The Gargoyle Read Free Page A

cause the cell walls to explode. This is not good. In a second scenario, the cell’s protein cooks up just like an egg in a frying pan, changing from a thin liquid into something gooey and white. If this happens, all metabolic activity of the cell ceases. So even though the heat was not sufficient to kill the cell outright, the loss of ability to deliver oxygen ensures the tissue will die soon enough. The difference is slow capitulation rather than immediate immolation.
     

     
    With Grandma gone, I went to live with Debi and Dwayne Michael Grace—an aunt and uncle, the quintessence of trash, who were annoyed with me from the moment I arrived. They did, however, like the government checks sent for my upkeep. It made scoring dope considerably easier.
    In my time with the graceless Graces, I relocated from one trailer park to another until my guardians found an all-night party that grew into a three-year methamphetamine festival. They were well ahead of their time: crystal meth was not nearly as popular in those days as it is now. If there was no pipe available with which to smoke it, a hollowed-out lightbulb was used, and sometimes the run on bulbs was such that we lived entirely in the dark. The drugs never seemed to run out, though. The Graces, flashing smiles like smashed keyboards, would hand over their every penny to the dealer.
    One of our neighbors traded the use of her daughter, a few years younger than me, for the equivalent in drugs. In case you’re wondering, the street value of an eight-year-old is $35, or at least it was when I was a kid. When the mother became savage-eyed and withdrawn, the young girl would come to cry fearfully in my tiny room, anticipating an impending sale. Last I heard, her mother had cleaned up, lost addiction, and found God. Last I heard, the girl (now adult) was a pregnant heroin addict.
    For the most part my childhood was not agreeable, but I was never sexually auctioned so my guardians might crank up. Still, a man should be able to say better things about his youth than that.
    The only way I was able to survive that shitty world was to imagine better ones, so I read everything I could get my hands on. By my early teens, I was spending so many hours in the library that the librarians brought extra sandwiches for me. I have such fond memories of these women, who would recommend books and then talk to me for hours about what I had learned.
    Long before I discovered the desire for drugs that would occupy my adulthood, my basic nature had already been established as compulsive. My first, and most lasting, addiction has always been to the obsessive study of any matter that took hold of my curiosity.
    Although I was never much for school, this was not because I believed education an inferior pursuit. Far from it: my problem was always that school interfered with matters more fascinating. The courses were designed to teach practical information but, because I understood the core concepts so quickly, they could not hold my interest. I was always distracted by the esoterica that might appear in a textbook’s footnote or a teacher’s offhand remark. For example: if my geometry teacher mentioned something about Galileo giving lectures on the physical structure of Hell, it became impossible for me to refocus my interest when he returned to talking about the sides of a parallelogram. I would skip the next three classes to visit the library, reading everything I could on Galileo, and when I returned to the school I would fail the next math test because it did not include any questions about the Inquisition.
    This passion for self-directed learning has remained, which should already be apparent in my depiction of burn treatment. The subject has such personal relevance it would be impossible for me not to learn as much as I could about it. My studies do not stop there: research on Engelthal monastery, for reasons that will become apparent, has also commanded a great many hours of my time.
    While it