The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

by Scott Stambach

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  She tried to stand but fell back into the autumn ambrosia.

  “When I sat here, I knew I wouldn’t get back up again,” she said.

  “Not an option.”

  I tried to yank Polina onto my lap, and she tried too. And after a few minutes of flailing, we proved that two halves of a person equal a whole. Eventually, her body fell over mine, and her fingers clung to my bloody T-shirt, while I started rolling at a drip. I didn’t know how long my one arm could push two people or whether there were things dying inside of Polina that were going to make her never come back, so I screamed for help. I screamed for Katya and Lyudmila and Elena, even though I never asked them for help before, because Polina taught me that there is no room for stubbornness in death. I screamed for them until I sanded down my vocal cords to nothing and the screams turned into air. And still I screamed some more. We were five meters from the forest when she started to convulse. We were twelve meters from the forest when the bleeding in her mouth turned to a thin little red river Styx accumulating on my shorts. We were eighteen meters from the woods when I saw the blurry blue scrubs burst out of the hospital. We were twenty-one meters from the woods when Nurse Katya and Nurse Elena each took hold of an extremity or two and carried her back half-dangling into the hospital.

  “Are you trying to die?” I heard Katya ask her.

  They left me back in the field, wheeling away like a one-armed fiend through the six-inch grass. The sky was like solid granite, like on every other November day in Belarus. Flecks of rain started to appear on my face, while I expended caveman-like effort, only to inch along at a speed that was not commensurate with that effort, while my beloved bled out bad blood from most of her orifices.

  Three minutes later, I was back inside the hospital, which was like a ghost town. All the mutants were put away into their rooms, and all the nurses were in the Red Room huddled around Polina’s bloody gums. I wheeled up close to the door and watched them all do a particular job. Nurse Elena wiped the blood from her teeth and her eyes. Nurse Katya slapped her cheeks. Nurse Lyudmila connected plastic tubes to her. My job was to pay better attention to the process of someone dying than I ever did before. Until that job wasn’t enough and I started shouting at the nurses to take more of my blood.

  “It won’t help, Ivan,” one said.

  “She’ll just bleed it out,” said another.

  “We took two of your pints in three days,” said the last one.

  “It’ll kill you,” said the first again.

  And it was true, it might. I felt like a vodka IV was dripping into my bloodstream ever since they took the second pint. But I hated feeling null.

  “How long now?” I asked.

  “Hours probably,” said another.

  “Now leave,” said the last one.

  Which of course I didn’t. I wheeled back a few inches so they couldn’t see me. And I went into a coma. But really I was listening to everything. All the jargon ricocheting around the room, mixing right along with all the memories in my head. And then the commotion inside the Red Room stopped, and everything was silent except for the chirp of each heartbeat. The nurses filed out one by one, passing my comatose body. When they were all gone, I wheeled back into the Red Room and held her sedated hand. Her eyes were fluttering under the skin of her eyelids again, and I felt brokenhearted because there was no dream she could possibly be having that was happy. So I held her hand tighter, subtly hoping that the pressure would find its way through the neural wires and let her know that she wasn’t alone. Then it occurred to me that it didn’t matter because dying is the loneliest event in life. Polina could be surrounded by a village, each resident tending to a different need, each one reminding her of why she mattered, and she would still die alone. Because when it finally comes, you take that step into the black by yourself.

  Some blurry hours later, Nurse Natalya showed up for her night shift.

  “Take more blood,” I said, aborting her attempt to pull me into her bosom.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Please?” I said.

  She crossed her arms.

  “I implore you.”

  “It could kill you.”

  “It won’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I feel strong.”

  “It won’t make any difference. She’s leaving now, Ivan.”

  “It could give her another day.”

  “You will always want one more day.”

  “Yes, but on this day, I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  Apparently this touched the right organ, because she was suddenly elbow deep inside of a drawer getting a syringe and bag.

  “Give me your arm,” she said.

  And I did, and the needle slipped in, and she took more blood, and immediately my brain stopped working and my vision blurred. Nurse Natalya gave me a few good slaps on the cheek.

  Stay here, Ivan.

  Stay here.

  I didn’t.

  DAY 3

  The Suitcase Day

  I woke up in the middle of the night, shortly after 3:00 in the A.M. The first thing I noticed was a large bruise on my forehead and also my nose, which hurt and felt swollen and slightly crooked according to my fingers. The second thing that I noticed was that I was still in my chair and still in the Red Room. Polina was asleep, or in a real coma, or whatever. I didn’t even know if the last transfusion happened. All I knew was that now tubes were coming up and over her ears and into her nose to help her breathe. I also noticed that when I looked at anything for too long, it felt like my head was attached to helicopter blades. So I decided to lay my head back down next to hers and make it stop. I remember feeling her few returning fuzzy hairs tickling my cheek as I laid my face against her otherwise bald head. And then the helicopter blades stopped and everything went black again.

