Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  It seemed the more minute the entity, the more volatile, explosive.

  On the next page was the Apollo 1 fire, and a photo of The Block I AIC nylon pressure suit that went up in flames and melted.

  I didn’t know how to picture my astronaut after that, what to make of his supposed freedom.

  Special lights are embedded in the fingertips of space-gloves. “The future promises an even stronger, self-heating design, manufactured with laser-scan technology, stereo lithography, 3d computer modeling, and CNC machining.”

  But protection had built a wall inside me. I couldn’t feel the freedom it was supposed to enable.

  So that day when I came to her dream of me outside the spacecraft not wanting to return, although I knew it was really about her, not me, I felt again that part of myself that never stopped wanting the astronaut, the space walk. That part that never believed in the fire. The fire was a lie. The fabric never melted.

  Dear A,

  The more I sensed you had forgotten me—or at least that in some fundamental way your attention had turned elsewhere—the more I began thinking about Margarita and the Master. Her life after he vanished. How she retreated to the darkest room of her Moscow apartment and unlocked a bureau drawer where from beneath some fabric scraps she took the only possessions she still valued—a photograph of the Master, some rose petals wrapped in tissue, the singed remnant of the manuscript he’d burned. Only a few sentences were left and she read them again and again, always arriving too soon at the end of the last, which was unfinished, “vanished as if it had never existed…”

  I didn’t have a photograph of you, or rose petals in tissue, or any words except that notecard with the grocery list and quote. Of course I’d deliberately ensured you couldn’t find me. I tried to remember why I’d been so set on that decision, so sure it was important. What was I trying to accomplish? But though I tried many times I couldn’t remember. I didn’t even let you know my name. The sound-colors came and went.

  The ocean stretched, a vast blank night, between us.

  Dear A,

  As I already mentioned, in the letters that fell from The Idiot, the writer sometimes seemed herself, but sometimes she was Dostoevsky, sometimes even Myshkin. Early on this troubled me, but as I paced and the darkness deepened and sounds took on more shapes and colors, at times I began to feel that I was Margarita. I sat on a bench beneath the Kremlin wall dwelling on the Master, “If you’ve been exiled, why haven’t you let me know? People do manage to let others know. Have you fallen out of love with me?” Or I’d walk along the Moskva River thinking, “Why am I cut off from life?” I didn’t know how long it had been since you’d left for Venice. Time and space collapsed like folded paper, or sometimes opened into sprays of roses—I never knew which would come next or how or why. I lived within a kind of quiet anarchy, a much-too-quiet-disarrangement whose laws —precise, exacting — governed me, though I couldn’t know what they were or how to follow. I walked by the Kremlin wall, held burning paper, thought about Bellini ferrying his servant. Nothing linear or clear left in the world.

  Dear A,

  Many years before, I’d read a book about the properties of time and space—how though we live within them they defy our understanding. What if time isn’t bound by a predictable rearrangement of atoms? What if it is another dimension of space, and our sense of its passing is our way of trying to feel and briefly capture it inside us? What if the future isn’t a logical outcome of the present? Or even a partial consequence of the present? What if the laws of physics aren’t static but malleable, ever-changing? Theories rise and crumble. As I walked along the Moskva River, or read the notecard I still carried, or wondered about the lost notebook and the writer of the fallen letters, my skin grew less than air but also full of light and color.

  Dear A,

  Even though I felt you had forgotten me, every now and then I thought back to Margarita’s stoic answer to the question Woland asked at their first meeting, “Is there perhaps some sadness or anguish that is poisoning your soul?”—and Margarita answered plainly “No, there’s nothing like that” though inside she was suffering. Maybe it was then that Woland realized he could trust her and decided to show her his globe. He could see she possessed a sense of tact, proportion. And though Woland didn’t say this (after all, he was the devil) it struck me that such qualities are part of what makes possible kindness and caring toward another. That awareness of being a small part of a darkness much vaster and deeper than one’s own. (As the sound-colors belong to something much older, more experienced than myself.) So even though my eyes no longer saw, and I feared you had forgotten me, I tried like Margarita not to give way to my own leanings. I imagined you walking the Venetian streets, your back briefly healed in a canal’s unwitting kindness, its undulant, distorting water.

  Dear A,

  But suddenly I‘m not sure what’s happening—my skin’s invisible and light as air, the muscles in my arms and legs are strong again and taut and I am weightless—It must be Woland’s ointment that has done this. I’m flying over St. Mark’s, over the fish market’s stone columns carved with water fleas and wind roses, over the crooked balconies of Palazzo Pemma, the remains of the old Anatomy Theater. The air shines a clear, bright blue then slowly darkens. I’m flying over the bas-relief of a shoe on the corner of Calle Crosera, and over the botanical gardens of Ca’ Morosini, the Ospidale Civile with its graffiti of a hand enclosing a wounded human heart. I’m flying over the Church of Santi Rocci e Margherita.

