The Port-Wine Stain (15 page)

“Forgive me, Ida!” I wanted to shout over the pious heads that separated us, amid the church's drab austerities.

After the recessional hymn, I waited across the street for Ida to come outside. When she did, she was surrounded by seraphim—or so I feverishly imagined. In actuality, they were three young women and a young man dressed in black. Each was clutching a black-bound copy of Holy Writ; each was breathing sanctity; each one seemed to float an inch or two above the dirty pavement. Unworthy, I turned my back on them. I had no idea where I ought to stand in the world: with the saints or the sinners. I liked neither faction. Where did Poe stand? Where did Mütter?

“E
DWARD
, I'
M A DOCTOR
and not a priest!” snarled Mütter. “Matters of the tormented soul are best left to churchmen—or to Edgar Poe and his acolytes.”

I had been hinting at my guilty thoughts and wanted absolution. His and Mary's role in my nightmarish comedy, I kept to myself. I could not scrub my mind clean, Moran! The mind's morgue, where all repulsive thoughts are hidden, had opened wide and said “Amen.”

“The physical world”—Mütter's glance swept its terrible reminders, preserved and neatly catalogued—“should be enough for you and any other would-be man of science!”

Ordinarily tranquil, he shook with anger over all
straitjackets of belief, causing kidney stones to rattle in the emesis basin in his hand. He strove to be brave and enlightened but was afraid that we were tied to God's apron strings by mesmerism. I think he hated the unseen and the imponderable.

Behind glass, the specimens, gross and inviolable, leered.

“You left before our friend had finished reading—left in a hurry,” said Mütter. He had set the basin down and wished to change the subject. “I nearly followed you, but I couldn't decently leave Mary to suffer Poe's charnel fancies without an escort.”

“I suddenly felt sick,” I said, putting on a pitiable mask.

“Ah! Then your escape had nothing to do with the tale he had chosen to read us.”

I couldn't tell if he meant to mock me or to console me.

“Not at all.”

“It was a disturbing piece. I wouldn't have blamed you for leaving—not after the unpleasantness at the Thanatopsis Club. I could almost hear your story in his. It shook me, I don't mind telling you. It left me with a feeling of profound unease. I can't imagine what it must have meant for you to hear it.”

What does he want with me? I asked myself. I nearly taunted him with Nathaniel Dickey's suicide, but I knew it was not in my interest to rub salt in the wound, if wound there was. He went on relentlessly.

“Did you go home?”

“I went to visit a whore,” I said, to be vicious and adult.

He smiled again and said, “In your opinion was she satisfactory?”

I shrugged—forlornly, no doubt. I was unequal to his Monday-morning peevishness, whose cause, on this occasion, I couldn't imagine. Dr. Mütter could be cruel, like anyone who has charge over others—their living and their dying.

“Edward, I've been worried about you lately. I know I asked you to keep close to Mr. Poe for the furtherance of your knowledge of . . . the pathological mind, shall we say? The experience of knowing him ought to be enriching. But I begin to see the telltale marks of too great a strain on your psyche: the tattoo, your flight from the theater, your debauches. Now you boast of having visited a certain house. I'd hoped the association with him would begin to steel you to aspects of the world—a harsh and merciless place—you will increasingly encounter. A doctor must attempt the impossible: to get close to another human while keeping his distance. If you can't, Edward, you'll be destroyed like so many of Edgar Poe's characters are. Like the man himself will be one day. Mark my words, Edward: No good can come from such a life or such a mind as his.”

“Should I keep clear of him?” I asked. Frightened, I meant the question sincerely.

“I'm afraid it's too late for that.”

“Why is it too late?”

“The connection between you has grown too strong.” He winked at me. “You're tied till death do you part. If Edgar's right and we carry on beyond the grave, not even that will separate you.”

“Meaning?” I asked in vexation.

“Even a dead frog can be made to jump if its hind leg is connected to a galvanic battery.”

Mütter liked to play the Sphinx.

We went up onto the roof. The east wind freshened, bringing with it the complex odors of tidal water, coal smoke from the steamers, fish and mussels on their way to the inevitable end of all things. In spite of my winter clothes, I trembled with cold.

