On 29 September 1849, a tired lean man with a battered suitcase traveled on the Baltimore boat. His appearance was glum and at the same time brilliant. He had a finely chiseled lordly head and an almond-colored face; the lines of his eyebrows, perfect in his youth, had been distorted by trials, disparate from his thirsts; and his eyes – violet-blue, radiant – gazed somewhat absently, enshrouded in eternal sorrow. Occasionally, he would tighten his elegant scarf, touch his forehead, and then his hands would uncertainly disappear into the pockets of the creased frock-coat.
He was watching the morning bustle presently. Behind his back, the deck lived its usual chaotic life. Whistling, inky smoke wreaths mixed with a painfully hissing vapor. Unapproachably silent deck-hands sank into the hatches; coal, thrown into the fire-box just a while ago, crackled; travelers had their breakfast, played cards, chatted, slept. He knew this medley well. Underlings from freshly hatched bureaus, their manners – a copy of the grand urbanity from a year ago. Employees of solid companies, with an officelike projecting right ear and imposing postures. Having transmuted fraudulence into an exact science, they evidently prided themselves on each inch of their exteriors. There were traders, shabby workers, wandering actors in cheap motley coats, gamblers, professional paupers. Tarts were giggling upon the knees of rich Jews; drunkards were drawing broad monograms with their feet.
The stranger ached to cry out that everyone here, the great States themselves were lacking in fine feeling and fine thought. The habitual solitude soothed him somewhat, and he sank into reminiscence.
He pictured the outskirts of London, where he had gone to school, the elm-garbed street, the church saturating with pealing the gothic dusk. Then he entered the University of Virginia, but the scarcity of money soon forced him to drop it. Two gentlemen were warming themselves at the funnel and discussing business. One was extolling his experience as a living advertisement, the other was glorifying the profit from cats’ tails. Oh, he knew well that bait into whose whirlpool the rarest treasures of the soul disappeared. Once a time the eagle had led the Romans, nowadays his compatriots waved had for a banner a trifling part of the eagle – the Dollar! – yet they would go to any lengths to worship it with a tenfold reverence, impervious to the charms of faraway dreams. He was an alien to them, they hated him because of his mockery, America was his prison – a literary hireling his whole life, slandered, breathing through the power of his imagination.
He tasted fame. It spouted when the Baltimore Saturday Visitor printed "A Ms. Found in a Bottle". He poured forth many more stories, articles, poems, "The Raven" brought won him the laurels of a poet, yet how much irony in the fact that his readers were most interested in the The Conchologist’s First Book, a compilation textbook on conches that went through several reprints. Absurd! Absurd as a riddle of the sphinx! And the inscription on the demonic mound from the parable said: dereliction. Legions of lilies reared dead heads toward the scarlet eye of a feverish sun.
That summer he’d lectured on the principles of poetry in Norfolk and Richmond. The memory of his beloved Virginia returned to him ever more often, he could hardly muster the courage to withstand the grief within. Why was not he able to save her! Only her eyes remained now, only her gaze kept shining on him. How long ago it was when he stood on the golden threshold to the kingdom of dreams and, blessed, peered into the opening sweeps. But the human lot is short-lived, sorrow-laden. Virginia died, writhing on the shroud-pale-sheeted pallet on the floor. Edgar was wrapping her in his ancient frayed coat; and could do nothing for her, who had gifted him his brightest years. The grave took her, doubly wretched in her youth.
They had wounded him with that appeal to raise funds for him. He was no beggar, may all hell gnaw at them! Even emaciated by hunger, he kept a noble inner bearing. He believed that the government could give him a grant for services to culture. Why had he hoped at all, knowing that the "Americans" democracy was despicable, with the bile of a bull, the heart of a hyena, the brain of a peacock? And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Hah! He’d had spells of uplift – smiling like a juvenile, with mustache sparkling like punch, he would spread on the sun-drenched lawn his new opuses written on narrow rolls. Yet he always passed for an "unwanted maniac": with his adoptive father, the merchant Allan, at the university, with the military (he hid there under the name of Perry and broke the regulations on purpose, so that they would dismiss him), in his unquenchably bold love for the Sublime. The deck was gay with butts, ginger apple peelings, hardening crumbs; the cardsharps were bickering, the tarts barked, the drunks slid down, bereft of their senses; the gentlemen by the funnel were in no rush to exhaust their élan with cats' tails – "Three harvests per year, buddy!" – and living advertisements. A wandering actor was drawing a soft, piercing sorrow from a trumpet.
