The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (6 page)

I'm not sure why Mary and Magdalena are here at the hospital. They have all their right parts in the right places. They are able to take care of themselves and have a grasp on most major hygienic rituals. By all standard societal measures, the duo appear normal. Actually that's a lie. They are so devastatingly abnormal it is difficult to think of them as fellow human beings. So far as I know, they have never spoken to
anyone
. And yet, if you asked anyone here, he might tell you that they speak to each other every moment of every day, only not out loud with words. Everyone here believes they talk to each other, and only each other, with thoughts. Understandably, Reader, you require evidence: when either Mary or Magdalena decides it's time to stand up and rummage through the box of toys, they
both
decide. When either Mary or Magdalena decides that it's time to jump to their feet and run laps around the Main Room, they
both
decide. When either Mary or Magdalena decides it's time to move to adjacent bathroom stalls to empty the day's waste, they
both
decide. Everything the ginger twins do is in synchrony. There is not a fraction of a moment's delay between the time one makes a decision and the other follows. And yet, not one nurse, not one doctor, not even Nurse Natalya, with all her clever antics and maternal tones, has ever been able to elicit a nod or a wink or any body language at all that even suggests that they are aware of the world outside their own two heads.

Once upon a time, even I, the poster child of unsociability, made a heroic attempt. Obviously not to cultivate any lifelong friendships—I was just bored. It began with innocent enough banter:
Who's your favorite nurse, Mary? How about you, Maggie? Can I call you Maggie? Do you girls really read minds like everyone says? So, what am I thinking?

(All said with my slow, offbeat droopy drawl.)

Unsurprisingly, no reaction whatsoever. And yet I wasn't rejected either.

This was my gateway into a game I could only play with myself, which, incidentally, is my favorite sort of game. A game of challenging my mind to develop a sufficiently provocative display that would force the duo to react to other human beings. In my head, I imagined the celebrity I might become around the asylum if I was the first to open them up to the universe.

I kept my first attempt humble. As per usual, the duo were playing
Durak
*
on the cold tiles of the Main Room. I rolled my chair within inches of the twins, close enough to smell their clinical shampoo, and parked myself on top of their game. As expected, the twins continued to deal their cards without reaction. So I nodded off into one of my well-rehearsed comatose states and let the drool that typically accumulates in the corner of my mouth drip down my cheek in a long molasses stream into my lap and then onto their cards. For the next half hour, the ginger twins carried on with their game as the puddle of my spittle gathered into a small pond. When Mary (or maybe it was Magdalena; I never bothered to learn which was which) shed her last card, the duo synchronistically stood up, collected their blankets, and shuffled off to bed, not taking care to avoid my puddle of drool. Both happened to step through it, leaving little liquid footprints leading to their door. Clearly, I would need to try harder.

Everyone needs to excrete waste. That, at the very least, is unavoidable.
What goes in must come out
is the most sacrosanct law of human biology. Here at the hospital, every room for a long-term resident has a bathroom. There are very few frills in this place, but at the very least we all get a bathroom. One of the design flaws of our bathrooms is that they all can be locked from the inside by pressing a small button on the doorknob and then closing the door. It is entirely too easy to lock yourself out of the bathroom if you happen to be on the outside and accidentally press the lock due to limited control of your extremities (clearly the case for 97 percent of all hospital residents). I know this from personal experience; I've accidentally locked myself out of my own bathroom no less than six times in my tenure here at the asylum. This scenario made my next attempt low-hanging fruit—I would reproduce this “accident” in the ginger twins' bathroom. My theory was that with a locked bathroom and nature pounding at their door, the duo would have no choice but to hunt down one of the nurses to unlock it.

Though the gingers are the most unpredictable and spontaneous residents at the hospital, with no set daily regimen or schedule, you could at the very least depend on their being immersed for hours whenever they were engaged in a competitive game with each other (perhaps winning is the only way the twins have to distinguish themselves). I waited all day in the Main Room until I caught the twins absorbed in some hand-clapping game, which apparently required extreme concentration so as not to lose the sequence, count, and rhythm of the claps. I figured this would buy me twenty or thirty minutes at least.

