The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (3 page)

The only consolation I have in my failure to bring her to life is the belief that despite my love for words, they are actually rather useless and undeniably fail to capture the essence of anything at all, let alone a creature like Polina. Consequently, if I ever meet her again in a different place, I can blame my shortcomings on Russian vocabulary and not on my inattentiveness to her details. With that said:

There is
no
doubt in my mind that if I hadn't met Polina here in this desolate place, I would have met her one night, years from now, moving gracefully across the antique black-and-white TV in the Main Room. She would have been Belarus's leading lady, captivating the love and lust of every man in Eastern Europe and setting a hopeless bar to which every woman and girl would hold herself. Similarly, there is no doubt that I still would have become addicted to her, falling every bit as in love as I did here while sitting next to her fading body.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Polina was objectively beautiful. She wasn't beautiful because I was a revolting invalid whose desperation for companionship dictated that he reduce his standards of beauty to a level that was practical for obtaining such companionship. Even as Polina lay pale, emaciated, and on the verge of death, she would have won any pageant in the world. With this clarification, I can go on to tell you what she looked like.

She had long brown hair besieged with curls and ringlets persisting in the face of her ongoing struggle—a struggle that forced her to abandon all modes of regular feminine hygiene. Her skin was a perfect tender porcelain with rosy undertones. Yet she had a simple, modest beauty mark on her right cheek, which made her just imperfect enough to be real. The structure of her face was exotic. Each turn and curve was slightly exaggerated, giving her face an instant edge over every other feminine face in the world, rendering Cleopatra unassuming, while intimidating the breath out of me every time I laid eyes on it. Her body was long and slender, yet adorable little breasts bloomed from her chest and would trace the contours of her respiration right up until her last breath. Reader, can you see what I'm dealing with?

 

And while you pull me to stay here with you,

I need to build our world.

You, of all people, would understand.
*

Max

Max is two years old and shaped like a sickle. His head and heels bend back in a perennial struggle to be the first to reach the other. His lips are blue, thin, dry, and chapped. His face is altogether taut, and his eyes bulge with exasperation and panic, as if at the tender age of two he realizes that his eyes are the only way he has of communicating. Sadly, no one will ever know what Max is trying to say, but I'm sure we all have a pretty good idea.

When Max was only a few months old, I began watching him every day with an intensity that was admittedly creepy. Perhaps it was the fresh new life sitting in a drab crib. Perhaps it was my inability to recall any suffering that looked deeper than his. Or perhaps it was a morbid fascination with his tightly drawn skin, which looked like it could snap open at any moment, revealing a loom of striated flesh and gizzards. I doubt I have the psychological insight into the ongoings of my head to know for sure. But what I do know is that in those first few months of meeting Max, I stumbled onto a new emotion, which I can only imagine is the feeling people call empathy.

Actually, it was more of a cousin of empathy because it included a sense of responsibility. Maybe it was an inbred, collectively unconscious, evolutionary impulse, a paternal drive to nurture and protect due to the fact that before Max, I never held anything worth protecting. Nor did I ever consider the marginal possibility that I would ever be in a position to protect. In fact, it is entirely possible that any tender emotions I felt toward Max were totally selfish and rooted in a desire to feel a fraction less freakish than the baseline level of freak I lived with.

At first, this had the counterproductive effect of making me feel
more
freakish. But I've had enough time to watch the behavior of normal people to know that they're not any different. I listen to the conversations between the nurses as they help each other pick up the pieces after any one of them finds out that her husband is leaving her for a nineteen-year-old ballet dancer with blue eyes and feet that are distinct from her ankles. Or when their Crohn's gets so bad that they can barely get off the toilet, and if they can barely get off the toilet, they can barely work, and if they can barely work, they can barely make money, and if they can barely make money, they can barely survive, and if they can barely survive, then …

I'm an invalid with no natural instinct for human nature. And yet I can see the twinkle in the eye of Nurse Lyudmila when she pats Nurse Elena on the back and explains that all will be well: the nineteen-year-old dancer is vapid and the husband will come running back, the diarrhea will lead to other more fulfilling jobs in an office in Minsk, and so on. The truth is Nurse Lyudmila (the youngest and newest of the nurses here) is an invalid in her own head, and I know invalids well. She will stuff a box of
ptichie moloko
*
into her slightly out-of-proportion mouth in about ten seconds and then sneak away to the bathroom to regurgitate it. I know this because I sneak into the bathroom after and see the residue of the foamy chunks floating in the water. So when Nurse Lyudmila gets the chance to tend to anyone, she feels less broken. And when I get to tend to Max, I feel less broken.

