The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Read Online Free

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