I had no idea what the status of Max’s bowel schedule was, so I gently pulled at his diaper to see if it was brimming with the characteristic heavy brown slop I’d become so intimate with. At the moment, we were pudding-free. So I sat. And waited. And attempted to sing to him in whispers. I sang Russian nursery rhymes like “Brother Ivan” and “The Hare Went Out for a Walk.” I sounded wretched, probably like the ghost of a chap who died at the peak of puberty, but it helped pass the time.
Then it happened: the aroma of fecal particles diffused into the air. The most intensive training never really prepares you for the reality of the moment. Max’s odd sickle-shaped body made the removal of his diaper far more formidable than I had expected. Eventually, however, I was able to slip it off, but not without leaving fecal streaks throughout his bungalow.
A part of me panicked, most likely because my reputation was on the line, my pride, my proof that I could, at the very least, tend to another being enough to change a shitty diaper. So I did what I could (with a mixture of saliva and my own sweatpants) to eliminate the streaks of chocolate from Max’s warm linen.
I could be crazy—actually I most certainly am—but I do believe I saw Max’s eyes ease a fraction when all was said and done. I doubt his dirty diaper had ever been changed with such gusto and love (typically the nurses toss him around like a bag of onions). After I completed my mission I stayed with him long enough to croak out “Granny Ate Peas” and then remounted my chair and disposed of Max’s soiled diaper in the Director’s office en route to my room.
The next morning, I woke before breakfast hour and wheeled myself back to the Yellow Room and waited smugly for the nurses to make their rounds. Eventually, Nurse Katya arrived at Max’s crib and checked the status of his undergarments. I watched as she manhandled his stiff, bent body, rotated his torso until he resembled a city arch, and opened the flaps of his diaper only to find it empty. Katya closed him up and then opened him right back up again for a second look. At which point she confirmed his clean diaper and scanned the bed frantically for alternative signs of waste. When she found the chocolate streaks, it only enhanced her bewildered look, leading her to scan the room in a panic, while I bit my inner cheek to the point of blood and thought about dead puppies in order to suppress the laughter. When she turned to me, I simply looked back with the remnants of a dirty smile. Then I fell into a coma.
On that day, I basically adopted Max. At least in my own head, where I don’t need papers or legal documentation. And after the diaper incident, I did my best to play the part. I would sneak into his room after lights-out with a stolen book or two. Some were age appropriate, like Special Clothing and the Electrician. Others weren’t, like Lolita and Notes from the Underground. Probably not a word makes it into Max’s head, and even if it did, the look on his face tells me he has worse things to worry about than Russian literature. But then there is a part of me that believes that he is being groomed to be a scholar. So when Nurse Katya asks me what the hell I’m doing reading Nabokov to a frozen toddler, as she often does, I respond with one simple word: otvyazhis.*
Currently the clock reads 4:57 in the A.M.
I’ve been writing for five hours.
It is the third day of December.
The year is 2005.
According to the clock, I slept for twenty-two minutes. I don’t remember my dreams, but I do know the vodka wore off, which means that I now can remember the green file folder with my name on it, which is currently hiding under my bed and overpopulating my (now) sober brain with irritating thoughts. I can’t bring myself to ask her. I would either choke on the words or choke her to death.
She hasn’t appeared since the last time she poured vodka down my throat, which is unfortunate, since I’m in need of more Stoli. I decided that a reasonable remedy would be to take the standard-issue metal bedpan they keep next to my bed for emergencies and beat the similarly metaled frame of my bed. So I whacked away incessantly, until Nurse Lyudmila opened the door.
“Ivan, what in the hell do you want?” she asked.
Now that Polina was dead, Nurse Lyudmila was back on nights.
“Natalya,” I said.
“Her week is over.”
Which was true. There are four nurses at the hospital, and four weeks in a month. Each one of them gets to work a week of nights every month.
“She said she would stay for me,” I said, but that was a lie.
“Tell me what you need, or I leave.”
“I need Natalya.”
