Free The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

when really I was preparing for the length of the next sentence. “I think you should give them to their rightful owners.”
    Her eyes opened wide, as if I had inserted a key into a secret lock, and it made me wonder whether I had just pushed the wrong button on the insanity panel. But, just as quickly, her elated look was replaced by one of suspicion. She moved to one corner of my bed, where she intoned something in another language.
“Jube, Domine benedicere.”
Latin? A short conversation followed, with her talking into the thin air, in a language that I couldn’t understand, waiting for responses I couldn’t hear. After the first imaginary conversation was completed, she bowed deeply and walked to a second corner of the bed to repeat the performance. And then, a third corner. She concluded each conversation the same way she started it—
“Jube, Domine benedicere”
—and she returned to her original position, with the look of suspicion gone.
    “My Three Masters confirmed that it really is you. It is for you that I’ve been perfecting my final heart.”
    The very act of saying this clearly caused great emotion to well up inside of her. She looked on the verge of tears as she said, “I’ve been waiting such a long time.”
    Just then Beth drew open the curtains. She seemed shocked to find that I had a visitor after so many weeks without, but her surprise quickly turned to concern when she noted the gleam of insane happiness in the woman’s eyes. Then Beth registered that while my visitor was clad in a gown, it wasn’t the visitor’s shade of green but the lighter shade of a patient, and that she had the color-coded bracelet that indicated a psychiatric patient. Beth, professional as always, did not engage my visitor directly but refused to leave me alone with her. She called an orderly immediately to “escort” the woman back to the psych ward.
    I felt that I had nothing to fear and, in fact, that it was nice to have a little wildness injected into an atmosphere so oppressively sterile. In the few minutes before the orderly arrived, the woman and I continued talking, calmly, while Beth stood in a far corner with a watchful eye. My visitor whispered so that she would not be overheard. “We have a common acquaintance.”
    “I doubt that.”
    “You only saw her once, in a crowd. She can’t speak,” she said, leaning in closer, “but she gave you a clue.”
    “A clue?”
    “‘Haven’t you ever wondered where your scar really came from?’” My visitor reached up to her chest and I thought that she was going to point to the spot where my scar was on my body, but she was only reaching in vain for her missing necklace.
    How could this woman guess precisely the words of the note that had been passed to me at the air show? Still, I am a rational man—this was a strange coincidence, nothing more. To prove it, I tried a little misdirection: “My entire body is a scar.”
    “Not your burns. The scar that you were born with, the one over your heart.”
    At this very moment, the orderly arrived and began the process of cajoling the woman to leave. Beth helped, using her body to deflect my visitor towards the door.
    My voice was not yet strong but I raised it as much as I could. “How did you know?”
    The woman turned back towards me, ignoring the arms pulling at her elbows. “The problem with people like us is that we don’t die properly.”
    With that, the orderly took her from the room.
     

     
    There is a logical explanation for everything; therefore, there was a logical explanation for the woman’s knowledge of my scar.
    First explanation: lucky guess.
    Second explanation: a joke was being played on me by a friend, someone who thought it would be funny to send in an actress playing a psychotic woman with intimate knowledge of my life. The problems with this hypothesis were that I’d never told any of my friends about the Asian woman at the airfield, and that I no longer had any friends left to play