Free The Port-Wine Stain by Norman Lock Page B

astonishment.
    â€œScience affirms a medium of attraction—ether, spiritus , pneuma, call it what you like—that conveys, across space, the influence of one thing on another. Newton described it as ‘a subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit, particles of bodies attract one another.’ It would explain the effect of the moon on tides and on the womb, the transmission of light, heat, and sound, the curious affinity of twins, the uncanny ability of some rare individuals to will objects to move as if by themselves, the eerie instances when a thought seems to jump wordlessly from one mind to another, the apparently collective intelligence of a flock of birds or a cloud of gnats that causes it to swerve en masse, perhaps the influence of facial features on character, and even the periodic incidence of various diseases.”
    My eyes about to wander to the window, I fixed them purposefully on Mütter’s own.
    â€œMesmer wrote of the effect of celestial gravitation on physiology. While a student in Paris, I attended Deleuze’s lectures and was persuaded of the existence of a magnetic fluid—Mesmer’s ‘imponderable fluid’ distributed uniformly throughout the universe, which makes actions at a distance possible. If there’s a soul, Edward, perhaps it resides in that magnetism, and evil—to speak in the idiom preferred by our friend Edgar Poe—in contagious effluvia.”
    He grew pensive and played absentmindedly with a jawbone, which he kept on his desk. The mandible, with its row of uneven teeth, had been dug up in a field by thecollege porter’s dog. Nothing more of what had once been a woman in her twenties had been recovered, although the police had turned over the lot with rakes and shovels. If her skull had been found intact, she might have called to her scattered remains. In my mind’s eye, I watched them tunnel through the earth and make her whole again. Such were the morbid thoughts of a young man—a fickle moon orbiting the poles of the worldly Thomas Mütter and otherworldly Edgar Poe.
    â€œWhat does not bear thinking about, however, is that human beings are no better than marionettes. There must be a countervailing individual will—a mind able to resist.”
    Dr. Mütter hoped to find a faculty of navigation in his pigeons independent of animal magnetism or the body’s “factors,” units of inheritance proposed a decade earlier by Gregor Mendel. He wished to show men and women that they were more than automatons doing the bidding of stronger wills than theirs, or of a legacy willed them by the past, or of the stars. He wanted to prove that the birds chose to fly home. I’ve always thought that this same ambition was the true meaning of his plastic operations: to free us from the urgencies of plan or accident or, at least, to oblige us to grapple with them, however unequal we may be to the struggle and uncertain of the outcome.
    How naïve! Poe, the pessimist and fatalist, would entertain the idea and quickly dismiss it, saying, “Each human being believes that he occupies the center of the universe , but it is only the center of a spider’s web . He’s blessed if he lives and dies in ignorance of his ensnarement.”
    I was too tired and, frankly, too bored to hear moreof Mütter’s disquisition. He handed me several pages of handwritten instructions for the birds’ care, feeding, breeding, and training and then bid me good night. I gave him mine and left him to his thoughts.
    Outside, the lamps had been lit; their lights fell uncertainly on streets and sidewalks, any suggestion of warmth in their yellowish glimmer dampened by newly fallen snow. The college building hulked, black against a bleached sky, its windows dark except for those of Dr. Mütter’s laboratory. Tomorrow, he would operate on Nathaniel Dickey’s face.
    I