The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (18 page)

By the time I finished thinking this last thought, I found myself in the precarious position of being eye to eye with the ceiling door with no more sheet above me.

“I can hold you for now, Ivan,” Polina said. “But you're going to need to get your ass on the roof.”

“But I only have one—”

“Blah, blah, blah. And I've had enough chemotherapy to kill Rasputin, which means you'd better pull yourself up, or I'm going to drop you like a dead baby.”

My best guess would be four minutes. That's how long my one extremity fumbled around the opening in the roof in order to establish the leverage required to hoist myself the rest of the way up, while Polina held the sheet steady as she sweat, quivered, and verbally abused me from below. There were several moments when my head already decided to give up. But then my mother would show up for a moment to tell me stories of pregnant women lifting cars up off their trapped children, which inspired me to summon the pissed-off pregnant mother inside of me, who I truly believe lives in all of us.

I was probably on the roof for thirteen seconds before I realized that I was on the roof. It took hearing Polina's voice to pull me back into reality.

“How is it up there?”

Instead of answering, I decided to take the sky in for the first time and also peel the thirty revolutions of gauze from my torso.

“Ivan, say something.”

I heard her feet climbing the metal rungs of the ladder.

“I'm okay.”

“Good,” she said as her shiny bald head popped out of the opening. She took a moment to drink in the night sky with me before continuing:

“I grew up in Lviv, where there is too much light in the city to see the stars at night. Thank sweet baby Jesus of Bethlehem for piece-of-shit Mazyr.”

I was too stuck on the stars to respond.

“
Blin!
*
My little Ivan, you've never seen the night sky before, have you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“But only through your window.”

“That is accurate.”

“No one would take you?”

“No.”

“Not even Natalya?”

“She would. She asked once. She actually asked more than once.”

“And?”

“And I said no.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Ivan, of course you know!”

And I did. We both knew that I knew.

“You're afraid,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of everything.”

“It makes no sense to be afraid of anything, let alone everything.”

“It doesn't mean you aren't.”

To which I didn't respond, because I didn't know what to say, which led Polina to break the uncomfortable silence:

“Well, I graciously accept the award for taking your virgin flower
.
”

I spit out a reflexive laugh, which caused Polina to spit one out too. Then we sat quietly, without saying anything to each other for the next twenty minutes, which was nice, though Polina eventually talked again.

“My mother and father were so different. My mother refused to believe in anything she couldn't see, and my father dreamed all the time. The sky reminds me of him. He was addicted to astrology. He explained every quirk and idiosyncrasy in everyone we met with the stars. He said that when he was a boy, he and his family spent a summer in Tallinn, because Chechnya was not safe. One night, he took a walk and met a Gypsy selling okra and cucumbers. She made a deal with him. She said, ‘If I tell you three things that will happen to you in the next three days and they all come true, will you come back here on the fourth day?' And he agreed.”

“What were the three things?”

“On the first day, she said, it would rain tarantulas from the sky, but aside from being a bit foul, he had nothing to worry about, since tarantula bites are not dangerous in themselves, and weather has a soul of its own. On the second day, she said, he would hear a droning hum for most of the morning, but, again, not to be afraid of it because it was there to repair his unconscious. And on the third day, everything would appear normal until he found himself, mysteriously, in a completely different place, disoriented, with no explanation of how he got there, but still he shouldn't be afraid because it meant that he transcended time and space.”

“All of them came true?”

“No, none of them.”

“Then why are you telling me the story?”

“Because I left out the best part.”

“What's the best part?”

“He went back on the fourth day to berate the Gypsy, but when he got there, the Gypsy was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe, screaming, ‘Oh, Russian boys!' between gasps of air. My father said it took her so long to calm down that he lost his patience and tried to leave, but she lured him back with some baklava.”

“And?”

“And he stayed. And they talked every day.”

“I don't believe in astrology.”

“I don't either. But I do believe in stars. Astrology is concept. Stars are just stars.”

I wasn't sure what she meant, but I didn't want to seem like an idiot by asking her to clarify, so I nodded and went back to looking at the sky.

“I was born on April 5,” she said.

“Aries.”

“What do you know about Aries?”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing.”

“Aries want to be the center of the universe. Someone like you would say that's because I'm an only child. And that may be true. But that's not the only way I make the perfect Aries. I'm loud, and I'm in love with life. Or at least I used to be before I got sick. It's hard to love life anymore.”

