The Port-Wine Stain (13 page)

Edgar's eyes had closed to rest, no doubt, on an inner vision.

“Finally, we came to the end of it, and the ship entered a zone unknown to me or to my officers. It reminded me—I'd made a study of arcane matters relating to my trade—of a Nubian geographer's account of Mare Tenebrarum, the name given to the Atlantic south of Morocco by fifteenth-century mariners. The Europeans and the Arabs believed it to be the southern limit of the world, a ‘dark sea' impossible to cross. The Portuguese called the point of land that marked it Cabo de Não. The explorer Alvise Cadamosto wrote of that dark, wild ocean, ‘
Quern passar o Cabo de Não, ou tornará ou não':
‘Those who cross it will return or not.'

“But it was not Cape Não on our starboard beam, nor could the ocean have been Mare Tenebrarum, which the Arabs called Bahr al-Zulumat. We had been sailing in the nineteenth century, not the fifteenth. The world's seas and oceans had been charted. I myself had sailed the western coast of Africa many times, and yet, gentlemen, I could not recognize this bedeviled sea, which the wind blew into precipitous crags to make even the most able seamen afraid to go aloft to reef the sails. We plunged into warring currents like a toy boat and were swept with demonic speed around the rims of gigantic whirlpools. The noise terrified us, and we could not make ourselves heard above the din. I believed the ship would shortly founder and go down to the bottom of one of those gnashing maelstroms.

“Suddenly, a black man appeared to us on the water. In a moment, the wind had fallen, the ocean grown calm, and the shuddering
Grampus
, whose stern was buried by the sea,
had righted and shaken off the foam from her sheets and rigging. He came striding across the slack water toward our ship, and, speaking through a grotesque mask in the language of the Yoruba, he demanded that we give up the
Patuxent
's master. I don't know how we understood him, unless we were dreaming actors in what the Yoruba call Odun Egungun, a ceremony in which the Egun is possessed by one of his dead ancestors. We understood that this black man, standing tall and erect beside our hull, was, in fact, the slave who'd been beaten to death aboard the
Patuxent
for some ‘insolence' to her master.

“I handed him over to the black. Why not? He was a brutal slave runner, deserving neither my protection nor my pity. Seamen are an unsentimental lot, Moran, and I was ship's captain, responsible for the lives of all aboard. I pushed the man over the side and watched him sink like a stone under the weight of his chains and his sins. The black man danced, briefly and ecstatically, and then he, too, sank beneath the flat calm of that most unnatural ocean.”

The captain paused. Entranced by memory, he rubbed a thumb across the corner of his gray mustache. It rasped in the silence of the cabin. Edgar's eyes were still closed, and, for a moment, I wondered if he had gone to sleep. You could have heard the woodworms gnawing the bulkhead, so very quiet was it. The captain roused himself from his reverie and quickly finished his tale.

“Shortly, the natural currents reasserted themselves; the wind freshened and filled the sails, which, miraculously, had not been rent by the ferocious winds; and we were once again on course for Lisbon. The
Grampus
spanked along
under a high, clear sky that held not even a memory of the dense fog that had enshrouded her. Having arrived in port, I polished my boots, donned my braided hat and finery, and went to see the admiral's man. I told him nothing about the weird sea or the black Jesus walking on the water. I reported that the
Patuxent
's master had died en route of black water fever, common in the tropics. No one disputed my claim.”

Was the captain's story the truth or a tall tale?

Moran, it doesn't matter.

Phillips drew on his pipe and sent another cloud of smoke into the roiling air. My mind a confusion of thoughts and fancies, I wondered if I had heard the story aright or if I'd imagined it, befuddled by rum and the strong Turkish tobacco. I glanced at Edgar, who seemed in a stupor. If not mine, was the tale his? Had it seeped into my mind from his unconsciousness through the pneuma of the smoky atmosphere? The tale was like one by Edgar Poe. In the years since then, I've read all of his stories to appear in print, but never have I come across one like that which I heard or dreamed aboard the
Grampus
.

