Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  xxxx And when they came looking for me and found me and I didn’t answer any of their questions they took me away xxx And then I didn’t know how to go on in the world anymore xxx I don’t know if I can live in my own body xxxx But why is the floor still covered with white flowers surely someone must have come and swept them xxx And the donkey’s eyes in the marketplace—remember xxx What is joy where does it come from do you think it still exists or has it vanished xxx No earth No sun xx but those long hours the white dress the green curtain xx Am I in Petersburg or on an island off of Venice Am I looking at black sky or is it morning xx Gray sun dissolving xx Gray-black light xxx If I could bring you a warm blanket some cool water xxx xxxx Are you falling are you lost like Myshkin xx A flightless bird A ghost xx I can’t see the waterfall anymore though I still hear it rushing through itself and through itself the way feeling struggles through the body to become thought—

  xxxx Dear Apollon I write the word “dark” and cross it out write “joy” and cross it out xxx cross out peace eternal freedom consent write “new terror”—cross it out xxx cross out disordered intellect sick soul xx Each word a torn shroud across the mouth xxx Sleep spindles xxx Proteins xxx Your window shut across the courtyard xxx The prion is a flightless bird a ghost xxx

  They have sent me back to the sanitarium in Switzerland xxx have given me white pills they say will calm me xxx but mostly I hide them in my clothes the bitter taste not touching my tongue xx Every now and then someone moves my chair onto the hill so I can sit in the warm sunlight xxx But this g green hill is so cold and without shadow why can’t they see that it is cold xxx and the universe splitting and splitting xxx I don’t expect them to see it xx And the cattle are hungry as they move through their white field where there’s no one left to tend them xxx It’s been so long since I’ve seen them xxx Marie’s rock is bare she stayed with them as long as she could xxxx why must time harm itself why does it need to live inside a body or maybe I am wrong and it has vanished xxx I think that I will never speak again xxx Do you still see the courtyard the twelve trees xxxxx Words are vulnerable and hurt I have buried them in secret places

  Now that Myshkin was cold on his cold hill, unspeaking, I thought back to the book’s opening pages where Myshkin’s eyes “possess something gentle,” his voice is “conciliatory and gentle.” Little more than a year elapses between the first chapter and the last, yet everything has changed. By the end, his eyes are “empty,” his voice completely silenced.

  In those first chapters, the word “gentle” appears often. And in them a train is hurtling toward St. Petersburg “at full speed.” In one of the third-class carriages two young men, two strangers, sit across from each other, tired, bored, but seemingly eager to speak. It is morning, November.

  The dark-haired man speaks first.

  “Cold?”

  To which the fair-haired traveler across from him replies,

  “Very.”

  These are the first words to ever pass between Rogozhin and Myshkin.

  As he listens and then talks to the stranger, Myshkin’s face is “thin, open, without suspicion.”

  I used to think of those first pages as the brief lull before Myshkin is pulled back into the world’s confusion. But already Rogozhin has said “Cold?” and that coldness gleams like a bright knife between them. The same knife that will enter Nastasya’s heart and kill her. But Myshkin doesn’t know this, he doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t see the bright glint that follows him out of the station and then everywhere after. How from that moment, when he enters a house the two words “cold” and “very” enter with him, and when he walks down the street they are there also, and when he speaks to Nastasya. They are there in his seizures, in his eyes when he looks in a store window. They are faithful and they never leave him.

  And when, after a time, Myshkin feels his tears flowing onto Rogozhin’s cheek, “but perhaps he does not even notice they are his own tears…and a new sensation gnaws with infinite anguish at his heart,” is this when he feels the cold knife, realizes it has followed? That it’s been following since that first moment on the train.

  Or maybe he doesn’t realize and it doesn’t matter. He is holding the murderer, his tears fall on the murderer’s cheek, and he is trembling. Sunlight begins to filter through the window. Every now and then the murderer mutters, grows agitated, stiffens, and Myshkin softly touches his hair, his face, calming and soothing him. And he isn’t cold. Rogozhin’s question doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe he was never cold.