“In the latest issue of
Chirurgical Journal
, I read an extract from a new book by Søren Kierkegaard,
Begrebet Angest
, which argues that the grant of inalienable freedom burdens us with choice. Obliged to choose and finding it difficult, we experience dread.” I must have looked perplexed, because he continued with an illustration. “A man stands on the roof of a building like this one. Having come to the edge, he's afraid to fall, and, at the same time, he feels an urge to jump.” Strange, that Poe should have used this example in one of his tales. “The tension produced by this harrowing choice Kierkegaard calls ‘angst.' Do you feel anxious, Edward, standing at the edge?”

He must have mistaken my shivering for fear.

“No, I'm cold.”

He looked amused. We went inside the coop and listened to the complaints of our diminutive subjects while they marched about the floor on the red twigs of their legs.

“What do you think, Edward? Are they also burdened by choice?” He nodded at the pigeons, which were chuckling over some secret. “No, I don't think so,” he said, sadly answering his own question. “They don't choose to fly home; they just do. Whether it's at the behest of instinct, gravity, magnetism, or predestination, I don't know.”

He had spoken almost brutally. Had his words been
knives, the coop would have resembled a bloody shambles. I think he knew even then that his search for a higher, sovereign faculty would fail.

“Poe's fictional characters remind me of our pigeons. They don't appear to choose, either. They're governed by something outside themselves. In ‘William Wilson,' he wrote, ‘. . . I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.' I'd give a great deal to know why we do what we do.”

We left the pigeons to themselves—to hatch their young or their conspiracies, to tune their harps or break their compass needles, to exult or to sharpen the tooth of nostalgia. In a show of bravado, I walked to the edge of the roof and stood there with my arms outstretched like a funambulist on the high wire, daring myself to fall or a raw wind to rise up and topple me or the God of the Calvinists to hurl me down onto the cobblestones amid swirling wraiths of snow. I waited for the galvanic battery to make me twitch!

“Is it to be the pit or the pendulum?” asked Mütter.

“I want to be someone else,” I groaned.

Have you never felt it, Moran? That you wanted, for once, to defy fate, destiny, accident, or whatever it is that hunts us, even if it should mean destruction? Poe called it “perverseness.” Of course, you have; it's written on your face.

“If you were a bird, Edward, you could jump and be upheld,” said Mütter—kindly, I thought.

But I was not a bird, and I would fall.

Philadelphia, March 1844

In early March, I received an invitation from the Thanatopsis Club to meet two nights later at one of the city's morgues. You can see it on the wall, next to my diploma from Jefferson Medical College and a commendation from William Hammond, surgeon general of the Union army during the time of the great slaughter. I've saved the invitation to recall the exact day in which my wits were turned. Edgar enjoyed such jests as this funereal card, bordered in black, which he sent me in care of the college.

PRIVATE VIEWING

T
HE
C
OMPANY OF
M
R
. E
DWARD FENZIL
,
OF
B
ATHTOWN
, N
ORTHERN
L
IBERTIES
, I
S
R
EQUESTED AT THE
M
ORGUE ON
C
ALLOWHILL
S
TREET
, O
N
T
HURSDAY
E
VENING
, M
ARCH
7, 1844,
AT
10
O'CLOCK.

THE THANATOPSIS CLUB

E
DGAR
A. P
OE,
F
OUNDER
& P
RESIDENT

I arrived at the appointed hour to find Edgar already there, together with Nergal, the rat catcher; Bao Zheng, the hangman; Yama, the coroner; and Orcus, the morgue attendant of the long beard and uncommon height. The latter greeted me as any host would a guest, although he did not offer to escort me through his damp domain, pointing out the novel appliances peculiar to his profession. He left the civilities to Edgar.

“I'm pleased you decided to join us, Mictlantecuhtli,” he said.

Poe—remember—had named me after the god of the lowest Aztec hell, who'd worn a necklace of human eyes. Ironic, isn't it, Moran, in that you lost one of yours to Confederate shrapnel? I'd ask you to drink to the strangeness of life if it weren't too early in the morning even for reprobates to indulge.