  I am looking for you in the corners of the poorest districts, in the rope factory’s narrow alleyway, the crumbling streets beside the women’s prison. But when I try to descend below the rooftops I can’t land. Why won’t Woland’s ointment let me? I want to draw close to you, to find you. If not to talk to you at least to briefly glimpse you. But from the air all faces blur, bodies stay unfocused. The lost roses of your name pull closed inside me.

  Dear A,

  It’s still dark and I can’t find you. But for some reason (have I paused in air?) I see cloud-letters slowly spelling out a word that I can’t read but I see now that it’s “care.” At first the meaning’s clear. “To take care of, to look after.”…“The charging of the mind with anything.”…“An inclination to or for.”…But like anyone’s lost or fading sight—like mine—it complicates itself, layers build and coarsen—“From the Germanic; “bed of trouble, sickness, grief.” “Mental suffering and sorrow.” “Dress of mourning.” “Burdened state of mind.” Why do words unhinge themselves? Wanting turning into mourning, charging changing into sorrow. Once I read, though I can’t remember where, “to cast water on a care-scorched face”—so care is also fire and scarring. So when I tell myself I care for you even without really knowing you, when I imagine soothing your hunched back, or repeating Woland’s claim that “everything will be made right, that is what the world is built on,” when I imagine my care for you making possible your flight beside me, and how I’ll say when you are tired, “Sleep will strengthen you and I will guard your sleep,” how can I not feel my words infected by that other meaning even as I focus on the first? In this darkness I can’t reach you.

  Dear A,

  I’m flying over the Grand Canal, over the tourist shops and bakeries, the lazzaretto islands where the plague victims were taken. I’m flying over the white boats no longer there, the blistered hands and ghostly purple faces, the pits where they were thrown and buried. I am still circling, circling, I can’t seem to leave the white boats behind, I don’t know why. I want to look for you on the calles near St. Marks, or among the small stone bridges that span even the narrowest canals, but the white boats keep reappearing. Why can’t I break free of this white circling? Even the closed rose inside your name is white now, and the bruised petals I touched inside the cradle. How can this whiteness be so strong when I can barely even see? Your white notecard in my pocket, its white ink—

  Dear A,

  But even if I could stop this white circl
ing and try again to find you, what if this ointment makes me stay invisible forever, what if there’s no way to rub it off? What if this white flying means that you will never see me?

  Florensky had pointed out the random gaps in our knowledge, the astonishments that lie past understanding, the impact of a searing light whose intensity is “pure potential—a light that is not, however, there.” In a way that’s how she felt to me, vivid as Florensky’s light that’s there except it isn’t. In her flying she was tireless, rejected nothing. But in her real room across the ocean, was she living in a dimness that grew emptier, grayer, the prions weakening and hobbling her further, even as her thoughts caught fire? The mind is a chaos of touches, Titian said, and although I carried my body’s weightedness and fractures, I tried to feel her flying more real than her hurt body, or the walls of the narrow room she lived in.

  I was walking toward Calle Largo dei Botteri looking for the remains of Titian’s house, its vast gardens and views of the lagoon. But when I turned the corner, the street was cluttered with hundreds of white boats. How could so many fit into that narrow street ending only in a garden, and why were they on land instead of water? Behind one and slightly to the right, Titian was on his knees, his hair yellow-white, his clothes tattered. His bony fingers were sifting the dry dirt, as he stiffly turned his head one way then another. He did this many times. It seemed he was looking for Orazio who he forgot had died of plague. I walked closer and stood beside him but he didn’t see me. I wanted to touch his shoulder, let him believe I was Orazio. But as I reached out my arm (I thought of Marei, Dostoevsky), something behind me pulled me back. It was Dr. Ambrosi, author of the famous paper, “Diseases of the Bone,” the one who shared my name and used the words calcareous bodies. I felt his breath against my hump, as it pressed through my shirt, my skin, and finally down into my blood where it circled and then settled in my eyes that were still watching Titian, though I couldn’t speak to him or reach him—

  Dear A,

  I’ve landed on the Lazzaretto island—but how could this have happened? Suddenly the air released me. I see long rows of wooden barracks, incineration pits, the quarantine warehouses stacked high with piles of silk and leather. And everywhere the smell of burning juniper and rosemary. Several times each day feathers and clothes are plunged into boiling vinegar or dragged into the sun for airing. Armed boats patrol the shore. Seneca wrote that we must seek out that which is untouched by Time and Chance. He says this is the soul. But I think this must be wrong. I walk back and forth on this island where nothing is untouched, yet everywhere dark souls are beating. I don’t know if I’m invisible, or if you’d see me if I finally found you. But when I turn around, except for the armed boats, the water’s empty. The stables hold 100 healthy horses.

  Dear A,

  Since my sight is mostly gone I try to count the coldest hours then add them up with the idea that because they’re cold they must be nights, then try to figure out how long it’s been since I last wrote you. But the numbers drift and crumble. I am still on the Lazzaretto island, I don’t know if it’s been days or weeks or maybe even months. Where is Woland with his globe, his belief that manuscripts don’t burn, and “everything will be made right” because that is what the world is built on? Where are the Venetian rooftops I flew above before I landed? There’s so much suffering and strife here—the sailors far from home, black sores appearing. It’s said that the dead who stay unburned before they’re buried hold and chew their white shrouds like milk in their mouths.

