The Convalescent Read online

  “Nature acts on every organ,” writes Darwin, “on the whole machinery of life.”

  Árpád knew that he had to somehow protect these people, even if only from themselves. So when Szeretlek crawled out of the tent and fell upon one heavy knee in front of him and begged, “Please, do not cast them out. It’s not their fault—” the Grand Prince quite agreed.

  “Your people may remain,” he said. “But only if you are exiled.”

  The giant man bit his giant lip. His eyes watered.

  Árpád raised one hand. “You will follow the river,” he announced, “until the river ends. If you are ever seen here again, by anyone, you will be cut in half. Or at the very least, exposed to—”

  “Hopeless situations,” said Lili. She fake-shivered.

  Árpád spun his cloaks and faced her. He lifted the lid of the bird-helmet. “And as for you,” he seethed, “you will make a life for yourself here, among these meat-cutters. These feet-suckers. You will watch over them and take care of them until I return.” He inched closer to her, lifting himself up to his tiptoes, his mustache dancing with anticipation. “And then you and I shall be reunited, Love Button,” he whispered. “And we shall be very, very happy.”

  Árpád’s officers waited outside as Lili and Szeretlek prepared for his departure. Inside the tent, the scene was somber. We Pfliegmans felt the heavy presence of authority and murmured quietly amongst ourselves. We watched Lili and Szeretlek pack up his things. One of us occasionally let out a weeping cough. Another sneezed. Another chewed off a hangnail too close and sniveled with self-pity. There was not much to pack: Szeretlek owned nothing beyond his cloak, his undershirt. Lili threw her head back, loudly worked a nubble of phlegm from her sinuses, and spit it professionally across the tent in one clean thip.

  “This sucks,” she said.

  Szeretlek shuddered with love. “Szeretlek,” he said.

  “Me too, babe.”

  The enormous man gazed at her face, moving his head all the way down her torso, kissing each fold of her stomach, all the way between her rolling, dimpled thighs. “I’m not good enough for you,” he said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Lili. “You’re awesome.”

  “But I’ve been exiled,” he whined. “How will I possibly be of use now?”

  The Giant did not know how to hunt or fish, and he certainly wasn’t much of a farmer. His only unique talent seemed to involve the blunting instrument with which he had clocked innumerable cows over their innumerable heads. What use, he wondered, is a large man with a soft brain?

  “I can haul rocks,” he said, miserably. “I can dig holes.”

  “You can leg wrestle,” said Lili. She threw herself on top of him, pinned him to the ground, and locked her bare legs around his. “And you belong here.” She grabbed her crotch and grinned.

  Szeretlek stared at her, and his chin trembled. “I’ll be so lonely.”

  “You’re not alone,” said Lili. “You have me. You have Ember az Égben.”

  “Who?”

  “The Man in the Sky.”

  Szeretlek thought about it for a second, then grabbed Lili’s waist and buried his head in her stomach. “I don’t want to go!” he cried.

  Lili pulled her hair back and began turning it into two thick braids. “You don’t have to,” she said. “These men aren’t going to stay here forever. Just go for a few days. Follow the river for a day or two, and then turn back. By the time you get home, they’ll be gone and no one will ever know.”

  Szeretlek sat up. His eyes were blotchy and puffed, but he blinked with hope. “Do you think it would work?” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He wiped his long cheeks. Things looked considerably brighter. “I never thought of that,” he said, and punched her on the arm. “You’re smart.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  Lili folded up the burlap on the floor for him to wear as a coat, and she packed him a heavy bag of ját. As Szeretlek watched her, he was filled with a sweeping, unmitigated desire. He grabbed her thick waist and tossed her onto the dirt floor. Lili locked her legs in, and they both laughed as they wrestled. Their laughter echoed around the tent.

