Convalescent, The Read online

  From the get-go, Pfliegmans were outcasts in a country made of outcasts. We were then, and probably always have been, whole ages behind the progress of the company we kept. When men were bashing rocks together to make tools, Pfliegmans were slithering from the ocean, coated in a greenish muck; when men were grunting, sneezing, and lighting fire, hirsute Pfliegmans lay recluse in a dark musty corner of a cave, hissing; when men began wearing pelts and eating meat and painting walls, Pfliegmans were stealing pelts to make fun of the pelt-wearers and would return to a cold cave hungry again, goddammit; when men began forming languages and speaking in recognizable tongues, Pfliegmans snorted and threw their heads in the mud in protest; when men began eating with forks, Pfliegmans licked their dirty nails; when men were building factories to work in and homes for themselves to live in, Pfliegmans rolled in the grass, deliciously; when Edison illuminated the world, Pfliegmans squealed and covered their eyes; when Ford made the world go faster, Pfliegmans stood at the curb, fearing for their lives, gaping at the shiny wheels, which explains why my father, János Pfliegman, who, one Christmas morning in 1984, after receiving a VCR as a Christmas present from my mother, spent four minutes examining the buttons and one minute examining the manual before bashing it in the face with an elbow—

  But I digress.

  Despite the fact that most historians only acknowledge ten tribes who migrated over the Ural Mountains that year; that the very word “Hungarian” is not a derivative of “Hun,” as so many people stubbornly and incorrectly assume, but actually stems from the Finno-Ugric word onogur meaning “ten arrows,” one for each tribe—despite this, I’m here to say there was an eleventh tribe. A tribe known for tripping over their own feet. For growling menacingly at perfectly friendly strangers. For stealing other people’s food. We are a tribe that suffers yearlong, incendiary illnesses, and our presence will be eclipsed by the history books. We participate in none of the world’s major events, and we have no official leader, as we know nothing of leaders and followers. We blink with uncertainty at quick-moving objects. We clean ourselves with our own tongues.

  We are the Pfliegmans.

  As the Magyars throw saddlebags over horses, don their finest hats, and set off into the wilderness, we are huddled around a dirt pile, trying to scurry up a fire for the scrap of deer we’ve stolen from a nearby tent. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is blowing the ashes. His wife, the she-male, is humming softly. Look at them: they’re emaciated. Their muscles are butter on the bread of their bones, bones that point out from their skin painfully, like they’re being pierced from the inside out.

  The male Pfliegman removes the deer from the fire and takes a large bite. It’s too hot; he spits it on the ground. The female smacks him on the head for being so foolish and wasting perfectly good meat.

  “Monga,” she admonishes, and grabs it.

  The male Pfliegman punches her hard on the shoulder. “Thpits!” he replies, and grabs it back. He eats it and swallows, despite the burn. The roof of his mouth singes, dislodging from itself in one long peel—

  This is the woman-Pfliegman’s fault.

  Later that night, holding his sore mouth, he watches her body lying underneath a pelt, the scrawny-boned back shifting, the hard-knobbed breasts rising and falling, and he feels hotly, overwhelmingly cheated. He leans forward and smacks his wife on the back of the head for not being greater than she is, and then he leaps on top of her.

  Between them, this night, they conceive a boy. A Pfliegman boy who will one day save the lives not only of his own people, but those of the entire Hungarian nation. A Pfliegman whose own child will begin the line of Pfliegmans who defy the simple laws of evolution and survive for little more than a thousand years until, one by one, we each drop off, and only a single near-midget, living across an entire ocean, selling cheap meat out of some bus in some field of some weedy armpit of North America, remains.

  III

  WHITE PEOPLE

  I may be the last remaining Pfliegman, I may live in a bus in a field, and out of this bus I may sell meat for a meager-yet-adequate living, but I’m not one of those introverted scoundrels. I don’t sneer at the beautiful, I don’t wax philosophic, and I’m not without a glimmer of urbanity: I have electricity, for example. I have a bed.

  I wear a stylish woolen cap.

