to swat away the rats that gnawed at him during the night. Sometimes he broke the restraints in his sleep, so he started wearing leather gloves covered in more sharpened brass tacks that would slice up his skin as effectively as if he’d run a cheese grater over it. Seuse kept these habits for sixteen years until another vision from God instructed him to throw these sleeping aids into a nearby river.
Rather than bring Seuse relief at being forbidden to keep punishing himself, these divine interventions bothered him greatly. When a nun asked how he was doing, Seuse replied that things were going quite badly because it had been a month since he’d known pain and he was afraid that God had forgotten him.
Such physical torments, Seuse realized, were only a beginning; they didn’t allow for a tangible sign of his great love for the Lord. To remedy this, he opened his robes one evening and used a sharpened stylus to carve the letters IHS into the flesh above his heart. (If that’s Greek to you, don’t worry: IHS is the abbreviated name of Christ in the Greek language.) Blood poured out of his ripped flesh but he claimed he barely felt the pain, such was his ecstasy. The scarified letters never vanished and he wore the wound in secret until the end of his life; it soothed him in times of struggle, he claimed, to know that the very name of Christ moved with each beat of his heart.
Seuse died in 1366 after a long life which, one can only surmise, must have seemed even longer than it actually was.
I find it interesting that Seuse had his “illumination” at age eighteen, just when schizophrenia most commonly manifests. If you were a schizophrenic, you could do worse than religious life in fourteenth-century Germany. In the Age of Mysticism, your visions would not be feared but revered. If you beat yourself senseless, you were not self-destructive but emulating Christ. If you heard voices, you had direct communication with God.
But for all this, there is one event in the life of Heinrich Seuse that I find particularly interesting, although it is something I have never been able to verify in my library research.
Marianne Engel insisted that, once upon a time, she met him.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I woke again, Marianne Engel was gone, but she had left behind a gift on the nightstand, a small stone gargoyle.
I turned the little fiend over in my hands. About six inches high, the gargoyle looked like a semi-human dumpling, cooked the color of a melancholic rain cloud. His potbelly drooped on crossed legs, his elbows were propped on his knees, and his chin rested upon three-fingered hands. His back sprouted short thick wings, presumably for show rather than flight. A blocky head was perched on his slumped shoulders like a boulder waiting to be pushed from the top of a cliff. He had enormous eyes that loomed underneath a Neanderthal brow, and a mouthful of uneven teeth. The gargoyle seemed to be trying hard to scowl, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. His expression was sweet and sad and somehow all too human, like that of a forlorn man who has spent his entire life dragging himself from one tiny accident to another until the cumulative effect has crushed him under the weight of words he can no longer speak.
My physical condition improved markedly in the days after the surgery. The garbage scow that is my stomach learned to float again, although it could no longer carry as full a load as it once did. My right leg, with its mangled knee and blasted hip, was also beginning to mend, and the doctors promised that they would soon remove the mechanical spider cast. Each day, I seemed to lie in the skeleton bed a little less awkwardly.
Nan poked me and wrote little messages to herself on my chart. She always remained professional, but I found myself calling her Nan more often than Dr. Edwards. I don’t know if she disliked this familiarity but she never asked me to stop. I suppose this emboldened me and in a moment of curiosity I asked her whether she was married. She hesitated and thought about answering, but in the end decided against it.
♦ ♦ ♦
The seat beside the skeleton bed remained empty, save for the visits from the nurses and Nan. One Marianneless day became two Marianneless days, two became three, five Marianneless days, until they formed a Marianneless week. I wanted to ask her about the little gargoyle, why she had given it to me, what it meant.
I was reading a lot, mostly lawyer mysteries that I didn’t actually enjoy. I needed something to replace them, so I requested of Nan that she loan me some textbooks on abnormal psychology. “You must have something on schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar disorder, anything like that?”
“It’s not my area of expertise,” she replied. “Besides, you should be reading about burns.”
Nan had already brought a number of books on burn recovery that sat untouched on my bedside table. I was not reading them simply because they were what I should be reading. We made a deal: for every psychology book she brought, I’d read one of the burn books. Nan considered this a victory and insisted that I read one of her books first.
After I had, Gregor arrived at my room, his corduroy thighs rubbing together, with a psychology text in his hands. He handed it over and said that Dr. Edwards had asked him to deliver it, from the private collection in his office.
“The place isn’t driving you nuts, is it?” The way he chuckled to himself, I wondered if he’d been thinking that up all the way from the psychiatric ward. When I asked him whether psychiatrists were really supposed to refer to patients as nuts, he dabbed a bead of sweat from his brow with a tartan handkerchief, and didn’t answer. Instead, he asked why I was so interested in schizophrenia and manic depression.
“None of your business,” I said.
Gregor opened his mouth as if to say something more, but instead he just smiled and tapped my little gargoyle once on the head. “I like this,” he said, before padding his way out of my room in his tasseled loafers.
♦ ♦ ♦
The following day, a very small Asian woman, who upon first glance looked more like a doll than a real person, entered my room.
Please don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m attempting to further the stereotype that all Asian women resemble china dolls. That’s not the kind of doll I have in mind. This woman had a broad face, a flat nose, and a most amazing smile. (I’ve always hated people who can smile widely without looking stupid.) Her cheeks were like ripe apples, which, when taken with the striped shirt and denim overalls under her gown, created an overall effect of an Oriental Raggedy Ann.
“Hi! My name is Sayuri Mizumoto. I’m pleased to meet you.” She thrust her hand into mine for a hearty shake. And while I might not write that every time she spoke, she did so with a large grin, please take it as a given from this point forward.
“What kind of name is Sayuri?”
“A beautiful one,” she answered with a touch of Australian in her accent. “Now sit up.”
I asked why she expected me to do what she told me.
“Because I’m your new physical therapist and now you’re going to sit up.”
“You don’t even know—”
“I’ve spoken with Dr. Edwards, and you can do it!” There was a strange combination of cheer and proclamation in the way that she told me I could do it! She placed her hands underneath my back and widened her stance to help me. She warned me that I would probably feel a little dizzy when the blood rushed to my head, and I protested that I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea.
“Sure it is,” she cheered. “Three, two, one, go!”
Up I went; she was pretty strong for a doll. For a moment I was fine, her hands steadying me. Then the vertigo hit and the room began to turn in strange circles. Sayuri moved a hand to the back of my neck to keep my head from lolling around. “You’re doing great! Steady.”
When she lowered me back down, she commented, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was fucking awful.”
“Shock!” She lifted her hand to her open mouth in mock horror. “You really are