Little Nothing by Marisa Silver

Author:Marisa Silver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-15T18:22:24+00:00

As on an ocean liner (or so he remembers being told by the combustible man, who, by habit, left nothing to chance and had studied the plan of the ship on which he was to sail after the season came to an end), there are three classes of accommodation at the Saint Gunther of Bohemia Home for Deteriorating Individuals. First class is reserved for the wealthy insane, the wives and daughters of landed nobility driven mad by purposeless days and a surfeit of embroidery projects, and mother-coddled, milksop sons incited to patricide by demeaning fathers. Danilo has never seen these quarters, but the chattering nurses, who speak freely among rank-and-file lunatics as if madness makes them only capable of infantile comprehension, have described rooms fitted out with gilt mirrors and pastoral watercolors imported from ancestral estates. These comforting details are meant to hasten convalescence or—and this is often the families’ truest desire—convince the patients to choose a lifetime at the asylum over returning home. The rooms also come with maid’s or butler’s quarters so that the wealthy will be properly bathed and shaved and serviced with afternoon tea. Danilo can well imagine how a perfectly sane lady’s maid must feel, trapped inside the labyrinthine building, once a monastery, where the screams of the mad resound against the thick stone walls of the corridors or gather at the upper reaches of the vaulted wards. He often wonders whether some of the shrieks emerging from the upper floor that houses these upscale quarters come not from insane barons and baronesses but from their entrapped and helpless help. The second class is reserved for merchants who have no staff or family heirlooms to keep them company but who, as bereft of sense as they might be, still maintain enough pride to refuse to be housed with the impoverished and the vagrant and the criminally insane. This third-class ward is where men like Danilo are housed, and he shares his quarters with two rapists, a sodomite, and a man who could not have accomplished either crime having cut off his penis. At his trial, the judge told Danilo he was lucky that progressive-minded lady reformers had made it their mission to protect brain-addled felons from the state prison. Danilo was relieved. Like every child he ever knew, he had grown up under the threat of being sent to that penitentiary of horrors for any number of childhood infractions. His mother routinely warned him that a stolen cookie would result in him joining the ranks of convicted thieves who had their wayward fingers crushed by thumbscrews.

Still, he cannot imagine that there is a place on earth more terrifying than the one in which he now finds himself, where on any given night he might wake to find a glowering cannibal standing above his bed regarding him with disturbing consideration, or where showers are places where men examine and exhort their bodies with the uninhibited abandon he can only remember exercising as a child, when he and his brother hid in the bushes and measured their respective lengths and trajectories.

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