  The cap was a given to me by a meat customer so impressed with the girth of his rump roast that he removed the hat from his own head and placed it, gently, on mine. My bed is a mattress flopped over two passenger seats at the back of the bus, made of arching springs that knuckle my back in a pleasing manner. Outside the bus an old battery-powered generator shudders, charging the stove, the meat refrigerator, and a lightbulb which hangs over my bed in a single dangling strand. The lightbulb illuminates a small bookshelf which holds a modest collection of literature: a shiny pamphlet titled Your First Hamster, by Peter H. Smith; The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures, by Captain Jerry Aldini; Madame Chafouin’s French Dictionary (Concise Edition), by Madame Chafouin; The Collapsing Universe, by Isaac Asimov; and The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians, by a writer known just as “Anonymus.”

  I keep these books on the bus because although I have read and returned nearly every book in the Lick County Library, these books came to me instead of me to them. I obtained Your First Hamster one afternoon when a customer brought her six-year-old son out to the field to buy some meat. The boy stared at me while I wrapped his mother’s rump roast. He tugged her arm. “Is that a kid?” he whispered. “A kid with a beard?”

  “Shhh,” his mother said.

  “This place is weird,” the boy said. “I want to go to a normal store. I want to go to the Big M.”

  “That’s not polite, Michael,” she said, and turned her back.

  Michael looked at me and stuck out his tongue.

  So I stuck out my tongue.

  The boy’s eyebrows raised, then he burst into tears. His mother spun around to see me standing with my tongue out. “I came here to be charitable,” she said. “But now we’re leaving, and I’m not going to buy a single thing. What do you think of that?”

  I rolled my eyes. I wagged my tongue. I opened my mouth, and gagged a little.

  “You are a horrible man,” she whispered. “A horrible, horrible little man!” She grabbed the boy and ran back to the car. They sped off down Back Lick Road. I looked down and saw that the boy had left the pamphlet behind on the grass. On the cover was a picture of a clean, soft, apricot-colored hamster, perched on the branch of a tree. I picked it up.

  “Dwarf hamsters,” it said, “are being seen more and more in the United States. Their petite size and charming ways point the way to an ever-increasing popularity.”

  I’d never thought about taking care of a hamster before, but ever since that moment, I’ve considered having one for company. There’s something in the photo that makes me long to hold the tiny creature. To nuzzle him against my hairy cheek. To let him crawl down my arm and back up again.

  But I don’t really need company. Although it may seem as though I’m alone, I’m really not; I am surrounded by a whole community of living and nonliving things, and each plays a small but vital role in the sustenance of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, and Pfliegman’s Meat Bus as a whole.

  * * *

  About a year ago, I came across a cardboard box at the bottom of a dumpster of a Mrs. Kipner’s Family Restaurant downtown. The box was packed with nonperishable canned goods. There was Mrs. Kipner’s American Beans-n-Wienies, Mrs. Kipner’s Bavarian Tomato Beef Stew, Mrs. Kipner’s Hungarian Goulash. I carried the box back to the bus, and unpacked it. That’s when I noticed that one of the cans felt light. Empty. I cranked open the lid.

  Looking up at me was the biggest beetle I have ever seen.

  He was enormous, with a waxy brown shell. He looked like a giant pecan. The beetle had apparently consumed the entire contents of a Mrs. Kipner’s Hungarian Goulash and grown so wide that h
is thorax stuck sharply into both sides of the can. He was trapped. I moved over to the window to get a better look at him and he blinked at the light. He flapped the hard-shelled blades of his back aggressively. His right eye was bright and healthy, but his left eye hung low, clouded with a white mucous. One of his wings was coated in little white spots, and he kept throwing his head back, in a futile attempt to scratch them. When I tried to reach in and help, he twirled his leafy antennae in a threatening manner, so I went into the fridge, found a rotten tomato, and dropped it into the can. He quickly lowered his pucker into the tomato and made long, satisfying slurping sounds.

  I call him Mrs. Kipner.