Genius and demon of the boat medley, his head was growing heavy, in the depths of his memory, very much like the shadows of fairies, sank-reemerged the plots of old stories, bell-moaning stanzas.
Ligea, Ulalume, Annabel Lee – their fates irradiated him with a scorching thin air, with a sharp, sweet and tart magic. He attempted to wrestle the circumstances that had been dragging him, the roughnesses in his character of a God’s elect, never stopped and did not mean to stop. The fire that made him outspoken, a knight in his friendships, did not die out; the enthusiasm with which he had wanted to fight for the freedom of Poland vibrated in him; his quest for the secrets of the soul and the sciences astounded.
The waves were ebbing in bluish green; somewhere under Poe’s gaze, the epopee of Captain Nemo was being born, the water currents anticipated swift Nautilus. Jules Verne, too, would take up the adventures of Gordon Pym. A solitary cloud resembled Cavour’s device; soon Welles would be born and later expose us, with a truly Poesque power of imagination and details, to the War of the Worlds. A wind flown from afar – from a century that he often traveled to in his utopias – brushed against him; and a barely audible voice, the tiniest murmur of water, whispered to him famous names: Yefremov, Lem, Bradbury, Simmons. His soul deserved to delight in the all-encompassing panorama of the societies of the Great Ring; to dig in the ancient rustling folios, in whose curves his characters would come alive as symbols of the dream; to wrap itself in the Solaris dawn, as the Ocean recreates the models of his cosmic insightfulness; or to roam the mysterious planet with the ancient Greek name of Hyperion, of the plentiful meteorite showers.
Baltimore was already near.
The bell on the foredeck was sprinkling around a myriad of somnambular conjuring trills, the drops on the copper facings had evaporated under the high-vaulting sun. And the purple reason of Poetry was ascending its throne still. The sky shone azure like the eye of a griffin. Where did this spring from? Ah, "The Tell-tale Heart". Nerves – taut to the point of breaking – nerves. One had to resist. He foresaw the alienation in the ?? mechanized human ?? swarm, the black series of horror, the scientific romance. In Richmond, the kernel of a story dawned on him. He wanted to write it, once he was done with "The Lighthouse", whose beginning rustled in his suitcase along with other manuscripts. Like "The Tell-tale Heart", the new story would also feature an old man, yet an utterly different one.
He recalled one of Graham’s Magazine contributors (used to edit it once). That was who would serve as the prototype. He even came with the penname with which the protagonist signed his recounts of Greek legends: Timothy Smiles, a name sweet with the Christmas cakes of his childhood. The narrator – inside whom Poe himself would breathe – would be issuing in his publication Smiles’s legends. The penchant for language, touchiness and indolence had so mixed within him that the old man seldom submitted translations, yet they contained no rough line.
Eyes narrowed, he pictured the image to come. A scrawny man, some six feet of height, eyes grown round from a lurking strain like those of a bird on the alert. Always wearing dark, blue-black suits, invariably adorned by a necktie the fine yellow color of white cherries. And once, in spite of his shyness and the menace of mockery, the translator trusts him with a secret long kept: he has constructed wings! And, seeking to dispel his incredulity, Smiles leads him on a late evening to the nearby field.
The grasses are thick, soft, even, savoring of vanilla, dotted with poppies and goldilocks. Having conquered the charms of mood long ago, Edgar Poe had now decided to splash out all the magic of poetry he’d gathered inside. Smiles draws out two pairs of folding wings. They are smiling – the older man anxious about the test of a secret hope; the other excited at the sight of the mechanisms and as ready as a child for a frolic whose end he knows well – they fasten them onto their shoulders. No heavier than four pounds, composed of a strange white material that sparkles like Paros marble. Are they, then, going to fly with such toys? A sweep, then another, a sweep, and a swish that lifts up! Crying out in amazement, they rise.
