The Convalescent Read online

  Dr. Monica said that everyone has to believe in something in order to make life worth living.

  Like what? I wrote.

  Dr. Monica shrugged. “Most people believe in God,” she said.

  She wanted me to write down for her what I believed in, but I just sat there. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t put into words a single thing that I believed in, because to believe in something is to have hope, and that is something that the Pfliegmans, in our stinking, wayward lives, have never had.

  Dr. Monica believes in water. As soon as she saw my peeling skin, she took away all of my prescriptions and made me start drinking eight glasses of water a day. It’s helping, although now every forty minutes or so I have to leave my post at the meat bus to take a piss. I also sweat more, which is extremely unpleasant for my customers. So she gave me a tube of fiercely pine deodorant. It covers my natural odor, a ruddy mixture of grass and meat and oil, and hovers about the small space around my lawnchair. It’s called Spice of Life. It keeps away the mosquitoes, which is a big relief, but the field ticks are still present, popping around my ankles. They are not afraid of Spice of Life. They are not afraid of anything.

  As it says on the tube, Spice of Life is For Men on the Go!® and there’s a picture of a tall, handsome man in a leisure suit, smiling like someone just complimented his pectorals.

  Maybe that’s my problem. I have no pectorals.

  But Dr. Monica believes there’s nothing better for the body than water, and she prescribes large quantities of it for the very sickest of her patients. I’ll often see the mothers of the Sick or Diseased children lugging around a plastic gallon, and there are two water fountains on either side of the Waiting Area alone. Sometimes Dr. Monica herself will appear for a drink at one of the fountains. She’ll bend over the fountain and wrap one delicious ankle around the other. A foot will delicately scratch her calf, all the way up one leg and then back down again—

  It’s enough to make one throw one’s hands in the air and denounce civility altogether.

  I look at my own hands. I should have washed them. I have darkly stained fingernails that will probably never be the proper color from all the animal cutting, the blood handling— Footsteps approach! I quickly pinch my cheeks to give them color; to give the illusion of vim, of vigor.

  Dr. Monica knocks, and then opens the door. “Hello, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says.

  Her blond hair is loose today, not bunned, and falls flat against her back in a yard of silk. Her white coat is open, and underneath is a soft blue turtleneck sweater. Tan slacks one size too small cinch her large thighs, pulling at the seams, and around her shoulders a Kermit the Frog stethoscope hangs like a piece of reliable rope.

  “GODDESS!” I want to shout.

  She smiles, turning the stethoscope in her fingers.

  “You’ve got some color in your cheeks,” she says. “How are you feeling today?”

  Dr. Monica always says “you” instead of “we.” All of my other doctors always referred to me the other way, as in: “How are we today, Mr. Pfliegman?” To which I would respond in my brain, “What we? We are not both Pfliegmans. We do not both live in a broken-down bus in a field. We do not both hold our cramping stomachs over the bucket, or cough until we bleed. We do not both dream worms are nibbling at our fingertips.”

  Dr. Monica is better than that.

  “Your vitals are up,” she says. “You’re drinking your water, I can tell. That’s excellent.” She produces a clean sheet of paper to write on. “You’re still not eating right, though, and you’re not doing your stretching exercises.”

  Stretching exercises?

  “Like I showed you last time, remember? Bend down, rise up, breathe?”

  Dr. Monica puts down her clipboard and bends at the waist. Her long hair spills in front of me in a waterfall of blond, exposing a creamy slice of neck—

  St. Benevolus shivers like an orphan in the cold.

  Her fingers quickly smooch the tips of her white pediatrician’s shoes, and then she stands up again. Blood rises to her face, coloring her cheeks. “Remember?” she says.

  Ah yes, now I remember, I write. I am a complete and total idiot.

  “You’ve got to work on rehabilitating that leg,” she says. “There’s absolutely no reason why it should be dragging like that.” She points to my bad leg with her pen. “The kneecap’s a little off, but that really shouldn’t affect anything,” she says, and she frowns at the kneecap. “Does it hurt to stretch?”

  I shake my head.

  “Okay then.” She sits back down and returns to my folder. “Have there been any more nosebleeds?” she says.

  A few.

  “And your leg? Is there any stiffness?

  There is some stiffness. You could say that there is some of that.

  “What about headaches? Are you still getting those?”

  Actually, those have eased up a bit, I write.

  “Good!” she says, scribbling. “And how’s the coughing? Is there any expectorating?”

  I nod.

  “And when that happens, what color is it? Is it white?” She wrinkles her nose. “Or is it yellowish or greenish?”

  Most of the time?

  “Yes.”

  Red. Or yellow. But most of the time, red.

  “Red, huh,” she says and looks at me sideways. She blinks, officiously, sucking in one part of her upper lip as though to hide it. Around the room the stuffed animals stare at me, unblinking. The white kitten looks panicked: Hang in there!

  “You know you have to be honest with me, Mr. Pfliegman. If you’re not honest about how you’re feeling and what’s happening to you, I won’t be able to help you. You won’t be able to see me anymore. Do you understand?”