“I nearly didn't come,” I told him, smarting still at the memory of my initiation into the rites and mysteries of the end of time that arrives to each and every one of us, a rehearsal for the harrowing last act of the play called
Man
. But, like a man who puts on a suit of armor and leaves the safety of the castle walls, I'd fortified myself and gone into the midst of my enemies to show them I was unafraid.

Did I think of Edgar Poe as an enemy?

An enemy one becomes captivated by, perhaps.

Damn it, Moran! I think we
should
make a libation. What will you have? Rye, gin, rum, or stout, which is the most nourishing of the four sacred tipples.

Stout it is! Mind the foam. To the strangeness of life and the confounding of Death in all its grim guises!

Let us return to the dread precincts of Death, the morgue, whose smell I recall in the sharp stinging in my nostrils produced by this blessed concoction of grain, hops, and yeast. You remember the smell, Moran. “Death's bouquet,” we called it. You were in the Armory Square Hospital, where Whitman nursed his boys. Let's drink to the “wound dresser” and Good Gray Poet!

The morgue was subject to a “creeping damp”; in a short
while, the chill of it had invaded the marrow of my bones. I would have liked nothing more than to rush out into the street, which, wet and cold with an early-March rain, was still less miserable than this. Even now, the memory makes me think of “The Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar's tale of entombment in the catacombs of the Montresors, gleaming phantasmagorically with niter. I coughed just as poor Fortunato had done as he was goaded by deceit and his own base appetite down the stone steps to the chains that had been prepared to receive him. This was not one of the “waiting mortuaries” favored by the Germans, where the deceased's body is laid, with a bell pull tied around its wrist, until decomposition should settle the question of its death. The Callowhill morgue was the anteroom of the grave, sharing in its dankness, mold, and penetrating chill. With the gaslights licking the stone walls, I might as easily have called it “hell's vestibule.” Faint of heart, I was determined to keep my uneasiness from the fraternity of ghouls. Several bottles of “embalming fluid” kept them warm and sociable. I was relieved that no one had brought the ether bottle; a combustible in that close space would have put us all to sleep or blown us to kingdom come.

“In English, the French word
morgue
means ‘to look at defiantly,'” said Edgar, swaggering like a music hall impresario. “We are, all of us, equal to the meaning of the word. A test of nerves, however, is not the reason we are gathered here tonight. Mr. Buffone—pardon me . . .
Orcus
, warder of this dismal establishment, has made a discovery of vital interest to our newest member. Edward, I recommend fortification before brother Orcus proceeds.”

Poe's roundabout prologue was beginning to anger me. I glared at him, but he had taken his own advice and was throwing a glass of gin down his gullet. He smacked his mustached lips, wiped them on the back of his hand, and then went on as before.

“Two days ago, in the Southwark district of our fair city, a man, after having murdered a shopkeeper, was shot dead by a constable. The deceased was thrown into a Black Maria and unceremoniously transported here to await claimants. None has stepped forward, doubtless ashamed to admit a familial connection to a strangler, and the body, therefore, will shortly be put to bed in a pauper's grave, there to begin the death sentence administered by Conqueror Worm. Orcus, an astute fellow, noticed—was it immediately?” Orcus nodded. “Orcus noticed
immediately
that the corpse bore—“

Poe had stopped in mid-sentence to enhance the suspense. I felt as the hanged man must have when he made his slow, final voyage toward the ground beneath the gibbet.

“What're you trying to say, Edgar!” I shouted, loudly enough for me to hear my impatience echo from the damp walls.

He waved his hand in the direction of the mortuary attendant, who, with the flourish of an artist about to unveil a new sculpture, whisked a white sheet from a cadaver that had been lying unnoticed among the city's recently departed. You can't begin to imagine the horror with which I beheld, lying on a slab, a dead man who was the very image of myself.

“Behold the doppelgänger!” Poe shouted in a weirdly
ecstatic voice, as if the secret of the universe were to be seen lying on the stone and not the withering remains of my dead facsimile.