Flying! The snow ellipses take them into the tropospheric air, it slowly gets cooler. Poe overcomes his fear of flights; the wings move on their own, driven by an unknown force hidden inside their fragile feathers, and the sense that your muscles are harmonizing with its rhythm elates. He would have to, after reference and synthesis, explain from a scientific point the energy and material of the new aerial constructions. Upward, upward, the world begins only now! Timothy and Edgar give themselves to the ecstasy tasted in myths only. Smiles’s face loses its tense expression and starts glowing, the fireworks of the west held in its eyes. From behind a cloud, whose color emulates the translator’s necktie, a flock of cranes sweeps. The birds’ chests creak almost inaudibly, and our heroes do understand: their speed, their human speed is a marvel. What fairy-tale upsurge is bearing them, they are soaring over the ground like in a child’s dream! The fleecy clouds underneath look like pearl-red clams, flecking the bed of a green river. Night falls; the mountains are sleeping inside cool aureoles, house windows are blinking; the dark, you may say, is made of the flesh of black violets, soaked with silent dampness. Around them flows a savor of hay, the smoke of field fires, ozone. Poe pictures the shadows of trout in the streams, the reverie of the forests, the evening round of the folk underneath. The thought that they do not even suspect where Mister Editor is and what he is doing fills him with joy, with awareness of the rare gift of his fate, with ever more magnificent longings, born by a dream already conquered.
With a soft sigh, he thanks Smiles. Through spherical trigonometry, Edgar Poe could determine what portion of the earth surface is seen from above, yet calculations now are redundant. Stars sprout; an odd warmth, as if each cell of his body feels the approach of a fire, wells up in him. The Moon, brilliant as the eyes of Annabel Lee, conceals itself behind a tempestuous wall; a lightning slashes the sky with a fiery lance and they glimpse for a split second – to its very core of darkness and flame – the astonishing suite of the air masses. And Poe, brimming with faith and with poetry, discerns at its rear the smiling images of a future yearned for.
A host of celestial choruses is echoing. Aspiring to the sun of the Sublime all his life, he at last feels his soul vibrating in perihelion. The flight is reviving him, carrying the harrowing memories away, the vanity of anchored existence. Soon his longings will merge with the luminaries, will take from their power and add their own. In joyful dismay, Timothy Smiles watches the changes on his friend’s face and recalls the setting is proper to trust him with one more secret.
Ordinary mortals, and yet fascinating! Smiles’s suit makes friends with the dark, his gaze with the throb of the Milky Way, rushing at them. His whisper resounding in the thirsty Ouranus kingdom, the old man confesses (how hadn’t he thought of that earlier!) that he is a visitor from a faraway planet – one that has reached greater, true harmony, and is now looking after its "younger brethren". Wide astral pupils; clouds flown away; a thickening solar breathing. And the fanciful translator has been performing precisely this task. "Humankind," Smiles goes on, singing galaxies form about, "needs much more unloosening, magical ideals, the quest for which will gift people with a fine omnipotent mind and new feelings in tune with the star symphonies."
Astonished, the editor listens to him. Astonished – he even laughs at the easy use of the word. The visitor offers his wings to those makers of art and of science whom he, Poe, would deem worthy. generous worlds can be reached with them, one can live there and come back, and inspire his works with yearnings of different cultures.
In the dazzling light, Smiles’s scraggy face grows, turns into a menacing comet, heady with charm. His voice twines with the music of the heavenly spheres, liquidly springs from the starry and pliable dome, resounds in the ears and heart, carries you deep below. Solely the sleepy creaking of those artificial feathers still link them to Earth. The wings guarantee a protective field, the flight will last less than a month, with little privation, and you shall be able to see true miracles: what horizons you’ll show to your kin afterwards!
Poe the storyteller promises to think over the offer, the friends come down. The cosmic grandeur fades away, the air grows more fragrant, the heat of the city more burning. Timothy helps Edgar land, folds the marble constructions and – quiet, with eyes like those of an alert bird – vanishes into the night. On his way home, Poe is thinking intensely. To accept a trek to mysterious chasms? But should human ideals be sought for on other planets? Could it be that our peoples do not have the vigor to find them, even more unsuspected and uplifting, on our very own earth, although the civilization upon it is in decline temporarily? And is it permissible to spread the Example as fashion; unsuffered, to have it imported, from suspicious distances, where the laws of Nature could be utterly alien to us? He was wondering if he should not take off in a crew of various specialists so as to look at the Universe from different angles; enough with lone heroes.
