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The next day, Polina didn’t show up for breakfast, and I couldn’t eat a bite of my putrid food. As the tables were being cleared, Nurse Natalya wheeled me aside, bit her lower lip, and nodded. I knew exactly what this meant. “Igor, you can be with her if you want,” she whispered.
Polina was transferred to the red room, which incidentally is where people die. She was hooked up to a nauseating machine that dripped morphine into her blood and secured her in a sufficiently dissociated state. My pale partial-hand held her little porcelain hand throughout the day as the usual suspects passed in and out to see if she had died yet.
And then it happened. During the last hours her hand grew icier and icier as if to warn me it was coming. When her skin hit a critical temperature, her torso leaped up, chest out, while her once adorable breasts were now compressed and stretched over the landscape of her ribcage. She lifelessly collapsed back to the bed.
Goodbye, sweet Polina.
V
By now Reader, I hope you understand that we live in a dreary little land where there is no absence of death. Tiny ghastly hands emerge from the walls and waft its smell in my face all day long, singing my nostrils and leaving me with a distinct and uninvited congestion. But somehow this perpetual exposure failed to habituate me to the sight of that limp, lifeless bag of bones whose kiss was warm only a few short hours ago. For if I’m to be truly honest here, Polina was the only creature I’d ever allowed myself to make real.
My resistance to her death gave birth to a terrible little thought. It leaked into my head, uninvited and unapologetic, and immediately established a dwelling: What if my beloved Polina wasn’t dead? What if this were some strange coma? And what if my beloved Polina would finally awaken long after she’d been buried? My imagination (which I must admit was quite honed after a lifetime of sensory deprivation) played out the scenario with precious immediacy. She would open her eyes in a cold, dark cell with pressure-treated pungent pine several inches from her eyes. And after a few confused moments, where she couldn’t be sure whether or not she were dreaming a terrible dream, reality would set in, along with real terror. Perhaps it would begin with transcendental claustrophobia, or perhaps the freezing realization of transcendental loneliness. She would panic. She would kick and hammer and thrash about and claw, but this would only remind her of how close the walls actually were. Even so, she would continue to fight for a minute, which would feel like hours in her fragile subjectivity. Then she would stop suddenly. The hopelessness of the situation would wash over her. A bereaved sympathetic nervous system would be forced to accept that she could not fight or flee. She would have to resign herself to sitting there in all her transcendental fear and loneliness — until she died of asphyxiation.
Amidst this terrible little thought, came a thought within a thought. A thought that perhaps as my beloved was gripped by this morbid arousal, the thoughts of her last waking moments would flood her, if for no other reason than their proximity, or maybe because they were relatively benign compared to what she was going through. Perhaps, our last night together would fill her mind. And perhaps she would again be flushed by the derealizarion that we felt that night. And perhaps she would think of our kiss. And perhaps all of this might become her world as the lesser parts of her were preparing to die. And perhaps the fantasy would continue on farther and farther into a future that neither of us saw but which she needed to imagine in that frigid lonely place. And perhaps we would die together after all.
About Scott Stambach