We kept silent awhile, as people do who experience something beyond their power to assess. I looked out the stern window, as if I expected an Egun to be walking on the night-blackened Delaware. There was only the water and, moving slowly past our starboard side, a wooden crate, whose contents might have been anything you care to imagine: silks from Japan, opium from China, or a woman's head hacked off in a fit of jealous rage. By night, a river is a sluice for dark dreams . . . an artery feeding the bewildered hearts of men . . . a sewer. I left them to drink
once more to the strangeness of life. I left the ship for the ice-cold air of a February night and walked, brooding over the captain's tale, to a sailors' taproom on Church Street, just beyond the naval yard.

At the bar, I stood beside an ordinary seaman arrived early that morning in Philadelphia after a cruise around the Horn. He'd been to Wake Island and the Philippines aboard the USS
Vincennes
, a Boston-class sloop of war, which had put into the yard for overhaul. I don't recall the man's name, though I told him mine—no, not mine, I'm embarrassed to admit. I told him my name was Edgar Poe. I haven't any excuse to make except that I was not myself at that late hour of the night. Like anyone who has drunk more than is good for him, I was eager to escape the confines of my narrow personality. Wishing to be somebody else, I took the first name that came to mind.

We drank until the barroom, with its maritime decorations and an amateur painting of the naval Battle of Plattsburg, began to gyre and the voices of the other inebriates grew distant. I remember the slap of coins on the bar, the scrape of my stool against the sawdust-strewn floor, the bang of a door, the sting on my face of the cold night air, an icy snuffle, and, outside a tattoo parlor, the hoarse voice of my friend—he was, by now, my boon companion, for whose sake I was prepared to martyr myself to drink—calling loudly through the shuttered window to be allowed inside. The proprietor must have let us in, for I awoke next morning on a broken couch in a corner of his shop with a painful arm and, beneath a scab, the tattoo of a rope looped around the inked words
EDGAR POE.

I told you he had left an indelible stain on me. Here it is, Moran, the livid souvenir of that preposterous night. There is another, which you are kind to ignore. Have you ever in your life met a fool like me?

Yes? Well, you've knocked around the country long enough to have met a boatload of fools and madmen.

I got dressed and walked through the empty early-morning streets to the college, hoping to clean myself up before Mütter arrived. He was already there, however, and, creep as stealthily as I might, he found me out.

“Edward, you look as though you haven't been home to bed.”

“Sorry, Dr. Mütter, I've been on the town,” I mumbled sheepishly.

“With Edgar Poe, I suppose.” His voice was neutral, calm; his eyes revealed nothing.

“Yes, sir. I've been observing him, as you suggested,” I said, without, I hoped, a trace of irony.

“For your enlightenment,” said Mütter.

I nodded soberly.

“There's blood on your shirt.”

I had not wanted to tell him about my tattoo, but there was no help for it. He rolled up my sleeve and saw the evidence of my folly. He neither smiled nor frowned. When he spoke next, I couldn't tell whether he meant to chide me or encourage me. His tone was, if anything, clinical.

“Your empathy is exceptional, Edward, and I commend your dedication. It's dangerous to forget oneself, however; you must know who you are. And you must keep the wound clean until it's healed. I wouldn't want to see you in the pit,
your gangrenous arm in the strap, waiting for my saw. Who would carry it to the incinerator afterward?”

I smiled wanly, feeling an exhaustion stealing over me. I had slept only a little, and that badly. And my damned arm hurt! Had I been alone, I would have cried in pity for myself. I was like someone who sees in the distance a wreck, the great waves washing over its ruined deck, soon to be seen no more. I couldn't see my life whole, couldn't see a future, and did not care to see what I was making of the present. My eyes were on the muddy toes of my shoes. I saw in them a token of my failure and my wretchedness. Well, Moran, I was sick with drink. Dr. Mütter knew I would be useless all the morning.

“You might as well go home and sleep,” he said. “It's Saturday, in any case. I'll see you Monday morning.”

“The pigeons,” I said, remembering my avian subjects on the roof.

“I'll do it. I want to see how they're getting along.”

I was grateful to him. The sight and smell of their guano—a green and oozing mess—would have brought me to my knees in a fit of vomiting. I rolled down my bloodied sleeve, put on my coat and hat, and left, wondering where Poe had spent the night.

O
N THE WAY TO
P
OE'S HOUSE,
I stopped at a lunchroom on Spruce Street and made a breakfast of scrambled eggs and ham, chased with coffee so strong, I feared my spoon would melt. But it was what I needed, or at least my head did, which felt as if it were bound by a slowly tightening iron band. The
ingenuity of the Inquisition has been matched only by our southern overseers and the modern surgeon, whose purpose is surely different but whose methods are much the same.

