The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (28 page)

“Thank you and good-bye,” I said.

“You're an odd fuck,” she whispered, because now everything she said was air.

“I wanted to make sure I said it now because you almost died yesterday before I had a chance.”

Our eyes were mutually soaked, which was nice.

“You're weird,” she said.

“I know.”

“Perhaps the weirdest.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to use the suitcase?”

“I don't know.”

“That's not a good answer.”

“I can't say yet.”

“For me?”

“Okay.”

I just said it, but I didn't mean it.

“Do you think it's going to hurt?” she asked.

“What?”

“Dying.”

“No. There's a lot of morphine in you right now.”

“Do you think there will be monsters like the Tibetans say?”

“I think the monsters are already in you.”

“How do I kill the monsters?”

“I don't think you need to kill them.”

“Then what?”

“I think you invite them. And let them stay. And learn to live with them. Then when you die, they stop being monsters.”

“I'm so scared.”

Then the dam broke, and Polina started wailing, maybe because she took my advice and let her monsters in. I wiped away the tears as best as I could, but they were coming faster than one hand could wipe.

“So scared, so scared,” she said.

“Don't be afraid of scared,” I said.

And she just kept repeating herself, and I just kept wiping her tears, which were orange. I kissed her cheeks in spite of the mess of it all. Some of her blood got onto my lips and into my mouth, which I knew because it tasted like tin. Some of it was bad blood, and some of it was my blood.

“I want my mother,” she said. “Mommy,” she repeated over and over like crying people sometimes do. Slowly the words abated. I thought that maybe it was all over. Maybe she had died. But the little chirp on the heart monitor kept chirping. So I said her name a few times, but she didn't respond. That was the last time I ever heard Polina talk. As suspected, despite my proximity, Polina would be dying alone.

I didn't move for the rest of the day except to run my fingers through her imaginary hair and listen carefully to the comforting ping of her heart monitor. Somehow her face looked peaceful. Occasionally, she would whisper something indecipherable, and I would get excited, imagining that possibly she was coming back from the void. But I quickly realized that she was in her head, probably in negotiations with monsters.

 

DAY 2

The Day of Delirium

On the second day, she was hooked up to a nauseating machine that dripped morphine into her blood and secured her in a sufficiently dissociated state. My pale partial hand held her little porcelain hand throughout the morning as the usual suspects passed in and out to see if she had died yet. Even though she was hooked up to an IV of saline water to keep her hydrated, her lips began to dry, almost in real time, and I could see the cracks and fissures of a California desert form in front of my eyes.

Nurse Natalya, who was still working nights, somehow appeared this morning.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I wanted to give you this,” she said.

It was like a sucker. Except instead of hard candy at the end, there was a moist sponge.

“You can use this to keep her mouth and lips moist.”

She demoed the Popsicle sponge on Polina's chapped lips. I watched her carefully dab and spread water over Polina's tongue and around the perimeter of her mouth. Then she showed me how to rehydrate the sponge with a cup of water.

“I will be here,” she said. “From now on.”

“You don't need to be,” I said.

“I want to,” she said.

“Are you staying in Polina's room?”

“It's the only available bed.”

“Don't look under it.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Okay, Ivan.”

Then she leaned in, and turned my face toward hers, and looked at me with her maternal eyes, and said:

“It's even lonelier for you than it is for her. I know.”

When she said that, I realized that Nurse Natalya had once been exactly where I was.

“I can take it from here,” I said.

“Of course you can,” she said. “I'll be cleaning dishes if you need me.”

Aside from the occasional nurse strolling in with a clipboard and taking down a few notes from the machine that illuminated her vitals, I was the only one tending to Polina on the second day. I kept her mouth moist, I checked her pulse and also her temperature to compare them to the results displayed on the machines, I gently shifted an arm or a leg this way or that to minimize bedsores (not that it mattered), I carefully monitored the amount of saline in her IV bag and morphine in her blood, I notified people if levels were low, I pushed back on them if they pushed back on me, I wiped the pellets of sweat from her fevered bald head as they developed, I adjusted her pillows, I hummed familiar songs (out of tune so I'm not sure she recognized them). Most of all I waited for signs that she was coming back from a temporary holiday in her mind.

By 11:00 in the
A.M.
the delirium set in, which was perhaps not a delirium at all and instead could have been the epic battle for her next incarnation, which I knew about from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
. But then I realized that such thoughts violated the Three Tenets of Ivanism, so I crushed them.

It wasn't always easy to decipher the contents of her whispering, mumbling, moaning, and guttural explosions, but I did the best I could and took liberty to fill in the gaps with reasonable details. At 11:17, she was clearly Cleopatra mourning the suicide of Antony. In the next hour, approximately 12:31, she was her very own seven-year-old self in a car with her mom and dad, driving down the trans-Siberian highway, asking her dad why the moon didn't fall to the earth. At 1:00 in the
P.M
, she was a concubine of Joseph Stalin, and at 2:40, she was inside of her dog Sputnik.

Then, at 3:17, something unexpected happened. Something that caused a cascade of biochemical reactions from my head to my nubs. Two unfamiliar characters showed up at the door of the Red Room. Both of them were female. One was Nurse Elena's age, and the other was Polina's age. I panicked due to an unacceptable lack of intelligence information. At the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, visitors were rare. They were even rarer when someone was about to die, because we all can secretly smell death and avoid it, quite literally, like a plague, which is why two new characters, at this precise moment, were unusual, and, in my personal opinion, in poor taste.