  Florensky had written of the body’s “isolation.” But it seemed there should be a word for an isolation that can never be healed yet still feels at its deepest core the unfathomable, beating presence of another—

  And your voice so tenderly xxx and your breath your moving hands—

  xxx And folding wrongly in the delicate tissues of the brain xxx xxx xxx a rapid process of misfiring xxx The soul of another is a dark place and what chaos is found there xxx

  Why must I remain here xxx This wooden chair so stiff on this green hill xx Why can’t I stand up and leave here—

  In the days when we were making our way through the passages where Myshkin cradles and comforts Rogozhin until light seeps in through the closed shutters and the police finally arrive, I felt I was bringing her a nearly unbearable world.

  Yet in those pages, one man still tenderly touches another. Strokes him, comforts him. Myshkin does this without reticence or question, and no matter how much he trembles, he doesn’t flinch or even once draw back his hand.

  But by morning he’s mute, his eyes blank and impassive.

  And now, in these last pages, in Switzerland, he’s completely alone.

  As I watch her follow Myshkin further and further into his unceasing isolation, the prions folding wrongly in the tissues of her brain, I wonder if she feels that no matter what he did, or whichever way he turned, he would still end in isolation.

  Even when a visitor stands beside him, Myshkin’s eyes show nothing. No words emerge from his mouth.

  There is no sign he will ever speak again.

  I lie down beside you x The twelve trees are still saplings x The darkness kind and forgiving The book we read from has flown off like a white bird but we still feel it xxx But no I am on my green hill in Switzerland the hard chair-back pressing the quarter moon stiffly brightening xxxx I don’t know what has happened to my hands x where are they x why are they no longer with me xxx and the universe splitting and splitting xx I don’t know what to do with my eyes now that I can’t see you now that I am sure you aren’t coming

  I didn’t think this wind could grow even colder but it has xxxx my skin moonwhite and listening xxxx But s skin is unimportant eyes are unimportant xxx But how can my hands have so suddenly vanished x Where are they where could they have gone to how could this possibly h have happened xxx And what can they remember now that they have left my body xxx If you fall who will bring you water a warm blanket I wish that I could help you xxx But how can I help you without hands xxx “and tenderly and eagerly” xx and the material the galaxies are made of is embedded in a sea of Dark Matter xx Are your hands turning pages xx Do you feel the redness spreading xxx s Sleep spindles Prions xxx Once I was a good cow-herder but now

  Now that she believes her hands have vanished and she sits on her green hill in Switzerland, cold and blankly staring, why does she still remember me and worry that I’ve fallen or think to bring me water? Even now she sometimes feels the turning pages, imagines lying down beside me. So how am I to understand the blankness of her eyes, or Myshkin’s?

  And sometimes, when I don’t go to her, or have gone and then come back but she thinks I didn’t go, I picture Myshkin cradling Rogozhin. How no part of him remained protected. And though the ones who think they know him lament “his afflicted and humiliated condition,” the only fact they can truly know is that his visible responsiveness is over. Everything else is conjecture. They can’t know what goes on behind his eyes.

  xxx B
ut how can I even be writing to you now that my hands have vanished into whiteness xxx I didn’t expect to be so cold I forgot the earth could be so cold xxxxxx I don’t know where the waterfall has gone to I I can’t hear it anymore or the donkey in the marketplace xxx and tenderly and eagerly xx xx What is sound when everything is stripped and silent xxx This chair-back stiff and heavy xx Dear Mikhail Dear Sonechka Dear Apollon xx The heavy sound of you not reading xxx The sound of you not walking toward me xxx

  And I would ask you again xxx what is a voice when no one hears it?

  xxx but where is the small, vulnerable being that I loved and who followed me with her eyes and looked like me though I am u ugly xx and she was beautiful—

  In a book about Titian I found in my first week in Venice, the author, whose name was Hope, wondered if one of the most important things about him is the way that we can never know him. “There is no lack of information about his day-to-day existence…but in a period when artists’ comments and even their eccentricities were eagerly recorded, Titian is remembered for almost none….Michelangelo is famous for his terribilita, Raphael for his social assurance and aristocratic manner, Leonardo for his enigmatic personality…but Titian exists for us in his paintings and near-silence alone.”

