The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (25 page)

 

clearly I'm drunk.

my apologies, Reader.

 

After about an hour of blue, thirty minutes of dusk, and two hours of black my thoughts were interrupted by her voice.

“How'd you get up here without bedsheets and duct tape?” said Polina's bald silhouette as it peeked out of the hole in the roof.

“I used the handicap ramp over there. How did you know I'd be up here?”

“I didn't, but it seemed like the only option after I checked your room, the Main Room, all the stairwells and colored rooms, the bathroom, and behind all the couches.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I have new blood.”

“Like a modern-day vampire.”

“Already occurred to me.”

Polina moved a little bit closer, so I started shivering.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Not really.”

Polina leaned toward my neck, opened her mouth, and blew moist, hot air onto my skin. I shivered some more.

“Ivan?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Take your shorts off.”

“That won't help with my shivering.”

“I asked you to pull down your shorts.”

When Polina said this, my
Hui
filled completely.

“I can't.”

“Of course you can.”

“No, I can't.”

“Why can't you?”

“Because my
Hui
is hard.”

“I want to see it.”

“I don't want you to see it.”

“You want me to touch it?”

“No.”

I meant yes. Fortunately, Polina pulled my shorts off anyway while I feigned resistance. My twitching
Hui
pointed to the moon, which was full and big and bright. I was too conscious of its size and appearance, as well as her face, which was an unsettling mixture of sex and sickness.

“Can I touch it?” she asked, but the question was rhetorical because she wrapped her palm and fingers around it before I had a chance to answer.

“It's nice.”

“It's not.”

“I like it.”

Polina began to slide her palm up and down the length of my
Hui
. Then she stopped to lick her palm in one long, thick lap and wrapped it back around, slowly sliding up and down, then twisting subtly. My head was clear and silent, except for the faint weight of my self-awareness and the occasional recognition that someone who was not me was touching my
Hui
.

“I'm going to do something now, okay?”

“What?”

“I'll show you.”

Polina opened her mouth and consumed my whole
Hui,
right to my flesh, and sucked on it with her lips and tongue. I didn't withdraw from it, but I said, “No, not this way.”

Polina pulled her mouth away long enough to say, “What way?” and then started licking the entirety of my
Hui
.

“Let me lick you first.”

“No, Ivan.” Then back to sucking she went.

“Why not?”

“Because I'm sick.”

“So am I.”

“No, you're not. Enjoy this.”

“Would you enjoy it if I were doing it to you?”

“I would.”

“Then let me.”

“No. This is for you.”

Polina decided to abandon words and instead began to attack my
Hui
with her mouth and wet palm with devout piety. She momentarily paused to describe how I tasted. And with almost every oscillation of her hand, her technique seemed to sharpen as if she knew exactly what my particular
Hui
needed to burst in her mouth. That's when an ugly thought came into my head, microscopically and wordlessly at first, but altogether uninvited:
Has she done this before?
And a flush of some as-of-yet-unnamed emotion, which felt like a stew of insecurity-jealousy-anxiety spread from my chest down into my
Hui
strong enough to make me worried that the whole apparatus would come down right in her mouth, but as per usual, reproductive biology won over fight-flight, and the thought dissolved in her saliva as my
Hui
became progressively harder, threatening, against her tongue, to erupt.

She stopped for a minute to say, “
Tvoyu sperma, pozhaluysta?
”
*

And before I had a choice in the matter I did, I gave it all, filling her mouth I'm sure, but entirely unaware because I was too busy noticing how a mixture of vulnerability and kinship results in orgasms that leave nothing the same ever again, irrevocable, a complete earthquake, screaming,
If this person goes away, I will die
. No one ever told me that would happen, which was inconvenient because Polina was going away.

Polina swallowed graciously and looked at me with a sultry smile most likely induced by the tremors in my thigh nubs and the gape in my mouth. She gently pushed my torso back down to the concrete, which was colder now than I remembered, and rested her head on my chest, through which she could feel my heart beating tortured little beats.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I'm fine.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you so quiet?”

“You should get back inside. We know what happens when you're out here too long.”

“Just five more minutes.”

“Three.”

“Fine. Three.”

“Natalya is working tonight. I can stay with you.”

“Okay.”

“Touch my head.”

“Okay.”

“Pet it?”

“Okay.

“Thank you.”

After five, not three, minutes, we both descended the handicap branch to Dennis's window. Inside, Dennis was asleep, and Polina adjusted his blankets so that they covered all his uncovered spots. Then she walked, and I slithered, back into my room and into my bed, where I fell asleep to the things Polina was saying.

 

DAY 6

The Little Green Folders

I don't think we deviated from our morphology once. Apparently, the less publicized side effect of a catastrophic orgasm is hibernation. I only know that I lifted my head to find my body in precisely the position it was when I collapsed on the bed last night, with Polina's arm wrapped around me from behind, and the early rays of morning sunlight starting to fill the room. If not for the death hanging in the air like smoke, it would have been a perfect way to wake up.

Polina sensed the motion.

“Hi, Ivan.”

She coughed some and then winced like a rodent.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Like
Khalva
and
Kozinaki.
”
*

“Gifted liar.”

“I had a crazy dream last night.”

“Another one?”

“Yes.”

“What happened in this one?”

“I dreamed that I sucked on your
Hui
.”

“What a nightmare.”

“I know.”

