SYNOPSIS
(EXTENDED VERSION)
Back to: Part 7
Part 8
Anaesthesia Dolorosa
Central protagonist: Andrew
Upon return to Moscow, Andrew finds himself in a public hospital, reuniting with Sofia in the overcrowded waiting hall. She tells him the full details of what happened. Mikhail, his father-in-law, drunk after his birthday party at the country house, decided to drive Nathalie and his granddaughter home in his brand-new luxury SUV. Nathalie herself was drunk enough to not care about the child's safety. After runnning a red light, they had a truck smash into the left side of the vehicle. Mikhail was dead on spot. Nathalie, riding on the passenger side, had a few fractures and burns but her life was out of danger. By contrast, Ann was severely injured and brought into the ICU in critical condition.
A few hours later, Andrew and Sofia learn that his daughter developed a massive internal bleeding and now has absolute indications for red blood cells transfusion. The problem is, due to her rare blood type, there's no compatible red blood cells in the hospital's bank at the moment, so they sent a request to other hospitals. Dreadful as it sounds to Sofia, this holds a devastating meaning for Andrew. Aware of his blood type and how its genetically inherited, he realizes that either the doctors made a mistake identifying his daughter's blood type, or the girl is in fact not his biological daughter. He remembers his father-in-law's messages about Nathalie's possible cheating at the time she was conceived. Refusing to believe it, he forces his way into the ICU, presenting himself as a fellow medical professional, and asks them to double-check the girl's blood type, then proceeding to do the test himself. There's no mistake, though. Ann's blood type is indeed rare, different from his, and incompatible with their biological connection.
Still unable to process the tough truth, he steals her blood sample from the hospital. There's a tiny chance that her blood type was altered by a spontaneous genetic mutation, so a full-DNA test is needed to establish or disprove his paternity. Unsurprisingly, his depression spirals up, making him think that God takes away his fatherhood as a visitation for his intention to leave his daughter and look for a better life in Spain, never mind the "sinful deviation" that he mistook for the love for Pablo.
The compatible transfusion medium is luckily obtained the same day, making her condition stable and then steadily improve. Within a week, both the girl and Nathalie get discharged. Andrew receives the result of the genetic test but cannot bring himself to open it. Instead, he goes into the delusion that if he now proves himself as a good husband to his wife, and the good father to his daughter, God will change his mind and bring about the unlikely test results, confirming his fatherhood. It doesn't occur to him that after him being an atheist for the majority of life, his current vision of the vindictive God is driven by his mental disorder.
Coming back to work at the hospital adds up to his mental agony. The employment conditions here are more miserable than they were before, and the shame around his impaired memory and compromised manual skills adds fuel to his depressive ideation. On the first day of his work, he learns about the recent suicides of two young male residents, and realizes they were subject to bullying because of the gossip about them having a relationship. He knew Ilya, one of those residents, from his previous work experience here, and remembered him as one of the few bright and honest people who, just like Andrew himself, spoke up against institutionalized bribery, cronyism, and malpractice. Now, he observes the hate and cruelty with which his co-workers speak about the dead young men. Without being aware, Andrew projects this story onto himself: homosexual people, he starts thinking, are the mistakes of God's creation, destined to annihilate themselves, so sooner or later he will also end up the same way.
Now, he again confronts corruption, extorsion of bribes from patients, the promotion of unqualified people into positions of power through nepotism, and malpractice leading to the irreversible damage of people's health — all covered up in silence, fear, and powerlessness experienced by the majority of underpaid workers like him. These realities, immutable in Russia because of its power paradigms, were exactly what made him want to emigrate to Europe for so many years. But now, he feels that he's no longer capable of effecting any change in his life.
Through their continuing correspondence, Pablo convinces him otherwise. Without Andrew having to mention the details, he understands how working here drives his mentally compromised condition further and pleads with him to quit immediately and come to Spain, where he's ready to offer every kind of support. Andrew doesn't share the story about his daughter's blood type, the genetic test, and his excruciating fear that Ann isn't his biological child. He doesn't share his delusion that this situation is God's punishment for their relationship with Pablo, so Pablo cannot intercept it. Andrew resists the idea of taking anti-depressant drugs, due to a mixture of ignorance and the fear that they will interfere with "God's plan". His wife, in the meantime, doesn't offer any empathy and support and instead is consumed by the litigation over her father's multi-million-dollar legacy.
Pablo's own problems, following his absence from the match and the allegations of dope usage, resolve smoothly with the help of the lawyers he hires. He now realizes that the ability to redress justice and honor truth in one's life largely depends on privilege, which he has a lot of. He feels overwhelmed by guilt, not just over his brutal betrayal of Andrew, but over many years of misunderstanding and invalidating Andrew's reality. Andrew's mental illness now becomes the obstacle to their better future. By mid-November 2009, when Andrew's self-prescribed approach of "spiritual purification" fails to improve his condition, Pablo finally convince him to find a private psychiatrist, who immediately puts him on medical therapy.
