The Port-Wine Stain (21 page)

Ida gasped like a Christian lady whom a drunkard had mistaken for a woman of the streets, while her pious sorority let out various noises descriptive of an unpleasant astonishment. None laid down their forks and spoons, which they grasped as though their bodies had stiffened in a cataleptic trance. The utensils did not shine, either, being as plain as the Calvinists who supped with them. Ida found her voice and raised it in an unchristian and uncharitable howl thrown at me like a stone at the woman taken in adultery. I watched in fascination while her pretty face, made
ugly by what could only be called hate, screwed itself into a hideous mask that might have graced the features of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. The other ladies seated at the table appeared to have gone to sleep.

“What are you doing here, Edward? You're a disgrace to your mother and an offense in the sight of God! What've you been doing? You're covered in filth! You've dirtied the Turkey rug with your muddy shoes!”

She may have railed at me in those words or some others. My brain was soused and my wits were addled. I can't swear to memory's faithfulness. There may not have been a Turkish carpet on the floor; its heathen origin and bright pattern would likely have jarred the boarders' puritanical consciences. Whatever the truth of that night thirty-two years ago, Ida looked at me as if I were one of the Gadarene swine into which Jesus cast the demons that had deranged the wits of a madman. I was muddy enough to look as if I'd spent the night in a wallow. Perhaps the dirt on my face covered the port-wine stain, because Ida made no mention of it, although by its itch I knew it must be increasing, along with my ignominy.

I ate a piece of toast and swilled a cup of tea, which scalded my mouth and made me bellow. The ladies who'd fainted awoke and found a lunatic raging amid needle-worked mottoes enjoining piety and zeal hanging on the walls. Their teacups trembled.

A woman took up her spoon against me, flinging tea like holy water from an aspergillum. “Satan, begone!” she intoned.

“Satan, begone!” the others commanded in unison while,
from the parlor, came a thin-voiced harmonium played by either an unseen boarder or a ghostly accompanist. Each of the sisters piped the old hymn in a reedy voice set to a deranged metronome audible only to herself.

          
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

          
Fast bound in sin and nature's night;

          
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—

          
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

          
My chains fell off, my heart was free,

          
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

It was not their censure, but their caterwauling, that drove me from the house. Its shrill vibrations pursued me through the ether. I took refuge behind a brick wall not unlike one on the other side of the city, behind which the witless lived obedient to laws peculiar to themselves. Soon enough, I'd be joining them.

What should I do now? I asked myself, squatting like a wretched toad.

“Kill Edgar Poe,” replied my skull from its tiny earthen catacomb with only the stone of itself to mark the place.

Idly, I wondered where the rest of me had gone and hoped the rats were not gnawing it—prayed that my remaining portion rested tranquilly in the early-morning light and would not be carried off piecemeal by the dogs. Would the tattooed rope encircling the name Edgar Poe be legible on my arm's yellowing parchment? I could only hope that my unstrung bones would somehow find their way into “Mütter's museum,” there to gather dust for another boy to clean.

“Knock, knock,” said the skull.

“Who's there?” I asked.

“Anna.”

“Anna who?”

“Annihilation.”

Yuk, yuk, yuk!

You look skeptical, Moran. My expulsion from the dining room might not have been so comical or Homeric as I've described it, but I do feel obligated to be entertaining, at least a little; I've not been particularly instructive. I'm telling a story, Moran, one of the uncounted omnibus of tales that compose the world. The poorest of them has the strength of an enchantment.

I hurried to Poe's house, armed with a knife from the boardinghouse table—the sharp one used to cut bread from the loaf. The good ladies of the house would have to use their claws.

I
HAMMERED ON THE
P
OES
' front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn't say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy. Mrs. Clemm opened the door as if I'd been a peddler of bits and bobs or evangelical tracts and not a wild man come to claim her nephew's life.

“Is anything the matter, Mr. Fenzil? You seem overwrought. Would you like some tea?”

