The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  What was in the satchel?

  Why, the skull, of course!

  “YOU’RE NOT YOURSELF, EDWARD,” 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?”

  “Naturally,” he said, with a wink for me, which she noticed.

  “Be careful with your brother, Franklin,” she said shrewdly. “He’s not well.”

  “What do you have in the bag?” asked Franklin as we got into our coats.

  “A severed head.”

  “It won’t look out of place among the mugs who soak themselves at Noonan’s trough.”

  We went to Noonan’s taproom, on Catherine Street. I took the satchel with me. I felt my nerves unknit like an anchor cable as we sat at the bar, which was carved with the names of men who would make their marks in this way and no other, except for the lucky ones whose memorials would be chiseled on gravestones. Luckier still were those whose names and spans would be joined by the endearing, if not enduring, inscriptions BELOVED SON or BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER.

  A dozen patrons, representing the stages of man’s fall from grace, stood at the bar. They were hardworking men whom work had not ennobled. They wanted little enough. In this, they were like homing pigeons, which yearned for only a tiny corner of the world in which to roost. As I grew into a sublime state of intoxication, I saw my fellow drunkards through a lens that softened them and blurred their coarseness. I began to think them a fine and generous lot, the “camerados” Walt Whitman adored. Noonan croaked out a sentimental ballad. It was his saloon and his right, therefore, to make a fool of himself.

  All the dames of France are fond and free

  And Flemish lips are really willing

  Very soft the maids of Italy

  And Spanish eyes are so thrilling

  Still, although I bask beneath their smile,

  Their charms will fail to bind me

  And my heart falls back to Erin’s isle

  To the girl I left behind me.

  What happened after that was mostly hidden from me in alcoholic fumes and tobacco smoke, which fogged my brain as much as they did the dusky room. I recall staggering outside into an alley to piss, and when I’d found my way back to my empty glass, my brother was ogling the skull. No one else in the madly whirling room seemed to have noticed it, squat and stolid on the bar, but Franklin was entranced. I had few wits left, but enough to wonder if the skull might not have spoken to him.

  “Franklin,” I said, tugging at his sleeve. “Franklin!”

  He looked at me and winced, as though my face were a skull, too. He got to his feet unsteadily, shambled toward the door, and vomited in the vicinity of a cuspidor. What did not manage to fall onto the sawdust-strewn planks hit a Swede boatswain’s shoes.

  “Watch where you’re spewing, you drunken lickfinger!”

  He pushed my brother into a knot of mangy good-for-nothings, stewed road menders, by the look of their clothes, well on their way to blazes. Their golden voyage abruptly ended, they turned in indignation and stomped him with their dirty boots. To see poor Franklin lying on the floor like a dead halibut, I wept, believing he had passed beyond all mortal storms. He was, however, soused by gin, which had rendered him, if not immortal, at least unconscious.

  We ought to drink a toast, Moran, to gin—the sovereign God-given general anesthetic!

  I left my brother to the sawdust and his infamy. My skull and I—I saw no difference now between my own and one the dead man had carried on his shoulders—stepped out into the chill March night like Caesar on his way to subdue the Gauls or to the Senate to be slain by Brutus. I held tight to the satchel. In it was the incorporation of a universal fear that not even Jesus at Gethsemane could have denied. I carried the satchel like a bomb I might fling at—what? The massive lock on Eden’s ancient rusted gate forever lost behind weeds and nettles? The impious Eschatologists numbing themselves with drink and ether against the coming on of night? Dr. Mütter’s “Old Curiosity Shop,” where a nature as malignant as the hunchback Daniel Quilp’s has undone the wicked and the innocent alike? I swear, Moran, if I’d had a bomb big enough to destroy the world, that night I’d have used it gladly
. I was, you see, filled to overflowing with the most corrosive of solvents: hatred and self-pity.

  There was a fine soft rain in the air that night. I watched the drops form and fall from my hat brim when I passed beneath the streetlights. After a while, which may have been long or short, I found myself outside the house where I had been betrayed by lust. “Found myself?” As if the invisible thread of a destructive desire or the desire for self-destruction had not reeled me in! I was just sober enough to mount the stairs of that sad house, but not enough to mount any of its sad women. I fell into a bed on the second floor. I dreamed of a table covered with a linen cloth, where raw meat erupted with maggots and gravy congealed into fat. Or maybe I dreamed it on some other night. Memory is notorious and tells its own tales. I heard a scream as I was dragged up from the fen of sleep by a large man whose breath smelled of onions.

  “Get out,” he said with menace. “If you can’t leave by the stairs, you’ll leave by the window!”

  A woman, half-dressed and that half slatternly, had opened the satchel and screamed upon seeing my skull grinning up at her. It was her scream that had come to me in my sleep like the last cry of the damned. The man pulled me out of bed. I caught the briefest glimpse of my face in a mirror. The port-wine stain had spread during my night of abandon. The man rushed me down the narrow, creaking staircase and sent me flying into the street with a kick. The next moment, the second-story window was thrown open and first the satchel and then the skull were tossed out into the rain. Sitting on the ground with the skull balanced on my knees, I thought of Ida. No, there was nothing tragic in this farce; the night had been one long and humiliating pratfall. Unlike Will Shakespeare’s “poor Richard,” I did not “sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” I thought of Ida and shed maudlin tears for myself.

