The Convalescent Read online

  I pick up the pen. What should I write about? I write.

  She shrugs. “Just write how you feel.”

  But my Darling, I want to say, it’s difficult for Pfliegmans to write how we feel because we are not now, and never have been, a sentimental people. After all, it’s difficult to romanticize anything when one is so hungry one licks one’s own arms for the salt. When one can fit one’s fingers underneath each wing of one’s own ribcage. When one’s own limbs feel as though they don’t fit the rigid frame of one’s own body. To understand this bus-dwelling creature, this Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, you need not know how he feels, you need only understand the history of his people—

  Dr. Monica turns to the babe’s mother. “Give him two drops of Tylenol before bed,” she says. And then, considering his size, adds, “Perhaps three.”

  The babe hears Dr. Monica’s voice and lifts his large head, his face contorted in hot agony. He finds her pear-shaped breast above him and reaches for it, smooching and bobbing his mouth, and then arrogantly kisses it. He turns his head and looks at me.

  He smirks.

  I imagine throwing myself down on my stomach. I imagine crawling slowly toward him, reaching for his giant infant ankles. I Can Bring Him Down—

  VII

  EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:

  THE BIRTH OF SZERETLEK

  My Darling, My Pediatrician. Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans—she felt savagely alone. Most Pfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.

  We called them hal.

  If a baby had been born hal north of the Ural Mountains, we would have picked it up and scuttled it over to the river and dropped it in, sending the little fish back where it came from. But now we were no longer living next to a river.

  We were nowhere near water at all.

  “After the sacrifice of Enni Hús,” writes Anonymus, “a curious dry spell descended upon the Carpathian Basin.” As the rest of the Hungarians worried about their crops, we Pfliegmans were extremely pleased with ourselves. We sauntered confidently around camp, soaking up the sunlight, muttering “Enni Hús, Enni Hús” so often that it didn’t take long for the Hungarians to hear our strange chants, miss their good cousin, see us licking our lips, and totally misunderstand what happened. They logically concluded that because we had no meat of our own, we had kidnapped Enni Hús and cooked and eaten him.

  In whispers, they began calling us the Fekete-Szem Hentes, the Black-Eyed Butchers from the Black Sea—

  But Aranka needn’t have worried. Her baby would not be born hal—far from it. One morning, late in the year 897, she was lying on the ground of the Pfliegman tent when her body finally seized, torquing the infant. She grabbed her belly with both hands. Her water broke and she began kneading, dough-like, into her unapologetic Pfliegman cervix. The water came fast, like a faucet, and did not stop. Aranka looked down, saw it rushing from her body, and unleashed a low and awful moan.

  We Pfliegmans heard the moan and stirred from our various angles of repose. We clicked our fingernails and scampered over. We prodded Aranka to turn her body, looking for the baby as if it would be born from her back. She tried pushing us away, but we swirled around, tugging her hair, smelling her moist skin. She lifted her head for air, taking in short, horrible breaths as the baby shifted inside of her—That’s it, she thought, it will take me— when the flaps flew open and six women from the Hungarian tribes entered, marching straight into the center of the tent.

  “Out, Cretins!” one of them shouted.

  The Hungarian woman was small, with ill-fitting limbs that had never seemed to broach adolescence, and yet no one questioned her authority. She clapped her hands, and in a flurry, dozens of little Pfliegmans scurried outside.

  She knelt down next to Aranka and ran her hands over the massive arc of the great white belly, noting immediately the problem with the water. A strange look passed her face. She whispered something to the other women: “Get back,” she said. “Make more room.” Then she leaned into Aranka’s ear. “Do not speak,” she said. “Not a word. If the child hears you, he will want to stay close to you, so you must not make a sound. If you keep it all in and hold your breath, he will pop out like a cork. Yes? Good. Now, what is your name?”

  “Aranka,” the mother whispered.

  “That’s a good name,” said the woman. “It means ‘gold.’ My name is Kunigunda, but you may call me Kinga. Now let’s get a look at this sonofa-bitch kisbaba. We need to move you up higher. Up onto the hearth. Careful of the water,” she said, and looked curiously at the water that continued to flow from between Aranka’s legs.

