The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (7 page)

At that time, the only information I had regarding the new intake was her age (sixteen) and gender (female). So I did with her what I would with any Interloper. The next morning, I parked my chair close to the brown double doors at the entrance of the hospital and waited so that I could assemble the rest of her picture. In hindsight, I should probably have been more concerned about the fact that a young girl of the human species was coming to a hospital to die a long and slow leukemic death, alone, without the comfort of her recently deceased parents. Instead, I was more concerned about what her posture, hair length (if any at all), pace, and stride might tell me about the potential duration of her stay at the hospital.

It was 9:17 in the
A.M.
on the fifth day of October when I first saw Polina. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and her flip-flops brought in a single autumn maple leaf from the outside. The jeans had a small rip in the left thigh. The T-shirt had a picture of a beam of light entering a blue triangle and coming out as a rainbow (which I later discovered was the cover of an album by a singer Polina liked called Floyd Pink). Reader, could you imagine anything that belonged less in this particular hospital? If your answer is yes (?!), then I've failed at telling our story.

Admittedly, there was a moment I felt sympathy. She had no idea where she was or what she was getting into. This place crushed the souls of sweet sixteen-year-old girls with pretty brown hair, blue eyes, and Floyd Pink T-shirts.

But mostly I hated her.

I hated her because she wasn't supposed to be here.

I hated her because even in her first three steps I could see that she obliterated the edges of my world.

I hated her because her presence alone taunted me.

I hated her because she forced me to see how easy it was for me to hate.

Twelve steps. That's how many steps she took from the front door to the Director's office, where she would complete her paperwork. I was able to feel that much hate in twelve steps.

That was the last time I saw Polina in jeans. After leaving the Director's office, she walked to the front desk and traded them in for a pair of gray sweatpants. They also handed her a hospital gown to adorn her during rounds of chemo, which is known to make patients spontaneously lose control of their bowels.

By the time she left the front desk with her new wardrobe, she was already a different girl. When she walked into the hospital, her back was erect and her shoulders were square, like she was actually walking into a prison, ready to break the nose of the first person she saw in order to establish alpha status. When she left the front desk holding her cancer uniform, her shoulders hung forward and her chin fell slightly no matter how hard she fought to hold it up. She also looked like she might have lost three kilos in those three minutes. And, suddenly, Polina was less threatening.

The next morning, I waited until breakfast hour was over and cautiously rolled myself out to the Main Room. I've never once eaten breakfast during the first twenty-four hours of a new Interloper intake. The situation is entirely too assailable. I need a few days to gather good, solid intelligence, and quietly observing anyone for three days reveals enough infirmities to knock even the most indestructible Interloper off his pedestal. Moreover, the thought of unprepared conversation with real people scares me like blood scares me.

When I first saw Polina that morning, she already had a bag full of chemical therapy plugged into her arm. It's a sight I've become rather familiar with over the years, especially with leukemia kids. What I wasn't used to was someone of
Polina's
pedigree getting pumped full of poison. I remember moving my eyes from the clear bag over to her brown hair, which hung almost all the way to the base of her spine. It was thick, with waves that verged on curls, and I could almost see my reflection in it. In a month it would be the scraggly wisps of a corpse. In two months it would be gone altogether.

Whenever I spy on a new leukemia kid, I can't help imagining what he will look like without hair. Besides enjoying the challenge, I find that it also mentally prepares me for the downhill wreck that is about to transpire. The first time I watched a leukemia kid lose all his hair, I was only eight. I bluntly recommended to Vladimir, the fifteen-year-old leukemia kid, that he put us out of our misery and take a razor to it before it got any worse. He told me that I would need much more than a razor for him to feel like he didn't want to heave cabbage every time he saw me.

Touché, Vlad.

But this time, for the first time, as I watched Polina's medical bag slowly drip chemicals into her bloodstream, I couldn't picture a leukemia kid without hair. Maybe I just didn't want to. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her but was too clouded by fear and trembling to notice. All I know is that no matter how hard I tried to put a bald head on Polina, the image wouldn't come. But my inability to imagine her without hair was hardly a problem. What really twisted my intestines in a bevy was when I slowly moved my eyes from her head down to her hands and saw that Polina was reading
Dead Souls.
*
Reader, patients at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children do
not
read Gogol, unless their name is Ivan Isaenko. And, upon further consideration, it occurred to me that no one at the asylum even
possesses
Gogol unless his name is Ivan Isaenko. Which meant that I was no longer the sole and exclusive recipient of Natalya's gifting.

Later that day, I decided to approach Nurse Natalya on the matter, not so much begrudgingly but more to make my curiosity known. While she was chiseling several species of mold from some bathroom tiles, I asked:

“How'd the new girl get
Dead Souls
?”

“How should I know? She probably brought it in with her.”

“Impossible. I watched her walk through the doors with nothing but a notebook and various cosmetics.”

“Maybe you should stop being so suspicious of new intakes.”

“I'm more suspicious of you.”

“Well, I'm innocent. You're the only one I've ever given Gogol to.”

Which, of course, made me curious. So I promptly wheeled myself into my room, and then into my closet, where I rustled past copies of Dostoyevsky, Chernyshevsky, Goncharov, Bulgakov, Lermontov, Turgenev, and, of course, Gorky, but no Gogol. Which could only mean one thing:
I had been burglarized!

