Convalescent, The Read online

  IV

  EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:

  THE SACRIFICE OF ENNI HÚS AND HIS FINE HAT

  According to The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians, the old history book that is, at this precise moment, leaning slumped to one side of my small bookshelf, as the Magyars throw saddlebags over their horses, don their finest, pointiest hats, and set off into the wilderness, we Pfliegmans perk up from our holes and chatter disagreeably. We do not know much, but we know that we cannot endure the raids of the Pechenegs alone. Hatless, horse-less, and saddle-less, we hop on donkeys and, unbeknownst to the good and civilized Magyars, follow their horses in a long, slow fumble away from the Steppes of Asia, southwestward to the Carpathian Basin.

  As they march confidently over the Ural Mountains, through the Verecke Narrows, easily passing the Impassable Forest, we miserably stumble our way up one precarious slope of the Urals, and begin slipping farther and farther behind them. Before now, life was divided into categories of Things That Will Hurt Us and Things That Won’t, but now life’s not so clear. As a consequence, we Pfliegmans fear the whole earth: the forests that sway and whistle in wind, the bad ice that sometimes cracks beneath our feet. Most of all, we fear the Man in the Sky. We fear His frigid winds, His omniscient darkness. We fear His rain.

  Our fear is not wholly unfounded: we Pfliegmans fear the rain because we are more prone to sickness than other people. We are prone to all kinds of sickness. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that, as a people, we are just plain prone. There was every chance in the world the little Pfliegman tribe would never make it. In The Origin of Species, Darwin writes, “If any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will be exterminated.”

  It is the design of the Pfliegman, it seems, to live according to Nature’s bitchy whim.

  Still remaining among us on the journey, however, is the she-Pfliegman who suffered the cruel misfortune of becoming pregnant before we left. She stumbles along the slippery rocks, cutting her fingers on sharp branches as she reaches for support. Nine hundred years earlier, another pregnant woman named Mary followed a similar path, keeping an eye out for the inn or whatever, settling for a barn, but this little troll is not the Virgin Mary; she does not know the story of Mary, nor does she even know that she is Woman. She is a Pfliegman. Right now she’s hoofing it up a mountain, gasping for air, hot with sweat and dirt and body oils. Right now she would kill for a frigging barn. The child growing inside of her presses down on the coils of her gut. Breathing is difficult. Fever boils in her throat. She wheezes painfully, looking for the male who made this happen to her, but he’s ditched her for another she-Pfliegman, one who can walk faster than she can. One with swooning, pendulous breasts. If it were possible for her to say it, if she could possibly formulate the words, she might mumble “Mother-fucker”; instead, she reaches forward and grabs on to the pelt of one of the Pfliegman men in front of her. She gives him a desperate, pleading look.

  Annoyed, he shoves her off.

  So when she reaches the crest of the mountain, she stops walking. With relief, with sorrow, she realizes that she cannot continue. She steps out onto a large rock, balances herself and her large belly for a moment, and then, as though nudged by a gentle breeze, pitches herself forward down the mountainside.

  Of the half a million early Hungarians on the march, only one, a man riding high up on horseback, happens to glance behind him. He is an extremely healthy and appealing early Magyar. Muscles pepper his body. He wears a thick warm cloak secured with a strap of leather, and a pointy hat made from fabrics the color of sunset, peaked with a shiny gold button. The world has been easy on this man. He overflows with inner resources. He is happy for his people and often surges with pride. He will throw his hands in the air and cry, “We are a new people!” or “This is an historic journey!” But as he turns his horse around to gaze at the shoulder-shaped peaks of the Carpathians, at the wide, sagacious eastern sky, he watches, in horror, as a pregnant woman tumbles down one side of the mountain.

  “Hooy!” he cries, and digs into his stirrups.

  He rides quickly back to the mountain, maneuvering his way up around the rocks and switchbacks until he finds her. She is alive, albeit uncomfortably embroiled, amidst a tangle of branches and sap and pine needles. He has never seen a woman like her. She is small, he observes. Inordinately hairy. Her belly is enormous, like a well-fed tick. He dismounts and squats down next to her, studying her face. He cringes. Her eyes do not look like regular eyes, he thinks. They are wide. Black. Exacerbated by the dark half-moons beneath them.

