Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  I still needed to figure out where to go and what to do. I decided to head outside, maybe buy a few groceries, see if distraction might lead to an idea. I’d never thought of my life as a project to be managed, assessed, fine-tuned, and couldn’t think that way now. I had been an orphan, an invalid, a book scanner, a seeker of a notebook—all these simply happened.

  But shortly after I stepped outside, I glimpsed, by mistake, my hump in a store window’s gilded mirror. At first I didn’t recognize the strange, unlikely creature I was seeing.

  Hadn’t my whole life been a resistance to the question of this hump I carried? How it was made of an essential wrongness—a wrongness I couldn’t undo.

  I had never even said the word aloud.

  The air was warming. I walked for several hours. Passing beside a canal, I saw my bulbous shadow, faceless, barely visible, as it moved across low walls and shadowed water.

  Titian had been silent a long time.

  I missed his red cloth, the dyers’ shops, the blurred hands of his late portraits. How he’d spoken of the beggars huddled under the portals of the Ducal Palace even as he refused to paint them, and when the plague came he didn’t flee with the city’s privileged others, but stayed near the locked doors and their white X’s. How he brought close the vulnerability of color, and light and form asked questions he could barely grasp.

  Walking the narrow cobblestone streets near Calle Largo dei Botteri, I wondered if his feet had touched them also.

  His silence a red wall…or…no…not red…but a hard gray.

  And as I walked, I remembered he used his bare fingertips to smear red pigment into the hollows and crevices of bodies. He’d seen his own child die, and killed countless others in his paintings, his eyes steady as he hung Marsyas from a tree and flayed him. He even let a small dog lap from the pooled blood. He painted the pope in old age, ailing, tired, and tore his cap from his head, the barest touch of his brush crushing the stooped shoulders. He painted his own face aged, lined, bony, and left the hands unfinished.

  But even he, with all his red watchfulness and power, hadn’t pried the black lenses from Frieda’s eyes.

  Day after day of wondering, walking…Each time I went out I made sure to avoid the store mirrors. My legs sore, my right foot swollen, dragging (the result, I assumed, of a small fracture). And always as I walked I remembered the hundreds of thousands of wood poles submerged beneath the city’s squares and buildings. Stone facades barely masking a too-quiet instability. The fragility beneath me.

  And then one afternoon this came:

  Dear A,

  It is dark most of the time now, but sometimes for a few minutes or even hours, suddenly my sight comes back—I don’t know how or why this happens. Everything briefly clear again—my room, this paper, the books I love that follow me even in this darkness. But mostly now I live in sounds—I didn’t know they have so many colors—and nuances, insinuations—they bolt and change so quickly. Always I feel them on my skin—this constant, shifting pressure—so in a sense I am never alone.

  Sometimes it is hard to know if what I’m seeing is in the world or in my mind. Or maybe both. Or does it even matter?

  I never told you what I found in those last weeks before you left for Venice. Back then I could still see even though my sight was dimming.

  I was standing at my work station scanning. The next book in line was a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Maybe you remember that we’d received a shipment from a library in Venice some months before. The copy was tattered but intact. But as I turned it over to press onto the scanner, a few loose pages fell out. I could see right away they were handwritten, not printed.

  I looked over at you but could tell you hadn’t noticed.

  The first stages of my illness had already begun to take hold. For weeks I had been sleeping less and less. And now, as I read those few pages, it was clear they were unsent letters from someone who suffered from my same affliction. But what was even more uncanny was that she was writing of a man named Ambrose who Dostoevsky had visited after the sudden death of his child.

  What was I to make of this convergence?—my sleeplessness and your name on the same page.

  I felt the air grow hot, a narrow fire spreading through my spine.

  But my eyesight’s starting to dim again. I still want to tell you more. Often I feel your name beside me. I will write to you again when I am able.

  It seemed nearly a lifetime ago that I stood beside her in that basement office, scanning. And nearly as long since I received any letters. I’d grown used to her silence, to wondering if maybe she had died, and to the fact that I’d never know her name.

  Again I remembered Ovid’s words—the ones I recalled when I first encountered Frieda: “All things which I denied could happen are now happening.”

  Had she sensed I’d found the notebook and that the voices inside it were now closed to me, that once again I was alone?

  But why was she even thinking of me? Why did she want to explain what had happened?

  For a moment I wished I could ask her. And that I could show her what I found, even if she’d already sensed I’d found it. (My hand lightly touched the notebook’s worn cover.)

  I thought of how startling the world must look to her in the moments when her eyesight briefly returned. So many intricate makings and remakings. The plainest line a thing of wonder.

  But I realized I was barely concentrating on the actual contents of her letter—how she’d found pages containing her illness and my name. Pages in a book from Venice.

