The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock Page B

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’sbirth 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.”
    â€œFear of what?” I asked as the cab clattered into the college courtyard.
    We walked across the wet stones and went inside the building.
    â€œOf losing himself. You seemed to have no such fear last night when you kissed yourself in the mirror.”
    â€œI’m ashamed.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œPoe 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. Dividinghis attention between the teapot and his train of thought, Mütter continued.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œAn 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.”
    â€œThen 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