Dr. Leon: Good morning, Ivan. I’m Dr. Leon. It’s good to meet you. How are you this morning?
Me: Bad.
Dr. Leon: Why are you bad, Ivan?
Me: Because I’m in a hospital. Because I’m ugly, and no one here talks. And because I don’t have any parents.
Dr. Leon looks genuinely uncomfortable as I share these things.
Me: Are you okay, Dr. Leon?
Dr. Leon: Yes, of course, Ivan. So what I hear is that you feel bad because it’s lonely here?
Me: Yes, and for the other reasons I said.
Dr. Leon: What does loneliness feel like, Ivan?
Me: It feels bad. Just like I said.
Dr. Leon: Can you tell me more about that?
Me: Have you ever felt bad?
Dr. Leon: Of course, Ivan. Everyone feels bad sometimes.
Me: Well, it feels like that. Except all the time.
Dr. Leon: Where does it feel bad?
Me: In my head. Actually pretty much everywhere.
Dr. Leon: You feel bad in your toes?
Me: I don’t have toes.
Dr. Leon: Of course. How long have you felt this way?
Me: I always felt this way.
Dr. Leon: Well, that doesn’t sound very good.
Me: Can I ask you a question, Dr. Leon?
Dr. Leon: Yes, Ivan, anything.
Me: How come you’re old but it seems like your first day?
Dr. Leon was my therapist for the next two years. Every meeting sounded approximately like the one above. After Dr. Leon, I had a therapist named Miss Lagounov. Our first conversation sounded like this:
Miss Lagounov: Hi, Ivan. I’m Miss Lagounov. How are you?
Me: I’m bad.
Miss Lagounov: Oh, that’s not good. Why are you bad?
Me: Because I’m in a hospital. Because I’m ugly, and no one here talks. And because I don’t have any parents.
Miss Lagounov: And how does that make you feel?
Me: It makes me feel bad.
Miss Lagounov: Oh, I see, Ivan. Let me see here …
Miss Lagounov begins typing into the computer in front of her that was recently donated by a local Belarusian tech firm named Belanuv.
Miss Lagounov: Would you say that you also feel angry frequently?
Me: Yes.
Miss Lagounov: Have you lost interest in the things you love?
Me: There are not many things that I love.
Miss Lagounov: And you can’t stop feeling sad.
Me: Yes, like I said, I feel bad.
Miss Lagounov: Here, Ivan, look at this.
Miss Lagounov turns the computer monitor in my direction.
Miss Lagounov: Ivan, this is the Internet. We can learn a lot from it. According to this Internet site, it says that you have depression.
Me: Doesn’t that just mean I feel bad?
All of them missed the only thing that I was ever looking for—someone who could make me forget for a second that I was talking to a shrink about being stuck in a hospital. By my fifth therapist, Dr. Polzin, I decided that I could do much better on my own. So I started asking Nurse Natalya (who was always good at making me forget I was talking to a nurse) for every book on clinical psychology she could find. Currently, I consider myself at least as educated in the therapeutic process as any of my therapists. Moreover, when I look back on the long line of carnival freaks masquerading as psychologists, I’m almost certain that at least ten of the fourteen were more psychologically damaged than anyone here at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. I have a strongly held belief that most therapists enter the field to fix themselves and later get sidetracked trying to fix other people. By the time I reached my sixth therapist, it only made sense to perform the altruistic service of serving my therapists.
My first project was Miss Moisey Sokolov, M.D. When I looked into Dr. Sokolov’s eyes, I noticed that she lived about three inches behind them. Her shoulders slumped forward, which, as I learned from a book on the Alexander technique, meant she was submissive. She also dressed like a pastor’s wife, spoke too fast, almost never looked me in the eye, and could not get out the door fast enough after each session, which I later discovered was so that she could light a cigarette. The impassioned way in which she took a drag reminded me of what a baby might look like when it attached itself to its mother’s teat after being starved for a day.
