Now my armor had melted away and been replaced with a raw wound. The line of beauty that I had used to separate myself from people was gone, replaced by a new barrier-ugliness-that kept people away from me, whether I liked it or not. One might expect the result to be the same, but that was not entirely true. While I was now surrounded by far fewer people than before, they were far better people. When my former acquaintances took a quick glance at me in the burn ward before turning around to walk out, they left the door open for Marianne Engel, Nan Edwards, Gregor Hnatiuk, and Sayuri Mizumoto.

What an unexpected reversal of fate: only after my skin was burned away did I finally become able to feel. Only after I was born into physical repulsiveness did I come to glimpse the possibilities of the heart: I accepted this atrocious face and abominable body because they were forcing me to overcome the limitations of who I am, while my previous body allowed me to hide them.

I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was. Or so I tell myself; and for now, that is enough.

Marianne Engel entered my room on February 13, midnight, and took me by the hand. She led me down the stairs and out the back door. Snow was falling, making it look as if the stony monsters littering the backyard were wearing white hoods.

She pulled open a gate that allowed us to enter the cemetery behind St. Romanus. Gravestones popped out of the snowdrifts like gray tongues and we tiptoed past them to the center of the cemetery, where she had already laid out a horsehide blanket. Above us, the moon was a magnificent blister in the midst of a gooseflesh of stars. Marianne Engel tried lighting candles but the wind kept blowing her matches out, and she laughed at this. She pulled her coat tighter around her body. I hated the cold but I liked being near her.

“I’ve brought you here to tell you something,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m going to die soon.”

No, you’re not. “Why would you say that?”

“I’ve only got sixteen hearts left.”

“You’re going to live until you’re an old woman,” I assured her. With me.

“I’m already old.” She smiled, wearily. “I hope this time, death takes.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die.” You’re not going to die.

She put her hand on my cheek. “My last heart has always been for you, so I need you to prepare.”

I was going to tell her that she was talking nonsense, but she moved her finger over my lips. When I tried to speak anyway, she kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth.

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, “but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.”

“It’s just-you have this medical condition.” I wondered to what degree I felt such tenderness towards her because of her schizophrenia, and to what degree despite it. “I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true…”

“How little you believe, and how very much it takes to make you believe,” she said. “But you will. Now let’s go inside.”

The way she stated that we should go inside with such finality, such certainty, made me fear the worst. “Why?”

“Because it’s freezing out here,” she said, and my relief must have been visible. “Don’t worry, I’m not ready to die tonight. We still have things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting you off the drugs.” NOT LIKELY. She said, “Do you really think I don’t know you’ve been buying extra morphine?”

That morning, Valentine’s Day, when I woke, I looked into the small wooden box that held my morphine stash to find it empty. I staggered into Marianne Engel’s bedroom, where her body lay unmoving. I shook her by the shoulders and when she opened her eyes a little, I asked where my kit was.

“Get into bed with me. You’ll be okay.”

“You don’t understand. There’s a snake in my spine-”

“Silly boy,” she said. “You should know better than to listen to snakes. They lie.”

“You didn’t give me enough time to adjust to the idea,” I pleaded. “Tomorrow, I’ll quit, but give me a day-”

I AM ALMOST HERE…

“Suffering is good for the soul.”

“No it isn’t!”

“If you cannot love the pain”-she tried to put a positive spin on it-“you can at least love the lessons it teaches.”

… AND THERE IS NOTHING…

I preferred to remain uneducated. “I can get my prescription refilled and-”

“I flushed it down the toilet,” she replied, “and Dr. Edwards won’t refill it again. And I’ve put your credit card on hold, so unless you’re going to rob me to buy street drugs, get into bed.”

… YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

“Sleep,” Marianne Engel said. “Just sleep.”

Morphine comes from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and was first isolated in the early 1800s by the German pharmacist F.W.A. Sertьrner. It is named for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, and I can testify that that is most appropriate. Morphine has a nocturnal, delusional quality that had colored every aspect of my life since it first swam upstream in my veins.

Though the primary use of morphine is to alleviate pain, it can also relieve fear and anxiety, decrease hunger, and produce euphoria. Whenever I injected, it flooded my body with a divine sweetness that made life bearable. Morphine also decreased my sexual drive, which, while perhaps not a desirable side effect for most, was a godsend for a man who lacks a penis but retains the ability to produce testosterone. As a negative, however, I was constantly constipated.

But what the morphine really did for me-its absolutely most vital function-was keep the snake silent, at least for a while.

When I first came to live with Marianne Engel, I was taking about one thousand milligrams a day. Over time my dosage had crept up with my tolerance and towards the end, I was taking that amount, times four.

XXIX.

YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE, DON’T YOU?

The blackness and my awareness arrived together. I was instantly awake, my eyes peeled wide, but I could see nothing. I could feel by the quality of the air (moist, massive) that I was in a constricted place. The atmosphere was almost too heavy for breathing, with the scent of rotting wood, and I was on my back. A feeling of smothered panic lay on top of me.

I AM HERE.

I could hear-no, feel-the glee in the snake’s voice; she was happier in my spine than she had ever been. The morphine had been keeping her in check but now, in this place, that protection had been lifted. The snake thrashed in celebration.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I tried to extend my arms but my hands met a barrier on all sides, only inches away. Flat, smooth wood. A few feet across; a few feet deep; the length of my body. For a human, there is only one box of this size.

YOU ARE IN A COFFIN.

This was not real. I tried to remember everything I’d learned about morphine withdrawal, because that was the reality of my situation, not this imagined tomb. I had studied, like the student who prays the test will be canceled, about the weaning from the addiction. Cold-turkeying off morphine is not life-threatening, as it is with some other drugs, but it can result in strange visions. Clearly, this was one of them.

There were so many reasons that this could not be real. How could I have been taken from the bedroom and buried without waking? If the wood of the coffin was already rotting, how could I have been underground that long? How could there still be oxygen? All this was impossible; therefore, I was hallucinating.