  Why should love, of all emotions, be so difficult, Moran?

  Did I ask my doppelgänger for his thoughts on the matter?

  I may have, and the conversation might have been something like this. I might even have “blacked up” with wet mud daubed on my face to complete my mortification, for I had degraded myself as vilely as the notorious “Daddy” Rice on the minstrel stage.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Brother Bones.

  BONES: Yessuh, Mr. Interlocutor?

  INTERLOCUTOR: What do you know of love?

  BONES: What kind?

  INTERLOCUTOR: A man for a woman, and vice versa.

  BONES: Of all the varieties of love, tha’s the one I know the least about.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Did you never love a woman, then?

  BONES: I misremember. Might have, once.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Why did you kill the shopkeeper? Was it hatred?

  BONES: “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man.” Tha’s all I ever knowed of love as I understood the term (and Mr. Poe wrote of it in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”) How’s about you, Mr. Interlocutor?

  INTERLOCUTOR: Ida . . .

  BONES: You full up for her, suh?

  INTERLOCUTOR: I was.

  BONES: Full up wid love or wid hate?

  INTERLOCUTOR: I can’t seem to separate them anymore. You’ve poisoned me.

  BONES: Has I?

  INTERLOCUTOR: You put the idea of murdering into my head, and I can’t shake it out again.

  BONES: Murderin’ who? Ida?

  INTERLOCUTOR: Not Ida.

  BONES: Dr. Mütter?

  INTERLOCUTOR: Not him.

  BONES: Holloway?

  INTERLOCUTOR: No.

  BONES: Edgar Allan?

  INTERLOCUTOR: That’s the one. (Bones laughs.) I never would’ve thought of it if I hadn’t met you.

  BONES: We was fated to meet. Our black hearts beat as one; our two brains have the mind of a hive. The thought of murder was tinglin’ in the nerves of my hands when I strangled the old man, and now it’s in yours. We’re like the pride of Mütter’s collection: the plaster cast of Chang and Eng, Siamese twins, who were born as such and died as such. Only in between, they married two sisters, so, presumably, they knew somethin’ we don’t know about that love you was askin’ me about.

  INTERLOCUTOR (sadly):. I’m to be a murderer, then?

  BONES: That is your destiny, suh. I sees it in your face.

  INTERLOCUTOR: The port-wine stain, you mean?

  BONES (shrugs):. That and other things not so easy to call by name. Cheer up, suh. It could have been worse.

  I didn’t want that destiny, Moran. I knew it would be the end of me as well as of my victim, Edgar Poe. To spill blood or ink, it was all the same to him.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Mr. Bones, what do you know about death?

  BONES: All there is.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Which is?

  BONES: Nothin’.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Meaning what?

  BONES: Nothin’.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Nothing is nothing.

  BONES (laughs):. Ain’t that the truth!

  INTERLOCUTOR: Have you had a glimpse of the life to come?

  BONES (uncomfortably):. Might have . . .

  INTERLOCUTOR: Any glory in it?

  BONES: No, ain’t much shine to it.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Dark?

  BONES (shivers): Plenty dark. Dark as a grave.

  INTERLOCUTOR: Any sign of a Savior thereabouts?

  BONES (laughs): Only the one on his door, sayin’ GONE FISHIN’.

  I found a piece of iron lying in the gray, withered grass and, with it, dug a hole—a grave—for the skull. It leered at me as I covered it over.

  “Nevermore!” I shouted to it in my mind. I thought I heard the skull laugh from under the dirt, but maybe that was only in my mind, too.

  The sky was beginning to lighten above the river; the drizzle had stopped. I threw the satchel into an ash pit and hurried toward Ida’s rooming house while the skull sang a minstrel tune in the chill voice of Mr. Bones.

  I won’t be here long,

  Oh, I won’t be here long.

  Oh, dark gonna catch me here,

  Dark gonna catch me here.

  Oh, I won’t be here long.

  Clothes dirty, hat gone, hair looking as though it had been threshed, I burst into the dining room, where Ida and the other boarders were eating their breakfast. I wore the ecstatic look peculiar to saints and lunatics. I’d seen something that needed saying but that couldn’t be spoken—a thing neither uplifting nor glorious, but true notwithstanding. My wits deranged, I believed the ladies would put down their forks and spoons and hear me with the ears of people hungry for the truth. I’d glimpsed it in the dark while sitting on the ground, a japing skull in my hands. It had been only dimly seen—there’d been no shine to it, as Mr. Bones had said—but I’d clutched it eagerly because it had come, like a telegraph message, from the Other Side. For a moment, the scales had fallen from my eyes, and I could see the darkness plainly. I suppose it was this that had finally driven me insane, not that I knew I was. I would have needed to step outside myself to know it, and that is a thing neither the mad nor anyone else can do. We’re all sentenced to the “Little Ease” between our ears, Moran. All of us are locked up for life in a prison of bone.

  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.