The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (2 page)

Early on, Nurse Natalya caught on that I was faking my comas and gently made me aware of her acuity in a way that resonated perfectly with her. She put a picture of a famous (and very naked) Belarusian actress in my field of vision and said tauntingly:

“Pretty girl, huh, Ivan? Such a beautiful naked woman, eh?”

And then while my attention was firmly embedded in that picture, glued by every ounce of my helplessly horny, adolescent, sex-deprived being, she yanked it out into my peripheral. Inevitably, my supposedly comatose eyes lustfully followed the image, and my game was revealed. But, before I even tried to explain myself, Nurse Natalya understood the psychology behind my game. So instead of shaming me, as any of the other nurses would have, she sat me down and interrogated me as to my interests. When I told her I had none, she flapped her hand and walked out. The next day she returned with an old paperback copy of Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita
. I devoured it in three days and asked her for more. Since then, Nurse Natalya has scoured libraries and used-book sales to feed my habit. On the days in which I'm too sick or overmedicated to read, she tells me stories on a variety of esoteric topics ranging from Tollund Man's peat bog to Saint Ursula's cathedral of bones to Cleopatra's seduction techniques. I once asked her how she knew so much about the world despite being almost as stuck in this place as I am.

“I'm a few chapters away from a Ph.D., Ivan,” she said. “But it turns out universities are even lonelier than hospitals.”

One day, Nurse Natalya gently suggested that I should try writing down the scripts that played through my pseudocatatonic head. She thought that it would amount to some sort of therapy.

“Where are you when you leave the hospital and go into your head?” she asked me.

I smiled asymmetrically, shook my head one and a half times, and looked away.

“Sometimes the stories play right in your eyes, Ivan,” she continued. “You should write them down.”

She paused for a second and smirked.

“If you wrote your stories with the same chutzpah you use with the nurses, I'd give you two years before you're the world's most despised Nobel laureate.”

“My stories are for me,” I replied.

“You say that now, Ivan.”

And then she smiled, and when she smiles, it means that she knows that we both know.

She would revisit the topic once or twice a week every week for the next few years. As always, she was right. Actually, I'm not sure Nurse Natalya has ever been wrong about anything.

One day she asked me, “Do you know how the Buddha became enlightened?”

“I don't believe in enlightenment.”

“Perfect, Ivan. The Buddha wouldn't want you to believe in enlightenment.”

“Aren't you Orthodox?”

“The Buddha makes me a better Christian.”

“So how?”

“How what?”

“How did he become enlightened?”

“He sat under the Bodhi Tree and promised himself not to move until he solved the whole puzzle of human suffering.”

I suppose I currently bear a striking resemblance to that Buddha under the Bodhi Tree.

 

Currently the clock reads 1:55 in the
A.M.

I've been writing for two hours.

It is the third day of December.

The year is 2005.

 

I closed my eyes and fell asleep for the first time in three days.

But it only lasted for three minutes.

I saw you, Polina.

But I saw the you of three days ago,

not the you of three months ago.

 

V

One Day in the Life of Ivan Isaenko

Every day is exactly the same. The episodes on the antique TV in the Main Room may change. The nurses' moods may oscillate according to the details of their lives and synchronized menstrual cycles. The menus might switch up by an ingredient or two. But, in every other way, every day is exactly the same.

My experience of the first sixty seconds of every day depends entirely on whether I wake up in one of the months between April and October. During the summer months, the sun rises at 4:00 in the
A.M.
, so when the internal alarm clock I've honed through the years starts trumpeting, my eyes open to the soft sunlight flowing through the black iron bars covering my window and onto the cold linoleum tiles, which incidentally warm just enough to make the crawl to the bathroom tolerable (the urge to urinate is too urgent to take the time to get into my wheelchair).

In the winter, however, the sun rises as late as 9:00 in the
A.M.
, so I wake into a dark, cold room, which feels like being born into the primordial loneliness from which I originally came. Waking up in the dark fills me with existential dread, and it isn't just because of the cold crawl to the bathroom. There is something deeper and darker to it, something that comes from a place that I'm not sure I will, or could ever, understand. But someplace familiar all the same.

After my mentally programmed alarm clamors, the first thing I do is pull off the covers in the hopes of finding all my body parts are actually in all the right spots and that the last seventeen years have all been a dream. When I realize that I'm still incomplete, I empty the contents of my freakishly small bladder and then move on to dressing myself, which includes some combination of the three T-shirts, three sweatshirts, three shorts, and three sweatpants I have on rotation.

When I turned four, the nurses became irritated with the obstinance I displayed during my dressing ritual. After several futile consultations, they transferred the responsibility of dressing to me. One day, Nurse Greta, the nurse formerly tasked with concealing my naked body every morning, simply dropped a bag of clothes onto the linoleum and said, “Well, then, have at it, Ivan.” For the next year, my dressing ritual turned out to be the most frustrating part of my day. Reader, if you care to step into my shoes, please put down the papers in your hand and try to put a shirt on with one arm and two nubs for legs. I'll wait before moving on …

Now that you understand, I will reveal that after a year of flubbing through my ritual, I eventually discovered a new technology that I affectionately call “the worm.” It involves laying my shirt facedown on my bed and squirming my body through the bottom until my head emerges from the top. Once in this configuration, I'm free to pop all my truncated parts through their respective holes. Dressing like a grub allows me to conceal my God-given nudity in under a minute.

If all goes well, I'm prepared for the two-minute wheelchair ride to the cafeteria for breakfast hour, which is from 8:00 in the
A.M.
to 9:00 in the
A.M.
Once there, I take my spot at the long table, which is the same spot I've eaten at three times a day, every day, for the last seventeen years. At any given time there are between fifteen and twenty-five patients living at the asylum, and they all have their regular seats, not because they were assigned but because that's just how things are. I've held mine the longest, so far as I know.

