“How long have you had this?” I asked.
“Two months, maybe.”
“Before we started talking.”
“Yes.”
“Please tell me what’s in my head is wrong.”
“What?”
“This is why you talked to me.”
“No, Ivan,” she blubbered harder.
“You did. I was a pet puzzle.”
“No.”
“You were bored.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
“At first. But then you became a person to me.”
“You were always a person.”
“You would have done the same.”
“To the gingers, sure.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Leave.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Go.”
“I’m dying, Ivan. Any minute. I don’t want to die alone.”
Promptly, all gauges turned cold.
Some insignificant voice told me I could be wrong, but it didn’t matter. The finite number of days lost their weight, because I lost the line between what was real and what was not as it pertained to Polina. And I suppose a part of me wanted to join forces with the leukemia and punish her for that.
“Good-bye,” I said.
DAY 5
Conversion Disorder
“What happened?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ivan, what little life she has left is being sucked out of her.”
I didn’t answer.
“If you’re happy killing her, I don’t mind. It’s on you.”
This was the first conversation of the fifth day. Technically, it was not really a conversation because only Nurse Katya was participating.
I had had an almost identical conversation with Nurse Natalya about twelve hours earlier, shortly after she arrived for her night shift. That conversation sounded like this:
“What happened?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ivan, what little life she has left is being sucked out of her.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s going to kill her, and you will live the rest of your life in a hole because you won’t forgive yourself.”
Nurse Natalya’s response was a bit more poignant. That said, responding to conversational advances was complicated for two reasons.
Reason #1: I couldn’t move my body. I tried, though. I sent orders to my mouth, and others to my hand, some to my neck, but the nerves didn’t respond. Freud would argue that there are very reasonable explanations for this phenomenon. Every human is a collection of conscious and unconscious thoughts, which all contribute some share of vitality to a human organism. These are typically thoughts about meaning, passion, and purpose; thoughts about why you were picked by the universe, and what your role should be in the cosmic dance. Polina unwittingly stole every single one of these thoughts when she handed me that green folder. In one valiant ballet, she detonated the ground I wheeled on, which had previously been built from my love and trust for Natalya and the plausible deniability of my absurd creation story.
Reason #2: There were new questions running through my head. Too many questions. Unbearable questions. For example:
1. Who knew I was Mikhail’s bastard kid? Mikhail’s affairs were the worst-kept secret of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. Did this mean I was the best kept?
2. Did this explain the unconscious hostility that every health care professional in this institution directed toward me since I was old enough to fake a coma?
3. Did this explain Nurse Natalya’s unconscious sympathy? My Natalya, the only creature I trusted, did she lie to four-year-old Ivan, and then ten-year-old Ivan, and every-other-year-old me?
So, no, Katya. It’s not on me. My body won’t move. Even now, days later, as I scribble through these pages, all I can move is my wrist, which is the minimum requirement to hold a pen or unscrew a flask. Tragically, even masturbation is off-limits.
To be fair to Polina, she tried to fix what she broke. Leave it to the dying to know that stubbornness has no place in death. I recall as the hands of the clocks spun around the perimeter of the day, there were plenty of knocks at my door. At least a few of these belonged to Polina, because the knocks were in her own language. I know this because the rhythm and cadence of remorse has its own dialect.
The other knocks belonged to nurses who burst in and lifted my eyelids only to have them snap back closed, each one accusing me of being a stubborn asshole, except for Natalya, who was wise enough to lure me with the most indecent pornographic images available in southern Belarus, only to find me still unresponsive. And as the big hand on the clock dragged the little one with it, they subjected me to an anthology of tests, needles in my median cubital, stethoscopes on my heart, hammers on my reflexes, lights in my eyes, pointy things in my ears, only to have everything come back negative for everything and Nurse Elena come in to yell at me, again in a different language, but by this time I could read her lips, which appeared to say, It’s all in your head, to which I responded, It’s all in my life, but I’m sure it actually came out, Baaaa ba baa bi baa, which was still a stunning development because it was my first response to anything in eighteen hours, but still without a reasonable diagnosis they brought in the big guns, the Director, Mikhail himself, to offer his assessment, only to bask in confusion when he found a boy, supposedly comatose but actually not at all, gnashing at his face with small, pointy teeth, clawing his eyes, spitting into his mouth, slapping his cheeks, pulling at his (remaining) hairs, screaming what would appear to be obscenities if only they were in the language of Mother Russia, which obliged him to order a cocktail of sedatives to be shot into my arm and then the rest was black squid ink.
* * *
That was the fifth day, the day I regret most. I had no way to know there would only be four more days. Or that only one of those days would be bearable.
Currently, the clock reads 5:45 in the P.M.
I’ve been writing for sixty-six hours.
It is the fifth day of December.
The year is 2005.
I can feel the end
of this.
DAY 4
Good-Bye, Yellow Brick Road
I awoke in the middle of the next day, departed.
Emotionally at least, I was blank like paper.
