Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  Dear A,

  I knew I’d never get to Venice. Never find the author of those letters. But it tugged at me—her vanished hands, her sleeplessness like mine. In one letter she wrote of someone named Marei touching a boy’s cheek with unexpected kindness and that night as I paced that hand was on me also. Once she wrote, “Why should I expect anything but darkness?”—I read this as my world was darkening.

  Then it occurred to me that you could go instead. Not in my place exactly but for other, vaguer reasons I couldn’t quite get hold of, the way I couldn’t understand the empty set or whether it was really empty, or if a set consists of likeness or unlikeness.

  And after all, I reasoned, like the Staret in those letters your back was hunched, your name was Ambrose.

  But how could I ask this of you? How could I even begin to suggest it? My mouth was mute like Myshkin’s, the nights lengthening beyond my seeing.

  As I read her letters, I realized that even as I claimed all along I didn’t really know her, and of course we hadn’t spoken, there was a part of me that had constructed some idea of her and carried it with me. But as she spoke of the hump on my back and the roses in my name, my cells remembered every cold and sterile waiting room, each test and brace and body cast—those things I never spoke of, though for a while I’d wondered, if not for them, would I have been less silent? The words I lived with seemed, so many of them, ugly: mutant type 1, negative type 1, management implications, rodding, deformity, intramolecular disulfide. Shortly after my diagnosis, I came across a reference to an Italian doctor, Dr. Ambrosi, who published a paper in 1905 on “Diseases of the Bone,” mine included, but all I remembered of it was calcareous bodies, and that his name was close to mine, and that closeness hurt me. I never knew what word might hurt me next.

  So now, as she longed for the part of me I found most ugly, and feared I would misunderstand her longing, I tried to imagine giving her what she wanted: I loosened my hump from my back and, standing by the bed where she lay face down, gently placed it on hers. I pressed for several minutes until I was sure the two had fused. Then I tucked a warm blanket over her, and from the chair beside the bed watched the rise and fall of her tender, almost-secret affliction. And as I did, it occurred to me that the prions inside her left no outward, clearly visible sign, that maybe this troubled her and so she imagined herself into my body, so visibly disfigured. I watched over her for many hours, though it’s possible she wasn’t really sleeping, but in some other state where the roses, now hers, not mine, could open.

  Dear A,

  In those first weeks of sleeplessness strange things often came to me, small facts or random details I’d once known but had forgotten. Plants which don’t form clusters are called solitaries. The painter Titian’s death date was August 27, 1576—why would I remember such a thing? The hours of darkness were increasing, but I could see in them the red that Titian painted, and the lotion Margarita rubbed into her skin until she glowed like roses and found she was invisible and could fly. I saw white boats, a barren summit, terraced gardens.

  Dear A,

  As I paced, I remembered other things as well. One night a phrase I had once learned came back to me. At first I barely heard it, blurred syllables not linking to make words but lost inside a hushed confusion. But after I paced more I could hear clearly: “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” I think the phrase is from Plotinus. I kept pacing and the phrase extended, “The flight of the alone to the Alone is and must be wordless.” As with many things that happened in those weeks since I’d stopped sleeping, I didn’t really understand and yet I deeply felt them. As if each required a kind of crumbling and rebuilding, a departure from assumptions I’d carried without even knowing they were with me. Each thought mercurial, sharp-edged, almost lawless, or even awkward, lumpy, as it pulled from what had bound it. I thought of how “alone” and “Ambrose” both begin with “a.” It seemed the smallest thing and yet it calmed me, as if the word “alone” which I had felt as cold and filled with distance, could also be a site of sharing. Though I still sensed a separateness in you wordless and enclosed beyond my knowing.

