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Custer?
    Fine! I’m glad you don’t find me tedious. Not yet anyway. You wouldn’t be the first to sit and squirm! But I like to reflect, as I go, because for me a tale’s use and interest lie exactly in the notions that come to mind as the narrative unspools. Try some of my tobacco, won’t you? Virginia spiced with perique. I bought it in New York the last time I visited Bellevue Hospital. I was there to see the marvelous job Dr. Smith’s doing for the insane.
    â€œThis Vogel who was hanged . . .” said Poe, stabbing at the catalogue entry with a finger, like a man stubbing out a cigarette. “I’d like to have been a thought inside his skull the moment the hangman dropped him. Time must have been in suspension during the body’s dying fall to the end of the rope and the snap of the neck. I’ve a feeling he had space enough to think with an intensity, a clarity, a rationality he’d never known before. Edward, I could write a book about that appalling moment, which was, for him, eternity,if I’d seen and thought what this young man did on his way toward extinction.”
    A merry notion, Moran! But that was Edgar Poe’s way.
    â€œIt would be obscene!” I said, honesty momentarily subduing a false humility.
    Poe shrugged. “The mind cannot help its thoughts.”
    It can keep its mouth shut, I said to myself. His fantasy had horrified me.
    Poe picked up Vogel’s skull and weighed it in his hands as if it were gold. I was struck by his admiration for the thing. He appeared suddenly to have been possessed by—well, I didn’t know what he found compelling, unless it was Czeslaw Vogel’s ghost, which had been shut up inside his skull like a genie in a lamp. I’d handled it many times, and never once had it incited in me anything other than a vague sympathy. To be honest, it was more my curiosity that would move me. Vogel meant nothing to me. Edgar’s curiosity was plain to see as he looked at what had been the face of a young man from Poland, who had come to grief in the Kensington ward of Philadelphia and had met his end on the penitentiary gibbet.
    â€œHis teeth were bad,” said Poe, running his finger over the dead man’s molars. “‘Possible abscesses,’ you’ve written here.”
    â€œThat’s right,” I said, leaning over his shoulder to read the annotation penned in my own fine cursive hand.
    â€œA toothache can drive a person to distraction until there’s nothing in the world except the pain of it.”
    I grunted in assent, remembering how I’d suffered from a carious incisor that not even oil of clove could calm. I feltthe gap left by its extraction with the tip of my tongue and shuddered at the memory.
    â€œAn abscess is worse. Perhaps it was an agony too great to be borne,” Poe said as much to himself as to me. “For Vogel. Pain is not absolute: Each of us tolerates it as he can.” Poe tapped at a diseased tooth. “There is no telling what a mouth such as this could have done to his mind.” He was silent a moment. “What do you think, Edward? Could a man’s mouth turn him into a murderer? I can imagine killing even a wife if she was foolish enough to nag and vex a man while he was in the throes of a toothache.”
    I had no answer for him.
    â€œI put it to you, Edward: Is the good man’s goodness fixed and impossible to pervert—an unswerving moral compass? Or can it be turned aside by pain?”
    He expected an answer, and I gave him one: “I suppose if the pain is great and the moral nature weak . . .”
    â€œYou’re being evasive, my friend. But let it go, for now.” He fell to studying Vogel’s skull again. “The body is not the only seat of pain. The mind, too, Edward—the mind can know pain more terrible than the body’s. Or have you never in your young life suffered doubt, envy, jealousy, bereavement,