Max's most primal survival needs are met through machinized feeding. However, there are some needs that the machines can't take care of. For example, Max needs to shit out the food that is pumped into him through the long plastic tubes. On most days, this happens into a disposable diaper. I once asked Nurse Katya (who is the only black woman in the whole Republic of Belarus as far as I know) if I could change Max's diaper. She took one hard, excessively long look at my one arm, with its see-through skin and digitless hand, and asked, “Child, have you lost your mind?” Despite having had fourteen years to come to terms with the epic cataclysm I have for a body, it still hurt. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I asked Nurse Natalya if I could borrow a few diapers. She looked at me quizzically, and then her face twisted in such a way that made it clear she didn't even want to know the reason for my absurd request. Then she walked off to a supply closet only to return a few seconds later with three baby-sized diapers.

The first one I tried on myself. The fit was snug, but luckily my frail pelvis was compact enough to accommodate the squishy fabric. There are two things I've learned over the years about my limits: (A) I can eventually, with enough time, sweat, and sometimes blood, learn to do just about anything with only one arm (the only exception to this rule is cutting a hard-boiled egg), and (B) if there is a God, then I should thank Him for my thumb, since it is the only thing that makes (A) possible.

While patiently waiting for the urge to defecate, I played with my diaper's tiny adhesive tabs. I was getting comfortable with the mechanics of the contraption, finding the subtle tricks required to get a single thumb and index finger to attach and detach the various flaps with ease, exploring the necessary tension required to keep a diaper in place. I've found that after about eight hours of practicing just about anything with my flimsy hand, I can become good enough at it to put a rare smile on my droopy face (incidentally, before the eight-hour mark of proficiency, don't touch me—I will simultaneously snap, beat, hiss, gnash at you; Nurse Natalya calls it my
d'yavol
*
face).

Luckily, eight hours is also a sufficient period of time to build up an adequate urge to defecate. In other words, by the time I mastered the art of the diaper I was ready to fill it. I cringed as the warm paste spread over my
zadnista.
†

I removed the diaper, which, by now, I could do quite easily, and used the towel in my room to clear out all the chocolate pudding that managed to coat every crack and contour of my backside. This proved far more challenging than I had expected, and I immediately wished I had more towels and diapers. In my stubborn obsession, I had also not really thought through what I would do with the leftovers. Nor did I fully appreciate the speed with which the smell would make me expel that morning's cabbage.

The soiled towel was the easy part. I just let it soak in my bathroom sink for the night so the next morning I could ring out all the supersaturated brown water until the towel was reduced to the traditional shade of antiquated off-white of the typical hospital towel. The diaper, however, would be more difficult. After considering several possibilities, I eventually decided that the best option would be to wait until the Director (as well as the majority of the nursing staff) left to go home for the day and drop off the soiled diaper behind the leather sofa in his office. At least half the days of the week he left his office unlocked so Nurse Lyudmila could casually let herself in for late-night erotic activities. Years later, I still imagine the carnal things that might have happened on that couch, directly above that diaper.

At this stage, I had one more step to mastering my diapery. There was an old (and by old I mean Stalin-era standard-issue model) baby doll buried in a bin of useless toys in the TV room. Unfortunately, rummaging through a crib-sized box of chaotic toys goes far beyond my current level of athletic ability, so I had to reduce myself to asking Nurse Elena if she could dig it out for me (Nurse Natalya was off-limits, as she was very close to her critical mass of suspicion). Nurse Elena was equally baffled by the request, since I had not asked to hold the creepy, odd-smelling doll in my entire tenure at the asylum, but she gave in nevertheless.

