“She’s here.”
“Where.”
“Here.”
I pointed to Polina’s limp body, which caused the two visitors to lose all the color in their faces. That’s when I realized just how devastated Polina’s physical body was. According to my day-to-day perspective of Polina’s transition, she was still the most beautiful girl I knew, hair loss and orifice bleeding included. This was not so for the poor bastards who got the bona fide before-and-after experience.
“That’s not Polina,” the younger one said, shaking her head.
“I promise it is.”
“What happened to her hair?”
“Chemotherapy.”
“And her eyes?”
“Her blood cells don’t work right.”
The younger one started to cry.
“Moya lyubov, you knew she was sick. We talked about this,” the older one said.
“Is she going to die?” the younger one asked.
“In a few hours,” I said.
The younger one started to cry harder, which made me want to suggest to the both of them that salt water causes spontaneous and fatal reactions in leukemia patients. I didn’t want to share Polina’s death with them.
“What happened to her gums?”
“I told you, her blood happened.”
I thought about what Polina would think if she heard me be an asshole to her friend, while the younger one walked over to the other side of the bed. Polina mumbled a few delirious words.
“Is she trying to talk to me? Does she know I’m here?” the younger one asked, choking all over her own wetness.
“No. I think she is playing poker with Oscar Wilde.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“Why were you touching her?”
“I was taking care of her.”
“Why do you look like that?”
“The same reason you look like you do—bad genes.”
“I don’t like you.”
“I don’t care enough to like or not like you.”
“Stop!” said the older one.
The younger one disengaged from me and turned back to Polina. She tried to touch her face in a tender way. It was clear that she thought the right thing to do was to act compassionately to her face, but really I could tell she was disgusted by it. She reminded me of an egg that looked like an egg in every way, only it was undercooked inside, which made it very disappointing when it came time to eat it.
“Mom, we should have come sooner. She’s already dead,” the younger one said as she reinitiated her sloppy wet mess, then rested her head on Polina’s chest. I noticed the tears starting to soak through Polina’s gown, and it made me want to leap across the bed and punch the girl in her big puffy wet face.
“You might not want to do that. She is very susceptible to bruising,” I said.
“Stop being an expert and let her say good-bye to her friend,” the older one said.
“I can’t be here,” said the younger one. “I just can’t.”
The younger one lifted her head and tried to look at Polina’s face for a few more seconds. It was like she was trying to stare at the sun for as long as she could before she burned her retinas, then turned to the side, wincing.
“Let’s go, Mom,” said the younger one.
“But we just got here,” said the older one.
“I said I can’t be here,” said the younger one.
“But we drove for—” said the older one, who was interrupted by the younger one unapologetically exiting the Red Room. The older one looked back at Polina for a few seconds, then over to me.
“You love her,” she said.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“Of course you don’t.”
She was about to leave but added, “You’re an asshole. But I’m sorry for you.”
She left before I had a chance to respond. Still, I said, “Thank you,” in a whisper. Then I sat confused about whether I was happier or sadder that they were gone.
* * *
I spent most of that afternoon wondering how long the fuse was, since it was clear that at this point Polina was a time bomb ticking away to a death rattle. Only it was a magical bomb that wouldn’t devastate my body physically like most bombs would. More traditional bombs would have been favorable considering my physical body was already fairly devastated and not much more substantive damage could be had. Instead, Polina’s bomb would wreak havoc on my emotional body in a way that had never been wrought, and I wasn’t exactly sure what that might mean.
After a few dozen minutes ruminating on this topic, I was jostled out by a voice. “But hasn’t the fuse already burned away and the bomb exploded?” it said. I looked up and realized the voice was coming from my mother, who appeared opposite Polina’s bed, standing in exactly the same place that Polina’s friend was standing a few hours ago.
“She’s already dead,” she said. “Let go.”
“She is. But also she isn’t,” I said.
“In what conceivable way is she not dead?” my mother asked.
“In the way that I can take care of her,” I said. “And in the way that, quantum mechanically speaking, something unbelievable could happen.”
“For a nihilist, you harbor a lot of hope.”
“I’ve lost my taste for labels, Mother. What is a nihilist anymore?”
“And now a rhetorical question? I don’t even know my baby boy anymore.”
“I’m not sure I know myself right now.”
“Start your mourning, moya lyubov.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Because you don’t want to. And in an hour, or tonight, or tomorrow morning, she will rattle. And you will still resist. And you will refuse to accept that it happened. And you will be convinced that they buried a girl alive. So, let go.”
“I wish I could.”
“It’s the only sane thing to do.”
“Sanity is overrated.”
“It wasn’t a month ago.”
“Touché, Mother.”
“I know best.”
“If I don’t listen, I lose you, don’t I?”
“In this case, maybe.”
“More yes than maybe?”
“Yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“Maybe to French Polynesia. Or your hippocampus.”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t have much need for me anymore.”