  I nod vigorously.

  “Okay then,” she says, and then stops writing. “Tell me, if your pain were on a scale from one to nine today, one being the least pain you’ve ever felt, and nine the most, how would say you feel?”

  I look at her. Is she serious? She is.

  Four?

  She closes the folder. “All right, Mr. Pfliegman, let’s have a look at you.”

  In one swift, breathtaking movement, Dr. Monica pulls all of her hair into a ponytail. The elastic hairband snaps like a hasty prophylactic.

  I shudder a little.

  “Take it easy,” she says. “I’m just going to see what your muscles are doing.” With cold hands, my pediatrician begins professionally squeezing my shoulders, my arms and legs, stopping along the way at every hinge of my small, oddly shaped appendages. She squeezes elbows, wrists, ankles. The wide part of my little plate-shaped feet. All the way down every phalanx of my awkward, reaching toes—

  “Joints seem fine,” she says. “Sit up now.” She kneads my head, pressing her fingers lightly against the lumps. “Does this hurt?” she says. “Does this?” She reaches around and presses the base of my skull with two cold fingers, then slips the other hand behind my beard and politely prods my throat, balancing my head on her hands as though it’s a fragile egg. She’s searching for something, I know not what, but it feels nice.

  “It’s important to try and speak every day,” Dr. Monica says. “Even if you can only make noises. Sometimes rubbing the throat helps loosen things up. Can you try and say something now? As I do this?”

  I am terrified of what would happen if I actually spoke. If I spoke, I would tell her that when I look at her, every circular cell in my body aches. I would tell her that if she wouldn’t mind, I should very much like her to lean over the examining table and let me unbutton her blouse and gently unwrap the Kermit the Frog stethoscope and nuzzle my beard into her neck. I lean forward slightly to see if my head might accidentally bump against her head, to see if she might accidentally brush her lips against mine and accidentally slip her tongue into my—“Algh,” I say.

  Dr. Monica looks up and blinks, hopefully. I try again.

  There’s nothing left.

  She makes her final notes, checks her
watch, and then hands me the folder. “Return this to Mrs. Himmel,” she says. “And I think it would be useful to see your parents’ health records. Can you get them for me?”

  I nod.

  “Okay then,” she says, and smiles again. “I’ll see you next week.”

  I watch her leave, thinking that I don’t have a clue about Ján and Janka’s health records. They never went to a doctor. As far as I know, there aren’t any records of anything about my parents beyond what sparse pieces of furniture lie moldering in the farmhouse that leans both east and west, and what was written in the Lick County Gazette on the day following the accident, June 16, 1985:

  János and Janka Pfliegman of Front Lick were killed yesterday afternoon when their car crashed into a telephone pole on Back Lick Road off Rural Route 9. The car, rented from Galaxy Car Rentals, was in showroom condition, and it has been determined that the accident is not the fault of Galaxy Car Rentals, which always provides Safe Cars and Safe Service®, but rather the fault of Mr. János Pfliegman, who was driving under the influence. The couple is survived by their son, Rovar.

  The article is divided into two columns. Directly underneath the second column, underneath my name, is a picture of a snail-shaped galaxy. In his extreme haste to meet the five o’clock deadline, the junior editor hadn’t read the column. He only knew that Galaxy Car Rentals was paying a hefty sum to have their advertisement advertised in this issue, and he was trying to find room for their logo. At the time, however, this wasn’t what bothered me about the article, nor was I bothered by the car rental’s disclaimer pinched into the text, nor was I even bothered by my name, detached, hovering. I was only bothered by the word “couple.”

  Nothing could be further from the truth.

  Imagine. In the busy hey-ho of life, tooling around in your automobile, you drive past a scrawny little man shuffling down the side of the road. He’s wearing a silk shirt with an anachronous paisley print. The long collar hangs from his neck in a limp frown. His hair is oiled and licked to one side with a comb he keeps in the back pocket of his creamy slacks. They’re not in fashion—wide, aggressive pockets buck out from either side—but his shoes are black Italian leather, finely polished. Every few steps or so the man stops walking, reaches down and rubs dust from the road off the tips, and then stands up again. His face is small and pointed, with eyes that dart like flies. His given name is János. It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced YAH-nosh. It means “God is good.” You drive past this man, you pass him, but something about him warrants a second glance; you grab a look from your rearview mirror, and it’s then you notice that the man is not alone: a small boy is walking next to him with skin so pale it’s almost transparent. You swear you can see his blood vessels and arteries churning. You can see the holes that hold his eyes. He stares at you, mournfully, and the look on his face makes your heart feel wet. You feel, suddenly, as though the arms of a thousand miserable children are reaching out to you, begging you to stop the car, but the skinny man catches you in the pause. He catches your eye, and smiles. The smile is handsome, but not genuine. It leaks to the edge of his face. At once, all the blood in your body makes for your feet, so you do not stop. You press the pedal. It’s just a boy and his father, you tell yourself.

  Walking home.

  Home is a farmhouse east of the Queeconococheecook River with large barn in the back, out of which János Pfliegman works as a butcher. