The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

by Scott Stambach

  As we assemble, the nurses drop plates in front of us with food that I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted. This is because I rush through my plate too fast to taste anything, mostly due to the eating habits of more than half of my comrades, which make me physically ill, as does the sloppy way the nurses feed the other half. That said, I’m not entirely sure I would be able to taste the food even if I made an effort to taste each bite. A typical breakfast invariably involves some combination of bread and cabbage. The taste and texture of the bread most closely resemble those of plywood. Not only are the loaves not baked fresh but they are shipped in from remote wholesale bakeries in countries like Greece and Tajikistan. According to our director, Mikhail Kruk, this is because most of our local state bread-and-cabbage facilities are either defunct or run by gavnoyeds* since the year 1991.

  After I finish my breakfast, with sweaty cabbage juice still running down my face, I return to my room to read until TV hour. To this day, no nurse or doctor employed at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children has ever been able to explain to me why TV hour is only an hour long. I spent three months lobbying Nurse Natalya to have the TV on all day. I provided written documentation to help promote my position. In the end, she returned with a one-sentence-long written memoranda from the Director, Mikhail Kruk:

  At the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, there is one hour of TV in the morning after breakfast, one hour of TV in the afternoon after lunch, and one hour of TV in the evening after dinner.

  So, until further notice, I get to watch TV for an hour every morning. When the hour is up, I return to my room, where I read some more and fantasize about ways to leave. Options for escape include slipping outside the front doors of the hospital when no one is looking or, in the middle of the night, squeezing my tiny body through the bars that line my bedroom window. But all of these options end with me slithering away at an embarrassingly slow clip, followed by someone catching me with grass stains and mud all up and down my nubs and dried tears caked to the side of my otherwise transparent face. After years of thinking it through, there is no viable plan for escape. Even if I managed to get to a major road, they’d look me up and down and take me straight to the nearest hospital, which is, of course, the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.

  That’s when I begin to think of other, more permanent methods of escape. I’ve gotten as close as breaking a jar of mayonnaise and picking up one of the jagged pieces, only to realize that I hadn’t thought through the fact that I only have one wrist, which, incidentally, is connected to my only hand, making wrist-cutting a violation of the laws of physics. Also, I’m terrified of blood, which makes throat-slicing impossible. The thought of my last sight in this life being two to five violent red spurts leaping out of my neck is simply too horrifying to entertain. And sadly, using other, more obscure, entry points would be difficult due to my limited knowledge of human anatomy. So, in the end, I usually just masturbate for the first of what is usually twice daily.

  By the time I finish and mop up, it’s usually time for lunch hour. Lunch is typically better than breakfast because it is usually warm and involves some sort of meat, though the particular variety of meat is questionable. It is too red to be chicken, but too white to be beef, so you can understand the dilemma. I once made the mistake of asking Nurse Katya:

  “Is this pork?”

  To which she replied:

  “Ivan, have you ever seen me eat the lunch here?”

  To which I answered:

  “No.”

  Then she stopped saying any more words.

  After lunch, it’s time for the second TV hour of the day. As much as I enjoy TV hour, I occasionally use this time to fake a good coma because I realized that it would be entirely too obvious if the only moments when I was not catatonic were moments when the TV was on. This concern led me to what I now call the two-three rule (i.e., every second, then every third, day, I pretend to be catatonic during afternoon TV hour). This schedule provides enough of an illusion of randomness to avoid other nurses catching on that my comas are actually acts of award-winning drama.

  I tend to wake up from my coma just in time for dinner, which is usually a cold, leftover version of lunch. At this point, I look around the table and note that although I’m no leading man, I’m also the only one of this gang of misfits who can remember my lines. I once asked Nurse Natalya why I’m the only mutant at the asylum who can spell his own name. She said that I should just be grateful for the fact that I could spell my own name. I said that if I was going to be stuck in a hospital for the duration of my life, I’d prefer to be mentally deficient (the word deficient is incidentally quite hard for me to say). She said that my self-awareness makes life worth living. I said that my self-awareness makes life lonely. She said that as long as she worked at the hospital, she would never let me be alone. I wanted to say that she didn’t understand, but couldn’t bring myself.

