The Port-Wine Stain (16 page)

I don't know what dramatic effect Poe intended to produce by this dumb show, whether horror or religious awe. His “untouchables” were halted in whatever they were about to do: drink another draft of liquor, mostly, their mouths opened, revealing missing or bad teeth. They were silenced; all of us were, for the moment, silenced, even the pantomime's author and his collaborator, Buffone. I thought I heard the sound of water dripping onto stone, but it might have been only in my mind that it fell. Someone coughed—it could have been I who coughed—and we were brought back with a jolt to the contemplation of my dead twin. We were alike in every particular except for a port-wine stain on his cheek.

“Damn me, if he's not the spitting image of Edward!” the coroner cried enthusiastically.

His opinion in matters of mortality was considered to be authoritative; he had the last word on the subject.

“He is
that
!” The rat catcher sniggered for a reason best known to outcasts who bore the peculiar stink of their repulsive trade.

Poe nodded toward the attendant, who produced a camera and tripod from another room.

“Stand the fellow up!” commanded Poe, and our burly hangman raised the dead body to its feet. “Stand beside your doppelgänger,” Poe said to me in a voice that could not be gainsaid.

I stood next to my dead other—my blood turned cold in my veins, like his—and, after having turned the gaslights
up to flood the room with a garish and an unnatural brilliance, Orcus began to fumble with the lens.

“Stand still!” he ordered.

In that my double would never move again of his own volition, I knew he meant me.

“Now don't move a muscle until I've counted to fifty.”

I assumed a pose as rigid as my twin's while Edgar rubbed his hands gleefully, like a boy who has just smoked out a nest of wasps.

“. . . forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” said Orcus, covering the camera's lens.

Had the earth vomited instead of me, trees would have been uprooted and mountains torn from its bowels. As I'd done after my premature burial, I rushed out into the street, determined to put as much distance between my other self and me as I could that night.

I paused in my homeward flight outside the city's House of Refuge and leaned against its rough stone wall to catch my breath.

“Take my hand,” a shadow adjured me—not a shadow, but a man standing in one.

He stumbled toward me with his hand outstretched. He was an old man, even an ancient one, dressed bizarrely like a character in a Washington Irving tale: a pigtail tied with a ribbon, a tricornered hat, an antique cloak, an old-fashioned frock coat, knee breeches, and buckled shoes. In spite of myself and my recent shock, I laughed at the strangeness of the apparition. He was not insulted. Perhaps he hadn't noticed my derision. He repeated that I should take his hand. I did and felt a thing as dry and bony as a
stick. I flinched and would have taken back my hand, but he held it fast in his own.

“When I was a boy,” he said in a distant, quavering voice, “I saw General Washington ride down Market Street on his white horse, Nelson. I saw Ben Franklin on his way to the Grand Convention. I heard the bells ring for the reading of the Declaration of Independence. All that is in me from those days is now in you. Memory is electric, like what's stored in the brass ball of Franklin's electrostatic machine, waiting for its spark to jump from one mind into another's.”

Holding his hand, I thought I had felt the spark.

He let go of mine and looked at me curiously. “They say I'm mad,” he said.

He stepped back into his shadow and was gone—to Sleepy Hollow, perchance, to dream some more.

I
WAS FINISHED WITH
P
OE
and resolved not to see him again, even if it should cost me Dr. Mütter's patronage. Two or three weeks had passed, and I began to feel safe from him and his baleful influence, when, while dusting the skulls on the shelf, I happened to see my own—that is, my twin's. Striking out wildly, I broke a jar in which a fetus had been swimming; it slipped out and came to rest in a puddle on the floor. I was beside myself! Wouldn't you have felt the same, Moran, to see yourself rendered down to bone, grinning back at you? I must have shouted in dismay, because Mütter came hurrying into the exhibits room, a dissecting scalpel in his hand.

“What is it, Edward?” he asked, and, in spite of my consternation, I was pleased to hear a genuine concern beneath his gruffness.

