The Convalescent Read online

  “Some homeless guy,” he says. “He reeks. Check out that sweatshirt.”

  “Don’t give him anything.”

  Mister Bis appears from out back and sees me in front of the Subdivisionists. He darts over to the meat section, politically inching himself between us. He looks at the businessmen. “I will be with you gentlemen in a moment,” he says, and then turns to me. “Go on up to the counter, Mister Pfliegman, and Missus Bis will ring you up.”

  I give the owner of the G&P a stricken look. He doesn’t realize what he’s done. Not until he sees my face. He said the word out loud: Pfliegman.

  The bruised Subdivisionist looks at me with fresh vitality. His eyes darken. “Hey now,” he says. “Wait a second,” and reaches over to grab my arm, but Mister Bis steps in front of him. He whistles at Missus Bis. His wife flies over and shuttles me quickly towards the door as Mister Bis plants himself in front of the Subdivisionists, blocking the aisle. He begins barking at them about the demise of the American business ethic with his own unique and distinguishable élan:

  “Chickenshits!” he cries. “You’re all a bunch of chickenshits!”

  The Subdivisionists point in my direction, shouting angrily at Mister Bis. They push him a little, sending him crashing into the meat display.

  In a leap, Richie clears the pharmaceuticals counter. He tackles one of them, and bites him on the shoulder, hard—

  “The police!” they cry. “We’re calling the police!”

  Missus Bis ushers me through the door and shoos me down sidewalk. “Go on!” she says. “Go and hide!”

  I hustle quickly down the rows of empty storefronts. But there really is no need for Rovar Ákos Pfliegman to hide. He’s been hiding from the world even from before the day that Ján and Janka crashed into that bent telephone pole. Most people do not live out of a bus in a field. Most do not bathe in a river and shit in a bucket. Most do not keep their eyes closed so tightly in the mornings that they get dizzying, fiery headaches, but headaches they would rather have than watch the diamond-shaped crack in the ceiling. Most do not possess a general fear of exposure; instead, most people awake in the mornings and pour themselves a bowl of breakfast cereal and get in their cars and drive to work. Which is fine. He has nothing against cars. He has nothing against cereal. But it’s safe to say that he’s been hiding from the world ever since the day that Grandfather Ákos packed his bags in the light of the hallway and walked out the front door of the farmhouse. Ever since he climbed up the three stairs of his school bus and started the engine.

  The boy ran outside and pressed a piece of paper against the door of the bus:

  Take me with you.

  Grandfather Ákos pulled the lever and opened it. He shook his head. “I can’t, Little Ákos,” he said.

  The boy looked at him, at the trim goatee, the heavy coat. The white of his knuckles gripping the steering wheel.

  Why not?

  Grandfather Ákos stared at the boy for a moment, then reached underneath the seat and handed him a book: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians. “You’re a Pfliegman,” he said.

  What does that mean?

  Grandfather Ákos scratched his chin and held the wheel a little tighter. He gave the windshield a grim, sorrowful look. “It means you’re on your own,” he said, and pulled the lever. The door closed shut.

  The old man never returned. One day a lawyer pulled the school bus up the driveway of the farmhouse. He delivered ten Hungarian wool coats which went straight to a downstairs closet. The boy crawled into the closet and lay down underneath the coats to hide. To wait. How long should a person wait for change? What if that change never comes? And how is change even possible, when we all have a past to return to? We Pfliegmans may not have much else, but we have a past. We carry it on our backs. It presses itself against our necks. It floats in glass jars stored in white boxes, hidden away in decrepit barns, and although we can hide from many things, we cannot hide from that. Darwin writes, “A man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

  But he writes nothing of lowly men from lowly origins.

  When I return to Dr. Monica’s, several of the birthday children have left, and Adrian convinces Mrs. Himmel to let me back in. “Honestly Annette,” she says. “You can’t just force him out into the rain. It’s not humane, or something.”

  “Whatever,” Mrs. Himmel says.

