Island of the Mad: A Novel
Page 19
Dear A,
When he looks up again he’s looking at my pail of water. (I still don’t know if he sees me, though when he speaks he says “your” so it seems he believes someone is there): “Your word pure derives from our Latin, purus, which means unstained…but isn’t living itself an impurity? So no one really escapes. I can see that such staining can at times and from certain angles be beautiful, though much of it is coarse and ugly. Of course some of us are much more badly stained than others, or even worse, are ourselves a source and implement of staining. I understand I am among the worst…By the time I returned to Rome I’d carried out Tiberius’s many brutal wishes and in turn thought up many of my own. I condemned an innocent man to death by crucifixion. Yet when that man stood before me bruised and beaten (I ordered him beaten many times) he treated me kindly. He even knew I suffered painful migraines—though I’d never said a word about them. So when I learned Tiberius was murdered in his bed clothes, I stood alone, face to face with my own ugliness. Tiberius’s brutal heart was destroyed but nothing could undo the horrid act I committed.”
Dear A,
The air begins to cool, the sky grows dimmer, I’m still holding my white cloth, my pail of water. I want to wash his oozing sores, the black crusts along his lips, his legs and arms blistering and swelling. Then the sky dims even more, turns flatter, duller, almost dark—a dark that’s also oddly white—and slowly I realize there’s something in me that doesn’t want to know his story. As I start to think this, I hear his words turning to coarse sand inside him. Wave after wave of it sifting back down his throat and back inside him.
Why have I silenced him like his? Why don’t I want to know his story?
Then I close my eyes and hear my mind saying to itself, I’m him.
Was I wrong to send you to Venice, did I harm you, was I blind and cruel like the one who sits beside me? Was I impetuous and selfish like him? Cowardly, destructive, arrogant, unwise, like him? Am I filled with burning sand like him?
How can I know if I hurt you, if you suffer even more in your bones because I sent you—
I need to try to fly to you, to find you….
Dear A,
But the man hasn’t finished, there are still things he needs to say…It’s morning again or afternoon, it’s too hot to be staying on that rock, the sky’s completely cloudless, too bright. Then I feel my mind taking back the sand that’s falling down his throat into his body, the isolation that can only make him suffer. He is so thin, his collar bones like the tips of arrows through his skin, his cheek bones sharp beneath the oozing sores. I still don’t know if he sees me, if maybe the ointment has worn off. But maybe his hurt mind would be incapable of seeing anyone.
“Do you know what the man I condemned to death said at our last meeting? ‘Every kind of power is a form of violence.’ That night after he was gone and over the next days I followed my usual routine, ate my favorite meals and enjoyed them. I even briefly convinced myself my migraines had dissipated—the dead man the irritant that had kept them going. I assumed I would forget him. But a slow blackening was spreading through my body. One day it simply sharpened into anguish, and that anguish clawed at me and at all my selfish parts. I knew there was something crucial we hadn’t finished saying. My nights grew hot with dreams of the two of us walking side by side, endlessly conversing, so rapt we hardly noticed alterations in the land, or light or darkness. But always by the time I woke I had forgotten every word. That forgetfulness carved traps inside me. Ever since, grinding sand pushes at the insides of my head and burns with piercing redness.”
Dear A,
As I keep listening to the stranger and telling you each word, I feel your hump fused to my back again, pressing down along my spine and spreading. How can I begin to know the ways I harmed and wronged you?
I was wrong to send you to Venice. I am sure now I was wrong. I was wrong to make sure you couldn’t find me.
…But why do I believe you even think of me or want to find me? Why should I imagine that once you got to Venice I was anything more than some vague, dragging thought connected to a notebook (though I still think that I was wrong to send you) your eyes filling with new names, streets of water—
Dear A,
I’m still standing near the stranger, I still see him. His voice hoarse as if a rock were rubbing raw his throat. “After Tiberius’s death, there is no record of what became of me, I simply vanished. Some believe I died by my own hand, others that I went into exile somewhere in Italy. Others say I retreated into a grim house on a dark hill where every living thing around me suffered—even the evergreen oak became tormented because it hadn’t resisted being made into a cross. Still others believe I branded my forehead until it oozed and blackened like a plague sore, so I was forced to wander endlessly over the earth in an attempt to drive away the pain. Still others believe my enemies consigned me to a well so deep that my sobs, though continuous, could never be heard. And even others believe I was sent to live beside the sulfurous lake, Ameria, whose waters are known for healing fractures. But given my hateful act, why would I be sent to any place of healing?”
But everything’s starting to blacken…I don’t know if the stranger’s beside me. I hear only my heartbeat, the small, clipped waves, your absence. ///
////
Dear A,
Why do I still talk to you…Why do I keep insisting I need to find you, knowing that I wronged and harmed you? // Why can’t I let this darkness pull me back to where I have no thoughts of flying or even remember that it happened? Why do I still feel my back as yours //// the awkward hump with its thousands of bruised roses?
