The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

by Scott Stambach

  As I expected, the good doctor leaped over to me while the carnivorous cameras panned over to the spectacle. In an effort of heroic proportions, Ridick pulled me out of my chair, laid me flat on the ground, and leaned in to protect my thrashing head. And as soon as his furled brow got close enough, his eyes poring over me, searching for a clue as to why my body had just turned into a Mexican jumping bean, I coughed the pseudoblood into his face. The cameras got in nice and close and caught everything like sick little robots. Ridick, who I expected would run for the hills, continued to hold my thrashing head as the cocktail of ketchup and spit dripped off his chin and into my agape mouth.

  Then the cameras disappeared, and all the thrashing turned into a vibratory hum in the background, and it was only his eyes and mine. It occurred to me that his priority was protecting my spastic head, and not the repulsive fluids that were spreading over his face. At that moment, I remember hearing Frank Sinatra singing “As Time Goes By,” which he once sang during TV hour. Perhaps all my thrashing jostled that particular memory loose. Eventually, the ambient sounds of the room fell away until nothing was left but the song and Ridick’s own Sinatra-brand blue eyes. As if it weren’t even my choice, my convulsions slowed and eventually stopped altogether, until my head fell to one side and I started to sob. Two parts shame and one part self-pity, it was the only time I felt loved by anyone besides Natalya.

  At some point, Ridick must have smelled the ketchup, because his vise grip on my head softened, and he wiped the spit and tomato from his face. He could have left me on the floor crying like an idiot. He could have left me in a cave of shame. He could have called a nurse to have me subjected to a battery of psychological evaluations. Instead, he continued to hold me, which made me blubber mercilessly.

  The cameras caught everything. It is entirely possible, Reader, that you have already witnessed the scene I just described. You would be sitting on a couch with your loved one(s) in front of a TV in the comfort of your pasteurized living rooms. The scene would end and the program would cut to commercial, and the awkward silence would prompt you to turn to each other to say words about me. I often muse about what those words might be.

  At some point, I must have fallen asleep, right there on the cold floor, because I woke up the next morning in my bed. After wiping away my dried tear crust, I found a white ball with red stitching next to my bed, signed with indecipherable squiggles. It was resting on a note written in very poor Russian, which intended to say:

  Dear Ivan,

  This baseball was signed by Reggie Jackson. He was my favorite baseball player when I was your age. Not sure what you know about him, but if you want, we can talk baseball sometime.

  Your friend,

  Ridick

  Later that day, I worked up the courage to find Ridick, disinfect his face, and return his gift, which I could not accept, though I wanted to. However, I was informed by Nurse Elena that he had already left for America.

  “Perhaps that will teach you to be a little govniuk* then, huh, Ivan?” she said.

  To which I said:

  “At least I need to pretend to be one.”

  To which she mumbled some ignorant shit and turned to walk away.

  I waited 188 days for Ridick to come back to the hospital to fix up more hearts. When he finally appeared one day, camera crew in tow, I had built up an elaborate six-month apology, teeming with various acts and scenes, but by the time my mouth opened wide enough to start, he tossed me another ball, which I dropped because I only have one arm, with two fingers on it. Then he picked it up and put it into my hand. This one was signed by someone named Tom Seaver.

  Ridick taught me about baseball for three hours that night. From then on, he brought me a signed baseball every time he came to patch hearts. Currently, I have twenty-two baseballs with names on them like Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Jim Palmer, Steve Carlton, Carlton Fisk, and Catfish Hunter.

  Currently, the clock reads 11:47 in the A.M.

  I have been writing for twelve hours.

  It is the third day of December.

  The year is 2005.

  Nurse Natalya came in a few moments ago with a change of clothes.

  “You haven’t changed in four days,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “I can smell you in the hallway.

  And so can everyone else.

  Do us this kindness.”

  “Leave them on my bed.”

  She stared at me for a few long seconds,

  and in that time I was close

  to asking her about the green folder,

  but the vodka had me sufficiently numb.

  She tossed the clean clothes onto my bed.

  “I’ll be back in an hour to pick up your dirties.”

  “Make it two.”

  Dennis

  Dennis is an enigma.

  He is unique in that he is the only one of us whose mother also lives here at the asylum. Living, however, may be a bit of an overstatement. At the moment, Dennis’s mother is a vegetable kept alive by the machines in the Red Room. Her fate has become a subject of controversy here at the asylum.

  Dennis and I arrived at the hospital within days of each other. Back then, as now, he was, quite simply, an enormous mass of catatonic flesh, spending forty minutes of every hour rocking in a wheelchair that is too small for his six-foot-eleven-inch frame. The other twenty minutes he is perfectly still and unresponsive. Doctors have kicked, prodded, zapped, jiggled, burned, and slapped Dennis during these twenty-minute periods, but these efforts never elicit anything close to a response. To add to the mystery, Dennis rocks with an astounding regularity. One day, in my boredom, I counted the number of undulations per minute during each forty-minute rocking period. I discovered that, invariably, Dennis rocks seventy-six times every minute. This was a complete puzzle until two days later when a nurse inadvertently locked me in the Red Room. In my escalating nausea, I noticed that the machine hooked up to Dennis’s mom (which I presume maintains her heart rate) was set to seventy-six beats per minute.