  After dinner, I head back to the Main Room to watch my third hour of TV for the day. By the time TV hour number three is over, there is no more light coming in through the windows, and all the other misfits have been locked away in their rooms. I sit for a minute in the stillness with my skin basking in all the fake lighting and only a few residual howls and groans reverberating through the halls. Then I wheel myself back to my room and read until I’m tired enough to masturbate again. Then I masturbate until I’m tired enough to sleep. Then I wake up the next morning and start all over.

  VI

  The Children of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children

  I have nothing to compare my hospitalities to, but from what little I know of the outside world, I am fairly certain that my comrades and I live in hell. For most of us, the hell is in our bodies; for others, the hell is in our heads. And there is no mistaking that, for each of us, hell is in the empty, clinical, perfectly adequate, smudgy, off-white brick walls that hold us in here. In spite of my intelligence, I’m forced to accept that I’m one of the lucky ones. But for you to truly understand, I will have to introduce my comrades.

  Polina

  Polina comes first, even if she is the only one of us who never belonged here. I’ve been sitting impatiently for thirty-seven minutes trying to write her into life, but nothing comes. My hand shakes at the thought of sharing her imperfectly, especially since this manifesto may be the only elixir that keeps her alive and, even then, only in your mind, Reader. Understand the gravity of your part in all this—you’re in control of her immortality. You preserve her, even if by accident.

  The only consolation I have in my failure to bring her to life is the belief that despite my love for words, they are actually rather useless and undeniably fail to capture the essence of anything at all, let alone a creature like Polina. Consequently, if I ever meet her again in a different place, I can blame my shortcomings on Russian vocabulary and not on my inattentiveness to her details. With that said:

  There is no doubt in my mind that if I hadn’t met Polina here in this desolate place, I would have met her one night, years from now, moving gracefully across the antique black-and-white TV in the Main Room. She would have been Belarus’s leading lady, captivating the love and lust of every man in Eastern Europe and setting a hopeless bar to which every woman and girl would hold herself. Similarly, there is no doubt that I still would have become addicted to her, falling every bit as in love as I did here while sitting next to her fading body.

  Let me make this perfectly clear: Polina was objectively beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful because I was a revolting invalid whose desperation for companionship dictated that he reduce his standards of beauty to a level that was practical for obtaining such companionship. Even as Polina lay pale, emaciated, and on the verge of death, she would have won any pageant in the world. With this clarification, I can go on to tell you what she looked like.

  She had long brown hair besieged with curls and ringlets persisting in the face of her ongoing struggle—a struggle that forced her to abandon all modes of regular fem
inine hygiene. Her skin was a perfect tender porcelain with rosy undertones. Yet she had a simple, modest beauty mark on her right cheek, which made her just imperfect enough to be real. The structure of her face was exotic. Each turn and curve was slightly exaggerated, giving her face an instant edge over every other feminine face in the world, rendering Cleopatra unassuming, while intimidating the breath out of me every time I laid eyes on it. Her body was long and slender, yet adorable little breasts bloomed from her chest and would trace the contours of her respiration right up until her last breath. Reader, can you see what I’m dealing with?

  And while you pull me to stay here with you,

  I need to build our world.

  You, of all people, would understand.*

  Max

  Max is two years old and shaped like a sickle. His head and heels bend back in a perennial struggle to be the first to reach the other. His lips are blue, thin, dry, and chapped. His face is altogether taut, and his eyes bulge with exasperation and panic, as if at the tender age of two he realizes that his eyes are the only way he has of communicating. Sadly, no one will ever know what Max is trying to say, but I’m sure we all have a pretty good idea.

