The Port-Wine Stain

by Norman Lock

And so, with my double’s death mask inside my trunk, I sailed home to Philadelphia.

  II

  No sooner had I settled into my rooms on Ludlow Street than I went out-of-doors again, carrying the death mask inside a valise. I was acquainted with a man who worked in the county coroner’s office, and I trusted that he would know someone with the requisite skills to produce a likeness of William Boyle’s head in wax, clay, or plaster of Paris from his death mask. I was successful in securing the services of an expert, and, in two or three weeks’ time, a trompe I’oeil recreation of my double’s head became the centerpiece of my dining-table, where I could study it to my heart’s content. I did so with the avidity of an astronomer who has discovered a new planet.

  I knew something of the sciences of phrenology and physiognomy, and, with my fingers, I would read his character, its aversions and propensities, until they became second nature to me. I would spend hours gazing at Boyle’s countenance, which was as familiar as my own, my mind empty of all thoughts, save his. In time, I completed the mental transference that had begun at Madame Tussaud’s. I now knew William Boyle as well as I knew my own self, because, in a very real sense, I was he and he was I. (Could “M. Louis” have whispered in my ear the history of William Boyle, while I was under the influence of his effigy? No—I say no! My knowledge of his perversities was too intimate and comprehensive.)

  It was only then that I understood the reason for our having met, as if by chance, and the purpose—ordained by fiend or devil—of our affinity: I would continue Boyle’s career, which had been curtailed by the hangman’s noose. I would bring to Philadelphia the terror Boyle had let loose in London, wreaking havoc on the City of Brotherly Love. I would kill for motives he had yet to confide, if indeed he himself knew them. Whether my fate was to experience ecstasy or depravity, it didn’t matter, so long as I followed Boyle’s wishes.

  And so, I, who had been a peaceable, even a meek man, sat at the dining-table, under the stern gaze of my master, preparing a list of victims, while the mantel clock ticked in the silence, like time’s own great heart. The passing seconds fell all about me, a fine gray snow that was, in fact, only dust. As I wrote, I felt a sensation on the skin of my cheek, which, to the touch of my fingers, was hot. Having gone to the mirror, I saw that my face now bore the lurid disfigurement of a port-wine stain. I was not surprised to find it there. That night, when I lay abed waiting for Morpheus to descend, I pondered our fates—Boyle’s and mine. If his blemish had been removed by the new surgery before he took to murdering, would his life—and mine—have been different? I had read an account in the American Sentinel of the repair of a hideous facial deformity, borne since birth by a young man named Nathaniel D-----------. Even now I could go to the surgeon, a Dr. Mütter, of my own city, and implore him to remove the stain from my cheek. But I did not want it gone!

  [A clause follows—the beginning of a sentence which was to be the start of a paragraph, but Poe had not had an opportunity to continue before I made off with his manuscript. The tale ends here.]

  No matter that he had left the manuscript unfinished, the story had shaken me. Pricked by nervous dread, I thought to throw it onto the fire as my mother wished and Savonarola, the fanatical priest, would have done had he been alive and his puritanical bonfires still raged. But they had been extinguished by tolerant men centuries ago, and I took my own dead fire as a sign that Poe’s work ought not to be destroyed. Nevertheless, I would not give it back to him to finish. I felt a superstitious fear; completed, the tale might become a fatal lodestone, strengthening the magnetic affinity between my own murderous double and me. Already, I thought of him as a part of me, vile and unwelcome like a maggot in a piece of meat. I wanted to jump up and run to the hospital’s incinerator and burn the tale together with gory bandages from the pit. But no, no, I mustn’t!

  I was on the horns of a dilemma, afraid to destroy Poe’s story and just as afraid not to. The manuscript was a curse that might be visited on me if I burned it or if I did not. My mother may have been right in fearing that the smoke from the smoldering manuscript could cause the devil to appear, if not he, then a horde of glowering authors whose works had perished during the burning of the Alexandrian library. Like a voodoo curse, the manuscript might also overturn my reason unless I were to get rid of it. Either/or. The pit or the pendulum. In the end, I hid it underneath my bedroom’s floorboards. I was sorry I’d taken the goddamn thing and wished I’d never met Edgar Allan Poe!

