The Port-Wine Stain (19 page)

I went downstairs to the exhibits room. I stood at the window and watched a teamster unload a heavy crate. I admired his strength and envied his ordinariness, although God knows what devils he might have had locked inside him. We are dirty windows, Moran; a little light passes through us—a candle's worth and no more. We are mostly blind to one another. All this time that I've been talking—what, I wonder, have you made of it and how much more remains that will be forever untold and unacknowledged?

Here, then, was the fatal crisis, Moran, when the fever rises but will not break. Here was anxiety raised beyond what can be endured. I wanted to be someone else but knew that it would make no difference if I were. We are beleaguered and estranged; we are, all of us, untouchables. I was a pallbearer for the funeral of all human feeling.

“Edward,” said a voice.

I turned from the window but saw no one.

“Edgar? Holloway?” I called.

There was no one there.

On impulse, I fetched my doppelgänger's skull and sat with it at the table where I'd catalogued many another cranium that had belonged to a man or a woman once living and now dead, a being like myself who had raised a hand in greeting, in anger, or, perchance, in murder. This one, my evil twin's, had thought to kill or had been driven to it, only to have been killed in his turn. Like a good phrenologist, I felt the skull's irregularities: The prominence above the ear indicated anger. I played at physiognomy: The small
chin told of a sensitive being whom the harshness of life might have overwhelmed and cankered. If I'd also had my double's hand, I'd have tried to read its naked palm; I'd have found, if only in my imagination, the line predicting a truncated life, a dangerous journey, a blasted heart. The nails would have been bitten in fear or envy or else broken by work or a life spent clawing out of some dung heap.

Under the influence of Poe's tale of the port-wine stain, I felt the flesh on my face tingle as it will when an eruption occurs—from a pore clogged by an ingrown whisker, for example. I went to the mirror above the sink and looked at my face. Moran, I swear to you, I saw a port-wine stain there! As yet, it was small, only the presage of what would come, in a short while, to cover my cheek—just as it had in Poe's execrable tale. I understood then that a consanguinity existed between the dead man, the murderer whose skull sat leering at me on the table, and myself. What he was, I must also be. What he did, I must, in my turn, do. You can't imagine with what horror I entertained the thought of my eventual overthrow. I returned to the table and took my twin's skull in my hands and gazed deeply into its eye sockets, where light was wont to arrive with pictures—pretty or not—like images carried on the beam of a magic lantern.

Where had they gone? Might they have wormed their way into me—into my brain with its furrows—eating, like worms inside the earth, into the sentient lump where my mind sits and broods? I strained to feel something not my own. I searched my memory for images, words, odors that had nothing to do with Edward Fenzil. In my vexed state
of mind, I began to sense the pneuma of another being. Its
spiritus
. I'd been invaded by this other me, Moran. I was Lucien; he was Louis; we felt each other's pain. We were the Corsican brothers, jumped from the pages of Dumas père into Dr. Mütter's ossuary. Like them, we were joined—my criminal twin and I—by animal magnetism. My God, Moran, the thoughts that tumbled into my agitated brain that winter afternoon would have deranged the sanest man alive!

And then a mad conversation ensued—madder than the one I'd imagined among Mr. Bones, Tambo, and the Interlocutor—a catechism, an interrogation, between my self and my double's skull.

Did he have a name?

I've forgotten it. No, in truth, Moran, I refused to know it, like a woman who refuses to acknowledge a person in the street who has offended her. I did not want to know my other self's name! I feared that, by knowing it, I'd give my twin power over me that might—who knows?—have usurped me.
Me, me, me
—there is no way to tell my tale without seeming vain and self-absorbed. Forgive me, I never meant to go this far. I've admitted much I never said to Walt Whitman or Eakins or to anyone else until now. I must be in need of confession or a purge. A bloodletting, perhaps. The choleric humor must have swamped me in its rancor; must have pickled me, liver and lights. Unless Poe has settled his
spiritus
on me like an inheritance from where he lies moldering. After all this time, I thought I had escaped him.

