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

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