Attempt number three: the next night, I waited until the duo went to bed. Once I was convinced they were sleeping deeply, I wheeled myself into their room armed with a flashlight and a pair of scissors I’d stolen from Miss Kris’s desk. I put the blades of the scissors right up to their long red locks and snipped away. I chopped and chopped at odd angles and dissonant lengths. I gave them the Ivan special. And with the wasted cords of hair I tied their little legs together for good measure. Then I wheeled myself out and returned the flashlight and scissors, leaving no evidence of my hooliganry.
It was hard for me to imagine any two human beings, particularly female ones, no matter how pathologically antisocial or psychically confined to each other, not reacting to the fact that their hair had been removed from their heads and used to bind them to one another. The next morning, the sisters emerged from their room with their hair looking like it had been through several rounds of chemo. Their faces, however, were perfectly buoyant. The duo synchronistically shuffled to the breakfast hall as if it were any other day.
Nurse Lyudmila was the first to comment:
“What in the name of Saint Alexander did you two girls do to each other?”
I thought the question was more rhetorical. But she continued anyway:
“If there was ever a time I need you two to talk, it is right now.”
The gingers continued to chew their cabbage. This inspired Nurse Lyudmila to shake them violently, which resulted in cabbage flying from their mouths, but nothing else. This is when I gave up and Nurse Lyudmila took the reins.
It was the first night of Lyudmila’s week of nights. Much more diabolical than I, she realized that the most effective way to torture the twins was to lock them in different rooms (brilliant!), thereby severing their psychic umbilical cord. So that night, she cleared out two heart-holers from their respective rooms and dragged one ginger into one room and the other into the second. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of selecting adjacent rooms, which allowed the ginger twins to communicate with each other through some combination of telepathy and Morse code, which they tapped to each other all night long through the connecting wall. On the next night, Lyudmila, in her serpentine way, would leave nothing to chance. She pulled Dasha from her room in the girls’ wing and replaced her with Mary, and Dennis from his room in the boys’ wing and replaced him with Magdalena. That night, no one at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children slept. We were kept wide awake by the shrill and grueling screams of two eleven-year-old girls.
VII
The Bleeders, the Non-Bleeders, and Polina the Interloper
I heard about Polina before I ever saw her. This is because I spend most of my days alert, ready for new intelligence, which I can then use to mentally prepare for any changes in my daily world that might upset my delicate equilibrium. A little reconnaissance also helps me predict the moods and general dispositions of hospital staff. For example, I know the precise day (and time) of the month on which all the nurses initiate their in-sync menses (the third at approximately 2:55 in the P.M.). Some experience worse menses than others (Nurse Lyudmila), so it is nice to know when in order to keep a vigorous distance from her. To ignore this information is negligent behavior. Two decades of observing human nature have revealed a few notable differences between the way men and women approach conflict: men will knock each other out and then hug it out, while women tend to leave deep, unresolved scars on the souls of their victims. I suppose this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view—women were forced to develop their own effective brand of violence to compensate for their disadvantages in size and strength.
One of the benefits of my espionage is that I quickly learn of all pending intakes. If I’m holding aces, I can glean important information about the newbies (age, gender, race, clinical diagnosis, personal and family history, demographics), which I can then use to predict how they might affect my day-to-day life. I am an expert at reading doctor-nurse body language, and this alerts me as to when important information is about to be revealed. Usually, it begins with a quick and nervous survey of the room as the doctor attempts to create the appearance of confidentiality. This is typically my cue to appear increasingly drowsy and bob my head until I nod off disingenuously. Within minutes, the disarmed doctor begins spilling his guts, giving the nurses orders as to how to attend to the new patient, while I take notes in the notepad of my mind.
Historically, this has been very helpful, since there are some new intakes I try to avoid completely. The most notable category is those who require me to have any visual contact with blood. This is because I have a deep, abiding, and existentially catastrophic fear of blood (there is no need for me to fake catatonia when I see blood). Over the years, there have been several new intakes who, without advance warning, would have caused me to pass out and vomit all over everything in a two-meter radius. I call these patients the Bleeders.
Alyona was a Bleeder. She had a three-year-old festering wound in her neck because she couldn’t help herself from picking at it in spite of varying states of infection. Had I not used the intelligence I gathered to hide from Alyona, I’m not sure I would be here to write this story. Fortunately, she didn’t last very long at the asylum, for she died tragically as a result of complications arising from picking at an infected neck.
My most feared Bleeder was Georgiy, whose blood ran through plastic tubes into a machine because his kidneys didn’t work. I’m not sure I would have escaped Georgiy alive if I’d had to face his blood plumbing. Fortunately, early reconnaissance revealed the extent of his blood woes and alerted me to keep my distance.
Most new intakes to the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children are Non-Bleeders. These include characters such as Max, Alex, the ginger twins, and most of the heart-hole children. When I gather enough intelligence to determine that a new intake is a Non-Bleeder, I breathe freely and return to reading my book or imagining Grace Kelly’s breasts. If evidence begins to point in the other direction, I flee straight for my room (or a stairwell, depending on which is closer).
Then there is a third, more esoteric category. These patients are not likely to set off any blood-related triggers, but they do pose a potential risk to the consistency of my day-to-day life. These patients are called Interlopers. Mostly, Interlopers are patients who just require more time to fully understand. For example, the ginger twins were Interlopers before they became your standard boring Non-Bleeders.
Interlopers and Non-Bleeders are best distinguished by their IQs. In a place where the average IQ doesn’t rise much above sixty-five, anyone of standard or superior intelligence poses a risk to the consistency of my daily life. These risks include competition for hospital resources, World War I–style power struggles, or the possibility of having to face the anxiety of interacting authentically with a person. Which brings me to my point, Reader—Polina was an Interloper. Actually, she was the worst kind of Interloper, the kind that didn’t belong here.
I first heard the name Polina as it was being screamed from the lips of the Director during a phone call with someone who was probably the director of another hospital. The Director was angry, and you could see the spit mist off his mouth as he screamed Russian obscenities to the man on the other end. Here is the intelligence I gathered from that conversation: (1) the man on the other end was trying to get the Director to accept a new patient into long-term care; (2) the new patient had leukemia, which implied strong Interloper potential (since both smart and dumb people can get leukemia); (3) the Director insisted that our hospital didn’t have the room or the resources to treat her and that it would likely be a death sentence; (4) the new patient had recently been orphaned and there was nowhere else for her to go. It was obvious to me when the Director slammed down the phone that he had lost the argument and the new patient would be staying at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.
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 Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 5