Not Quite Dead

by John MacLachlan Gray

* * *

  Economy Manor

  Mr. Dickens, suh, am I to understand that David Copperfield is now complete?” Poe said this with a concealed weariness indicating a loss of patience with something.

  “Of course it is. I should never have come to America without having submitted the final number. I worked day and night on it. We meet our deadlines, sir.”

  Poe seemed not to care about deadlines. “Then I take it, suh, that you know how the story ends?”

  “Certainly, sir. That is what outlines are for.”

  “I do not do outlines myself. For me they inhibit the poetic spirit.”

  “That is all well and good with the writing of poems. Try it with a novel and you will find yourself in an unholy mess.”

  “Point taken, suh. Then perhaps you can be of assistance to me on a number of themes.”

  “Am I to believe that you wish me to assist you in fabricating my work? In palming it off to the public as my own? What an obscene suggestion.”

  “I suggest to you, suh, that your work will be stolen from you in any case.”

  “Yes, well, in a sense that is true. But I give up on that one, Mr. Poe. I am sick to death of the copyrights issue, it will never be solved in my lifetime; I simply wish to go home.”

  “Since you have nothing to gain or lose from its publication in America, is it not to your advantage, as an artist, that your tale be told in the way that you mean it to be told? I am a different sort of writer, suh, with a different outlook on life. Do you really want me to tell your tale for you? For that is what I am obliged to do, or someone dear to me will suffer grievous harm.”

  “Isn’t that curious?” said Dickens. “It never occurred to me that anyone might be held hostage other than myself. A self-centered occupation—hostage.”

  At this Poe laughed, perhaps for the first time since he won a swimming contest as a lad some twenty-five years ago.

  It was by now clear to Dickens that he was in a grim situation and might need Poe’s assistance to come out of it in one piece. In life, as in politics it seems, one must learn to rise above principle.

  “Very well, Mr. Poe, I shall help you to complete your damn forgery. But under protest.”

  Poe nodded gravely, then preceded to finger through the manuscript before him the way a bank teller counts a pile of dollar bills. He had marked specific pages by turning over the corners; every few pages he stopped at a notation, gave it long consideration, muttered something, and carried on. Having worked his way through the entire document, he stopped, sighed, and turned to Dickens with the look of a lawyer on a bafflingly complicated case.

  “Mr. Dickens, as you can imagine, I have many technical queries about your protagonist. I take him to be in some measure yourself; therefore, it is probable that Mr. Copperfield’s inconsistencies are also your own. Well and good. Yet one development baffles me completely: The incest, suh. Where in hell’s kitchen are you going with the incest?”

  Dickens opened his mouth but no sound came forth. Had he been asked about the last time he fornicated with sheep, it could not possibly have produced a deeper glaze of incomprehension and alarm.

  Poe handed Dickens a cigarette, which he accepted readily, and was grateful for the proffered lucifer, that his companion would not observe his hands trembling.

  “Mr. Dickens,” continued Poe, “you may write for the pulp trade, but you are not an author who treats his reader as a fool. And yet again and again you hint at deeper, darker currents just beneath the surface, without revealing precisely what they are. Setting aside the amative, may I say erotic, affinity between David and Steerforth, I would be most grateful if you would explain the incestuous love between Agnes Wickfield and her father. To be certain, you have seeded it masterfully throughout the text; yet how does it end, suh? How does it resolve itself?”

  “Mr. Wickfield? Ah yes—Mr. Wickfield,” replied Dickens, thinking back. For the surname had changed several times before publication.

  Poe shuffled through the manuscript, produced a number, and continued. “You wrote this CHAPTER, sir, I have it in its entirety. It is entitled, Agnes.”

  “Agnes was the name of our cook,” said Dickens. “She was a good cook, and I thought she would be chuffed by it.”

  “Accepted, Mr. Dickens. Yet listen to what Mr. Wickfield, her father, says about the relations between them. All I ask is that you tell me what it means.”