  I passed the night in a hive of dreams. Next morning, I retained mostly vague impressions from that troubled sleep. I recalled Ida as I had pictured her while I’d fumbled foolishly with the fat whore. I seemed to see Virginia Poe’s sad porcelain face and remembered that I wanted very much to trace its lines and contours with my hands. I saw my mother on the stairs with a lighted candle in her mouth. In the most vivid of those jumbled scenes, I saw myself once again at the séance that Edgar and I had attended in January with Frances Osgood. We were holding one another’s hands as we sat around the medium’s table. I unclasped one of mine and laid it on Osgood’s lap, and a bird, a pigeon, flew out from the collar of her dress. She swooned, and Edgar snickered. His mustache fell onto the table and wriggled there until Mütter impaled it with a specimen pin.

  Poe’s tale had put a torch to my imagination, turning its mazy, commonplace passages into Prince Prospero’s lurid halls. I might have been stalked by the Red Death itself, so fine and inescapable was the net of Edgar’s prose enchantment.

  I knew the tale was dangerous, Moran, but I couldn’t resist exhuming it from beneath the floorboards. I was drawn to it the way we are drawn to sin or to an evil that charms us. I would ponder Edgar’s story, which was also mine, whenever I had an idle moment. Solitary during those weeks, I drank a good deal, as one does in hopes of forgetfulness. Sometimes the thought came into my head that I might be released from sin—strange words in this instance, but let them stand—if my house should burn down, through no fault of mine, but spontaneously, by a spark, say, jumping from Ben Franklin’s machine—or from God’s finger, the one that touched Adam and raised him from the mud. If only He would destroy Poe’s infernal manuscript, I’d be saved! A lunatic’s delusion.

  TWO OR THREE DAYS AFTER I’D BURIED “The Port-Wine Stain” under the floorboards, Poe confronted me. Confronted is too strong a word for our encounter on the college roof. There was no evident hostility. He approached me—the better word—while I was feeding and watering the birds. I had been preoccupied by his unfinished tale and did not hear him enter the coop until his shoes crunched on the gritty floor. I turned in surprise and saw him standing in a shaft of weak March sunlight, alive with dust motes and down. By impulse, I picked up the manure shovel in case I should have to fend him off.

  “Good morning, Edward,” he said with disarming geniality.

  I put the shovel down and faced him with more resolution than I’d previously been able to muster during our . . . trysts.

  “Good morning, Edgar,” I replied in kind.

  “And how are your subjects—thriving, I hope?”

  He picked a downy feather from the sleeve of his black coat.

  “Tolerably well,” I replied.

  He kept his dark eyes fixed on mine; I held his gaze. He wiped the sole of his shoe—nervously, I thought—on the boot scraper. I took his nervousness as a triumph of my will. He must have realized his discomfiture, because he took a step toward me and frowned. He meant to appear menacing, but his mustache twitched comically as in my dream of Sarah Whitman’s séance.

  “Did you steal my manuscript?” he demanded.

  If there’d been a clock inside the coop, its ticking would have echoed in the silence that followed his challenge. The time between one tick and the next would have seemed an age. In that silence and during that age, I’d have pondered my answer. Should I admit my robbery or pretend innocence? But no clock ticked; the moment was brief.

  “I stole it!” I blustered.

 
My defiance seemed to stagger him. No doubt, he’d come prepared to hear an indignant or a frightened denial. I took a step toward him; he took one back.

  “Why?” he asked without anger. I realized that I’d hurt his feelings—had wounded him—betrayed his idea of the friendship we two had shared—never mind the shocks he’d given me. “Why?” he asked again in perplexity.

  “You had no right to use me as you did!” I stammered in a sudden gust of anger. “Again and again, you took advantage of me . . . used me—shamefully!” Anger had grown too hot for grammatical niceties. “Having me boxed up like a . . . sending me the skull . . . and now this story.” I spat out the word like a rancid morsel.

  “I dedicated it to you, Edward,” he said, offended.

  I laughed at the presumption. He believed that I’d be honored to have an Edgar Poe tale dedicated to me and that his offenses against me would be pardoned because of it! I turned my back. I heard the hesitation, the reluctance, that would have been visible in his stance had I been facing him. I kept my back turned toward him, and, in a moment, he left the coop.