  Dear A,

  Even though I knew I couldn’t really know you, one night I started writing you a letter. At first I was sure I wouldn’t send it—that it would be like those unsent letters that had fallen from The Idiot. By then I was shifting in and out of darkness, often for many hours I couldn’t see. The color-sounds were sometimes comforting but also lonely, even threatening, cut off from some essential steadiness or sheltering I still remembered but knew I was losing. Sometimes I didn’t want to know them, but then, without them, the darkness grew too flat and gripped too tightly. I knew I couldn’t return to the office. But even as my thoughts began to take shape on the page, I still considered thinking basically private and withheld, not visible or shared like action.

  My hands like the hands of the one from San Servolo—vanished hands.

  Dear A,

  I realized something in me considered action—as opposed to thought—aggressive and intrusive, the way we speak of “military action” or “the exertion of force by one thing on another.” So to write to you was one thing, but to send the letter was another. And how could I ask you to go out into a world I sensed you felt hurt by and avoided? How could I suggest you cross an ocean? Yet I watched as my hand sought out an envelope, my mind considering how my words could reach you. And still I thought of how an action is something taken in court against another, or even subtly invasive or intrusive as in Einstein’s “action at a distance” where if one entangled atom is prodded its entangled twin must feel this also even if there’s half the universe between them.

  But I also thought of Bulgakov’s book and Titian’s paintings. How actions made them possible. And though my actions weren’t important like theirs, maybe there was a place for some degree of gesture, though I feared that by sending you the letter I’d unwittingly hurt you and myself.

  Dear A,

  But there is so much darkness now. I hear words inside my head, but mostly I can’t see to write. The air grows rough with unsent words. This grinding red of interruption. My heartbeat silver-gray. Wired hiss of sunset. Black rocks beneath the waves.

  Dear A,

  Of course you know what happened next. I left the letter and you found it. So many roses in the air between us. The bruised petals crushed inside my back. I worried I had wronged you. Somewhere I had read, “When thought is free then what can bind us?” But my thoughts felt chained even as I tried to set them free. Even as the color-sounds sometimes sought them out. I started wondering if maybe the true nature of thought is that it can’t be free at all, not really. Often I still think this. So by sending you that letter, was I enchaining you as I’d enchained myself?

  And yet something in me trusted you, and wondered, though I feared I’d bring you harm, was there some way my words could also be in some small way like Margarita’s ointment.

  Dear A,

  It wasn’t until I was sliding the folded note into the envelope that I decided to leave it on your desk instead of send it through the mail. This seemed more intimate than the postal system’s computerized conveyer belts and zones and bar codes. But maybe it was also more entrapping—maybe you’d find it harder to ignore or put aside if you found it in the space we shared, that shared space with a silence woven by us both with threads that, though sound-proof, were embedded with microscopic eyes, though neither of us admitted they were there.

  I addressed the envelope quickly—I only had to write one letter, A.

  With the darkness slipping toward me, I’d been trying to learn what I could about the eye’s physiology and functioning. In the end I got a lot wrong, but back then I thought I could at least pin down the basics. So I learned there’s a small, curved depression, the fovea, located at the center of the retina’s macula luten, the only place where the retina’s layered folds spread aside and light falls directly on the cone cells, which are the cells that register images mos
t sharply, and are also the most responsive to the color red. I thought then (though I soon learned I was wrong) that red would help me see better, more acutely. (Later I found out the rods in the eyes, not the cones, function best in darkness. The cones with their sensitivity to red, work best in light.)

  I wrote your initial in red ink. The red looked somehow brave. This pleased me.

  Dear A,

  But did I really think you’d cross the ocean just because I asked you? At first I told myself that even though of course you wouldn’t go to Venice, I had shared with you the world I had begun to live in, and that sharing pointed to some bond between us, an unspoken sense of kinship. I’d sensed your kindness even as I didn’t know you. Then once again it struck me how the word “alone” derives from “all” and “one” as if it holds within its core a silent, unacknowledged sharing. But as the hours went on, I came to understand I believed all along you’d do exactly what I wanted—fiercely sensed this even as I claimed to doubt it. And so my act felt largely cruel and coldly selfish. How could I send you into hardship, the unknown, maybe even into unexpected harm? Why would I do that to you? Always I thought of your hunched back, your cane, how hard it is for you to walk. Why wasn’t I protecting you? And still I imagined you traveling across the ocean, the sound of the Venetian canals entering your body.