As we assemble, the nurses drop plates in front of us with food that I'm not sure I've ever tasted. This is because I rush through my plate too fast to taste anything, mostly due to the eating habits of more than half of my comrades, which make me physically ill, as does the sloppy way the nurses feed the other half. That said, I'm not entirely sure I would be able to taste the food even if I made an effort to taste each bite. A typical breakfast invariably involves some combination of bread and cabbage. The taste and texture of the bread most closely resemble those of plywood. Not only are the loaves not baked fresh but they are shipped in from remote wholesale bakeries in countries like Greece and Tajikistan. According to our director, Mikhail Kruk, this is because most of our local state bread-and-cabbage facilities are either defunct or run by
gavnoyed
s
*
since the year 1991.

After I finish my breakfast, with sweaty cabbage juice still running down my face, I return to my room to read until TV hour. To this day, no nurse or doctor employed at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children has ever been able to explain to me why TV hour is only an hour long. I spent three months lobbying Nurse Natalya to have the TV on all day. I provided written documentation to help promote my position. In the end, she returned with a one-sentence-long written memoranda from the Director, Mikhail Kruk:

At the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, there is one hour of TV in the morning after breakfast, one hour of TV in the afternoon after lunch, and one hour of TV in the evening after dinner.

So, until further notice, I get to watch TV for an hour every morning. When the hour is up, I return to my room, where I read some more and fantasize about ways to leave. Options for escape include slipping outside the front doors of the hospital when no one is looking or, in the middle of the night, squeezing my tiny body through the bars that line my bedroom window. But all of these options end with me slithering away at an embarrassingly slow clip, followed by someone catching me with grass stains and mud all up and down my nubs and dried tears caked to the side of my otherwise transparent face. After years of thinking it through, there is no viable plan for escape. Even if I managed to get to a major road, they'd look me up and down and take me straight to the nearest hospital, which is, of course, the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.

That's when I begin to think of other, more permanent methods of escape. I've gotten as close as breaking a jar of mayonnaise and picking up one of the jagged pieces, only to realize that I hadn't thought through the fact that I only have one wrist, which, incidentally, is connected to my only hand, making wrist-cutting a violation of the laws of physics. Also, I'm terrified of blood, which makes throat-slicing impossible. The thought of my last sight in this life being two to five violent red spurts leaping out of my neck is simply too horrifying to entertain. And sadly, using other, more obscure, entry points would be difficult due to my limited knowledge of human anatomy. So, in the end, I usually just masturbate for the first of what is usually twice daily.

By the time I finish and mop up, it's usually time for lunch hour. Lunch is typically better than breakfast because it is usually warm and involves some sort of meat, though the particular variety of meat is questionable. It is too red to be chicken, but too white to be beef, so you can understand the dilemma. I once made the mistake of asking Nurse Katya:

“Is this pork?”

To which she replied:

“Ivan, have you ever seen me eat the lunch here?”

To which I answered:

“No.”

Then she stopped saying any more words.

After lunch, it's time for the second TV hour of the day. As much as I enjoy TV hour, I occasionally use this time to fake a good coma because I realized that it would be entirely too obvious if the only moments when I was
not
catatonic were moments when the TV was on. This concern led me to what I now call the
two-three rule
(i.e., every second, then every third, day, I pretend to be catatonic during afternoon TV hour). This schedule provides enough of an illusion of randomness to avoid other nurses catching on that my comas are actually acts of award-winning drama.

I tend to wake up from my coma just in time for dinner, which is usually a cold, leftover version of lunch. At this point, I look around the table and note that although I'm no leading man, I'm also the only one of this gang of misfits who can remember my lines. I once asked Nurse Natalya why I'm the only mutant at the asylum who can spell his own name. She said that I should just be grateful for the fact that I could spell my own name. I said that if I was going to be stuck in a hospital for the duration of my life, I'd prefer to be mentally deficient (the word
deficient
is incidentally quite hard for me to say). She said that my self-awareness makes life worth living. I said that my self-awareness makes life lonely. She said that as long as she worked at the hospital, she would never let me be alone. I wanted to say that she didn't understand, but couldn't bring myself.

After dinner, I head back to the Main Room to watch my third hour of TV for the day. By the time TV hour number three is over, there is no more light coming in through the windows, and all the other misfits have been locked away in their rooms. I sit for a minute in the stillness with my skin basking in all the fake lighting and only a few residual howls and groans reverberating through the halls. Then I wheel myself back to my room and read until I'm tired enough to masturbate again. Then I masturbate until I'm tired enough to sleep. Then I wake up the next morning and start all over.

 

VI

The Children of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children

I have nothing to compare my hospitalities to, but from what little I know of the outside world, I am fairly certain that my comrades and I live in hell. For most of us, the hell is in our bodies; for others, the hell is in our heads. And there is no mistaking that, for each of us, hell is in the empty, clinical, perfectly adequate, smudgy, off-white brick walls that hold us in here. In spite of my intelligence, I'm forced to accept that I'm one of the lucky ones. But for you to truly understand, I will have to introduce my comrades.

Polina

Polina comes first, even if she is the only one of us who never belonged here. I've been sitting impatiently for thirty-seven minutes trying to write her into life, but nothing comes. My hand shakes at the thought of sharing her imperfectly, especially since this manifesto may be the only elixir that keeps her alive and, even then, only in your mind, Reader. Understand the gravity of your part in all this—you're in control of her immortality. You preserve her, even if by accident.