The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (19 page)

“I would kill you myself if you even thought…,” she said slowly, on the cusp of a murmur, choking on some sympathies she clearly wasn't expecting.

“I would never.”

“But you said—”

“I don't have the balls.”

She was just close enough to touch my hand, which she did. Then she slowly moved her fingers around in little circles. This lasted for about seven seconds, until she said:

“From what I understand, you have quite active balls.”

To which I said:

“Not really.”

To which she said:

“I overheard them talking about your bedsheets.”

To which I said:

“You're lying.”

To which she said:

“How else would I know that the nurses have to replace them twice as often as every other patient's?”

And just as the repartee began to crescendo into its most playful state to date, her face changed into something frozen, as if one of her internal organs had exploded or she'd received a prophetic message that rapture would commence in T-minus five seconds and she wasn't yet quite right with the Big Guy.

“You should go,” she said.

“But—”

“But you should go.”

I wheeled out of the Orange Room.

I didn't see Polina anymore on the sixteenth day.

 

DAY 15

Polina's Magic School Bus

(Three days until lab results)

Stem cells live inside bones. Stem cells can turn into either a myeloid stem cell or a lymphoid stem cell. If a stem cell turns into a myeloid stem cell, it will eventually turn into a myeloid blast. Myeloid blasts can become either a red blood cell, which carries oxygen to the brain, or platelets, which make it so that we don't bleed to death when we get a paper cut. If a stem cell turns into a lymphoid stem cell, it becomes a white blood cell, which fights infections (and anything else that's not supposed to be in blood). When old white blood cells die, stem cells make new lymphoid stem cells, which turn into new white blood cells to take their place. I know this because that's how it works according to
The Basic Science of Oncology,
by Ian Tannock and Richard Hill, published in 1987 by the McGraw-Hill Companies.

I made Nurse Natalya find it for me on the fifteenth day. Not this book in particular but any book like it. She said she found it in Mikhail's personal library and that he would never miss it, because in twenty-three years of working at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, she never once saw him touch a book. I made her find it after I rolled up to the Orange Room shortly after breakfast to find Polina in the midst of some combination of coughing and dry heaving while Nurse Natalya was catching the contents of her expulsion, which included a Pollock-esque mixture of mucus and blood. At some point, Nurse Natalya made the mistake of noticing me, which made Polina turn in suit, which inspired her to say, “Not now, Ivan. Go away.”

Polina makes bad white blood cells. Her white blood cells are immortal and vampiric. They overpopulate her blood and clog up all her good blood cells, which slowly die. Polina needs new stem cells that don't make bad white blood cells. Then Polina would be okay.

Like most things in the universe, it's not that simple. First, Polina has to use chemotherapy to kill every white blood cell in her body because the poison can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. This approximately makes her an all-you-can-eat buffet for infections. Second, Polina's new white blood cells can only come from another person, and every person has antigens. Antigens tell the white blood cells which cells belong to the body and which do not. In other words, they tell the white blood cells who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. If a leukemia kid gets new bone marrow that doesn't match his old bone marrow, the old white blood cells will think that the new white blood cells are bad guys. Within days, all the white blood cells kill each other, and she's back to being an all-you-can-eat buffet. Polina needs stems cells that have her antigens. This is not easy. It's not easy because we live in Chernobyl-town, Belarus, the blood disease capital of the world, where bone marrow transplants are more common than dental office visits.

On the fifteenth day, I approached Nurse Natalya while she was disinfecting a windowsill.

“How long is the list now?” I asked.

Nurse Natalya stopped wiping away germs from the hard-to-reach area underneath the lip of the sill and put down her towel. This meant that I was about to hear something that I didn't want to hear.

“Thirty-three months,” she said.

“But she only has three months, and that's only if she's lucky,” I noted.

“The ones at the top of the list are the ones who have three days. Or the children of government ministers,” she said.

According to Tannock and Hill, you get half of your antigens from your mom and half from your dad. Consequently, there is a 25 percent chance of finding a match in a sibling. According to Polina's journal, she was an only child. This left the rest of the Belarusian donor community, which was small and included a wide range of misfits, most of which already have their own colorful genetic fingerprints. The chance of finding a match in someone who is not a sibling is about 3 percent.

“What do I need to do to get tested?” I asked.

“No, Ivan.”

“Why not?”

“It's not a good idea.”

“Hypothetically.”

“I would need your blood. And some cheek cells.”

“That's easy. Test me.”

“You're not the gambling type.”

“Today I am.”

“It would take a Saint Christopher–type miracle.”

“Could she catch anything from me?”

“Like what?”

“Like what's wrong with me.”

“Probably not.”

“Then test me.”

Nurse Natalya looked over my face, breathed out all the air in her lungs, and made a calculation. She calculated that there was no amount of arguing in this particular situation that would convince me to quit. When she was done calculating, her body surrendered, and she wheeled me into one of the supply rooms on the second floor, where she pulled out a needle and easily inserted it into a vein, possibly without even looking, mostly because my skin is like peach-colored plastic. Then she jammed a piece of cotton in my mouth, violently swabbed the inside of my cheek, and put everything in a plastic bag, which she then put into a brown envelope.

“The lab will take three days,” she said. “Or three weeks. It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On the moon.”

“She can't wait that long.”

“I can't change the laws of physics or laboratory wait times, Ivan.”

Then she knelt down to me so that our faces were close together.

“I know how you are.”

“How am I?”

“You're rationally irrational.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you get hopeful even when there's no hope.”

