Nurse Natalya knelt next to my bed and put her face right up to mine.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Ivan, she asked if you were an option before you even asked.”
Which meant Polina was not repellent to the possibility of having some of me inside of her if it meant saving her life.
“I would still like you to leave.”
“Yes, Ivan.”
She put down the croissant on the table next to my bed.
“One more thing,” she said before walking out. “The nurses received a memo that Lyudmila will not have duty for the next week. Elena will be working her nights.”
Then she closed the door behind her.
I took a bite of the croissant and then let it drop back out of my mouth after a few chews because the Director appeared in my room, sitting in the corner, telling me that surely I was unhappy now, and if so, shouldn’t I leave? Then it occurred to me that the only way I would be able to make him leave instead would be to hurl the back of my head against the wall behind me, which I did several times until the splotch of blood made me squeamish enough to collapse and squirm to sleep.
Currently, the clock reads 10:58 in the A.M.
I’ve been writing for fifty-nine hours.
It is the fifth day of December.
The year is 2005.
Nurse Natalya knocked a few minutes ago.
How’s my baby Bulgakov?
I didn’t answer her.
Because I was on the verge of asking her.
But the words got stuck in my throat
or somewhere lower.
Maybe I was a sip shy.
I’ll be back later.
She closed the door.
DAYS 11 AND 10
Crying with Nabokov
This time I woke up when the red digital matchsticks arranged themselves to say 1:54 in the A.M. I know this because just before I read it, I heard a slow, gentle, arrhythmic, and noncommittal knock at my door, followed by a slow, gentle, arrhythmic, and noncommittal whisper.
“Are you awake?”
The dread, the anxiety, the existential crisis, the arguable psychosis: it all evaporated with just those whispers, which resulted in a newfound respect for this particular drug (love? infatuation? addiction? enslavement?). I also felt personally humbled by my private ridiculing of the characters inside my novels and those who flickered across the TV and the icons from history who did asinine things in the name of romance.
To all the Romeos and all the Juliets—I absolve you.
“Polina?”
“Where have you been?”
“Asleep.”
“Can I come in?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Polina walked in, and it occurred to me that it was the first time I’d seen her since the Incident. A fraction of a moon bleeding in through my barred windows provided the only light of the room. It was an unforgiving light that emphasized every shadow caused by her ever-shrinking and sharpening face. She was, however, wearing a small red hat in place of her wig, which I found to be an alarmingly good look for her, despite her emaciated state.
“What happened with Mikhail?”
I wasn’t at all prepared for this question or a perfectly truthful response. At the same time, lying to her was approximately impossible.
“I had to look into his cold, dark soul,” I said with 60 percent of a smile to ensure that she knew that I was at least 60 percent playing.
“Seriously, did he threaten you like a big, fat buffoon? And then did you drop those pictures on his desk and pop his big, fat balloon?”
“I didn’t need to.”
“What?”
“He just wanted to talk.”
“About?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“About nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing of substance. Mostly small talk.”
Polina thought while she looked at my pupils. Then she said, “Did you tell him Lyudmila hit me?”
“He knew.”
“Did he mention it?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know he knew?”
“Because he said it without words. It will never happen again.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I said it too.”
“In words?”
“No, I said it the same way he—”
Before I could even finish this sentence, I could see that there was a tremor in Polina’s hand, which began to palpitate like a drug-induced metronome. Then the quaking spread from her hands into her arms, then throughout her entire body. And when it got to her face, it spread into her eyes, where the shaking turned to liquid and heavy streams started to flow across her face at biologically questionable volumes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but the last half of “sorry” was only air, so she said it again. And then she fell to the ground and started to heave and lurch like a fish, and the quaking mixed with sounds, such as tiny rhythmic howls and the staccato of her nose trying to snort all her liquids back into her body.
“It’s okay,” I reassured her, though I knew it wasn’t, primarily because the quaking was contagious, and I noticed my own hand begin to waver.
“This is my fault,” she said.
“It is your fault,” I said. “But who cares.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. And she repeated it over and over with her head in her own hands.
I’m sorry. So sorry. So sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry. So. Sor—. Sorr—. Sorry.
She was breaking up before my eyes.
“Come here,” I said.
She didn’t move.
“Come here,” I said, forcefully, like a man.
She brought her knees beneath her and crawled over to the edge of my bed. Then I cradled her tiny head and wiped the tears off her face with my thumb because that’s also what I had seen in movies and also because the quaking had spread to my own eyes.
“I’m done. I’m over,” she said.
“Not quite.”
“Quite.”
In my professional opinion, that was when all the barriers and all the defense mechanisms fell to the floor like battle-pocked plates of armor, because the storm turned to hysteria, and she struggled to take breaths in between sobs.
I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t dying, but she was.
I wanted to tell her that we’re all dying, but that was annoying.