  Together the six women moved the stones of the hearth to create a flat surface, over which they tossed assorted pelts, burlap. All the loose accoutrements of the miserable Pfliegman mundane. They hoisted Aranka up on top of the pile and watched as the water came faster now. They grabbed a few bowls and moved them beneath her to catch it. The bowls quickly filled. The women moved Aranka’s legs back to inspect the source and a long lace of green slipped from her body. It fell into one of the bowls with a quick, wet slap. One of the women grabbed a poker from the hearth and lifted the green thing. It hung long off the poker, dripping like a soaked feather.

  “It’s algae!” she cried.

  The women all gasped. Kinga put her finger to her lips and shushed them, and then she took Aranka’s hand. She leaned in close, offering up soothing whispers: “How wonderful you’re doing, Mother. Keep going, there’s been some real progress now.” But as the labor wore on, the baby, perhaps resenting the fact that his mother wanted him to leave a happy warm place for the Carpathian Basin late in the ninth century, only burrowed himself deeper inside her. The water was now running even faster, spilling out from between Aranka’s hairy legs in a fat and even spout. The floor of the tent turned to mud. Spongy. Viscous. The women groaned and lifted their feet, and when the ground had absorbed all it could possibly absorb, the water began to rise. Quickly it became ankle-deep.

  The women looked at each other. “The water is still coming,” they whispered. “Perhaps there is no child. Perhaps there is only water.”

  Then one of the nurses gasped. “Look!” she cried. “A fish!”

  Aranka, in a daze, heard the women talking. She lifted her head, breathing in sharp, uneven breaths, and looked down just in time to watch herself giving birth to a silvery, spoon-shaped fish. Certain that her child had been born hal and there was nothing to be done, she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to carry her to a place far more sane and comfortable. She found herself standing on the wide grassy embankment of the river where she once lived. She dunked her toes into the water, and it cooled them. Her body felt light, almost weightless, as though she might rise, as though the sun itself were pulling her up with two warm hands. From far off, a tinny voice rang in her left ear, but she deliberately ignored it. Why go anywhere? Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she looked at the sky and admired cloudshapes.

  The women, meanwhile, covered their mouths and watched carefully as a small, narrow fish, a fish the color of metal, slithered out of her body and fell into the rising water. The fish wiggled for a second, then, in a quick line, deliberately darted outside the tent. The women waded over to the flaps of the tent and peeked out at th
e Pfliegmans scurrying up the embankment. “It’s everywhere,” they said. “It’s a deluge. The water is filling the land.”

  “Wait,” Kinga said, and watched as another fish came, slipping from the mother’s body, and then came another. “There’s more now! Help, all of you!”

  The women tugged their skirts through the water back to the body. They pulled out whole pieces of furry, arm-length algae, but it was difficult to manage and slipped easily from their hands. One of the nurses grabbed her dress and held it up as the top of the water licked her knees, as fish slapped her ankles. She looked at Kinga. “This creature is giving birth to a river.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Kinga. “Not yet. Now get to work! All of you!” Kinga pressed her hands against Aranka’s face and then noticed Aranka’s rolling eyes. She grabbed her head. “Mother!” she cried. “Do not leave this baby behind!” She snapped her fingers in front of Aranka’s face. She pinched her cheeks. The little she-Pfliegman did not respond. And yet the water still came. It rose higher now, and nearly reached their waists. The women all tried to jump up onto the hearth. “Do something!” they cried. “We’ll all be dead and drowned!”

  “No one is drowning,” Kinga said. “Grab the poker.” With one hand, she held the mother’s chin so she could not breathe, then leaned down and firmly bit her on the nose. The nose was oily and soft, but Kinga held tight. She motioned for the poker.

  The woman tossed it across the water.

  Kinga caught it, and immediately stabbed Aranka, deep in the shoulder.