  We Pfliegmans heard the laughing and hung back. We shook our wobbly heads. We knew that to laugh was a dangerous thing: laughing meant that one was enjoying oneself, and to be enjoying oneself only meant that later on, at some horrifying, unanticipated moment, one would not be enjoying oneself at all. Far better, we believed, to celebrate nothing and keep the pain constant, than to feel your body rise up, lifted high by the Man in the Sky’s nimble fingertips, to only then be released, plummeting to the hard earth below. This had happened to a few of us before, this lifting and dropping. Every once in a while, one of us would rise up in the tent, hover in the air for a moment, then fall back down again, landing clumsily on some crucial appendage. So while we may not have been the most capable, the most intelligent of the early Hungarian tribes, when Isaac Asimov was nothing more than a twittering future prospect, a modern táltos bearing hunky white muttonchops, we Pfliegmans innately understood the laws of weakness, of gravity. We understood that what rises must inevitably fall.

  Szeretlek rose from Lili’s arms and strode outside to greet Árpád’s officers. Standing in front of him was a large and healthy horse, as it was the custom among the proto-Hungarians that if a man was to be forever banished from the country, he should at least be given a ride.

  “I don’t know if he’s big enough for you,” one officer said. “But he’s the biggest one we have.”

  What the men didn’t know was that whether due to his size, his uncoordinated limbs, or his aching stupidity, Szeretlek had never ridden a horse. He’d never even saddled one.

  Anonymus writes: “The pagan Hungarians were among the first peoples across the entire Asian continent to ride horses with saddles, and the first among the Europeans to use the stirrup.”

  But a stirrup is of little assistance to a Giant. Every time Szeretlek tried to mount the horse, the animal sensed that something it could not possibly carry was about to climb on its back, and shuffled off a few feet to the side, indignant. The officers all circled around the horse to help, but after Szeretlek had tried and failed several times, they gave up. “What can we do?” they cried. “An animal doesn’t even want you.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Szeretlek said. “I am about as tall as a horse anyway. I’ll just be my own horse.”

  “What are you talking about?” the men asked.

  “I’ll walk,” he said

  The men shrugged. “Whatever, man,” they said, and handed him a bow and a quiver packed with arrows.

  “What’s this for?” he asked.

  Árpád’s men stared at him. “Are you serious?” they asked. They looked at each other. “Is he serious?”

  Szeretlek waved to Lili, to the men, to us all, and then took his first steps into the wilderness. His legs were so long that his walk was really more of an amble, a lumbering gait with his long arms swinging askew from their sockets. Szeretlek stopped before he entered the forest completely, and turned around. He had nothing but a bow, a few arrows, and a bagful of sticky ját, but he felt very fortunate. He grinned. “Lili!” he shouted. “Ember az Égben! The Man in the Sky! How he loves me!”

  Árpád’s men watched him go and clucked their tongues.

  “That guy,” one said, “is totally fucked.”

  Lili slammed a fist into his shoulder. But as she watched Szeretlek enter the woods, plodding like a large, confused bear, the familiar form of his figure slowly disappearing, slowly becoming swallowed by the tall and bending trees, she felt her waters shift uneasily inside her, as though something had deeply and permanently changed, as though the entire Danube River had suddenly sprung up between them.

  There were immediate benefits to not being able to ride a horse. Without being restricted to the saddle, Szeretlek was able to shoot arrows in all directions, instead of just straight ahead, or
left or right. He could shoot from behind. As he wandered through the forest over the next two days, the Giant became a rather skilled early-Hungarian foot-archer. There was only one problem: his thick fingers were not well suited for archery. So he carved for himself a longer bow from a soft, limber pine. Instead of one single curve of the bow, he made two smaller curves, cinched in the middle with several binds of leather into a tightly wound, pre-medieval EZ-Grip handle. The handle helped keep a firm hold on the tightness of the bowstring. Szeretlek placed an arrow in the center of the bow and pulled back the string until it tightened. When he loosened his fingers, releasing the pressure, the arrow soared through the trees at twice the velocity and distance of a normal bow. Grasping the first doubly curved bow in existence, Szeretlek might have been a Pfliegman, but there was no doubt that he was a self-made man in a time when there was no such thing.

  He felt extremely new and modern.

