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

happy?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut we’re all so wrong.”
    â€œYou’re exactly what you’re supposed to be.”
    â€œWhy can’t they at least pretend?”
    â€œIvan, you lose your patience over cold cabbage. What kind of nurse would you be in this place?”
    Touché, Natalya.
    Â 
    X
    The Jungian Archetypes
    Carl Jung, the esteemed psychologist and protégé of Sigmund Freud, is the only man who could tell me something I didn’t already know about my own head. Like every other author I read, I challenged every point, mostly because I’m clinically stubborn. In his book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1969), Jung argues that every person is made from an archetype or hybrid of archetypes, which are basically cosmic personas that existed well before you or I were born. I spent the first fifty pages deconstructing and demolishing his thesis sentence by sentence. By the hundredth page, I couldn’t argue anymore. Currently, Jung’s archetypes are the only method I have for understanding the characters who populate my world. A few of my favorites include the Trickster (clearly my dominant), the Mother (Natalya), the Child (Max), and the Goddess (Polina).
    The rest of the nurses have their archetypes too. Nurse Elena is the Addict. By my current count, there are seven bottles of vodka of varying brands hidden in cupboards and sofas throughout the hospital, though I’m not sure why she even hides them anymore, since the Director and every nurse at the asylum know where they are. Luckily, alcoholism is a widely accepted vice in Belarus.
    Nurse Katya is the Bully. She is large, imposing, and highly black. She is also an unhappy woman with eight kids and only a half of a husband (and I mean that literally—he lost both of his legs in an industrial accident; I know this because he comes to the hospital every few months to have fluid drained from his stumps). Carl Jung would say that Nurse Katya uses her size and exotic appearance to exert control over a world that often leaves her feeling out of control.
    Nurse Lyudmila plays the part of the Insecure Vixen (I prefer Bulimic Adulterer, but Jung failed to coin that term). She is also the Enforcer, since she rigidly and uncompromisingly adheres to the rules, even in an environment where rules hardly matter. Furthermore, while the nursing staff of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children includes its share of dubious characters, she is the only one who inspires a deep, abiding fear in me. This is because she is a complete sociopath, and I’m fairly certain that, like Dennis, she was born without a soul. To dispense with the obvious first, she is engaged in a long and nauseatingly sexual affair with the Director, Mikhail Kruk. I know this because the hall often smells of erotic play on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and also because Lyudmila can’t remain quiet during orgasm. But her maleficent ways extend far beyond the Director’s office. The only reason she works at this hospital is because she was transferred here five years ago from a mental asylum after one of her old patients shot himself in the head. Apparently, he was playing a game called Russian roulette with several other patients. Furthermore, during her tenure at the hospital, I’ve seen her steal money from every nurse, take a bar of shoko away from Alex only to toss it in a trash can seconds later, and systematically cut her inner thigh with a collection of kitchen knives she hides behind the laundry detergent. There was also a patient named Dimitri, who I was almost friends with because he was almost as smart as me, but Nurse Lyudmila psychologically tortured him until he left the asylum without saying good-bye.
    There is one more character in my story worth mentioning: the secretary, Miss Kristina. She spends her business days filing paperwork and robotically greeting nurses and patients as they pass by. She plays the part of