I wanted to tell her that it would get better, but it was about to get worse.
So I just said, “I know.” And repeated it at intervals that felt appropriate, while rocking her body at the pace of my own clunky rhythm. And she repeated, I’m dying, dying, dying, dy-ing, I’m going to give up the ghost. And then the refrain turned to whispers, and eventually the whispers faded into air, as did the quaking, and Polina’s tiny pale face was asleep in my arm.
I waited for as long as it took for my brain to catch up with the moment so that it could fully realize the absurdity and improbability of itself. The corresponding endorphins must have been enough to lull me into a sedated opiatic state, because I have no more memories of that night until approximately 4:32 in the A.M. when I half awoke to find Polina fully in my bed, with my partial body cradled around her, my one arm draped around her body, and blankets spread over the both of us, without any recollection of how we arrived in that configuration.
I lifted my body high enough to see her sweet, undulating face, which was now prone and open and void of any resistance, almost as if she fast-tracked through the Kübler-Ross model of grief, from denial to acceptance after nearly suffocating to death on her tears.
I shifted the blankets and checked my legs.
I thought about waking her. I thought about telling her that she should go before someone found us here together. But I decided to let us sleep. And after a few minutes of trying, I realized that my eyes wouldn’t close, so I just held her and let her sleep and got acquainted with the rhyth
m of her breathing.
* * *
At some point, the sun cracked the horizon wide open, resulting in Polina shifting through the sheets, and rolling away from the sun—which meant toward me—causing her to jump six inches vertically when she found us in bed with our noses glancing.
I scanned my head for the appropriate thing to say in this particular situation, but everything that came up was faintly self-deprecating, or suggestive, or defensive, or awkward. So instead, I waited for her brain to collect the memories of the last eight hours and recall on her own why she was in bed, braided up with a circus freak. In her eyes, I could watch the filmstrip of recollections pass by until she accepted the story line and said, “Hi.”
To which I said, “Hi.”
To which she said, “Remember how when I first came to this hospital you just stared like a bug and wouldn’t talk?”
To which I said, “Fuck you.”
To which she attempted to put her pillow into my mouth.
She closed her eyes and looked like she was heading back to sleep, which I took as a promising sign of comfort, though I did not know why I still unconsciously and habitually searched for signs of comfort considering that Polina would be dead in a few days.
With her eyes still closed, Polina interrupted my stream of thought.
“I’m done,” she said.
I assumed she meant with her life again, but I thought it was worth clarifying.
“With what?” I asked.
“With the poison.”
Which seemed reasonable to me. Three months and seven days, ten hours a day, a gleaming bald head, vomit and diarrhea all day, and nothing to show for it in the way of depleted bone marrow. From a utilitarian perspective, it made more sense to quit than to live the last days of her life in formidable misery. Still, something inside urged me to play devil’s advocate or at least pretend I didn’t know as much as I did.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“They told me it wouldn’t make a difference anymore,” she said.
“Who told you?”
“Some doctor from the city who comes in to tell me how much I’m dying, and his student.”
She was referring to Dr. Stanislav Kariyev, the city oncologist.
“Dr. Kariyev?”
“Yes. He told me it would only kill me faster at this point.”
Polina coughed several times, which made the veins extending from her temples to her neck bulge through her cellophane skin as they wove in and out of the red splotches that were flourishing across her face like poinsettia. (Dr. Kariyev called these spots petechiae when referring to other leukemia kids.) I also noticed a smell drifting out of her skin, not quite sweet and not quite sour; not subtle but not pungent.
“Then I agree with you.”
I suspected that I should say this confidently, so I did.
“You know what this means?”
“What?”
Once again I expected her to remind me of her upcoming death.
“It means we can see each other during the day, and I’m not at risk of shitting myself in your presence. We can start checking things off your list.”
“My list?”
“The one that you made with everything you wanted to do before they buried me.”
I must have looked surprised, because she said:
“Don’t look so surprised. I obviously saw that while you were sleeping too.”
To which I replied:
“So were you leaning toward making out in priest/nun attire or having sex on the roof?”
To which she laughed courteously, so I added:
“I think the roof is closer and, therefore, the more realistic option.”
Still face-to-face and somewhat pretzelized in the bed, Polina laughed, and a burst of moist air, which smelled sweet like warm jam, flew into my face. Then she pinched her lips together, and her eyes rolled into her imagination.
“We should read the best book ever written,” she said.
“You have one foot in the ground, and you want to spend your time analyzing classic Russian literature?” I asked.
“I suppose we could ski the Alps like I always wanted,” she said.
Touché, Polina.
“Your pick.”
“My last book needs to be Nabokov,” she said.
“Invitation to a Beheading?”
“Too depressing.”
“Laughter in the Dark?”
“Lolita.”
“Lolita is less depressing?”
