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Early on, Nurse Natalya caught on that I was faking these comas and gently made me aware of her acuity in a way that resonated perfectly with her. She put a picture of a famous (and very naked) Belarusian actress in my field of vision and said tauntingly, “Pretty girl, huh, Igor? Such a beautiful naked woman, eh?” And then while my attention was firmly embedded in that picture, glued by every ounce of my helplessly horny, adolescent, sex-deprived being, she yanked it out into my peripheral. Inevitably, my supposedly comatose eyes lustfully followed the image, and my game was revealed. But before I even tried to explain myself, Nurse Natalya completely understood the psychology behind my game. So instead of shaming me, as any of the other nurses would have, she sat me down and interrogated me as to my interests. When I told her I had none, she flapped her hand and walked out. The next day she returned with an old paperback copy of Bulgokov’s The Master and Margerita. I devoured it in three days and asked her for more. Since then, Nurse Natalya has scoured libraries and used book sales to feed my habit.
III
Despite my intelligence, I’m forced to accept that I’m one of the lucky ones. For you to truly understand this, I will have to describe my comrades. Let’s begin with Max. Max is 2 years old and shaped like a sickle. His head and heels bend back in a perennial struggle to be the first to reach the other. His lips are blue, thin, dry and chapped. His face is altogether taut, and his eyes bulge with exasperation and panic, as if at the tender age of 2, he realizes that his eyes are the only way he has of communicating. Sadly, no one will ever know what Max is trying to say, but I’m sure we all have a pretty good idea.
Alex looks nearly normal from the nose down. However, at his temple region his head blossoms into a veritable melon at least three times the diameter of the rest of his head. It is no surprise that Alex has trouble holding up and controlling this colossus. As a result, he is constantly bonking his head off furniture, doorframes, and medical equipment.
Enja, Dasha, Vlad, Alexa and Nick all have holes in their hearts, or so I’ve overheard. Apparently, this is the most common affliction at the asylum. These children are all confined to the red room (it’s actually a scuffed up pink) where they all lie in an assortment of beds and cribs with plastic wires that leave their chests and arrive at machines whose cold intelligence makes me slightly nauseous.
Dennis is an enigma. He is unique in that he is the only one of us whose mother is here at the asylum. Though I don’t know her full story, I do know that she unsuccessfully attempted suicide shortly after Dennis arrived. Now she is a vegetable kept alive by the machines in the red room. Her fate has become a subject of serious controversy here at the asylum.
The mysterious thing about Dennis is that he spends 40 minutes of every hour rocking in a wheelchair that is too small for his 6-foot-11-inch frame. The other 20 minutes, he is perfectly still and unresponsive. Doctors have kicked, prodded, zapped, jiggled, burned and slapped Dennis during these 20-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 40-minute rocking period. I discovered that invariably, Dennis rocks 77 times every minute. This was a complete puzzle until two days later when a nurse inadvertently left me in front of the red room and forgot that she had done so. 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 77 bpm.
About Scott Stambach