Speechless as the skulls themselves, I pointed to my doppelgänger's. Clenched between its teeth—the slack jaw bandaged shut—was a paper inscribed in India ink with these words:

EDWARD A. FENZIL

BORN DECEMBER 29, 1824

DIED MARCH 5, 1844

Mütter laughed. I suppose to him the joke was irresistible. “It's a student prank, Edward. In the worst of taste, of course, but our young men are a rowdy, childish lot. I shouldn't let it distress you.”

“You don't understand,” I said, tremors passing through me like an electric current.

“What don't I understand?” asked Mütter.

“It's my skull bone sitting on the shelf—or it might as well be.”

Then I told him the story of the encounter with my doppelgänger in the Callowhill morgue, my gaze fixed in fascination on a drop of blood resisting gravity at the edge of Mütter's scalpel. While I spoke, there was in me a voice that asked to know what kind of blood it was. A rat's? A dog's? A pigeon's? Or was it human blood? One looks like another to the naked eye. I suppose it's only from the quantity of blood—its profusion—that we can guess its source without benefit of a body. My mother had been surprised when a colored boy, son of a stable hand, had cut his finger on
broken glass. Friends, we'd been throwing stones at empty bottles. Later, she said that she would never have guessed a black person's blood could be red like ours.

When I'd finished my panicked recitation, Mütter replied with a reasonableness meant to comfort me. “The light in the morgue is treacherous, Edward, and you may, in fact, have borne only slight resemblance to the dead man.”

His composure enraged me, for I had lost mine completely.

“From what you've told me, your friends are not above playing a practical joke, either. With rouge and chalk, an embalmer could produce the desired effect in that starkly lighted place where one might almost expect to see ghosts. Smartly done by an able man, the illusion could have persuaded a far less susceptible person than you of its reality.”

“I looked exactly like him,” I said doggedly. “He looked exactly like me. We looked exactly like each other except for the blemish on his cheek.”

“Let me grant you, then, that you did see your double.” He was all patience and reason. “What of it? While the chances are slight, the encounter is not impossible. I don't doubt that there exists, for some of us anyway, a likeness that may even, in rare instances, be perfect. The world is large, and there are a great many people in it. Doppelgängers may be among them. I further grant you that to meet one's own in a morgue, at night, in such fantastical company would be terrifying. But the encounter does not signify that your life is at risk either from harm or damnation. There may be doppelgängers, but Poe's use of the idea in ‘William Wilson' is
absurd. He based his tale on an impossibly evolved affinity where to kill one's double is to kill oneself. It's laughable!”

I did not laugh, but I thought it best to pretend to Dr. Mütter that his logic had convinced me of my childishness. Satisfied as much with himself as with me, he returned to the dissecting room, while I went to the pit to observe Dr. Chapman operate on an ulcerated artery after a second hemorrhaging brought on by a night of “excess,” meaning whiskey and women. The patient, an ironmonger, had been shot six days earlier and, having had the wound dressed by a barber-surgeon, never realized that his earthly vessel would shortly be unstoppered and his life's blood let to spill onto the floor. I did not see him go. I was preoccupied by the mortal danger in which I found myself—and would soon lose myself. When the corpse had been removed, I went into the pit and mopped. Watching the red strings of the mop turn the water in the pail to blood, I thought of old Aaron's parlor trick.

By the afternoon, I had almost forgotten my doppelgänger when, having taken the specimen book from the shelf in order to catalogue a prodigious gallstone, I happened to turn to the osteological pages and saw my name and entry written there:

          
Name, age: Edward Arthur Fenzil, 19

          
Gender: Male

          
Place of Origin: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

          
Cause of Death: Delirium tremens and moral degeneracy

          
Description: Port-wine stain on cheek. Warder of Mütter's monsters

Holloway! No one else would have carried the joke, if joke it was meant to be, to this extreme. Enraged, I went in search of him. At that moment, I wouldn't have cared if Dr. Mütter had come into the room with George Washington's brain on a tray to be pickled and catalogued. Goddamn Holloway! I could have filleted him with the nearest scalpel. I found him sitting in a quiet corner of the medical library, smoking a cheroot.

