Free The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock

physician. I know that’s your ambition, and it is a noble one. I can help you. But you won’t last—I would not have lasted for as long as I have—without a counterbalancing emotion: humor, irreverence, blasphemy, even. Do you see what I mean?”
    I did, but I kept silent.
    His disappointment was evident. Squirming, I felt the specimen pin of his penetrating gaze.
    â€œYou’ll learn stoicism, Edward, or you will surely fail. If you had Edgar Poe’s gift, you might write your horrors down and make a few dollars. I don’t foresee a long or happy life for our friend. By the way, I invited Edgar to view the restorative surgery on Nathaniel Dickey’s face. He’s written that he’ll come. I knew he would. The organ where his curiosity is seated is degenerate. As a surgeon, I would advise him to have it out, if only I knew where to cut. He’d refuse, of course. Men like him must cling to their perversities; they are what define them. Can you imagine Poe as a clergyman? No, not even a Unitarian. Demons have eaten intohis vitals; his heart is cankered. His reason, I suspect, is perpetually in the balance. I wouldn’t recommend his life or his example. You’re better off here, where hearts no longer beat or minds think.”
    He handed me a slip of paper. “I’ve an errand for you. Take the dogcart to the Union Street pier. I ordered some birds that will keep you busy: three conjugal pairs of domesticated rock pigeons from Belgium.”
    I stuffed a bill of sale into my pocket and put on my coat and hat again. I would rather have confessed to murder than to show Mütter my curiosity, which, at that moment, I regarded as something sordid and repugnant—a voyeurism broader than a man’s natural interest in sex—an unnatural, shameful fascination for what is properly left to obscurity. I was a Christian, Moran. I suppose I still am in whatever organ belief, however adulterated, resides. I don’t think we can ever be rid of doctrines instilled in us in childhood. Our characters are tells: history’s deposits laid down one on top of another by time. Outwardly, we are modern men and women, but you have only to dig to discover the primitive state from which we came. While I mock hell, in my marrow, I quake in fear of it.
    The cobbled streets jarred me as I drove the cart, on iron wheels, eastward toward the river. I let the horse have its way, being in no hurry to get back to the college. Flaming in the western-facing windows of the city’s buildings, the sun felt almost mild on my face. The wind having lessened, the afternoon was warm for January. The snowy lots on either side of the road were ugly with ashes and soot, the curbstones stained yellow by horses’ stale.
    I gave myself up to passing fancies of a kind alien to Poe’s and Mütter’s grotesque imaginations: fresh snow in the shape of an elephant’s head clinging to the brick wall of the American Sentinel building on Sansom Street; my father’s dark, mysterious member exposed when he climbed out of the galvanized tub in the shed, soapy rivulets streaming from his hairy body; my mother’s face when she leaned toward the candlelight to turn the page of her book; the tattooed anchor livid on my brother’s arm; Ida’s pretty neck, white and slender as a swan’s where it rose demurely above the collar of her Sunday dress. I realized with a start that I wanted very much to see her. Did I care for her, or was she only an antidote for my poisoned heart? I would always be unsure of myself in love, that most complicated of emotions.
    I tied the horse to a hitching post outside the warehouse and stood awhile on the wharf to watch the river traffic. The Delaware was already darkening as the sun declined toward evening. I imagined that the Atlantic, on the far side of New Jersey, was already drained of light, its wide beach gray as ash. I watched stevedores walk