“Not happening,” she said, and she initiated the process of turning toward the door. So I started beating at the frame of my bed some more. In response, Nurse Lyudmila turned back, ripped the bedpan out of my hand, and threw it in the corner of the room. By the time the bedpan stopped ringing, a tired and haggard Nurse Natalya, with her nurse’s belt noticeably off center, her hair swollen, showed up at the door with a face that condemned the both of us.
“I can take care of this, Lyudmila,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” Nurse Lyudmila asked, fairly flummoxed, but Nurse Natalya ignored the question. Instead, she took a few seconds to seethe at me, during which I stared back resolutely, at which point Nurse Lyudmila just stomped out of the room.
“You don’t have permission to be an asshole,” Nurse Natalya said.
“Lyudmila is an asshole,” I said.
“You’re both assholes.”
“I need more.”
“More what?”
“Vodka.”
“Uh-uh, no, Ivan. I’m not letting this turn you into a drunk before your eighteenth birthday.”
“You and I both know I’m too stubborn to be a drunk.”
“Yes and no. You’re stubborn for certain, but I’ve met plenty of stubborn drunks.”
“It’s the only thing that helps, and I don’t want to stop writing.”
My gamble was that sympathy would work. I lifted my notebook and fanned through the filled pages, several of which were wavy as a result of the salt water that had leaked onto them from my face. When she saw the waterlogged pages, she sighed, walked out, and returned with a flask a few minutes later.
“It’s full,” she said, while setting it on the table next to my bed. “Don’t even think about asking for more.”
Spasibo, Natalya.
Then she knelt down and kissed my forehead.
“You stayed for me?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
She combed her fingers through my greasy, unshowered hair, and I let my head fall to the side, feigning sleep. When she left, I took one long, hard sip, waited a moment to evaluate its effect on my brain, and then took another.
Alex
Alex looks almost normal from the nose down. However, at his temple region, his head blossoms into a veritable melon at least three times the diameter of the rest of his head. I once asked Nurse Elena why his head was so big. She just said:
“That boy’s dome is just one big water balloon. Don’t get too close, Ivan. It may pop one day.”
It is entirely obvious to anyone within a hundred meters of Alex that his center of gravity resides at the tip of his forehead. Consequently, it’s no surprise that balance is a luxury for the boy, making it nearly impossible for him to hold up and control the colossus. As a result, he is constantly bonking his head off furniture, doorframes, and medical equipment.
Apparently, all that water resting on Alex’s brain results in a variety of neurological disadvantages, including an inability to formulate any words with his mouth except for shoko,* severe limits in the range of motion in his legs, and spontaneous outbursts that have become part of the melodious soundtrack of this institution. Fortunately, his love for shoko often negates whatever irritation is causing his tantrum. At any given time, we are likely to find charming gobs of chocolate smeared all over Alex (primarily on his cheeks and elbows).
There is a bright spot for Alex: when he is not tantruming, he is smiling. It is an idiotic oaf-like smile, bu
t it is a smile nevertheless, and to be perfectly honest, it is a smile that I would love to have if only my weak cheeks could muster it. Why Alex smiles, I do not know. Maybe it’s the weight of all that water applying constant pressure to the smile real estate of his brain. Or it could simply be one of the more innocuous consequences of the brain damage he suffers due to repeated head collisions.
Alex once had a mom and a dad. When he arrived a few years ago, they visited him every Sunday morning. Shortly after church hours, the duo would arrive with blank, stoic faces and spend an average of eight minutes making small talk, to which Alex responded with various varietals of shoko, some deep and boomy, others abrupt and shrieky, to which the parents responded by feeding him bar after bar of chocolate. When they were out of chocolate bars, the mother would violently wipe away the chocolate residue from his round cheeks, and you could almost hear the water in his head slosh around.
The father, who peeled the wrappers off all those bars, was a tall, imposing, and quite fat man with a serious, almost fierce face. He dressed sharply in expensive suits tailored to fit his monstrous stomach perfectly. The mother, who scrubbed the chocolate off Alex’s face, was quiet and aloof and looked like she might have suffered some brain damage herself. She wore frumpy, conservative church dresses, which made it impossible to tell what hid beneath them.