He was well aware of the relativism of the new plan: the wings are a mere frame to a Place that exists nowhere, whose making he would build on familiar failures and successes. He did not want to end up with an aesthete or user utopia, he dreamed of unfolding all-embracing contours of the future before Earth. He was anxious, however, about the rough enthusiasm of the first drafts; the appetite of the forming pictures, which hungrily sucked in details; the fairy tree of fancies, laden with ripely sweet, and green and decaying fruit...
In vain shall Timothy Smiles wait for a call.
Of course, Poe could succeed in creating convincing, attractive visions of soaring systems; astronomy was in his blood – the flight itself had given him excellent opportunities for a display of imagination; and in Eureka, his last book, the scientists would stumble in wonder over a post-Einsteinian course of thought. Yet, with a treatment like that, was he not going to be chasing specters in disguise and, most of all, offend his belief in humankind, in spite of his present wretchedness for all his genius? How would the next generations judge such a story, leafing through the drifts of the old press, in which most words spun so much like whip tops and it was obvious that many authors had not even found time to reflect! He should carry the plot and its morals still longer, free himself from the doubts. Let him first finish "The Lighthouse". The masts of Baltimore rose.
The traders and the clerks were waking up, their sleepy faces utterly astounded with their sham grandeur. People were jostling around the luggage – sobering earthen-skinned drunks; speculators, who had feed some quick-acting prostitute; gamblers with trembling hands; workers storing away the leftovers of a succinct snack in their bundles. There emerged the warehouses, the docks and the offices of the Baltimore port, the tawdry doors of the sailor’s bars. The wheels of the boat were dozing off in the oil-green bay, as it lazily drew alongside a quay; Edgar was watching the thick billows of smoke from a gigantic plant chimney. The ashy bricks made it look scaly, painfully alive, hallucinatory: a nightmarish throat of the Machine Demon, oblivious of its progenitors. The clouds in the background resembled a smoldered-away map of the ancient dusty seas of Good and Beauty, which he was trying to draw with eternal lines. The actor with the trumpet launched into a merry marchlike greeting to the city (yet, the inscription on the mound from the parable said: danger). The travel had added to his tiredness; he needed a long, long rest, and then, like the knight in quest for immortal Eldorado, he would gallop again.
It was September 29, 1849. On that early afternoon, Edgar Poe left his suitcase in safe-keeping at the seaport. He was planning to leave for Philadelphia in the evening, where he was going to take his chance with a new magazine of his own; and now – a brief stroll, a diversion, plus a small glass of brandy to help him pull himself together. Without hurrying, he escaped the wells of the harbor streets, their Babel stir, rotting garbage and smells of transoceanic goods, taunting his ever awake urge toward distant lands, more and more cruelly unattainable. Election posters on fences and houses invited him to vote for cheerfully, trustfully grinning faces, of which he only knew they would not fulfill their vociferous promises. He pouted his lips in revulsion. The universal franchise in America aided the swindlers; each party that was not shy of mean action could reap as many votes as it wished; no one would stop or expose it. Pshaw! He was sliding his gaze over the posters as if they were nursery daubs.
Flashy drugstores, offices, steel shutters crashing down over them, a night bar (an owl caught by surprise in the light, frozen uncertainly), a poky bookstore, now there’s a more decent saloon – no grievous curlicues on its door, and no shouts within. Poe went in. As he was peering around, a solid plump gentleman at the far end caught sight of him, whispered something to his bottlemate , the other one started, smacked his lips, and the two beckoned him: "Eddie, Eddie, this way!" They were long-time acquaintances. The plump gentleman who looked like an aging sportsman was Lloyd Nelson, a former compositor in Philadelphia. When he was typesetting the The Conchologist’s First Book, he won the sympathies of its author with his jolly, sincere character and his professionalism; it was not uncommon then that, after Edgar had looked through the last galley-proofs, they would take a drop with mutual pleasure (the lonely conchologist did not pick his companions too daintily). How many theories he had elaborated before him, how many plots – just like that, for the "reader’s effect" – he’d presented to him! Then Nelson came into a modest inheritance, started renting printing offices, they came across each other in the Philadelphia publishing circles, Edgar Poe was coaxing him, almost jokingly, to launch together a magazine.
They had already clinked glasses for the encounter and were chatting amicably about the latest in their lives. The writer’s sense of loneliness was giving way to a beguilement among minor, mild-tempered acquaintances. Mentally, he begged them to keep away from his soul, to immerse him unostentatiously in their simple, attainable interests. He promised himself he would not ask them the impossible and took pleasure in their ruddy, well-fed faces, their elegant clothes, their clear baritones and the attention they showed him, with sparkling eyes, small relevant questions and gentlemanly pats on his frail stooping shoulders.
