“If we were in any other two bodies, in any other place, at any other time, I would still feel like we first met as two quarks a few seconds after the big bang.”
“You expect me to take you seriously after that?”
“Gravely serious.”
“I think you need some blood. I should tell them you’re awake.”
I wheeled out of the Red Room and informed the nurses that Polina was ready for more blood. Then I went back to my room, picked up a book, unaware of what book it was, and started reading, hoping my eyes would get heavy enough to sleep. Fifty pages later, I was still wide awake. So I skipped the morphine, went right for one of Elena’s caches, and sipped the burn until I choked. I almost made it back to my room before I passed out.
* * *
I awoke hours later in my bed with a respectable amount of vomit on my chest. My first thought was, Is it mine? My second thought was, Of course it is. My third thought was that it was the first day of Nurse Natalya on the night shift, which meant that I could take care of it now and face fire and brimstone, or I could take care of it tonight and live in a full body cast of my own vomit in the meantime. I decided to embrace the vomit and clean up later. In the meantime, I mitigated the circumstances by cleaning as much as I could with standard tap water, a change of clothes, and hiding the dirties in the far reaches of the netherworld beneath my bed.
Next, I wheeled past the Red Room to check on the current state of Polina’s transfusion. I was not surprised to find her in a deep trance with all the necessary tubing still attached. What do I do with myself? I wondered. To be truthful, I wanted to disappear. And more than just into my head, while my body remained in plain view of the rest of the hospital. I wanted to disappear in the way of Houdini or Hoffa.
I remembered a branch next to Dennis’s window when we were in the courtyard on the eighth day, which, if it were a Rorschach test, would have reminded me of a handicap ramp sloping to the rooftop, and at that particular moment, the rooftop seemed like a great place to disappear to. Moreover, the clang and clatter of plates coming from the cafeteria meant that in three minutes Dennis would be in the Main Room rocking away to an episode of something. Which meant nurses arranging mutants for TV hour, others packing up the kitchen. Which meant the stars were aligning. So I ditched my chair in my room, slithered two doors down to Dennis’s room, broke in (basically, I turned the doorknob), slithered to his window, opened it, squeezed my body through the black bars, maneuvered my way onto the handicap branch, nearly fell two stories to my death, spent about twelve minutes learning to crawl on a branch using only three points of contact (my arm and two leg nubs), nearly fell to my death thrice more, arrived at the corner of the rooftop terrace only to realize that at this point the branch was a bit farther away from the building than I had originally calculated (myopia), decided that if I had come this far I would play the odds, and rolled my body off the branch with as much (virtually none) momentum as I could, and (just barely) made impact with the unforgiving concrete roof, resulting in at least three bloody scrapes distributed over various nubs and my elbow.
After that, I didn’t want to move anymore, so instead I just lay there and watched the blue fade from the sky at an unnoticeably slow drip until nothing was left but black and the hydrogen fingerprints of stars. In the interim, I, like Polina, noticed how nothing felt real. I noticed how the last few months could be erased like chalk, leaving only a blurry residue of the original words, which of course serve as the bones that imagination uses to fill the space with meat and striated muscular details, and I wouldn’t question the fact that it was all suddenly gone, that the flesh was eaten off the bone, and the bones would soon be buried deep beneath the layers of silt and dirt, and new civilizations would be built on that dirt, and new beings would populate its cities, and live in its architecture, and new loves would grow, while old ones that once felt so important would be forgotten, and
clearly I’m drunk.
my apologies, Reader.
After about an hour of blue, thirty minutes of dusk, and two hours of black my thoughts were interrupted by her voice.
“How’d you get up here without bedsheets and duct tape?” said Polina’s bald silhouette as it peeked out of the hole in the roof.
“I used the handicap ramp over there. How did you know I’d be up here?”
“I didn’t, but it seemed like the only option after I checked your room, the Main Room, all the stairwells and colored rooms, the bathroom, and behind all the couches.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I have new blood.”
“Like a modern-day vampire.”
“Already occurred to me.”
Polina moved a little bit closer, so I started shivering.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“Not really.”
Polina leaned toward my neck, opened her mouth, and blew moist, hot air onto my skin. I shivered some more.
“Ivan?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Take your shorts off.”
“That won’t help with my shivering.”
“I asked you to pull down your shorts.”
When Polina said this, my Hui filled completely.
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because my Hui is hard.”
“I want to see it.”
“I don’t want you to see it.”
“You want me to touch it?”
“No.”
I meant yes. Fortunately, Polina pulled my shorts off anyway while I feigned resistance. My twitching Hui pointed to the moon, which was full and big and bright. I was too conscious of its size and appearance, as well as her face, which was an unsettling mixture of sex and sickness.
“Can I touch it?” she asked, but the question was rhetorical because she wrapped her palm and fingers around it before I had a chance to answer.