  Unfortunately, after only an hour or so, he became so absorbed in the game that he didn’t realize he couldn’t see, or even hear, the river anymore.

  “Follow the river and back again,” Lili had told him, but now Szeretlek had already somehow lost it.

  “Crap!” he said, and kicked himself for not being smarter than he was. “How does a person lose a whole river?”

  Whole days and nights passed as the Giant lumbered sadly through the conifers. The firs and the larches. The spruces and yews. For the trees he could not recognize, he smiled at their strange shapes as he looked for the river. He came across several streams, so there was water to drink, and he was warm enough with Lili’s burlap fashioned like proper cloak, but the bag of ját was running out. Hunger set in, and his body went tight. But he was hungry for other things as well. Lili had told him he would never be alone, that he would always have Ember az Égben, and yet each day the landscape turned. The wilderness was full of sudden, unpredictable changes. Szeretlek walked for three days in one direction until finally the trees broke at the edge of the forest, and he gasped at the white expanse in front of him. Mountains of ice and heavy snow. Wind sliced his cheeks as he stepped into the whiteness, and he gasped at how quickly his fingers and toes pigeoned, how his eyelashes curled—

  He sprinted back into the warm arms of the forest. “Ember az Égben,” he thought bitterly. “If He exists, this must surely be where he lives.”

  After the Giant had wandered in the wilderness for nearly two months, his mood changed. The hunger of loneliness was far worse than the want of food or drink as the truth of his new existence set in. He no longer marveled at the trees, the drip-drip noises. The white of the barrens. He lived to protect himself, to prevent discomfort as much as possible. He watched with a seasoned indifference how quickly his wide stomach, which in his loneliest moments he had clutched like a favorite stuffed animal, began to deflate. He did not speak to the Man in the Sky. He did not speak to anyone. He had been rationing his food, removing only the tiniest pieces of ját from his bag, but there was so little left. He would have shot and killed something, but deer tiptoed away from his loud noises and might as well have moved into another region of the world.

  By the sixtieth day, Szeretlek’s original size had halved. He reached into his bag and picked out the last remaining piece of ját. It was frozen. Lumpy and oblong. The color of boredom. Despite the unpleasant, bald taste that coated his tongue, he licked and gnawed the ját. He chewed harder, but the saliva that should have softened it only seemed to turn it into a mealy paste. It was utterly inedible. He sat down on a hollow log and stared at his legs. They were incredibly thin. “I will grow so thin that I will simply disappear,” he thought.

  A raccoon poked its nose out from under the log and sniffed Szeretlek’s foot. It opened its little jaw and tried to taste his ankle. Szeretlek reached for the raccoon, but it was too fast, and he was too tired.

  “I am too thin and too tired,” he thought, reasonably. “I will simply be eaten by tiny forest creatures.”

  His ankle bled from the bite. He reached down to touch the blood, then lost all feeling in his hands and head. He leaned forward and collapsed onto the cold earth, his limbs awkwardly entwined. He could no longer move them. And although not far away was a small monastery full of men who could assist him, Szeretlek did not know about the monastery; he only knew that Lili had been quite wrong. He stared up at the enormous, empty sky. “There is no Ember az Égben,” he said, and willingly slipped into unconsciousness.

  XXIII

  DECENT SOCIETY

  Telephone poles lean, left and right, as I limp away from the Big M Supermarket and enter the Village Square. Front Lick, Virginia, is like most small American towns. There are subdivisions. There is community theater. It was once quaint and beautiful, but now thanks to television, prescription drugs, and trickle-down economics, has fallen a few notches to “not a wholly unattractive place to live.”

  Across the street, three boys in spring jackets are throwing handfuls of mud at each other. They see me shuffling into the park and stop what they’re doing. They stare at me. Their mouths are open.

  “Oh my God,” one shouts. “Look at the midget!”

  “Nice freaking coat!”

  They burst out laughing.

  “The coat? Take a look at that hat!”

  “Those boots!”

  “Where’s your shoelaces, midget?”

