The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (12 page)

And then in one earthquake, arising somewhere in the center of my chest, that all changed. It lasted approximately two and a half minutes and came without warning. In every book I've ever read, the protagonist's shifts in emotion come slowly. You can sense the change coming and building over chapters. You can feel the billows before the calm of the storm. Then the cloud bursts, and nothing is the same again. Not so for eleven-year-old Ivan. I was at the breakfast table putting spoonful after spoonful of cold plastic into my mouth, bouncing listlessly from thought to thought, much like I did every morning. And then, with no warning at all, I lurched and spit out my bite, and squirts of salt water leaped from one or more of my eyes. And in a moment, all the nurses feeding all the children dropped the spoons they were holding and turned to me, looking every bit as shocked as I'm sure I looked. I dropped my spoon too and then turned around and wheeled myself into a hallway and let the rest of it out. It took about twenty seconds for Nurse Natalya to arrive and throw her bat wings around me (that's what I call arms with droopy fat that dangles all the way up to your armpits). After twenty or so more seconds, she saw the storm wasn't about to end, so she pulled me tightly into the soft velvet of her enormous breasts while I purged myself of every trace of sadness I ever held but never knew I held. Then it was over. For a few minutes, Nurse Natalya continued to hold me. When I finally pulled away, I could see that she had been crying right along with me.

“It needed to happen” was all she said.

Then she wheeled me back to my room, where she picked my small body out of the wheelchair and put me into my bed.

“Should I be mad at God?” I asked.

“No. God didn't do this, Ivan.”

“Then who?”

“You'll find, Ivan, that most of the evil in the world is done by men who are addicted to their own thoughts.”

Nurse Natalya could tell I wasn't really satisfied with this answer, and, at the time, I never really understood what she meant. To be honest, I'm not even sure I understand now either. But it strikes me as one of those utterances that one will finally understand later in life in one sudden epiphany, so I carry it with me in the back of my head and wait for it. In the meantime, I resolved to squash whatever mental germs led to those feelings.

It was never discussed further. I spent a long time wondering if her silence was an expression of her disappointment in me or her guilt for not knowing the right words to say in order to make everything all right. The answer came about six months later while wheeling myself into my room en route to bed. That night, instead of sleep, I spent hours flipping through the scrapbook I found sitting in the middle of the floor. There was no note to accompany it. No name, no nothing. No evidence at all as to who put it together or why it was sitting there next to my bed.

The first page had a single picture of your standard industrial building with smokestacks and steel guts and dense edifices nestled sloppily next to each other. The second page had a picture of that same complex of buildings with a crater in the middle of it. The third page had several pictures of children who looked ominously like the residents of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. One boy had legs that were long and twisted, like a comic book character. There was a girl with bulging eyes and a fat tongue. There were pictures of kids with gigantic heads, which reminded me of Alex.

The articles began on the fourth page. Pages upon pages of articles. That night I couldn't bring myself to actually read the sentences. I could only scan and note the most commonly occurring words such as
Soviet, radiation, wildstock, core, communist, reactor, moral,
and
bankruptcy
. It occurred to me that Nurse Natalya couldn't find the right words, so she picked the right pictures and let a few international journalists and scientists pick the words for her.

I sat in my bed without moving for the next twenty-four hours.

When Soviet engineers were trying to figure out how to stem the massive waves of radiation flowing from Nuclear Reactor Number Four, they decided to create a massive concrete-and-steel enclosure to cut the radiation off from the rest of the world. They affectionately named this structure the sarcophagus. It didn't take me long to realize the symbolism. There isn't just one sarcophagus. There never was only one. This hospital is a sarcophagus too. And there are probably hundreds more sarcophagi out there filled with Maxes and Dennises and colonies of heart-hole children.

There is nothing innocuous about the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.

 

Currently the clock reads 11:50 in the
P.M.

I've been writing for twenty-four hours.

It is the third day of December.

The year is 2005.