I made no answer, but pushed past her into the front room. I confess I knocked the old woman down. Aghast, she shrieked, bringing the neighbors into the street.

“Where's Edgar?” I shouted.

“Not here,” she said, settling her cap back on her head.

I ran upstairs and found Virginia rising from her bed in alarm. “Edward!” she gasped.

“Where is Edgar?”

In an ornate mirror hung above her dressing table, I saw the lurid face of a maniac. It was the face of my doppelgänger as I'd seen it in the morgue, only the port-wine stain was now twice the size of the dead man's.

“He's gone to Mr. Lowell's.” She'd seized a hairbrush of ivory or bone from the bedside table. I suppose she thought to use it against me if I should lunge at her. Poor creature, her small hand trembled. “Edward, whatever's the matter?”

I turned and ran down the crooked stairs and out the door, leaving her to gape at the place where I had stood, a madman in the toils of his mania.

I arrived at the boardinghouse on the corner of Fourth and Arch, where the Lowells were staying. In my disordered mind, the transit from one place to the other seemed instantaneous. I might have been a speeding atom of electricity, for all I knew of the intervening streets. Rarely have I been so unaware of my surroundings—the space and time they occupy. I was that way during my first amputation and have been so during the “little death” that sometimes follows an excess of alcohol or ether. I'm not one of those who employ the term to describe the culmination of sexual congress. I stood in the street, beneath the reeling March sky, and felt an upheaval in my gut and brain.

Waiting for a streetcar, a man and a woman formed a tableau of ordinary life. I felt sorry for them, as one pities those who live in a lesser world of diminished intelligence and sensation. I had “lost my hold of the magnetic chain of humanity,” to steal a line from Hawthorne. He, too, must have believed in Mesmer's theory, which spawned the metaphor. Figures of speech, like myths, outlive the science that precedes them.

You were in the war, Moran, and traveled through the West. You must have killed.

You have. I thought so. One can tell, you know; extremity of emotion confers its own red badge—let's say, a certain look. Your face has it, your missing eye aside. I don't need to be a physiognomist to know that you have taken a life.

Two
lives? They've left their marks on you. Killing is a continental divide in a man's character: on one side, experience, which is just another word for guilt, on the other, innocence, which is guilt in abeyance.

No, no! But thought is prelude to the act, and it marked me, also, as you can plainly see. There was nothing to be seen on the faces of that young couple waiting for a car except stolidity. I mean to say that they looked perfectly ordinary. And what is the perfection of a commonplace existence but nothingness? And so I pitied them while I exulted in a heightened consciousness—the sensorium, if you know the word—that sharpened every perceiving organ and faculty. If I'd been on the college roof that day and the pigeons alive and gibbering, I could have
understood their language, as we will when we reenter paradise, according to the mystic shoemaker Jacob Böhme.

There'd been a storm inside my head—that's a fair way of putting it—and it had blown itself out and, with it, the trash laid down by almost twenty years of ordinary life. I saw—no, I suffered lucidity. Yes—
suffered
it, Moran. I saw clearly what the man and woman stepping into the streetcar did not, or Poe, either, for all his vaunted insight into the mind at its limits. My double would've understood me—perhaps he did understand, if the cable by which we were made fast, one to the other, still held in his underground hell or nothingness. I nearly called to the skull but forbore, having cunning enough not to betray my violent state of mind in the public street—as if it were not obvious from my demeanor and my tousled hair!

Finding the door to the Lowells' rooms unlocked, I entered without knocking and discovered James Russell and Edgar at a large writing desk, each with a pencil poised above a manuscript. Lowell, who did not know me, uttered an involuntary cry.

“Who are you?” said Lowell, having recovered sufficient breath to sputter in astonishment.

“I know him,” said Poe with more presence of mind than the poet and abolitionist had shown. “It's the young man I mentioned in relation to the case of the port-wine stain. What do you want with me, Edward?”

“To murder you,” I said to great effect, I thought, while I brandished the sharp bread knife.

