The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (31 page)

Thank you, Polina. Now, I can't be tricked.

Then, I set the lid back down and let the priest proceed with his sermon. Until the words were over and they lifted the box and put it into the ground.

By now, Reader, I hope you understand that at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, there is no absence of death. The tiny hands of ghosts emerge from the walls and waft its smell in my face all day long, singeing my nostrils and leaving me with a distinct and uninvited congestion. But somehow this perpetual exposure failed to habituate me to the sight of that limp, lavender, lifeless bag of bones whose kiss was warm only a few days ago. If I'm to be honest, Polina was the only creature I ever allowed myself to make real.

My mother (the one in my head) was right. My resistance to Polina's death gave birth to a terrible little thought. It leaked into my head, uninvited and unapologetic, and immediately established a dwelling: What if my beloved Polina wasn't dead? What if this were an inexplicable coma? A medical anomaly? And what if my beloved Polina would awaken long after she'd been buried? My imagination, which was quite honed after a lifetime of sensory deprivation, played out the scenario with precious immediacy. She would open her eyes in a cold, dark cell with pressure-treated pungent pine several inches from her eyes. And after a few confused moments, where she couldn't be sure whether or not she was dreaming a terrible dream, reality would set in, along with real terror. Perhaps it would begin with transcendental claustrophobia or perhaps the freezing realization of transcendental loneliness. She would panic. She would kick and hammer and thrash about and claw, but this would only remind her of how close the walls actually were. Even so, she would continue to fight for a minute, which would feel like hours in her fragile subjectivity. Then she would stop suddenly. The hopelessness of the situation would wash over her. A bereaved sympathetic nervous system would be forced to accept that she could not fight or flee. She would have to resign herself to lying there in all her transcendental fear and loneliness—until she died of asphyxiation.

Amid this terrible little thought, came a thought within a thought. A thought that perhaps as my beloved was gripped by this morbid arousal, the thoughts of her last waking moments would flood her, if for no other reason than their proximity, or maybe because they were relatively benign compared to what she was going through. Perhaps our last night together would fill her mind. And perhaps she would again be flushed by the derealization that we felt that night. And perhaps she would think of our kiss. And perhaps all this might become her world as the lesser parts of her were preparing to die. And perhaps the fantasy would continue on further and further into a future that neither of us saw but which she needed to imagine in that frigid, lonely place. And perhaps we would die together after all.

 

III

The Drive Back

Was silent.

But also not uncomfortable. Silently cathartic, in fact.

I looked at Nurse Natalya's face long enough to realize that while her eyes were on the road, her head was a merry-go-round with me, and Polina, and Mikhail, and her husband, and my mother, whose name is apparently Yulia, spinning around in exhausting little circles. I saw all our absurd faces flicker through her eyes.

I, on the other hand, thought about the mating rituals of penguins, and the pros and cons of circumcision, and how antibiotics have only been around for less than one hundred years, and how awful it must have been for men to get a dose of the clap in the 1800s, and how early hominids could survive the cold in Siberia before modern technology, and anything else that could keep me from thinking about the last one hundred hours of my own life.

Fortunately, by the time I ran out of thoughts, we pulled back into the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children. And, almost as soon as I saw its off-white painted brick façade and heard the random sounds of nurses barking and the occasional mutant howl through the open windows, I began to feel gravely ill myself. But ill in the sweetest sense. I breathed through that wave of ill and looked around at the forested, partially manicured open air and didn't want to throw up all over it. This meant that for the first time in my life, I preferred the outside to the inside.

Nurse Natalya, still silent, pulled out my chair and then pulled me out of her car and dropped me into it. She wheeled me back up the dirt path to the big brown double doors, which, for me, meant being immersed in every memory that could ever haunt me, and for Natalya it must have meant something completely different, because her clip was too brisk, and there was something alarming about the waves of intensity radiating from her loose skin as she plowed through those brown doors. When we broke the seal, the intensity didn't abate. She pushed my chair through the hallway, past Miss Kristina's desk—“Morning, Natalya,” she said—and on through the linoleum she wheeled me, at least twice as fast as the fastest she ever pushed before, and then through the Main Room, where the gingers were building a castle from hospital pillows, and Dennis undulated like a human timepiece, and Alex smeared chocolate all over his face, and a couple of heart-hole kids sat somberly avoiding any escalation in heart rate, and on past the Red Room, where no one was left to die, and then through to the girls' wing, and right up to Polina's door, which she opened, and then wheeled me inside and shut the door behind me, at which point I said, “Natalya?” but of course she didn't respond because she was too absorbed in the process of rummaging underneath Polina's bed and squeezing more of her physical body through the space between the floor and the bed frame than the space would allow for her and then almost lifting the bed right from the floor as she thrust and thrashed on until she pulled out the suitcase, my suitcase, the escape pod that Polina had built for me, which she then plopped onto my lap.

“Say yes, and we're gone,” Nurse Natalya said. “But it has to come from you.”

“Where will I go?”

“With me.”

“In your home.”

“In my home.”

“And Mikhail?”

“I will worry about Mikhail.”

The room bent and spun while my heart started jamming the blood that remained in my veins (what I didn't give to Polina) into the farthest parts of my body, like my fingers, nubs, and earlobes. Then I wondered why I was so afraid. And as if she could read the prose across my eyes, Nurse Natalya said:

“It's because your life will be yours. Which means your misery will be yours too. It won't belong to Lyudmila, or Mikhail, or the state.”

