Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  Often I wonder, how will I take my place among those who came before me?

  The first suspected case was a physician who died in the Campo Santi Apostoli near the Jewish Ghetto in 1765. For a year his breathing grew increasingly labored until finally he took to his bed.

  In his delirium he gathered Caterina Quirini’s spilled pearls from the ballroom floor before the King of Denmark could grab them for himself, insisted on exchanging his red leggings (the color of revolution) for the safer black signifying piety, knocked on his own window thinking it a golden door.

  For brief moments he almost came back to himself, pondered the beauty of mathematics, science, reason. Scrutinized and wondered. Jotted down what he could. After all, his teacher was Morgani who had been taught by Valsalva, who himself had been taught by the anatomist Malpighi, who had been taught, in turn, by Borelli, pupil of the monk Castelli, who had been taught by Galileo.

  He remembered standing in the Acquapendente in Padua, the most famous anatomy theater in all of Europe, watching the miraculous wand of Morgani’s scalpel. He was so young then, ideas didn’t frighten him.

  But in his bed hundreds of pearls rolled across the ballroom floor. Caterina Quirini spun faster and faster, her hem churning to white foam.

  Finally everything grew still. The anatomists stood faceless, without hands. The ballroom was empty.

  Pearls didn’t exist. Anatomy theaters didn’t exist.

  Why do I tell you this? I want only for you to open Dostoevsky’s book and read to me of Prince Myshkin stepping off the train in Petersburg after many years away in the sanitarium in Switzerland—everything he once knew pressing into him again, his face curious in the dirty light—

  These errant proteins inside me are named for a genus of small petrels, pachyptila desolata, also known as the avian prion, found in the south seas. “A fluttering thing of pale gray-blue and white…a flightless bird…a ghost…”

  It’s marked with a black “m” across the back extending from one wing-tip to another.

  Sometimes I feel those flightless wings with their black “m” inside me.

  But mostly I feel no wings at all. I think only of what’s fact: that among the many hundreds of genes on Chromosome 20, some for the regulation of insulin, others for the control of childhood eczema etc.—one is misfiring inside me.

  Dostoevsky had one black eye and one brown eye, did you know this? The black one—his right—was said to have resulted from an epileptic fall or maybe from the treatment that ensued (some say it was a needle in the eye) which left the pupil enormously enlarged, the iris almost entirely obscured.

  Often I think of that dark eye. He wrote in his notebook, “My nerves are unstrung in the extreme…Yesterday I pawned my overcoat…I sit at my desk night and day but still need to work faster. The fit has left me very tired. I have ruined my own joy like a hawk attacking a small bird.”

  The less I sleep the more I need the books I can no longer read. I believe you can help me.

  Forgive me, I xxx it’s not that I expect things to make sense

  “Strange facts are before us in abundance,” the elusive, unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, says, “but far from making things clearer, they obscure every explanation.”

  How can I explain why I need this so badly?

  “The soul of another is a dark place,” Prince Myshkin thinks to himself as he walks in his own darkness, “and what chaos is found there.”

  Today I found a copy of The Idiot in the hospital library, and although I’ve just barely started skimming, I can see it’s the story of a young man, Prince Myshkin, who after years away from St. Petersburg for treatment for epilepsy struggles to adjust to the world he has returned to. But much trouble befalls him. He is a good man but unworldly. When moved by the tormented, beautiful Nastasya, he wants only to help and comfort her. But the more he tries to understand the ways and motives of Nastasya and others around him, the more his fragile steadiness begins to crumble. Often he feels different and apart. By the end of the book he has seen many terrible things and can’t find his way back from that knowledge.

  Why did she choose this book for us to read? Does she know that like Myshkin I also seize and fall?

  How could I even begin to absorb what I was reading?—her need, the history of her illness, how she asked for help though she didn’t even know him. His willingness to go to her, how he listened and didn’t turn away.

  And how could this not be shadowed by what happened between Frieda and myself?

  The notewriter said Dostoevsky believed he ruined his own joy. But what wrong did he believe he committed, what violence inflicted on himself? Did he believe his fits were his own fault?

  Once again, I remembered my childhood infirmary. My left leg had broken (a break that came mysteriously and quietly, as if a furtive creature lived in me who hated me but wouldn’t say why, and every now and then would hurt me). Thin fractures started spreading through my spine. I learned very young that clamor often does less harm than what takes place in secret quiet. And now, in the infirmary, I had to stay still for many weeks.

  I was reading a book called Phillips’s New World of Words.

  At “J” I came to “joy”:

  “Joys of the Planets are certain Dignities that befall such planets.”

  “Every planet, according to Ptolemy, is in his joy when another is dignified and when each planet can exist according to its nature.”

  But what, exactly, was a Dignity? And how could it “befall” a planet? What had this to do with joy? Right away I knew I couldn’t understand. But though I couldn’t say just how, those words felt to me like balance and justice, maybe even peace. As if somewhere the universe is deeply kind and can communicate that kindness. For a moment I pictured my body not breaking, and the others around me unhurt within their given natures.

