrolyte solution to combat the dehydration. Luckily, she was too exhausted to work up much anger over the fact that I had put her under the care of the enemy doctors. I left her side only to go home to get some sleep. I let Bougatsa share my bed, even though Nan would have had a fit about the irritation that dog hair can cause burned skin. YOU CAN’T EVEN LOOK AFTER YOURSELF. In the mornings, I immediately returned to the hospital. HOW CAN YOU LOOK AFTER HER?

Marianne Engel was released on Christmas Eve. Honestly, the doctors should have held her longer, but they discharged her in consideration of the date. When we got home, she wanted to eat marzipan and nothing else, but I persuaded her to eat some mandarin oranges as well. I hauled my television and video player from the belfry into her bedroom and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, because that’s what normal people do on Christmas Eve. After it ended, she insisted that I stay in her bed, because she wanted to wake into Christmas Day with me at her side.

I lay in that bed with my thick pressure suit pressed up against her thin nakedness, aware that I should have been enjoying our closeness. But I wasn’t; I was contemplating why her body affected me as powerfully as it did. I had spent much of my adult life in the company of naked women-it had been my job during the day, and my hobby at night-but with Marianne Engel it had always seemed different. It was different.

There are many possible explanations for my discomfort. Perhaps her body had a greater effect than that of other women because I actually cared for her. Perhaps it was because for the first time in my life, as a result of my penectomy, I could not dismiss the woman’s body by conquering it. Perhaps my feeling was simply pheromonal. All these theories are plausible, and to some extent perhaps all are valid, but on that Christmas Eve, lying beside her unable to sleep, I worked it through. The principal reason, I believe, that her body so thrilled mine was this: her body affected me as if it were not only human, but also as something that approached memory and ghost.

The first time that I had seen her body, fully, was in the burn ward when she had undressed to show her tattoos. The sight made me aroused and bashful, and when I ran my fingertips over the plumage of her angel wings her body trembled and, in return, trembled my heart. At the time, I did not understand why I felt the way I did, but in the many months that had passed, I had grown into the realization that it was because my fingers felt not as if they were visiting her body for the first time but as if they were returning to a familiar location. I did not understand this until I saw how, when Marianne Engel gave me my first bath in the fortress, she had reached out to touch my body as if it was hers to touch. She moved her arm just as I had reached towards her winged back that first time. It was as if the other’s flesh was already owned, and the reaching hand belonged to a master who had been long absent and was now returned. When I had touched her that first time, it did not feel like the first time I had touched her.

Now, in the bed next to her on this Christmas Eve, her body retained that effect upon me. When I lay beside her, it was as if I were meant to be there, as if my body had rested against hers thousands of times before. So it felt as if I were lying not next to a person, but next to the memory of a person, while at the same time that memory was undergoing a transformation into something even less material. Her body was all too human in its ravagedness, but it also struck me as an entity becoming ghost, as if in her thinness she were slipping into something less than solid. I ran my fingers across her bumpy ribs and traced the gaunt hill of the pelvic bone that overlooked her stomach. Her body, whose flesh and memory had always confused and excited, still felt as if it belonged to me but also as if it were disappearing. It was not only that she was losing substance as she worked, it was as if she were working to lose substance; as if it were not only the gargoyles that were backwards art, but also the artist herself, progressing to a state in which they were both less and more than the material from which they started.

So this is how her body-flesh, memory, and ghost-disarmed me.

I woke, after I finally fell into a short and fitful sleep, before she did. I brought her eggs on a tray, and worked up the courage to give her that year’s gift. Again it was writing, as I apparently had not learned my lesson from the previous year’s poems. I had written from memory the stories she’d told me about her four ghostly friends-“The Good Ironworker,” “The Woman on the Cliff,” “The Glassblower’s Apprentice,” and “Sigurðr’s Gift”-and bound them between covers. On the front was the title The Lovers’ Tales, as told by Marianne Engel.