The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

by Scott Stambach

  I pulled my own pencil from my pocket and wrote back:

  I agree to your terms. Is your person a woman?

  Then I handed it back to her, at which point she quickly scribbled:

  Yes, eleven.

  And then she handed it back to me.

  Is your person fictional?

  Switch:

  No, ten.

  Switch:

  Is she anyone that we have seen on the screen during TV hour?

  Switch:

  No, nine.

  Switch:

  Is she a character in a book?

  Switch:

  No, eight.

  Switch:

  A historical figure?

  Switch:

  Yes, seven.

  Switch:

  Biblical?

  Switch:

  Yes, six.

  Switch:

  On God’s side?

  Switch:

  No, five.

  Switch:

  Was her flesh eaten by stray dogs at the time of her death?

  Switch:

  Yes, four.

  Switch:

  Jezebel.

  Switch:

  Polina laughed, which startled me because no one had ever laughed in response to something I had done, nor had I ever considered the possibility that I was capable of making a person laugh. Then she scribbled down a few words and handed the book back again.

  I hate you, Ivan.

  Switch:

  Why?

  Switch:

  Because that was only nine questions.

  Switch:

  It was too easy. She’s your alter ego.

  Switch:

  Ask your question.

  She dropped the book back into my lap, and I sat for a few minutes dreaming up questions, and a thousand came to mind, all of which were the type of deep and existential questions that inevitably result in long nights on the linoleum floor (n.b.: I’ve never actually had a long night on a linoleum floor). Such questions included: What do you think happens after you die? Have humans evolved to be monogamous? Why do bonobos have sex more than other primates? Is there a boundary to the universe? What is true happiness? What if a one-armed man robbed a bank; how would you handcuff him? If vampires can’t see their reflection, why do they have such perfect hair? Is it possible to daydream at night? and, of course, Do you think it would be possible for you to see me in a sexual sort of way?

  In the end, I decided to ask her for more time. So I wrote:

  Can I have the book for the night?

  To which she responded:

  If you don’t mind my puke.

  To which I responded:

  I have smelled a lot of puke at this hospital, and yours is not the worst.

  To which she laughed (that was two) and responded:

  Good night, creep.

  Which I hoped was also a joke.

  Then I wheeled myself back to my room, where my mother was waiting up with a mouth that was clearly ready to explode with maternal-like things.

  “So, how was your first date?”

  “Dates involve words, Mother.”

  “I’m submitting a request for a grandchild.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “For one, I’m not built for procreation.”

  “Max Moyovich. Quadruple amputee from the Second World War. His son is currently mayor of Yakutsk. You have a whole arm on him.”

  “For two, she’ll die before any zygote is the size of a ten-ruble coin.”

  “Have you not seen the latest incubators?”

  “Good night, Mother.”

  I spent the rest of the evening reading through classic literature in order to come up with a question for Polina. At some point, it occurred to me that there might be nothing left to ask. I knew the names and faces of each of the demons that populated her world. She painted all their faces with her words. It only seemed fair that I should offer the same courtesy.

  The clock read 6:53 in the A.M. when I finished writing The Retroactive Diary of Ivan Isaenko. I was as honest as I’d ever been. As I could ever let myself be. It was the unabridged history brimming with all my crippling phobias, my morbid games, and a dictionary for my exclusive lexicon. There were other things I couldn’t bring myself to share. For example, my obsessive masturbation habits.

  As soon as I put my pen down, I fell asleep and had a dream that Polina and I were walking down a street that looked nothing like somewhere in Eastern Europe. The road was as long as I could see, the sky was gray, the streets were foggy, and the scene was almost entirely black and white except for trees that lined the road, each one of them blooming with little purple flowers that were being shed all over my black-and-white road, which looked like little pieces of purple candy.

  I turned to Polina and asked:

  “What are these trees?”

  “Jacarandas,” she said.

  Something about her voice made me realize that I was dreaming, but somehow I didn’t wake up. Instead, I wondered how I knew the name for something in my dream that I didn’t know the name of in real life. I was, however, able to let this paradox go and choose to enjoy the dream for as long as it would play out. We continued to walk without saying anything to each other until it became apparent that under one of the trees clarifying itself on the horizon there was a body lying limp and lifeless over the strewn purple candies. Eventually the ripped jeans and T-shirt could be ascertained, and a few steps later it was clear that it was the Polina who walked into the hospital two months ago. I leaned down and shook her body, but it was uninhabited. Then I turned to my left, and the Polina that I had been walking with was gone. Like a balloon, the scene popped, and I found myself in my bed with The Retroactive Diary of Ivan Isaenko bobbing on my torso to the rhythm of my escalating breath. I leaped quickly into my morning rituals of urination and dress and proceeded to breakfast hour. But this morning, Polina would not be reading my diary. This would be the morning that in spite of waking up in Abaddon every day, in spite of the debilitating isolation I weather and my daily broken heart, in spite of the unbroken stream of thoughts hustling like loyal little slaves to erect some meaning out of my existence, in spite of all this and everything else, I’d never really hurt before.

