I wait until a midsummer’s Saturday night before joining Upton and his fellow gamblers at the card table in his room. A broad-shouldered blond fellow named Samuel, whom I’ve met once or twice, lets me in, a gold snuff box in hand.
“Do you take snuff, Poe?” he asks.
“No, I was raised by a tobacconist. I’m trying to escape the world of tobacco while freed from his dominion.”
“Understandable.” Samuel kicks the door shut while pinching snuff from the box. He then sucks the wad of tobacco up his left nostril and offers a sniffled “Welcome.”
“Thank you.”
“Welcome, Poe,” says Upton, hopping up from the table and shaking my hand. “So glad you finally decided to join us.”
“There’s the Poet to a T,” says Philip Slaughter, slapping my back from the chair beside me. He reaches around to take a pinch of snuff from Samuel’s box and snorts it up his red-rimmed nose.
“Welcome, Mr. Poe,” says one of the players at the table—none other than the hotelkeeper George Washington Spotswood—who’s shuffling the deck, an emptied glass of brandy parked at his right elbow.
“Have a drink,” says Upton. “Pull up a chair. We’re just about to start a new hand.”
“Thank you, gentlemen. I’m much obliged.”
I dip a cup into Upton’s punch bowl but force myself to wait to take a sip until I’ve won a little money. The libations smell less sweet tonight—more likely to numb my brain with astounding swiftness. I pull up a chair and rest the glass as far from myself as I can.
“How are you at loo, Poe?” asks Upton with a dimpled grin while he raises his drink to his lips.
“I’ve never played it,” I admit, but the others gladly teach me.
Before we officially commence playing, Garland glides into the room amid a round of cheers from the other fellows, who apparently adore him. He plants himself in a chair behind me. He has no money for wagers, for reasons obvious to me, so he simply watches me toss my borrowed-on-credit dollars into the pot.
Between hands Garland leans forward and whispers near my ear, “You’re better than this dissolute rabble, Poe. You’re smarter than the lot of them. You can win this and save yourself from your impecuniousness.”
During the second hand, I lay down my five cards—three of them spades—and grind my teeth over the superior flushes unfurling around me on the table’s scratched surface. Upton wins the pot, and William Sewell to his left deals next.
A wind bangs the shutters boarding Upton’s window, and the flames in the lamps dance in the draft. The dimming of the light turns everyone’s faces into the golden visages of phantasms with hollowed-out eyes. The transformation, for some reason, brings to mind a student named Sterling Edmunds, who recently returned to the grounds. The faculty suspended Sterling for whipping a schoolmate—whipping him brutally several times with a cowhide—over cheating at cards.
We’re all nothing more than beautiful young monsters, I realize as I glance at the faces glowing around me, one small step away from killing each other.
I’m forced to keep passing—luck fails me at every hand—and I watch my schoolmates, as well as Mr. Spotswood, scoop my coins and bills into their piles of winnings. I nip small sips of peach and honey, letting the brandy soothe my nerves, but I remain careful—oh, so careful—not to slip into incapacitation.
The clock strikes midnight with hellish clangs that dent my eardrums. I totter out of Upton’s room, my pockets empty, my brain dulled, my knees wobbly.
Upton grabs my left arm and keeps me upright. “Maybe next time luck will smile upon you, Poe.”
“Thank you, friend.” I slap him on his back and cling a moment to his shirt and vest to avoid falling. “But I must stay cautious. John Allan is watching.” I bend forward, close to his doughy face, and I say in a slow and measured voice, so he’ll understand me, “John Allan is always watching.”
Upton purses his brows. “Who the devil is John Allan?”
“I don’t know,” I say, rocking to and fro. “That’s an excellent question. Who is John Allan, and why does he plague me like a—plague?” I laugh at the cleverness of my phraseology, which I foolishly mistake for a pun.
Garland yanks me backward by my collar and escorts me to my room. He slams the door shut behind us and flings me down on my bed.
I hit my left knee on wood and cry out in pain.
“Maybe gambling and drinking isn’t such a good idea,” he says, sounding far too much like Pa. “Maybe we should stick to hosting fellows like Miles and Tom in your room and reading your work aloud for them. You’re a terrible gambler, and your drinking makes me sick. Do you know how hard it was for me to pretend to keep my wits about me in there?”
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes and groan. “Miles and Tom are my only two friends from the Lawn who’ll even speak to me now, and they laughed the last time I read them a story. They said I overused the name of my protagonist, Gaffy.”
“I know. I was there and watched you fly into a rage and throw the story into the fire. See the singe marks on my arm!”
Garland pulls back his shirtsleeve and shows me a scaly black patch of bubbles on his inner forearm that makes my stomach lurch. He then backs away, and his eyes lose their luster. His voice sharpens to the lacerating blade of a scythe. “Don’t ruin this, Poe. You’re doing too well in your classes. You just joined the damned Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. You’re thriving here when you’re not worrying about money and John Allan.”
“Tom calls me Gaffy Poe.”
“Who cares what Tom calls you! My God, Poe!” He yanks his hat farther down on his head with both hands, his knuckles whitening. “I’m losing my patience. Stop hesitating and feeling sorry for yourself. Pick yourself up and write.”
“Not now.”
“Write!” yells Garland, and he leans down over me on the bed and roars with a force that rattles the walls: “WRITE!”
I scramble off the mattress, grab a sheet of paper so recklessly, it tears, and write deep into the night—about what I do not even know. I ramble on and on about injustices, and poverty, or some other subject that’s chewing at my brain until my eyes water and my hand goes numb—and Garland’s looming there behind me the entire time, his shadow lengthening into the shape of a bird on the wall, squawking, “Write! Write! Write!”
The gambling continues.
The losses accrue.
Garland’s oppressiveness worsens.
Pa’s lack of financial assistance endures.
Ma writes that she’s suffering from another cold.
Elmira still won’t respond to my letters.
I toss all my earlier manuscripts, the ones I brought from home—as well as my work on “Tamerlane,”
“The Lake,” and the beginning threads of my ode to Helen—down into the cobwebs of the floor beneath my table.
And all throughout the humid heat of summer, my friends in the West Range view me as their source of entertainment—a theatrical teller of tales in a candlelit room pungent with charcoal, ink, sweat, and booze. But if they look deep into the eyes of the drawings spreading across my new walls, they’ll witness what I truly am. They’ll learn I’m not just the laughing boy who challenges fellow students to foot races in the Lawn and impresses his professors. They’ll understand I’m not the carefree wit they think they know.
I’m lonely. I’m terrified. I’m penniless. I’m haunted.
And I could take down every single one of them with a few swift strokes of my pen, for I see the ugliness inside us all.