Most of the mutants were assembled in their seats by the time I arrived, and just like always, I took my seat unnoticed. But somehow, everyone, the entire ensemble, the scene, and the setting all looked different. Pinker maybe, or more innocent (maybe pink is the color of innocence) or less caustic, or a fraction less dreadful. I’ve inquired to the authority inside if something in the breakfast-hour routine had truly changed (possibilities include a new brand of lightbulb, some trimmed trees outside the barred windows, or some mass hygiene initiative for the less-abled patients). I only know that for a few seconds while I sipped a tolerable bowl of cabbage juice, I felt as though I was coexisting and not merely tolerating the other bodies at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.
After my fill of cabbage juice, I wheeled my way around the asylum with no agenda but to count the number of objects that seemed different. When I’d had enough of this, I returned to my bedroom to read a few pages, but I only made it through a noun and two adverbs before Nurse Natalya burst into room without knocking, holding a stack of linens.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I need to change your sheets,” she said.
“No, you don’t need to change my sheets. It’s not a Tuesday, and it’s not the third week of the month.”
Nurse Natalya dropped the linen and sat her plump ass on the edge of my bed.
“We have a favor to ask of you,” she said.
“No promises.”
“I think you will want to do this favor.”
“Okay.”
“She needs transfusions. They might give her a few days.”
“Are you looking for permission?”
“We’re looking for help.”
“With the transfusion?”
“With your blood.”
“You want me to give her my blood?”
“She is AB negative, and the banks are dry.”
Which, I’m regularly told, has been the case since Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, AB negative is the rarest blood type in the universe. I, however, am O negative, which means my blood mixes with the entire human race. I know this because the city of Mazyr (under the auspices of Mikhail Kruk) has approached me every month for eleven years to donate blood, and I’ve categorically refused. This is because no individual human life in the abstract has ever been important enough to face my pathological fear of blood.
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought so,” she said.
And with that, Nurse Natalya dove inside her stack of linens. Tucked inside were an empty pint bag, a syringe, and a few feet of tubing. She dropped the linens and instantly stabbed the needle into my vein, before there was any chance for me to (A) change my mind, or (B) have any psychophysical reaction that would hijack the process.
Clever, Natalya.
Blood that touches the atmosphere has always been worse than blood that runs through a plastic tube. This offered me just enough space to approximately enjoy the way the blood spiraled and spurted up through the translucent tubing and pooled into the plastic bag, while my nubs trembled and my forehead obtained a glossy sheen.
“Just ten seconds, Ivan,” she said. “That’s all it takes.”
This was true, except that time lives in the mind, and seconds stop being seconds when your heart is on fire.
“Eight … seven … six…,” she said, as entire masturbatory episodes flashed through my head.
“There’s nothing wrong with it?” I asked, just to clarify.
“Your blood?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t be worse than hers,” she answered with a demonic smile. “Three … two … one … and we’re done. You kind soul.”
“She won’t know?”
“Only if she asks. Belarusian law.”
“In the Red Room?”
“Where else? But I’m sure you don’t want to watch.”
She closed the door with her bag of blood in tow as I turned to the clock and waited for the minute to be up and then one more before wheeling my way over to the edge of the Red Room. I leaned in as unnoticeably as possible. Nurse Natalya, Nurse Katya, and a doctor from the city, whom I had seen several times before but whose name I never knew, were all surrounding Polina. I watched as Katya made a pincushion out of Polina’s forearm by repeatedly missing her vein. When she finally found the vein, I watched several heartbeats worth of hot blood spurt (which also was not supposed to happen) while Polina winced and moaned.
“No worries. It’s bad blood anyhow, kid,” Katya said.
Just shy of the fourth spurt, Natalya managed to connect the tube coming out of Polina’s arm into the plump purplish bag dangling from the mobile IV stand. A few seconds later, I watched the level in that bag begin to drop as my blood mixed with Polina’s.
* * *
I rolled back into the Main Room, found a tennis ball inside the toy box, and started bouncing it off the wall repeatedly while the universe around me fell away. Then I dropped the ball and fell into a coma, recognizing I was due one. Unfortunately, it was short-lived, because seven minutes later, I opened my eyes to find Nurse Natalya shaking me awake.
“She’s asleep. We’ll have to monitor her in the Red Room for most of the day. We need to make sure she doesn’t have a reaction to the blood,” she said.
“Why are you telling me?”
“I figured you would want to know.”
“I do and I don’t.”
“You do.”
“What if she reacts?”
“We suppress her immune system.”
“It’s already weak.”
“I know.”
“She will die.”
“Yes,” she said. “She will. Either today or tomorrow or next week. Or in a hundred years.”
She turned around and started walking away, and as she did she said, “I will help with the pieces.”