  When Dennis’s mother first brought her child to the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, she was looking for help. She loved the poor lump of skin and bones to death but needed an explanation as to why he never cried, babbled, crawled, played, grabbed, kicked, or ate. After the first few weeks of consultations and dozens of neurological, physical, and mental examinations, the doctors concluded, quite simply, that Dennis lacked a soul. All the bits and pieces of a person were there, all connected and wired in the way that God intended, and yet he was lifeless (in those days Dennis hadn’t yet developed his habit of rocking). The medical team of the time, which included three nurse practitioners and a doctor with a degree from an unaccredited medical school in Lithuania, decided that no other conclusions could be drawn.

  As the days went by, Dennis’s mom became more and more desperate, which registered primarily in her face, which was crumpling like a Coke can, and her hair, which was turning gray in real time. She insisted on a regimen of experimental procedures that could put the soul back into her son. The roomful of medical specialists took one long, hard look into her desperate eyes and very disingenuously told her of some new cutting-edge research at the frontier of medicine, knowing full well that there were no promising methods for putting the soul back into a child.

  At this point in the story, a little background is necessary. According to hospital folklore, Dennis’s mom had been born to be a mom. She expected nothing more and nothing less from life. But despite her destiny as a maternal provider, the poor woman lost eight fetuses before finally giving birth to the lifeless bag of bones she named Dennis. Moreover, the eight fetuses that came before Dennis were conceived by the same man. Unfortunately, that man lost his patience after the eighth attempt and apparently left the woman—and Belarus—altogether. Her last and final attempt was allegedly with a drunk soldier in a dark alley during an inebriated walk home from a pub on Leninskaya Street. Apparently, dr
unken sperm tend to be more viable. So, in this context, you can imagine the disappointment when the child she finally birthed after all eight attempts entered the world with a heartbeat and nothing else. Hence the dramatic display of emotion when Dennis’s mom challenged the doctors to fix her baby.

  In an unusual show of pity, the doctors performed about six months of experimental treatments to reconnect Dennis’s soul. They did so with earnest faces, knowing full well that the boy would never change. And when all diagnostic theories were tested and the doctors could do nothing else to convince her that there was any chance that some life might jump back into the child, they offered Dennis a permanent spot at the hospital and let it be known that they could care for the child, could monitor, stimulate, and examine him in a way that would be impossible for her alone. Dennis’s mom responded by packing up her child and walking out of the hospital.

  Two days later, she was back, an unbearable, terrible, tearful mess, charging through hallways, frantically looking for anyone in a white coat but settling for a nurse, to whom she handed the baby before locking herself in a bathroom. Then came the thud that could only be one thing. By the time the three on-staff nurses and a security guard were able to break down the door, it was difficult to tell if more blood was streaming from her wrists or from the laceration on her head that happened when it slammed into the tiled floor.

  The doctors were able to stop the bleeding both from her wrists and from her head. They were not, however, able to fix the fact that she was now just as lifeless as her son. Dennis’s mom was brought into the Red Room, where they connected her to machines that have kept her alive ever since. I sometimes wonder if Dennis’s mom lost her soul then too. One day, I found Nurse Natalya folding some linens and asked her if she thought Dennis’s mom would ever wake up.

  “Never,” she said. “Her brain is mostly dead.”

  “Then why don’t they just unplug her?” I asked.

  “Ivan, this hospital is funded by the church. She’ll be here as long as we are.” And with that, she shook her head at an invisible deity and returned to folding linens.

  I, for one, have a special appreciation for Dennis. Not because I sympathize with his story or feel any deep primal connection. I appreciate Dennis because he unintentionally serves as my timepiece. Three sets of rocking from breakfast and I know it’s time to make my way to the TV room for Nu, pogodi!* Six sets of undulations from lunch and I know it’s time for dinner. Two sets of undulations from dinner and I make my way back to the TV room for Czterej pancerni i pies.† Four more rocking fits and it’s lights-out.

  During one of our semiregular power outages, resulting in the failure of every clock in the Main Room, I was even able to keep the nurses and technicians abreast of the local time by counting Dennis’s undulatory episodes.

  Everyone deserves a purpose.

  The Ginger Twins

  Mary and Magdalena are eleven-year-old ginger twins. Their long ginger hair is not the bright red hair of model notoriety. It is the dull red hair that inevitably comes with a nondescript homely face and freckles that verge on scar-like. Their skin is whiter than ivory, even whiter than mine, if that’s possible, and perhaps with a hint of lavender, as ginger skin often is. Their faces are spotted with freckles, and their eyes are green like what I imagine the color of seaweed to be. I would almost find them cute in a sexually specific sort of way if not for the way their peculiar aura wilts my Hui.