Somewhat disgusted, somewhat excited, I wheeled myself back to my room, laid the doll (whom I lovingly named Rebeka Rebokov) on my bed, removed its tattered outfit, and tried to slip the diaper onto its androgynous pelvis. Then I slid Rebeka Rebokov under the covers of my bed and fell asleep next to her.

The next morning, I initiated another eight-hour session. On and off, on and off, on and off with that diaper. All morning. Then lunch hour. And then again all afternoon. During one particularly awkward moment, Nurse Natalya had come by to change my sheets (in my fever, I'd forgotten it was sheet day, which is the third Tuesday of every month). When I heard the knob turn and the door open, I craned my head back around my shoulder to find her staring wide-eyed with a stack of linen in her arms. After three or four unbearable seconds, in which both of our sets of deer eyes were locked into each other, she simply turned around and walked in the opposite direction.

“I'll come back. Perhaps by then our doll will be ready for a bottle,” she said.

By the time my eight hours were up, I could change a diaper in ten seconds, which I find impressive for an invalid with one arm and three fingers. I had one diaper left—the one I saved for Max. I waited till the lights went out and the hum of the hospital died down to approximate silence and the daytime nurses left for the night, and which made it easy to slip into the Yellow Room, which is the room that holds all the children under three years old.

Max is not exactly a flight risk, so his crib doesn't have a high-gated perimeter. It is actually something between a crib and a cradle. He lives his shitty little life in a tiny blanketed tublike dwelling with walls on either side that are at most a foot and a half high. Lucky for me, this is a height I can scale.

I wiggled my way out of my chair and maneuvered myself into the tiny padded nest in order to arrive at Max's tiny meniscus of a body. This was the first time I'd ever seen Max at night. My first thought was that Max makes the same face regardless of whether he is awake or asleep. I've watched enough faces on enough sleepless nights to know that faces soften when they sleep, regardless of what thoughts and demons torture their minds when they're awake. Max, however, looked equally desperate in the stillness of sleep.

I had no idea what the status of Max's bowel schedule was, so I gently pulled at his diaper to see if it was brimming with the characteristic heavy brown slop I'd become so intimate with. At the moment, we were pudding-free. So I sat. And waited. And attempted to sing to him in whispers. I sang Russian nursery rhymes like “Brother Ivan” and “The Hare Went Out for a Walk.” I sounded wretched, probably like the ghost of a chap who died at the peak of puberty, but it helped pass the time.

Then it happened: the aroma of fecal particles diffused into the air. The most intensive training never really prepares you for the reality of the moment. Max's odd sickle-shaped body made the removal of his diaper far more formidable than I had expected. Eventually, however, I was able to slip it off, but not without leaving fecal streaks throughout his bungalow.

A part of me panicked, most likely because my reputation was on the line, my pride, my proof that I could, at the very least, tend to another being enough to change a shitty diaper. So I did what I could (with a mixture of saliva and my own sweatpants) to eliminate the streaks of chocolate from Max's warm linen.

I could be crazy—actually I most certainly am—but I do believe I saw Max's eyes ease a fraction when all was said and done. I doubt his dirty diaper had ever been changed with such gusto and love (typically the nurses toss him around like a bag of onions). After I completed my mission I stayed with him long enough to croak out “Granny Ate Peas” and then remounted my chair and disposed of Max's soiled diaper in the Director's office en route to my room.

The next morning, I woke before breakfast hour and wheeled myself back to the Yellow Room and waited smugly for the nurses to make their rounds. Eventually, Nurse Katya arrived at Max's crib and checked the status of his undergarments. I watched as she manhandled his stiff, bent body, rotated his torso until he resembled a city arch, and opened the flaps of his diaper only to find it empty. Katya closed him up and then opened him right back up again for a second look. At which point she confirmed his clean diaper and scanned the bed frantically for alternative signs of waste. When she found the chocolate streaks, it only enhanced her bewildered look, leading her to scan the room in a panic, while I bit my inner cheek to the point of blood and thought about dead puppies in order to suppress the laughter. When she turned to me, I simply looked back with the remnants of a dirty smile. Then I fell into a coma.