Polina aimed for my eye but kissed my nose, which was followed by a smile, followed by the playful creases in her face becoming deep and solemn. And with those new wrinkles, somehow the air in the room congealed. Enough for me, with all my limited understanding of social cues and interpersonal intelligence, to know that something bad was about to happen.

“What is it?”

“What is what?”

“Something bad is about to happen.”

“It's been about to happen for a long a time. One more day won't hurt.”

Which is exactly when I discovered that I don't do well with any form of uncertainty. So I said:

“I don't do well with any form of uncertainty.”

“Can't it wait another day?”

“No.”

“Then I need to show you something.”

“Okay.”

“But it's not here.”

“Okay.”

“I'll be back.”

“Okay.”

And she left, closing the door behind her, shuffling like a sprite, while I waited on the edge of a knife in my bed. In my ensuing dread, I started to count and made it to sixty-seven before the doorknob turned and Polina reentered with three army-green folders, which were quite familiar to me because they were the same folders that every patient at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children gets on his or her first day at the asylum. She sat down on the cold linoleum next to my face.

“You're like me, Ivan. A curious punk, right?”

“I guess.”

“Is there a patient in this hospital whose file you haven't read?”

“No, I've read them all.”

“Of course you have. Max, Alex, Dennis, the gingers. Even the ones who have come and gone before we even got here. Before
you
got here. They're all too interesting, and we get bored, right?”

“Right.”

“Where have you found every file you've ever read?”

“In the cabinet behind Miss Kristina's desk.”

I said the words as if they were formalities rushed through on the way to the point.

“And who filled in all the blanks in every one of those files?”

“Miss Kris.”

“Right.”

“Can we skip the questions I already know the answers to?”

“You know the difference between you and me?”

“You're a burglar? And you're attractive when you have hair.”

“Yes, but I'm also much more patient than you.”

“Maybe.”

“You've never opened the safe in Mikhail's office.”

“It's locked.”

“Yes, but you would never think to sit in front of it on the nights he's not fucking Lyudmila and try every combination, would you?”

“I would think about it.”

“But you would never do it.”

“Probably not.”

“I would.”

“And you did.”

“I did.”

“And you found those.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Look at the handwriting.”

Polina pulled a random page from the top folder and put it in my hand.

“Does it look familiar?” she asked.

“No.”

“So, it's not the same handwriting that's on every file in the hospital?”

“No.”

From the bottom of her stack, Polina pulled out another piece of paper.

“This is a letter Mikhail wrote to the city treasurer requesting more funds for the hospital, but he never sent it because I stole it.”

Polina gave it to me. It was clearly the same handwriting as in the green file I was holding, which confirmed that Mikhail Kruk filled out those files
instead
for an as-of-yet-unknown reason, which I was sure she was about to share. I nodded to confirm as much.

“So whose files are those?”

“The oldest one is for a patient named Albina. She had leukemia just like me. Didn't make it to her eighth birthday. She died before you were born.”

“Okay, next?”

“Next is Dimitri.”

“I remember Dimitri.”

“Do you remember what was wrong with him?”

“Nothing was wrong with him.”

“Almost true. He had a connective tissue disorder like you. But his was apparently called Dupuytren's contracture, which, according to his file, means he had little pits in his hands that no one could even see unless they were up close.”

“So?”

“So, why was he here?”

“Maybe that's why he left.”

“Maybe. But he left when he was fifteen. It's hard to explain a fifteen-year prison sentence for a few weird tendons.”

“And the last one?”

“The last one is yours, Ivan.”

“Not possible. I already have a file.”

“You have two files.”

Polina handed me Ivan File #2. I opened the cover and started flipping through the pages.

“This is the same exact file. These are just copies.”

“It is the same. Except for Mikhail's handwriting and one more thing.”

“What?”

“This one has your date of birth. It says you were born on June 10, 1987. You're a Gemini, in case you were wondering.”

Specks of black started to fill my eyes, and the right angles of my room, which I had long taken for granted, started to bend and bulge.

“There's another difference,” she said.

“I see it,” I said.

To inform you, Reader, on Ivan File #1 the word “unknown” was written on the lines reserved for the names of my mother and father. In Ivan File #2, there were names very clearly once written but now blacked out with a thick marker.

“What are you thinking?” Polina asked.

I had been too deep inside my own head, dreaming up every possible explanation for this new intelligence, to notice that I was shaking wildly and that the paper I was holding was being crushed into a ball. I couldn't see the name beneath the ink on the line that said “Father” but there was only one explanation for these files, penned by Mikhail, to be defaced with a marker and then locked away. The devil wouldn't protect a soul, unless it was his own. I wished I were an idiot like the others. I wished it because even if I tried to turn my head the other way and stick mud in my ears and claw out my eyes, under the surface, the calculations would continue uninterrupted, and I would come to the conclusion that this ended only one way and that Polina already had it figured out: I was an unintended fuck child. I was the bastard spawn of the Most Mediocre Man in the World and a large-breasted nurse. I was unwanted in the purest of ways, an accident of the universe, bad news, a typo, and my whole life I've been kept from the world because I'm shame encoded in bastard DNA.

Despite the monsoon ripping through my head and then chest, I had enough presence of mind to look up. Polina was spewing tears down her face, as if I had said each of those thoughts out loud. Maybe I did.

“Maybe this isn't bad, Ivan. You might have a family. You have a brother. Maybe a mother.”