“It’s nice.”
“It’s not.”
“I like it.”
Polina began to slide her palm up and down the length of my Hui. Then she stopped to lick her palm in one long, thick lap and wrapped it back around, slowly sliding up and down, then twisting subtly. My head was clear and silent, except for the faint weight of my self-awareness and the occasional recognition that someone who was not me was touching my Hui.
“I’m going to do something now, okay?”
“What?”
“I’ll show you.”
Polina opened her mouth and consumed my whole Hui, right to my flesh, and sucked on it with her lips and tongue. I didn’t withdraw from it, but I said, “No, not this way.”
Polina pulled her mouth away long enough to say, “What way?” and then started licking the entirety of my Hui.
“Let me lick you first.”
“No, Ivan.” Then back to sucking she went.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m sick.”
“So am I.”
“No, you’re not. Enjoy this.”
“Would you enjoy it if I were doing it to you?”
“I would.”
“Then let me.”
“No. This is for you.”
Polina decided to abandon words and instead began to attack my Hui with her mouth and wet palm with devout piety. She momentarily paused to describe how I tasted. And with almost every oscillation of her hand, her technique seemed to sharpen as if she knew exactly what my particular Hui needed to burst in her mouth. That’s when an ugly thought came into my head, microscopically and wordlessly at first, but altogether uninvited: Has she done this before? And a flush of some as-of-yet-unnamed emotion, which felt like a stew of insecurity-jealousy-anxiety spread from my chest down into my Hui strong enough to make me worried that the whole apparatus would come down right in her mouth, but as per usual, reproductive biology won over fight-flight, and the thought dissolved in her saliva as my Hui became progressively harder
, threatening, against her tongue, to erupt.
She stopped for a minute to say, “Tvoyu sperma, pozhaluysta?”*
And before I had a choice in the matter I did, I gave it all, filling her mouth I’m sure, but entirely unaware because I was too busy noticing how a mixture of vulnerability and kinship results in orgasms that leave nothing the same ever again, irrevocable, a complete earthquake, screaming, If this person goes away, I will die. No one ever told me that would happen, which was inconvenient because Polina was going away.
Polina swallowed graciously and looked at me with a sultry smile most likely induced by the tremors in my thigh nubs and the gape in my mouth. She gently pushed my torso back down to the concrete, which was colder now than I remembered, and rested her head on my chest, through which she could feel my heart beating tortured little beats.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Did you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you so quiet?”
“You should get back inside. We know what happens when you’re out here too long.”
“Just five more minutes.”
“Three.”
“Fine. Three.”
“Natalya is working tonight. I can stay with you.”
“Okay.”
“Touch my head.”
“Okay.”
“Pet it?”
“Okay.
“Thank you.”
After five, not three, minutes, we both descended the handicap branch to Dennis’s window. Inside, Dennis was asleep, and Polina adjusted his blankets so that they covered all his uncovered spots. Then she walked, and I slithered, back into my room and into my bed, where I fell asleep to the things Polina was saying.
DAY 6
The Little Green Folders
I don’t think we deviated from our morphology once. Apparently, the less publicized side effect of a catastrophic orgasm is hibernation. I only know that I lifted my head to find my body in precisely the position it was when I collapsed on the bed last night, with Polina’s arm wrapped around me from behind, and the early rays of morning sunlight starting to fill the room. If not for the death hanging in the air like smoke, it would have been a perfect way to wake up.
Polina sensed the motion.
“Hi, Ivan.”
She coughed some and then winced like a rodent.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Like Khalva and Kozinaki.”*
“Gifted liar.”
“I had a crazy dream last night.”
“Another one?”
“Yes.”
“What happened in this one?”
“I dreamed that I sucked on your Hui.”
“What a nightmare.”
“I know.”
Polina aimed for my eye but kissed my nose, which was followed by a smile, followed by the playful creases in her face becoming deep and solemn. And with those new wrinkles, somehow the air in the room congealed. Enough for me, with all my limited understanding of social cues and interpersonal intelligence, to know that something bad was about to happen.
“What is it?”
“What is what?”
“Something bad is about to happen.”
“It’s been about to happen for a long a time. One more day won’t hurt.”
Which is exactly when I discovered that I don’t do well with any form of uncertainty. So I said:
“I don’t do well with any form of uncertainty.”
“Can’t it wait another day?”
“No.”
“Then I need to show you something.”
“Okay.”
“But it’s not here.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Okay.”
And she left, closing the door behind her, shuffling like a sprite, while I waited on the edge of a knife in my bed. In my ensuing dread, I started to count and made it to sixty-seven before the doorknob turned and Polina reentered with three army-green folders, which were quite familiar to me because they were the same folders that every patient at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children gets on his or her first day at the asylum. She sat down on the cold linoleum next to my face.
