“I was born on April 5,” she said.
“Aries.”
“What do you know about Aries?”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.”
“Aries want to be the center of the universe. Someone like you would say that’s because I’m an only child. And that may be true. But that’s not the only way I make the perfect Aries. I’m loud, and I’m in love with life. Or at least I used to be before I got sick. It’s hard to love life anymore.”
Her eyes moved from me back to the stars.
“When were you born, Ivan?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know when you were born?”
“No.”
Polina was silent for a few seconds, and I remember her eyes looked calm and gentle like she was trying to be careful with me, which, incidentally, was not very Aries of her. Then in her most high-pitched, academic, nasally voice, she said:
“Ivan, could you tell me more about that?” which sounded entirely too much like Dr. Boulatnikov, our current resident psychologist. And with those words, Polina accidentally pushed the button inside my brain that was responsible for releasing all the laughter that was ever held inside but never allowed out. It started with innocent enough burps. And then a river of thick saliva started running down my chin and pooled onto my lap, which made me laugh harder, which instigated Polina to laugh too, which brought the feedback loop to the next level, which made me lose control of my proprioception, which made me roll all over the cold cement of the rooftop. I lost the ability to breathe. I was gasping for air, tears streaming down my face, begging for Polina to make it stop, somewhat aware that I was in the process of laughing out all the absurdity, and all the isolation, and all my grievances against the universe in one spastic, uncontrollable fit. And eventually, Polina was scared.
“Ivan!” she yelled while cradling my tiny spasming body. “It wasn’t that funny.”
I tried to say words back to her, but I was too busy trying to breathe.
“Ivan, what? What are you trying to say? Calm the fuck down,” she said while slapping my cheeks repeatedly. Her face looked stuck between panic and not falling back into the pit of laughter I was stuck in. Still, she had the presence of mind to hold my head off the concrete and wipe the tears off my face.
Eventually I could say, “I never laughed like that before.”
“Not once?”
“I practiced in the mirror, but never for real.”
“Never?”
“It needed to happen.”
As I looked up at her, it occurred to me that this was the moment when, if we were trapped inside of a TV set, we would have kissed, which is when, not coincidentally, she gently let my head back down to the concrete and slid a few inches back.
“Glad you didn’t break your head,” she said. “I’m too sick and tired to clean the blood.”
To which I answered:
“I can answer your question.”
“What question?”
“Why I don’t know my birthday.”
“I’m listening.”
“I wrote it down. I can read it to you. Or you can read it.”
“What?”
“Everything from my nonexistent birthday until three days ago.”
“You wrote it for me?”
“It felt like the right thing to do after I stole your diary. I could keep you company while you get poisoned tomorrow.”
“Is it depressing?”
“My story?”
“Yes.”
“Of course.”
“I’m not sure I can handle depressing while I’m being poisoned.”
“Actually, it’s a fairy tale, and I’m the boy version of Cinderella.”
“You would need a foot to be Cinderella, Ivan.”
Touché, Polina.
“That was mean, which means you owe me.”
“No, I don’t.”
Those were her last words. I accepted her reticence, and she accepted my silence. Then we stared at the Milky Way until the urge to urinate forced me back inside.
Currently, the clock reads 2:58 in the A.M.
I’ve been writing for fifty-one hours.
It is the fifth day of December.
The year is 2005.
I slept for a few minutes.
It would have been longer if not for the
vodka having evaporated from my blood.
I shook the flask and heard a few drops rattling.
I drank all three of them and decided I needed more.
I knew the location of Elena’s
hidden stash.
From the laundry chute,
I obtained an entire bottle, minus a few swigs.
DAY 16
The Retroactive Biography of Ivan Isaenko
Click, check, repeat.
My internal alarm trumpeted. I checked my missing legs. I rolled off the bed. I slithered to the bathroom. I ignored the cold floor. I pissed myself dry. I slithered back. I mountaineered into my bed. I spread out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I wormed my way into both of them. I Tarzaned into my chair. I wheeled down to the cafeteria. I assumed my position. I checked Polina’s empty seat. I let pungent cabbage juice drip from my chin. I quit after three bites, which is when Nurse Elena strolled by half-inebriated and said to me, “The sick girl wanted Natalya, but Natalya’s not here. She gave me this.”
Then she dropped a piece of paper, and it careened down half into my cabbage juice.
“Sick girl has a name,” I said.
To which Elena did not respond.
So I said, “Polina.”
To which she still did not respond, which forced me to whisper bitch under my breath while I read the piece of paper. It said, Poison on high. Where are you?
I crammed the note into my shorts, and the wheels on my chair started moving by themselves. They rolled themselves back to my room, where I pried out my retroactive diary from under the edge of my mattress and then crammed it under my ass. Then my wheels turned themselves around and started rolling down to the Orange Room, which is where people receive chemotherapy.
