The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (29 page)

“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 that 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, Ivan. 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,

Stop reading my journal. You have a problem.

If it's possible to miss someone as a ghost, then I'm sure I will miss you. Looking forward to haunting your life.

Live,

Polina.

PS—You'd better use the suitcase. You have no idea how hard it was to steal ten thousand rubles in this cheap hospital.

Then, like a grandmother clock, Natalya exploded back through the door and began wrapping a tie around my neck. Her face was about six inches from mine, so I got to watch the sequence of faces that she made while attempting to get it tied.

“It's been a while,” she said.

“Since your husband?” I asked while simultaneously holding my breath so that she couldn't smell the Stoli.

“Yes. Since him,” she said, and then after a few more seconds of wrangling and pinching the skin of my neck:

“There. Quite handsome, Ivan,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She maneuvered her way behind my chair and wheeled me out of my room, and then down the hall, and past Miss Kristina's desk, and then out the two big brown double doors, and then we were outside, which I hated. She stopped for a moment, perhaps to get me acclimated to my agoraphobia, or maybe because she was tired of pushing. Then she dusted some of the hair off my forehead and continued to push me down a gray concrete ramp to a small parking lot where her car was parked.

“What do you call this car?” I asked.

“It's a Lada.”

“It looks old.”

“It is old.”