To pick up the thread where I left off: I conversed with
the skull of my doppelgänger.
Conversed
is more apt for learned intercourse than a lunatic's debate.

          
ME
(angry and fearful):
What is it you want from me?

          
S
KULL
: To size you up.
(Pause.)
To take your measure, then. By now, you realize the strength of the bond between us—the affinity, a word you seem to like. We have an ether in common. It's that which enables us to have this conversation.

          
M
E
: I—

          
S
KULL
: Not I.
We
. And having said “we,” I might just as easily say “I,” meaning me myself.

          
M
E
: Who gave you the right to speak for me?

          
S
KULL
(amused):
Who?

          
M
E
:
What
, then.

          
S
KULL
: You haven't a monopoly on our mutual identity. An identity until now apparently separate and equal. No, Edward, I can just as readily become you . . . drive you out . . . expel and destroy you.

          
M
E
: I'll fight tooth and claw to be what I am.

          
S
KULL
: What are you? You dust the doctor's shelves. You dispose of the bloody
messes he and the other gods make. You yearn for a girl and fuck her fat facsimile. You wander the streets, confused and full of doubt. You drink too much. You fall under the spell of a madman. You let him use you for his own purposes. You're a very flimsy idea of a person, Edward. I, on the other hand, know myself and my strength. It would be nothing for me to take your place. I would do it with no more regret than having crushed a gnat under my thumb. I could do it with the same ease and untroubled conscience.

I was beginning to lose my mind. I might have already lost it. I felt the port-wine stain spreading across my cheek. Soon, I said to myself—while I still had a self to speak to—Soon you will be worse than a madman; you'll have become a character in a madman's fiction.

Don't misunderstand me, Moran: This that I'm telling you now isn't a fable of the old notion of the Bi-Part Soul, nor am I recounting the magnification to an unnatural degree of the empathic faculty or an inadvertent ventriloquism on my part. I hadn't thrown my voice into the skull; the skull had spoken to me—and for my ears alone—and I had spoken to it.

I had not seen Dr. Mütter enter the exhibits room, and I wouldn't have known he was standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder if he hadn't shaken me.

“For God's sake, Edward, what are you saying?” He looked at me as at a person in a fit. “What are you saying to that skull!” he cried.

Mütter hadn't seen a ghastly pantomime, but had overheard my part in a dialogue—his sense of hearing inadequate to the utterances of a talking skull.

I tore my hat and coat from the clothes tree violently enough to make it teeter. I ran up the stairs to the roof, intending to break the thread that tied me to a murderer's thoughts. I stood at the edge of the roof—it might just as well have been the summit of Mount Everest—and waited for the pendulum to decide my fate. I couldn't do it, Moran. For all my faint heart's bluster, I hadn't the courage to step out into the void.

Shamed by my cowardice, I went inside the coop and strode among the bickering birds, like Gulliver in Lilliput, and, with a fury I had not known before, I wrung their necks. A part of me was appalled; another part marveled at the sensation in my hands as, one by one, their gristly necks snapped and, with them, the thread—a slender one, no more substantial than a spider's—that had held them fast to the dirty floor and would have reeled them home in sunlight from the darkness of their wickerwork baskets. Did they feel what Holtz, or Heinz, had felt at the moment of surrendering his neck, for good and all, to a vengeful justice? It's a solemn thing to kill a bird, and I was sorry afterward.

Yes, yes, they were only birds. But it takes only a little more effort, a turn or two of the screw, to kill one of our own kind, Moran. Ordinarily, I'm as sensitive as an oyster,
and my sympathies embrace even an injured bird. But that day, I could have out-Heroded Herod.

I was glad that Mütter hadn't followed me onto the roof. I might have thrown him from it. I could picture him falling in his purple velvet waistcoat with the gold filigreed buttons, the tails of a beautifully tailored cutaway flapping in his headlong rush to ground himself once more and forever to the earth.

