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myself put into the ground, with no other company than beetles and worms.”
    Poe was amused, so I continued to jolly him.
    â€œAnyone would be glad to have his leftovers cleaned and dusted regularly by a smart young man like me. And isn’t it a privilege for them to advance the cause of science when, more than likely, these skulls did nothing in life but think where their next drink was coming from?”
    â€œYou are a scoundrel, Mr. Fenzil.”
    â€œThank you, sir,” I said, bowing. “I value your good opinion.”
    Composing himself, he returned to his cranial examination. I, in turn, examined him further. The curls of his hair fell romantically over a frayed high collar. His shoulders were narrow, but I’d been mistaken in my first impression: Poe was not delicate, although many of his lady admirers thought him so. In his slender, erect frame, there was vigor, a strength of sinew consonant with tenacity and grit. He’d been a soldier, and, impoverished, he lived much of his mature life among ruffians and hard men. He knew how to get on with all sorts. During the winter of ‘44, we visited low haunts and did things good Christians would have seen us jailed for, if not hanged. But I had the feeling that he did what he did for the sake of his art and not for any relish of vice. He wasn’t vicious. He might have been weak—his troubles made him so—but he was not the moral degenerate some people say, no more than Dr. Mütter was for doting on nature’s freaks.
    â€œEven now, after boiling and bleaching, this skullhas secrets it won’t tell,” said Poe while he held Mirjam Dekker’s mortal portion in his hands and peered into the empty eye sockets.
    â€œIt has nothing anymore to tell them with,” I said flippantly.
    â€œThe truth will out, regardless.” He put the bone down on the table. “In its shape, it is as ancient as the mountains and, like them, keeps the time of the firmament and of the first atom.”
    Poe had a conscience; he wrote about its crises—and something more: the dread that slowly erodes the better part of us with the inevitability of water dripping on a rock. Who of us can stand between the pit and the pendulum and not give way? I believe that this was the human tragedy that fascinated him—not evil, but the faulty center, the rot in the roof beam, the crack in the keystone, an almost inevitable flaw at the heart of every human character, made to beat in a “story” that is not of its making and not entirely within its control. This is the awful truth that Edgar Poe realized, what he labored under, what he wrote about, and what the poor man died of. Not alcohol, brain congestion, opiates, consumption, cholera, rabies, or suicide did him in, but his embattled senses and embittered virtue, together with a lack of means and prospects. He was Micawber without optimism. I knew Edgar Allan Poe for only a short time; I was a principal character in one of his horrors.
    I no longer blame him. I was too impressionable, too ready to fall under his spell, his dark enchantment, too young, too inexperienced to resist. I tell you, Moran, I lost myself that winter! Now, each morning, I look at my facein the shaving mirror to assure myself that I am still here. I and my unsavory—you are kind to take no notice of it.
    Peering in a mirror is the nearest most children come to magic, or madness; for them, the looking glass alters, if only slightly, the world submerged in its depths. The boy in my mother’s cheval glass, staring at me with quizzical, even frightened, eyes was not me. I had momentarily lost myself in it! Each time, I would come away feeling diminished and afraid. And yet, I would return to stand and look—helpless to do otherwise—as I do now at Eakins’s picture.
    When does the last ferry to Philadelphia leave?
    Six o’clock tonight. Will that give you enough time to meet your General