My first thought of the day was that I had thrown away a day, though to be fair it’s debatable whether I had a choice. My second thought was to go to the pantry and steal some non–cabbage juice sustenance (matzo crackers and a 90-percent-eaten three-year-old jar of peanut butter). My third thought was to find Polina, first in her room, which was empty, then in the Red Room, which only held Dennis’s mom and a few heart-hole children struggling to maintain the proper lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub rhythm, then to the Main Room, stairwells, and bathrooms, which were all empty. This, of course, meant that she either wandered off into the surrounding environment to die in a forest with tree-dwelling critters or she was on the roof. So I wheeled myself back to the stairwell, dismounted from my chair, writhed up the stairs to the top of the hospital, and yelled through the red metal door leading to the roof.
“You look like a boy with a bald head!” I yelled.
No answer.
“If you plan to die up there, at least let me cover you in peanut butter so vultures can get past the bitter taste of your flesh.”
Nothing.
Finally: “Vitas is a homosexual!”
I could officially be sure she wasn’t on the roof. So I went back to the Main Room, found Alex’s hair being brushed by Nurse Lyudmila, whom I deftly ignored, and searched on for a viable alternative, like Nurse Katya, who was absorbed in the supernatural task of organizing Tupperware by size and color.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Now you want to see her?”
“Where?”
“In her room. She looks like the fire went out. I give her two days.”
<
br /> “She’s not in her room. I checked.”
“Then she’s floating around here somewhere.”
“The girl could fall dead any second, and you don’t know where she is?”
“How far could a dead girl be, Ivan?”
I decided this comment wasn’t worth responding to, so I rolled on. I rolled past Nurse Elena, who was oblivious and buried in a toilet, and I rolled past Miss Kristina, who was oblivious and buried in a phone, and I rolled out through the big brown double doors, and I rolled down the ramp onto the trail, and I rolled past my dread, as my insides felt like a fully formed fly pushing its way out of maggot skin.
I yelled her name. I looked around. I was without answer, and sure she was gone. This was it. I wasn’t to see her again. This was day one.
In my resignation, I saw a piece of grass shimmer near the tree where two days ago we sat outside in the rain. This, of course, required me to wheel through the grass to pursue it, which, in my current state, required supernatural strength—but, hey, anything for love, right?—and precision eye-tracking. Black. It was black. And shiny. Black, yet shiny. As I inched ahead, I wondered what things are both black and shiny. Obsidian. Onyx. Polished lava. Which of these would be in the area immediately surrounding the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children? Probably none. I was desperate, possibly, looking for some hope in nothing at all. But this is the same sort of desperation that lets losing soccer teams come back to win in the last few seconds of a game, so I let go. Which was the right thing to do because eventually I found that the black and shiny thing was a broken piece of a vinyl record, and there was only one reason why a piece of broken record would be sitting amid blades of grass in the hospital courtyard. Furthermore, it didn’t take too much squinting to see that between me and the forest that surrounded the hospital in a little horseshoe, there was another black and shiny sliver, which, after a bit more wheeling through brutally tall grass, was obviously another piece of broken record, and up ahead, just a few more meters was another, and it occurred to me that this was Polina’s own version of Hansel and Gretel.
A few more jagged pieces later and I could see I was being led to the forest and, more specifically, into a tiny opening that imitated the closest thing to a trail that nature has ever made without the help of a man. By my seventh serrated piece of vinyl, which I added to the puddle of black now collecting on my shorts, I was there, at the trailhead, quivering, with a heart rate of 130. I tried to whistle, but I was never good at whistling. Besides, whistling was never a way in which Polina and I typically summoned each other, so I stopped trying to whistle and instead just called out to her, but didn’t hear anything back.
The forest floor was a potpourri canvas of dirt, broken twigs, and soggy leaves, which was not at all conducive to more wheelchair wheeling. Nevertheless, I pushed the wheel anyway, testing new boundaries in disabled locomotion, and of course, looking furiously for more glint. Up ahead, slight right, I saw some gleam, which I laboriously pushed myself toward to discover that it was indeed another piece. This one, however, had some writing—“До свидания, желтaя кирпичнaя дорогa”*—which I took to be a sign. A few more meters ahead was another sliver, this one with the track length (3:11). And then another one that was just pure black. But then there were no more. Ten meters of rolling around in every direction and nothing.
So I started to weave new story lines in my head to accommodate the facts. Polina, one frustrated and lonely night, leaves her room to come outside and shatter old records to release six months of stifled rage, the yellow brick road just a cruel coincidence. No rhymes, no reasons. Just anger. And I started to believe there was no trail and no bread crumbs and that she was gone again. Until I looked down and saw the thirteen pieces sitting in my lap and thought that perhaps I should put the pieces back together. Perhaps there was a clue in the puzzle. So I began to arrange the shards on my shorts into a vinyl jigsaw. I arranged them like it was the only thing that mattered, and as each one found a partner, I felt a dollop of faith.
But in the end, it was only a record with a mosaic of jagged lines winding through it like spider legs, no secret messages or further game instructions.
Nothing.
Except for the laughing.
“You would, wouldn’t you, Ivan?”
Which, of course, came from Polina, who was sitting in a splotch of shade, sporting her hospital gown and dusty bald head, arranging twigs into a model log cabin with crispy leaves for shingles.