  Then suddenly for a full week the letters stopped. I worried she had grown too ill to continue, or maybe even died (though her letters weren’t feverish like the ones from the one who’d waited to be read to). And of course I couldn’t reach her. But even as I missed her and worried for her safety, part of me withdrew into a different, separate silence that was troubled by her certitude I’d go to Venice. I hadn’t guessed she would have felt this. The more I thought about it, the more I felt a spreading coldness. If she’d been sure I would go, did that mean there was a part of her as ruthless and enclosed as Pilate? (She’d almost hinted this herself.) Yet what she sensed I could find in Venice, and what I found, was filled with everything Pilate tried so hard to disavow (care, tenderness), even if in the end he couldn’t. The cold stayed for many hours, as if the only covering I had, had been lifted from my body. Though I missed the hurt colors in the words she sent me.

  A white sheet was covering her from foot-soles to waist as she lay face down on a gurney. I leaned over, my hands in latex gloves; my right hand held a scalpel. The room was white and windowless, the only noise the buzz from the florescent lighting. A quieter, more focused light attached by a metal cord to the ceiling, hung directly over her as I inserted the scalpel and cut from the hump’s base to her shoulders. Then, parting the wet flesh, I cut deeper into bone and sinew. When her hump was fully opened, its skin pulled back on either side like curtains, I slipped in my hand to loosen and set free the roses—not hundreds as I supposed, but many thousands—wave upon wave of crushed and brown-edged petals. But though I tried for many hours, the petals wouldn’t budge, as if dampened with a lotion the opposite of Margarita’s. I wondered if the roses had lived outside her hump, and then something forced them into her, or if they were born there, and if they were, did they always have brown edges? There was nothing else to do but to sew her up again as best I could. I labored to make each stitch as neat as possible, though with each one I remembered the crossed-out words in the notebook, the silence that followed.

  Dear A,

  Maybe it’s been days or even weeks since I last wrote you, I lose track each time the dark comes back. But I remember clearly what I wrote you last, how I was certain you would go to Venice. And that certainty felt cruel. But once you left I thought about you constantly even though you didn’t know it, the way Margarita worries about the Master after he vanishes, having left behind him only a handful of scorched pages and pressed roses. He’d lived a solitary life until she came as if from nowhere and stayed with him among his many books, red furniture, heat from a small stove. Lilacs grew outside his door in summer. But on the day he vanished the bushes were weighted with snow, his worn coat had no buttons. Often, as I thought of you in Venice, I thought also of the silence they both lived in after that—she unable to find him, he too ashamed and hopeless to be found. So when I stopped writing to you, it was as if I was both of them at once, each wrapped inside their separate silence. There was no way you could know that I still thought of you, still cared what might befall you, so wasn’t my silence inflicting an even harsher, further cruelty? One night I dreamed your cane splintered into hundreds of charred pieces.

  Dear A,

  Of course by then my eyes were failing badly. I lived mostly in dimness and in dark, so I tried not to blame myself excessively for the cruelty of my silence. (The sound-colors were still coming and going, and though I lived with them, I didn’t know how to trust them, or understand what they were.) Even when I wrote to you in my mind I couldn’t get the words on paper. And still I felt I was to blame. Every now and then I grew convinced you had forgotten me, that my not writing no longer mattered. You were walking along canals named Rio dei Santissimo and Rio di Santa Margherita; down streets with enchanting names—Calle Valmarana, Calle Arco, Calle del Sansoni—or maybe passing the Old Pharmacy, or the bronze face of Pietro Arentino above a doorway, or the Orsini Glass Kiln with its Library of 3,000 shades of enamels. So why should you remember me? With that new world before you, wouldn’t the idea of the lost notebook be drowned within a million new sensations?—

  Dear A,

  And yet in truth I didn’t doubt you still remembered me. That no matter how many winding streets or hidden courtyards you discovered, you were essentially like Myshkin in the book I scanned—unable to forget the reality of another. Or like the epileptic in the few letters I found, who crossed the courtyard to read to the one who needed him and waited.