  Currently, the clock reads 7:47 in the P.M.

  I’ve been writing for forty-four hours.

  It is the fourth day of December.

  The year is 2005.

  Natalya knocked again.

  I told her to come in.

  It’s the day after tomorrow.

  (Silence.)

  I will pick you up at nine.

  I’m not going.

  I disagree.

  XX

  The Case for Diacetylmorphine

  I wasn’t completely honest when I said that I had correctly guessed every three-monther since I invented the game. I was wrong once, and not long ago. I was wrong because denial is the voluptuous mistress of puppy love. By the time I made it to my spot at the breakfast table, on a Wednesday morning of a particularly cold November, everyone had already started eating, including Polina, whom I audaciously avoided with my eyes. The plan was to rush through my cold plastic food as per usual, only this time I would leave my book with Polina and wheel away like a two-legged puma.

  Wednesdays are also med days. If there are meds to be delivered, it happens during breakfast hour on a Wednesday. On this particular Wednesday, I had forgotten it was a Wednesday for all the obvious reasons. So when I saw Nurse Katya approach the table with her big box of plastic Baggies tucked in her big brown arms, I instinctively made my guesses for the week. As usual, the ginger twins, Alex, Dennis, and the heart-hole children all had normal six-month bags. I also correctly called Anton, the ten-year-old autistic progerian, who received a three-month bag. But on this day, for the first time ever, I was wrong. On this Wednesday in the month of November, Nurse Katya dropped a bag in front of Polina that was about half the
size of her usual med day bag.

  I was surprised to find out just how many thoughts could arrive in the width of a second if the circumstances are right. Thoughts like thought Number One: Well, less of a thought and more of a complete body experience of devastation. Thought Number Two: Polina had not been here long enough nor did she have (yet) a sufficiently morbid enough sense of curiosity to know about the two classes of patients at the hospital. Nor is there an adequate system of communication here which would have helped Polina to understand the meaning of her reduced-sized bag of pills. This meant that Polina had no idea that she had somewhere between one day and three months left to live. It also meant that the only two people who did know were me and Nurse Katya and whatever higher powers decided that Polina was about to die. Thought Number Three: Everyone deserves to know when they are going to die. Thought Number Four: Thought Number Three is all wrong. If not for the fear, death is just a word, and if I never tell her she doesn’t have to be afraid. Thought Number Five: Thought Number Four is all wrong. Knowing when one is going to die helps one to make informed decisions about how one would live one’s last days. Thought Number Six: Somebody needs to tell her. Thought Number Seven: It is me or Nurse Katya. I can’t even look her in the eye, so it must be Nurse Katya. Thought Number Eight: I need to talk to Nurse Katya.

  All these thoughts arrived in this sequence in about the time it took for my bite of food to drop from my lips. I had hoped that Polina would not notice this, but Nurse Katya would. Unfortunately, it was the other way around; I could feel the heat of Polina’s clearly disgusted eyes baking my skin while Nurse Katya aloofly continued to pass out her pills. I decided it might be easier to get her attention by taking a dull butter knife to the nub that would have been my inner thigh and doing my best to get a nontrivial stream of blood flowing. This resulted in a suitable commotion of crying among the heart-holes, an unbearable eruption of “Shoko” by Alex, and some Olympic-style rocking by Dennis, which was, of course, enough to get Nurse Katya to drop her box of meds and scream, “Christ, Ivan! In the name of Saint Thomas Aquinas!”

  Now, the sight of blood makes me pass out, even if it’s my own, so by the time I saw her run over to me, the cabbage on my plate turned blurry, and my face fell flat into my partially chewed bite. When I woke up I was in the White Room. The first thing I saw was Nurse Katya’s big brown arms slapping my droopy cheeks back and forth.

  “I’m awake, I’m awake,” I said.

  To which she responded by slapping me twice more, harder. I tasted a bit of blood, which almost made me pass out again.

  “Why in the hell would you do that?” she asked.

  “Were you worried about me?” I asked.

  “Not in the least. But now the hospital is in a frenzy, and I have a pint of blood to mop up. And don’t you even think I’m about to change that,” she said, motioning to the blood-soaked gauze that was taped over my nub.

  “I can handle it,” I said.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Yes, I need a favor too. I need someone to mop the blood off the floor.”

  “I’ll do it if you do me a favor back.”

  “There’s more chance of getting struck by lightning, child.”

  “You wouldn’t be helping me. You need to tell Polina she’s dying.”

  “She knows she’s dying,” she said while pouring water into the mop bucket.

  “I need you to tell her that she’s dying in less than three months.”

  “How do I know when she’s dying?”

