The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

about Jack?”
    “Of course not. Your private life is private, right?”
    “The relationship is complicated.”
    “With Jack?”
    “With doctors.” Marianne Engel drummed her fingertips on her pantdragon’s bejeweled eyes. “But Dr. Edwards seems okay, I guess.”
    “Yeah. So you’re all healed from your, whatever, sickness?”
    “Exhaustion, mostly.” She tilted her head to one side. “Tell me about your accident.”
    “I was stoned, and I drove off a cliff.”
    “He who eats fire, shits sparks.”
    I indicated the little statue on the bedside table. “I like the gargoyle.”
    “Not a gargoyle. It’s a grotesque.”
    “You say oyster, I say erster.”
    “I ain’t gonna to stop eating ersters,” Marianne Engel replied, “but that’s a grotesque. A gargoyle’s a waterspout.”
    “Everyone calls these things gargoyles.”
    “Everyone’s wrong.” She pulled a cigarette out of a pack and, after not lighting it, began to roll it between her thumb and forefinger. “Gargoyles throw water from the walls of cathedrals so the foundations don’t wash away. The Germans call them
Wasserspeier.
Do you remember that?”
    “Remember what?”
    “‘Water spitter.’ That’s the literal translation.”
    “Why do you know so much about them?”
    “Grotesques or languages?”
    “Both.”
    “Grotesques are what I do,” Marianne Engel answered. “Languages are a hobby.”
    “What do you mean, you ‘do’ grotesques?”
    “I carve.” She nodded towards the stunted monster in my hand. “I did that.”
    “My psychiatrist likes it.”
    “Which shrink?”
    “Dr. Hnatiuk.”
    “He’s better than most.”
    I was slightly surprised. “You know him?”
    “I know most of them.”
    “Tell me about your carving.”
    “I became interested while watching you do it.” Her other hand was now fidgeting with her arrowhead necklace.
    “I don’t carve.”
    “You did.”
    “No, I never have,” I insisted. “Tell me why you like carving.”
    “It’s backwards art. You end up with less than what you started with.” She paused. “It’s too bad you can’t remember carving. I still have something you did.”
    “What?”
    “My
Morgengabe
.” Marianne Engel looked at me intently, as if waiting for a nonexistent memory to enter my mind. When she saw that none was coming, she shrugged and leaned back into her chair. “Jack’s my manager.”
    A professional acquaintance. Good. “Tell me about him.”
    “I think I’ll keep you guessing.” She was definitely in fine spirits on this day. “How about I tell you a story?”
    “About what, this time?”
    “About me.”
     
IV.
     
    T he exact date of my birth hardly matters now, but as far as I know it was sometime in the year 1300. I never knew my birth parents, who left me in a basket at the front gate of Engelthal monastery in mid-April when I was only a few days old. Normally an abandoned child wouldn’t have been taken in and raised—Engelthal wasn’t an orphanage, after all—but as fate would have it, I was found by Sister Christina Ebner and Father Friedrich Sunder on the very evening that they’d been discussing what constituted a sign from God.
    Sister Christina had entered the monastery at the age of twelve and started having visions two years after that. When she found me she was in her early twenties, and her reputation as a mystic was already secure. Father Sunder was approaching fifty, a chaplain of the area, who had entered the religious life much later than most. By this time, he’d been serving as confessor to the Engelthal nuns for about twenty years. But the most important thing to know about them was their basic natures, because if they had not been so sympathetic, everything would have turned out much differently.
    There were two notes in my basket. One was in Latin and the other in German, but both read the same.
A destined child, tenth-born of a good family, given as a gift to our Savior Jesus Christ and Engelthal monastery. Do