The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach Read Free Book Online Page A

for Dennis. Not because I sympathize with his story or feel any deep primal connection. I appreciate Dennis because he unintentionally serves as my timepiece. Three sets of rocking from breakfast and I know it’s time to make my way to the TV room for Nu, pogodi! * Six sets of undulations from lunch and I know it’s time for dinner. Two sets of undulations from dinner and I make my way back to the TV room for Czterej pancerni i pies. † Four more rocking fits and it’s lights-out.
    During one of our semiregular power outages, resulting in the failure of every clock in the Main Room, I was even able to keep the nurses and technicians abreast of the local time by counting Dennis’s undulatory episodes.
    Everyone deserves a purpose.
    The Ginger Twins
    Mary and Magdalena are eleven-year-old ginger twins. Their long ginger hair is not the bright red hair of model notoriety. It is the dull red hair that inevitably comes with a nondescript homely face and freckles that verge on scar-like. Their skin is whiter than ivory, even whiter than mine, if that’s possible, and perhaps with a hint of lavender, as ginger skin often is. Their faces are spotted with freckles, and their eyes are green like what I imagine the color of seaweed to be. I would almost find them cute in a sexually specific sort of way if not for the way their peculiar aura wilts my Hui .
    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