  “You know she’s a three-monther.”

  “Ivan, what in the hell is a three-monther?”

  “The kids who get the small bags.”

  “Not my job, Ivan.”

  “Then whose job is it?”

  “Not mine.”

  “Is it anyone’s job?”

  “Nope.”

  “So you’re saying it’s no one’s job to tell people when they are going to die in a place where people die all the time?”

  “Yes, that is what I’m saying,” she said, and she left the White Room with her bucket and mop.

  I gave myself sixty seconds to bring myself together. Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight …

  By fifty, forty-nine … I fell out of my chair.

  By forty-three, forty-two … water was trying to work its way out of my eyes.

  By fifteen, fourteen … I had successfully sucked most of the water back into my eyes.

  By one … I was back in my chair.

  By zero, I was frantically wheeling myself to Nurse Natalya, who was also the only person left who could fix this. I started with the Blue Room (laundry room), then the Red Room, then the Yellow Room, but she was nowhere. I went to the front desk, where I found Miss Kristina chewing on an already overchewed pen.

  “Where’s Natalya?” I asked.

  “She’s not here today,” she said.

  “Where is she?”

  “Niece’s baptism or something.”

  “You need to call her.”

  “Ivan, I c—”

  “Yes, you can. I will dial the number.”

  “She is at the Mass.”

  “Don’t you know that baptisms don’t happen at 8:00 in the A.M.? Actually, no you wouldn’t because you’re an idiot.”

  “That was mean.”

  “That was true.”

  “There is a reason I won’t let you call. Would you like to know the reason?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m not supposed to ever let you use the phone again since the time that you made a hundred long-distance phone calls in one night.”

  “For one, that was three years ago; for two, someone is going to die.”

  She looked down at my bloody gauze in alarm.

  “Is it you?” she asked.

  “Yes, and I need Natalya.”

  “I think we should just call one of the other nurses over here. Everyone else—”

  “I can’t talk to them.”

  She responded with a face that said, I understand exactly what you mean …

  She put the phone up to my ear and asked, “Do you need her number?”

  To which I said:

  “No, I remember.”

  To which she said:

  “Hurry.”

  It took about twenty-seven seconds for my clumsy index finger to spin through all the numbers. It was 8:00 in the A.M., so I hoped she was awake, and if she was awake that she wasn’t praying. As I had already learned, hope, like prayer, almost never works. Only being a pest works. The phone rang through seventeen times, and no one picked up. So I hung up the phone and started all over again, which was met with various protests from Miss Kris, which I adroitly fended off. Then, after eight more rings:

  “Ivan?”

  To which I was startled but responded:

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Then she hung up.

  Nine minutes later, she plowed through the double front doors, in a heavy black coat, and no nurse’s uniform. In seventeen years, I don’t know if I had ever seen her without her scrubs. Her chubby little figure immediately charged over to me, took the handlebars on my chair, and wheeled me off to a quiet stairwell on the third floor. Then she threw her arms around me and started to sob.

  “Ivan, my baby, I know about your Dear Diary game,” she confessed through her tears. Her crying motivated me to cry.

  Then I said:

  “Sorry for interrupting baptism day.”

  To which she replied:

  “Oh, stop it!”

  Then we cried some more, and when we finished, she dried us both off and wheeled me back to my room, which is when I asked:

  “Can you tell her?”

  “Who else?” she asked, which I knew was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t respond.

  She left, and I decided to hide in my room for the rest of the day while I alterna
tingly read various medical books and attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate.

  The next morning, we were all back at the breakfast table, precisely the same characters in precisely the same configuration, but this time, Polina and I both knew she was dying. All I could think to do was send her a forced smile from across the breakfast table (or at least as much of a smile as my droopy cheeks could muster). I was shocked by how easy it was to get a smile back considering the circumstances. I concede it was a courtesy smile, no doubt about it. It was a smile that said, “I’m weak, tired, and dying, and you are a freak, but, despite these facts, social courtesy dictates that I reciprocate your kind sentiment.” And maybe, just maybe, she was also charmed by it on some level.

  I decided at that moment that breakfast would become my training ground. I would use a system of smiles and glances to slowly melt the ice and desensitize myself to her Goddessness. Every morning I would wait for her to be ushered to her spot at the breakfast table, while I exercised my cheek muscles with a series of techniques that I developed to improve my smile. Every morning, when she finally arrived, I would patiently wait for her eyes to randomly move in my direction, and when they did, I would pitch my best beam. And every morning, she would reflect it back to me.

  Eventually, I wouldn’t have to wait for her eyes to randomly meet mine. She would come to expect my smile, relish it maybe, and consequently when she took her place at the table, her first impulse would be to look over to me and receive it. Soon I would be glancing over at her several times during each meal, partly to deepen my desensitization regimen and partly to fish for any reason to tell myself that she would see some inexplicable beauty in me.