  When Max was only a few months old, I began watching him every day with an intensity that was admittedly creepy. Perhaps it was the fresh new life sitting in a drab crib. Perhaps it was my inability to recall any suffering that looked deeper than his. Or perhaps it was a morbid fascination with his tightly drawn skin, which looked like it could snap open at any moment, revealing a loom of striated flesh and gizzards. I doubt I have the psychological insight into the ongoings of my head to know for sure. But what I do know is that in those first few months of meeting Max, I stumbled onto a new emotion, which I can only imagine is the feeling people call empathy.

  Actually, it was more of a cousin of empathy because it included a sense of responsibility. Maybe it was an inbred, collectively unconscious, evolutionary impulse, a paternal drive to nurture and protect due to the fact that before Max, I never held anything worth protecting. Nor did I ever consider the marginal possibility that I would ever be in a position to protect. In fact, it is entirely possible that any tender emotions I felt toward Max were totally selfish and rooted in a desire to feel a fraction less freakish than the baseline level of freak I lived with.

  At first, this had the counterproductive effect of making me feel more freakish. But I’ve had enough time to watch the behavior of normal people to know that they’re not any different. I listen to the conversations between the nurses as they help each other pick up the pieces after any one of them finds out that her husband is leaving her for a nineteen-year-old ballet dancer with blue eyes and feet that are distinct from her ankles. Or when their Crohn’s gets so bad that they can barely get off the toilet, and if they can barely get off the toilet, they can barely work, and if they can barely work, they can barely make money, and if they can barely make money, they can barely survive, and if they can barely survive, then …

  I’m an invalid with no natural instinct for human nature. And yet I can see the twinkle in the eye of Nurse Lyudmila when she pats Nurse Elena on the back and explains that all will be well: the nineteen-year-old dancer is vapid and the husband will come running back, the diarrhea will lead to other more fulfilling jobs in an office in Minsk, and so on. The truth is Nurse Lyudmila (the youngest and newest of the nurses here) is an invalid in her own head, and I know invalids well. She will stuff a box of ptichie moloko* into her slightly out-of-proportion mouth in about ten seconds and then sneak away to the bathroom to regurgitate it. I know this because I sneak into the bathroom after and see the residue of the foamy chunks floating in the water. So when Nurse Lyudmila gets the chance to tend to anyone, she feels less broken. And when I get to tend to Max, I feel less broken.

  Max’s most primal survival needs are met through machinized feeding. However, there are some needs that the machines can’t take care of. For example, Max needs to shit out the food that is pumped into him through the long plastic tubes. On most days, this happens into a disposable diaper. I once asked Nurse Katya (who is the only black woman in the whole Republic of Belarus as far as I know) if I could change Max’s diaper. She took one hard, excessively long look at my one arm, with its see-through skin and digitless hand, and asked, “Child, have you lost your mind?” Despite having had fourteen years to come to terms with the epic cataclysm I have for a body, it still hurt. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I asked Nurse Natalya if I could borrow a few diapers. She looked at me quizzically, and then her face twisted in such a way that made it clear she didn’t even want to know the reason for my absurd request. Then she walked off to a supply closet only to return a few seconds later with three baby-sized diapers.

  The first one I tried on myself. The fit was snug, but luckily my frail pelvis was compact enough to accommodate the squishy fabric. There are two things I’ve learned over the years about my limits: (A) I can eventually, with enough time, sweat, and sometimes blood, learn to do just about anything with only one arm (the only exception to this rule is cutting a hard-boiled egg), and (B) if there is a God, then I should thank Him for my thumb, since it is the only thing that makes (A) possible.

  While patiently waiting for the urge to defecate, I played with my diaper’s tiny adhesive tabs. I was getting comfortable with the mechanics of the contraption, finding the subtle tricks required to get a single thumb and index finger to attach and detach the various flaps with ease, exploring the necessary tension required to keep a diaper in place. I’ve found that after about eight hours of practicing just about anything with my flimsy hand, I can become good enough at it to put a rare smile on my droopy face (incidentally, before the eight-hour mark of proficiency, don’t touch me—I will simultaneously snap, beat, hiss, gnash at you; Nurse Natalya calls it my d’yavol* face).