  Politely, the Magyar removes his hat and holds it to his chest. “Are you all right, Madam?” he says.

  She does not answer. She only stares, dumbly, at the gold button on his hat.

  “What is your name?” he asks.

  “Pshaw,” she gags, and passes out.

  So the Magyar reaches his arms beneath her body. He picks her up. “Even pregnant, she is remarkably small,” he thinks, then ties a long sack from the horse’s neck to his saddle. He places the woman in the sack to lie, hammock-like, until they reach the New Region. He talks to her, even though she does not talk back. He gives her a proper Hungarian name.

  “I will call you Aranka,” he says. “For ‘gold.’ For the way you looked at my button.”

  From that point on, the handsome Magyar stays close to watch over the Pfliegmans. He gives us water to drink. He gives the children pieces of sweet bark to chew. He smiles at Aranka, swinging in the sack. But despite his many kindnesses, we Pfliegmans distrust him. This man is too friendly, too pink-cheeked, and where we only drink water, the smiling man drinks warm animal milk. He also eats meat every day.

  Come evening, he builds a campfire to cook his meat, and we Pfliegmans twitter around it, attracted to the light. “Careful,” he says, but a few of us get too close. Our fingers singe, and we howl into the darkness.

  “No!” he shouts. “Get back! Now look here…”

  So he shows us how to make a proper hearth; he shows us what to do with fire and what not to do, and then brings out thick slices of salted meat. He sticks them into the fire.

  Watching this man gobble his meat and not share it, watching his lips become slick and shiny, we begin quivering with want. We sniff the oils that hang in the air. Our dark eyes glow. We lick our lips.

  We call him Enni Hús, for “eat meat.”

  As the weeks pass, we Pfliegmans scuttle along behind Enni Hús’s horse, watching and waiting to see if perhaps one of those fine slabs of meat might fall from his pockets. We snigger behind his back, “Enni Hoosh, Enni Hoosh.” We shake our fists, imitating him. We mock the sounds he makes on our sticky tongues:

  Oo-wee-goo! Oo-wee-goo!

  Alas, there is nothing more irritating to a handsome man than mockery. Enni Hús stops his exultations. He also stops giving us his food and water. He no longer allows us near his fires at night, and when Aranka groans inside the sack, it is not past Enni Hús to give her a swift kick in the side to shut her up. By the time we reach the Carpathian Basin, he decides that there is utterly no point in being of service to a people who are not interested in being serviced, so he dismounts from his horse, unties Aranka from the wrap around his saddle, and drops her body to the ground.

  “Oof,” she says, and rubs her butt.

  The rest of us, cold and shivering, stare at him. We clutch our exposed skins.

  “What more can I give you?” he says, bitterly, but we do not answer. We only stand there, blinking at his hat. Shivers sprinkle over his arms, his neck, like he’s being covered by insects. He shakes them off. “May the Man in the Sky save you,” he mumbles.

  Then Enni Hús abandons us.

  A brutal rain begins spitting out of the sky. We see the other Hungarians pitching their tents, so we quickly cobble together our own, which is not tall and erect, fortified with a strong bundle of sticks, or tightly secured with animal pelts; our tent is erec
ted sloppily, made from the Leftover Pelt Scrap Heap. It leans east and west, with far too many people living in it.

  As the proper Hungarians begin digging holes and planting seeds, milking cattle and roasting swine, as they conceive of other, more intellectual projects, like wine production, tax collecting, and beekeeping— beekeeping!—all we Pfliegmans can do is take care of the living, take care of our many dead, and stare wide-eyed at the enormously pregnant woman suffering in the corner of the tent. We click our fingernails against our teeth. We cough, miserably. We listen to the relentless, interminable rain.

  Late one night, all of us packed into the bulging tent in the manner unique to our own perverse ochlocracy, we decide that we must pacify the Man in the Sky, to stop the rain and bring out the sun. Darwin writes, “Many more individuals are born than can possibly survive,” and although we don’t know the word “expendable,” at this point we somehow can sense it.

  An elder Pfliegman pulls out one of his eyelids as far as it will go. It snaps back into place. “Sacrifice,” he says.