I thought Edgar showed remarkable restraint for the object of so dire a threat. Lowell had retreated across the
room, where he cowered behind an armchair—a very comfortable-looking armchair made cheerful by a pattern of tea roses that, here and there, had been singed by fiery embers of tobacco. I told you I saw things with unusual clarity; you could say a preternatural one.

“Why do you want to murder me?” asked Poe in the most reasonable way in the world. “What have I done to deserve it?”

“You introduced me to my double.”

“Yes, it is a dangerous thing to meet oneself in the person of someone else, especially when the other happens to be dead.”

“He was a murderer!” I exclaimed. “He may be one still!”

Poe gave me an amused smile. His voice still calm, he said, “I'm afraid you've let your imagination run away with you.”

Having grown weak in the knees, Lowell sat abruptly in the chair.

“Is it comfortable?” I asked perversely, but he gave no answer.

“Edward . . .” Poe was about to console me, or else make sport of me.

“You sent me his skull!” I shouted with a child's sudden peevishness.

“It was meant in jest, Edward. As a prank.”

“I know its mind.”

“Its mind?” My oracular tone must have confounded him.

“I think its thoughts, and it thinks mine. It has given
me the wish to murder. I've chosen you, Edgar. It's only right that I should have. Even after having met myself and spoken with my skull, I would still not have dreamed of killing if not for your story ‘The Port-Wine Stain.'”

“You should not have taken my manuscript!” He was incensed by the theft of his writing more than by my threat on his life. You see how vain and self-absorbed a breed these artists are. “You had no right to it!”

“It was about
me
!” I shouted, loudly enough to rattle the windows in their sashes.

“‘Seeking some unknown thing in pain,'” Lowell chimed, quoting one of his own lines.

“I took an incident and made it mine,” Poe continued equably, but the strain of having to maintain his composure told on his face.

“He took you and made you his creature,” whispered the buried skull.

“And try as I might, I cannot find the words to tell it again.” Poe laid a hand on his heart and lamented, “My muse has deserted me.”

What a miserable, conceited ass!

He implored in a woebegone voice, “Please be so good as to return my story.”

“I burned it,” I said, gloating.

“Then it's lost forever.”

“Evermore,” I intoned. “It left me this to remember it by.”

“What?”

“The stain on my cheek!”

“There's nothing there, Edward. You're imagining it. I fear you've lost your mind.”

I lunged at him. The knife was large, and I'd have run him through if not for the timely intervention of a policeman called to the scene by a woman in the rooms opposite. He knocked me senseless with his truncheon.

Philadelphia, March–September 1844

I awoke in what was called, at that time, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, maintained by the Society of Friends, in Frankford, northeast of the old city. How I'd arrived, by what conveyance I'd been whisked there, I could not have said. The chamber where I lay was narrow and chill; the windows were barred, the walls whitewashed and equipped with manacles for the better management of the guest. Thankfully, my brainstorm had subsided, making them unnecessary. I would not have worn them with any grace. After what may have been an hour or only minutes, an attendant appeared before me with a bowl of gruel. I wondered if I had not somehow fallen from Poe's tale into one by Dickens. But the attendant, whose name was Bruno, was kind, and during the six months and a little more that I was at the asylum, I was never abused.

We, the inmates, were treated according to the enlightened practices of our modern age, not as if we'd been possessed by devils, were being chastised for iniquity, or had had our wits turned by a cerebral inflammation or a lesion on the brain—the latter maladies once believed to
be the universal causes of madness. Our reason had been overwhelmed by a perversion of the sensorial functions through which the mind expresses itself. The brain acts wrongly, and the result is a deranged intellect or feeling. The cause of mental alienation none can tell, because no one understands yet how the brain acts as the instrument of the mind. The great principle in the management of insanity, where there is no physical cause, is to direct the mind toward normal trains of thought and states of feeling, by which healthful actions can be excited and reinstated in the brain.