  Then I woke up at 5:00 in the A.M., to some jostling by Nurse Natalya.

  “Ivan, can you hear me?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  “I have to leave now. Eat this Tula bread. It will help.”

  “Help what?”

  “Help you keep your head up.”

  “You took my blood?”

  “You begged me.”

  “And you gave it to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will she wake up today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I need sleep too, moya lyubov.”*

  “You can sleep here.”

  “Where?”

  “In my room.”

  “Never. I know what happens there.”

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  Natalya went home, and I took a bite of Tula bread, which made my head stop spinning for a second. I took the opportunity to look over Polina, who was illuminated by the summer morning light coming in through the barred windows. By now most of her skin was purplish black, as opposed to the innocent porcelain she donned when I first saw her walk into the hospital. And where the skin wasn’t purplish black, it was smeared with occasional brushstrokes of blood. Her bones were like tiny hands trying to push through her face and shoulders, and her knees were like the pictures that they sometimes show of Auschwitz residents. Her mouth hung open vulnerably, and her teeth were orange from the slow diffusion of blood from her gums, and incidentally, so were the half-moons just beneath her eyes. Her breathing was short and shallow and sounded like her lungs had been replaced by birthday balloons. I could go on, but as it is I’m sure you’ll never get this picture out of your head, Reader. I traced some of her bruises with my limited fingers, laid my head next to hers, and went back to sleep.

  The next time I woke up, it was because of Polina, who was trying to kill me in my sleep again. I gasped for air to save my life, and she started laughing like an insane person.

  “There’s something very wrong with you,” I said.

  “We don
’t have much time, so I’m going to have to ask you to go to my room and look under my bed,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Wheel yourself into my room and look under my bed.”

  “Why?”

  “Ivan, I’m going to die waiting for you to do me this one small favor.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned around and wheeled my way through the three halls and two turns required to get to Polina’s room. When I opened the door, I noticed the faint smell of mold light up my nostrils. As quickly as I could, I dismounted from my chair and writhed under her bed, where I found an old-style portmanteau. I writhed back and awkwardly dragged it out from under the bed. Then I unlatched each of the two latches on either side and opened it up. The first thing that caught my attention was a stack of rubles, which after counting amounted to about ten thousand.* The second thing I noticed was a large folded map of the Mazyr metropolitan area, with several key locations circled in red ink, including restaurants, alternative health care locations, and notable city landmarks. Also included were six packets of cookies, some crackers, two bottles of water, a small knife, an umbrella, a combination lock, a watch, a compass, several books by Russian masters, including Lolita, The Master and Margarita, and Crime and Punishment, and Polina’s journal. I put the journal in my shorts, packed up the rest of the suitcase, pushed it underneath the bed, and wheeled myself back to the Red Room.

  “Thank you and good-bye,” I said.

  “You’re an odd fuck,” she whispered, because now everything she said was air.

  “I wanted to make sure I said it now because you almost died yesterday before I had a chance.”

  Our eyes were mutually soaked, which was nice.

  “You’re weird,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Perhaps the weirdest.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to use the suitcase?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not a good answer.”

  “I can’t say yet.”

  “For me?”

  “Okay.”

  I just said it, but I didn’t mean it.

  “Do you think it’s going to hurt?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Dying.”

  “No. There’s a lot of morphine in you right now.”

  “Do you think there will be monsters like the Tibetans say?”

  “I think the monsters are already in you.”

  “How do I kill the monsters?”

  “I don’t think you need to kill them.”

  “Then what?”

  “I think you invite them. And let them stay. And learn to live with them. Then when you die, they stop being monsters.”

  “I’m so scared.”

  Then the dam broke, and Polina started wailing, maybe because she took my advice and let her monsters in. I wiped away the tears as best as I could, but they were coming faster than one hand could wipe.

  “So scared, so scared,” she said.

  “Don’t be afraid of scared,” I said.

  And she just kept repeating herself, and I just kept wiping her tears, which were orange. I kissed her cheeks in spite of the mess of it all. Some of her blood got onto my lips and into my mouth, which I knew because it tasted like tin. Some of it was bad blood, and some of it was my blood.

  “I want my mother,” she said. “Mommy,” she repeated over and over like crying people sometimes do. Slowly the words abated. I thought that maybe it was all over. Maybe she had died. But the little chirp on the heart monitor kept chirping. So I said her name a few times, but she didn’t respond. That was the last time I ever heard Polina talk. As suspected, despite my proximity, Polina would be dying alone.