Her eyes moved from me back to the stars.

“When were you born, Ivan?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know when you were born?”

“No.”

Polina was silent for a few seconds, and I remember her eyes looked calm and gentle like she was trying to be careful with me, which, incidentally, was not very Aries of her. Then in her most high-pitched, academic, nasally voice, she said:

“Ivan, could you tell me more about that?” which sounded entirely too much like Dr. Boulatnikov, our current resident psychologist. And with those words, Polina accidentally pushed the button inside my brain that was responsible for releasing all the laughter that was ever held inside but never allowed out. It started with innocent enough burps. And then a river of thick saliva started running down my chin and pooled onto my lap, which made me laugh harder, which instigated Polina to laugh too, which brought the feedback loop to the next level, which made me lose control of my proprioception, which made me roll all over the cold cement of the rooftop. I lost the ability to breathe. I was gasping for air, tears streaming down my face, begging for Polina to make it stop, somewhat aware that I was in the process of laughing out all the absurdity, and all the isolation, and all my grievances against the universe in one spastic, uncontrollable fit. And eventually, Polina was scared.

“Ivan!” she yelled while cradling my tiny spasming body. “It wasn't
that
funny.”

I tried to say words back to her, but I was too busy trying to breathe.

“Ivan, what? What are you trying to say? Calm the fuck down,” she said while slapping my cheeks repeatedly. Her face looked stuck between panic and not falling back into the pit of laughter I was stuck in. Still, she had the presence of mind to hold my head off the concrete and wipe the tears off my face.

Eventually I could say, “I never laughed like that before.”

“Not once?”

“I practiced in the mirror, but never for real.”

“Never?”

“It needed to happen.”

As I looked up at her, it occurred to me that this was the moment when, if we were trapped inside of a TV set, we would have kissed, which is when, not coincidentally, she gently let my head back down to the concrete and slid a few inches back.

“Glad you didn't break your head,” she said. “I'm too sick and tired to clean the blood.”

To which I answered:

“I can answer your question.”

“What question?”

“Why I don't know my birthday.”

“I'm listening.”

“I wrote it down. I can read it to you. Or you can read it.”

“What?”

“Everything from my nonexistent birthday until three days ago.”

“You wrote it for me?”

“It felt like the right thing to do after I stole your diary. I could keep you company while you get poisoned tomorrow.”

“Is it depressing?”

“My story?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“I'm not sure I can handle depressing while I'm being poisoned.”

“Actually, it's a fairy tale, and I'm the boy version of Cinderella.”

“You would need a foot to be Cinderella, Ivan.”

Touché, Polina.

“That was mean, which means you owe me.”

“No, I don't.”

Those were her last words. I accepted her reticence, and she accepted my silence. Then we stared at the Milky Way until the urge to urinate forced me back inside.

 

Currently, the clock reads 2:58 in the
A.M
.

I've been writing for fifty-one hours.

It is the fifth day of December.

The year is 2005.

 

I slept for a few minutes.

It would have been longer if not for the

vodka having evaporated from my blood.

I shook the flask and heard a few drops rattling.

I drank all three of them and decided I needed more.

I knew the location of Elena's

hidden stash.

From the laundry chute,

I obtained an entire bottle, minus a few swigs.

 

DAY 16

The Retroactive Biography of Ivan Isaenko

Click, check, repeat.

My internal alarm trumpeted. I checked my missing legs. I rolled off the bed. I slithered to the bathroom. I ignored the cold floor. I pissed myself dry. I slithered back. I mountaineered into my bed. I spread out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I wormed my way into both of them. I Tarzaned into my chair. I wheeled down to the cafeteria. I assumed my position. I checked Polina's empty seat. I let pungent cabbage juice drip from my chin. I quit after three bites, which is when Nurse Elena strolled by half-inebriated and said to me, “The sick girl wanted Natalya, but Natalya's not here. She gave me this.”

Then she dropped a piece of paper, and it careened down half into my cabbage juice.

“Sick girl has a name,” I said.

To which Elena did not respond.

So I said, “Polina.”

To which she still did not respond, which forced me to whisper
bitch
under my breath while I read the piece of paper. It said,
Poison on high. Where are you?