  Already we’ve made our way through the first few chapters of The Idiot. And last night before I left she spoke briefly about Dostoevsky’s life—his childhood in Moscow and Daravoe, the prison years, his travels through Europe, though the whole time she kept her eyes averted. Often when we read she asks me to double back and go over the same passages again, or even parts we finished days before—so it’s as if I’m thrown back into a darkness I’ve struggled hard to leave, or a patch of mottled sunlight I never expected to set eyes on again. I try not to think about time, the ways it can feel torn and broken.

  But this morning I had a seizure that’s left me too tired to go to her tonight. Hours of black waves washing over me. A feeling of great thirst.

  Last night when you didn’t come I tried looking through the book myself, but the letters blurred and spread across the page. I’ve been thinking about how Dostoevsky wanted to write a novel about a truly good man, but I’m not sure in the end he did this. Doesn’t Myshkin become more and more like the others, his pure goodness and compassion confused, his thoughts contaminated and contorted, until a darkness overtakes him.

  In the beginning he sees and feels so clearly but gradually arrives at a seeing that is torn and desperate.

  I wonder what you think of this. Is it impossible to live unruined in the world?—

  I have noticed throughout the book the word “ruin” appears often.

  I don’t know if it is day or night now. I don’t know why you’re not coming.

  Frieda was sitting in her stone chair on the parched summit. Behind her, miles of jagged peaks jutted up from the rough, untended soil. The Servetta Muta lay like her white handkerchief in her lap, and from the tilt of her head she seemed to be staring at the moon, though I couldn’t see her face. Black miles between us, miles of cold, degraded air. Then I thought I heard her speaking, though knew also she was far from me and silent, He goes to her whenever he can, reads page after page even as his world swerves and breaks and a red fire spreads inside his eyes. Even as he fears the words will hurt her. I imagine much tenderness in his face. His hands turning pages.

  I told
myself her voice was a small vessel that would crack if I touched it. But when I looked at my hands I saw only two fingerless stumps, blunt matter cut off at the wrists, the blotched, purple skin sewn shut with coarse black stitches.

  “Here are the islands of the painful,” Pompeo Molmenti wrote in Venice: Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic, his monumental 5-volume work from 1905. Over 2,000 pages, but less than a paragraph on San Servolo.

  In all those thousands of pages he passed over the small islands so quickly, with not even a pause to explain why he chose the word “painful.”

  But now as I pictured the epileptic and the one he read to, each alone but still thinking of the other, I thought of how Dostoevsky understood more than anyone that dailyness is a form of extremity, and instability and pain live within the most ordinary hour.

  He wrote in a letter, “Writers don’t invent or fantasize but document what is.”

  Why did I ever think of sleep as stillness?

  Sleep spindles are synchronous brain waves that come in bursts in stage 2 sleep. I know this now, though when my brain could still make use of them I didn’t know the term or that they even existed. They show as eye-shaped clusters on the EEG. It’s said they enable the integration of new information into our existing knowledge, but what happens when those eyes begin to vanish?…

  Today I had a waking dream. I was in a stranger’s room, bare except for a small writing table with a carafe of water; a divan draped in worn brown fabric; also a round table covered with a small red cotton cloth. I realized this was Dostoevsky’s study. There were many papers on the floor but of course I didn’t touch them. For hours I waited, hoping he might come. Then I felt his dilated eye watching from outside the window. But the more I felt it, the more it dawned on me he didn’t see me, that I was nothing to him, he was lost in thoughts of Myshkin and of the word “ruin” that accompanied him everywhere he went. He marveled that he could love such a treacherous word, that it drew rather than repelled him. Then I, too, felt flooded with love for that word though I couldn’t explain it.

  I wonder when you’ll read to me again. I believe that you still want to.

  Since you still haven’t come, I’ve been remembering the early passages where Myshkin speaks of the Swiss village he was sent to with the hope he would recover. But there’s something I still don’t understand. Remember how soon after his arrival he notices a waterfall nearby—“It fell from a height on the mountain, almost perpendicular, white and splashing.” At night its sound calms him, and often at mid-day he wanders up the mountainside to glimpse it. But he goes on to say, “If I walked straight on, far, far away, and reached the line where sky and earth meet…there I should find a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.”

  But why would he want a more turbulent life? Why would he say that? Why would he even think such a thing? And he, especially, whose body already fills with turbulence as it seizes and then floods him with shame.

  Do you understand what that turbulence a thousand times stronger would give him, what he would find in that new life, why he could think it a good thing?

  It’s been many days since I last saw you. I wonder where you are and why you aren’t coming. I hope nothing has harmed you.

  Last night I was finally well enough to go to her again. We read from Chapter 6, Part 1, where Myshkin remembers the destitute Swiss peasant girl, Marie, but then as soon as I finished she asked for it again, and then again. I keep wondering what it means to her, what she is thinking.

  All day I’ve been going over the bare outline in my mind: how Marie, humiliated and sick, crawls back through mud to her small village, having been abandoned by the traveler she ran off with. But the villagers treat her like “a spider,” mock her and refuse her food. Finally “she no longer opens her lips,” but walks among the cattle that move in inhuman quietness through the fields. All she wants is to watch over them and tend them. Each day she does this until the herdsman sees her and drives her away.

