Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  xxxxx Already it is November I have filled many notebooks for my story about the Prince but he keeps slipping away from me xxx Today I read of another Prince—Antonovich—born in 1740 who at the age of one was imprisoned by his enemies and kept for twenty years in isolation xxx At twenty he could barely even speak his lonely mind filled up with dreams and visions xxx When the young officer Mirovich rescues him he tries to explain certain things about the world—how others might have to die for him etc. xxx But the Prince looks at him with saddened eyes and says with his few words If this is what the world is then I do not wish to live

  As I put down the notebook, I remembered that Holbein had used for his model a dead body fished out of the Rhine.

  It had been years since I’d remembered.

  As a boy when I first glimpsed that painting in a book, its unsparing honesty shocked me. I had never seen a figure so coldly alone.

  I learned that Holbein had a brother, Ambrosius, who had died. And maybe because he shared my name, my child-mind forged a link between the painting’s brutal truth and the world I would go into and who I was. But that was along ago, and for years I had forgotten.

  It’s said that Holbein died of plague 33 years before Titian.

  His mind was an unswerving line and he painted its cruel edges.

  For weeks after I saw that painting, as I lay in the infirmary bed I wondered what happened to the body after Holbein finished. Had he wondered about its age or name? Or if it was an “it” or had a family? And though I didn’t really have the words, something in me tried to think about what beauty is when mixed with what’s repugnant, and a goodness that’s intact but also spoiled.

  My small back was already sloped and crooked, sometimes it pushed in against my lungs, my shadow on the wall a sort of monster, lopsided, lumpy, over-spilling, a loose blackness where the neck should have been, head and shoulders fused together.

  But I knew he’d paint my flesh, not shadow.

  I learned Holbein worked under the patronage of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, and by 1535 was named King’s painter to King Henry VIII (his life so different from the body in the river). But when I flipped through the book for the day he died, I found this: between October 7 and November 29, 1543. How could that happen? He’d been famous, respected. It made no sense his death date was unknown.

  He’s buried in an unmarked grave. Even now, no one knows where.

  But as soon as I think unmarked grave, I almost feel Frieda beside me, the black dirt of the forest floor all over her hands, then her hands smelling of antimatter, burning metal, her eyes watchful from behind her black lenses.

  And Apollon I tell myself to choose only the bare facts without reasoning or explanation Facts on the side of action and mystery not description or interpretation Often I fear what I will find xxx I sit here late at night and certain words come close to me and find me—Mental darkness / Striving / Isolation

  xxx Dear Apollon I am still living in Geneva I have a newborn daughter xxx Already she follows me with her eyes and seems to know and love me but how can she depend on me when even on the morning of her birth I had a seizure xx From the first day I have already failed her xxx So why do I even think I have the right to envision a beautiful man xxx To try to write on my pages a beautiful man xxx And now the small creature who resembles me though she is beautiful and I am ugly lies sleeping in her crib beside me—

  xx Dear Apollon Though I have written many pages I am still struggling to bring my Prince into focus xxx How can I show his innocence and compassion without violating the ways he is also unaware and enigmatic xxxxx Without pretending that I understand him x

  And Apollon Last night as I filled my pages Rogozhin assaulted Nastasya Filipova and broke both of her hands xxx The brutality of the act horrified me yet it came from my own mind xxx xxx My child smiles when I sing to her and rock her xxx It is so cold in Geneva I think we must leave here very soon maybe for Florence Milan or even Venice xxx These nights are very long xxx A flightless bird A ghost xx There is a harshness I am trying to understand

  But why should I expect anything but harshness xxx Facts are brutal and ordinary xxx I am falling many times each week xxx Alpha waves Beta waves xxxx Why is no one coming

  Do all distances vanish when you fall until even the white sky’s inside you xx Do you feel a sudden light like Myshkin’s xxx

  Maybe because we’ll be forced very soon to leave the island, I’ve been having many dreams. Last night I was walking down Meshchanskaya Street, empty except for a man in a black coat approaching from the opposite direction. After a while I realized it was Myshkin. When he drew close, he started speaking, his voice soft but steady: “I used to believe in a firm footing, if not for myself then at least for many others. But I see now I was wrong. Whoever you are, whatever you do, don’t try to follow me, don’t even think of it, don’t try to go where I am going.”

  Then he reminded me that Holbein painted his dead Christ without a hint of comfort or transcendence.

  Yet as he spoke I saw something beautiful, maybe even transcendent, in his face. Something that had to do with his effort to care for and protect another.

  A few hours after my dream of Meshchanskaya Street, the red aura started building, until finally I fell. Even now I’m not sure how long it lasted.

  When I came to, I knew that I cared about someone named Myshkin, though I couldn’t remember who he was or why I cared. Why would I be thinking of a Russian?

  My temples ached, blood trickled from the corner of my mouth.

  For some reason I was also thinking about a dog Azorska who had once been in a circus. And of a girl who explained why begging isn’t wrong, and a donkey in a marketplace.

  I felt a newborn’s breath beside me.

  I could make no sense of anything I thought.

