During the coma, atrophy of the muscles couldn’t be avoided. There was my lack of movement and the fact that with large portions of my skin eradicated, my body was eating itself. It consumed the protein within, spending a tremendous amount of energy just trying to maintain a constant temperature. The heat shield was not enough, so my body ceased delivering blood to the extremities. The body’s concern is for the center, the outskirts be damned, and I stopped producing urine and became toxic. As my body contracted, my heart expanded: not from love, but from stress.

I was covered with maggots, a treatment used more frequently in the past but which has recently come back into medical vogue. The bugs ate away at the necrotic flesh, becoming fat on my decay, while leaving the living flesh intact. The doctors sewed my eyelids shut to protect my eyes and all that I required was for someone to cover them with coins. Then, I would have been complete.

I have one happy memory from my time with the Graces: happy, yet marked with a most curious occurrence.

The air show was on a hot day in mid-August at a nearby airfield. The planes did not excite me-but the skydivers, with their parachutes open to the heavens and the colored streams of smoke that trailed behind them! The falling from sky to earth, a Hephaestian plummet slowed only by fluttering swells of silk, seemed like a miracle. The skydivers operated their magic levers, circling large white bull’s-eyes stenciled on the ground, invariably hitting their marks, dead center. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

At one point, an Asian woman moved behind me. I felt her before I saw her; it was as if my skin jumped just from her presence. When I turned around, there she was, standing with a tiny smile. I was young and I had no idea whether she was Chinese or Japanese or Vietnamese; she just had Asian skin color and eyes and she was barely as tall as I, although I was only ten years old. She wore a dark robe of a simple material that made me think that she must belong to some sort of religious order. Her attire was completely out of the ordinary but no one in the crowd seemed to notice, and she was completely bald.

I wanted to give my attention back to the skydivers, but I couldn’t. Not with her behind me. A few moments passed, with me trying not to look at her again, before I could no longer stop myself. All the other people had their faces turned up into the sky but she was looking directly at me.

“What do you want?” My voice was steady; I simply wanted an answer. She said nothing but continued to smile.

“Can’t you speak?” I asked. She shook her head, then held out a note. I hesitated before taking it.

It read: Haven’t you ever wondered where your scar really came from?

When I looked back up, she was gone. All I saw was the crowd of upturned faces.

I read the note again, not believing she could know of my imperfection. It was on my chest, hidden under my shirt, and I was certain I’d never seen this woman before. But even if I had somehow improbably forgotten a previous encounter with a tiny bald Asian woman in a robe, there was no chance I would have shown her my scar.

I started to weave through the crowd, looking for any trace of her-a robe slipping through the masses; the back of her head-but there was nothing.

I put the note into my pocket, taking it out a few more times during the day to assure myself that it was real. Dwayne Michael Grace must have been feeling unusually generous, because he bought me cotton candy from the concession stand. Then Debi hugged me, and it was almost like we were a family. After the show, we attended an exhibition of lit paper lanterns floating down a nearby river, a display that was quite beautiful and unlike anything I had ever seen before.

When we got home late that evening, the note had disappeared from my pocket even though I had been extra careful.

I dreamt incessantly in my coma. Images reeled into each other, competing for the center ring of the circus.

I dreamt of a farmwoman heating bathwater. I dreamt of the blood from my mother’s womb. I dreamt of the flabby arms of my dying grandmother, pushing me up into the blue blue sky. I dreamt about Buddhist temples near cool rushing rivers. I dreamt of the little girl who was sold by her mother for meth. I dreamt of the twisted furnace of my car. I dreamt of a Viking warship. I dreamt of an ironworker’s anvil. I dreamt of a sculptor’s hands working furious chisels on stone. I dreamt of flaming arrows bursting out of the sky, I dreamt of raining fire. I dreamt of glass exploding everywhere. I dreamt of a delirious angel frozen in water.

But most of all, I dreamt of the gargoyles waiting to be born.

It was after the incident at the airfield that stroking the birth scar on my chest became a habitual action. I never noticed I was doing it, but others did. Dwayne hated it, slapping my hand away from my chest while telling me to “quit playing with yourself.” Then he’d smoke more drugs, making it difficult to take his criticism seriously.

When Dwayne and Debi died, I lost my only remaining relatives-from my mother’s side, anyway; my father’s side was nothing more than a question mark. I was placed in a group home called Second Chance House, which only made me wonder when I had had my first chance. It was while in Second Chance that I obtained most of my government-sponsored instruction. I went to high school classes fairly regularly, even though I found them boring, and acquired the basics in math and the sciences. All my hours in the library were not wasted. Long before anyone tried to teach me anything, I had already taught myself how to learn.

With the help of the other kids at Second Chance, I soon discovered a variety of drugs with which to experiment. Although disgusted by crystal meth, I was intrigued by marijuana and hashish. In fact, I’d received early encouragement towards these substances from my aunt and uncle who, not realizing that people could actually survive without chemical assistance, were trying to protect me from anything harder.

I also discovered a third hobby to go with libraries and narcotics: the miracle of making the sheets sing. It began by trading exploratory blowjobs with my new best friend, Eddie. This is the sort of thing that teenage boys do: they dare the other to kiss it and then call him a fag when he does. The next night, the same thing. I liked sex but homosexuality was not my flavor, so I soon progressed to some of the young female occupants-in particular, one girl named Chastity who was blissfully unaware of her name’s meaning. She was, in fact, unaware of a great many things. The first time that Chastity heard the phrase “oral sex” she thought it somehow involved the ear. Aural sex, one supposes.

By seventeen, I’d moved on to indulging my sexual curiosity with one of the counselors. Being a ward of the government was not without its advantages. Sarah was a troubled adult if ever there was one: an alcoholic in her mid-thirties with a cheating husband and an early midlife crisis. I provided her with consolation and excitement, and she provided me with sex. It did not hurt that my handsomeness, which hitherto had been little more than chubby-faced cuteness, had bloomed. My cheeks had acquired striking angles, my hair had curled pleasantly, and my body had made the transition to graceful muscularity.

When it came time for my discharge at eighteen, I had two talents. One was smoking drugs, the other was fucking my counselor, and I needed to convert one of these abilities into food and shelter. It did not seem that consuming drugs would be a well-paid occupation, but it was easy to find some work posing nude for $50, as the world is not short of middle-aged men who will pay boys to stand naked in their living rooms. I had no moral judgment about it; I was too busy calculating how many hamburgers fifty bucks could buy. From there it was a short jump to $150 for photos involving sexual activity and-since you’re already posing for stills, anyway-it makes a lot of sense to double or triple your income by acting in videos. Besides, who doesn’t want to be a movie star? Each shoot took, at most, a couple of days; more often, simply a few hours. That’s good money for an eighteen-year-old with no skills and, as simple as that, my career in pornography had started.