"Well, for a libation to the Sun," he offered, "who the new idols Wealth and Fashion are essaying to eclipse! Cheers!"
The two friends exchanged furtive glances to the effect of "Didn’t I tell you?", "Still the same," or "Easy with him!"
"I’ll share with you a personal discovery of mine," said the merchant Pete Windborough, a long-time partner of Poe’s second father John Allen Poe. "You must admit that few of the people of limitless profundity scorn the bottle. Whether such an inclination is the cause of their profundity, or a mere confirmation thereof, is a problem beyond our poweres..."
Edgar smiled; the alcohol was gradually, mildly warming him. Well, never mind his rash joining the Richmond Abstinence Brotherhood. Just a few more, and he’ll go back to the docks, refreshed and ready to seek for his Eldorado, a single shining bar of it at least. And Windborough possessed the iron quality of remaining the same over the years. The same black frock-coat, the fleshy pink nose dominating his features, the boorish, ever-piqued tone, the same favorite jokes, the same profiteering schemes. Compared to the merchant Allen, however, he emanated an inborn artistry, and although stepson and stepfather did not get along at the time, he did not shun Poe. There could be no news around Pete, Edgar thought, so he turned to Lloyd Nelson.
"You can congratulate me, Eddie," Nelson shot him with his marvelous hawk eyes, "I’m an owner already! The press for civic services Universum is mine. This one’s on me!... Say, may I offer you any help? Do you remember our dreams about a magazine?"
"Friend," the merchant coughed, "I’ve got no doubts a publication on de luxe paper, with the finest of types, is completely within your capability. Do not be shy, we’ve got Edgar Allen Poe here – a nationally famed writer, an editor and dreamer par excellence!"
"If it indeed were the case, Pete, I’d have already launched a journal to my liking. Let it rest, please. I’ve knocked on many doors, but no one responded. At the very best they’d open them a crack, just to jam the visitor’s foot or head."
"It’s only because you’ve never come across a gentleman like Lloyd. Look him over carefully, leave the past behind! D’you know how many times he’s told me his greatest purpose is to help start a decent journal that would shake America’s nap? And all the time, truth be told, Lloyd’s been thinking of your illustrious person. You are the editor he’s looking for!"
Universum’s owner confessed his suffering in a whisper: Poe had appeared at the right moment, and things would look up. His pupils widened with sympathy, he reflected awhile, struck the table: "Settled! Enough fooling around with Universum, I’m sick of all those engagement, wedding and requiem invitation cards, drugstore ads and freighters’ timetables! Time will blow them away, makes more sense to invest in art. In a great enterprise, Eddie, that the audience has long been waiting for!"
Edgar watched the arousal of his companions with a disguised irony. He could not escape from the impression they were staging a farce. Were they not merely trying to provoke him, use him as a diversion (they were not bad fellows otherwise, nor stingy)? And yet, when someone talked about his great dream, even making a joke of it, he could not lie low for long. He decided to join the game, without any serious hope of wagging his tongue and unraveling the vaudeville whims of the merchant and the compositor. There was still time till the Philadelphia train.
Nelson started talking about wonderful types of paper – "Even the Dutch will be envious!" – about artistic types; he promised to hire Baltimore’s most capable typesetters and correctors, poured forth illustrators’ names that Poe heard for the first time. He was listening to him absent-mindedly, as a grown-up nods to a child’s jabbering. Hmm, the company could be endured, and the performance wasn’t arid either; he peered into the recesses of the saloon. They had lit candles – slender white angels; a drunk was raving in the corner, showing his merriment by smashing his fist against the butts. Edgar’s legs softened, the demon inside unglued his eyelids and sighed before waking. A quiet hubbub slunk-skulked into his brain. He thought Windborough was weighing him with glassy eyes.
"Right then," he let his tongue run away, "what are you going to publish in that journal of yours? What is its vision going to be?"
"Old chap, you very well know the workings of the readers’ demand. It’s your style that will conquer the crowds! Most of all, of course, sensational prose, exquisite poetry, the latest in science." Lloyd lowered his voice. "We can come up with it news ourselves, but careful, Eddie, careful!"