  My hump felt heavy. My shoulders stiff, unwieldy.

  All night I lay awake and wondered—after the island of San Servolo had been emptied of its patients, how had its library come to end up in that far-off basement room?

  That copy of The Idiot the epileptic read from to the sleepless one, and that she held in the long hours of her aloneness, had been a living skin to them, and yet it had remained with neither.

  I pictured him holding it open as he read, and she holding it also on those long days he didn’t come, her eyes fixed on pages she knew but couldn’t un-blur.

  Their fingerprints all over it and yet no one could see them.

  When I’d finished the notebook, I believed it held all the notes the sleepless one had written to the epileptic—he had taken such pains to paste them in. But given the letter I’d just gotten, maybe there were others. Again I felt my hump press firmly down, my lungs constricting, faltering, too narrow.

  Dear A,

  At first I found the loose pages somewhat confusing. They began straightforwardly enough—the writer referring to chemical changes in her brain, but soon she was writing of Dostoevsky and his visit to Father Ambrose at the Monastery of Optina Pustyn. And then suddenly she seemed to be Dostoevsky but she was also sitting on a hill in Switzerland, the lost sound of a waterfall inside her. And she was longing for someone from across a courtyard who had come and then no longer came. She worried he was hurt. I must have kept the letters somewhere, I probably still have them. But my sight’s fading again, the darkness returning.

  Dear A,

  This morning I found one of the letters—

  If I could write to you If I could find you xxx What is a mind what is breathing when inside them there is always a dead child xxxxxx Always now I ask myself this question xx I have come to the Monastery of Optina Pustyn to see its Staret Father Ambrose xx xxx xx xxx xx He speaks into my blackened mind his cane propped against the wall his body hunchbacked straining frail “Do not try to be consoled, but weep and grieve. Your tears will turn in the end to quiet joy” xxx xx But what if joy can’t break through this Dark Energy Dark Matter What if it can never reach me xx And how can I be here when I am also on my hill in Switzerland xx x The Nucleus Solitarius is such a lonely name forgive me xxx Are you hurt do you need water have you fallen xxx Your window dark across the courtyard xxx My hands completely vanished now the branches of twelve trees dissolving

  Dear A,

>   As I read that letter, how could I not think of you? For months I watched you at your work station. Your hunched back, the way you often seemed in pain, the cane you leaned against the wall each morning. I knew your name was Ambrose. I didn’t see why you would do the work you did with the body you’d been given. And yet those books seemed living things to you—the way you held them. Of course anything I thought was just conjecture, but I sensed a wounded gentleness in you and also something dark like Dostoevsky. At first I didn’t think much more about it, but as my illness grew and deepened, I felt you near me even when you weren’t there. But how could I feel this when I didn’t even know you?

  Dear A,

  One night in my sleeplessness I found myself wondering about your name, turning over its history and syllables, all the ways it seemed to fit you as it fit the Staret of Optina Pustyn. The “am” in it, the “rose” that followed. I learned that Ambrose of Optina fell ill as a young man and never fully recovered. “Weakness is a teacher of gratefulness and patience”—he wrote this years later. His happiest hours were spent in solitude translating Greek texts—one of them was called “The Ladder.” In 1884 he founded a convent for the destitute, the blind, the sickly. At that time this was uncommon. When appointed Staret he replied, “I would prefer to live in solitude and silence but this is not allowed me.”

  Then I found another Ambrose—this one Bishop of Milan from 374 until his death in 397, who wrote in his De Officiis, “What a splendid thing is justice—to be born for others rather than oneself.” I hadn’t thought of justice in that way. His definition seemed to me a thing of beauty.

  He believed our human deeds inflict a violence on the world that’s left it fractured, gravely wounded. But “what has been weakened and warped can in some measure be restored.” I noticed he said “some measure”—again I felt the exacting pressure of his words, his acknowledgment of harm and limitation. How there are elements beyond all healing.

  The more I paced and thought of him, the more I felt the rose inside your name, the many roses in the air before me, red petals bruised and opening. And still I knew I didn’t know you. But the less I slept the less that seemed to matter—everything more vivid and more real, less real, at once. Or maybe the idea of realness began to seem too limited, imprecise in some essential way. The air turned darker, tinted with deep reds. Small sounds I’d never heard entered me like pinpricks, swelled in growing waves around me.

  Dear A,

  In my sleeplessness I paced back and forth among rows of blackened windows, thinking to myself, “am rose,” “am rose.”

  And then one night inside my sleep (in those days I could still sleep for a few minutes) I felt a weight along my back and understood it was my hump and that my hump was filled with roses. Thousands of bruised petals trapped inside that weight I carried. There was no way I could release them. In the hiddenness they couldn’t open.