  Flung from her grassy embankment back to the tent where she could only see the strange, wide orb that was her vastly pregnant belly, heaving like it was its own, separate animal, Aranka forgot her earlier promise to Kinga not to make a sound, opened her mouth, and cried out:

  It was a sound that seemed to come from somewhere outside of herself. Louder than any Hun entering battle. Hungarian farmers two tribes west heard it. It startled Kinga, it startled the women, and it startled Aranka. She pushed the baby, who, at that precise moment, happened to be rocking comfortably back and forth on the cushy inner lining of his mother’s fat, extraordinary uterus. The push caught him off guard, and out he went. Two women tried, but he was so big they could not hold him; he slipped between their hands and splashed into the water. The impact caused a considerable wave.

  “Szörny!” the nurses cried. “He’s a monster!”

  Aranka lifted her head and saw her child. She reached for him: “Szeretlek,” she whispered, and then collapsed back onto the hearth.

  The women threw their arms into the water, holding on to the enormous baby with four hands. They managed to slice off the umbilical cord, thick as an eel, but the water was by now so deep that it had developed a current. They struggled and splashed in the water to hold him, but the grip was lost.

  “Get him!” Kinga shouted, as the baby began floating outside.

  Someone managed to grab an ankle and pull the child out of the water. Together the women lifted him, dripping, from the river. They held him high above their heads. “Out!” they cried. “Everyone, out!” But Kinga would not yet leave Aranka. She turned back to the mother’s body, floating like some grotesque and useless bauble in the waters. Her legs had fallen back, and her shoulders slid away from her neck. Kinga placed a cold, wet hand over her chest. There was no movement, no lifepulse. “Welp,” she mumbled, “that’s that,” and pulled herself to the edge of the tent. She yanked back the flaps, but at that moment the pegs affixed to the ground finally gave way. The entire Pfliegman tent lifted up from the mud, twisting into itself in the current—

  Kinga barely made it out alive. She swam across the water to the dry part of the embankment, surrounded by a gaggle of chattering Pfliegmans. We were laughing idiotically, inching ourselves away from the rising waters, and Kinga’s nurses were kicking us back with their heels:

  “Hiss!” they cried. “Shoo!”

  We Pfliegmans danced and howled, watching our home collapse in the water. Kinga ignored us. She walked up the embankment and reached for the gigantic baby. The women had bundled the boy in a dry wrap, and in it he lay oafish and uncomfortable. The size of the cloth was too small. His large face pinched, and he wailed with unhappiness. Fat arms and legs stuck out all over. There was no disagreement that the baby was unattractive: he had a wide, moonish forehead. A mouth that hung agape, like his nose didn’t work. His eyes looked as though they had been tossed on his face.

  “That’s the ugliest baby I have ever seen,” one of the nurses said.

  “He’ll be of use,” said Kinga.

  The women quickly got down to the business of naming the child and recording him in the Log of Births. As we Pfliegmans were not official members of the Magyar tribes, we had no name or traditions of our own to speak of. We certainly didn’t follow any of the common conduct practiced in the Magyar camps, and everyone argued over what to name him.

  “We will name him Szeretlek,” Kinga said.

  “But that’s not a name,” the women protested. “Call him a proper name, like Odon or Zoltán.”

  “Szeretlek,” said Kinga. “It was what his mother called him.”

  “I love you?” the women said. “You can’t name a baby ‘I love you.’”

  “Watch me.”

  As it happened, Kinga knew a little more about this particular baby than the other women. She knew that the baby’s father and Aranka’s father were cousins. She knew this because she and Aranka were sisters. Kinga was a Pfliegman as well, and was frankly a little surprised that no one noticed her hairy, flaking skin, her fingers like little claws, her lips as thin as wire. But had she said anything, the women might have been even more frightened of her and the child than they already were. They would not have even bothered to name him.

  They might, in fact, have even killed him.

  Kinga held on to her nephew tight. “Szeretlek,” she said again, and from the top of the embankment, Pfliegmans teeming about her legs like needy, monstrous vermin, she watched as Aranka’s river filled the dry landscape. The Pfliegman tent turned along the surface of the water, rolling itself around Aranka’s body, and floated down the bend.