A moment ago, I wiggled my flask and found it to be about half-full, which is plenty for my body weight. Eight in ten mutants agree: extreme susceptibility to alcohol is one of the few perks of having only half a body. It may be the only perk.

Nurse Natalya came in a few minutes ago. She was not at all pleased to find my clean clothes sitting at the end of my bed where she left them, while I played aloof, scribbling words like a mental patient.

“You asked for two hours, Ivan. I gave you six,” she said. “Change them now.”

“Not with you in the room.”

“You lost the right to privacy when you proved you can't change without me.”

She barked with such love.

“Turn around,” I said, and Nurse Natalya obeyed.

The removal of my clothes was slow and laborious, mostly because I was still shitty from the Stoli. I repeatedly missed the hole in my shirt where my arm was supposed to go. After one-point-five uncomfortable minutes, I asked for help.

“Since when can't you dress yourself?” Natalya asked.

“Since someone put a full flask on my table.”

She turned around and threw my arm into the correct sleeve while my skin hung from my bones and my body laughed hysterically. Then she pulled my underwear up over my boy parts, and I laughed some more at the sight of that. I know she enjoyed seeing me laugh, even if I was deranged. Then Nurse Natalya put the majority of her nose into my mouth.

“You stink of it, Ivan,” she reported.

“Sorry,” I said disingenuously.

 

XVIII

Ivanism

When Nurse Natalya found books she thought might make me leave the hospital for more whimsical worlds, she mostly did so without any input on my part. She knew my perverse sensibilities well enough that I never needed to make a formal request. I was thirteen before I ever begged Nurse Natalya for a book. It was the Old Testament.

“I want the Bible,” I told her.

She looked approving, but surprised, and then asked, “For a doorstop?”

“For my life,” I said.

A few days later, a copy of the Slovo Zhizny
*
showed up on the table next to my bed. Unfortunately, it only took a week before I was using it as a sedative. To be fair, I tried. I tried as hard as any fifteen-year-old boy could try to make any cosmic sense out of a convoluted and poorly edited book. I was, after all, used to Tolstoy. But, in the end, it was the prophets who tied their own nooses. I already knew enough about plate tectonics and erosion rates to completely discount Genesis. Exodus had a certain sexy appeal in the same way that an epic saga flickering on the TV in the Main Room would. Unfortunately, I'm not a Jew, so I felt left out. Leviticus was a list of archaic rules that will never be relevant to me here at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. Furthermore, it seemed to suggest that the world is “very good” and only subject to evil through “sin and defilement,” but I was a victim of evil well before I even had the opportunity to defile anything. Numbers tickled me until God decided to will his darlings to get lost in the wilderness and starve to death because they had doubts about their ability to win a war in Canaan—not the fatherly persona I was hoping for. I had high hopes for Deuteronomy, but after ten more pages of Moses ranting, I gave up.

So I tried to find God in Hinduism. Instead, I found several thousand of Him, each adorned with anywhere from eight to twenty arms. I only had one arm, so none of these could be my God. Then I looked for Him in the Greek and Roman myths, but those Gods were pettier than our nurses. Then I tried to find Him in Islam, until I heard that this God was the same ornery bastard from the Old Testament. Eventually, I put down all the books and said, “God, clearly I'm trying here. Could You just come talk to me? No books, I promise.” I sat there for a while listening very hard, but I didn't hear anything. So I said, “Please, God, anything. Give me something, and I will be loyal to You for as long as I live.” I listened hard with a scrunched and pensive face for thirty minutes. Still nothing. No booming voice. No burning bush. Not even a piece of paint falling off the wall.

Logic suggested that my next step be to find God with my intellect. So I crafted every mental argument I could dream up to prove His existence. Then, after consulting Saint Thomas Aquinas, I discovered that I had accidentally re-created both the teleological and ontological arguments for the existence of God, which had previously been invented by Socrates and Anselm of Canterbury, respectively. Neither of these satisfied me. In the end, they were just words, and when I looked inside them, still no God.