Needless to say, Andrew doesn't tell the real story to the doctor. He just seeks symptomatic relief. The adverse effects of the drug emerge almost immediately, but the therapeutic effect doesn't appear even after two weeks. The doctor switches him to another antidepressant, then to combined therapy, but nothing works. In the severity of his condition, Andrew doesn't see that the root causes of his mental disorder, like his miserable employment, persist in his outer reality. They're so long-lived and heavy that the power of medications cannot compensate for them. Instead, the failure of medical treatment reinforces his conviction that keeping him in the hell of mental illness is part of God's immutable plan. In December, his suicidal ideation becomes constant — just in case God, hell, and afterlife don't exist, stopping his body's functions appears the only way to terminate his otherwise unterminable suffering.
In the last-resort attempt to "earn salvation" and "obtain God's pardon", Andrew goes to a church and confesses "the mortal sin" of his homosexuality. He shares with a priest what he never shared with his psychiatrist. Despite his expectations, the priest says that God loves him and only wants him to love himself, and that's exactly what Andrew cannot do at the bottom of depression. Instead, he thinks that God hates him so much that He doesn't even want to accept his repentance. In another crazy attempt to prove to God his resolve to "quit his sin", he erases Pablo's emails and stops responding to his new messages and taking his calls. Increasingly panicked, Pablo eventually obtains his landline number from a Russian website selling leaked databases, and blows up the phone in Andrew's apartment the entire day, hanging up every time Sofia responds. When Andrew comes home, Sofia asks him to pick up the receiver. Hearing Pablo's voice, he hides in the bedroom and says he'll go out and call him back from the street later. Hearing him talk in Spanish confirms Sofia's guess about a secret part of life Andrew has in Spain.
Calling back, Andrew breaks down and finally shares his story about God giving him the untreatable mental illness as the punishment for their love. He discloses his church confession and decision to ignore Pablo as the "last-resort measures" to earn God's pardon. At this point, Pablo understands that his beloved's cognitive impairment is terminal and suicide is within an arm's reach.
With no Russian visa, which takes about two weeks to obtain, Pablo sees no way to come to Moscow and feels powerless. In a few days, Andrew starts making preparations for a suicide by overdose, stealing narcotic drugs from the hospital. His plan is faciliated by the circumstances that he again sees as arranged by God: his wife wins the litigation over her father's country house, and decides to move here, selling the apartment they all live in. Andrew refuses to move along with his family, under the pretext that the new location will require much longer commutes to his work. Instead, he is going to move to the old apartment of his parents, which he'd been leasing over the years. His long-time tenants moved out recently, and he didn't care to find new ones. He sets the exact timing for offing himself, which is as close as the upcoming Saturday night, the very first night after he plans to move in.
On his part, realizing his powerlessness despite his resources and privilege, Pablo makes up his own story about God's plans. He thinks that Andrew's terminal depression would have never happened if it hadn't been for his betrayal. As his human agency cannot fix the situation, and his prayers for Andrew's health over the months don't help either, he takes his own desperate action. One early December morning, with his parents still asleep, he drives to the same church where five years ago he'd made his confession, then hearing in response what he'd believed to be God's voice. Believing God to be all-mighty and realizing that he's powerless, he now offers God a bargain: to take his own health, but give Andrew his sanity back, making it possible for him to move and have a new life in Spain.
Pablo does not feel that God hears him, and he repeats his plea many times in different words, pressing the point that after a lifetime of misery, Andrew deserves happiness and peace more than he does. Finally, his eye is struck by a ray of rising sun breaking through the window, and he suddenly senses a stabbing pain in his chest. He'd felt this specific kind of pain only once, that morning on the beach where he and Andrew met after his exhausting three-hour-long marathon. Memories about their meeting and the little time they spent together over the years rush upon him, and he feels grateful despite the ongoing pain. After a couple of minutes, it subdues, and Pablo leaves the church convinced that God has heard him and accepted his sacrifice.
Back in Moscow, Andrew is counting down minutes to Saturday night. On the morning of the day his family and he are moving out, he watches them sleep and mentally says goodbye to them. On his last day of working in the hospital, he faces a scheme of electoral fraud playing out: with the State Duma elections being held on the weekend, all the hospital staff are ordered to produce their passports in order to falsify their admission to the institution as patients, and thus oblige them to cast their votes at the hospital polling station under governmental supervision. Andrew refuses to participate, making the head of his unit threaten him with a layoff, but Andrew doesn't give a shit — he doesn't expect to live longer than this weekend anyway.
On Friday night, moving into the uninhabited apartment where his childhood was once interrupted by the unexpected trauma, he decides to give himself the final blow. He thinks he has nothing to lose anyway, so he opens the results of the genetic test and reads the truth. He is not the biological father of the child he'd been raising for five years. His marriage was a joke.
And strangely, instead of feeling terminally devastated, he feels somewhat relieved. For the first time after months of insomnia, he feels drowsiness and reaches for the bed. As he slips under the blanket, instead of depressive ideations, he again starts seeing the visions about a better, brighter life in Spain. What he believed was lost forever is now coming rushing back as his mind goes into the kind of profound, healthy sleep he hasn't experienced for so long.
Next: Part 9