I crammed the note into my shorts, and the wheels on my chair started moving by themselves. They rolled themselves back to my room, where I pried out my retroactive diary from under the edge of my mattress and then crammed it under my ass. Then my wheels turned themselves around and started rolling down to the Orange Room, which is where people receive chemotherapy.

As I had expected, Polina was the lone chemo patient in the room, since all the leuks, lymphs, and brainers had died in the last year. She was sitting in her poison chair, sketching in her diary, with yellow morning sunlight splashing her from different directions, ricocheting off the orange walls, mixing with the peach of her skin and the purples of her bruising, and curving around the new curves made out of her newly exposed bones. She looked like an expressionist painting, possibly brushed by someone suitably insane like Munch or Marc or Kirchner.

I decided to stay quiet and roll in slowly and wait till she noticed me so that I could enjoy the candid view for as long as I could. This was easy, since the room was a veritable labyrinth of old, defunct, obsolete, or irrelevant medical equipment that easily concealed my meandering wheelchair. And as I rolled like a wheel-bound ninja, it occurred to me that Polina, as bald and bony as she was, made this room about as tolerable as it was capable of getting. And as I was lost in these thoughts, I collided with some gray machine or another, and Polina's startled head swung over to me and she reflexively yelled, “Sleaze!” To which I agreed. Then I continued to weave myself through the equipment until my chair was next to hers. She was facing the outside window, where the sun was particularly new.

“You look okay,” I said.

“I don't feel okay.”

“What do you feel?”

“Like a mouse in a mousetrap just before it dies.”

She smiled like she knew she was being dramatic and then looked down at the notebook I'd just removed from under the seat of my pants.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Let's get on with it.”

“I thought it was too depressing.”

“I'm bored,” she said.

“You must be,” I said.

“Let me see it.”

I handed the notebook over to her.

“You wrote all this?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“In three days?”

“In one night.”

She stopped talking for a few seconds and just fanned through the pages of what I'm sure appeared to be the handwriting of a young epileptic child living through a nonstop seizure.

“I was going to give it to you, but then you became a three-monther,” I said.

“This is a first.”

“What?”

“No one has ever written me a book.”

“Obviously.”

“Start.”

She handed the book back, and I turned to the first page. The words started falling out of my mouth with the slow, extremely deliberate, and overly academic delivery that the loose muscles in my face could accommodate. I read to her about the anonymous doorstop drop-off and how that meant that I've never been anywhere else. I read that I never met my parents but that I do have a mother who is a Tinker Bell–like apparition that pops into my life primarily when I'm contemplating suicide or about to commit a social blunder. I read about how every nurse, Nurse Natalya included, is far too squirmy and twitchy when I bring up my origins for there not to be more to the story. I read to her about waking up to the universe with a slap in the face and colorful language coming from a woman with a fuzzy mole on her upper lip. I read to her about how so much of my life isn't real because it's spent asleep, but really awake, but not really awake. I read her the fifty faces I wear, which I'm sure really only look like one. I read about the full encyclopedia of my defense mechanisms, ranging from denial to dissociation to displacement (not to mention repression, rationalization, and regression). I read every flavor of self-harm that goes through my head. I read through my various options for escape and how I haven't the testicles for any of them. I read through the secret lives I've written for the Ivan I would be under any other set of circumstances. I read her the tenets of Ivanism. I read about how mad I am that He put such a big life into such a small, broken box. I read about being trapped with people just like me in every way except for the fact that they will never understand a thought that goes through my head. I read to her about my mistrust of karma. I read to her about my fourteen useless shrinks. I read about how none of it makes any sense, yet the little brain stuffed in all our heads needs things to make sense even though nothing makes sense. I read to her about her and about how when she arrived, things made a little more sense, and as soon as some sense was made for the first time, suddenly things stopped making sense because she became a three-monther. Sometimes I stuck to the script. Sometimes I stopped in between sentences to elaborate in order to accommodate the new level of rapport we had developed. Sometimes I paused to swallow a storm that was welling up my throat, which I blamed on a rare type of asthma. And not for one second of the whole confession did I dare look at her face for fear that I might shit my pants. I waited for the last sentence to be over before finally looking up, which, according to the clock on the Orange Room wall, came eighty-seven minutes after I started reading. And when I did look up at her face, I found that her cheeks were red, moist, and puffy despite her emaciated state.