by Norman Lock
He laughed, and I did, too, to be agreeable. I was not happy with the conversation and changed it.
“What will you have me do today, Dr. Mütter?”
“Please excuse me, both of you,” said Mary, rising from the table. “I must see Cook. Will you be home for dinner, Thomas?”
“Yes.”
“Anything special you’d like?” she asked her husband, tucking a stray wisp of hair inside her old-fashioned “Sally cap.
“A shank of beef would be very nice, and some boiled potatoes.”
Mary nodded, smiled politely at me, and withdrew to the kitchen.
“She does not like to hear the hospital discussed, in case I should forget myself and mention some grisly business. She is delicate.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“I’m expecting several specimens from the city morgue. There are the pigeons—and Dr. Meigs has agreed that you shall give him whatever assistance you can this afternoon in the pit. I’m grooming you, my boy.”
“I’m very grateful to you, sir.”
“Don’t disappoint me. And consider Mr. Poe as having a role to play in your education if for no other reason than he will afford you the opportunity to study the pathological mind firsthand.”
“I’ll keep an open mind, sir.”
“Good fellow!”
Morning crept into the room with the obsequiousness of a medical student approaching the chief of surgery. Conversation adjourned, I gave myself up to the luxury of silence. I would have been content to remain so; Mütter, however, had something on his mind.
“Not long ago, Poe came to me with the most astonishing request: He wanted me to allow Menz to mesmerize one of my patients, Ernest Valdemar, who, he had found out through one of his cronies, was dying of Bright’s disease. It was, he said, to be in the nature of an experiment—one I could, conceivably, profit from. He intended nothing less than to discover, through the dead offices of poor Valdemar, ‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns.’ There was something in Edgar’s face—a shame-lessness that made me shudder.
“‘Would you go even there to satisfy your curiosity?’ I asked him.
“Poe smiled and said, ‘There is nowhere I wouldn’t go to learn the truth of the matter.’
“I’m a doctor, Edward. I’ve done things to make the anti-vivisections howl and virtuous young ladies blush. I’ve done them—sometimes reluctantly—for the advancement of science and the medical arts. My curiosity is not an idle one. I acknowledge the inviolable mystery of death and the proprieties surrounding it. I’ve dissected corpses, but I would not put a telegraph key into a dying man’s hands and await his dispatches from the Other Side.”
I made no answer, having none.
“Strange, these fellows whose life seems all in the mind,” said Mütter as we rode in a cab toward the medical college. “From what I’ve read about Edgar, he’s done little during his thirty-five years on earth. Oh, he was in the army—at Fort Independence, in Boston Harbor, and, later, in Charleston, where he was—fabulous coincidence!—an ‘artificer,’ meaning an enlisted man who assembles artillery shells. He would become an artificer of quite a different sort. Did you know he’d enlisted under an assumed name? Edgar A. Perry. I’ve known Poe only a short while, but I sense an instability in his character, a crisis of identity. It is often the case for orphaned children accepted into another’s household. Good God! Edgar’s birth parents were actors! What chance did he have to be his own person? You noticed last night how, when Menz asked the audience for volunteers, Poe did not offer his services. You’d have thought that a writer of the fantastic would have jumped at the chance to experience the trance state . . . to have let his mind sleep in order to know what dreams would follow. I watched him closely and saw on his face a contest between curiosity and fear.”
“Fear of what?” I asked as the cab clattered into the college courtyard.
We walked across the wet stones and went inside the building.
“Of losing himself. You seemed to have no such fear last night when you kissed yourself in the mirror.”
“I’m ashamed.”
“You needn’t be. You are irresistible.”
Mütter laughed, and for a moment, I hated him.
Inside the laboratory, he put the kettle on for tea. The room was not yet warm, and we kept our coats buttoned up. It was the first of February; winter stretched before me, a gray and limitless prospect. Nourishing myself on a warming draft of self-pity, I imagined myself as one of Franklin’s men, cold and miserable on the polar ice. I drizzled a little water on the plants, though they were past reviving.
“Poe lives his life in his own pages,” said Mütter, opening the wooden chest of the Earl Grey he favored above all other teas. “Maybe that’s sufficiently lively. I’d give a good deal of what I own to know where his words come from.”
I didn’t much care, but I pretended otherwise. Dividing his attention between the teapot and his train of thought, Mütter continued.
“We say ‘from his muse’ or, just as enigmatically, ‘from out of thin air’ because we haven’t a clue. If they are carried to him—a gift—by the spiritus or pneuma—call it what you like—in whose mind do they originate? A god’s? A devil’s? The Demiurge’s? They have to come from someone or somewhere, Edward. We’re bounded by a nutshell, and the imagination can only grope toward its congenital limitations. I fear we shall never know the origin of words, ideas, the ideal forms, any more than we’ll fathom the mystery of the homing pigeon, regardless of how many tiny brains I will slice.”
I was glad that my imagination was pedestrian. I wanted nothing to do with muses, no matter how pretty and seductive, with ghostly dictation, or with any other enigmas of a writer’s secret and unhappy life.
