On this particular day, Nurse Natalya was in charge of distributing food during dinner hour. As she pulled small pieces of unidentified meats from what looked too much like a bucket, I stopped her.
“Have you seen her today?” I asked.
“I heard her howling into a toilet,” she said, and she returned to rationing out boiled meat.
Hearing this incited the voice inside my head to begin to mentally prepare me for the possibility that everything would not go as planned. I had become extremely familiar with this automated defense system over the years. It said things such as You know you’d rather be in your room masturbating, Ivan, or Girls are unapologetically uninteresting, or She’s going to die in a minute anyway.
As the voice finished making a rather compelling case for remaining unfazed, I returned to my room, where I pulled three books out from under my bed: The Pathological Basis of Disease by Gustav Stein (Russian translation by Kierkegaard Polov), The Molecular Biology of Cancer by Mark Roman (Russian translation by Sergei Ilikov), and Genetics: Analysis and Principles by Robert Brooker (Ukrainian translation by Vladimir Medyedev). These were the only books Nurse Natalya never sold from her nursing school days, and in a place where self-diagnosis is an essential means of survival, they were vital to my personal library.
I decided to spend the remainder of the night prior to rendezvous hour reading up on why chemotherapy causes people to experience bouts of vomiting and explosive stool. According to Roman (page 342), cancer cells reproduce like Australian bunnies, and the chemicals in a chemo cocktail kill rapidly reproducing cells. Unfortunately, the cells that line human stomachs and intestines also fit into this category and become collateral damage.
At 8:50 in the P.M., I put the book down, got into my chair, collected chess, Pantomime, and a deck of cards (variety is the spice of life, according to my mother) and rolled down to the Main Room, which was empty of nurses and mutants but illuminated by an oil lamp and about twelve candles, clearly lit by Nurse Natalya, who actually had no intention of doing this as a kindness but rather as a charming joke designed to make my nubs squirm. I panicked and began blowing out every candle, which is difficult due to my limited lung capacity. When I got to the oil lamp, I made the strategic decision to leave it on, since the alternative (hospital lighting) made me slightly nauseous, much like blood, sloppy eating, and the Red Room. Then I writhed out of my chair, grabbed the first box from my bag, which happened to be chess, and started placing the plastic pieces onto the board, but quickly decided against this after my mother appeared and told me that Polina probably wouldn’t want to think that hard after vomiting consistently for the better part of her day. So I threw all the plastic pieces back into the bag and pulled out Pantomime before realizing that I didn’t actually know how to play, which inspired me to speed-read through the instructions at high velocity before my mother appeared again and said, “T-minus fifty seconds, Ivan. You can’t learn this game in fifty seconds. Just play it safe with the cards,” at which point I frantically rummaged through the bag, pulled out the deck of cards, and began dealing them into two Durak piles.
After the last card was put into its pile, I thought exactly two thoughts. The first thought was How pitiful if in thirty minutes from now I find myself sitting out here alone doused in oil lamp lighting, with cards dealt and no Polina? The second thought was How can a game of cards ever compete with a slow leukemic demise, which left her weak, tired, irritable, and in a constant state of anti-vomit concentration? The joint effort of both of these thoughts caused me to abort. I quickly messed up the piles and started putting the cards away, which was just in time for Polina to wheel herself into the room asserting (somewhat joyfully):
“I haven’t played cards since I’ve been here.”
Which resulted in the involuntary reflex of pretending to be dealing the cards rather than putting them away.
“Durak?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“How do I know you’re not cheating?”
“You don’t.”
“You know it’s bad karma to let a dying girl win?”
“I would never.”
As I said this, I placed our last card, and as I placed our last card, I looked up at Polina for the first time that night. Even in the forgiving light of Nurse Natalya’s oil lamp, I could see the bruises slowly climbing up Polina’s arms and onto her face.
“Stop staring and pick up your cards.”
I did.
“Attack,” she said.
I played my first card with my hand while inside my head I was fumbling around for conversation given this particular set of circumstances (i.e., Polina is getting sicker and sicker, so sick in fact that she can’t show her face but for a few minutes at night, so sick that she can’t keep down a few bites of cabbage, so sick that she…). And then out of the silence:
“Play your card, Ivan.”
“Is it hard to get up in the morning?” I asked.
“That’s your best card?” she asked, which I’m almost sure was rhetorical, because then she threw her cards down and destroyed our piles.
“This is how it works: we don’t talk about it.”
I nodded through the oil light and shadows.
“I’m dealing this time,” she said.
Polina slowly collected her body up and out of her wheelchair and started picking up the cards, which by now were strewn across the cold linoleum and diffused to almost every corner of the Main Room. I writhed around the floor wormlike as best I could to collect a few myself and handed them back to her. Then she sat back down across from me and started dealing the cards, during which time we were both quiet because I could feel the residue of her anger. This lasted well into the first hand of the game. Polina was first to break the silence.