“Hello,” the older one said.

“Who are you looking for?” I asked. “This is the Red Room. This is where people die. I don't think you meant to come here.”

“The nurse said this is the room. She pointed right to it,” the older one said again. The younger one just looked confused and nervous.

“Well, who are you looking for?” I asked.

“Polina Pushkin. Is she here?” the younger one said.

I wanted to say no. Instead, I instantly stopped swabbing Polina's mouth.

“Who are you?” I said.

The two looked at each other as if to silently decide who should say it.

“I'm Mary Markov, and this is my daughter Katerina. She and Polina were friends in school.”

“Best friends,” the younger one confirmed. “Is she here?”

“How did you know she was here?” I asked directly to the younger one. “Her parents are dead.”

Again the two looked at each other uncomfortably.

“I got a letter from her. About a month ago,” the younger one said.

“What did it say?” I asked.

“It said she was here. And that she was sick. Can you please tell us where she is?”

“She's here.”

“Where.”

“Here.”

I pointed to Polina's limp body, which caused the two visitors to lose all the color in their faces. That's when I realized just how devastated Polina's physical body was. According to my day-to-day perspective of Polina's transition, she was still the most beautiful girl I knew, hair loss and orifice bleeding included. This was not so for the poor bastards who got the bona fide before-and-after experience.

“That's not Polina,” the younger one said, shaking her head.

“I promise it is.”

“What happened to her hair?”

“Chemotherapy.”

“And her eyes?”

“Her blood cells don't work right.”

The younger one started to cry.

“
Moya lyubov,
you knew she was sick. We talked about this,” the older one said.

“Is she going to die?” the younger one asked.

“In a few hours,” I said.

The younger one started to cry harder, which made me want to suggest to the both of them that salt water causes spontaneous and fatal reactions in leukemia patients. I didn't want to share Polina's death with them.

“What happened to her gums?”

“I told you, her blood happened.”

I thought about what Polina would think if she heard me be an asshole to her friend, while the younger one walked over to the other side of the bed. Polina mumbled a few delirious words.

“Is she trying to talk to me? Does she know I'm here?” the younger one asked, choking all over her own wetness.

“No. I think she is playing poker with Oscar Wilde.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Why were you touching her?”

“I was taking care of her.”

“Why do you look like that?”

“The same reason you look like you do—bad genes.”

“I don't like you.”

“I don't care enough to like or not like you.”

“Stop!” said the older one.

The younger one disengaged from me and turned back to Polina. She tried to touch her face in a tender way. It was clear that she thought the right thing to do was to act compassionately to her face, but really I could tell she was disgusted by it. She reminded me of an egg that looked like an egg in every way, only it was undercooked inside, which made it very disappointing when it came time to eat it.

“Mom, we should have come sooner. She's already dead,” the younger one said as she reinitiated her sloppy wet mess, then rested her head on Polina's chest. I noticed the tears starting to soak through Polina's gown, and it made me want to leap across the bed and punch the girl in her big puffy wet face.

“You might not want to do that. She is very susceptible to bruising,” I said.

“Stop being an expert and let her say good-bye to her friend,” the older one said.

“I can't be here,” said the younger one. “I just can't.”

The younger one lifted her head and tried to look at Polina's face for a few more seconds. It was like she was trying to stare at the sun for as long as she could before she burned her retinas, then turned to the side, wincing.

“Let's go, Mom,” said the younger one.

“But we just got here,” said the older one.

“I said I can't be here,” said the younger one.

“But we drove for—” said the older one, who was interrupted by the younger one unapologetically exiting the Red Room. The older one looked back at Polina for a few seconds, then over to me.

“You love her,” she said.

“I don't know what that means,” I said.

“Of course you don't.”

She was about to leave but added, “You're an asshole. But I'm sorry for you.”

She left before I had a chance to respond. Still, I said, “Thank you,” in a whisper. Then I sat confused about whether I was happier or sadder that they were gone.

*   *   *

I spent
most of that afternoon wondering how long the fuse was, since it was clear that at this point Polina was a time bomb ticking away to a death rattle. Only it was a magical bomb that wouldn't devastate my body physically like most bombs would. More traditional bombs would have been favorable considering my physical body was already fairly devastated and not much more substantive damage could be had. Instead, Polina's bomb would wreak havoc on my emotional body in a way that had never been wrought, and I wasn't exactly sure what that might mean.

After a few dozen minutes ruminating on this topic, I was jostled out by a voice. “But hasn't the fuse already burned away and the bomb exploded?” it said. I looked up and realized the voice was coming from my mother, who appeared opposite Polina's bed, standing in exactly the same place that Polina's friend was standing a few hours ago.

“She's already dead,” she said. “Let go.”

“She is. But also she isn't,” I said.

“In what conceivable way is she not dead?” my mother asked.

“In the way that I can take care of her,” I said. “And in the way that, quantum mechanically speaking, something unbelievable could happen.”

“For a nihilist, you harbor a lot of hope.”

“I've lost my taste for labels, Mother. What is a nihilist anymore?”

“And now a rhetorical question? I don't even know my baby boy anymore.”

“I'm not sure I know myself right now.”

“Start your mourning,
moya lyubov
.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can't.”

“Because you don't want to. And in an hour, or tonight, or tomorrow morning, she will rattle. And you will still resist. And you will refuse to accept that it happened. And you will be convinced that they buried a girl alive. So, let go.”

“I wish I could.”

“It's the only sane thing to do.”

“Sanity is overrated.”

“It wasn't a month ago.”