So I took the opportunity to wheel myself into their room discreetly, then into the bathroom, where I pressed the button on the doorknob, then back into their room, where I closed the door behind me, then out into the hall, unnoticed like the world's only wheelchair-bound ninja. Then I waited. First, for twenty-four hours. Then for forty-eight. I didn't take my eyes off those twins (except, of course, during the moments in which they slept behind their closed door). And nothing. No ginger twins running out to a nurse with flailing arms. I didn't even hear them rattling the bathroom door. Not a sound.

After the third day, I learned that while peeing is unavoidable, peeing in a bathroom isn't. Inundated with curiosity, I waited for another high-intensity game of cards to do some investigating at the Ginger residence. Sure enough, the bathroom door was still locked. This left two options: the twins had managed to hold their bladders for three days, risking infection and rupture, or they had found another way to relieve themselves altogether. So I frantically wheeled around the room, searching high and low for an alternative. Eventually, I found it hiding under their beds. The twins were stealing their breakfast, lunch, and dinner bowls in order to fill them with pints of their own urine and waste. I deduced that the nurses would soon find them too, check the bathroom door, and unlock it (i.e., another failure).

Attempt number three: the next night, I waited until the duo went to bed. Once I was convinced they were sleeping deeply, I wheeled myself into their room armed with a flashlight and a pair of scissors I'd stolen from Miss Kris's desk. I put the blades of the scissors right up to their long red locks and snipped away. I chopped and chopped at odd angles and dissonant lengths. I gave them the Ivan special. And with the wasted cords of hair I tied their little legs together for good measure. Then I wheeled myself out and returned the flashlight and scissors, leaving no evidence of my hooliganry.

It was hard for me to imagine any two human beings, particularly female ones, no matter how pathologically antisocial or psychically confined to each other, not reacting to the fact that their hair had been removed from their heads and used to bind them to one another. The next morning, the sisters emerged from their room with their hair looking like it had been through several rounds of chemo. Their faces, however, were perfectly buoyant. The duo synchronistically shuffled to the breakfast hall as if it were any other day.

Nurse Lyudmila was the first to comment:

“What in the name of Saint Alexander did you two girls do to each other?”

I thought the question was more rhetorical. But she continued anyway:

“If there was ever a time I need you two to talk, it is right now.”

The gingers continued to chew their cabbage. This inspired Nurse Lyudmila to shake them violently, which resulted in cabbage flying from their mouths, but nothing else. This is when I gave up and Nurse Lyudmila took the reins.

It was the first night of Lyudmila's week of nights. Much more diabolical than I, she realized that the most effective way to torture the twins was to lock them in different rooms (brilliant!), thereby severing their psychic umbilical cord. So that night, she cleared out two heart-holers from their respective rooms and dragged one ginger into one room and the other into the second. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of selecting adjacent rooms, which allowed the ginger twins to communicate with each other through some combination of telepathy and Morse code, which they tapped to each other all night long through the connecting wall. On the next night, Lyudmila, in her serpentine way, would leave nothing to chance. She pulled Dasha from her room in the girls' wing and replaced her with Mary, and Dennis from his room in the boys' wing and replaced him with Magdalena. That night, no one at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children slept. We were kept wide awake by the shrill and grueling screams of two eleven-year-old girls.

 

VII

The Bleeders, the Non-Bleeders, and Polina the Interloper

I heard about Polina before I ever saw her. This is because I spend most of my days alert, ready for new intelligence, which I can then use to mentally prepare for any changes in my daily world that might upset my delicate equilibrium. A little reconnaissance also helps me predict the moods and general dispositions of hospital staff. For example, I know the precise day (and time) of the month on which all the nurses initiate their in-sync menses (the third at approximately 2:55 in the
P.M.
). Some experience worse menses than others (Nurse Lyudmila), so it is nice to know when in order to keep a vigorous distance from her. To ignore this information is negligent behavior. Two decades of observing human nature have revealed a few notable differences between the way men and women approach conflict: men will knock each other out and then hug it out, while women tend to leave deep, unresolved scars on the souls of their victims. I suppose this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view—women were forced to develop their own effective brand of violence to compensate for their disadvantages in size and strength.

