Now the mercenaries who’d been sent for wood were returning and Kuonrat pointed to the space under your feet. They piled the wood halfway up your legs. And I knew what was coming next. The wind and the whipping of the snow made it difficult to light the fire, but the mercenaries were used to living in the wild, so they knew how to hunch their bodies into windbreaks. Soon enough, a spark caught and the twigs started to smolder and there was smoke and I could hear the popping sap as the fire caught, and it reminded me of your breaking hands and feet. Little flames were approaching your toes but you couldn’t lift them out of the way, and they were nailed to the wall anyway. And then Kuonrat instructed his archers to take up their bows and to light their arrows in the flames and the archers did it, and when the tips were on fire, they lined up in a semicircle and they angled in on you. Kuonrat told them they were not to kill you but they were to shoot the arrows as close to your body as possible, that was the game, the goal was to light the wall on fire and slowly burn you from all sides rather than just from the bottom up. But then Kuonrat had a better idea and changed his instructions and told the archers that they could hit your body, just not in any spot that would be fatal-piercing your arms and legs was fine, but piercing your head or chest was not-and he had such glee in his voice, such utter pride in his brilliance, and the archers lifted their bows and started calling out body parts-“Left hand!” “Right foot!” “Upper thigh!”-and they were good shots, they usually got the places they called. When an arrow hit its mark, everyone cheered, and if an arrow missed everyone jeered, like it was a carnival game, and the flames under you were growing larger, new flames were bursting out all around your body, igniting with every arrow.

Over the laughs and happy shouts of the mercenaries, Kuonrat called out his final goodbye to you, “Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.”

And then I knew what I had to do.

I reached into my coat and found my necklace. I clenched my hand around the arrowhead that Father Sunder had blessed, and I prayed for strength.

I lifted the crossbow. I tried to remember the lesson that you’d given. It’s all in the breathing, you had said, you steady the instrument by slowing your breathing. In, out, steady, in, out, aim. I checked once more that the arrow was properly loaded. I knew I would have only one shot, the first shot of my life and the last. It’s all about the breathing. Trust the arrow. Calm.

I asked the Lord to deliver the arrow straight and true, directly to your heart, through the snowstorm and the condotta.

XXVIII.

Between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Marianne Engel stopped carving. There was only one afternoon in late January when she went into the basement to complete the gargoyle that had been left unfinished when she passed out and was admitted to the hospital. When this little task was put away, quickly and without any drama, she returned to focusing on her recovery-and back to preparing meals.

Since I had been released from the hospital, only once had she brought forth an extravagant feast: Japanese food, on the night of Sei’s story. But every third or fourth day during this period, she would go shopping before disappearing into her kitchen for hours. Each time she emerged, she came with a spread of delicacies from another region of the world.

Among the more notable meals was Senegalese, a rare culinary step outside Asia or Europe. For appetizers we had black-eyed pea fritters and fried plantains, followed by a sweet milk-rice soup called sombi. The main dishes: Yassa poulet, chicken marinated overnight and then simmered with onions in lemony garlic-mustard sauce; ceebu jen, fish in tomato sauce with vegetables on rice, the national dish of Senegal; mafй, a meat dish in peanut sauce that can be made with chicken, lamb, or beef-so, of course, she made all three versions; and a seafood stew with shrimp, perch, and unripe bananas. For dessert, she served Cinq Centimes, the “five-cent” peanut cookies popular in marketplaces, and ngalax, sweetened porridge made from millet couscous. Throughout the meal we sipped on mango, bissap, and monkey bread fruit juices, before ending with tea. And as much as I enjoyed the feasts Marianne Engel was preparing, the greatest benefit was that her tattooed angel wings were starting to plump out again because of the calories.

Things appeared to be good for everyone, in this century at least: there was Marianne Engel’s returning health; Sayuri talked about the great success of her trip to meet Gregor’s parents; and Gregor confided over coffee that he was more or less certain that Sayuri liked him. Even Bougatsa was pleased, as he was able to go for daily walks with his mistress again.

Often at midnight, Marianne Engel and I would take trips to the ocean. Despite the hour and the biting cold there were usually a few teenagers on the shore, drinking beer and making out. She would light bonfires, tending them as they sent ashes into the sky, and feed me from the picnic baskets that she always prepared, often with leftovers from the previous day’s international buffet. She lit the fires in an effort to lessen my fear of them; she said I needed to come to some sort of understanding with the elemental forces of the universe. They weren’t going away, after all.

I could not look at the fires without emotion, but surprisingly I thought less about my own fate in the car than I did about my fourteenth-century counterpart in the flames, nailed to the wall. I begged Marianne Engel to continue the story but she urged patience, citing more nonsense about single days in the vastness of eternity. Instead, she told me other stories that I knew were not true, creation and Armageddon myths, but I didn’t care. If she believed them, that was enough.

Then she would look out over the ocean, stretch her legs in its direction, and lament the fact that it was not yet warm enough to go swimming. “Oh, well,” she’d say, “I suppose the spring is coming soon enough…”

My pressure garments came off in early February and it was like emerging from a slough in which I had been swimming for nearly a year. My mask and dental retractor were also removed and my face was finally returned to me, albeit unrecognizable as the one I had before.

I experienced the panicked exhilaration that comes with starting anew. It’s not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phantom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may “get the girl”-but usually only with a pickax.

I hesitated to claim possession of my face, but this was also why I had to: if I didn’t, it seemed inevitable that my face would take possession of me. The clichй goes that at twenty a person has the face that God gave him, but at forty he has the face he has earned. But if the face and the soul are intertwined so that the face can reflect the soul, surely it follows that the soul can also reflect the face. As Nietzsche wrote: “The criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo (a monster in face, and a monster in soul).”

But Nietzsche was wrong. I was born beautiful and lived beautiful for thirty-plus years, and during all that time I never once allowed my soul to know love. My unblemished skin was numb armor used to attract women with its shininess, while repelling any true emotion and protecting the wearer. The most erotic of actions were merely technical: sex was mechanics; conquest a hobby; my body constantly used, but rarely enjoyed. In short, I was born with all the advantages that a monster never had, and I chose to disregard them all.