  We whistle and scoot around him.

  The following morning, we Pfliegmans move quickly in a pack until we find what we’re looking for: a young man on horseback, wearing a pointy hat made of lovely fabrics, silks the color of a broken sky. At the top, a gleaming circle of gold. Enni Hús has just finished digesting a plump and satisfying leg of deer and licks the sweetness from his lips, watching the progress of his people with his usual pride, even a bit of wistful awe. “My brothers,” he says, and pulls a sentimental tear from his face with a long and healthy finger. Then, from an unknown corner of his keen peripheral vision, something flashes from behind one tent to another.

  A shiver scampers up his back. He looks for any sign of danger and sees only a dog growling with a scrap of food. He settles back comfortably in his seat. The grass turns slowly in the wind.

  “Enni Hús!” we shout.

  He cries out for help, but we gather him too quickly; we smother him in our cloaks and drag him behind our tent, hurling rocks until the healthy and able Hungarian collapses at our feet. We form a circle. Everyone is given a small axe. This is the routine: each member of the Eleventh Tribe must take his own piece of Enni Hús, and then together we will sacrifice him to the punishing Man in the Sky to stop the rain and bring out the sun.

  The elder Pfliegman raises his axe, and then solemnly lowers it.

  And this is how the Pfliegmans make themselves known for the first time in history: sneaking up behind some perfectly good citizen, knocking him off his horse in broad, gray daylight, pummeling him with rocks until he is unconscious, and then dragging him behind a tent and chopping him into several chunky, loaf-sized pieces.

  “Man,” writes Darwin, “selects only for his own good.”

  One Pfliegman receives a large piece of thigh. He tries to have a taste of Enni Hús, but another Pfliegman growls and slaps his hand. A female Pfliegman appears wearing Enni Hús’s hat with the button. Everyone sees her and cheers. She smiles at the luck of her booty, but then another Pfliegman tries to take the hat from her. He scampers over to her and tugs it from her head. She screeches out in protest, but he pulls back, and then everyone wants Enni Hús’s hat. We fly upon each other, Pfliegman upon Pfliegman, until tent collapses, the fire goes out, and everyone’s pieces of Enni Hús get mixed up with everyone else’s in a grisly mise-en-scène.

  A hoary elder roars at us to stop, and so we stop, panting, and begin trying to sort out which pieces of Enni Hús belonged to whom. The elder demands the hat from the Pfliegman who found it.

  She reluctantly hands it over.

  We rekindle the fire in the exact manner Enni Hús taught us and then drop in our meats. Together, we mouth the words we heard him use, “My brothers, my brothers,” as the fire roars up and the meat boils off the bone, and when every trace of Enni Hús has been transformed into a husky, awful-smelling spiral of smoke, the elder hobbles over to the licking flames and gamely tosses in the hat as well.

  V

  A PILL FOR EVERYTHING

  This morning an extraordinarily fat Virginian jokes in a very funny manner that I should have some kind of outfit to wear while I sit out here in my green plastic lawnchair in front of the bus. He’s wearing a baseball cap with an M on it, and suggests that I wear a hat that looks like a pig’s head. Because I sell pork. Or, the man says, I could have different hats for different meat, like when I’m giving someone a steak I would wear a cow hat, and when I’m giving out lamb I could wear a lamb hat. “It might make you easier to look at,” he says.

  And then he laughs.

  If I could speak, I might argue that he himself is not so exciting to look at. I might say that there’s nothing particularly enthralling about the way his stomach swells over his pants, or the way his nose is so round it looks like a lightbulb. I might mention that his eyes are so close together it looks like his head has been caught in a vise—but I am not an angry man.

  In fact, sitting here in my lawnchair, out in the open air, packages of meat passing from palm to palm, I think it’s fair to say that ever since I left the farmhouse and moved into this bus, I’ve only had one single, throbbing emotion:

  Her name is Dr. Monica.

  Dr. Monica is a pediatrician. She wears a white hat. Underneath the hat is a tiny blond bun, but her hair isn’t long enough to wear tied up like that, so the shorter pieces fall about her neck, giving me erections.

  Rovar, you say, that is a rather disgusting notion, but you must understand that I’m a feeble man. They’re only feeble erections. Perfectly benevolent.