“What is a doppelgänger?” I asked him, remembering the word Poe had used to ridicule me. The thought of my public humiliation on the stage of the Athenaeum the night before still rankled.
“An alter ego, a double, an evil twin, as in Edgar’s story ‘William Wilson.’ To see oneself mirrored by another can be unnerving. But I shouldn’t worry, Edward! Such unnatural phenomena belong to the world of gothic fiction—and, of course, in ‘Mütter’s museum.’” He laughed good-naturedly. “I know what the students say of me.”
“Then you don’t believe it’s possible?” I found myself needing his assurance.
Say what he liked, I had seen my double and embraced it. It was nothing more than a parlor trick, like one of Benjamin Franklin’s “electricity parties” when the hair of his delighted guests would be made to rise by the cranking of an electrostatic generator or the discharge from a Leyden jar. But I had been in a trance, and mightn’t I—by conjuration or suggestion—have been . . . I don’t quite know how to put it, Moran, without sounding foolish or hysterical. In the lurid limelight, could I have become two persons, if only for an instant? Could my personality, which was thought to be inalienable and indissoluble, have split in two like Nathaniel Dickey’s face before his surgery? On the Athenaeum stage, could I have given something of myself away?
“Do I believe that, somewhere in the world, one’s double might exist?” said Mütter. “I would not say no, not absolutely. Chances are, in rare instances, doppelgängers do exist. Probability favors them. But the idea that one of the pair is an ill omen or a malignancy is utter nonsense. This is the year 1844, in an age of scientific progress! We have the telegraph, railroads, and daguerreotypes. I hope to see the day when a general anesthetic more reliable than ether or nitrous oxide will make our work painless.”
We drank our cups of tea, and then Mütter left me to get on with the cataloguing of a fine specimen of pauper’s brain. At noon, I went onto the roof to feed and water the birds. While there, Edgar Poe appeared like an apparition. Remembering my promise to Dr. Mütter to keep him under observation, as I would any interesting type, I dissembled my irritation.
“The good doctor said I might come up and see for myself you
r ‘kingdom,’” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he meant to mock me once again, but I smiled and introduced him to my subjects: two red-check hens, a pretty white, a gray, a blue, and a calico cock.
He listened to their peevish grumbling as they pecked at feed in an almost indifferent manner, like housewives unwilling to betray their admiration for a grocer’s wares. Already, I’d grown to like “my” birds. You’d never guess that they had character—personalities, even—to see them, at the edges of your attention, waddling in the street or roosting under a railway bridge. Poe must have seen it immediately.
“They remind me of soldiers on furlough,” he said, recalling a private memory of army life, perchance. “Dr. Mütter says he hopes to find out how they navigate.”
“That’s right,” I said, carelessly picking molt from my trouser leg.
“By tiny compass. You must look for a miniature pocket, Edward.” He went to stand by the window, where the homing birds might enter, and looked down into the street. The college building was four stories in height, and the view of the city took one’s breath away. “Standing here, I’m reminded of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. ‘Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’” How would you have answered the devil, Edward?”
“I’d tell him to go to hell.”
“A straightforward answer,” said Poe, and then he added thoughtfully, “I wonder if I would’ve answered likewise?”
“Aren’t you a Christian?” I asked, made to feel uneasy once more by his unorthodoxy. I was never what you’d call a good Christian, Moran—not of the churchgoing and hymn-singing variety. Not like Ida or my mother or even my brother, Franklin, who would go to church on Sunday morning after a glorious carousal the night before.
“I believe in God and all the principalities and powers of light and darkness,” said Poe. “I believe in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Whether or not it can be regained is another story.”
Always, he came back to literature, Moran, as surely as a homing pigeon does its coop.
“If Satan were to offer me knowledge . . . if he would show me the secrets of the human heart . . . tell me why we are as we are and behave as we do . . . Nathaniel Hawthorne has sent me a new tale, which is apposite to what we’ve been talking about.”
With the theatricality of an actor, he recited a passage from memory. His back to me, he seemed to be speaking to passersby in the street, who, had they bothered to look up, would have thought him a madman or a prophet announcing ruin.
“‘. . . before Ethan Brand departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the fiend each laboring to frame the image of some mode of guilt, which could neither be atoned for, nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of light upon the mountain-top, the fiend crept in at the iron door, there to abide in the intensest element of fire, until again summoned forth to share in the dreadful task of extending man’s possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven’s else infinite mercy.’”
Edgar stood there gazing at the street, while I pretended to fuss over the birds and the appliances of their small domicile. Again, I felt a fascination for him growing in me like a cyst that would prove to be either benign or malignant. Dr. Mütter was right—he was nearly always so: There was an affinity between us, and I could not flee Poe, his influence, no matter how far I might run. And here we two were now, standing three feet apart, framed by the wide world and all its strangeness, with the little world of the pigeon coop at our feet, equally strange and marvelous. I knew in my heart I’d be obedient to his will and whims. He was my fiend and I his Ethan Brand. Even at this moment, Moran, I feel Poe’s eyes on me, though he’s been in his grave for more than a quarter of a century.
“Come with me tonight, Edward,” he said casually, but I felt an injunction in his words.