As I had expected, Polina was the lone chemo patient in the room, since all the leuks, lymphs, and brainers had died in the last year. She was sitting in her poison chair, sketching in her diary, with yellow morning sunlight splashing her from different directions, ricocheting off the orange walls, mixing with the peach of her skin and the purples of her bruising, and curving around the new curves made out of her newly exposed bones. She looked like an expressionist painting, possibly brushed by someone suitably insane like Munch or Marc or Kirchner.
I decided to stay quiet and roll in slowly and wait till she noticed me so that I could enjoy the candid view for as long as I could. This was easy, since the room was a veritable labyrinth of old, defunct, obsolete, or irrelevant medical equipment that easily concealed my meandering wheelchair. And as I rolled like a wheel-bound ninja, it occurred to me that Polina, as bald and bony as she was, made this room about as tolerable as it was capable of getting. And as I was lost in these thoughts, I collided with some gray machine or another, and Polina’s startled head swung over to me and she reflexively yelled, “Sleaze!” To which I agreed. Then I continued to weave myself through the equipment until my chair was next to hers. She was facing the outside window, where the sun was particularly new.
“You look okay,” I said.
“I don’t feel okay.”
“What do you feel?”
“Like a mouse in a mousetrap just before it dies.”
She smiled like she knew she was being dramatic and then looked down at the notebook I’d just removed from under the seat of my pants.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“I thought it was too depressing.”
“I’m bored,” she said.
“You must be,” I said.
“Let me see it.”
I handed the notebook over to her.
“You wrote all this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“In three days?”
“In one night.”
She stopped talking for a few seconds and just fanned through the pages of what I’m sure appeared to be the handwriting of a young epileptic child living through a nonstop seizure.
“I was going to give it to you, but then you became a three-monther,” I said.
“This is a first.”
“What?”
“No one has ever written me a book.”
“Obviously.”
“Start.”
She handed the book back, and I turned to the first page. The words started falling out of my mouth with the slow, extremely deliberate, and overly academic delivery that the loose muscles in my face could accommodate. I read to her about the anonymous doorstop drop-off and how that meant that I’ve never been anywhere else. I read that I never met my parents but that I do have a mother who is a Tinker Bell–like apparition that pops into my life primarily when I’m contemplating suicide or about to commit a social blunder. I read about how every nurse, Nurse Natalya included, is far too squirmy and twitchy when I bring up my origins for there not to be more to the story. I read to her about waking up to the universe with a slap in the face and colorful language coming from a woman with a fuzzy mole on her upper lip. I read to her about how so much of my life isn’t real because it’s spent asleep, but really awake, but not really awake. I read her the fifty faces I wear, which I’m sure really only look like one. I read about the full encyclopedia of my defense mechanisms, ranging from denial to dissociation to displacement (not to mention repression, rationalization, and regression). I read every flavor of self-harm that goes through my head. I read through my various options for escape and how I haven’t the testicles for any of them. I read through the secret lives I’ve written for the Ivan I would be under any other set of circumstances. I read her the tenets of Ivanism. I read about how mad I am that He put such a big life into such a small, broken box. I read about being trapped with people just like me in every way except for the fact that they will never understand a thought that goes through my head. I read to her about my mistrust of karma. I read to her about my fourteen useless shrinks. I read about how none of it makes any sense, yet the little brain stuffed in all our heads needs things to make sense even though nothing makes sense. I read to her about her and about how when she arrived, things made a little more sense, and as soon as some sense was made for the first time, suddenly things stopped making sense because she became a three-monther. Sometimes I stuck to the script. Sometimes I stopped in between sentences to elaborate in order to accommodate the new level of rapport we had developed. Sometimes I paused to swallow a storm that was welling up my throat, which I blamed on a rare type of asthma. And not for one second of the whole confession did I dare look at her face for fear that I might shit my pants. I waited for the last sentence to be over before finally looking up, which, according to the clock on the Orange Room wall, came eighty-seven minutes after I started reading. And when I did look up at her face, I found that her cheeks were red, moist, and puffy despite her emaciated state.
“I would kill you myself if you even thought…,” she said slowly, on the cusp of a murmur, choking on some sympathies she clearly wasn’t expecting.
“I would never.”
“But you said—”
“I don’t have the balls.”
She was just close enough to touch my hand, which she did. Then she slowly moved her fingers around in little circles. This lasted for about seven seconds, until she said:
“From what I understand, you have quite active balls.”
To which I said:
“Not really.”
To which she said:
“I overheard them talking about your bedsheets.”
To which I said:
“You’re lying.”
To which she said:
“How else would I know that the nurses have to replace them twice as often as every other patient’s?”
