The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (24 page)

“They told you?”

“I overheard that too.”

“When?”

“When I was asleep. Or waking up. Or some combination. We're blood brothers, I suppose.”

Then Polina pulled on a fistful of my hair and asked:

“Does this hurt?”

To which I said:

“What the fuck? Why are you pulling my hair?”

To which she replied:

“Because you need to wake up. You just took morphine.”

To which I said:

“I'm awake. And now prematurely balding.”

Then Polina said:

“Let's go outside.”

“And do what?”

“Just sit. Talk. Listen to things.”

“Really?”

“These walls are making me ill.”

“We can't go outside.”

“Really, have you asked?”

“Since I was old enough to talk.”

“Let's ask Natalya.”

Polina stood up carefully because leukemia makes balance a coveted commodity and walked out of the room, ignoring two or three protests on my part. I wormed into my clothes and made it halfway into my chair before she returned with Nurse Natalya.

“Ask her,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Ask me what?” Natalya asked.

“Ivan, I'm going to be in the dirt in a few days, so grow some
mudyá
and ask her.”

“Polina would like to know if we can go outside,” I asked.

“Well, obviously you can, Ivan, but you won't,” she said. Then she turned to Polina and said:

“I've been trying to get him outside since before he knew words.”

Before I could protest, Polina shoved me the rest of the way into my chair, and I was suddenly halfway down the hall. Elena and Lyudmila and Kristina (“Hi, Polina; Hi, Ivan”) all watched with varying degrees of gape as I crossed the threshold of the big brown double doors for the second time since I arrived at the asylum.

There was a small concrete ramp that led down to a courtyard with scattered flowers of differing varieties and colors and a modest fountain bath that had not been used in the twentieth or twenty-first century. The sky was Belarusian gray with thick patches of drunk clouds.

“Stay as long as you like, or don't come back at all,” Natalya said, and she walked away. Once her body disappeared back through the doors, I said nothing. And Polina didn't either. And almost as if it were planned, droplets started to pelt our heads and skin as we sat silently and, at least on my part, awkwardly, as my muscles and tendons worked together to shrivel my skin. Polina reached with her glossy pink tongue, which looked strikingly healthy compared to the rest of her decaying body, to catch the acid rain.

“That can kill you,” I said.

She only looked back at me like,
Stop being a curmudgeon.
Then the frequency of the droplets increased, and our clothes started to soak.

“Let's get back in before you get sicker,” I said.

She gulped a mouthful, gargled it in her throat, and spit it out like a Roman fountain.

When her mouth was empty, she asked, “What is it?”

“What is what?” I asked.

“Why are you crawling out of your skin?”

“I'm not.”

Polina stopped collecting water in her mouth and looked at me for a few seconds. Then she wiped away the beads of rain accumulating on her bald head.

“Never mind. I already know.”

“What?”

Polina continued to play with the water falling from the sky.

“Look at you. You're shaking, Ivan,” she said.

“It's cold.”

“It's your heart beating through your skin.”

“I'm fine.”

“Want to know my theory?”

“Sure.”

“When you're inside, everything is comfortably broken. When you're out here, everything is alive. But you feel better around broken things.”

By now, every cell in my body was shaking. But I was stuck in my head, which meant that my eyes were stuck on a single bead of rain sliding down a single blade of grass.

“Why are you still here, Ivan?”

“Here in this life, or here in this hospital?”

“The hospital. Actually, either…”

Then, before I could answer, she performed an unexpected kindness. She stood up and held either side of my quaking face in her hands, and she kissed my lips. And instead of pulling away quickly, as if out of charity, she kept her face close to mine and looked at me with her intolerably blue eyes until I stopped. Then her fragile little body weakly pushed me through the grass underneath an oak tree, which was largely impervious to the rain. Then we sat without talking for the rest of the afternoon and watched things happen.