  Dear A,

  Maybe you remember Woland’s notion that “a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.” But as I walk back and forth in my invisible skin and waves crawl on this shore where plague doctors in oiled black coats and masks walk toward the barracks carrying white sticks, I’m not sure anymore what a fact is, only that I see your roses opening somewhere far away in safety, white petals tucked in their white cradle. So maybe, unlike here, Woland’s cold and bitter midnight hasn’t reached you. Woland says a fact is anything that comes true, but what’s true isn’t always possible to see. And often it isn’t just one thing. The truth that’s Venice from the air is different from this truth since I’ve landed. Can’t even facts grow wobbly, unsure, confuse and obscure themselves, sometimes lie or partly disguise themselves to others, even to themselves? Ever since this sleeplessness began, the solid world, which must be one of Woland’s “facts,” is different from what I thought or ever expected—its truths decentered, restless, prismatic. Its angles more vulnerable and porous than I imagined or that my eyes or mind can see even when they’re there. “If” is a fact, and “doubt,” and “contradiction.” Mystery is fact. The limits of my knowing, fact. Once I thought facts were my shoes on the pavement, my hand on the scanner, my paycheck, my morning cup of coffee. But now none of that feels real. Remember that book on time and space I mentioned? How it said though we live in time and space they defy our understanding. Our human minds can’t grasp them. So how are we to say what’s fact? All I know is that this sleeplessness is sometimes water sometimes wind and that it carries me. And maybe if everything keeps shifting, there’s solace for you even though it seems there’s not. Sometimes I sense that it exists for you, I don’t know why I feel this but I do. Why should I care if you remember me as long as the roses in your name can briefly open? But then I feel your hump again. The fractured bones. The bruised rose that also closes.

  Dear A,

  I wish that I could fly to you, that you could tell me if my skin is still invisible, but I can’t fly anymore, I don’t know why, and I can’t find you. And as I walk this shore I have no means of leaving, colors appear like sentences that have no endings or beginnings. Remember the Master’s scorched page, its sentence with “vanished as if it never existed,” but no ending? Often I think of that burned page and wonder, why did humankind decide to build these structures we call sentences, why choose to move within their narrow rooms, their walls, look out from their clipped windows?—If the laws of physics aren’t static but malleable, if the future isn’t a logical outcome of the present or even a partial consequence of the present, then why should a sentence move only forward, and most always toward an ending? (Yet I’m writing to you in sentences…though sometimes I doubt I’m even writing—I’m walking on the sand and I was flying.) If order, at least as we know it, doesn’t exist…if it’s different from what we think it is…is there some other kind of sentence not a sentence…some other way to make you hear me…You are far from me and silent ///

  Dear A,

  And now, as I walk back and forth, this salt-air heavy on my skin, I see a man in white, tattered clothes sitting on a rock in the full sun. He’s holding his bowed head between his hands. I can’t see the plague barracks anymore, and the air no longer smells of juniper and rosemary—it’s heavy with the scent of roses. I edge closer, but don’t want to get too close. His face is oozing with black sores, his arms and legs purpling and blackening. His lap is covered with a white and crimson cloth. And now I also have a cloth, white with a frayed border, and I’m carrying a pail of water, though I don’t remember where or how I got them or why they’re with me. I don’t want to let the man’s oozing face any closer, but for some reason I’m still walking toward him. Maybe my white cloth and water are supposed to soothe his spoiling sores, though I don’t want to know or touch him, and anyway it wouldn’t really help him. I don’t know if he wants me to come near. I don’t know if he even sees or hears me. But I’m still stepping closer, I don’t know why my legs want to do this, then finally I stop and stand as still as possible…wait to see if maybe he senses me—if maybe he’ll lift his eyes and see me—

  Dear A,

  He lifts his eyes and sees me. At least he seems to see me. I’m not sure. Then he parts his cracked, black lips, he’s speaking: “I’m from Rome but lived away in Yershalaim for many years where I carried out my official duties as was required. When I finally finished out my service and was permitted to return home, the jou
rney back was arduous and took many weeks in a caravan over difficult terrain. But every day I saw any number of amazing things—hundreds of bird’s nests woven of fish bones and seaweeds, animals with four ears or one blue eye, the other black or gold. Jeweled, minute birds flying backward. Ladders arranged in a circle surrounded by miles of empty sand. Silver nets and handprints in red air. But when I finally reached Rome, the city seemed more alien, more strange, than all the things I just mentioned. At first I thought I confused my route, made some navigational error, ended up in a foreign land at carnival, its streets brimming with bright banners, burning torches, flutes like the flights of wild birds. I stood apart near an alley at the edge of an open square. After a while someone must have noticed the mute, baffled man leaning by himself against a wall—a stranger approached me: “‘The Emperor Tiberius is dead, smothered in his bed clothes.’”

  He stops, lowers his eyes. Turns his oozing face toward the water.