  Her television program is on. She grabs the remote control and demands that everyone be quiet. She cranks the volume. We all watch as Television Elise slightly overcooks a chicken in the oven and nobody eats her dinner. She bursts into tears. At the end of the program she gets free tickets to the opera, but she’s clearly still mad. “I don’t even like opera,” she says, and then they cut to commercial.

  “That was a bad one,” says Mrs. Himmel, having seen better rewards on other episodes. She gets up and ambles to the bathroom.

  The boy with the BANG THE DRUM! T-shirt walks in with his mother. His mother has dark crescents under her eyes, and the boy isn’t looking so hot either; his face is so pale it rivals my own. His cheeks and forehead are all puffed and dry. He can barely keep his eyes open.

  The other Sick or Diseased children see him and instinctively shuttle to the other side of the Waiting Area.

  His mother sits down in the chair next to me and reaches into her purse. She brings out a book called If Jesus Was A Soccer Player. There’s a picture of a man wearing a cloak and a large wooden cross around his neck. He’s kicking a ball into a net as the crowd behind him cheers. The mother begins reading softly, but the boy isn’t listening, not even when she gets to the part about Jesus scoring the winning goal. “Go Jesus!” she whispers. The boy doesn’t move. He’s slumped over, one arm hanging listless off the side of the chair. He shifts for a moment, like he’s afraid of something, and then leans forward and vomits on the Berber carpeting.

  The Sick or Diseased children scream. Adrian rushes over with a roll of paper towels and the necessary powders, and the Good Mothers all hold handkerchiefs over their noses.

  The BANG THE DRUM! boy barely notices any of them; he falls back into his chair as his mother quietly apologizes to everyone.

  In this moment, all of the mothers, Good and Bad, are kind. “Don’t worry,” they tell her, looking nervously at her boy’s gray face. “It’s not like it’s the first time,” they say.

  Afterward, THE BANG THE DRUM! boy feels better. He gets cleaned up and is given a small cup of ginger ale. He slides off his chair to join the other children building skyscrapers out of Legos in the corner. They’re uncertain about the boy—he might throw up again—so they keep to themselves, piling Legos on top of their buildings. The boy sits on his ankles in front of them, not moving. Not saying a word.

  I cough a little into my fist and stare longingly at Mrs. Himmel’s sugar packets behind her desk. I lick my lips. I think about the sugar at Mister Bis’s and take out a box of the Evermores. I unwrap one and eat it, but it’s not the same—

  I spit it out into my hand.

  Adrian brings me a cup of the ginger ale. “You don’t look so good, either, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. The cup is warm and plastic. It smells faintly of modeling clay and peanut butter. “Go on,” she says. “Drink it.”

  I choke it down.

  “You don’t have to stay here, you know,” Adrian says. “A person has a lot of options. There are other places. My parents live in Oakland, California, for example. You could go someplace like that. Why not? Fix up that old bus and drive to California. It would be fun.”

  “There may be better places for someone who can do a hundred pushups,” I want to say. “There may be better places for someone who climbs mountains.”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” Mrs. Himmel says, across the room.

  Adrian nods. “That’s true. It’s very true,” she says.

  The BANG THE DRUM! boy waits for Adrian to leave and then walks over. �
�Whenever I get sick,” he says, “Dad says I’m a Little Soldier.” He puts his hands together into a gun and pretends to shoot me.

  His mother looks up from her magazine and nods. So I shoot him back.

  The boy grabs his throat and falls to the ground, rolling about on the Berber carpeting, emitting miserable, exaggerated groans. His mother goes back to the magazine, smiling from behind the pages. She’s younger than I thought, wearing clean slacks and a pressed shirt, and her hair is turned up above her ears, cinched by matching barrettes. She rests her head, poised on her fingers. She appears tidy, organized. Controlling the things she can control. She puts the magazine back on the table and looks at the boy. “Sometimes I feel glued to him,” she says, and laughs a little. But the laugh trails off. “Isn’t that funny?”

  No, I write.

  Together, we watch him play.

  “You’re Mr. Pfliegman, is that correct? I’ve heard Adrian say your name. I’m Cathy,” she says, and sticks out one hand.

  Cathy’s hand is clean and soft. Her fingernails unmarked by age or experience. I hold out my own hand, dirty and bloodied from the ditch.