In summary, Dr. Sokolov needed some fixing. During one session, she was in the middle of a sentence that may have sounded something like, “So, Ivan, have we made any progress on your communication style blah … blah … psychobabble … blah?” when I interrupted her:
“Do I make you uncomfortable, Dr. Sokolov?” I asked.
“Umm, no, Ivan, of course not. Why would you ask me that?” she said in her characteristic whisper.
“I notice you never look me in the eye. Didn’t Carl Rogers* say that eye contact is the key to establishing trust and rapport during the therapeutic process?”
“I make consistent eye contact with you every time we meet, Ivan.”
“See, just then you tried to make eye contact in the beginning, then your eyes drifted over to your hands. I make you uncomfortable; don’t be afraid to admit it. You said yourself we need to learn to trust each other.”
“Ivan, I promise—”
“Have you thought about why?”
“Why what?”
“Why I make you uncomfortable.”
“Ivan, this is my job, I promise—”
She paused to take a sip of tea, which gave me time to interrupt her again: “I make you uncomfortable because you want to have sex with me.”
Dr. Sokolov spit out her tea, and I continued:
“I’m not judging you, Dr. Sokolov. Not in the least. I’m sure there are many understandable reasons for your paraphilic attraction to the disabled.”
“Ivan—”
She desperately tried to regain control of the conversation, but I continued:
“I’m guessing when you were a child you were rather plain, if not ugly. You felt isolated and alone. I’m guessing your father was emotionally abusive and fortified your feelings of inadequacy.”
In reality, I was only about 60 percent sure of anything I was saying.
“Ivan, this is inappropriate, and just … wrong. Let’s get back to you.”
Even in her indignation she could hardly rise above an angry whisper.
“Dr. Sokolov, how can we continue to have a mutually beneficial therapeutic relationship if we don’t first address the strong sexual feelings underlying our interactions? I can almost see the heat radiating from your nether regions.”
I subtly motioned toward her vaginal area.
“Either you stop or I leave,” she threatened.
“The city already paid for your hour here. We might as well enjoy it. Besides, this is important. As I was saying, your feelings of inadequacy crystallized around puberty, at which point you began fetishizing the disabled, because in your head you are an invalid yourself.”
“Stop it, Ivan.”
She was about as close to screaming as a whisper could come.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Sokolov. This is a perfectly normal and understandable reaction. I have it all the time. We’re not that different.”
“We are nothing alike.”
“Didn’t you graduate from the Belarusian State University in Minsk? You could’ve chosen any clinic in Europe. Instead, you picked a peanut-paying job working for the City of Mazyr visiting kids like me. Have you asked yourself why?”
“My brother was sick like you.”
She started to pack up her notebook and papers.
“How many times have you masturbated while thinking of me, Dr. Sokolov?”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m not the one with the fetish.”
“I’m never working with you again.”
“Probably for the best. It would never work with all this sexual tension.”
That was my last appointment with Dr. Sokolov. Obviously, I was hooked. For the next six years, I used the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to convince Dr. Konstantinov that he had an incurable case of generalized anxiety disorder, Dr. Andreev that he suffered from repressed homosexual tendencies, Dr. Yakovlev that he had schizoaffective personality disorder, and Dr. Otken that she had Munchausen. The only therapist that I was unable to crack was Dr. Berkinov, but that’s only because he was a psychopath. I know this because two years ago he was arrested by Mazyr authorities midsession for carving matryoshka dolls from the bones of corpses he exhumed from a cemetery in Minsk.
