Read Online The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach - Free Book Online
Authors: Scott Stambach
Ads: Link
Moreover, the thought of unprepared conversation with real people scares me like blood scares me.
When I first saw Polina that morning, she already had a bag full of chemical therapy plugged into her arm. Itâs a sight Iâve become rather familiar with over the years, especially with leukemia kids. What I wasnât used to was someone of Polinaâs pedigree getting pumped full of poison. I remember moving my eyes from the clear bag over to her brown hair, which hung almost all the way to the base of her spine. It was thick, with waves that verged on curls, and I could almost see my reflection in it. In a month it would be the scraggly wisps of a corpse. In two months it would be gone altogether.
Whenever I spy on a new leukemia kid, I canât help imagining what he will look like without hair. Besides enjoying the challenge, I find that it also mentally prepares me for the downhill wreck that is about to transpire. The first time I watched a leukemia kid lose all his hair, I was only eight. I bluntly recommended to Vladimir, the fifteen-year-old leukemia kid, that he put us out of our misery and take a razor to it before it got any worse. He told me that I would need much more than a razor for him to feel like he didnât want to heave cabbage every time he saw me.
Touché, Vlad.
But this time, for the first time, as I watched Polinaâs medical bag slowly drip chemicals into her bloodstream, I couldnât picture a leukemia kid without hair. Maybe I just didnât want to. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her but was too clouded by fear and trembling to notice. All I know is that no matter how hard I tried to put a bald head on Polina, the image wouldnât come. But my inability to imagine her without hair was hardly a problem. What really twisted my intestines in a bevy was when I slowly moved my eyes from her head down to her hands and saw that Polina was reading Dead Souls. * Reader, patients at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children do not read Gogol, unless their name is Ivan Isaenko. And, upon further consideration, it occurred to me that no one at the asylum even possesses Gogol unless his name is Ivan Isaenko. Which meant that I was no longer the sole and exclusive recipient of Natalyaâs gifting.
Later that day, I decided to approach Nurse Natalya on the matter, not so much begrudgingly but more to make my curiosity known. While she was chiseling several species of mold from some bathroom tiles, I asked:
âHowâd the new girl get Dead Souls ?â
âHow should I know? She probably brought it in with her.â
âImpossible. I watched her walk through the doors with nothing but a notebook and various cosmetics.â
âMaybe you should stop being so suspicious of new intakes.â
âIâm more suspicious of you.â
âWell, Iâm innocent. Youâre the only one Iâve ever given Gogol to.â
Which, of course, made me curious. So I promptly wheeled myself into my room, and then into my closet, where I rustled past copies of Dostoyevsky, Chernyshevsky, Goncharov, Bulgakov, Lermontov, Turgenev, and, of course, Gorky, but no Gogol. Which could only mean one thing: I had been burglarized!
This presented a novel quagmire (so to speak). I was rattled, but not in the way you would suspect. It wasnât the sense of personal violation that spooked me, though in almost any other set of circumstances I would have been raising holy hell. It was the unsettling unfamiliarity, which I typically only feel in the presence of insects and news anchors. She was not a Max, or an Alex, or a Dennis, or any of the two- to three-year-old kids with holes in their hearts. She was a different genus. She was the hospital void. The missing demographic. A beguiling blend of cherub and imp. She was a puerile Goddess in enough want of proper Russian literature that she stole from a convalescent. Which meant that she was someone who could see
When I first saw Polina that morning, she already had a bag full of chemical therapy plugged into her arm. Itâs a sight Iâve become rather familiar with over the years, especially with leukemia kids. What I wasnât used to was someone of Polinaâs pedigree getting pumped full of poison. I remember moving my eyes from the clear bag over to her brown hair, which hung almost all the way to the base of her spine. It was thick, with waves that verged on curls, and I could almost see my reflection in it. In a month it would be the scraggly wisps of a corpse. In two months it would be gone altogether.
Whenever I spy on a new leukemia kid, I canât help imagining what he will look like without hair. Besides enjoying the challenge, I find that it also mentally prepares me for the downhill wreck that is about to transpire. The first time I watched a leukemia kid lose all his hair, I was only eight. I bluntly recommended to Vladimir, the fifteen-year-old leukemia kid, that he put us out of our misery and take a razor to it before it got any worse. He told me that I would need much more than a razor for him to feel like he didnât want to heave cabbage every time he saw me.
Touché, Vlad.
But this time, for the first time, as I watched Polinaâs medical bag slowly drip chemicals into her bloodstream, I couldnât picture a leukemia kid without hair. Maybe I just didnât want to. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her but was too clouded by fear and trembling to notice. All I know is that no matter how hard I tried to put a bald head on Polina, the image wouldnât come. But my inability to imagine her without hair was hardly a problem. What really twisted my intestines in a bevy was when I slowly moved my eyes from her head down to her hands and saw that Polina was reading Dead Souls. * Reader, patients at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children do not read Gogol, unless their name is Ivan Isaenko. And, upon further consideration, it occurred to me that no one at the asylum even possesses Gogol unless his name is Ivan Isaenko. Which meant that I was no longer the sole and exclusive recipient of Natalyaâs gifting.
Later that day, I decided to approach Nurse Natalya on the matter, not so much begrudgingly but more to make my curiosity known. While she was chiseling several species of mold from some bathroom tiles, I asked:
âHowâd the new girl get Dead Souls ?â
âHow should I know? She probably brought it in with her.â
âImpossible. I watched her walk through the doors with nothing but a notebook and various cosmetics.â
âMaybe you should stop being so suspicious of new intakes.â
âIâm more suspicious of you.â
âWell, Iâm innocent. Youâre the only one Iâve ever given Gogol to.â
Which, of course, made me curious. So I promptly wheeled myself into my room, and then into my closet, where I rustled past copies of Dostoyevsky, Chernyshevsky, Goncharov, Bulgakov, Lermontov, Turgenev, and, of course, Gorky, but no Gogol. Which could only mean one thing: I had been burglarized!
This presented a novel quagmire (so to speak). I was rattled, but not in the way you would suspect. It wasnât the sense of personal violation that spooked me, though in almost any other set of circumstances I would have been raising holy hell. It was the unsettling unfamiliarity, which I typically only feel in the presence of insects and news anchors. She was not a Max, or an Alex, or a Dennis, or any of the two- to three-year-old kids with holes in their hearts. She was a different genus. She was the hospital void. The missing demographic. A beguiling blend of cherub and imp. She was a puerile Goddess in enough want of proper Russian literature that she stole from a convalescent. Which meant that she was someone who could see
Similar Books