“I thought about you today,” she said.
And for the tiniest part of a second I was flooded with a wave of euphoria until she continued:
“Intellectually, I understand why you should be so odd. I would be strange if I were trapped in this hellhole for a year, let alone however long you’ve been here. But you are levels of strange I’ve never met, and I’ve met strange. Mostly prostitutes and derelicts in Moscow.”
She said all this without taking her eyes off her cards.
“Not sure I have anything to compare me to,” I said.
“Well, you’re weird. Devastatingly weird. With no appreciation for social rules of any kind. Which makes you both weird and an idiot,” she said.
Luckily for Polina, I was enjoying the abuse.
“You’re being a prick to me because you’re dying,” I said.
“Fuck you, Ivan,” she said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Never,” she said.
“Furthermore, you’re being a prick to me because I’m safe to be a prick to and there’s no one else here that you can safely be a prick with at the moment. So, actually, I find it endearing. Prick away.”
“Does it makes you feel big to know things?”
“It makes me feel even bigger to know I’m right.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’ve lived it already.”
“Lived what?”
“Lived being a prick to anyone who is willing to smile at me. So go ahead. Get it out.”
“Okay. Besides being a social idiot, I think you’re disgusting to look at. But what’s worse is that you will never have an authentic relationship because it will always be out of pity.”
“Too bad there’s no one left to pity you.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d broken all the rules and immediately tried to suck them back in. This was not how this game worked. I wasn’t supposed to hit back; I was supposed to absorb and imbibe until there was nothing left but trust.
Polina set her cards back down, quietly, coldly, indifferently, and wheeled herself away.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But, of course, it didn’t matter.
DAY 18
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The Nothing Day
On the eighteenth day, I ate breakfast, watched three episodes of Nu, Pogodi! (none of which I actually remember), masturbated twice (possibly three times), organized my three pairs of socks, read eighty-eight pages of Les Misérables, spent two hours catatonic, another two sleeping, read seventeen pages of Love in the Time of Cholera (imagining that I was Florentino Ariza), helped Nurse Natalya fold laundry (mentioned the candles), practiced holding my breath for over three minutes, practiced a card trick I read about in a book of magic from 1933, and considered how the DSM might diagnose Van Gogh if he lived today. At no point on the eighteenth day did I see Polina. According to Nurse Natalya, she was busy getting her first blood transfusion and then some more chemotherapy.
DAY 17
Stars and Stairwells
I woke up on day seventeen at about 6:58 in the A.M., checked my body parts, and slithered across the cold linoleum floor to empty my pee bag. Only this time on my squirm to the toilet, I found four pieces of paper scattered around my door. I read each one and then rearranged them into their most probable order. The first one read, You awake?, the second one said, Forgive me?, the third, I’m still here…, and the fourth, Fourth floor, stairwell, lights-out, tomorrow.
As every day is exactly the same, there is really no point in sharing the details leading up to the moment, probably 10:01 in the P.M., when I pushed through the non-cripple-friendly double steel door leading into the fourth-floor stairwell, which was, incidentally, the top floor of the hospital, to find Polina sitting on the highest step without her chair and doodling in her journal. Behind her there was a red steel ladder leading up to a red door, which opened up to the roof. There also happened to be a long white bedsheet dangling from the opening.
“I’m done with the chair, so don’t ask,” she said while bouncing up and stuffing her journal into the ass section of her sweatpants. “Did you know this existed?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
And I did. If I were to issue my best guess, I’d say I spent approximately five hundred hours sitting underneath this door pondering the engineering required for me to make it up the ladder and through the hole with one arm and no legs.
“Have you been up there recently?” she asked.
“Have you looked at me recently?” I replied.
“Yes, I have actually. Which is why I made you a mechanism.”
“A mechanism?”
“Yes, a mechanism.”
“All I see is a bedsheet.”
“A bedsheet and a pulley,” she said.
Which is when I realized it was in fact a bedsheet plus a wheelchair wheel, which she was using as a pulley-like device (and also explained the absence of her wheelchair).
“You only need to hold on,” she said.
“Hold on with what?” I asked.
“With your hand.”
Then we both synchronistically looked down at my three fingers.
“That won’t be a problem,” she said, and then she produced a roll of state-approved medical gauze.
“Where did you find that?”
“Behind Miss Kristina’s desk.”
Inspiration and zealot-like fervor: DSM’s diagnostic criteria for a manic state.
A manic state: DSM diagnostic criterion for bipolar disorder.
Then my mother appeared just behind Polina to say: Try not to judge. Death brings out the manic in the best of us.
“You’re going to tie me to this sheet?” I asked for further clarification.
“I’m going to tie you, and you’re going to hold on with all your fingers.”
“No,” I said.
“Come here,” she said, and I obeyed, rolling out of my chair, onto the ground, and writhing my way over to the sheet dangling from the roof.