  Then I remembered the one across the courtyard. She must be wondering where I am, if something happened. I need to go to her as soon as I can—

  Pilate sat in his stone chair on the desolate summit, his eyes focused on the icy moonlight. All around him, bare rock and arid soil.

  If he was bleeding in the darkness of his brain, self-stabbed by his own cruelty to another, could there ever be a way he could begin to learn tenderness or kindness? But how could he begin to find them, trapped as he was within a cruelty that would last forever, the awful act he could never undo?

  I am waiting for you by the ocean—no—I am in Geneva in the depths of winter—no—I am carrying your voice in my mind I am near Venice it is raining—but no—no—We are reading many pages the twelve trees are bare your window lit across the courtyard—no—but no—xx Dear Apollon my baby is dead xxx She contracted an inflammation of the lungs and even three hours before her death the doctor said she would still live xx xxx We buried her on May 24 xxx She was barely three months old xxx Words mean nothing Thoughts mean nothing—But where is the poor vulnerable being that I love—

  I don’t believe you will ever come to read to me again I don’t know why I feel this xxx Black Holes Dark Matter xx I am searching for the donkey in the marketplace my cupped palm filled with sugar xxx And as I walk I remember the theory that the universe is splitting it is doing it right now though we can’t feel it xx And I remember also that Columbus was said to be most happy three days before discovering the New World xx before anything was safe or settled xx I can’t remember where I read this xx Have you fallen are you waking has your brain momentarily caught fire xx and the “serene, harmonious joy” do you feel it xxx and this is not tenderheartedness x and vanished xx and no longer xx and if the universe goes on for long enough every conceivable accident is likely to happen xx No earth No sun No moon Instability Disorder xx Holbein painted his dead Christ bruised and broken without any trace of comfort or transcendence xxx When my baby lived I sang to her and she smiled xxx Do you still think of me do you still look across the courtyard

  All day I’ve been asking myself if now with that dead child inside her mind she would build a barri
er between herself and Dostoevsky if she could, turn her eyes from him and never look again. And Marie would be gone and the rock ledge gone. And Marei’s hand nonexistent, the boy’s face he touched nonexistent. None of it ever existed. She sang to the child and knew it loved her, then suddenly all breathing ceased. Nothing protects anything. So it seems only sensible she feels no one in the world can find her.

  Though we’ve never touched, sometimes I almost feel her in my arms—her shoulders and small hips, her narrow spine. How she grows softer and more brittle as she moves into a solitude I’ve tried to reach but can only partly understand.

  I wish she could believe that I still go to her, that our hours of reading haven’t ended.

  Titian was standing before a wrought-iron gate set into a wall of pale pink stone in front of his last home on Calle Larga dei Botteri.

  “By 1534 my fame had spread all over Europe. Charles V made me a Knight of the Golden Spur, my works were found in the great courts from Mantua to Urbino. I owned two saw mills at Ansogne, extensive lands and buildings in Cadore, 18 fields in Milare, and numerous other tracts as well. But how can I explain what I felt as I stood before my canvases? Color and form asked questions I could barely grasp.

  Finally I came to understand that my brushwork must be left open and visible, my human failings part of what I paint. This was done out of honesty and love, though of course at times I questioned my motives.

  But this late change brought mostly mockery and condescension. My effort to be faithful to the textures and angles of what I saw left me largely in a private darkness (though of course there was Orazio).

  Mary, Regent of the Netherlands, claimed my late work could be viewed only from a distance and even then only in the brightest light. Vasari wrote that I painted ‘in rapidly dashed off patches so that the pictures cannot be viewed from up close.’ Nicolo Atoppio was simply convinced I could no longer see, that even if my mind was still alert my hand was feeble. And as if that weren’t enough, in 1675 Joachim Sandrart wrote that I’d ruined numerous works of my youth by repainting them when old, and my assistants had taken to mixing wood oil into my paint to keep it from drying so that when I was absent they could wipe away my changes. I don’t know if this is true.

  I often think of how precarious color is, how mercurial. Though it is also joy.”

  Maybe you can’t believe in Myshkin’s joy anymore and that’s why you no longer come xx I believe that you no longer come xx Ever since my baby died I xxx And these prions inside me xxx But what if Myshkin’s joy doesn’t leave him even in the darkest hour what if it still lives inside him xx “And sense the whole of nature and suddenly say yes” Is it wrong of me to think this xxx And the waterfall the donkey the twelve trees xx Soon I will enter the room of Nastasya’s death I will part the green curtain xxx Behind it the deathbed where she lies xxx I will do all this without you xx I remember the pages I once read Myshkin’s helplessness within them his hopes completely over xxx And the universe x splitting and splitting x Where are you have you fallen I would bring you a warm blanket these blurred pages—

  It had been a long time since I’d last opened the copy of The Idiot I’d found on the Rio dei Assassinini. But that night after I closed the notebook, I spent the next few hours following Myshkin and Nastasya into their grim, concluding pages. I watched her become increasingly convinced that Myshkin’s need to protect her could only bring him harm. When he realizes she’s fled, he searches the streets with an unfolding sense of doom until behind a green curtain in Rogozhin’s room he sees a body covered head to toe by a white sheet. The floor is strewn with flowers, torn ribbons, a white dress.