XIII
My Mother
Dear Reader, you will be the first to know. Not even Nurse Natalya or Polina knows. It’s easier to tell you because I do not, and will never, know who you are. I have a mother, and we’re quite close. In fact, I see her almost every day. It didn’t happen overnight. At some point, I stopped blaming her for handing me off and then evaporating like spit in the Sahara. I acknowledged there were a gamut of possibilities that did not make her a demon. Maybe my mother was dying when I came out of her. Or even better, perhaps she died in childbirth. Perhaps she herself was a victim of the same political calamity that made Ivan Isaenko and knew she couldn’t care for me the way that I deserved. Perhaps she left to search the world for a cure for what went wrong in me. It’s hard to hate when any of these possibilities exist. So when the distaste for my phantom mother subsided, it was replaced by a genuine desire to know who she was, what she looked like, and what her hands felt like.
I had never actually asked anyone at the hospital about her before. A long time ago, I had invented her effigy out of a mixture of my assumptions and defenses so that I could properly resent her. At some point, it occurred to me that this wasn’t fair, so I decided to ask Nurse Natalya about her while she sorted through bags of blood in a large refrigerator.
“Tell me about my mother.”
She waited a moment to respond while continuing to shift around blood bags.
“Why are you asking me now after all these years?” she asked. “I thought by now you didn’t want to know.”
“I didn’t. But now I do.”
“Ivan, darling, I’m sorry, but no one knows anything about your mother.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Nurse Natalya’s face involuntarily twisted into equal parts shock and disappointment.
“Believe what you want, Ivan,” she said.
“Nothing? Nothing at all?” I asked.
“Nothing, Ivan.”
“Then how did I get here?”
“You came in an ambulance one day. You had no papers and no mother.”
“And no one thought that was strange?”
“Yes, of course, Ivan, but look around you. Everything is strange here.”
“What about my name? How did I get my name?”
“The same way all the kids without names get named at the hospital—boys get I names, and girls get K names.”
“And my last name?”
“The same way.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then what can I do?”
This was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t respond.
Despite my accusations, a part of me did believe her. Nurse Natalya, aside from being human, had never done anything to make me question her scruples. But another part of me worried that she thought that she might need to protect me from something. So I decided that the only logical solution would be to call every Isaenko in Belarus. My only problem was that I had never once used a phone before due to the fact that I did not have a connection with anyone in the outside world. Consequently, I initiated the following conversation with Nurse Natalya:
Me: Can I call you sometime?
Nurse Natalya: Ay, Ivan, call me? For what? We talk every day, face-to-face, like people are supposed to talk.
Me: You take it for granted, don’t you?
(There is no substitute for a little ableism guilt.)
Nurse Natalya: What exactly do I take for granted, Ivan?
Me: Simple things, like talking to someone on the phone. You do it every day. I’ve never even dialed a number. To me, it’s magic.
Nurse Natalya: I promise you it’s not all that exciting.
Me: Just show me how to call you, and I will call you tonight. We will talk for a minute, and then we will hang up.
(A distrustful pause.)
Nurse Natalya: Fine.
I knew she would put up some token resistance. I also knew that in the end she would give in and take out the old 1952 model rotary phone from behind the front desk and show me how to dial a number. Moreover, she somehow managed to get Nurse Katya (who worked the evening shift that night) to act as an accomplice. At 9:00 in the P.M., a customarily humorless Katya came into my room and said:
“Don’t you have a phone call to make, Ivan?”
So I wheeled myself out to the front desk and began turning Nurse Natalya’s numbers into the rotary dial. When I was finished, it started to ring, and after one and a half rings, a voice that sounded only marginally like Nurse Natalya’s came through the earpiece.
Voice: Hi, Ivan.
Me: Hello. Is this Natalya?
Voice: Who else would it be?
Me: How are you?
Voice: I’m fine. Quite tired, actually.
Me: Yeah, it was a long day.
Voice: How is everything over there tonight?
Me: Quiet. No one is howling tonight.
Voice: Well, you should probably get to bed.
Me: I know.
Voice: Good night, Ivan.
Me: Good night.
When I hung up the phone, I noticed the three-kilo phonebook sitting on a shelf below the counter. This helped resolve the question of where I was going to get the numbers for every Isaenko in Belarus. The next issue of what to be done about the night nurse was also quickly resolved when I remembered that Nurse Elena was on nights in three days, and she typically passed out in the Main Room by midnight, due to her lust for vodka.