He had not been mistaken. Windborough and Nelson cared nothing for making new forms of the Sublime. He beat off the assault of drowsiness; despite the late hour, he reassured himself that such a change in the rhythm was safe. Imagine he’d bump into Timothy Smiles on the night train again.
"Splendid." The poet wiped his bristling moustache, his gaze flared up. "You too may become sought-after writers, dear Pete and Lloyd. I’ll give you the secret. Whoever wishes to write sensational stories, must at once furnish himself with the most horrid black ink" – Edgar downed his glass – "and a huge, blunt-tipped quill pen. Remember, the quill should never be sharpened and if your manuscript is easy to read, then it does not at all deserve to be read."
"What are you saying, I’ll find the most capable typesetters, don’t you remember?" the boss of Universum protested. Poe sensed that Lloyd was unconsciously falling out of his role. "Such typesetters for whom even Chinese will be a trifle."
"Chinese is the language of editorials, dear friends, to keep common folk from confusion. Sensational articles now, they teem with Latin and especially Greek phrases, for Hellenic letters stare from the page wisely and vastly impress the voracious readers. Once you’ve mustered courage to write, I’ll share with you a few of those phrases, and for the first issue of our journal I’ll offer my sensational household novella "The Kitchen Towel".
"Bravo, bravo!" Windborough took out an antique watch on a gold chain, raised his brows meaningfully at Nelson. "Some of your thoughts, Eddie, I’ll write in the family Bible. Joking, of course. Rest assured that no one will limit your tastes in the new publication, your imagination will flow wide like the Gulf of Mexico."
Poe was getting bored with the company already. He noticed that Pete’s skin was glimmering sinisterly and the candles had turned into incorporeal specters with fiery hats; the air around was suffused with sorrow. He was getting drunk, he had to eat something. Windborough went to the buffet. The writer did not hear the whispering of the merchant and the saloon keeper, nor did he see the latter producing a fruit stuck with litter from his pocket. "I’ll make a Virginia dish for your customer: ham baked with pears." He rubbed the yellowish peel with his sleeve. "The esthete he is, he’d appreciate it!" The two burst into chuckle. Pete announced that "Mister Poe is done," and brought the serving.
As he ate, Nelson carefully hinted to him that elections were coming and Poe, like any upright citizen of democratic America, had to exercise his franchise. A vague surmise cut Poe. The faction to which his tablemates belonged, they were saying, had nominated for Congress some Van Brinsen from Baltimore. They launched into an eulogy of the crystalline man of great merits he was, of his fondness for arts and his certain blessing the future journal. And Poe’s popularity, his prestige and incorruptibility would affect the elections immensely.
"To human reason!" the poet cut them short, barely suppressing his impulse for scandal. "To Van Brinsen and the obscure geniuses of America!"
The demon inside him stretched, fully awake. The tables were emptier now, solitary gas lamps glimmered outside. September 30'th had begun. He broke out into a cold sweat, there was rumbling in his ears. He overcame a surge of nausea with an effort and said that most likely their candidate possessed a "bump of decency" – a childhood memory from the time his governess had given him a smack, so that he’d stop tormenting her with his boohoo. Lloyd and Pete exchanged glances, gnashed their teeth and went on exalting great Van Brinsen.
Some ne’er-do-well fell in the fireplace thrice, taking it for the door. Another slept, his forehead drowned in a puddle of porter; his neighbors existed before death took them away completely. Let it end, let this meeting end! Poe tried to redirect the conversation to the beauty of traveling, but obviously it was of no import to the gentlemen who kept treating him for hours on end. It was too late for the Philadelphia train, who should he bother now, so he decided to spend the night here. Why had not he taken his leave and his hat earlier? His fingers felt soft as wax. Wishing to cheer his chapfallen companions, he told them about a good friend of his, owner of a journal with a colossal circulation: he had tamed a baboon so that the noble animal, for a glass of undiluted Dutch gin composed wonderful stories that the most talented of contributors could not come up with. Pete gave a faint smile, Lloyd, hawk eyes rekindled, took up his panegyric for the new enterprise, mixing his naïve projects with the Congressman’s nomination. Poe eventually got terribly tired of this, the wicked spirit of an unaccountable worry clutched at his throat.