I went back to comaland but realized that my standard feigned comas were haunted by ghosts and ghouls when bad things were happening. It occurred to me that I should make my coma legitimate. So I wheeled myself into the Red Room, kissed Polina’s sweaty forehead, pulled a syringe of morphine out from the morphine drawer, rolled beside her, and injected the needle into my vein.
DAY 8
The Organic Wonderland (and Other Conversations)
I awoke on the eighth day in my bed to Polina combing the shaggy hair off my sweaty forehead with her fingers. Her eyes were yellow, and the skin on her face was starting to crack. I could also feel her fever radiating through the molecules between her face and mine. But in spite of all the decay, her irises continued to be heartbreakingly blue.
“Don’t go away like that again,” she said.
“Where did I go?”
“Apparently into a morphine syringe.”
“I did?”
“They said you could’ve died. It’s the dose they use to sedate Dennis, and three of you fit into him.”
“I was just trying to pass the time.”
“You almost beat me to death.”
That’s when the door swung open revealing a frenzied Nurse Natalya. She walked over to my face, propped my eyelids open with her fingers, shined a bright penlight into my retina, let the lids snap back closed, slapped me in the face, and then exited the room.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“A bit better. Thanks to you.”
“They told you?”
“I overheard that too.”
“When?”
“When I was asleep. Or waking up. Or some combination. We’re blood brothers, I suppose.”
Then Polina pulled on a fistful of my hair and asked:
“Does this hurt?”
To which I said:
“What the fuck? Why are you pulling my hair?”
To which she replied:
“Because you need to wake up. You just took morphine.”
To which I said:
“I’m awake. And now prematurely balding.”
Then Polina said:
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“Let’s go outside.”
“And do what?”
“Just sit. Talk. Listen to things.”
“Really?”
“These walls are making me ill.”
“We can’t go outside.”
“Really, have you asked?”
“Since I was old enough to talk.”
“Let’s ask Natalya.”
Polina stood up carefully because leukemia makes balance a coveted commodity and walked out of the room, ignoring two or three protests on my part. I wormed into my clothes and made it halfway into my chair before she returned with Nurse Natalya.
“Ask her,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Ask me what?” Natalya asked.
“Ivan, I’m going to be in the dirt in a few days, so grow some mudyá and ask her.”
“Polina would like to know if we can go outside,” I asked.
“Well, obviously you can, Ivan, but you won’t,” she said. Then she turned to Polina and said:
“I’ve been trying to get him outside since before he knew words.”
Before I could protest, Polina shoved me the rest of the way into my chair, and I was suddenly halfway down the hall. Elena and Lyudmila and Kristina (“Hi, Polina; Hi, Ivan”) all watched with varying degrees of gape as I crossed the threshold of the big brown double doors for the second time since I arrived at the asylum.
There was a small concrete ramp that led down to a courtyard with scattered flowers of differing varieties and colors and a modest fountain bath that had not been used in the twentieth or twenty-first century. The sky was Belarusian gray with thick patches of drunk clouds.
“Stay as long as you like, or don’t come back at all,” Natalya said, and she walked away. Once her body disappeared back through the doors, I said nothing. And Polina didn’t either. And almost as if it were planned, droplets started to pelt our heads and skin as we sat silently and, at least on my part, awkwardly, as my muscles and tendons worked together to shrivel my skin. Polina reached with her glossy pink tongue, which looked strikingly healthy compared to the rest of her decaying body, to catch the acid rain.
“That can kill you,” I said.
She only looked back at me like, Stop being a curmudgeon. Then the frequency of the droplets increased, and our clothes started to soak.
“Let’s get back in before you get sicker,” I said.
She gulped a mouthful, gargled it in her throat, and spit it out like a Roman fountain.
When her mouth was empty, she asked, “What is it?”
“What is what?” I asked.
“Why are you crawling out of your skin?”
“I’m not.”
Polina stopped collecting water in her mouth and looked at me for a few seconds. Then she wiped away the beads of rain accumulating on her bald head.
“Never mind. I already know.”
“What?”
Polina continued to play with the water falling from the sky.
“Look at you. You’re shaking, Ivan,” she said.
“It’s cold.”
“It’s your heart beating through your skin.”
“I’m fine.”
“Want to know my theory?”
“Sure.”
“When you’re inside, everything is comfortably broken. When you’re out here, everything is alive. But you feel better around broken things.”
By now, every cell in my body was shaking. But I was stuck in my head, which meant that my eyes were stuck on a single bead of rain sliding down a single blade of grass.
“Why are you still here, Ivan?”
“Here in this life, or here in this hospital?”