“But I will.”
“But according to your brain you won’t.”
She paused and thought and smirked.
“But do what you need to do,” she said.
Then I closed my eyes, and she was gone.
That was the last time I talked to my mother.
* * *
Three hours later, I had still not let go of Polina and had no intention of doing so. Instead, I continued to rehydrate her lips and mouth. I couldn’t remember the last time I rehydrated myself. When the other nurses left, Nurse Natalya attempted to remedy this situation by providing me with several hydration options, including soft drinks, lemonade, Orangina, and several varietals of bottled water, which is quite rare in Mazyr, Belarus. I largely ignored those drinks and continued to tend to her vitals and sweaty forehead. Several times, I felt my head drop suddenly as the delta waves took over and I was legally asleep. The first seven times this happened, I caught myself plummeting. On the eighth time, I woke up to Nurse Natalya pulling the lollipop sponge out of Polina’s mouth because it was blocking her throat, causing a hideous guttural sound, which incidentally was the sound that people have just before they choke to death.
“Please sleep,” she said. “You can’t help her like this.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Do as you will. I know you’re too stubborn to listen.”
And she was right. But she was also clever. She knew me well enough to know th
at my head would plummet again. So she staked out the Red Room waiting for my eyelids to get heavy like a neutron star, and when they did, she immediately pulled the sponge pop from my hand, turned out the lights, and left my head positioned carefully next to the skin of Polina’s neck. That’s where I would wake up the next morning. On the last day.
DAY 1
The Death of Polina Pushkin
A Tuesday.
I think it was the smell of cancer that woke me up.
Prior coma reconnaissance has revealed that there are two sides to this debate. Some say cancer has no smell. They say death odors depend on the particular person and the bedsheets, gauze brands, cleaning solutions, and antibacterial soaps used by that particular hospital, mixed with the general city and cultural aromas. Others say that the cancer itself has an unforgettably pungent smell, one that is indescribable yet distinctive. On the morning that Polina died, the debate was settled for me. Her smell was nonclinical. It was not an odor that a soap or a bedsheet or anything chemically based could produce. It was organic. It was alive. And it was dead. It drew you in, and it pushed you away. It was the smell of sweet, but also the smell of rot.
After coughing out the night’s worth of sweet-and-sour cancer residue from my nose and lungs, I reinitiated the caretaking process. The first thing that I noticed was that my rehydration campaign was now a lost cause. Her lips now looked like a Martian landscape with red valleys that bordered on tectonic fissures. I felt guilty because when I looked at them I was disgusted.
The second thing I noticed was her tongue, which looked like it was perpetually seizing. I also noticed her eyes, which were all whites and no iris, because they were fighting so hard to roll to the back of her head. I noticed her breathing, which seemed to be only long, wheezing exhales, and I wondered where she was getting the air to exhale so much without any inhales, and then I wondered if she had just stored secret oxygen in her body from sixteen years of breathing and just now her body was giving it back to the universe. Surely, someone more spiritually minded would have been convinced that she was exhaling her soul, breath by breath. And if I were any less rational, I might have thought the same thing.
I noticed her skin, which had almost completed its transformation to purplish black.
I noticed her scalp, which was more cracked than it was smooth.
I noticed her ribs through her hospital gown, which were now carved like the ripples in desert sand.
I noticed her legs poking out from her hospital gown, which now looked more like broomsticks.
I noticed my hand was on her hand because I didn’t know what else I could do.
I noticed it was 7:43 in the A.M.
As I was noticing all these things, her tiny little hand grew icier and icier as if to warn me it was coming. Then her skin hit a critical temperature, and her torso leaped up, chest out, exhaling one more long sandpaper breath, while her once adorable breasts were now compressed and stretched over the landscape of her rib cage. Then she lifelessly collapsed back to the bed, and her chest didn’t undulate anymore, and the chirping of the heart monitor stopped. I put my face really close to her chapped mouth and felt nothing against my cheek.
Good-bye, Polina.
PART THREE
Farewell Song
I
The Aftermath
My first thought after Polina died was that I hoped the millions of rubles of medical technology that was attached to her would notify the nurses that she was dead so I wouldn’t have to. Instead, I stared with lifeless eyes at her equally lifeless body for at least a thousand seconds before it occurred to me that no one was coming. So I said, “It happened,” and then I waited a few more seconds. No one came. Then, it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t say it loud enough, so I said it louder—“It happened!” Still there was no stampede of hospital personnel from the Main Room, which usually accompanies a death. It occurred to me that I had lost my ability to judge the volume of my own voice, so I decided to repeat myself one more time because I didn’t think I had the gumption to do it again:
“IT HAPPENED.
THERE IS A DEAD GIRL IN THE RED ROOM.
ATTENTION: COLLECT THE DEAD GIRL FROM THE RED ROOM.”