Dear A,
The stranger is very quiet, maybe he’s been this way for many hours, or even days, I don’t know. I can never tell how long I stay inside the blackness. // My eyes are still blurry but I can see the silver pail, silver water inside it. I dip my white cloth, the water covers my fingers so I know it’s still cool— /// I take the cloth and press it to the stranger’s forehead. But the second he feels it touching him he flinches, and with great effort grabs my wrist to stop my washing. With great effort he pushes me away.
//
With each new letter, her handwriting was growing larger, more erratic.
I reminded myself that even as she held her cloth and pail of water, she was in her real room across the ocean, her real sleeplessness building.
(I couldn’t know the ways that illness—intricate, ingrained, destructive—both held her and didn’t. Dostoevsky would say this is the real.)
And as I thought this, I glanced over at the notebook from San Servolo still open on the table beside me—though I was sure I’d left it closed—my eyes blurring Myshkin to My skin.
For a split second I couldn’t see, as if a thin sliver of the light that entered Myshkin’s brain before he fell was slipping into me—that same light that moved through the epileptic’s hands as he read, and into the hands of the one who waited until she didn’t wait anymore but sat with vanished hands on her green hill, the same hill as Myshkin’s.
My skin was very hot.
Did the sliver of light touch her also, the one across the ocean, whose back was my back and filled with roses?
For several weeks there were no letters.
///
Dear A,
// //
The stranger is gone from me, and the white rock, the gray-black sand. (Or maybe I should say, I’m gone. In all likelihood he probably still sits there.)
I’m in a room that’s mostly bare except for a round wood table covered with red cloth, and on the room’s far side, across from me, a long, rectangular table (maybe it’s a work desk) beneath a large window. On top is a carafe of water. There are lilac bushes outside, and here, on the round table, a vase of roses. There’s not much else—just a wood stove in one corner, some books and papers.
I don’t know who the room belongs to or why I am here.
Loose piles of
papers are scattered on the floor, some written-on, some blank, others marked with just one word.
I look down and my eyes land on the single word: ruin.
//
///
Dear A,
But I never told you what finally happened on the island before I found myself suddenly in this room.
After the man on the white rock spoke that last word “healing”—“Given my hateful act, why would I be sent to any place of healing?” I waited for many hours…and then days…weeks maybe, maybe longer (time is still a perplexing thing to me). But he never spoke again.
Even so, I kept listening for his voice. Concentrating. Focusing. Even as I didn’t want to know his story or even be near him.
The blackness had come back, I was listening from inside it.
I worried that his words might spill out in a faint whisper and I’d miss them. Or that the pale reds of the sound-colors might cover up a death rattle, or that maybe he’d change his mind and ask for the damp cloth, though I saw no reason he’d let himself have it. In a waking dream I heard the word Procula, and for one second mistook it as coming from his mouth.
But why did I care if he spoke, or if I missed it? Why was I listening like that, knife-sharp in the blackness? (The prions inside me still spreading, destroying…) If I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, why was I wasting any shred of caring on him? I didn’t know a word for what I felt—it wasn’t pity, or tenderness, or compassion, but something more impersonal, maybe not even human.
Why did I feel I had to wait in case he spoke? He had done terrible things. For a while I had even turned his words to sand inside him, but then I’d relented. And I was probably still invisible, he never gave a sign that he could see me. ///
And still I stayed nearby him, listened.
Dear A,
And then one day I was just here. My arms on the chair’s wooden arms. Lilac bushes outside the window.
I started thinking, maybe now that the man on the white rock was far away—or I was far away from him—I could feel the hump growing on my back again, and the trapped roses, and feel I was near you.
But the more I thought of it the more I knew that as long as I had harmed and wronged you—remember I finally decided I was wrong to send you to Venice—the roses would no longer come back, and the coarse sand would build in me, even though I wasn’t on the island.
I couldn’t fly, and I had no right to find you.
///
Dear A,
///
I sat inside this room, just waiting, though I didn’t know for what. The blackness came and seemed to stay for a long time. The sound-colors wove bright threads in me, though sometimes they suddenly turned white like the man on the island, and I’d wonder if my sand was rushing down his throat again, was he choking?…Or maybe someone else had stumbled upon his rock by now and he was telling the same story…maybe that just happened over and over.
And then one day the blackness lifted, and with my eyes still blurring (the glass vase hurt air, not solid, the lilac bushes bruised, unstable), I noticed a stapled article on the floor and picked it up and, after my eyes cleared more, started reading.
It was from The American Journal of Medical Genetics (after that came: 122A, but I had no idea what that referred to. Then: 201–214, I assumed those were the page numbers. And then the year: 2003.)
Its title was: Personality and Stereotype in Osteogenesis Imperfecta: Behavioral Phenotype or Response to Life’s Hard Challenges?
