The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

  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 POES’ 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.

  To this end, we were permitted to walk unhindered within the asylum walls, to breathe freely out-of-doors, to enjoy and cultivate the gardens, aesthetic interests, and the manual arts. We were not ourselves free, of course; the walls, bars, restraints, and the segregation of the two sexes were constant reminders of our confinement. But we learned to regulate our thoughts and emotions, so that, for all but the incurable among us, reason was eventually restored and we were allowed to go home. I didn’t object to being there. I was a model inmate—tractable and affable—and never acknowledged, by word or gesture, that I bore the port-wine stain on my cheek.

  Edgar visited me once. He forgave me, he said, for having destroyed his manuscript, and he presented me with an autographed copy of his newest published work, The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. James Lowell visited me shortly afterward and gave me a copy of his new book, Miscellaneous Poems, also signed. The conceit of some writers who think their books sufficient to cure the woes of the world and the wretched people in it! Ida also visited me, once, making me a gift of Institutes of the Christian Religion, written by John Calvin in 1536—not signed. I was sick of books, stories, and of all who feel obliged to inflict them on the world. I consigned them to the netherworld beneath my cot, next to the bedpan.

  At least once each week, Dr. Mütter visited the asylum. I called it the “seminary” because dark minds were remade there. He brought me tobacco for my pipe and would always offer me a drink of brandy from his flask. For these useful gifts, I was grateful, and grateful still more for his goodwill. It was by virtue of his generosity that I was a patient of the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason instead of locked up in the charity hospital for the insane poor. The asylum was a private institution. Dr. Mütter was one of its patrons and paid the cost of my maintenance and cure from out of his own pocket. When I had recovered my wits and was restored to life as it is generally lived, he gave me back my old job as his assistant, and, as I’ve said, in years to come he would see me enrolled in and graduated from the medical college. Dr. Mütter was my great benefactor, and I was sorry for the unkind thoughts I’d had of him. I mourned him when he died in ‘59 of the gout. His remains did not end up in jars or under glass for boys to dust, but are entombed in the family vault in Charleston.

  I remember one conversation we had in the azalea garden just inside the asylum’s main gate. It was early May. The bushes were scarlet. The new grass underneath the dogwood trees was white with blossoms brought down by recent rain. We sat side by side on an ornamental iron bench and watched the robins tug up worms from the sodden earth.

  “The mind gives up its secrets as reluctantly as the ground does those worms,” he said in the gnomic manner that I very much used to resent. It pleased me now, however, to hear him take the roundabout. I waited for him to come to his point; I knew he had one. Dr. Mütter was never anything less than serious where the body or the mind was concerned. He was an eminent doctor, surgeon, teacher of medicine, and connoisseur of its oddities. “Your mind has suffered, Edward, and I feel partly to blame.”

  His contrition surprised me, Moran!

  “I should not have thrown you and Poe together as I did. I should’ve known better than to encourage a friendship with a man whose own sanity was balanced on the edge of a knife. It was partly for your own good, but mostly for mine: I was curious to see the effect he’d have on you. I introduced you to an unstable element, and this is the result of my recklessness.”

  His roving eye took in the asylum and, here and there on the grass, persons ensnared in the various phases of lunacy. It was easy to imagine them as little boats set rocking by the sea’s local disturbances—the sea’s entirety drawn by the moon’s own animal magnetism, causing the “moon sickness,” which had brought us there. None of these airy thoughts occurred to me then; my mind, even before it had become obscured, was largely unformed and unused to speculation. It lacked . . . subtlety, the devil’s gift to man, as wonderful and damnable as fire.

  “His story was stronger than yours, Edward,” said Mütter in conclusion.

  LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, Moran, at the people in the street. Smiling or frowning at one another or, more likely, buried in a private dream—a dishonorable fantasy, perhaps—rarely do they ever sense the spirit that moves them this way or that. And if they do sometimes sense it, they delude themselves into believing that it is their own that moves them. We tell ourselves a story we call our life.

  I’ve come to believe that the world is papered over with stories. The most convincing of them become, for each one of us, reality. I knew a man in the asylum who believed he was an adjutant on Winfield Scott’s staff during the War of 1812. He would be executed by the British, he told me, at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, on July 25, 1814. On that day in July—in 1844—he hanged himself. He died believing he was in another man’s story. His mind was deranged, the story untrue for him, but the rope
was real enough to make it true. My double’s story very nearly did me in. But I got the better of him, and, lately, I’ve been able to make him do my bidding.

  See what I have here, Moran, in this silk pillowslip. He likes the feel of silk, you know, and I see no reason not to make him comfortable.

  Yes, it’s my old skull, the one I buried years ago. Recently, I dug it up. It was dirty, like an unearthed potato, and I had to scrub it clean. There was something green sprouting from the socket. I’d like to dig up Edgar Poe and talk to him. When he was alive, I didn’t appreciate his gifts. He was the object of my first powerful attraction and the author of a second, greater one. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have known two men endowed with superior minds: Edgar Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter—both deceased.

  Yes, yes, Moran! I speak to the skull, and it speaks to me. Handsome, don’t you think? You can almost see it smile. It lacks only a layer of skin over the bone to prove its resemblance to me. More than an uncanny likeness, it would be a faithful copy. You’d see a port-wine stain exactly like my own. Eakins was kind not only to make me appear younger in his painting but to omit my disfigurement. Everyone pretends there’s nothing there. I would not have believed people could be so sympathetic.

  Not that I mind the mark anymore. I’ve lived with it for such a long time. The stain has become part of me; you could no more separate it from me than you could a bruise from the skin of a pear. Dr. Mütter tried—that is, he pretended to. He thought that a pretense of the restorative surgery in which he excelled would remove the monomania from my mind. I went along with his fraud for my future’s sake, and when I awoke from the oblivion of an ether sleep and beheld my face in the mirror, I cried in my happiness. The tears were crocodile, and the port-wine stain had been as vividly present in the mirror as before. No surgeon’s knife or mesmerist’s power of suggestion can remove it. A counterstory might, but who is there to write one? I had no wish to return to the asylum, and I understood that normality dazzles those who are afraid to appear different from their neighbors. And so it has been. I’ve kept the secret locked up—here—inside my brain and inside this skull, whose gaze I still find riveting. No one has ever heard a complete account of my strange and eventful history until now.