“Goddamn you!” I shouted in his face, whose mouth, after the cigar had been removed, relaxed into a grin.

“What is it now, Fenzil? Has one of your skeletal exhibits run off?”

I hit him. I saw the blood come out on his upper lip, soaking a portion of his dandified mustache. I saw him remove a white handkerchief from his pocket and daub at it. The blood—so crimson!—made a rose-shaped stain on the linen. A small gray rose of ash had fallen from the end of his cigar. My anger spent, I was suddenly calm.

“You oughtn't to have done that, you know,” he said.

For a moment, I thought he meant to slap my cheek and challenge me to a duel: scalpels at twenty paces, lancets at dawn. But he was too taken aback and much too craven for charades.

“Where did you get it, Holloway?”

He knew what I meant. “A friend sent it over last night while I was on duty.”

“What friend?”

“Buffone, the hairy attendant.”

I was surprised that he would know such a person.

“I make it a point to cultivate friends in low places,”
he said smugly. “I don't expect to have a brilliant career doctoring, Fenzil. I'm just a muddler. If I didn't have a few good friends in
high
places—or, rather, if my father didn't—I wouldn't be enrolled here at all. Father has his heart set on my following in his footsteps. To be frank, mine isn't in it. I'm sure to botch things once in a while, and I wouldn't want my ineptitude becoming common knowledge. You know what they say: Dead men tell no tales, but the coroner, the mortician, and the morgue chap will unless you're on good terms with them. You might say I'm an honorary Eschatologist.” He laughed, delighted with himself. “They appreciate the occasional gift of a bottle—doesn't matter what so long as it scalds the inner man. Now if you'll forgive me, Fenzil, I need an astringent and a sticking plaster.”

“Then you know Edgar Poe?” I asked as he removed his bulk from the depths of the chair with a creak of leather.

“Everybody in the ‘underworld' knows Thánatos.”

“Did he put Buffone up to it?”

Holloway shrugged and said, “You have to find that out for yourself.”

He left me alone in the room, with only the ghost of his tobacco smoke to mark his having been there.

Holloway died this year. His heart. He grew to be enormously fat! He was also in the gallery when Eakins made his preliminary sketches for
Dr. Gross's Clinic
. I was pleased to no end when I saw that Holloway had been left out of the final painting.

               
“Revenge, revenge,” Timotheus cries,

               
“See the furies arise,

               
See the snakes that they rear,

               
How they hiss in their hair,

               
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!”

Sorry, Moran, I've not much of a singing voice. But Handel knew the delicious meal that malice sometimes makes.

That night, I returned to the morgue to confront Buffone. The negro grave digger was with him. They were sharing a bottle of Old Tom gin without bothering to wipe its mouth on their sleeves. I always thought that drunkards were the true democrats.

Buffone set the bottle down on an empty slab and shouted, “Mictlantecuhtli!”

“My name is Fenzil,” I said. My scowl went unnoticed where faces of pain, fear, regret, and protest were commonplace.

“Mr.
Fenzil
, please forgive me,” he said, bowing genteelly in an alcoholic befuddlement. “You are correct inasmuch as the Thanatopsis Club has not been called into session. Having put aside, for the moment, our divine natures, we are met here tonight as ordinary friends.”

“I'm not your friend.”

“No? Acquaintances, then. We are acquaintances—there's no disputing the fact. Am I right, Young Werther?” he asked the negro. “He was named thus by his
ol' massa
for his sorrows. His
massa
was a southern gentleman who taught the classics of literature to little southern
massas
and gents in English, German, French, and, if I'm not
mistaken, Greek. My friend has sorrowed a great deal. You've sorrowed a great deal, haven't you, Young Werther? Sorrowed and suffered.”

The grave digger indicated that he had sorrowed and suffered.

“He's no longer young, of course. His sorrows have aged him, turned his woolly pate white. White like the hair of a southern gentleman at a dignified time of life.” Buffone took another drink from the gin bottle and then thought to offer me some. I declined. “What do you want here?” he asked, his tone sharpened by my look of distaste.