And I knew she was right. It was something my mother (my imaginary one) would have said if she were still here. This, however, came from a real person, which made it problematic.

“Ivan, if you want to give them custody of your misery, I—”

“No.”

It shot out of me.

“What?” Nurse Natalya asked.

“I said no.”

“No what?”

“Do you have a TV?”

“Ivan, it's 2005. Everyone has a TV.”

“And borscht?”

“Every Sunday.”

“Okay.”

And with an agility that was not congruent with her age or athleticism, Natalya got behind me and started pushing, and I quickly secured my suitcase, which almost fell from my lap due to the sudden acceleration. Once she started pushing, she didn't stop. She kept pushing. She pushed me back through the Main Room, through my carnival of friendly mutants, through the foyer past Miss Kristina's desk—“Bye, Natalya; Bye, Ivan”—through the big heavy brown double doors, through the front seat of her car, through the seventeen miles of road leading to her small apartment in downtown Mazyr, onto a street called Vostok, and through the charming front red door of her apartment, through her adequately but elderly decorated living room, and then dining room, and finally into a guest room, which appeared to be my room, because it was already set up for me, equipped with a large bookcase filled with volumes of Russian, and also French, and also American literature, and various textbooks ranging in topics from medicine to quantum physics, and the walls had posters of things like celestial events, and James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, and then she said, “I expected you would be here someday, just didn't know which one,” and then I used my index finger to motion for her to come to me, because I wouldn't have been able to use words, and when her face got close, I kissed her. Then I asked her for a few minutes so that I could pull out this notebook and write down what just happened, which is what I'm doing right now.

Ivan Isaenko
June 10, 1987– September 3, 2008
Mazyr, Belarus

 

Epilogue

There is
a ghost that haunts the descendants of Pripyat. It hides inside of every seed and every cell. It resides in the mind where it sneaks up behind every thought and every hope. A tricky spook that dulls the bliss of every birth and every love. Some call it a ticking time bomb, but no one ever knows when the clock is set.

Ivan Isaenko succumbed to his own ghost on September 3, 2008. Six months earlier, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, one of Pripyat's favorite phantoms. Inevitably, it is hard to overstate the bitterness of this pill given the denouement of Ivan's story.

Beyond his death we know little of Ivan's life after the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children with the exception of these few sanguine details. Ivan lived with Natalya Beneshenko for almost nineteen months before losing his fight. Miss Beneshenko retired from the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children shortly after Ivan moved in. We know that in the nineteen months Ivan lived outside of the hospital, he published two short stories, one in the
Mazyr Chronicle
titled “дважды,”
*
and another in the Belarus State University literary journal, titled “клерк.”
*
He also visited the grave of his hero Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, Switzerland, during a trip to Western Europe. When Ivan passed, Miss Beneshenko buried him in the same cemetery as her husband, next to Polina Pushkin.

There are as many themes in Ivan's story as there are pages. It is at once a love story, a revelation of the dark legacy of the Soviet experiment, a conversation on medical ethics, a reproach of religious hypocrisy, and an admonition against choosing fear over purpose. But, ultimately, it is simply the story of a single human life, within which so much can be held. We hope the reader can pause to appreciate that fact.

 

Acknowledgments

Had I
not met these people, this book either would have never been published or I wouldn't have been the guy who wrote it:

Victoria Sanders, you probably don't realize, but you single-handedly taught me more about how to write a novel than any other person on the planet. I'm so grateful to have you in my corner.

Jen Enderlin, dream editor and co-parent of
Ivan Isaenko
. I couldn't ask for a more wonderful person to share this book with.

Bernadette Baker-Baughman, the supportive spirit who makes me feel perfectly at ease asking the dumbest, most naive questions about this weird new world of publishing.

Linda Stambach, the bold supporter of every pie-in-the-sky dream I've had since the age of five.

Shawn and Nicole, best siblings ever.

The OG Circle: Ryan Begley, Bill Kalish, Danny Trout, Matthew Ellish. Who the hell would I be without all of you?

George and Donna Lightsey, my West Coast parents, you'll never know how grateful I am for the nonstop love and
Big Bang
night.

Stacey Keating, my soul sister, moral compass, co-founder of Noetic, and the 2,349 other things you are in my life.

Cat White, my first reader and dear friend. Thank you for being the most loyal friend in the world.

Anna Chiles, my teaching partner and constant reminder to be my best self.

Lucy Boulatnikov, my lovely Russian-language checker, so much of you is in this story.

Tania Jabour, my wonderful friend, this book would not have happened if not for Six Flags 2013.

Paul Temple, my broham and possibly the kindest human being alive.

Mike Anderson, for the years of inspiration, encouragement, and epic late-night convos.

Jon Yu and Matt Ortiz, my brothers and fellow Sets.

Many thanks to all my early readers for their feedback and encouragement: Matt Martin, Mike Heyd, Isaac Rivera, Kennadi Yates, Sarah Dear, Ady Sukkar Kayrouz, Isabella Miranda, Samira Kester, Miriam Tullgren, Erin Duarte, Alejandra Torrero, Deborah Kutyla, Daniel Cordello, Jyothsna Konda.

All my teachers for the sum total of what you've taught me.

All the sweet, crazy, and earnest High Tech High, Mesa, City, and Grossmont students I've ever had the privilege of ranting to about physics and space. I'm a better writer when I see the world through your wild eyes.

If I missed anyone, you know I love you. Deadlines make for bad memories.…

 

About the Author