  As I held the epileptic’s notebook in my hands, a quiet dread came over me, as if I had forgotten my own name.

  I It is late and I want to go to her, v want her to t know that I still read the notes she sends though most likely she doesn’t remember that she sends them. // her wooden chair so far from her gray courtyard xxx How ca can I let her know that I still think of her still feel her—or maybe she doesn’t want to know xx but the red aura vv keeps burning through my arms and spreading even further through my chest and up my neck xxx the air surging in hot waves then crumbling unstable I’ve never felt it surge so strongly. T xx I keep waiting to fall but I don’t fall. Everything wavering, splintering, uncertain. I’m still trying t to paste her notes into these pages but can’t read anymore what they say. Even thi this paper xxx is red flame.

  This air so hot now. I didn’t know that air could be so hot—

  The epileptic was burning on a wooden pyre. Only his face remained untouched. His eyes were wide open, filled with tears, his eyelids swollen. I was sure he wanted to speak but didn’t know why I felt this or who he wanted to speak to or what he might say. When I tried to get close to him to help him, I realized both my legs were broken. Then even his face began to burn.

  This air’s unbearably hot now xxx I can hardly x see m nn my hand for all the redness xxx

  I can’t see her pages or ss anything she n means to tell me xxx

  When for one second the fire turns less fierce (but rr then it starts up again even more violently than before) I suddenly remember how N Myshkin said “I don’t l know how one can walk by a xxx tree and not be happy at the sight of it xxx …And what beautiful things // there are at every step” xxx

  I was walking on the slope of a green hill where a solitary figure stared into the distance, a blanket draped across his narrow lap. I thought it must be Myshkin and that I must be in Switzerland, but when I got closer I saw it was the epileptic, his eyes red with tears. He was trying to paste new pages into his notebook but they scattered to the ground like ashes. It was clear that he could barely see. I wanted to gather them and read to him what he could no longer read for himself, but knew this was impossible, though I didn’t know why. For a moment it seemed Frieda was near me, but when I looked up there was only empty land. I understood I had to keep walking, but had no idea where I was going or from where I had come.

  But do you remember “kindness can rescue everything”—how we read this once on an island off of Venice xxx Or maybe I was never on an island Maybe you never came to me at all xxx Even my arms are white mist now and my legs xxx Have you fallen are you hurt now are you sleeping xxx I still wonder what you think of what we read xxx Do you believe that kindness is so powerful there’s a way that it remains no matter what xxxx…and could not endure…would vanish…Do you still hear the word “cold” spoken by a stranger xxxx and tenderly and eagerly xx No earth No sun No moon I wish I still had hands to write to you to find you

  Can it be true that there is no such thing as empty space but Dark Energy Dark Matter xxx xxx The cow-herder sent me away but I came back xxx I must part the green curtain xxx It still amazes me to walk without fetters x xx xx and the stars will go out and there will be no life-bearing planets xx and what’s here is higher than love and there’s such joy

  As the pages thinned, the notes were often pasted sidewise, sometimes even upside down, bulging awkwardly and wrinkling. What effort did it cost him to still keep the notebook, though from the start he said he meant to burn it?

  I wondered, had he fallen? Or was the redness spreading even further?

  And she, who sat on her green hill with vanished hands, who was herself and not, was others than herself and not, was remembering and not, dissolving into mist and not—was there some way she understood that although he was gone he hadn’t left her?

  This hard chair is mist now xxxxx your vanished voice enfolded in the air xxx

  But could the joy be unbroken even so—

  And sense the whole of nature and say yes

  Even my face is white mist now and my hair xxx xxxxx The green hill has vanished the green fields xxx But how can the earth survive like this when it’s so white so insubstantial xxx xxx xx xx Remember the fragile island we once lived on xxx I write the word “dark” and cross it out write “joy” and cross it out xxx Where are the twelve trees the night filling with our turning pages xxx The Nucleus Solitarius is such a lonely name forgive me xxxx White mist of vanished footsteps xxx vanished eyes xxx

  There were no more pages left to turn.