Eventually, I drank so much of Nurse Elena's laundry room stash of Beluga
*
that I stopped thinking at all. When everything turned black, there was space for questions to start to bubble up. Questions like: Who makes someone in His image, then chops off his or her arm and several fingers? Who goes through the effort of creating something that will never be able to mate and therefore propagate its genes, which, ultimately, is the only purpose of life? And, of course, was God Himself drunk when He made me? I noticed I had no good answers to these questions, so I pulled out a blank piece of paper and wrote down only the things I knew for sure. When I was done, I had three principles, which I dub the Three Tenets of Ivanism:

1. There is no Creator, at least not in the way that we hope for.

2. There is no fate, no destiny, no prewritten laws that say how things are supposed to be.

3. The only order in the universe is the laws of physics—besides that, the universe is amoral and chaotic.

There are two reasonable reactions to Ivanism. Reaction #1 goes something like:
Bravo, cheers, well done, Ivan! This is the only conclusion that makes any sense.
If this is your reaction, I'm only preaching to the choir. Reaction #2 sounds more like:
I refuse to believe this. Of course there is a God. If not, then who made everything? Besides, I need to believe in a God. I need something to give all of this meaning.
If this is your reaction, there's nothing I can say to change your mind.

 

Currently the clock reads 12:03 in the
P.M.

I've been writing for more than thirty-six hours.

It is the fourth day of December.

The year is 2005.

 

Nurse Natalya just came in.

She says she had a dream.

Have you been up all night? she asks.

More or less.

Do you need anything?

Vodka.

Besides that.

I'm all right.

Can I read it?

No.

I couldn't sleep either. I had a dream about you.

About what?

You were a student at the university.

I saw you walking in the street,

so I stopped you.

You looked at me like you didn't know who I was.

Then you walked away.

I had legs?

Yes.

What do you think it meant?

I haven't decided yet.

 

XIX

Polina's Journal

If Polina had an addiction, it was writing in a small, seasoned notebook. Sometimes with a hand that was calm and precise, and sometimes on the cusp of violence. Sometimes she would look up and around in between sentences, and sometimes her face would be buried in the page for an hour at a time. Sometimes she would just hold it during TV hour while slowly stroking the cover with her left hand. Sometimes she would read old pages with a fraction of a smile on her cheeks, which activated her shallow dimples. Sometimes she would read old pages with eyes that held varying degrees of blue water.

I'm not ashamed to tell you, Reader, that I wanted to read every private and lascivious thought inside that book. Unfortunately, this was close to impossible because she brought it everywhere. She brought it to breakfast first thing in the morning. She brought it to her chemo session, where it turned salty from her cold sweats. She brought it into the bathroom, where the pages would slowly start to turn wavy from post-hand-wash moisture. She brought it to lunch and then to dinner, where it slowly became stained with unidentified animal grease.

There is not a lot of wisdom that comes with being a seventeen-year-old boy who has spent his entire life inside of an asylum for mutant children, but you do eventually develop a deep understanding of the benefits of patience. Since this was my only strength (as well as my only option) I waited for her to fumble. Every girl has a moment when she is helplessly lost to her own world at the expense of the contents of the real one.

The infamous fumble came after six weeks and three days of stoic waiting. After lunch on a Wednesday, a day when her features were particularly glum, she walked into the common bathroom with it and walked out without it. I waited a few minutes to give reality a chance to catch up with my eyes. I was four meters from the bathroom door, there wasn't a nurse to be seen, and the only others in the room were Dennis, who was rocking away like a grandfather clock, and the two ginger twins, who were absorbed in an intense game of chess, neither of which was an obvious threat. A few more fidgety moments passed before I realized that everything was as it seemed and the book was mine for the taking. So I wheeled myself over to the bathroom door and made my way inside after banging my chair multiple times into the metallic doorframe due to my accelerated heart rate and sweaty palm. Once inside, with the door closed firmly behind me, I found it sitting innocently enough on the floor beside the toilet. So I carefully placed my awkward ass on the porcelain seat and reached down with Old Lefty to pick up her book, which instantly began to vibrate along with my trembling hand.