  She shakes it.

  “It’s nice to meet you, officially,” she says. “You don’t speak much.”

  I look at her.

  “It’s kind of nice, actually.”

  We watch the boy play for a while with a plastic toy, the kind where at first it’s a robot and then it’s a wrestler. He knows the pieces well; he turns them quickly and expertly in his hands, and the toy does not last in either form for very long. It goes from robot to wrestler and back again without a second’s contemplation for what it means to be either one. Then, without taking her eyes off the boy, his mother says, “He’s dying.” She smiles, but her eyes don’t mean it. “Do you believe in God, Mr. Pfliegman? I know it’s a strange thing to ask someone nowadays. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  I know Dr. Monica says that if you cannot be honest with others, how can you expect to be honest with yourself, but I also know that sometimes myth is preferable to truth. And here is Cathy, with her manicured hands, her coiffed hair, and her child who is not Sick, not Diseased, but Dying—

  I bring out my writing tablet.

  I believe, I write.

  XXIV

  EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:

  THE WOMAN IN THE PIT

  In the late spring of 931 AD, the early Hungarian armies launched through Bavaria and Swabia along Lake Constance to a small inlet where a gathering of monks resided with a considerable library of books, which they cherished. An anchoress named Wiborada also lived there, whom they did not cherish, but whom the monks had allowed to move into a pit in the cellar ten years earlier due to her inability to cure herself from impure thoughts and frightening visions. The visions stopped for a while, but one afternoon in the spring of that year, Wiborada was sitting calmly in the center of the floor of her pit, praying for a clear and simple mind, when the wall in front of her began to move. It moved slowly at first, and she rubbed her eyes to make sure she was seeing correctly, but when she assured herself that she was indeed watching the heavy stones of the wall creak and shift, she cried out, “The wall is moving!” The stones shifted faster, toppling over each other, until the dust cleared and a wide space unveiled itself in the dead center of the wall. There was nothing left between Wiborada and the elements. In front of her was a sprawling field with vibrant grasses. A bright and earnest sky.

  Cold air rushed into the pit, making her shiver. She wiped her nose with a sleeve and backed into a far corner where the stones were safely in place.

  “It’s completely gone!” she screamed.

  Upstairs, the monks heard Wiborada’s cries, but they were enjoying a midday meal of leek and potato, which was everyone’s favorite, and besides, the woman was always shouting about something. Shouting like mad was bound to happen if one immured oneself for too long, as many monks who had taken Vows of Isolation had witnessed.

  They resumed sipping their meal in silence.

  Downstairs, Wiborada stared at the field in front of her. The cold air disappeared to make way for the sun which now poured in, illuminating everything. “What the—” she said. From far off, thunder rumbled over the field. At least she thought it was thunder, but it couldn’t be! There were no clouds. There was no dark and telling sign of rain. Wiborada stood up and walked toward the open space. She squinted, shading her eyes to block the sun, when a line appeared over the horizon. It quickly became apparent that the line was moving.

  “Horses!” she whispered, as the mass rumbled over the clearing. Then she looked closer, and the anchoress realized with terror that these horses were not alone: they carried men on their backs. Men with spears, long bows and arrows, tall pointy hats covered in buttons, and bulging packs of supplies. Their flags waved. Their horses pulled long, heavy logs with which to bash open certain doors to certain unprotected monasteries.

  “Holy shit!” shouted Wiborada.

  At this, the monks’ wooden spoons went clattering to their bowls.

  “Suppose we check on the Lady Wiborada?” said one.

  The monks nodded. As a unit, they rose from the wooden table and made their way to the heavy door that led to the cellar pit. Although none of the brothers would admit it, they were slightly agitated that they had not been able to finish their meal in peace. They were all thinking that by the time they returned to their tables, the soup would be cold and the bread would be hard, and this would mean the whole afternoon was shot, as there was nothing more frustrating than trying to communicate with the Heavenly Father on an unevenly digested meal.

  One of the brothers jiggled the key. “Darn it all,” he said.

  “Patience, Brother,” said another brother behind him.

