“I’m dead,” says Anatoly Sverdloff, gasping for air, lungs shot. He whispers this in Russian, in English, the crazy mixture he speaks, but stumbling, gulping to get air in, trawling for oxygen, voice so small, you can hardly hear him. He can’t breathe. His heart is killing him, he says, pushing the words out in short helpless bursts.
Medics, nurses, other people crowd around the bed, a whole mob of them, shaking their heads to indicate there’s no hope. Hooked up to machines, thick transparent corrugated tubes, blue, white, pushing air into him, expelling the bad stuff. IVs stuck in his arms trail up to clear plastic sacks of medicine on a metal stand. He wears a sleeveless hospital gown that’s too short.
On his back, this huge man, six foot six, normally three hundred pounds, but seeming suddenly shrunken, like the carcass of a beached whale. Only the dimples in the large square face that resembles an Easter Island statue make him recognizable.
Somewhere, on a CD, schlocky music is playing, music will help, somebody says, and a voice cries out, no, not that, put on Sinatra, he loves Sinatra. Or opera. Italian. Verdi. Whose voice is crying out? Tolya’s? No one is listening.
More doctors and nurses bundled up in white paper suits like spacemen come and go. But there’s no reason for it, no radioactive poison in him, why are you dressed like that? the voice says. Everybody has a white mask on, and white paper hats. Party hats. Somebody is blowing a red party whistle. People wander in and out of the room, some lost, others looking for the festivities. The guy is dead, somebody says, there’s no party.
A single shoe, yellow alligator, big gold buckle dull from dust, is near the bed, just lying there. Somebody picks it up. His massive feet sticking out from a blanket are the gray of some prehistoric mammal, as if Tolya is returning to a primitive form, the disease eating him from the inside out.
And then he’s dead.
He’s in a coffin, for viewing, and he turns into Stalin, the enormous head, the hair, the mustache, the large nostrils, why Stalin? Why? Or is it Yeltsin? Big men. Big Russian men.
My best friend is dying, and I can’t stop it, and he says, Artie, help me, and then he’s dead, and I start to cry. Stop the music, I yell. Turn it off! Suddenly I have to sit down on a chair in the hospital room because I can’t breathe anymore. Somebody tries to stick a tube in my nose but I fight back. The tubes trip me, I’m tangled in clear plastic tubes, falling.
He rips off the tubes, pulls out the lifelines, the IVs, and all he says is, “I knew Sasha Litvinenko. I met him, and they killed him and nobody remembers the poor bastard anymore.”