  Turning up the lamp, Poe read from the manuscript:

  My love for my dear child was a diseased love, but my mind was all unhealthy then. I say no more of that. I am not speaking of myself, Trotwood, but of her mother, and of her. If I give you any clue to what I am, or to what I have been, you will unravel it, I know.

  A long silence followed, and Poe grew impatient. “Come, suh, surely you cannot deny the self-loathing in the speech. Its manner of expression suggests a man who cannot bring himself to say where his ‘diseased love’ for his daughter led him. At the very least, suh, what does he do next?”

  “Whose speech is that, did you say?” asked Dickens.

  Poe’s enormous eyes rolled with impatience. “Mr. Wickfield, suh. The father of Agnes—”

  “Ah yes. Agnes. Gentle Agnes.”

  “Gentle Agnes, exactly so—who, unless I am very much mistaken, is to marry David, and they will grow old together in a state of connubial bliss.”

  “That is a rough approximation of what happens, yes.” Dickens never liked plot summaries of his work, thinking that they revealed his innate shallowness. He always felt he showed better in the details.

  “Which brings me again to the question, suh—what is to be the outcome of incest? What natural justice will put it to rights and settle the score? Will Agnes murder her father by giving him a sleeping draft that is a bit stronger than usual? Will he hang himself? Or does Agnes’s mother return in some way—in a dream perhaps, or as a ghost, or as an awakened corpse, to confront Mr. Wickfield with his sin, whereupon he is found in his bed the next morning, dead, and on his face an expression of ineffable horror?”

  Dickens struggled to recall writing the passage. What, indeed, had he been thinking of? “Sir, were I to take your approach and question every line I wrote, I should have found myself confined to the writing of short tales—extremely short tales, if I may say so.”

  “Are you telling me that Mr. Wickfield’s speech means nothing, suh? That he might as well have been singing ring around the rosy”?

  “Mr. Wickfield feels remorse over his employment of his daughter during her most marriageable years to take the place of his dead wife. Otherwise he would not so willingly give her up in marriage to Copperfield and lose her companionship. Sir, my deadline was drawing very near and I needed a resolution.”

  Or perhaps, Dickens thought, it was something he scribbled down during a sleepless night. He had known many such nights at the time. If he wrote it in that state of mind, there was no telling what he was getting at.

  “Yet incest explains everything, suh, does it not? Did not Mr. Wickfield drink himself to sleep each night? Did he not gaze upon Agnes repeatedly with an expression of anguish? There is only one satisfactory narrative, suh: a man in the throes of grief looks upon his daughter, who suddenly becomes his wife incarnate. He succumbs to passion, and only when the deed is done does he realize that he has violated his own flesh and blood …”

  “Stop!” cried Dickens. “Good God, man, what the devil are you talking about? That is not the world of David Copperfield! That is not benevolent, sad Mr. Wickfield. Many men take to drink in their later years, and not because they have committed incest.”

  “Then what is the reason for his drinking, suh?”

  “Surely you can’t expect me to answer for a character’s every twitch …”

  “If you will pardon me, suh, for a man to violate his daughter is a bit more than a twitch.”

  “Please, Mr. Poe. From the bowels of Christ, I beg you to put that line of inquiry out of your mind. There is no incest in David
Copperfield. I pledge to you that no thought of any such nature crossed my mind in the writing of the tale.”

  “My love for my dear child was a diseased love …” I ask you only to tell me, What does it mean?”

  “I admit that I cannot tell you off the tip of my tongue. Perhaps it slipped in of its own accord.”

  “And you rejected ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ because Venice has no cellars!” replied]Poe, with a certain bitterness in his tone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  Germantown

  Putnam and I rode to Germantown on rented saddle hosses, resentfully obedient animals at best, like hired thugs. The federal agent had for once eschewed his normal flamboyant style of dress for a more appropriate set of hunting tweeds. He wore his belt and holster around his hip in the way of a penny-dreadful gunfighter, which I confess I found a bit overdone.