This presented a novel quagmire (so to speak). I was rattled, but not in the way you would suspect. It wasn't the sense of personal violation that spooked me, though in almost any other set of circumstances I would have been raising holy hell. It was the unsettling unfamiliarity, which I typically only feel in the presence of insects and news anchors. She was not a Max, or an Alex, or a Dennis, or any of the two- to three-year-old kids with holes in their hearts. She was a different genus. She was the hospital void. The missing demographic. A beguiling blend of cherub and imp. She was a puerile Goddess in enough want of proper Russian literature that she stole from a convalescent. Which meant that she was someone who could see my reality and reflect it back to me. She was someone who could make me feel like I was not just a ghost haunting hallways. I was used to playing with chimeras, not equals. And what's worse, she wasn't an equal, she was a
greater
. She didn't belong here. She was the true Interloper. She was perfect, and perfectly awry. She was supposed to be the queen of somebody's two-person kingdom. And I knew nothing of fairy tales. I only knew about Gogol and the side effects of benzodiazepines.

After a few moments of mounting anxiety, I returned to reality and wheeled myself back to the Main Room to take another look, careful to check my proximity and exposure in order to see if I was at any risk of getting caught. I shifted slightly away, wheeled myself a few meters toward the north wall to make it look like I was watching TV, and looked back at her again, but only from the corner of my eyes, which now left her hands and moved down to where her legs grew out of her hospital gown. They were soft and foreign and prohibited, and I found it adorable the way her calves were swallowed by her pink socks. Then I returned to her face, which didn't betray any of the fear that I was sure she was feeling or the nausea that was building as the chemo started marching on the cells that lined her stomach. She only read intently and calmly, like someone might read a book on a Tahitian beach, free from worldly concerns. Her face was so calm that I got lost in it for a minute, like getting lost in Mona Lisa's smile, and I forgot that I was staring at her at all and probably had a dollop of drool gathering at the corner of my mouth. She must have felt the infrared heat of my eyeballs, because she lifted her head away from the book and toward my face. I, quite predictably, panicked, unlocked my chair, turned myself around, and wheeled myself away as fast I could, which, of course, is not that fast because I only have one arm.

I saw Polina once more that day. Usually when I need to hide away, I go to my room and shut the door. But occasionally, I cannot sit still, in which case I roam the halls of the hospital until I've used up enough energy to pass out somewhere. Sometimes, I wheel myself into stairwells only to hum and chant gibberish because I like the sound of reverb. On that morning, I tried to go back to my room but was too muddled to stay put. So I spent the next few hours wandering the lesser-used halls. After four hours, I ran out of hallways and decided to move into stairwells. I love the second-floor stairwell most because, owing to whatever laws of physics, the reverb there is most like a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox cathedral. This time when I opened the door, I detected the reverbic sounds of suppressed crying coming from the floor below. Of course, I knew who it was. Not many people here had enough function in their tear ducts to cry like that, and by now I knew the lachrymal fingerprints of most of the nurses. Which meant it had to be Polina. I listened for a few minutes, thinking about what I might say to her. Then I turned around and went to my room.

That night, Polina stopped being an Interloper. True Interloper status is reserved for robots and psychopaths. She had inadvertently arrived in a new unnamed category, which was far scarier than the others.

 

VIII

The Three-Monthers

In my seventeen years at the asylum, the most important piece of information I've gathered from faking comas is that the children here fall into two categories: six-monthers and three-monthers. This is because medications are prescribed in either six- or three-month supplies. For the vast majority of us, six-month supplies are prescribed, since they are cheaper and require fewer prescriptions. We are, of course, the six-monthers. However, when a doctor deems that there is little chance that a child will make it more than a couple of months, one final three-month supply is ordered to cut down on costs. In the tatters of an Eastern Bloc economy, every penny counts.

When you live in a place where nothing changes, even morbid change is entertaining. Thus, one of my favorite activities is guessing three-monthers before med day. One of the few things I pride myself on is how good I am at this game. In fact, until a month ago, I had correctly called every new three-monther over the last fifty months.

The more spiritually inclined nurses have argued that my radiation poisoning gave me psychic powers pertaining to death, but I reject this because it would violate the Three Tenets of Ivanism (see below). The simple truth is that after seventeen years of watching kids die slowly, I have gotten good at picking up all the telltale signs. Every disease has its own classic omens, a fingerprint of mortality. For example, the leading cause of death here at the asylum is thyroid cancer. When a thyroid kid is still a six-monther, he looks just like any other cancer patient (i.e., bald-headed, pale, thin, frequent trips to the restroom, a bit spacey—also known as chemo brain). But when he becomes a three-monther, you can expect an onslaught of much more interesting symptoms. I got so good at recognizing these symptoms that Nurse Natalya once asked me to create a diagnostic assessment document (DAD) for the other nurses, in the hopes that it would streamline care and also make me feel useful. Here are a few sample pages (as you can see, in another life I would have made an excellent diagnostician):

 

A thyroid kid is a three-monther if he/she exhibits four of the following five symptoms:

       
(1) His/her neck swells up so big it looks like the kid swallowed a rabbit, which then became lodged in his/her throat.

       
(2) It takes him/her thirty minutes or more to get through a single bite of food.

       
(3) When he/she asks for an injection of Aloxi and it sounds like his/her vocal cords have been replaced by an Apple Computer–style voice generator.

       
(4) He/she keeps the entire hospital up all night coughing.

       
(5) His/her ordinary breathing sounds like a fat kid after walking ten flights of stairs.

 

A leukemia kid is a three-monther if he/she exhibits any five of the following six symptoms:

       
(1) His/her smile looks like he/she flossed with barbed wire.

       
(2) Every one of his/her standard white hospital T-shirts is stained with blood from daily nosebleeds and eye bleeds.

       
(3) His/her bones ache too much to walk.

       
(4) He/she begins to resemble Olive Oyl from famed American cartoon
Popeye
.

       
(5) He/she stops showing up to breakfast hour, lunch hour, and dinner hour.

       
(6) He/she begins sleeping through his/her favorite Russian TV shows.