*   *   *

We were
back in the hospital before dusk, and by the time the sun set completely, Polina's fever rose to forty degrees. Nurse Natalya was running around flailing her arms, gathering acetaminophen, and publicly berating herself for letting us sit in the rain.

“She'll be taking an ice bath tonight, Ivan,” she said.

They wheeled her delirious body into the White Room, which has a large stained tub and almost nothing else. I followed because it was easy to stay cloaked in the chaos of the moment. I watched them pull off her clothes, one cotton article at a time, until all that was left was her purple-and-white body, which looked like it had been starved and tortured in a Kazakh prison. The cancer had become like a time machine, eating her curves away until she arrived back at her prepubescent state. Katya and Natalya lifted her up, while her semi-lucid head dangled like a pendulum off her torso. Lyudmila started the cold water running and then poured a bucket of ice into the cold soup. When her body hit the water, Polina screamed, and her arms punched the air while she hollered a variety of obscenities. The nurses did their best to hold her body down, until she stopped screaming and just twitched in the water while her eyes focused loosely on some hallucinated event on the ceiling.

*   *   *

Polina was
brought into the Red Room, where she slept, and I went back to the lab to give up another pint of blood. Nurse Natalya took the needle out of my arm and put my blood in a refrigerator. Then I wheeled myself to the Red Room and wiped the fever sweat from Polina's head, determined to be present for any last heartbeats.

 

DAY 7

дзень я закахаўся ў
*

I woke up on the seventh day to find that I had been using the metal rail of Polina's bed as a pillow all night and that her fingers were laced with mine. Given that I did not have the confidence to initiate this degree of intimate contact on my own, I deduced that our fingers somehow found each other while we were sleeping.

A few seconds later, Nurse Elena, vodka vapors abounding, came in and slipped a thermometer under Polina's tongue as she slept. Polina stirred gently, whimpered slightly, but didn't wake. Then Nurse Elena pulled the thermometer from her mouth and swung it up close to her eyes.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“Thirty-nine.”

“So, she's better.”

“Somewhat.”

Then Nurse Elena left, and a few seconds later I followed her.

“What's next?” I asked.

“Another transfusion.”

“And then?”

“Then nothing.”

I wheeled back to the Red Room, put our fingers back into the configuration they were in when I woke up, and waited for something to happen. I waited for her breath to change, or for her body to shift, or her eyebrows to scrunch, or for her eyes to flutter below her eyelids, which would tell me she was dreaming. At some point during the waiting, I must have fallen asleep too, because there was a break in my consciousness followed by waking to the sensation of suffocation, which was Polina pinching my nose. I gasped for air, and she laughed a mischievous but evidently dying laugh.

“That wasn't funny.”

“Then why am I laughing?”

I noticed our interlaced fingers again and quickly reconfigured them to something less intimate.

“I had a weird dream,” she said.

“Forty degrees will do that.”

“Don't you want to hear about it?”

“I do.”

“Everyone was there. And by everyone, I mean
everyone
. The entire world. All seven billion people or however many there are now. All in one big, empty field with long grass and nothing else.”

“How did you know it was everyone?”

“I just knew. You know how in dreams you just know?”

“Sometimes.”

“You were there, and my parents, and everyone I knew was close by. The people I didn't know were on the outside.”

“I was there?”

“Yes.”

“What did I look like?”

“Like you.”

“Anything else?”

“My mother was crying. And everyone else—the whole world—just turned to me. Even the trees. And the weird part was that they didn't have faces. And everything was perfectly quiet. Except for Sputnik, who was barking like it was the end of the world.”

“Maybe it was.”

“Maybe.”

I tried to feel her forehead, halfheartedly because I did not actually know what an inappropriate temperature felt like but wanted to appear like a competent caregiver.

“Still there, huh?” she asked.

“Not like yesterday.”

“Ivan, you can put your hand back.”

“On your head?”

“On my hand.”

I followed her orders.

“What is this?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“This?”

She lifted our interlaced hands for a few seconds and then let them fall back to the bed.