In all the years of their visits, I don’t believe I ever heard them say a word to each other. Sometimes the nurses would try to say a few cordial niceties or ask questions, but the parents would never respond. When their time was up, they would pack their coats, scarves, and assorted other belongings (faces just as blank and emotionless as when they arrived) and walk out. No hug, no emotional good-byes. And yet they never missed a Sunday.
“What’s with Alex’s parents?” I once asked Nurse Natalya while she arranged giant cans of cabbage in the pantry.
“They remind me of my parents before they died. To them life is all about duty. They are just two tiny pieces of a big machine, and machines don’t smile, Ivan. It’s a souvenir of communism. Old folk wouldn’t know how to give it up for a lifetime of sbiten.”*
This was their ritual for years, until one day, one tiny detail changed. The suits that once fit Alex’s father so precisely began to look off. At first I couldn’t pinpoint the difference, but as the weeks passed by, I kept watching from across the room, and luckily, they were too oblivious to notice.
After a few weeks it became clear that the suits were beginning to hang off the old man like the Soviet flag. And eventually it appeared to me that you could fit two of Alex’s father in one of his suits. While I was puzzled by how this out-of-touch, gruff old man could have the combination of discipline and vanity required to lose so much weight so fast, I found myself secretly applauding him. For a while, he looked like he could model for the Communist Party of Belarus. But, eventually, the fat-shedding went too far, and it was abundantly clear that the transformation was not his choice. His face turned gray and gaunt, and his suits (which he somehow didn’t replace) began to swallow him. The makeover made the man look even more stern and unforgivingly Slavic than he already did. Eventually, he began to slow down, and every movement looked like it took his entire will to live to complete.
As he wasted away to nothing, Alex continued to smile dumbly, while the mother’s face continued to look aloof and mildly brain damaged. Honestly, with the exception of the father’s facial structure becoming more crisp and the ever-increasing drape of his suits, nothing seemed to change in these weekly episodes. The family carried on normally as if it were business as usual. Judging by the nurses’ faces, even they were baffled by the absence of emotion.
One unimportant Sunday morning, another tiny detail changed: Alex’s mother arrived alone. And despite all the fluid resting on Alex’s brain, disrupting all of Alex’s natural mental processes, it was easy to see that Alex knew his father was gone. When his mother sat down next to him and peeled off the wrapper to his chocolate bar (a job that had been reserved for his father), the idiotic smile fell off Alex’s face, and he broke into an unprecedented tantrum, screaming, “Shoko! Shoko! Shoko!” while batting the chocolate out of his mother’s hands. His mother responded by grabbing the boy’s cheeks and pushing a piece of chocolate into his unopened mouth. As she did, Alex surrendered and chewed sadly while his body slumped and his eyes filled with glass.
When I was young, I had this naïve notion of karma. I believed that there was a set amount of bad to be distributed to all people and that each person received the same amount. If it were any other way, God would just be too much of an asshole. Or maybe it was my own flavor of communist conditioning bleeding through the hospital walls. Either way, this notion of cosmic justice helped me get up in the morning. Because if this were true, then that would mean that my entire lifetime of bad things had already been dealt to me. I was born a hideous mutant, abandoned by my parents, and relegated to a dreary hospital. This, I believed, was my full lifetime’s allowance of misfortune, leaving a windfall of good for the rest of my life. But on the day I saw tears roll down Alex’s bloated, chocolate-stained cheeks, I had to let go of my theory. Alex, like me, had been born with his entire lifetime of bad things, and still, with not a prospect of good in sight, he was getting steamrolled with more.
After a year, Alex’s mother stopped showing up too. I asked Nurse Natalya what happened to her.
“Cardiomyopathy, Ivan. Some call it broken heart syndrome.”
Sometimes I spend too much time wondering what Alex might be like if his brain weren’t supporting the weight of a koi pond.