“The hospital. Actually, either…”
Then, before I could answer, she performed an unexpected kindness. She stood up and held either side of my quaking face in her hands, and she kissed my lips. And instead of pulling away quickly, as if out of charity, she kept her face close to mine and looked at me with her intolerably blue eyes until I stopped. Then her fragile little body weakly pushed me through the grass underneath an oak tree, which was largely impervious to the rain. Then we sat without talking for the rest of the afternoon and watched things happen.
* * *
We were back in the hospital before dusk, and by the time the sun set completely, Polina’s fever rose to forty degrees. Nurse Natalya was running around flailing her arms, gathering acetaminophen, and publicly berating herself for letting us sit in the rain.
“She’ll be taking an ice bath tonight, Ivan,” she said.
They wheeled her delirious body into the White Room, which has a large stained tub and almost nothing else. I followed because it was easy to stay cloaked in the chaos of the moment. I watched them pull off her clothes, one cotton article at a time, until all that was left was her purple-and-white body, which looked like it had been starved and tortured in a Kazakh prison. The cancer had become like a time machine, eating her curves away until she arrived back at her prepubescent state. Katya and Natalya lifted her up, while her semi-lucid head dangled like a pendulum off her torso. Lyudmila started the cold water running and then poured a bucket of ice into the cold soup. When her body hit the water, Polina screamed, and her arms punched the air while she hollered a variety of obscenities. The nurses did their best to hold her body down, until she stopped screaming and just twitched in the water while her eyes focused loosely on some hallucinated event on the ceiling.
* * *
Polina was brought into the Red Room, where she slept, and I went back to the lab to give up another pint of blood. Nurse Natalya took the needle out of my arm and put my blood in a refrigerator. Then I wheeled myself to the Red Room and wiped the fever sweat from Polina’s head, determined to be present for any last heartbeats.
DAY 7
дзень я закахаўся ў*
I woke up on the seventh day to find that I had been using the metal rail of Polina’s bed as a pillow all night and that her fingers were laced with mine. Given that I did not have the confidence to initiate this degree of intimate contact on my own, I deduced that our fingers somehow found each other while we were sleeping.
A few seconds later, Nurse Elena, vodka vapors abounding, came in and slipped a thermometer under Polina’s tongue as she slept. Polina stirred gently, whimpered slightly, but didn’t wake. Then Nurse Elena pulled the thermometer from her mouth and swung it up close to her eyes.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Thirty-nine.”
“So, she’s better.”
“Somewhat.”
Then Nurse Elena left, and a few seconds later I followed her.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Another transfusion.”
“And then?”
“Then nothing.”
I wheeled back to the Red Room, put our fingers back into the configuration they were in when I woke up, and waited for something to happen. I waited for her breath to change, or for her body to shift, or her eyebrows to scrunch, or for her eyes to flutter below her eyelids, which would tell me she was dreaming. At some point during the waiting, I must have fallen asleep too, because there was a break in my consciousness followed by waking to the sensation of suffocation, which was Polina pinching my nose. I gasped for air, and she laughed a mischievous but evidently dying laugh.
“That wasn’t funny.”
“Then why am I laughing?”
I noticed our interlaced fingers again and quickly reconfigured them to something less intimate.
“I had a weird dream,” she said.
“Forty degrees will do that.”
“Don’t you want to hear about it?”
“I do.”
“Everyone was there. And by everyone, I mean everyone. The entire world. All seven billion people or however many there are now. All in one big, empty field with long grass and nothing else.”
“How did you know it was everyone?”
“I just knew. You know
how in dreams you just know?”
“Sometimes.”
“You were there, and my parents, and everyone I knew was close by. The people I didn’t know were on the outside.”
“I was there?”
“Yes.”
“What did I look like?”
“Like you.”
“Anything else?”
“My mother was crying. And everyone else—the whole world—just turned to me. Even the trees. And the weird part was that they didn’t have faces. And everything was perfectly quiet. Except for Sputnik, who was barking like it was the end of the world.”
“Maybe it was.”
“Maybe.”
I tried to feel her forehead, halfheartedly because I did not actually know what an inappropriate temperature felt like but wanted to appear like a competent caregiver.
“Still there, huh?” she asked.
“Not like yesterday.”
“Ivan, you can put your hand back.”
“On your head?”
“On my hand.”
I followed her orders.
“What is this?” she asked.
“What is what?”
“This?”
She lifted our interlaced hands for a few seconds and then let them fall back to the bed.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s strange.”
“You don’t want to die alone.”
“Nothing more?”
“Anything ‘more’ is your brain making meaning—”
“And the brain needs meaning … I know. You’re so unbearably you, Ivan.”
“But I’m right.”
“Maybe.”
“If we weren’t in this hospital and you saw me in a restaurant, you would be just beautiful enough to be disgusted by me and just soulful enough to pity me.”
“You don’t make me wet, Ivan, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not asking anything.”
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 18