Did you ever see the “Pear of Anguish,” Moran? It's a grim device of iron spikes, a spring, and a key. An instrument of torture, it's not far removed from the cervical dilator, the tonsil guillotine, or the hernia tool.

All this to say, I had a headache, the body's own chastisement for its abuse. While I sat contritely, eating for my body's good, a young medical student, whom I knew at the college, came into the lunchroom. Seeing me, he asked if he might share my table. My eyes indicated that he could. He did. He spoke his order to the man standing at the stove. He smiled at me in that exaggeratedly affable way of his, which always made me squirm.

“Good morning to you, Fenzil.”

“Morning, Holloway.”

“Nothing doing in the pit or at ‘Madame Tussaud's'?”

He meant, of course, Dr. Mütter's museum.

“I've already been.”

“Unwell, are you? I must say, Edward, you look like hell. If I were a gambling man, I'd wager you were out all night.”

“I was,” I said, unwilling to elaborate.

“I'm on my way home. I was on duty until seven o'clock this morning,” he said self-importantly.

Unconcerned, I went on with my breakfast.

“You know we're all envious of you.”

“Of me?” I said, surprised.

“Of your intimacy with the great man. We mere medical students are seldom honored with his confidences. You
have the god's ear, Fenzil, and the god has yours.” Holloway sighed like an acolyte or a lovesick girl. “Shame about Nathaniel Dickey. And after a brilliant piece of surgery, too! I tell you, Fenzil, we in the gallery were in awe of Mütter that afternoon.”

I wiped the grease from my lips with a threadbare napkin and asked, “What about him?”

“Haven't you heard? The poor fellow did away with himself. I'm surprised you didn't know. Old Meigs said Mütter took it hard.”

“He said nothing to me.”

“No?”

Holloway's eyes shone to find out I was not so much in the doctor's confidence as he had supposed. He smiled in spite of himself and the sad news of Dickey's suicide. Holloway enjoyed childish pranks, like stuffing the fingers of my gloves with phalanx bones or putting a shaving mirror among a row of skulls, so that I'd wince to see my face among the faces of the dead when I went to dust them.

“Why would he do it?” I asked, shaken.

“Don't know,” said Holloway, buttering his toast. “They fished his body out of the river yesterday. The color of a Maryland blue claw, he was. He looked as though the crabs had made a meal of him.”

The students prided themselves on their gallows humor. I looked away in distaste.

Dr. Mütter never did mention Dickey to me, and I knew enough not to pry. I left Holloway to finish his breakfast. At the lunchroom door, I turned in time to see his wolfish smile.

Later, I asked Poe what could possibly have driven Dickey to take his own life.

“Before the operation,” he said thoughtfully, “Dickey was a monster—a prodigy of nature, to be kind. He occupied a category of being all his own, like a gnome or troll—or the Minotaur, solitary on its island, at the center of its Labyrinth. Incomparable, Dickey may have been unmoved by others, their condemnation and disgust. He was a thing to be feared, in the same way as a creature out of myth is feared. Our fear of him gave him strength and a kind of arrogance.”

Poe's fancy seemed absurd and insensitive. In my experience, artists show little respect for human suffering. They're too absorbed by their own creations. Somewhere he wrote, “
The pure Imagination
chooses, from
either Beauty or Deformity
.” In the pages of a tale, one quality is like another: Both produce a single powerful effect on the imagination. Beauty or deformity—it was one and the same to him.

“The operation on his face made him merely ugly in the sight of others and in his own mind, as well,” said Poe, touching his own. “By it, he forfeited his uniqueness, his sui generis condition. He could not stand to see the horror in the eyes of strangers or the pity in the eyes of those who may have loved him. God grant there was someone to love him! It may have been the look on his mother's face that sent him to the river. Mütter made him an ordinary man, and that's what did him in. The mind is a perilous swamp, Edward, worse than Bunyan's Slough of Despond, which refers only to the loss of faith. The loss of reason—now there is a subject for our time! There is no science to
explain it adequately. My tales concern the mind breached and overwhelmed, but what is the anguish of literary characters to that of real men and women?”