A long-worn-out metaphor stung him – the waxen theater of the will... He stopped listening, stopped replying, as he found that the sound of his own voice was nettling him. An icy terror suddenly seized him that he had nothing in his life, he did not know enough people and all of this was a dream within dreams. Was there nothing more he could give, then: run away, enough, go! He recalled Timothy Smiles. Oh, would it not be fine to sketch out at least the beginning of the visitor’s tale on the train? It would let him wash away the scale of tonight. Poppies and goldilocks danced, he felt with his feet the soft thick grasses of the nearby field.
Age-old mountains dozed among silent aureoles, leaves fell into streams, drifting away swiftly under the enigmatic susurrus of the wind. He heard the creak of white wings and once again saw the heavenly constellations. Smiles was telling him about fascinating faraway planets; slowly and splendidly did they soar above the ocean, which groaned down below, phosphorescent. And the seconds of their onrush equaled a whole mundane century.
While Nelson and Windsborough dazzled themselves in gazing at, as it seemed to him, minor details, the demon inside spread all over, possessed him, pinned him to his chair. He glimpsed the shadows under Pete’s eyes: they were deep, dark, akin to a second pair of brows. He did not hear them urge him to drink (his hold not full yet, heh, how much more they had loaded!), ridicule him. Lloyd Nelson announced he was Poe’s superior "in every one respect"; Allen’s partner added that Edgar occupied himself only with things that did not fit the world’s proper order. "A wastrel!" joined the refrain the port watchman, who’d meanwhile attached himself to the company. And they fiercely put him through the Procrustean bed of their conclusions, yet he no longer knew where he was. Virginia, Timothy Smiles, his loyal mother-in-law Clemm, were all searching for him desperately.
In the midnight mist it seemed to him he had to vote for a rather queer congressman from Baltimore, who had split into three in the faces of Pete, Lloyd and the smirking port watchman of the tobacco-cocoa teeth. Ah, may all hell gnaw at them! After this nightmare, the writer saw tall marvelous walls. The walls quickly narrowed around him – silver, flashing with galvanic convulsive radiance, dotted with lightgreen snakelike ornaments.
They raised his limp body and dragged it into the gloomiest corner. There the watchman hissed: "Dead-drunk!", and the two old friends, as if having whispered to each other’s soul, "Could you expect anything from a swine like this? We’d better rid him of the needless possessions, he’ll have no use for them, and besides, we’ve gone to quite some expenses!", with feverish swaying pulled off Poe’s tie and jersey, handed a few odds and ends over the body and, grunting, carried it a few blocks away. They left it in an abandoned engine-shed, where they always rounded up drunk voters. After two or three days of captivity, they could squeeze half a score votes out of anyone. The port watchman, content with the scarf of the poet, vanished obligingly.
Some ninety hours later, the robbed Edgar Poe was discovered in another saloon. His ordinarily almond-colored face was now ashen. They drove him to the hospital of Washington College. Here on 7 October 1849 he would pass away from a meningitis and bequeath a mysterious shadow over his fate, for the Angel of the Odd had taken vengeance on him more than once for the heresy (the arguments over his universe would cross swords over his still fresh grave). "The Lighthouse" remained incomplete; the visitor Smiles got no answer. Decades later, Debussy would not finish his piece based on the American’s stories, although he clearly heard the bells of its scores. Children’s, wedding, funeral – they grew and deafened him with their groaning rhythm.
But was it not Poe himself, who bred during his late wild perihelion the sprouts that would bear the fruits of Jules Verne and Yefremov’s worlds ... of Lem and Simmons’s? They seemed to have visited planets akin to those promised by Timothy Smiles, without leaving Earth, her very own might providing them fountains of inspiration! These were people who had flown to faraway galaxies on wings of their own, in order to show their depth and changeable beauty to humankind, which "black" Poe had so feared to offend with his utopias.
Nine mourners buried him in Baltimore, which had first heralded his fame. On the same farewell day, "Annabel Lee" was published. And when the moon shines, it carries dreams of Annabel, and neither the heavenly angels nor the demons in the depths of the earth and in us can separate Edgar Poe’s soul from Annabel Lee – the dream, unattainable – and ever approached light of the flight.
Aleksander Karapantshev
c/o Yuriy Ilkov (Terra Fantastica)
"Sveta Troitsa", bl. 325, vh. A, ap. 13
1309 Sofia, Bulgaria.
Translated by Kalin Nenov © 2005