  It’s like holding your finger for a second and then letting go.

  Pfliegman men suffer Benevolent Erections very easily. I get them from cross-breezes, the smell of laundry detergent. The color orange. But Dr. Monica’s neck is way up there. She hides the neck with sweaters, a gold cross gleaming above her breasts as if to say, “Back, Vampire.” I get anywhere near that neck and St. Benevolus starts to tremble.

  I go to Dr. Monica’s office once a week, which is paid for by me, in cash.

  It always costs thirty-five dollars.

  What’s wrong with me? It’s a fair question. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fair answer. No doctor has yet been able to identify the reason for my panoply of disorders, therefore it suffices to say that I suffer because I am a Pfliegman, and Pfliegmans have been physically gypped in every way imaginable: my left knee is bent, and drags along the road as I walk; my head is lumpy and bulges outward, like it’s made of potatoes; my stomach is uncouth and easily flummoxed, leaving me in a perpetual and contradictory state of nausea and starvation; and my skin is so dry it tends to peel on its own. Every day, flakes of skin parachute from my body. Occasionally a meat customer will look down and spot the tiny dry coils that have crash-landed on the reaches of my lawnchair, and they’ll cough politely and take a step back from the line, or look at me funny and take a step back, or just take a step back.

  Before I met Dr. Monica, I felt so lousy I could barely sell my meat. I would just lie in bed all day watching the rainwater leak from the crack in the ceiling. Fatigue boiled away at my anemic Pfliegman marrow. It got so bad that I couldn’t even focus my eyes, not even enough to read, and for every different thing wrong with my body, I saw a different doctor. I saw a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, neurologist, urologist, traumatologist, an orthopedist, eye-doctors, ear, nose, and throat doctors, endocrinologists, dermatologists, and an allergist. I carried all of my medicines in a backpack, and the doctors said there was a pill for everything. It was true. There was a pill for everything, and taking just one of the pills for one of my ailments might have done me just fine, but if you take Drug A, there may be inflammation, which means you have to take Drug A and B, which causes emotional disorder warranting Drug C, however Drug A and Drug C are catalysts for severe rashes and should only be taken at midnight, and if you forget to take them at midnight, you need Drug D to counteract the vomiting, which negates the positi
ve effects of Drug B.

  I was up to Drug R before I sat in front of a histopathologist, a pale, trembling wreck of a human being, and she recommended that I give up all of my independent treatments and go to the hospital for a very, very, very long time—all of this was before I met Dr. Monica.

  It happened at the G&P.

  Mister Bis’s Grocery and Pharmaceuticals is a small grocery market on a corner of the Front Lick Village Square. The Virginians call it the G&P. The man in charge, Mister Bis, has a wide, protruding stomach, and black hair that falls over his head in five distinct fingers. He is an Indian, but not like the Indian who sold textiles. He’s an Indian-from-India, and his real name is Tharavaad Bis Ghandi. He says that tharavaad means “ancestral home,” and ghandi means “grocer,” but bis doesn’t mean anything, so as long as he lives in America, he’ll go by Mister Bis.

  The G&P used to have the largest meat display in Lick County, but ever since the Subdivisionists subdivided a large parcel of Virginia farmland and the BIG M supermarket opened, business has been slow for Mister Bis. He walks the aisles with a worried look, nervously tugging the collar of his shirt. When the first letter from Subdivisions LLC arrived at the bus, I brought it into town and showed it to Mister Bis. He read it and scowled. “How many letters have they sent you?”

  I held up a finger.

  “You let me know if you get more,” he said. “They’re trying to rezone the zoning laws. They can’t kick you out without the proper zoning.” He crumpled up the letter and threw it in the trash. “The Subdivisionists want to turn this whole goddamn country into a goddamn amusement park,” he said.

  But Mister Bis is a devoted, earnest meat-seller, and he buys all of his meat from me. We cut each other deals. My meat is arranged in neat rows with a white forked sign above it that says PFLIEGMAN MEAT. I buy my medicines, groceries, and wax paper wrapping from the G&P, but other times I like to go when I’m not going to buy anything at all. I like to go to my section and hover around and see who buys my meat.