And just as the repartee began to crescendo into its most playful state to date, her face changed into something frozen, as if one of her internal organs had exploded or she’d received a prophetic message that rapture would commence in T-minus five seconds and she wasn’t yet quite right with the Big Guy.
“You should go,” she said.
“But—”
“But you should go.”
I wheeled out of the Orange Room.
I didn’t see Polina anymore on the sixteenth day.
DAY 15
Polina’s Magic School Bus
(Three days until lab results)
Stem cells live inside bones. Stem cells can turn into either a myeloid stem cell or a lymphoid stem cell. If a stem cell turns into a myeloid stem cell, it will eventually turn into a myeloid blast. Myeloid blasts can become either a red blood cell, which carries oxygen to the brain, or platelets, which make it so that we don’t bleed to death when we get a paper cut. If a stem cell turns into a lymphoid stem cell, it becomes a white blood cell, which fights infections (and anything else that’s not supposed to be in blood). When old white blood cells die, stem cells make new lymphoid stem cells, which turn into new white blood cells to take their place. I know this because that’s how it works according to The Basic Science of Oncology, by Ian Tannock and Richard Hill, published in 1987 by the McGraw-Hill Companies.
I made Nurse Natalya find it for me on the fifteenth day. Not this book in particular but any book like it. She said she found it in Mikhail’s personal library and that he would never miss it, because in twenty-three years of working at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, she never once saw him touch a book. I made her find it after I rolled up to the Orange Room shortly after breakfast to find Polina in the midst of some combination of coughing and dry heaving while Nurse Natalya was catching the contents of her expulsion, which included a Pollock-esque mixture of mucus and blood. At some point, Nurse Natalya made the mistake of noticing me, which made Polina turn in suit, which inspired her to say, “Not now, Ivan. Go away.”
Polina makes bad white blood cells. Her white blood cells are immortal and vampiric. They overpopulate her blood and clog up all her good blood cells, which slowly die. Polina needs new stem cells that don’t make bad white blood cells. Then Polina would be okay.
Like most things in the universe, it’s not that simple. First, Polina has to use chemotherapy to kill every white blood cell in her body because the poison can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. This approximately makes her an all-you-can-eat buffet for infections. Second, Polina’s new white blood cells can only come from another person, and every person has antigens. Antigens tell the white blood cells which cells belong to the body and which do not. In other words, they tell the white blood cells who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. If a leukemia kid gets new bone marrow that doesn’t match his old bone marrow, the old white blood cells will think that the new white blood cells are bad guys. Within days, all the white blood cells kill each other, and she’s back to being an all-you-can-eat buffet. Polina needs stems cells that have her antigens. This is not easy. It’s not easy because we live in Chernobyl-town, Belarus, the blood disease capital of the world, where bone marrow transplants are more common than dental office visits.
On the fifteenth day, I approached Nurse Natalya while she was disinfecting a windowsill.
“How long is the list now?” I asked.
Nurse Natalya stopped wiping away germs from the hard-to-reach area underneath the lip of the sill and put down her towel. This meant that I was about to hear something that I didn’t want to hear.
“Thirty-three months,” she said.
“But she only has three months, and that’s only if she’s lucky,” I noted.
“The ones at the top of the list are the ones who have three days
. Or the children of government ministers,” she said.
According to Tannock and Hill, you get half of your antigens from your mom and half from your dad. Consequently, there is a 25 percent chance of finding a match in a sibling. According to Polina’s journal, she was an only child. This left the rest of the Belarusian donor community, which was small and included a wide range of misfits, most of which already have their own colorful genetic fingerprints. The chance of finding a match in someone who is not a sibling is about 3 percent.
“What do I need to do to get tested?” I asked.
“No, Ivan.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“Hypothetically.”
“I would need your blood. And some cheek cells.”
“That’s easy. Test me.”
“You’re not the gambling type.”
“Today I am.”
“It would take a Saint Christopher–type miracle.”
“Could she catch anything from me?”
“Like what?”
“Like what’s wrong with me.”
“Probably not.”
“Then test me.”
Nurse Natalya looked over my face, breathed out all the air in her lungs, and made a calculation. She calculated that there was no amount of arguing in this particular situation that would convince me to quit. When she was done calculating, her body surrendered, and she wheeled me into one of the supply rooms on the second floor, where she pulled out a needle and easily inserted it into a vein, possibly without even looking, mostly because my skin is like peach-colored plastic. Then she jammed a piece of cotton in my mouth, violently swabbed the inside of my cheek, and put everything in a plastic bag, which she then put into a brown envelope.
“The lab will take three days,” she said. “Or three weeks. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“On the moon.”
“She can’t wait that long.”
“I can’t change the laws of physics or laboratory wait times, Ivan.”
Then she knelt down to me so that our faces were close together.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 14