  “Go nearer,” Rogozhin coaxes. Then after a while, whispers, “It was I.”

  “What did you do it with? A knife…?”

  “It was all so strange…the blade went in three or four inches…just under the left breast…yet no more than a half tablespoon of blood flowed out.”

  Myshkin’s whole body is trembling, his chest is on fire and he can’t move.

  Dear Apollon How can I accept what is happening on my pages even as I know it would be wrong and dishonest to pull back xxx Isn’t there a way to know Myshkin without subjecting him to useless pain perverse suffering x why did I even think I could begin to know him xx x But why do you never c come anymore why do you xxx the twelve trees dissolving xxx the courtyard gray and fading xxx and Rogozhin places four cushions on the floor by the green curtain xx the dead body behind it xx He insists Myshkin lie down on the ones on the left because they are “the best” then undresses and lies beside him on the right xx T Tears flow from Myshkin’s eyes onto the murderer’s cheeks as they talk about flowers the knife the drops of blood xxx xxx And “Rogozhin tenderly and eagerly” takes him by the arm—remember—xxx But how can the word “tenderly” survive after all that’s come before it xxx how can “eagerly” survive And Myshkin’s hand is tender as he strokes the pale crazed man beside him xxx How can his touch contain such kindness given all that’s happened why does he reach out to soothe him xxxx Am I in Petersburg or on an island off of Venice Am I across from your lit window or is your window d dark now and you’re elsewhere xxx Why is my hand stroking a murderer’s face xxx xxx How can this possibly be happening xx Why do I feel a strange love for him xx Why don’t I pull back in horror xxx

  Even though she says I no longer come to her and read, and she believes she is going on without me, most nights we are still reading. Last night we read from the passage where Nastasya says “I have renounced the world…I have almost ceased to exist and I know it.”

  I didn’t want those words to leave my mouth.

  But already she is in Rogozhin’s room, she has parted the green curtain….She sees the torn ribbons, the white dress. Lies down on the “best cushions.” Holds the murderer close, her tears falling on his cheek.

  So where is there left for me to take her, and why would she even want to go? In her mind the green curtain is parted again and again, she will never stop parting it.

  And her hand will never withdraw from Rogozhin’s face, his breath on her skin, tears falling from her eyes onto his cheek. She won’t ever stop feeling this strange love she can’t understand.

  Soon it will be morning but it’s never quite morning. Sun filters in through the window, touching the unsleeping bodies.

  How could I have ever thought she would allow me to go with her. How could I not have known that this would happen.

  But why is Myshkin so kind to Rogozhin xx He knows he has murdered Nastasya yet “he passes his trembling hand softly over Rogozhin’s hair and cheeks” caresses him and holds him xxx How can this happen what does this say of him And the flowers the white dress the ribbons the green curtain xxxxx And when you still came to me and this island wasn’t drowned in quiet xxx No earth No sun No moon Instability Disorder xx So many boundaries blurring xx And how can I know what is beautiful what is ugly in what ways do they blend into each other xx Dark Energy Dark Matter xxx “Crushed by gravity…destroyed…but a star is simple” xx When the police enter Rogozhin’s room they see a delirious man raving in another man’s arms but the man who holds him won’t answer anything they ask x only looks at them with empty eyes—

  I am walking across the courtyard to you the night is very cold too quiet xxx In the far future the stars will all burn out there will be no life-bearing planets xx the inhabitants of earth will see only black sky they will think we lived in a delusion x their sophisticated technology their instruments their calculations will support this xx what is the real why is it so difficult xx and Dostoevsky said “they dismiss my approach as ‘fantastic’ but for me it is the height of realism…their realism cannot illuminate a hundredth part of the facts that are actually occurring.” I am close to your room now xx I am not thinking of cold planets x I am not thinking of carbon or black space or computational processes xx I arrange the cushions on the floor the best ones on the left for you the other ones for me xx We lie down not speaking never touching thoug
h in my mind I stroke your hair my tears fall on your narrow cheeks xxx I want to know what you are thinking but you look past me with empty eyes

  And if my eyes, like Myshkin’s, are empty to her now, why would I even hope she could believe I still see her?

  It seems a form of suffering—to be cared for and companioned by another, yet unable to feel this or remember.

  Is this partly why she lies beside Rogozhin? She touches him, and doesn’t doubt he’s beside her. But if she were to turn her eyes from the green curtain, if she were to lift her hand from his face for just one second, there’d be nothing left for her but a world where she believes she’s completely alone.

  Each day I go to her, and each day she doesn’t know it.

  But when Myshkin first enters Rogozhin’s room, a “strange dreaminess” comes over him even before the green curtain is parted and “words suddenly seem to mean something quite different” from the words that are being said. Why can’t I find a way for her to hear those different meanings from my mouth? Those meanings I hear each time I fall—