  Dear A,

  Some years before my illness, I’d read about a “foundling wheel” in Venice that was built in the 1300’s. It was a kind of rotating cradle inserted in a convent door where parents could safely leave their newborns. The parents placed the child inside, then rang a bell so the nuns would know to turn the cradle and retrieve the abandoned child. The opening was bordered by a grille so narrow only newborns could fit through. One day as I was pacing, the darkness pressing down inside me, for some reason I envisioned the infant you once were inside that cradle. Your clenched fists and lumpy back, your twisted spine. I didn’t know if your eyes were closed or open, the cradle’s wooden arms around you—

  Dear A,

  Weeks later, when I managed to sleep for a few minutes (every now and then I briefly slept), I woke from a dream in which I came across a wooden cradle. But when I reached inside to lift the sleeping infant, my hands found only hundreds of bruised roses.

  Dear A,

  How could I miss someone I didn’t even really know? And yet I missed you. One day when you’d left work before me, I noticed a notecard on your table—a grocery list you made but had forgotten. Bread, milk, coffee, eggs. But on the other side you’d copied this: “the soul’s strange solitude, H. More Ψυχωδιa Platonica sig. P4.” So even though I didn’t know you, there was a way you came to me like light on water, or as when one glimpses through a window a stranger’s face that suddenly feels intimate, or a new room that feels familiar.

  Dear A,

  But as time went on I sensed more and more you didn’t miss me. That although you’d crossed an ocean as I’d asked, I’d ceased being vivid in your mind. It’s not that I believed you had forgotten, I still felt you were like Myshkin. That you would never turn your back on another. I didn’t even doubt you were trying to track down the notebook. (Maybe you had even found it). One night as I was pacing as I always did, I pictured us in outer space—me locked inside the spaceship’s narrow capsule, you tethered and spacewalking outside. I tried to pull you back but you resisted, entranced by all you moved among and saw—flashes of white light, sounds like grinding metal mixed with static, blue pearl of earth, the many-colored stars, etc. After a while, I could only glimpse the si
lvered rim of your left boot, one strip of shoulder. Once I feared my silence was a cruelty I’d inflicted, but now I, not you, was locked inside it. I felt the weight of your hunched back in mine, even as I knew I shouldn’t.

  In my mind’s eye, an astronaut was spacewalking outside the capsule. It was the summer I was eight or nine. Both legs were in casts, new rods had been inserted. The astronaut was testing the newest prototype of protective gear from NASA, a suit equipped with a PLSS device that enabled him to walk untethered. Even mission-control couldn’t reach him.

  What if he refused to come back? How would they force him?

  Space smelled charred but fresh—that same space-smell he smelled every time, and every time found impossible to describe.

  Streaks of blue-white light flashed by. The earth turned minutely below, its surface strewn with dirt pits of shattered bones, trenches and graveyards, and billions of other bones still laboring in moving bodies.

  I was him and I was floating. What was I hearing? Something like a wind tunnel, but metallic—cold and at the same time fiery.

  Then I was on earth again. The days felt long, I spent them reading free government pamphlets I’d ordered. A new one had arrived, Spacesuits: A Short History. But why did the word protection appear on almost every page, and often more than once? I wanted to read about the latest “Z-series” of space suits, which included a prototype for planetary vehicular activity and “increased tether-free mobility.” But instead I saw: protection against micrometeoroids….protection consisting of five layers of aluminized insulation….without this protection human flesh expands to twice its usual size…. I tried to skip past it, but only came to: the blood will boil without protection, the lungs will fill with boiling water….It is crucial to have protection from radiation…. protection for the DNA…Pressurized DNA molecules will shatter apart from the inside….