  Once I tried to rescue Mrs. Kipner from the tin can by popping him out with a knife, but he wouldn’t budge. I pressed down too hard, and the knife slipped a little, accidentally shucking off a small piece of shell. He squealed with unhappiness. Every time I came at him with the knife after that he twirled his antennae, so for the most part I keep my distance from Mrs. Kipner. I feed him slices of tomato and keep his tin can open, perched on a windowledge of the bus, so if he ever wants a peek at the big old world, he’ll have a nice view.

  But even without Mrs. Kipner, I’m not alone. Not by a long shot. Moles burrow underneath the bus, searching for the heat that travels underground from the generator; wolves bay in the distance, their breath spooling out in long clouds; and then there’s the field itself. The presence of the bus, the human being, his beetle, and his collection of literature has somehow altered its natural state. Grass out here grows like it’s pushed from the earth and fed by the sky. There’s this one blade of grass that’s taller than I am. She greets me every morning at a window of the bus with an endearing tap-tap sound.

  I call her Marjorie.

  In the summer sun, Marjorie hangs like a palm frond. In the fall, she waves in the wind in a friendly manner, and in the winter rains, she slaps the wide flat of the windows. In the spring, she grows. So you can see that I am not alone.

  But there are those who do not understand my small and vibrant community.

  “White people,” said the Indian, shaking his head. “You live out here all by yourself?”

  He was standing in the center of the bus, leaning one large hip against a passenger’s seat. I couldn’t remember how he even got here. He glanced at the books parked on my bookshelf. “Those belong to you?” he said.

  I didn’t answer.

  He reached into his bag and produced a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. He said he was reading it to understand how white people think. “Turn to page one,” he said.

  I turned to page one.

  “The existing forms of life,” the Indian recited, “are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms.” He produced a toothpick and began cleaning his teeth. “My grandfather said white people have no history. As a consequence, they always have to change to fit their environment. It’s how they have survived, and it’s why they can’t be trusted. Saying one thing and then doing another—”

  The Indian went on for a while, but I was more excited about the book. New reading material is rather scarce when you live in a field in a bus. I went to the meat refrigerator, reached for my highest priced section, and handed him a blushing, swollen lambshank, the color of spring peaches. He looked pleased. “My grandfather said all white people are made of hate and Elmer’s glue,” he said. “But you don’t seem like a glue sort of fellow to me.”

  I tried to laugh, but a cough bubbled up instead. I stumbled over to a passenger’s seat and slumped into it, hacking away. Something wet flew from my mouth and landed smack on top of The Origin of Species.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” the Indian said. “Would you like something hot to drink? I’ll make some tea.” He stood up and looked for the food cabinet, but I am a man who lives in a bus. I do not have a food cabinet. “Some hot water then,” the Indian said, and wandered over to the stove. Outside the sky darkened, and thunder rolled above us. The air inside grew hot and thick. The Indian found a rusty pot hanging from a nail and went to the sink. He turned the knob, but the water never came. Slowly, he replaced the pot on the nail, just as it was. Then noticed a pile of envelopes lying next to the sink. “Rovar Pfliegman,” he read. “Is that you?”

  I coughed again.

  The Indian picked up one of the envelopes and turned it in his hands. “It says that it’s from Subdivisions LLC. It looks important. You’re not going to open it?”

  I held on to the Darwin tight, suddenly nervous for some reason that the Indian might want his book back, but he stayed focused on the envelope.

  “It’s marked Urgent,” he said. “Would you like me to open it for you?”

  It was clear that the Indian was looking for some conversation, it was clear that he wanted to open the envelope and chat, but herein lies the rub: I don’t talk. At all. Certainly not since Ján and Janka died, but I’m not even sure I ever really talked before.

  I’m no mute—let’s just get this out of the way right now. I don’t speak words, but there’ve always been noises, and as far as I know mutes don’t make noises. I make all sorts of noises. The loud blat, the long shhhhug, the murgle. The heaving wherge.

  And I’ve always been coughing. My coughs are full-bodied, lung-flattening coughs that give me headaches and nausea. The occasional, errant nosebleed. I once counted the number of times I cough in a day, and it was over two hundred before I fell asleep. That means I cough over a hundred thousand times a year. A million times since I’ve lived in the bus.