I nodded, not caring to ask where. Unannounced destinations were part of the allure of my winter with Edgar Poe.
“I’ll stop for you here, at the college’s front gate, at half past six. We’ll have a bite of supper and then be on our way.”
I asked no questions.
“We’ll be attending a small gathering of friends,” he said, his back again turned to me. “Some very interesting fellows.”
He left me to the solitude of my charges. They paid me no heed, existing for themselves alone, in their own universe of appetite, desire, and—who knows?—thought. They have brains—I’ve seen and weighed them. How else can they navigate with the skill of a mariner armed with a sextant? Even if they ride the mesmeric currents, they must—in my opinion—think.
That afternoon, I joined Dr. Meigs and his assistants in the surgical theater. To say that I was one of them would be untrue. I was only at the beginning of the road that would lead me to this Camden practice, tending Whitman’s pleurisy. The stations of my particular cross have been painful enough: A man can’t amputate in the field and not suffer more than a little, regardless of how he might try to distance himself by taking refuge in aesthetics. Strange word! But it’s true, Moran. We doctors see beauty in a clean incision, a neat suture, even in the cauterized stump of flesh that will heal.
Dr. Meigs performed a trephination that afternoon. A hod of Belgian bricks at a building site had fallen on a mason’s head. Meigs opened the skull and scraped out the bone splinters. While he worked, he told us of a reproduction he’d once seen of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Extraction of the Stone of Madness. A medieval doctor, wearing a funnel hat, digs out a stone from a patient’s cranium to cure him of his folly.
Meester snyt die keye ras
Myne name is Lubbert Das.
Master, cut away the stone
my name is Lubbert Das.
When we snickered at the primitivism of sixteenth-century medicine, Meigs chided us. “Gentleman, don’t deceive yourselves.” He made no further remark.
Lately, remembering his rebuke, I think how we were convinced, without room for doubt, of the truth of phrenology and physiognomy, sciences that are now questionable. Even the existence of an imponderable fluid is being debated. To me, its absence is unthinkable, Moran. We’d be like marionettes whose strings have been cut. Only a few extraordinary people are capable of self-government.
After the operation, which I observed, I cleaned the pit of blood and bandages, and then I wrote a report for Dr. Mütter.
“What have you learned?” he asked, having come to the end of it.
“That we can peer through a lens into a man’s brain and see nothing of what makes him a man.”
“Go on,” he said flatly.
“Thoughts, instincts, inclinations, virtues, vices—none was visible through the opening in the patient’s skull.”
“And they never will be, Edward. It is our inscrutability that makes us a human being instead of a machine. We’re physicians, not mechanics; our science is not Newton’s. Maybe someday we’ll be able to heal the mind, but the products of the mind must be left to philosophers and clergymen.”
“Our thoughts can make us suffer,” I said naïvely.
“We can do nothing about them.” He was suddenly angry. “Do you want to be a man of science and medicine or a fantasist like your friend? The body is enough for us to worry about.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“By the way, Mr. Fenzil, the instrument Dr. Meigs used to raise the trephined bone was an elevator lever, not a scalpel.” His manner had changed suddenly. “And is it asking too much for you to write legibly? It looks as if you’d written ‘trepidation,’ which might have been how you felt watching Dr. Meigs, but the surgery he performed was a trephination. Accuracy is essential. Muddle a prescription or a diagnosis and you can kill the patient.”
“I’m very sorry, Dr. Mütte
r,” I said, eying with a mixture of envy and contempt his gold filigreed buttons and purple velvet waistcoat.
“And well you should be.”
He was right, of course, but I was in no mood to hear him. You know how it is, Moran: A young man would sooner scald himself than obey someone older and wiser who’s warned him that, on no account, must he stick his hand in a pot of boiling water. There’s no more vain and stubborn creature in God’s creation than a boy who believes himself to be a man. You can die of such a delusion. Many have. I rewrote my notes, washed my hands and face, put on my coat and hat, doused the lights, and went outside to wait for Edgar Poe.
“YOU HAVEN’T ASKED ME where we’re going tonight,” said Poe.
We were making a meal of bread, wurst, and bitter beer in a German saloon on Spring Garden Street. It was small, cramped, and rank with cigar smoke and rancid oil. Armed with knives and forks, stout men in worn suits of clothes sat talking loudly in Low German. The place was as different from the tavern where Mütter had taken us after Menz’s shenanigans as a ballet is from a clog dance.
“Where are we going?” I asked, to have something to say. My head was beginning to ache from the turbid atmosphere.
“To meet with friends at a shop nearby.”
“What kind of shop?”
“Oh, a place where coffins are made. We call ourselves the Eschatologists.”
“Meaning what?”
“We share an interest in last things.”
It didn’t surprise me that Poe should have surrounded himself with men of a similarly morbid temperament. He was a man prowling the edges of society; even solitary persons will, however, gravitate to one another by the principle of mutual attraction. Edgar was devoted to his wife, Virginia, but I could not imagine her sharing in his dark fantasies. There was something of the ghoul in him.
“The Thanatopsis Club meets tonight,” he said, and then he recited a mournful verse by William Cullen Bryant.