  I move quicker down the sidewalk, bad leg dragging behind. One of the boots slips off, and I have to stumble back for it.

  The boys howl.

  I may be sick. I may come from a hole in the ground. My best friend may be an insect.

  But at least I don’t live in decent society.

  The G&P used to be a candy store called Lick’s, for Lick’s Candy Company, which opened a factory here in the late 1800s. The tin ceilings are original, as is the wooden floor. The planks have spread and buckled with age, but Mister Bis treats them every summer with a highly durable polyurethane gloss. “It is the very best you can buy,” he says.

  When I go inside, Mister Bis doesn’t appear to be anywhere, but Missus Bis is working the register, and from across the store, Richie is trying to persuade an old man to buy an eighty-dollar prescription for back pain.

  “All I want’s generics!” the old man cries. “Who can afford that Rolls Royce of aspirin, goddammit?”

  Missus Bis sees me from behind the register and waves me over. “Mister Pfliegman!”

  She moves quickly around the counter and places her hands down on my shoulders. She air-kisses my cheeks. She is swathed in a flowing pink sari, freckled with green flowers, and leans down so that her face is as close as possible to my face. She even smells like flowers.

  “I am so glad you’re here,” she says. “What can we do for you?”

  I bring out my writing tablet.

  Evermore Cough Drops, I write.

  Missus Bis spins back around the counter and reaches underneath the register. She hands me three whole boxes. I slide a few bills over the counter, but she refuses them; she smiles and shakes her head. “No no no,” she says, and presses the boxes over the counter. “But let me ask you: have you thought about our offer, Mister Pfliegman?”

  I give her a questioning look.

  Missus Bis swoops a sheet of the sari over one shoulder. “Mister Bis told me about your situation in the bus, and we would very much like you to stay with us for a while. Please. You do so much for us, and we feel it is the least that we can do for you. We would very much like to give you a place to stay.”

  Thank you, I write, but no.

  “But Mister Pfliegman—”

  Missus Bis continues talking, but my attention has turned to the polyurethaned floor. A few granules of sugar are shining on the wide planks. I wander away from Missus Bis, following them around the corner to baking goods—“We’ll talk about it later,” she shouts—all the way up to a large, leaking bag. It’s white cane sugar. I lick my finger and press it on the granules and steal one small taste. The sugar dissolves into
my tongue like water on scorched earth. I press my finger into more of it, and put it in my mouth and swallow. I start using two fingers, and then more fingers, and then I rip open the bag a little. I scoop it out with my hands. The sugar starts pouring out in a white waterfall. As quick as I can catch it, I’m shoving it in, munching and gulping until the bag is empty. I stop eating, breathless and a bit bewildered. I belch a little, and then look up—

  Richie Bis is staring at me.

  I calmly put the empty bag back on the shelf, and turn around to my display of Pfliegman Meat.

  Three men in black suits are hovering over my meat section. They’re all of equal height, chatting over a pile of T-bones. They manhandle my steaks. They toss my chops, my shanks. They smell them and then toss them in a disgusted manner back onto the shelf, ruining Mister Bis’s neat array. They can’t seem to stop moving, and wander aimlessly around each other, twittering. They wag their large chins. Their eyes roll.

  One of them has a bruise on his chin. He makes an ugly gesture with his fist and the crook of his elbow. He turns around and looks at the hairy little man wearing a coat much too big for him. He sees my thick eyeglasses, my stylish woolen cap—

  “What do you want?” he says.

  The Subdivisionist does not, it seems, know who I am.

  I adjust my eyeglasses and show myself, rather boldly, in front of Pfliegman Meat. I begin organizing the packets of meat that have been so carelessly flung about, glaring at the Subdivisionists in the exact menacing way that Mrs. Himmel glares at me from the receptionist’s window.

  “What’s your problem,” one of them says.

  If I could speak, I might retort with something intellectual. Thought-provoking. Instead I just open my mouth and go: “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.”

  The Subdivisionist rubs his bruised chin. “Get lost, why don’t you,” he says.

  The others turn around. “Who is it?”