I left the little scene of carnage—a miniature version of Ulysses' house in Ithaca after he'd slaughtered Penelope's suitors, or of Niobe's after the gods had expunged her seven sons and seven daughters for some Olympian slight. Classical metaphors, Moran, for our ignoble age. It was only then I noticed the satchel. Unaware, I'd carried it onto the roof and into the coop, set it down to strangle the birds, and picked it up again. I had not noticed the deadweight in my hand, possessed, as I was, by hopelessness and its underside, rage.

What was in the satchel?

Why, the skull, of course!

“Y
OU
'
RE NOT YOURSELF
, E
DWARD
,” said my mother in that querulous tone of voice I hated. “You're distracted and snappish when you're not glowering at the fire or reading those infernal pages. That monster you call your friend has ruined your peace of mind and mine. I would forbid you to see him again, if I thought you'd listen.”

If not myself, then who in the hell am I? I wondered.

“I won't see him anymore,” I said with an involuntary shudder.

That shut her up, I can tell you! We were having dinner, boiled potatoes and some kind of stringy meat that appeared gray by the light of the oil lamps. It may have been gray, even in daylight. I beheld my plate with the disgust ordinarily reserved for the contents of a bedpan. I beheld my mother, with her sharp face, and my brother, with his jowly one, with a like distaste. Not that I didn't have affection for them.

Before my derangement, I'd have been happy to shovel the steaming food into my mouth and glad of their company after a day spent amid human wreckage brought by the tide of death into the college's exhibits room. But the memory of the pigeons—their little corpses on the floor, necks twisted evilly, tiny hearts stilled—made me despise Mother and Franklin both for the simple reason that at that moment in my history I despised myself.
That
, Moran, is the usual way of our species. Our brows are furrowed by doubt; our brains are furrowed by the struggle to think; our affections are a tangled skein impossible to unravel.

My mother lowered her fork, on which a piece of meat—once the exclusive property of a pig, a goat, or, who knows?, a dog; if dog, why not a rat?—was skewered. Do you know of a more revolting word than
meat?

“I'm glad, Eddie. Will you go to church with me on Sunday?”

“My rehabilitation does not extend that far.”

To my own ears, I sounded wonderfully arch. I might have been playing the villain in a melodrama.

“It will do you good,” said my mother, whose ears were either deaf to irony, or plugged up with wax.

“I'm not interested in doing good, neither for my own sake nor anybody else's.”

What a prig I was! What a smug little bastard!

“You ought to get out into the air more,” she said, setting her horrible fork down on the plate so that it rang. “It's unhealthy, that job of yours, to be all day surrounded by monstrosities and deformities. They come of wickedness, Edward—wickedness and a sinful nature. You'll turn into a monster yourself if you're not careful.”

If she'd been a Catholic, she would have crossed herself.

The skull of my doppelgänger sniggered from the leather satchel, where it was shut up in the dark. I looked at Mother and Franklin to see if they'd heard it. Franklin was noisily mashing a potato with a fork, while she fixed me with a stare whose censoriousness was undermined by myopia. I felt tempted to retrieve the skull from the front room and fling it apocalyptically onto the platter, whose leftover meat might have been mistaken for its brains.

“Franklin, why don't you take your brother with you tonight? He's out of sorts. He spends too much time with Mütter's horrors and with that horrible man Poe. It'll be good for him to get out among —”

The phrase “vulgar, coarse, and common men like you” hung unspoken in the air before us. She seemed embarrassed by it. My brother snorted.

Here was a twist, Moran! My mother had always tried to keep us apart, fearing my brother's low morals would corrupt me, the younger of her two sons. Franklin was
twenty-four or twenty-five at the time and had had experiences consonant with his age, with his liking for gin and cards, and with the type of men with whom he rubbed shoulders on the docks.

“What do you say to that, little brother?”

“I'd be delighted!” I replied like a swank.

“Beer and a game of draughts won't harm you, Edward, so long as it's only small beer and you don't wager anything but matchsticks. Do they play draughts at Noonan's, Franklin?”