I chose to ignore this comment.

“How was she when you left?”

“Coughing. Badly. With a forty-degree fever.”

“Pneumonia?”

“Yes. Probably.”

Symptom #7 on my diagnostic criteria for a leukemia three-monther. Her white blood cells are too beaten up to stand up to a pimple, let alone a type-A flu virus. See above.

“Wasn't she vaccinated?”

“It's November, Ivan. There are no vaccinations.”

Which was true. They typically ran out the first week of October—well before winter.

“Don't tell her anything,” I said.

“About what?” she asked.

“About testing me.”

“You don't want her to know?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Reasons.”

I know I didn't have to tell her because I knew she would read the reasons right out of my brain, only to smile once, hug me twice, and then wheel me back out to the Main Room for evening TV hour, which I hated because it made me feel helpless, but I know it made her feel helpful, so I let her. As soon as she dropped me off and her chubby little frame was out of sight, I rolled my way to the drinking fountains, which really was just so that I could pass the Orange Room and see what was happening inside. Polina was asleep in her chair with the bag of drugs dangling above her in its last throes. There was a luminous river of saliva flowing from her lips to her collarbone, which was now chiseled like a Greco-Roman sculpture. Then I forgot all about the drinking fountain and went back to the Main Room to finish watching an episode of
Nu, Pogodi!
while actually not watching any of it.

 

DAY 14

The Janis Joplin Day

(Two days until lab results)

The next morning, most of the patients living at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children and I were woken by the sounds of Polina coughing out several of her thoracic organs from her room in the girls' wing clear across the hospital.

I dressed early and stole some dextromethorphan from one of the supply closets, as well as some individually wrapped honey packets from the cafeteria, wheeled myself to Polina's room, and slid them under the door. For a moment, the coughing stopped. Then the configuration of shadows spilling from under Polina's door danced a bit.

“Take the medicine first, then the honey,” I whispered.

“Thanks,” she whispered back. “Water, please?”

“I can't pass that under the door. Use your spit.”

“I'm out of spit.”

I heard her swallowing, then coughing, then wrestling with the packet of honey.

“You didn't even ask what it is,” I whispered.

“It doesn't matter,” she whispered back. “It can't make me worse.”

“Okay, I'm going now,” I said.

“Wait. Don't go.”

“Okay.”

“Let's talk today.”

“Okay.”

“But not right now. Later. Because I don't feel good.”

“I'm vaccinated, so yes.”

“Okay. Now you can go.”

I turned my chair around and then:

“Ivan, wait!”

“What?”

“Can you do me a favor?”

“Yes.”

“There is a record in the second drawer down in the cabinet behind the front desk. Can you get that and slide it under my door too?”

“But you don't have a record player.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Natalya?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Wait, Ivan.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“Okay.”

I wheeled my way over to the front desk and pushed my way inside the area I was never supposed to go since the Incident, and then to the cabinet where I dutifully opened the second drawer down and found an old ten-inch record mixed in with about two hundred sheets of medical records and accounting. I dropped it into my lap, rolled back to Polina's room, and slipped it under her door.

I heard her whisper:

“What would I do without you?”

This question, I realized, was rhetorical, so I simply said:

“You would get it yourself.”

To which Polina laughed acutely, like a belch.

As I rolled back to my room, in the midst of the unique morning light wrestling its way through the barred windows on the Main Room, it occurred to me that the day was November 8, which meant it was the second week of November, which meant that Nurse Natalya no longer worked nights, which meant that Nurse Lyudmila, the only nurse who really instilled a sociopath-like fear in me, was working, which meant that if we were caught together after lights-out, we risked quarantine or worse, which seemed like a ridiculous thing for one dead person and another almost dead person to have to worry about, but a valid concern nevertheless. After breakfast hour, I found Nurse Natalya sterilizing some previously used syringes and made her aware of my dilemma.

“What can be done?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Can't you tell her that you approved it?”

“Do you like having me be your nurse?”

Another rhetorical question, so I stayed silent.

“Then I can't,” she said. “You and I both know that Mikhail is pathological about his rules. I only broke them because I could. If Lyudmila wanted, I could be at another hospital. We both know that too.”

“But you've worked here ten more years than her.”

“But she's fucking Mikhail.”

Which was the first time Nurse Natalya admitted that fact in words. Also, Nurse Natalya rarely uses such colorful language.

“Just don't get caught,” she said, and the conversation was over.

I decided to time my ride to Polina's room at 11:30 in the
P.M.
, which was typically the time that Mikhail's family was sleeping deeply enough for him to slip out of his house unnoticed, return to his office, and get lascivious with Nurse Lyudmila. Typically, the wheelchair ride to Polina's room takes about ninety seconds. Tonight, it took six minutes and eight seconds, due to the ninja-like stealth that I employed while making the trip undetected. There were momentary lapses where the natural excitement of the moment had me rolling at speeds that created an audible hiss, but when this happened, my mother appeared and said, “They probably can't hear you over Lyudmila's hideous wailing, but you should still be careful, Ivan.” To which I nodded and lowered my velocity to inaudible levels and held steady all the way to Polina's door.

I was about to knock, but the door opened up before my knuckle ever had a chance to hit the wood, revealing a wigless Polina.

“Come in. You're late. I almost went to sleep.”

“It's because Lyudmila is working.”

“So?”

“So, she hates me. And probably you too. She hates everybody, except for Mikhail, who she fucks, and most probably she is fucking him right now.”