“You’re like me, Ivan. A curious punk, right?”
“I guess.”
“Is there a patient in this hospital whose file you haven’t read?”
“No, I’ve read them all.”
“Of course you have. Max, Alex, Dennis, the gingers. Even the ones who have come and gone before we even got here. Before you got here. They’re all too interesting, and we get bored, right?”
“Right.”
“Where have you found every file you’ve ever read?”
“In the cabinet behind Miss Kristina’s desk.”
I said the words as if they were formalities rushed through on the way to the point.
“And who filled in all the blanks in every one of those files?”
“Miss Kris.”
“Right.”
“Can we skip the questions I already know the answers to?”
“You know the difference between you and me?”
“You’re a burglar? And you’re attractive when you have hair.”
“Yes, but I’m also much more patient than you.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve never opened the safe in Mikhail’s office.”
“It’s locked.”
“Yes, but you would never think to sit in front of it on the nights he’s not fucking Lyudmila and try every combination, would you?”
“I would think about it.”
“But you would never do it.”
“Probably not.”
“I would.”
“And you did.”
“I did.”
“And you found those.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Look at the handwriting.”
Polina pulled a random page from the top folder and put it in my hand.
“Does it look familiar?” she asked.
“No.”
“So, it’s not the same handwriting that’s on every file in the hospital?”
“No.”
From the bottom of her stack, Polina pulled out another piece of paper.
“This is a letter Mikhail wrote to the city treasurer requesting more funds for the hospital, but he never sent it because I stole it.”
Polina gave it to me. It was clearly the same handwriting as in the green file I was holding, which confirmed that Mikhail Kruk filled out those files instead for an as-of-yet-unknown reason, which I was sure she was about to share. I nodded to confirm as much.
“So whose files are those?”
“The oldest one is for a patient named Albina. She had leukemia just like me. Didn’t make it to her eighth birthday. She died before you were born.”
“Okay, next?”
“Next is Dimitri.”
“I remember Dimitri.”
“Do you remember what was wrong with him?”
“Nothing was wrong with him.”
“Almost true. He had a connective tissue disorder like you. But his was apparently called Dupuytren’s contracture, which, according to his file, means he had little pits in his hands that no one could even see unless they were up close.”
“So?”
“So, why was he here?”
“Maybe that’s why he left.”
“Maybe. But he left when he was fifteen. It’s hard to explain a fifteen-year prison sentence for a few weird tendons.”
“And the last one?”
“The last one is yours, Ivan.”
“Not possible. I already have a file.”
“You have two files.”
Polina handed me Ivan File #2. I opened the cover and started flipping through the pages.
“This is the same exact file. These are just copies.”
“It is the same. Except for Mikhail’s han
dwriting and one more thing.”
“What?”
“This one has your date of birth. It says you were born on June 10, 1987. You’re a Gemini, in case you were wondering.”
Specks of black started to fill my eyes, and the right angles of my room, which I had long taken for granted, started to bend and bulge.
“There’s another difference,” she said.
“I see it,” I said.
To inform you, Reader, on Ivan File #1 the word “unknown” was written on the lines reserved for the names of my mother and father. In Ivan File #2, there were names very clearly once written but now blacked out with a thick marker.
“What are you thinking?” Polina asked.
I had been too deep inside my own head, dreaming up every possible explanation for this new intelligence, to notice that I was shaking wildly and that the paper I was holding was being crushed into a ball. I couldn’t see the name beneath the ink on the line that said “Father” but there was only one explanation for these files, penned by Mikhail, to be defaced with a marker and then locked away. The devil wouldn’t protect a soul, unless it was his own. I wished I were an idiot like the others. I wished it because even if I tried to turn my head the other way and stick mud in my ears and claw out my eyes, under the surface, the calculations would continue uninterrupted, and I would come to the conclusion that this ended only one way and that Polina already had it figured out: I was an unintended fuck child. I was the bastard spawn of the Most Mediocre Man in the World and a large-breasted nurse. I was unwanted in the purest of ways, an accident of the universe, bad news, a typo, and my whole life I’ve been kept from the world because I’m shame encoded in bastard DNA.
Despite the monsoon ripping through my head and then chest, I had enough presence of mind to look up. Polina was spewing tears down her face, as if I had said each of those thoughts out loud. Maybe I did.
“Maybe this isn’t bad, Ivan. You might have a family. You have a brother. Maybe a mother.”
“Does Natalya know?”
“How would I know?”
“He could have erased us. Why didn’t he erase us?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“Or even better, never let me out of her piz’da.”
“I don’t know. He’s not okay, mentally speaking.”
Before she finished that sentence, a colossus of a thought appeared in my brain, big and bright, but too quick to hold down and pummel, a true mindfuck typed up all pretty on a shiny banner carried across by miniature imps, cackling and jeering.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 19