  I’m not sure why Mary and Magdalena are here at the hospital. They have all their right parts in the right places. They are able to take care of themselves and have a grasp on most major hygienic rituals. By all standard societal measures, the duo appear normal. Actually that’s a lie. They are so devastatingly abnormal it is difficult to think of them as fellow human beings. So far as I know, they have never spoken to anyone. And yet, if you asked anyone here, he might tell you that they speak to each other every moment of every day, only not out loud with words. Everyone here believes they talk to each other, and only each other, with thoughts. Understandably, Reader, you require evidence: when either Mary or Magdalena decides it’s time to stand up and rummage through the box of toys, they both decide. When either Mary or Magdalena decides that it’s time to jump to their feet and run laps around the Main Room, they both decide. When either Mary or Magdalena decides it’s time to move to adjacent bathroom stalls to empty the day’s waste, they both decide. Everything the ginger twins do is in synchrony. There is not a fraction of a moment’s delay between the time one makes a decision and the other follows. And yet, not one nurse, not one doctor, not even Nurse Natalya, with all her clever antics and maternal tones, has ever been able to elicit a nod or a wink or any body language at all that even suggests that they are aware of the world outside their own two heads.

  Once upon a time, even I, the poster child of unsociability, made a heroic attempt. Obviously not to cultivate any lifelong friendships—I was just bored. It began with innocent enough banter: Who’s your favorite nurse, Mary? How about you, Maggie? Can I call you Maggie? Do you girls really read minds like everyone says? So, what am I thinking?

  (All said with my slow, offbeat droopy drawl.)

  Unsurprisingly, no reaction whatsoever. And yet I wasn’t rejected either.

  This was my gateway into a game I could only play with myself, which, incidentally, is my favorite sort of game. A game of challenging my mind to develop a sufficiently provocative display that would force the duo to react to other human beings. In my head, I imagined the celebrity I might become around the asylum if I was the first to open them up to the universe.

  I kept my first attempt humble. As per usual, the duo were playing Durak* on the cold tiles of the Main Room. I rolled my chair within inches of the twins, close enough to smell their clinical shampoo, and parked myself on top of their game. As expected, the twins continued to deal their cards without reaction. So I nodded off into one of my well-rehearsed comatose states and let the drool that typically accumulates in the corner of my mouth drip down my cheek in a long molasses stream into my lap and then onto their cards. For the next half hour, the ginger twins carried on with their game as the puddle of my spittle gathered into a small pond. When Mary (or maybe it was Magdalena; I never bothered to learn which was which) shed her last card, the duo synchronistically stood up, collected their blankets, and shuffled off to bed, not taking care to avoid my puddle of drool. Both happened to step through it, leaving little liquid footprints leading to their door. Clearly, I would need to try harder.

  Everyone needs to excrete waste. That, at the very least, is unavoidable. What goes in must come out is the most sacrosanct law of human biology. Here at the hospital, every room for a long-term resident has a bathroom. There are very few frills in this place, but at the very least we all get a bathroom. One of the design flaws of our bathrooms is that they all can be locked from the inside by pressing a small button on the doorknob and then closing the door. It is entirely too easy to lock yourself out of the bathroom if you happen to be on the outside and accidentally press the lock due to limited control of your extremities (clearly the case for 97 percent of all hospital residents). I know this from personal experience; I’ve accidentally locked myself out of my own bathroom no less than six times in my tenure here at the asylum. This scenario made my next attempt low-hanging fruit—I would reproduce this “accident” in the ginger twins’ bathroom. My theory was that with a locked bathroom and nature pounding at their door, the duo would have no choice but to hunt down one of the nurses to unlock it.

  Though the gingers are the most unpredictable and spontaneous residents at the hospital, with no set daily regimen or schedule, you could at the very least depend on their being immersed for hours whenever they were engaged in a competitive game with each other (perhaps winning is the only way the twins have to distinguish themselves). I waited all day in the Main Room until I caught the twins absorbed in some hand-clapping game, which apparently required extreme concentration so as not to l
ose the sequence, count, and rhythm of the claps. I figured this would buy me twenty or thirty minutes at least.

  So I took the opportunity to wheel myself into their room discreetly, then into the bathroom, where I pressed the button on the doorknob, then back into their room, where I closed the door behind me, then out into the hall, unnoticed like the world’s only wheelchair-bound ninja. Then I waited. First, for twenty-four hours. Then for forty-eight. I didn’t take my eyes off those twins (except, of course, during the moments in which they slept behind their closed door). And nothing. No ginger twins running out to a nurse with flailing arms. I didn’t even hear them rattling the bathroom door. Not a sound.

  After the third day, I learned that while peeing is unavoidable, peeing in a bathroom isn’t. Inundated with curiosity, I waited for another high-intensity game of cards to do some investigating at the Ginger residence. Sure enough, the bathroom door was still locked. This left two options: the twins had managed to hold their bladders for three days, risking infection and rupture, or they had found another way to relieve themselves altogether. So I frantically wheeled around the room, searching high and low for an alternative. Eventually, I found it hiding under their beds. The twins were stealing their breakfast, lunch, and dinner bowls in order to fill them with pints of their own urine and waste. I deduced that the nurses would soon find them too, check the bathroom door, and unlock it (i.e., another failure).