  But she slips back among them with her wooden stick. Even after she’s grown too ill to walk, she rests on a nearby ledge and watches. This brings her great happiness. Her face thin as a skeleton’s by then.

  When we finished, I waited a few minutes to see if she might ask why I hadn’t come the week before, but she said nothing.

  Sometimes the nights are very long but at other times short I don’t know how to account for this xxx And how can I be in this room when I am also on my rock ledge watching for my cattle Remember how Myshkin says of himself “I have no right sense of proportion” xx the waterfall still bright white inside him though no one in St Petersburg can see it xxx His gestures so often awkward misbegotten xxx “My words are incongruous” Myshkin says It is so hard for him to steady himself in a world that keeps shifting and confusing him though all he wants is to be kind xxx But after the herdsman chased me away I slipped back and for a long time he didn’t see me and then one day he watched and saw I could be useful x xx he left me scraps of bread sometimes left-overs from his dinner xx But the cows where are they it’s snowing xx If I could go to them if I could tend them—

  I think you were here last night but I’m not sure why can’t I be sure xxxx

  And the cattle are lost in their white field their eyelids weighted down with ice xx I don’t know how to help them xx I can’t move from this rock ledge my legs too weak white air burning my lungs xx If I could go to them like I used to If I could herd them give them some dry hay and shelter but they shiver and move off and I fear they will soon freeze or starve xxx and the stray calves have separated from the others it’s growing darker now where are they xxx they could be wandering lost by the ravine xx Why won’t someone come for them now that it’s too hard for me to walk xx The snow spreading its white harm all over their mysterious bodies their faces trapped in isolation xx xx

  Is sleep also white it’s been so long since I’ve felt it I can’t remember its color or how it enters the body how it stays xxx Synaptic instability xxx Sleep spindles xxx Prions xxx xxx Once I was a good cow-herder but now—

  I knew I was in Venice among canals and stone bridges, that my back was humped, my bones distorted, that I’d once traveled to San Servolo….

  Still, as I closed the notebook for the night, I could almost smell that snow-white field with its cold cattle. And the one who waited to be read to, it seemed I almost touched her (though, as with Frieda, I would never actually touch her)—that I should try to soothe the sleepless pressure she was under. I didn’t know how to think about the way she was in her room on the island and not, waiting to be read to and not, was Marie and still herself yet not, partly sheltered, protected, and yet not. Her sleeplessness carrying her somewhere malleable and porous even as filled with struggle.

  But I’m remembering back to before Myshkin even arrives at the sanitarium xxx he is on his way there sick and half out of his mind with little hope of ever getting well xxx “I had no logical power of thought” he says xx often he could barely even speak xx had trouble understanding what was asked xx and these prions inside me xx On a stop in the marketplace at Bale he comes upon a donkey xx He has never seen one before but as soon as he’s near its braying brings him peace xx xx But why would that braying bring peace what could be more odd x unlikely xxx “I understood what a useful creature it was—patient, industrious, strong, long-suffering, and when I heard it my sadness passed completely.” Even after Myshkin says this I still can’t fully stop my wondering x xxx I hold these pages looking for some answer but they blacken in my hands xxx Then I start thinking that though the donkey is long-suffering mistreated it inflicts no suffering or harm on others…it doesn’t add by its own actions to the wrongness of the world xxx its voice grating inelegant honest without power xxx Myshkin hears it and instantly feels and understands this xx xx xx It is so easy to do harm and so hard not to xx though the donkey is misused and burdened its eyes aren’t ugly its whole being is alive with feeling xx
Is this why Myshkin grows less desperate—

  Each time she sends a note I answer only with this quiet—I never send anything in return. When I am with her I read calmly, go over each page as many times as she wants. We go back to Marie moving with the cattle through the field until she is too weak to walk. We go back to the Swiss village, the waterfall, the donkey. But she never sees me when I fall, or the drained hours that come after when even words are lesions and those lesions are alive, they’re creatures, and I know if I try to speak them I’ll only cause them harm. My pronunciation’s not right, sounds garble in my mouth, I am a beggar who doesn’t know how to beg.

  But tonight, I’m finally well again—my hands the snow of her cold field, her ground ice-white, new snow still falling, and I’m listening to how she is Marie and the rock ledge is there for her and the cattle, and this makes it possible for her to live. Tonight, I can’t know myself apart from her, my thoughts inseparable from the words she sends me.

  But each time a seizure comes, there’s no bridge connecting me to anyone, not even her.

  xxx But what if there is a patient hidden chaos within even the most tender-seeming word even the most kind most calming despite the donkey’s eyes its usefulness its goodness A feeling of No earth No sun No moon xxx Instability xx Disorder—I wondered this last night after you left xxx I wish that I could see you as I write this xxx I know I’m not sitting on my rock ledge anymore but in this room where we’ve read so many pages xxx And yet I feel the rock ledge pressing xxx The hours laboring and folding xx the twelve trees x the courtyard