  I went downstairs to the exhibits room. I stood at the window and watched a teamster unload a heavy crate. I admired his strength and envied his ordinariness, although God knows what devils he might have had locked inside him. We are dirty windows, Moran; a little light passes through us—a candle’s worth and no more. We are mostly blind to one another. All this time that I’ve been talking—what, I wonder, have you made of it and how much more remains that will be forever untold and unacknowledged?

  Here, then, was the fatal crisis, Moran, when the fever rises but will not break. Here was anxiety raised beyond what can be endured. I wanted to be someone else but knew that it would make no difference if I were. We are beleaguered and estranged; we are, all of us, untouchables. I was a pallbearer for the funeral of all human feeling.

  “Edward,” said a voice.

  I turned from the window but saw no one.

  “Edgar? Holloway?” I called.

  There was no one there.

  On impulse, I fetched my doppelgänger’s skull and sat with it at the table where I’d catalogued many another cranium that had belonged to a man or a woman once living and now dead, a being like myself who had raised a hand in greeting, in anger, or, perchance, in murder. This one, my evil twin’s, had thought to kill or had been driven to it, only to have been killed in his turn. Like a good phrenologist, I felt the skull’s irregularities: The prominence above the ear indicated anger. I played at physiognomy: The small chin told of a sensitive being whom the harshness of life might have overwhelmed and cankered. If I’d also had my double’s hand, I’d have tried to read its naked palm; I’d have found, if only in my imagination, the line predicting a truncated life, a dangerous journey, a blasted heart. The nails would have been bitten in fear or envy or else broken by work or a life spent clawing out of some dung heap.

  Under the influence of Poe’s tale of the port-wine stain, I felt the flesh on my face tingle as it will when an eruption occurs—from a pore clogged by an ingrown whisker, for example. I went to the mirror above the sink and looked at my face. Moran, I swear to you, I saw a port-wine stain there! As yet, it was small, only the presage of what would come, in a short while, to cover my cheek—just as it had in Poe’s execrable tale. I understood then that a consanguinity existed between the dead man, the murderer whose skull sat leering at me on the table, and myself. What he was, I must also be. What he did, I must, in my turn, do. You can’t imagine with what horror I entertained the thought of my eventual overthrow. I returned to the table and took my twin’s skull in my hands and gazed deeply into its eye sockets, where light was wont to arrive with pictures—pretty or not—like images carried on the beam of a magic lantern.

  Where had they gone? Might they have wormed their way into me—into my brain with its furrows—eating, like worms inside the earth, into the sentient lump where my mind sits and broods? I strained to feel something not my own. I searched my memory for images, words, odors that had nothing to do with Edward Fenzil. In my vexed state of mind, I began to sense the pneuma of another being. Its spiritus. I’d been invaded by this other me, Moran. I was Lucien; he was Louis; we felt each other’s pain. We were the Corsican brothers, jumped from the pages of Dumas père into Dr. Mütter’s ossuary. Like them, we were joined—my criminal twin and I—by animal magnetism. My God, Moran, the thoughts that tumbled into my agitated brain that winter afternoon would have deranged the sanest man alive!

  And then a mad conversation ensued—madder than the one I’d imagined among Mr. Bones, Tambo, and the Interlocutor—a catechism, an interrogation, between my self and my double’s skull.

  Did he have a name?

  I’ve forgotten it. No, in truth, Moran, I refused to know it, like a woman who refuses to acknowledge a person in the street who has offended her. I did not want to know my other self’s name! I feared that, by knowing it, I’d give my twin power over me that might—who knows?—have usurped me. Me, me, me—there is no way to tell my tale without seeming vain and self-absorbed. Forgive me, I never meant to go this far. I’ve admitted much I never said to Walt Whitman or Eakins or to anyone else until now. I must be in need of confession or a purge. A bloodletting, perhaps. The choleric humor must have swamped me in its rancor; must have pickled me, liver and lights. Unless Poe has settled his spiritus on me like an inheritance from where he lies moldering. After all this time, I thought I had escaped him.

  To pick up the thread where I left off: I conversed with the skull of my doppelgänger. Conversed is more apt for learned intercourse than a lunatic’s debate.

  ME (angry and fearful): What is it you want from me?