  I imagined the epileptic feeling the redness finally drain, or maybe it would stay forever. And the one he read to, what comfort was left to her once he could no longer come?

  Had they lived to see their island emptied? Where could they have gone to after that? I knew that I would never know.

  I pictured her writing in white mist. The word “vanished” taking form beneath her hand.

  As Frieda had vanished, and the one across the ocean who’d faded into silence.

  Vanish: “To pass completely from existence.” “To assume the value zero.”

  From the Latin: vanus, evanescere – “empty.” “To dissipate like vapor.”

  But I didn’t know anymore what emptiness was, or what it really means “to dissipate like vapor.”

  PART III

  MARGARITA FLYING

  I knew I should leave Venice.

  Just pack up my few things, walk out to the ferry, make my way back to the airport.

  But when I tried to think of where to go my mind went blank. As if the earth were taken from me and yet it was still there.

  My whole body the Servetta Muta, that white mask Frieda held before her face.

  My white walls mask-like also, a vivid stillness that I couldn’t name.

  Florensky had written of the “beautiful continuity of light.”

  “In a space filled with light it is impossible to single out an area that does not communicate with any other region. It is only our granular optical environment which obscures the presence of this ongoing communication.”

  But now, as I sat in my room, nothing felt continuous.

  I saw only my four walls, my computer, my coffee cup, my cane. The closed notebook beside me.

  The material world exacting and opaque, insistent.

  “What lies past the single horizon, the single scale?”

  It had been months since any letter had come from the one across the ocean.

  And Frieda—what had she been to me, who was she? And the one who was read to and the one who crossed the courtyard until he could no longer cross?

  I heard the soft sounds of the canals, but it was as if something jagged, almost predatory, was moving underneath their wat
ers.

  Why didn’t you turn to me? What would it have cost you to turn to me?

  I raised my eyes but saw only a mute figure seated in a chair on a parched summit staring at the barren moonlight.

  Her face was nearly featureless, her hands unmoving.

  But as I thought of the one who read and the other who waited and worried he was hurt—so much care had passed between them—I finally turned to show that I could see her. The black smudges of her eyes stared straight ahead. I had waited much too long. There was no way I could know if she had seen me.

  Pilate sat on his dry summit in the moonlight. His dog lay by his side, the wooden splint on its right, front leg wrapped in layers of white gauze; a silver muzzle covered its mouth. As the centuries passed, they watched comets fall through the sky, whole stars imploding. Atoms wavering, unlocked, unstable. Atoms caught in giant machines, split, recombined, broken open. They had no words for what they saw, what they were hearing. Sometimes when the moon thinned to its most razored crescent, Pilate tried to remember the philosophy he once learned, or just the names of fellow pupils, a few teachers. But even those mostly escaped him. What was it Xenephon had posited?—something about safety…And Democritus…“the wrong-doer is more unfortunate than…” But more unfortunate than…what…or whom…? He couldn’t remember, though a chill with a bright silver edge went through him. Once he recalled an entire line from Anaxagorus, “The seed of everything is in everything else.” But this he’d never understood from the moment he first learned it. And once, after a green incandescent comet sheered much too close to his summit, he remembered a fiery redness, and for a moment, though he didn’t know why, the bones in his neck and shoulders frayed to a thread-like fragility; his right temple burned and pounded, as if a shard of the comet, too minute for even the strongest microscope to detect, had entered through his skull and lodged there. Long ago, after an important death, he’d seen an eclipse of the sun, the sky on fire, burning embers in free-fall, but whose death could it have been? Every now and then, the injured dog sighed quietly from behind its silver muzzle, but Pilate no longer heard it. Its legs twitched in a reflex of pursuit or fleeing. But mostly it lay still. It had never been trained to know distance, or what a wrong-doer is, or a seed, or unfortunate. All it knew was that white light poured all over its skin, but that light, though bright, resembled darkness, and was filled with an enormous silence.