“It's nothing.”

“It's strange.”

“You don't want to die alone.”

“Nothing more?”

“Anything ‘more' is your brain making meaning—”

“And the brain needs meaning … I know. You're so unbearably you, Ivan.”

“But I'm right.”

“Maybe.”

“If we weren't in this hospital and you saw me in a restaurant, you would be just beautiful enough to be disgusted by me and just soulful enough to pity me.”

“You don't make me wet, Ivan, if that's what you're asking.”

“I'm not asking anything.”

“If we were in any other two bodies, in any other place, at any other time, I would still feel like we first met as two quarks a few seconds after the big bang.”

“You expect me to take you seriously after that?”

“Gravely serious.”

“I think you need some blood. I should tell them you're awake.”

I wheeled out of the Red Room and informed the nurses that Polina was ready for more blood. Then I went back to my room, picked up a book, unaware of what book it was, and started reading, hoping my eyes would get heavy enough to sleep. Fifty pages later, I was still wide awake. So I skipped the morphine, went right for one of Elena's caches, and sipped the burn until I choked. I almost made it back to my room before I passed out.

*   *   *

I awoke
hours later in my bed with a respectable amount of vomit on my chest. My first thought was,
Is it mine?
My second thought was,
Of course it is
. My third thought was that it was the first day of Nurse Natalya on the night shift, which meant that I could take care of it now and face fire and brimstone, or I could take care of it tonight and live in a full body cast of my own vomit in the meantime. I decided to embrace the vomit and clean up later. In the meantime, I mitigated the circumstances by cleaning as much as I could with standard tap water, a change of clothes, and hiding the dirties in the far reaches of the netherworld beneath my bed.

Next, I wheeled past the Red Room to check on the current state of Polina's transfusion. I was not surprised to find her in a deep trance with all the necessary tubing still attached.
What do I do with myself?
I wondered. To be truthful, I wanted to disappear. And more than just into my head, while my body remained in plain view of the rest of the hospital. I wanted to disappear in the way of Houdini or Hoffa.

I remembered a branch next to Dennis's window when we were in the courtyard on the eighth day, which, if it were a Rorschach test, would have reminded me of a handicap ramp sloping to the rooftop, and at that particular moment, the rooftop seemed like a great place to disappear to. Moreover, the clang and clatter of plates coming from the cafeteria meant that in three minutes Dennis would be in the Main Room rocking away to an episode of something. Which meant nurses arranging mutants for TV hour, others packing up the kitchen. Which meant the stars were aligning. So I ditched my chair in my room, slithered two doors down to Dennis's room, broke in (basically, I turned the doorknob), slithered to his window, opened it, squeezed my body through the black bars, maneuvered my way onto the handicap branch, nearly fell two stories to my death, spent about twelve minutes learning to crawl on a branch using only three points of contact (my arm and two leg nubs), nearly fell to my death thrice more, arrived at the corner of the rooftop terrace only to realize that at this point the branch was a bit farther away from the building than I had originally calculated (myopia), decided that if I had come this far I would play the odds, and rolled my body off the branch with as much (virtually none) momentum as I could, and (just barely) made impact with the unforgiving concrete roof, resulting in at least three bloody scrapes distributed over various nubs and my elbow.

After that, I didn't want to move anymore, so instead I just lay there and watched the blue fade from the sky at an unnoticeably slow drip until nothing was left but black and the hydrogen fingerprints of stars. In the interim, I, like Polina, noticed how nothing felt real. I noticed how the last few months could be erased like chalk, leaving only a blurry residue of the original words, which of course serve as the bones that imagination uses to fill the space with meat and striated muscular details, and I wouldn't question the fact that it was all suddenly gone, that the flesh was eaten off the bone, and the bones would soon be buried deep beneath the layers of silt and dirt, and new civilizations would be built on that dirt, and new beings would populate its cities, and live in its architecture, and new loves would grow, while old ones that once felt so important would be forgotten, and