So, 12:02 in the A.M., three nights later, I wheeled myself behind the front counter and pulled out the phonebook. Before I ever turned the rotary dial, I made a list of the name, address, and phone number of every Isaenko in Belarus, including a small space to write in any notes that might be relevant to my investigation. There were 869 Isaenkos listed, and for the next seven days, from 12:01 in the A.M. until 5:59 in the A.M., I called all of them.
After dialing the first number, I panicked because I didn’t have any idea what I would say, and because I forgot it was the middle of the night. But before I could end the call, the voice of Ivanna Isaenko said, “You’d better be the prime minister or the Holy Ghost to be calling at this hour.”
“No, it’s Ivan,” I responded.
Then I hung up.
This sequence of events happened three more times before I decided that I would need a script to establish some legitimacy. After a bit of trial and error, I found something that worked:
Me: Hello. May I speak with Mr. or Ms. Isaenko?
Mr./Ms. Isaenko: This is him/her.
Me: Oh, hello, Mr./Ms. Isaenko. It appears that I have some good news and some bad news. What would you like first?
Mr./Ms. Isaenko: The bad news, please.
Me: It seems your son Ivan has passed away at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. The good news is that Ivan was a genius. Before he died, he developed several computer patents that are currently worth over three million rubles. He had expressed a desire to leave the money to his biological parents in the event that he should pass away.
This script was far more effective at initiating a serious dialogue. Here are the results of my 869 phone calls:
• 506 Isaenkos expressed sympathy but stated that they did not have a son named Ivan.
• 68 of those 506 Isaenkos stated that they wished Ivan was their son.
•
59 Isaenkos said I sounded drunk, but I assured them it was just my voice.
• 196 Isaenkos hung up.
• 212 Isaenkos said they weren’t actually Isaenkos.
• 27 Isaenkos told me to fuck off.
• 45 Isaenkos’ phones just rang and rang.
• 38 Isaenkos’ phones were disconnected.
• 7 Isaenkos were dead.
• 13 Isaenkos had a son named Ivan but said that he was sleeping peacefully in bed.
• 8 Isaenkos had a son named Ivan who was alive and well with a wife and x children somewhere in the suburbs of Mazyr.
• 5 Isaenkos claimed they had a son at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill children, but upon deeper questioning admitted that they were lying because they needed money.
• 0 Isaenkos were actually related to me.
Additionally, seventeen Isaenkos were long-distance phone numbers, which, altogether, cost the hospital 470 rubles, apparently enough to get the attention of the Director, who first blamed Nurse Elena, who then did some investigating, which revealed that the common thread to the calls was my last name. Consequently, I was never again allowed near a telephone.
This experiment made my options clear—I would need to invent my mother. I needed to write her into existence if only in my own head. Her hair would be dark and not yet grayed. This was because I’ve always felt dark-haired women are stronger than light-haired women, and with the freedom to dream my mother as I desired, I could adorn her with all the characteristics I deemed strong in a woman.
She had a fierce Polissian accent because, if I’m to be honest, she sounded a bit like Nurse Natalya, only without her rasp.
She had crow’s-feet that wrapped around her eyes, but not deep enough to make her old, just enough to season her face.
She smelled like lilacs.
She was strong yet soft at the same time.
When I first began to assemble her image, I noticed it was hard to remain objective. At first, the hair flowing from her head was perpetually blowing back in some imaginary wind, an obvious side effect of watching too much Russian television. Eventually, the long hair remained, but I reduced the special effects.
Her physical features created a sense of comfort and safety, but it was the personality I carved into her that helped me to feel loved and seen in a way that no real person has ever made me feel. She was warm and maternal. She could hold me through anything. But she could discipline me too. She could tell me, without hesitation, what thoughts were toxic and which would make me float on.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 7