“I’ve been watching you for fifteen minutes,” she said.
Stubbornness has no place in dying.
“This wasn’t a game?”
“No. It was a victim of rage.”
“That was my second theory.”
“Astute.”
“How did you know I would find you?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to find me.”
“I didn’t.”
Polina’s eyes gently returned to her miniature log cabin.
“Were you planning to die out here?” I asked.
“Probably. I always imagined I would die against a tree on a cliff in Anapa. Overlooking the Black Sea. Fade out right in nature’s bosom. Feed a few bearded vultures with my dead carcass. This seemed close enough.”
“Romantic.”
“Would you like to hear a story?”
“I would.”
“It’s about my dad.”
“Assistant Professor of Piano. University of Lviv, 1992–2004.”
“Yes.”
I could see that Polina’s eyes were turning luminescent due to some flavor of melancholy.
“Don’t waste your time telling stories you don’t want to tell.”
“No, I want to tell this one.”
“You may proceed.”
“He taught me how to play piano. He was my hero. He was perfect.”
“Standard little girl.”
“They sent us home from school early on the day Lviv flooded. When I got home, he was fucking one of his students on our piano. The one he taught me on. She was eighteen. I was twelve. She scrambled to grab her purse and panties. My father scrambled to cover up his Hui.”
“What did you do?”
“I stood there, shaking. I couldn’t look at his eyes. I remember there was a tiny piece of wallpaper peeling off the wall, so I stared at it. He tried to touch me, and I yelled. He offered me anything I wanted. He told me he loved me more than anything in the world. All the standard shit. Though, when you’re twelve, it doesn’t feel all that standard. He said that there was no limit to what he would do to make it right. I said, tell Mom. He said, except that. That it would ruin the family. He asked me if I loved the family. I said yes. So I let him bribe me. Whatever I wanted for the next two years. I almost started to forgive him.”
“Almost?”
“Déjà vu two years later. She was sixteen, and her tits had just started to bud. It was also the day before my fifteenth birthday. The apologies started all over. How he would do anything to make it right. So I pretended that everything would be okay. I would take the gifts. But I kept the panties, which were blue. Then when my mom came home, the words burst right out of my mouth. She didn’t believe me. I was dubbed a storyteller. Until I showed her the blue panties. Luckily, neither of us had blue panties.”
“What did she do?”
“She left. For approximately three hours. Which was just enough time for my dad to knock a tooth out of my mouth. But the worst part is that my mother died that day. Not her body—she still had a heartbeat and everything—but after that day, she was like a piece of driftwood. And every day since, I’ve blamed myself for killing her.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I’m not looking for absolution. This isn’t a confession. I was absolved when I got cancer. Dying is nature’s purification. You should try it.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“Because we’re all going to hell, Ivan. Except maybe you.�
��
“You don’t even believe in hell.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“What makes me special?”
“Because you’ve been severed. You’re a karmic anomaly. It’s why I risked everything to tell you. You’re free.”
“I don’t feel free.”
“That doesn’t make it untrue. There’s a safety in the trap. But when Mikhail locked up your file and made a new one, one that says that your parents could be anyone in the universe or no one at all, you were severed from him. You were cut from history. You’re not required to live out someone else’s sins. That’s something I’ll never know. But you, you’re a vacancy. Starting yesterday, you get to write yourself to life.”
“If I’m free, you’re free. His sins aren’t your sins.”
“I played my own part in everything. I participated. Not that it matters much at this point. I just know that after they died, I looked at my father and then at my mother. And it was in their eyes. And then in mine. They seeped into me. I knew we would be tangled up forever.”
Polina stopped to adjust a few twigs in her cabin and remove the leaves from the top so that she could see inside.
Then she said:
“You’re not tangled up with anything.”
To which I said:
“I’m tangled up with you.”
To which Polina lifted her head and smiled 12 percent, which made me ask:
“Have I told you how surprisingly pretty you are for a bald person?”
Polina dropped the twig she was fidgeting with and crawled over to me, presumably because that was all she could do. Then she took my face into her hands and kissed me for the second time. But this time felt different from the last. Counterfeit could not live in that kiss. I’m not sure whether at that moment she was possessed by some imperial and selfless charity, or if she, like me, was caught up in the fantasy that I wasn’t a hideous creature, but I didn’t care. I felt the addictive grandeur. I leaned in and kissed her moist mouth back, even harder. I had no idea what I was doing, but the more primal currents in my body took over and attacked her lips in a way that I can only imagine resembled what a passionate kiss should look and feel like. An impulse arose to pull away and see where her eyes were and attempt to assess her reactions through her facial expressions. Before giving in to it, I considered whom I was kissing, succumbed to the ensuing avalanche, and sucked her upper lip. I got to enjoy that lip for a few delicious seconds, and then the moment soured, literally. I tasted familiar metallic bitters, which probably meant that Polina was bleeding into my mouth. When I pulled away I saw bloody streaks oozing from the corner of her eyes. Without thinking, I used my white T-shirt to wipe them up. Polina looked down in alarm, saw the bloody smears, and cried hysterically.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 20