  “I’ve almost got it,” said the first brother.

  The monks all prayed silently for the first brother:

  Credo in unum Deum… Visibilium et invisibilium…

  The door opened, and everyone stepped downstairs, where Wiborada, dripping in sweat, lay curled into a tiny knot on the floor.

  The wall, of course, was still there, in the exact place that it had always been.

  Wiborada opened her eyes and stared at one of the monks. He towered over the others. He was so big he had to stoop under the doorjamb, and was now crouching down to even fit into the pit. Although she had never seen him before, Wiborada looked at him as if she’d known him for many years. She studied his face, his dark eyes, and then she gasped. A slight thread of spit hung from her lower lip.

  She motioned for him to lower himself to her, and the monk did so, obediently. “If I can be of use,” he said.

  But Wiborada could not understand his gawky, foreign tongue. “What is his name?” she asked.

  “We call him Brother Lignarius,” the monks said.

  Some years back, the monks had found the Giant lying in the woods half-starved, looking as if all of the air had been sucked out of him. A skeleton with skin. They unanimously agreed that God had delivered the man for a purpose, and decided to watch over him until he recovered. At first, the arrangement worked quite well. As soon as the Giant regained his size and strength, they were delighted by the breadth of his utility: he could haul six full barrels of potatoes at once. Fix a leaky roof without a ladder. The man could enter, bare-armed, into the forest, and emerge minutes later carrying an entire cord of winter wood. On top of this, his personality suited the monastery: all of these tasks he performed without complaint. “If I can be of use,” Lignarius always said.

  The monks knew that Brother Lignarius was not intelligent; his face rarely changed expression; his eyes did not possess even a flicker of the curiosity that speaks to an enlightened mind. But eventually they were able to teach him a few simple prayers, which he mimicked lightly on his large lips: “God is love,” they said, and he repeated the words even if he did not understand them. “The age of the myth is over,” they explained, distinguishing God from the
stories of the Greeks and their shape-shifters. These were false gods, they said, the ones that became bulls and swans and oxen. Gods that assumed earth-forms to deceive. Manipulate. They had heard rumors of a pagan deity, some “Man in the Sky” capable of bringing sunshine and rain at his own inestimable whim, and they made sure to explain to Lignarius in simple terms that there could never be a Man in the Sky, because, reasonably, men require ground to stand on. Could he disagree with that?

  He could not.

  “Credo in unum Patrem?” they asked.

  Szeretlek shrugged his shoulders. “Credo,” he said.

  And then they would give him his breakfast.

  But as time passed, the monks spoke less and less to Lignarius, and Lignarius rarely spoke to them. He developed a lingering cough which no one could cure; he suffered from nosebleeds, crippling headaches. Mysterious pains grabbed random places on his body, and his skin dried in flakes and itched him terribly. He was always lifting his arms up around his back to reach one particularly tortuous itch which brewed in the exact place where neither hand can reach.

  But his change in behavior disturbed them the most. The monks watched as Lignarius started wandering the woods, snapping trees he was not supposed to snap. He would not cut them or pile them neatly as before; instead he dragged the logs back to the monastery and abandoned them, strewn haphazardly all over their nice front lawn. The giant monk walked for hours in the vegetable gardens, coughing until his chest rattled and making funny gestures with his arms and body, as though pretending to shoot imaginary targets with imaginary arrows. The honey pot was always empty, and there was Lignarius, ducking out of the kitchen, furtively licking his fingers. He began mumbling to himself in a tongue so unrecognizable it did not sound like human speech at all. If scolded, no look of contrition crossed his face. Lignarius would only say “Credo” and then walk away.

  The monks tried offering him gifts: a fresh piece of cloth, occasional shoe leather. But Lignarius just looked blankly at the objects. He displayed no gratitude. No emotion at all. One afternoon, the matter grew quite serious when Lignarius was served his supper and right away he began slurping his tomatoes. Without prayer. If he realized the brothers were staring at him, he did not show it; he sucked down the meal quickly, without regard for anyone else at the table. When he finished, he looked up, skin flaking from his cheeks.