“Hold this to your chest,” she said, pressing the white linen to my T-shirt, which I did, and when I did, she started wrapping my body to the sheet, possibly twenty or thirty revolutions worth, at which point I said, “I think that’s enough.” Then she added two more for good measure.
“Hold on,” she said, which I did, eventually, but my nubs left the ground before she finished the directive. My first thought was that it looked entirely too easy for her to pull down handful after handful of sheet, which made me feel approximately emasculated. But I let it go after I remembered my second thought, which was that Polina recently had to endure vomiting all over herself in my presence just a few days ago. So I attempted some relaxation techniques I’d read about in a book on managing stress and let my head fall back while watching the night sky get steadily closer through the hole in the roof. This was the first time I’d ever seen the sky at night, and I was, to be candid, surprised that stars twinkle just like the songs say.
By the time I finished thinking this last thought, I found myself in the precarious position of being eye to eye with the ceiling door with no more sheet above me.
“I can hold you for now, Ivan,” Polina said. “But you’re going to need to get your ass on the roof.”
“But I only have one—”
“Blah, blah, blah. And I’ve had enough chemotherapy to kill Rasputin, which means you’d better pull yourself up, or I’m going to drop you like a dead baby.”
My best guess would be four minutes. That’s how long my one extremity fumbled around the opening in the roof in order to establish the leverage required to hoist myself the rest of the way up, while Polina held the sheet steady as she sweat, quivered, and verbally abused me from below. There were several moments when my head already decided to give up. But then my mother would show up for a moment to tell me stories of pregnant women lifting cars up off their trapped children, which inspired me to summon the pissed-off pregnant mother inside of me, who I truly believe lives in all of us.
I was probably on the roof for thirteen seconds before I realized that I was on the roof. It took hearing Polina’s voice to pull me back into reality.
“How is it up there?”
Instead of answering, I decided to take the sky in for the first time and also peel the thirty revolutions of gauze from my torso.
“Ivan, say something.”
I heard her feet climbing the metal rungs of the ladder.
“I’m okay.”
“Good,” she said as her shiny bald head popped out of the opening. She took a moment to drink in the night sky with me before continuing:
“I grew up in Lviv, where there is too much light in the city to see the stars at night. Thank sweet baby Jesus of Bethlehem for piece-of-shit Mazyr.”
I was too stuck on the stars to respond.
“Blin!* My little Ivan, you’ve never seen the night sky before, have you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“But only through your window.”
“That is accurate.”
“No one would take you?”
“No.”
“Not even Natalya?”
“She would. She asked once. She actually asked more than once.”
“And?”
“And I said no.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ivan, of course you know!”
And I did. We both knew that I knew.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of everything.”
“It makes no sense to be afraid of anything, let alone everything.”
“It doesn’t mean you aren’t.”
To which I didn’t respond, because I didn’t know what to say, which led Polina to break the uncomfortable silence:
“Well, I graciously accept the award for taking your virgin flower.”
I spit out a reflexive laugh, which caused Polina to spit one out too. Then we sat quietly, without saying anything to each other for the next twenty minutes, which was nice, though Polina eventually talked again.
“My mother and father were so different. My mother refused to believe in anything she couldn’t see, and my fat
her dreamed all the time. The sky reminds me of him. He was addicted to astrology. He explained every quirk and idiosyncrasy in everyone we met with the stars. He said that when he was a boy, he and his family spent a summer in Tallinn, because Chechnya was not safe. One night, he took a walk and met a Gypsy selling okra and cucumbers. She made a deal with him. She said, ‘If I tell you three things that will happen to you in the next three days and they all come true, will you come back here on the fourth day?’ And he agreed.”
“What were the three things?”
“On the first day, she said, it would rain tarantulas from the sky, but aside from being a bit foul, he had nothing to worry about, since tarantula bites are not dangerous in themselves, and weather has a soul of its own. On the second day, she said, he would hear a droning hum for most of the morning, but, again, not to be afraid of it because it was there to repair his unconscious. And on the third day, everything would appear normal until he found himself, mysteriously, in a completely different place, disoriented, with no explanation of how he got there, but still he shouldn’t be afraid because it meant that he transcended time and space.”
“All of them came true?”
“No, none of them.”
“Then why are you telling me the story?”
“Because I left out the best part.”
“What’s the best part?”
“He went back on the fourth day to berate the Gypsy, but when he got there, the Gypsy was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, screaming, ‘Oh, Russian boys!’ between gasps of air. My father said it took her so long to calm down that he lost his patience and tried to leave, but she lured him back with some baklava.”
“And?”
“And he stayed. And they talked every day.”
“I don’t believe in astrology.”
“I don’t either. But I do believe in stars. Astrology is concept. Stars are just stars.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I didn’t want to seem like an idiot by asking her to clarify, so I nodded and went back to looking at the sky.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 13