Read The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko for Free Online Page B

Ivan,
    This baseball was signed by Reggie Jackson. He was my favorite baseball player when I was your age. Not sure what you know about him, but if you want, we can talk baseball sometime.
    Your friend,
    Ridick
    Later that day, I worked up the courage to find Ridick, disinfect his face, and return his gift, which I could not accept, though I wanted to. However, I was informed by Nurse Elena that he had already left for America.
    â€œPerhaps that will teach you to be a little govniuk * then, huh, Ivan?” she said.
    To which I said:
    â€œAt least I need to pretend to be one.”
    To which she mumbled some ignorant shit and turned to walk away.
    I waited 188 days for Ridick to come back to the hospital to fix up more hearts. When he finally appeared one day, camera crew in tow, I had built up an elaborate six-month apology, teeming with various acts and scenes, but by the time my mouth opened wide enough to start, he tossed me another ball, which I dropped because I only have one arm, with two fingers on it. Then he picked it up and put it into my hand. This one was signed by someone named Tom Seaver.
    Ridick taught me about baseball for three hours that night. From then on, he brought me a signed baseball every time he came to patch hearts. Currently, I have twenty-two baseballs with names on them like Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Jim Palmer, Steve Carlton, Carlton Fisk, and Catfish Hunter.
    Â 
    Currently, the clock reads 11:47 in the A.M.
    I have been writing for twelve hours.
    It is the third day of December.
    The year is 2005.
    Â 
    Nurse Natalya came in a few moments ago with a change of clothes.
    â€œYou haven’t changed in four days,” she said.
    â€œI’m fine,” I said.
    â€œI can smell you in the hallway.
    And so can everyone else.
    Do us this kindness.”
    â€œLeave them on my bed.”
    She stared at me for a few long seconds,
    and in that time I was close
    to asking her about the green folder,
    but the vodka had me sufficiently numb.
    She tossed the clean clothes onto my bed.
    â€œI’ll be back in an hour to pick up your dirties.”
    â€œMake it two.”
    Dennis
    Dennis is an enigma.
    He is unique in that he is the only one of us whose mother also lives here at the asylum. Living, however, may be a bit of an overstatement. At the moment, Dennis’s mother is a vegetable kept alive by the machines in the Red Room. Her fate has become a subject of controversy here at the asylum.
    Dennis and I arrived at the hospital within days of each other. Back then, as now, he was, quite simply, an enormous mass of catatonic flesh, spending forty minutes of every hour rocking in a wheelchair that is too small for his six-foot-eleven-inch frame. The other twenty minutes he is perfectly still and unresponsive. Doctors have kicked, prodded, zapped, jiggled, burned, and slapped Dennis during these twenty-minute periods, but these efforts never elicit anything close to a response. To add to the mystery, Dennis rocks with an astounding regularity. One day, in my boredom, I counted the number of undulations per minute during each forty-minute rocking period. I discovered that, invariably, Dennis rocks seventy-six times every minute. This was a complete puzzle until two days later when a nurse inadvertently locked me in the Red Room. In my escalating nausea, I noticed that the machine hooked up to Dennis’s mom (which I presume maintains her heart rate) was set to seventy-six beats per minute.
    When Dennis’s mother first brought her child to the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, she was looking for help. She loved the poor lump of skin and bones to death but needed an explanation as to why he never cried, babbled, crawled, played, grabbed, kicked, or ate. After the first few weeks of consultations and dozens of neurological, physical, and mental examinations, the doctors concluded, quite simply, that Dennis lacked a soul. All the bits and pieces of a person