The Heart-Hole Children
Enja, Dasha, Vlad, Alexa, and Nick all have holes in their hearts. Apparently, this is the most common affliction at the asylum. These kids are relegated to the Red Room (it’s actually a scuffed-up pink), where they all lie in an assortment of beds and cribs with plastic wires that leave their chests and arrive at machines whose cold and impersonal intelligence fills me with existential nausea.
The heart-hole children don’t last here for very long, and certainly not long enough for them to reach an age where they’ve developed a deep enough sense of personhood for me to see them as human beings. Actually, they feel more like a miniature alien species with humanoid features than actual people. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, the heart-holes’ brief tenancies are not due to cardiac arrest but to a miracle of God. Within ten months, their hearts are fixed, and they are released back to their families and out into the world, presumably to live a normal life filled with candy, sex, and voting.
Actually, God is not responsible for fixing any heart-holers, so far as I can tell. I used to wonder why He, if He were to exist, wouldn’t make it easier to know it’s Him doing all the fixing. Then I realized that it’s probably because we would also blame Him for all the rest of us, who, incidentally, are much less fixable. So until I have some evidence that God is the one making the heart-hole children better, I will give all the credit to Dr. Ridick.
When I was about eight years old, Ridick started showing up in Mazyr with an entourage of assistants carrying boxes of medical supplies. Included in these boxes were a few pieces of technologically advanced medical fabric, which are apparently the perfect substitute for heart stuff. Currently, Ridick visits about twice a year, once in June and once in December, and during his stay, the good doctor sews up as many hearts as he can. The newly patched heart-hole kids wake up the next morning with a smile that comes with the feeling of their hearts beating properly for the first time in their lives. I know this because I’ve camped out and waited patiently to watch their eyes open. Then, two days later, an unfamiliar vehicle rolls up to the front door and picks up one of the newly patched kids. The child saunters down the front steps and wobbles into the backseat and then drives off into a new life where he eats real food cooked by a mother who takes proper credit for birthing him and makes friends who are capable of uttering words and courts a mate whom he can learn to love and copulate with.
For most of my life at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, I’ve resented the heart-hole kids, but this has changed recently. Not because my situation is any different but because I’ve met Ridick.
Like most people, I hated Ridick at first. The first few times he and his entourage arrived, they were accompanied by a team of cameras and audio equipment that followed around the good doctor as if he were, in fact, the God of Old Testament notoriety. They filmed the bloody open hearts of the heart-hole kids, careful not to omit any detail of the carnage, for the enjoyment of thousands of faceless viewers who wanted to feel warm and gushy over the prospect that happy endings are real. I observed from a good safe distance as Ridick, and then the nurses, and then the newly functional heart-hole children were interviewed by glib international journalists. It’s not that I wanted the attention (maybe I secretly did). It just lit my mutant fuse to see the cameras put a pretty ornate frame around the affable doctor and happy heart-holers as if they were some island isolated from the rest of us. One abrupt 360-degree panoramic revolution would expose the fact that we all have a story here. But I quickly learned that Nabokov was right when he said the world needs happy endings, no matter how unethical.
As a cripple confined to a wheelchair, and consequently severely limited as to my means of releasing anger, I typically resort to prankery as my primary method for expressing difficult emotions. So, one gray day, the kind that leaves even a whole person questioning the meaning of life, I found myself caught amid the dreary mood I was already in, next to an interview between an Irish journalist named Nigel—whose accent I found like sandpaper to my Hui*—and Ridick. Though I did not understand a word of the English they spit back and forth, I found myself wanting to tear both of their heads clear off their necks. Logistically, this was an impossibility, once again, given the limitations of my physical body. So instead I took one of the ketchup packets I had stolen from the pantry earlier that day, opened it up with my teeth, and squirted the contents into my mouth. Then I whisked the mixture up with my tongue (one of my few perfectly functioning organs) until it had a nice homogeneous consistency, which could easily be mistaken for blood. Then I started convulsing like I was possessed by Caligula’s ghost.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 3