  I didn’t move for the rest of the day except to run my fingers through her imaginary hair and listen carefully to the comforting ping of her heart monitor. Somehow her face looked peaceful. Occasionally, she would whisper something indecipherable, and I would get excited, imagining that possibly she was coming back from the void. But I quickly realized that she was in her head, probably in negotiations with monsters.

  DAY 2

  The Day of Delirium

  On the second day, she was hooked up to a nauseating machine that dripped morphine into her blood and secured her in a sufficiently dissociated state. My pale partial hand held her little porcelain hand throughout the morning as the usual suspects passed in and out to see if she had died yet. Even though she was hooked up to an IV of saline water to keep her hydrated, her lips began to dry, almost in real time, and I could see the cracks and fissures of a California desert form in front of my eyes.

  Nurse Natalya, who was still working nights, somehow appeared this morning.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I wanted to give you this,” she said.

  It was like a sucker. Except instead of hard candy at the end, there was a moist sponge.

  “You can use this to keep her mouth and lips moist.”

  She demoed the Popsicle sponge on Polina’s chapped lips. I watched her carefully dab and spread water over Polina’s tongue and around the perimeter of her mouth. Then she showed me how to rehydrate the sponge with a cup of water.

  “I will be here,” she said. “From now on.”

  “You don’t need to be,” I said.

  “I want to,” she said.

  “Are you staying in Polina’s room?”

  “It’s the only available bed.”

  “Don’t look under it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Okay, Ivan.”

  Then she leaned in, and turned my face toward hers, and looked at me with her maternal eyes, and said:

  “It’s even lonelier for you than it is for her. I know.”

  When she said that, I realized that Nurse Natalya had once been exactly where I was.

  “I can take it from here,” I said.

  “Of course you can,” she said. “I’ll be cleaning dishes if you need me.”

  Aside from the occasional nurse strolling in with a clipboard and taking down a few notes from the machine that illuminated her vitals, I was the only one tending to Polina on the second day. I kept her mouth moist, I checked her pulse and also her temperature to compare them to the results displayed on the machines, I gently shifted an arm or a leg this way or that to minimize bedsores (not that it mattered), I carefully monitored the amount of saline in her IV bag and morphine in her blood, I notified people if levels were low, I pushed back on them if they pushed back on me, I wiped the pellets of sweat from her fevered bald head as they developed, I adjusted her pillows, I hummed familiar songs (out of tune so I’m not sure she recognized them). Most of all I waited for signs that she was coming back from a temporary holiday in her mind.

  By 11:00 in the A.M. the delirium set in, which was perhaps not a delirium at all and instead could have been the epic battle for her next incarnation, which I knew about from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But then I realized that such thoughts violated the Three Tenets of Ivanism, so I crushed them.

  It wasn’t always easy to decipher the contents of her whispering, mumbling, moaning, and guttural explosions, but I did the best I could and took liberty to fill in the gaps with reasonable details. At 11:17, she was clearly Cleopatra mourning the suicide of Antony. In the next hour, approximately 12:31, she was her very own seven-year-old self in a car with her mom and dad, driving down the trans-Siberian highway, asking her dad why the moon didn’t fall to the earth. At 1:00 in the P.M, she was a concubine of Joseph Stalin, and at 2:40, she was inside of her dog Sputnik.

  Then, at 3:17, something unexpected happened. Something that caused a cascade of biochemical reactions from my head to my nubs. Two unfamiliar characters showed up at the door of the Red Room. Both of them were female. One was Nurse Elena’s age, and the other was Polina’s age. I panicked due to an unacceptable lack of intelligence information. At the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Childre
n, visitors were rare. They were even rarer when someone was about to die, because we all can secretly smell death and avoid it, quite literally, like a plague, which is why two new characters, at this precise moment, were unusual, and, in my personal opinion, in poor taste.

  “Hello,” the older one said.

  “Who are you looking for?” I asked. “This is the Red Room. This is where people die. I don’t think you meant to come here.”

  “The nurse said this is the room. She pointed right to it,” the older one said again. The younger one just looked confused and nervous.

  “Well, who are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Polina Pushkin. Is she here?” the younger one said.

  I wanted to say no. Instead, I instantly stopped swabbing Polina’s mouth.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  The two looked at each other as if to silently decide who should say it.

  “I’m Mary Markov, and this is my daughter Katerina. She and Polina were friends in school.”

  “Best friends,” the younger one confirmed. “Is she here?”

  “How did you know she was here?” I asked directly to the younger one. “Her parents are dead.”

  Again the two looked at each other uncomfortably.

  “I got a letter from her. About a month ago,” the younger one said.

  “What did it say?” I asked.

  “It said she was here. And that she was sick. Can you please tell us where she is?”