Of course I thought of you. As I said, my eyes were very weak and it was hard to see, but this had been the case for a long time. There was a magnifying glass on the sill beneath the window. As I walked over to pick it up, my back was lithe above my hips—much too light, too slender, unburdened. The floor against my shoes too flat, predictable. No roses inside me.
At first I felt relieved to hold the letters and know she was alive. It had been many weeks with no word from her. The handwriting was no larger or more awkward than before. But when I thought of the article she mentioned, not only myself but everything I looked at or touched seemed fragile. It was hard for me to explain even to myself that my illness, though flagrantly visible, felt to me essentially private, fenced within a mute, concealing darkness. Just as I’d never once spoken the word hump, there was a larger kind of silence, maybe a silence of thought and feeling I’d built for it as best I could.
But now I remembered clearly:
Rodding: ‘Internal splinting’ of the long bones by means of the insertion of a metal rod. Under general anesthesia a long bone (e.g. leg or arm bone) may be cut in one or several places, straightened and ‘threaded’ onto a metal rod. The surgery generally involves an incision long enough to expose the bone where it is deformed. The procedure is most often used to treat children with moderate to severe Osteogenesis Imperfecta. It is recommended to control the repeated fracturing of a long bone; however, it does not necessarily prevent fractures—the bone may still fracture—but the rod will provide an internal splint that may help maintain proper alignment.
I was sure that by now she had read similar words.
I grew hot again like before when I first felt the light-splinter enter.
Dea xx
Dear A,
As soon as I found it I knew you wouldn’t want me to read it. I had already harmed and wronged you. Trespassed. Trampled. Made assumptions. Asserted my own wishes. Interfered where I had no right and sent you to Venice. I knew you were deeply private, strongly sensed this from the beginning, that morning you first came to work. And of course, all that time in the office you never once looked me in the eyes (though I know the same is true of me with you). But I’m sure all this is clear already, and anyway of course you know it. That privacy, your lowered eyes, was part of the hurt gentleness in you—the thing I noticed most—that made me trust you and feel I knew you without knowing you and could send you to Venice.
Though I know now I was wrong to send you.
So when I picked up the magnifying glass, right away I wondered if maybe I should just smash it right there, throw it against the wall (though I quickly realized that wouldn’t be effective) or find an axe or hammer—some way to destroy it as the Master destroyed his manuscript, though Margarita tried to lift it from the fire and Woland said “manuscripts don’t burn.”
I didn’t want to hurt you but I still wanted to read it. I scanned KEY WORDS in a box in the upper right-hand corner: osteogenesis imperfecta; behavioral phenotype; stereotype; genetic conditions—psychosocial aspects.
The words were ugly but I wanted to read on. Even though I knew I shouldn’t. Even as I thought of the bruised roses—
////
Dear A,
The article was a scholarly research paper, peer-reviewed and thoroughly vetted. In an asterisked note at the bottom of the first column of the first page, was this: Received 1 July, 2002; Accepted 17 March 2003.
Then: Grant sponsor: National Science Foundation. Grant number: SBR-9407268.
It was divided into 7 sections with numerous sub-sections. The main sections were: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Response of Subjects to the Stereotyped Features of OI, Response of Subjects to the Assertion of Euphoria, Discussion, Conclusions. (I noticed that last was plural.)
As you can imagine, “Euphoria” caught my eye—What was that doing in this paper?
But I didn’t know when the blackness would come back, and decided I would go through the paper methodically, in an orderly fashion, so that if I were left for a long while in blackness before I finished, it wouldn’t turn into a jumble inside me. Even in the darkness I could consider the parts I read without confusing them with parts that might come after. So though I wanted to, I didn’t skip to “Euphoria.”
Of course I wonder, will that word catch your eye also when you see this? (Though maybe you don’t read the things I send. Why should I believe you read
them?)
And as before, I still wonder, is it wrong to read this article, and send this? To almost pretend that we’ve spoken. (You’ve never once sent me a letter; though of course I made sure you couldn’t. But even if you could it doesn’t mean you would have.) Is it wrong to learn these details that belong to you, not me, am I trespassing again?—the procedures, the roddings, the body casts, the long hours of isolation, surgeries, x-rays, “resilience” and “perseverance”?
I am so tired I
and how once, but it seems so long ago, I wrote
to you of Una note bianco, a night in white
I sent you to Venice I I was wrong to send you
Why am I cut off from life the soul’s strange solitude
and that sign above our work-stations…digitized…
delivered in a variety of media that have not yet been invented
Sometimes I still almost sign my name. I remember my flying—
////
Though it pained me that she was taking into her eyes what I most wanted to keep silent and hidden, and to imagine her wondering how each detail might apply to me, which procedures, how many and at what intervals, to what extent etc., and though at times I resented her eyes that never had to hide from a store mirror—(though I never forgot her sleeplessness, the prions)—I also realized I had lost myself in the epileptic’s notebook, his red auras, his seizures; and in the lazzaretto islands; in Marie too weak to tend the cattle; in Myshkin’s and Dostoevsky’s joy and then their falling….