  No matter how I stood or walked the hump was hard to carry.

  When I woke, I felt a sense of mourning and revulsion, though I tried to tell myself the hump was just a part of me and wasn’t ugly.

  I thought of St. Ambrose’s hurt world. Its fractured wholeness. Of healing’s lacks and limitations.

  But why had I dreamed myself as you? Why had I become your body?

  Dear A,

  Even now, I worry you’ll believe I thought you ugly. That the revulsion I felt after my dream was what I felt toward you.

  But nothing could be further from the truth. After a few weeks in our shared work space I understood you wouldn’t lift your eyes to see me, that we would never speak. (Of course I lived in my own silence also.) I wondered if your hunchback shamed you, if it had built a rigid fence inside you. But that hump was beautiful to me—I don’t know how else to say it. The very thing that was a site of shame to you seemed to me inseparable from your goodness, your hurt gentleness that wondered and observed and questioned, even if you couldn’t see it. Even if you hated what you were.

  Of course, as I already said, this was conjecture. There was no way I could know what you were thinking.

  In those days I was reading Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita on my lunch breaks. Maybe you even saw it on my work station. So when I got to the part where Margarita requests of the devil that he prevent the handkerchief from being brought to Frieda, for a moment I imagined I was her but my request was different—I asked him to free you from your hump. But as soon as I spoke he glared at me with weary, disappointed eyes—I realized he was seeing my blunt ignorance, misunderstanding. The task was not to take away the hump but to understand it wasn’t ugly.

  So when I woke from my dream of revulsion and bruised roses, I felt ashamed. Wasn’t it my own mind, not your body, I was dreaming—the limits of my thinking? The cramped darkness I moved within as sleep grew less and less. My fear of what was next.

  And still at night I paced and thought “am rose,” “am rose,” the boundaries between us loosening even as I didn’t know you. Even as we didn’t speak.

  Dear A,

  But why did I need to dream myself into your body, to feel your hump as mine, the dragging weight of it, that coarse, unbalanced heaviness you carried?

  Dear A,

  Those last weeks in the office I kept the loose pages in my pocket. Felt their hard, slow burn inside me, the white-hot pressure of the writer’s vanished hands. Often in her notes she returned to the idea of her lost hands—that because of this she couldn’t write. And yet her words were there before me. There was someone across a courtyard who she missed and had no way of reaching.

  By then I had almost finished scanning The Idiot’s final chapters. It was the last book I ever scanned.

  One afternoon I paused at the passage where Myshkin holds and comforts the murderer Rogozhin until the whole world and what passes between them becomes more than he can bear to live with or ever absorb. After that he sits in the sanitarium in Switzerland, his body like those vanished hands.

  I wanted to tell you of those letters in which the world had vanished to white mist, and Myshkin was alone in his cold chair, and your name was shared by a man who had comforted Dostoevsky. It had been weeks since I’d slept more than a few hours.

  But why did I want to tell you? Why did I feel you’d understand?

  We who’d never even spoken.

  Dear A,

  In mathematics there is an entity known as the empty set. Maybe you have seen the symbol Ø which stands for this emptiness, this set with no elements. There are many ways to speak of loneliness and isolation. For instance, think of how the empty set is said to be both closed and open—all its boundary points (of which there are none) are confined within it and so it’s closed, and yet for every one of its points (of which there are none) there is a surrounding openness, and therefore it is open.

  Maybe you have felt this in yourself—an openness within the confines of an equal isolation.

  I believe this is what I sensed in you.

  I have seen it called the “proper name of being.”

  Dear A,

  Back then when I tried to understand the concept of the empty set, my mind knotted and strained beneath the weight, and it still does. But I found a theorist whose angle partly helped me—what if the empty set isn’t empty after all, it’s just that we can’t fathom what’s inside it? Then he went on to wonder if although we think of a set consisting of “like things,” maybe this is wrong and instead it consists of things that are different but in ways beyond our comprehension and so we see them as alike. What if things that we assume are unalike are linked and bonded in ways we’re too limited to see?

  What I am trying too awkwardly to say is that the less I slept, the more I felt we were alike and different and the line between the two began to vanish. I couldn’t live inside my old distinctions. Inside each face, each body, so many paradoxes, anomalies. I should have known this all along, and yet it took my sleeplessness to lead me. The vanished hands in the letters were different from my hands and yet
they were my hands, Myshkin’s silence in his chair was yours but different, his cradling of Rogozhin an act that couldn’t fit within a single, rigid category, containing as it did kindness and compassion but also violent damage and destruction.

  Each night I felt the complex weight of who you were even as I didn’t know you.