One of the benefits of my espionage is that I quickly learn of all pending intakes. If I'm holding aces, I can glean important information about the newbies (age, gender, race, clinical diagnosis, personal and family history, demographics), which I can then use to predict how they might affect my day-to-day life. I am an expert at reading doctor-nurse body language, and this alerts me as to when important information is about to be revealed. Usually, it begins with a quick and nervous survey of the room as the doctor attempts to create the appearance of confidentiality. This is typically my cue to appear increasingly drowsy and bob my head until I nod off disingenuously. Within minutes, the disarmed doctor begins spilling his guts, giving the nurses orders as to how to attend to the new patient, while I take notes in the notepad of my mind.

Historically, this has been very helpful, since there are some new intakes I try to avoid completely. The most notable category is those who require me to have any visual contact with blood. This is because I have a deep, abiding, and existentially catastrophic fear of blood (there is no need for me to fake catatonia when I see blood). Over the years, there have been several new intakes who, without advance warning, would have caused me to pass out and vomit all over everything in a two-meter radius. I call these patients the Bleeders.

Alyona was a Bleeder. She had a three-year-old festering wound in her neck because she couldn't help herself from picking at it in spite of varying states of infection. Had I not used the intelligence I gathered to hide from Alyona, I'm not sure I would be here to write this story. Fortunately, she didn't last very long at the asylum, for she died tragically as a result of complications arising from picking at an infected neck.

My most feared Bleeder was Georgiy, whose blood ran through plastic tubes into a machine because his kidneys didn't work. I'm not sure I would have escaped Georgiy alive if I'd had to face his blood plumbing. Fortunately, early reconnaissance revealed the extent of his blood woes and alerted me to keep my distance.

Most new intakes to the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children are Non-Bleeders. These include characters such as Max, Alex, the ginger twins, and most of the heart-hole children. When I gather enough intelligence to determine that a new intake is a Non-Bleeder, I breathe freely and return to reading my book or imagining Grace Kelly's breasts. If evidence begins to point in the other direction, I flee straight for my room (or a stairwell, depending on which is closer).

Then there is a third, more esoteric category. These patients are not likely to set off any blood-related triggers, but they do pose a potential risk to the consistency of my day-to-day life. These patients are called Interlopers. Mostly, Interlopers are patients who just require more time to fully understand. For example, the ginger twins were Interlopers before they became your standard boring Non-Bleeders.

Interlopers and Non-Bleeders are best distinguished by their IQs. In a place where the average IQ doesn't rise much above sixty-five, anyone of standard or superior intelligence poses a risk to the consistency of my daily life. These risks include competition for hospital resources, World War I–style power struggles, or the possibility of having to face the anxiety of interacting authentically with a person. Which brings me to my point, Reader—Polina was an Interloper. Actually, she was the worst kind of Interloper, the kind that didn't belong here.

I first heard the name Polina as it was being screamed from the lips of the Director during a phone call with someone who was probably the director of another hospital. The Director was angry, and you could see the spit mist off his mouth as he screamed Russian obscenities to the man on the other end. Here is the intelligence I gathered from that conversation: (1) the man on the other end was trying to get the Director to accept a new patient into long-term care; (2) the new patient had leukemia, which implied strong Interloper potential (since both smart and dumb people can get leukemia); (3) the Director insisted that our hospital didn't have the room or the resources to treat her and that it would likely be a death sentence; (4) the new patient had recently been orphaned and there was nowhere else for her to go. It was obvious to me when the Director slammed down the phone that he had lost the argument and the new patient would be staying at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children.