“Lolita is sexual. And dark. But not depressing.”
“Lolita is acceptable.”
“Of course it is. It’s my last book.”
“I propose we read it straight through. No sleep until the last page.”
“Do you turn everything into a game?” she asked.
“Everything.”
“Ivan?”
“Yes?”
“How do you even start a book you know is going to be your last?”
“You lie and say it’s not.”
“Lying is impossible at the moment. Dying is like truth serum.”
I writhed out of my bed and wormed my way into the pseudocloseted region of my room, where I had not two but three different copies of Lolita. I knew this because it was my favorite book from 1998 to 1999, and I lied and told Natalya I’d lost it twice, only to make sure I had extra copies in case of some apocalyptic event. I rummaged through a miniature avalanche, which spread over my floor, until I found one, and then two, Lolitas; the latter I tossed to Polina. She looked at the book from every angle and caressed all six surfaces.
“When do we start?” she asked.
“After breakfast, or Natalya will worry.”
“You love her,” she said declaratively.
“You can close your eyes again. I will make sure we wake up in time.”
She looked at me with unimaginably blue eyes for a few more seconds, and then she let them fall closed, where they stayed hidden until breakfast hour.
* * *
We sipped cabbage juice like normal. In the middle, Nurse Natalya approached her with a clipboard and a pen, and whispered a few somethings into her ear, at which point Polina scribbled her name down. Natalya’s eyes couldn’t help jerking over to me a few times in the process, which provided an opportunity to catch her attention during one of them, at which point she walked back over to me and whispered a few somethings in my ear as well.
“Why are you whispering?” I asked. “No one knows, and no one cares.”
* * *
I said: “One, two…”
“No, when the clock says eight,” she said. It was 7:59 so …
Fair enough, Polina.
When the red matchsticks shifted, we both entered a trancelike state of absorption, where the only thing that evolved was our physical configuration, which morphed from parallel (with a holy ghost between us), to perpendicular (with her legs draped over my trunk), to antiparallel (with her feet in my face).
The only interruptions came when Nurse Natalya would knock twice, open the door, and drop off two pieces of baklava, or two boiled pierogi, or two pastillas, all nonstandard menu cuisine. She spoke to us only once: “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be in the Main Room with the gingers?”
Translation: “There is only so long I can make excuses for your disappearances.”
We both slowly rotated our heads from our books, to each other, then to her and shook them categorically no.
“I see,” she said, then left.
Other interruptions came in the form of our favorite lines bursting out of our mouths like Tourette’s tics.
Polina (33 minutes in): Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece …
Ivan’s response: And the rest is rust and stardust.
Ivan (339 minutes in): I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.
Polina’s response: Imagine being stuck inside of a story?<
br />
Polina (608 minutes in): He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
Ivan’s response: Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.
We were interrupted again much later on, somewhere around the eighteenth hour, by Polina herself. Spontaneously, she stopped reading and set the book over her chest, which was now flat and taut enough to serve as an adequate surface. Her eyes locked onto the ceiling as if she were looking through to the clouds on the other side. Potential diagnoses included absence seizure, Ivan-like coma, or rapturous daydreaming.
“Polina?”
“Is any of this happening?”
I wondered if this was a rhetorical question in disguise so I said:
“I think so.”
“It doesn’t feel real.”
“What?”
“Any of it.”
“The book?”
“This book, all books, my thoughts, all my dreams, the dreams of my parents. It doesn’t feel like it should be over.”
“It doesn’t feel real because it’s not over.”
It was almost too obvious to me. To her too, because her eyes came back to life and rolled over to me, while her body remained still.
“Don’t die before you’re dead. And if you do, let it be the good kind,” I said.
“What’s the good kind?”
“When the only part that dies is who you were supposed to be.”
“Ah, the good kind.”
“Yes.”
“Good kind, good kind, good kind.” Her words became weaker and more whimsical with every iteration as her eyes wobbled on the edge of some invisible fulcrum until gravity had its way, and they fell shut. Polina slept, and I was the first to finish Lolita.
DAY 9
Blood Brothers
I awoke to the simultaneously welcoming and shrill voice of Polina, along with the feeling of her shaking my body like I was a bath towel.
“You shit,” she said.
“What?”
“You weren’t supposed to let me sleep.”
“That was not a stipulation of our parley.”
“I expected more from you. Also, I’m heading to my room. I haven’t changed my clothes in three days. Plus my cheeks are salty.”
Polina had developed a smell that was sweet like a soiled baby, only with a hint of death. I quickly gathered the two remaining pastillas from our literary marathon along with all associated crumbs and said, “Take these.” I knew that at this stage the thought of food in general turned her stomach inside out, and nothing less than sugar would overwhelm the disgust response. She thanked me and left. I, however, was obligated to show up at the breakfast table due to previous contractual commitments I had made with Nurse Natalya.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 17