  SKULL: To size you up. (Pause.) To take your measure, then. By now, you realize the strength of the bond between us—the affinity, a word you seem to like. We have an ether in common. It’s that which enables us to have this conversation.

  ME: I—

  SKULL: Not I. We. And having said “we,” I might just as easily say “I,” meaning me myself.

  ME: Who gave you the right to speak for me?

  SKULL (amused): Who?

  ME: What, then.

  SKULL: You haven’t a monopoly on our mutual identity. An identity until now apparently separate and equal. No, Edward, I can just as readily become you . . . drive you out . . . expel and destroy you.

  ME: I’ll fight tooth and claw to be what I am.

  SKULL: What are you? You dust the doctor’s shelves. You dispose of the bloody messes he and the other gods make. You yearn for a girl and fuck her fat facsimile. You wander the streets, confused and full of doubt. You drink too much. You fall under the spell of a madman. You let him use you for his own purposes. You’re a very flimsy idea of a person, Edward. I, on the other hand, know myself and my strength. It would be nothing for me to take your place. I would do it with no more regret than having crushed a gnat under my thumb. I could do it with the same ease and untroubled conscience.

  I was beginning to lose my mind. I might have already lost it. I felt the port-wine stain spreading across my cheek. Soon, I said to myself—while I still had a self to speak to—Soon you will be worse than a madman; you’ll have become a character in a madman’s fiction.

  Don’t misunderstand me, Moran: This that I’m telling you now isn’t a fable of the old notion of the Bi-Part Soul, nor am I recounting the magnification to an unnatural degree of the empathic faculty or an inadvertent ventriloquism on my part. I hadn’t thrown my voice into the skull; the skull had spoken to me—and for my ears alone—and I had spoken to it.

  I had not seen Dr. Mütter enter the exhibits room, and I wouldn’t have known he was standing behind me with a hand on my shoulder if he hadn’t shaken me.

  “For God’s sake, Edward, what are you saying?” He looked at me as at a person in a fit. “What are you saying to that skull!” he cried.

  Mütter hadn’t seen a ghastly pantomime, but had overheard my part in a dialogue—hi
s sense of hearing inadequate to the utterances of a talking skull.

  I tore my hat and coat from the clothes tree violently enough to make it teeter. I ran up the stairs to the roof, intending to break the thread that tied me to a murderer’s thoughts. I stood at the edge of the roof—it might just as well have been the summit of Mount Everest—and waited for the pendulum to decide my fate. I couldn’t do it, Moran. For all my faint heart’s bluster, I hadn’t the courage to step out into the void.

  Shamed by my cowardice, I went inside the coop and strode among the bickering birds, like Gulliver in Lilliput, and, with a fury I had not known before, I wrung their necks. A part of me was appalled; another part marveled at the sensation in my hands as, one by one, their gristly necks snapped and, with them, the thread—a slender one, no more substantial than a spider’s—that had held them fast to the dirty floor and would have reeled them home in sunlight from the darkness of their wickerwork baskets. Did they feel what Holtz, or Heinz, had felt at the moment of surrendering his neck, for good and all, to a vengeful justice? It’s a solemn thing to kill a bird, and I was sorry afterward.

  Yes, yes, they were only birds. But it takes only a little more effort, a turn or two of the screw, to kill one of our own kind, Moran. Ordinarily, I’m as sensitive as an oyster, and my sympathies embrace even an injured bird. But that day, I could have out-Heroded Herod.

  I was glad that Mütter hadn’t followed me onto the roof. I might have thrown him from it. I could picture him falling in his purple velvet waistcoat with the gold filigreed buttons, the tails of a beautifully tailored cutaway flapping in his headlong rush to ground himself once more and forever to the earth.

  I left the little scene of carnage—a miniature version of Ulysses’ house in Ithaca after he’d slaughtered Penelope’s suitors, or of Niobe’s after the gods had expunged her seven sons and seven daughters for some Olympian slight. Classical metaphors, Moran, for our ignoble age. It was only then I noticed the satchel. Unaware, I’d carried it onto the roof and into the coop, set it down to strangle the birds, and picked it up again. I had not noticed the deadweight in my hand, possessed, as I was, by hopelessness and its underside, rage.