  More irritating was his riding ability, which was well beyond my own—he had trained as a cavalryman, after all, before his present calling. My thighs cried for mercy at the speed he kept up, and I knew I would be crippled next morning. My riding ability was further impaired by the fact that I remained blind in one eye and could not perceive distances with any accuracy, so that every pothole became an unanticipated jolt that nearly knocked the molars out of my head.

  We thundered past a field containing bristling stalks of Indian corn; they looked like a crop of walking sticks, all hard edges, like the bristling firs set against the sky. To a Southerner like myself, the Pennsylvania landscape seemed overrated, a two-dimensional spectacle even for a man with two eyes—suitable, perhaps, to the two-dimensional morals of its inhabitants.

  In rural America, life made a person simple, in ways both good and bad. No man bred in the city can fully appreciate the isolation that attends country life, and its effects on the human soul. How each settlement becomes a small, stagnant pond, where life forms develop without interference from the “outside;” whose laws are determined by the will of a patriarch, where justice is what seems legitimate to fewer than a dozen men.

  It occurred to me that this was Eddie’s America—whose inbred inhabitants became inured to the grotesques they had made of themselves.

  Economy Manor was a remnant of an even older form of settlement, one that preceded the remaining farms in the area—and even more isolated as well; a remnant of the German penchant for forming cults around activities and ideas, from the hunting of boars to breast-feeding children at the age of twelve. A time when every dispute over philosophy or doctrine had the capacity to become the basis for a way of life.

  Compared to the rest of Germantown, the woods surrounding Economy Manor created a small island of primordial swamp in the midst of a garden. Conifers that dated to wilderness times. Fruit trees that had gone to seed for so many generations as to resemble the limbs of giant hags, contorted this way and that by the pressure of surrounding birches and alders. The result was an impassable wall of vegetation, pierced by a narrow driveway that might have been the entrance to a medieval fort.

  Above us, like a celestial scarecrow, the crumbling tower added a sinister touch to the disheveled property, as though proclaiming a purpose behind this vegetative pandemonium.

  The driveway was so pitted with holes and trenches as to be scarcely a drive anymore; we dismounted and walked rather than risk splitting a hoof or breaking a leg. Eventually we reached a stone wall surrounding a clearing about the size of a football pitch, containing what seemed to have once been a tiny village. After tethering the hosses beyond sight and sound, we crouched beneath the wall, peered over, and took stock.

  Had we ventured upon a field of dinosaur skeletons I should not have experienced a stronger sense of having wandered into something that belonged to another age. The wall itself was of a type of masonry that had not been practiced for at least a century. Within its boundaries, the foundations of collapsed buildings and the construction of the few remaining ones belonged to a time when men worked not for money or ambition, but as repayment to God for something done or not done by some distant relative in biblical times.

  Putnam spoke in a rather officious whisper, as though we were on a training exercise. “There are three inhabited buildings, if you count the church in the middle. He must be in one of them.”

  “Well and good,” I said. “However, these sects often segregate the sexes; therefore Mr. Dickens and my wife may not be in the same building.”

  “I was not aware of that.”

  “Try to remember, Mr. Putnam, that we are not on the same mission. I don’t give a hoot about your hostage. I am here to rescue mine.”

  This was all bombast of course, and a lie besides, since my warped objective was to murder my old friend Eddie. I felt my pistol under my coat; with only one shot, and only one eye, not for the first time did I feel out of my depth. Not for the first time was I seized by the panicked impulse to simply get up and run away, flee, disappear, and do … something else.

  “I plumb knackered myself bringing you along,” said Putnam. “It will be a black mark on my record for certain.”

  “Nonsense, Mr. Putnam. Had you left me behind in Philadelphia, I should have gone straight to the press, thereby triggering an international incident. Precisely what your superiors engaged you to avoid.”

  “Point taken,” replied Putnam, but he appeared to take no comfort in it.

  “What procedure are we going to follow?” I asked. “I am only a simple doctor; you are the professional with all the expertise.”

  “Dunno,” he replied, at length. “I need more information. A better vantage point.”