  Two million times since the death of Ján and Janka Pfliegman.

  When he realized that I don’t talk, that I just sit in this bus, coughing, the Indian put the envelope back on the pile. He ran a finger around it one last time. “I’ll leave it here for you, in case you want to read it,” he said, and then a drop of water splashed onto his hand. He looked up. Rain hit the bus all at once. It sounded like beans being poured on a snare drum. “There’s a crack in the ceiling,” he said. Then there was nothing else to say. He climbed down and looked around the bus, nervously. He wiped his brow.

  I sat back in the passenger’s seat, watching him. Listening to the pleasant hum of the meat refrigerator. He could have been nervous about the bus, but I think he was more nervous about me.

  Most people are.

  I expected the Indian to leave at that point, but instead he sat down next to me, reached into his bag, and produced two cans of beer. He offered me one.

  I shook my head.

  He shrugged and snapped one open. “I don’t get it,” he said. “My grandfather said white people can’t exist without speaking. He said they’re all just imitations of each other, so it’s like they have to speak to distinguish themselves.” He took a long drink of the beer and roundly belched. “They’re like mirrors or something. Illusions.”

  If I could speak, I would have told him about the time a Virginian drove up to my bus with a mirror in the back of his truck. The mirror was big and oval-shaped, framed in gold leafing. He said it was something his ex-wife bought and it’d been hanging in his living room for twenty years and he couldn’t stand the thing. The man looked tired. “The dump won’t take it,” he said. “So I thought you might want it.”

  Of course I didn’t protest, so he hauled the mirror out of the back of the truck and laid it down on the grass by my bus. “There,” he said, and wiped his hands. “That looks super!”

  After he left, I walked over to the mirror, took one look at what was staring back at me, promptly started gagging, and found no reason ever to look in it again. Weeds quickly engulfed the frame, and now the mirror looks exactly like a gentle frog pond.

  Which is fine.

  “Hell,” said the Indian, “this bus could be an illusion.” He polished off the beer and stood up, rubbing his stomach. “I don’t suppose you have anything to eat that isn’t raw?” he said. “A sandwich?”

  I shook my head. He walked to the front of the bus and opened the
door of the meat refrigerator to look for sandwiches. Then he craned his neck around the driver’s seat, but there were no sandwiches there either, so he slung his bag of textiles over his shoulder. He stepped down from the bus and crossed the wet field, swatting at field ticks, and did not turn around to wave. Which was fine.

  I rapped a knuckle on the side of the bus to see if the bus was an illusion.

  It wasn’t.

  But I liked the Indian. I would have liked it if he’d stayed. If he’d stayed, we could have listened to music together. I could have brought out the tape-radio and played some music. Silence, I’ve noticed, makes people uncomfortable, and music always helps.

  Most people are not content to listen to the hum of a meat refrigerator.

  I suppose it’s just as well, since I only have two cassettes for my tape-radio: Bach fugues and The Best of Carly Simon. They were given to me by a magnanimous Virginian who thought I’d get lonely living out here in a bus in a field by myself. I played the Carly Simon once all the way through and then suffered a twenty-four-hour panic attack. So I never listen to the Carly Simon. But I listen to the Bach. I enjoy the way the notes are simple at first, and then become complex. Mrs. Kipner likes the Bach as well; he likes it when the notes get faster, tripping over each other. When this happens, he lifts his head and makes a sound like a tiny drumroll.

  There’s also the radio part of the tape-radio, but the antenna broke a long time ago. I put a paperclip in the hole, so now I only get a station that plays German pop songs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, with an announcer who cries, “Deutsch Hits aus den Fünfziger, Sechziger, und Siebziger!” I’ve tried placing other items into the antenna hole: a tack, a rolled-up piece of aluminum, but then I get no reception at all. So I don’t listen to the radio too often. Which is fine. If I listened to music it might seem like I was an active part of the community, the general populace.

  And this, I am most definitely not.