The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson Page A

skull, the bitch. I AM COMING. I was overwhelmed by whiteness and choking on antiseptic. I wanted to crawl through my urinary tube and drown in my piss.
    As bad as it was, it became worse when Nan explained that at the end of my hospital stay—which would not come for many more months—I’d be placed in a halfway house for “reintegration” into society. Eventually, she said, I’d be able to look after most of my own needs and live on my own.
    Seventeen years after release from one government home, I would find my way back into a different one—but at least when I was a penniless child, I had had my life ahead of me. At thirty-five I was a spent, struck match.
    So I listened to the doctors and I nodded yeses when they told me about upcoming surgeries, but they might as well have been telling me about my upcoming trip to the city at the bottom of the sea. I signed consent forms; I signed away my house and all my personal possessions. A burn such as mine can easily cost half a million dollars to treat, and without much more effort can climb its way to more than a million.
    My lawyer came to visit, uncomfortable in his gown. Unlike the other visitors, he had also decided to wear a surgical mask; it would be charitable to think this was for my protection, but it was more likely his own paranoia that he might catch something. In any case, I thought it appropriate: I could not look upon his masked face without thinking of a thief come to rob me.
    He said a few words about how sorry he was about my accident; then, this formality dispensed with, he launched into an explanation of the serious trouble that my production company was experiencing. At the root, the problem was nonfulfillment of contracts to deliver new content to sales outlets; filming had ceased the moment I wasn’t around to run operations, but delivery commitments had already been signed. He ran through a number of options, but because I had never trained anyone to fulfill my duties if I was incapacitated, only one scenario was truly viable: bankruptcy. He didn’t want to bother me continually in my “difficult time,” he explained, so he had already prepared the documents enabling my creditors to seize and liquidate my assets. Of course, he had ensured that the bankruptcy filing fees would be paid up front.
    I just signed everything he placed in front of me, in order to get him out of the room quicker. The irony was not lost upon me that after making all my money in the skin trade, I was now trading all my money for skin. The deed done and my company instantly folded, the lawyer didn’t know what to do other than say he was sorry one more time and exit the ward as quickly as possible.
    And so my life went. When the doctors told me that I was improving, I did my best imitation of a smile. The nurses were proud of me as I squeezed the therapy ball with my burnt hand. They thought I was doing it to improve my strength, but I only wanted to shut them up. I was tired of Maddy’s teasing, Beth’s seriousness, and Connie’s optimism.
    I lay patiently during the Eucerin rubs, each one a tour of duty. I would pray, in the foxhole of my mind, for the opportunity to desert. At one point, Nan nonchalantly stated that my wounds were a “classic challenge” for a doctor such as herself. I pointed out that I was not a problem to be solved. She stammered. “That’s not what I meant, I—I, uh…You’re right. I was out of line, and I’m truly sorry.”
    I felt a brief sense of victory, but the funny thing was that I agreed with her completely: I
was
a problem to be solved, although we saw it from opposing angles. She saw my bandages as a larval cocoon from which I would emerge, while I saw them as a funeral shroud.
    The bitchsnake of my spine kept swishing her tail around in my guts and churning out the sentence I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. I didn’t even care anymore. The snake was coming. So what? Just one more problem in an endless