  Suddenly, in the way that a dog moves when he sees a squirrel, my companion leaped the wall and traversed the clearing, in a crouched scurry used by infantrymen on an advance through open country, as far as the stone foundation of a ruined barn.

  He disappeared inside the foundation. Seconds later his head reappeared as he waved impatiently for me to follow. I did so, but with less grace and slower speed.

  Now we found ourselves behind a wall of rough stonework in what was once a shallow cellar. Before us and perhaps twenty paces away stood two plain, tall buildings shaped like oblong boxes, separated by a sort of pagoda with the absurd steeple sprouting out of its cap.

  “We must wait until we know where the hostages are being kept,” said Putnam.

  “How long do you suppose that will take?”

  “Dunno. I am a federal agent, not a fortune-teller.” It was the first time I had seen Putnam become testy, and I began to suspect that he too was out of his depth.

  We waited, crouched on our haunches against the masonry, staring at the darkening sky awaiting the moon, each utterly uninterested in what the other was thinking. Then I sensed a vague rumble, a slight earth tremor, which became a furious clatter from the direction of the front gate, and in rolled a prairie schooner, hosses in a lather as though doused with whipped cream. The driver, whom I recognized at once, hauled furiously on the reins, the wagon lurched to a halt, and out tumbled a number of shavers in duster coats, in a great hurry.

  “The driver is O’Reilly,” I said. “We are in the right place.”

  “You recognize him from a considerable distance,” said Putnam. You must have seen him at close quarters.”

  “Close enough for him to pluck out my eye.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  * * *

  Economy Manor

  After several hours attempting to collaborate, having filled the room with cigarette smoke as an opaque defense against Poe’s absurd interpretations, Dickens had begun to experience a sensation of having died already, in his sleep perhaps. Now he faced eternal punishment for his sins as a writer—for what could be worse than to have one’s work perversely misinterpreted in an eternal, Satanic seminar?

  As a literary interrogator Poe was relentless, being eager to have the thing over and done, and with no wish to invent a word more than absolutely necessary. At the same time, like all writers of t
ales, Poe had acquired firm opinions about what constituted acceptable fiction, and Dickens’s explications fell well short of the mark.

  “Suh, as I see it, being a demon in human form, Uriah Heep might disappear into thin air before he can be charged with any crime, as the beast incarnate. Or better yet, at some moment during his trial, before a stunned magistrate, Heep’s flesh might fall away to the bare skeleton, which would clatter to the floor in a pile of bones.”

  “Confound it, Mr. Poe, you weary me with your ghastly ideas! Where did you unearth that one? Not from anything in Copperfield, surely.”

  “On the contrary, suh. From your text, how is any conclusion possible other than that Heep is a supernatural being? Look at your descriptions of him, suh. At every opportunity you evoke his ‘cadaverous’ appearance. In other movements he resembles a serpent. In his speech he resembles a vampire—that produces no reflection in a glass. Why plant these seeds of meaning, if not to reveal Heep as beyond human?”

  “This might seem mundane to you, Mr. Poe, but I described him thus so that the reader could identify him next time he appears. Surely you don’t expect the casual reader of a serialized novel to recognize more than one primary quality per character.”

  “And all you mean to point out about Mr. Heep is that he is thin}”

  “Well, it could never be, simply, thin. Cadaverous sticks more firmly in the mind, don’t you see. But, Mr. Poe, just because a man is thin, even cadaverous, it does not follow that he is a supernatural being.”

  Then what, suh, am I to make of the following?” Poe rose to his feet, cleared his throat, and read aloud, in the resonant voice that had held audiences spellbound over “The Raven”:

  … the poker got into my dozing thoughts besides, and wouldn’t come out. I thought, between sleeping and waking, that it was still red-hot, and I had snatched it out of the fire, and run him through the body. I was so haunted by this idea that I stole into the next room to look at him. There I saw him, lying on his back, with his legs extending to I don’t know where, gurglings taking place in his throat, stoppages in his nose, and his mouth open like a post office.