  Luckily, eight hours is also a sufficient period of time to build up an adequate urge to defecate. In other words, by the time I mastered the art of the diaper I was ready to fill it. I cringed as the warm paste spread over my zadnista.†

  I removed the diaper, which, by now, I could do quite easily, and used the towel in my room to clear out all the chocolate pudding that managed to coat every crack and contour of my backside. This proved far more challenging than I had expected, and I immediately wished I had more towels and diapers. In my stubborn obsession, I had also not really thought through what I would do with the leftovers. Nor did I fully appreciate the speed with which the smell would make me expel that morning’s cabbage.

  The soiled towel was the easy part. I just let it soak in my bathroom sink for the night so the next morning I could ring out all the supersaturated brown water until the towel was reduced to the traditional shade of antiquated off-white of the typical hospital towel. The diaper, however, would be more difficult. After considering several possibilities, I eventually decided that the best option would be to wait until the Director (as well as the majority of the nursing staff) left to go home for the day and drop off the soiled diaper behind the leather sofa in his office. At least half the days of the week he left his office unlocked so Nurse Lyudmila could casually let herself in for late-night erotic activities. Years later, I still imagine the carnal things that might have happened on that couch, directly above that diaper.

  At this stage, I had one more step to mastering my diapery. There was an old (and by old I mean Stalin-era standard-issue model) baby doll buried in a bin of useless toys in the TV room. Unfortunately, rummaging through a crib-sized box of chaotic toys goes far beyond my current level of athletic ability, so I had to reduce myself to asking Nurse Elena if she could dig it out for me (Nurse Natalya was off-limits, as she was very close to her critical mass of suspicion). Nurse Elena was equally baffled by the request, since I had not asked to hold the creepy, odd-smelling doll in my entire tenure at the asylum, but she gave in nevertheless.

  Somewhat disgusted, somewhat excited, I wheeled myself back to my room, laid the doll (w
hom I lovingly named Rebeka Rebokov) on my bed, removed its tattered outfit, and tried to slip the diaper onto its androgynous pelvis. Then I slid Rebeka Rebokov under the covers of my bed and fell asleep next to her.

  The next morning, I initiated another eight-hour session. On and off, on and off, on and off with that diaper. All morning. Then lunch hour. And then again all afternoon. During one particularly awkward moment, Nurse Natalya had come by to change my sheets (in my fever, I’d forgotten it was sheet day, which is the third Tuesday of every month). When I heard the knob turn and the door open, I craned my head back around my shoulder to find her staring wide-eyed with a stack of linen in her arms. After three or four unbearable seconds, in which both of our sets of deer eyes were locked into each other, she simply turned around and walked in the opposite direction.

  “I’ll come back. Perhaps by then our doll will be ready for a bottle,” she said.

  By the time my eight hours were up, I could change a diaper in ten seconds, which I find impressive for an invalid with one arm and three fingers. I had one diaper left—the one I saved for Max. I waited till the lights went out and the hum of the hospital died down to approximate silence and the daytime nurses left for the night, and which made it easy to slip into the Yellow Room, which is the room that holds all the children under three years old.

  Max is not exactly a flight risk, so his crib doesn’t have a high-gated perimeter. It is actually something between a crib and a cradle. He lives his shitty little life in a tiny blanketed tublike dwelling with walls on either side that are at most a foot and a half high. Lucky for me, this is a height I can scale.

  I wiggled my way out of my chair and maneuvered myself into the tiny padded nest in order to arrive at Max’s tiny meniscus of a body. This was the first time I’d ever seen Max at night. My first thought was that Max makes the same face regardless of whether he is awake or asleep. I’ve watched enough faces on enough sleepless nights to know that faces soften when they sleep, regardless of what thoughts and demons torture their minds when they’re awake. Max, however, looked equally desperate in the stillness of sleep.