This may have also been accompanied by a bit of thrashing about, which may have resulted in several intravenous tubes being yanked from Polina’s dead body and a few monitors crashing to the floor, which further resulted in a flood of broken glass spreading throughout the Red Room. And finally, the dead were woken, and the room flooded with nurses, Natalya, Lyudmila, Katya, Elena, to be exact. And Mikhail Kruk, my father.
The next hour passed by in some combination of fast forward and slow motion. Arms and fingers fluttered around with vapor trails, pulling out stethoscopes, then putting them away, then pulling out needles from veins, disconnecting tubes, turning off machines, sweeping up monitor glass, wiping down sweat and bile, disrobing then rerobing Polina, transferring her body onto another bed (one with wheels), which was then rolled off to some undisclosed location. Throughout the whole ballet, I was simply a prop that was worked around, an inanimate object to be avoided, much like I’ve been for my whole life.
At some point the curtain closed, but I was still there. Natalya was the first one to make contact. Ivan? she said. Moya lyubov? she said. Where are you? she asked. I didn’t know. But I do know I found myself in my bed the next morning, quite literally paralyzed. Then three days later, three days ago, I started writing to you, dear Reader.
Currently, the clock reads 5:55 in the A.M.
It is the sixth day of December.
The year is 2005.
I have been writing for seventy-seven hours.
And now it is now. It is hard to imagine that I brought so much of you back to life, my strange love, only to let you die all over again. At this moment, I’m terrified that I failed you. I’m worried that this memorial won’t be acceptable to Bulgakov or Nabokov or Tolstoy, let alone you. Part of me wants to rip these pages into confetti and start all over. But I’m tired. I’ve just completed a complicated surgical procedure in which I’ve cut a two-hundred-kilo tumor from my soul, and I’m not sure I feel like putting it back in right now. And, if I’m to be totally honest, I’m not sure if this catharsis was for me or for you. Besides, I think I might finally sleep. Really sleep. Sleep made of limestone and granite. The urge is building at the base of my brain and spreading up into my amygdala and occipital lobe. In a few seconds, it will reach my eyes. I hope that’s okay.
* * *
Nurse Natalya caught me sleeping.
“I measured you in your sleep,” she said, barging into my room with boundless enthusiasm, her hands behind her back where she was clearly concealing something.
“How long was I asleep.”
“Almost a day.”
“And you did what?”
“I measured you.”
“For what?”
“To make sure you would fit into this.”
Nurse Natalya pulled her hands from behind her back to reveal that she was holding a black suit. The legs were thoughtfully tailored into shorts so that the two long, empty black pant legs wouldn’t draw attention to my lack of appendages.
“I’m supposed to wear that?”
“You are.”
“Where did you find this?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does.”
“My church.”
“Then I’m definitely not wearing it. You should know better by now.”
“Oh, stop. You act like the savior himself wove it. Actually, it belonged to a young boy who now studies astrophysics at Heidelberg University.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“How do we get there?”
“A long time ago, Karl Benz invented the automobile.”
“I knew that.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“I’ve never been in a car before.”
“It’s like being in your bed, Iva
n. Only it moves.”
“You’re wittier than normal.”
“I switched coffees. Now get dressed.”
This was when I typically initiated protest behavior, but I was surprised to find the edge wasn’t there.
“Okay.”
“No countermove?”
“Knowing I can win is enough.”
Natalya looked disoriented. Then her face twisted into suspicion and then back to normal.
“Well, then, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to tie your tie,” she said.
Natalya left, and I laid out my suit and wormed into it. Then I writhed my way across the floor, while I thought about how I should have writhed across the floor first and then changed into my suit. Nevertheless, I made it to the bathroom and began to pee. And as the long-built-up stream made music into the toilet, I couldn’t help noticing the mirror, which was forever positioned above the sink. It was the same mirror I typically avoided at all costs due to my previously mentioned phobia of reflective surfaces. This time, however, while adorned with a suit for the first time, albeit with floor dust smeared over the lapels, I was overwhelmed with curiosity and could not help myself but to look. The first thing I noticed was that my hair was atrocious, so I licked my palm and adjusted some of the dirty-blond madness geysering from the top of my head. The second thing I noticed was that for the first time I wasn’t completely disgusted by my own reflection, though I give most of the credit to the suit.
I finished peeing and writhed back to my bed to check the clock. There were three more minutes before Nurse Natalya would return to tie my tie, and she was quite punctual when it came to things involving dressing and funerals. I decided to use these three minutes to open up the folder hiding beneath my bed and take out the top page, which contained the inked-out part. I folded up this paper and put it into the breast pocket of my suit, like I had seen people do in the movies before, but which I had never done myself because I never before wore anything with a breast pocket. This only took two minutes and twenty seconds, so for the rest of the forty seconds, I took rapid swigs of ethanol and then pulled out Polina’s journal and read the last page. It said:
Dear Ivan,
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 22