  Miles away, the Hungarians stopped their farming and ran for cover as the water roared past them, a river carving out the path for the cities of the long and distant future: Gyr, Komárom, Esztergom, Visegrád, Vác, Szentendre, Budapest. They lifted their pointy hats and cheered as Aranka’s body floated past, pulling with it the waters of the wide Black Sea.

  VIII

  MARCH 18

  “And don’t you forget it!” Mrs. Himmel shouts. She slams down the phone. Mrs. Himmel always slams down the phone after speaking to her daughter, Elise. Elise is graduating in June, and Mrs. Himmel wants her to be a model, but Elise hasn’t got the looks. She has thick bones, her hair frizzes weirdly in the back, and she has a stiffly bent neck. Her head looks like it was placed crooked on a mantel. Elise is also the name of the lead actress in one of Mrs. Himmel’s favorite television sitcoms. Dr. Monica has a television set going all day that hangs from the ceiling in the Waiting Area. Whenever Mrs. Himmel’s program comes on, she shushes everyone, all of the Sick or Diseased children, so we can watch.

  Today is no exception.

  “Everyone quiet!” she demands, and picks up the remote control.

  The Sick or Diseased children all stop what they’re doing. They stare mournfully at the screen.

  Television Elise is a mother who looks after her children all day and is misunderstood by her husband. She does her best to appear strong before her family, but always ends up losing her marbles over some small thing, like not being able to buy 1 percent milk at the grocery store. At the end of every episode, Television Elise cries to her family and makes them feel guilty for ruining her life. Then the husband gets a Bright Idea, and hustles the children to the flower shop so they can buy Television Elise roses, and all is forgiven. One episode they surprised her with a trip to Cancún.

 
Mrs. Himmel watches every episode with her hands on her chin, a wistful look about her face, and then, when the program ends, she sighs in one explosive breath, replaces her eyeglasses on the tip of her nose, pulls her fingers through her short, tightly permed hair, and, quick as a lightswitch, returns to her regular, acerbic self. Today when the program ends, Mrs. Himmel picks the phone up again and makes a phone call to Daughter Elise’s modeling agent.

  Perhaps I was tough on Daughter Elise. She has big brown eyes and nice skin, and she’s great with the Sick or Diseased children. In fact, if she weren’t under so much pressure to be a model, I’d say she was quite beautiful. Suddenly I feel compelled to tell this information to Mrs. Himmel. I tear off a piece of paper from my writing tablet, and quickly write:

  Your daughter is quite beautiful.

  I hold the paper in my hand and imagine getting up out of my chair and walking up to reception and giving it to her. The look that would cloak her face! But upsetting Mrs. Himmel could make me lose privileges with Dr. Monica, and that’s just one risk I’m not willing to take.

  I fold the piece of paper and stick it in the pocket of my trousers as Adrian pops her head into the Waiting Area.

  “Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “You’re up.”

  I follow Adrian down the hallway that runs behind the reception desk, passing more pictures of bucolic farmyards, and into Dr. Monica’s office. Adrian flips a few pages of her clipboard. “Dr. Monica wants you to change into the examining gown today,” she says, and closes the door.

  Mrs. Himmel had to order the special paper gown for me because I’m obviously not like the other patients. The Sick or Diseased children’s gown has trains on it if you’re a boy and daisies if you’re a girl, but Mrs. Himmel insisted on ordering me an adult-sized gown. It’s big and blue. Sterile-looking. It’s much too big for me, and hangs poufed over my limbs as though inflated. I put on the gown and then take a seat on the child-sized examining table. Stuffed animals are scattered all over the place. They’re everywhere: on the windowledge, the examining table, the counter below the cabinets where Dr. Monica keeps stacks of paper cups and glass containers filled with tongue depressors and throat swabs. Color-coded anatomical illustrations of children’s bodies hang on one wall, and on another is a poster of a white kitten hanging by its claws off the branch of a tree, its eyes squeezed tight in terror. Beneath the kitten, the poster says HANG IN THERE! The first time I came to Dr. Monica’s and saw the kitten, I brought out a scrap of paper and wrote Life is not worth living.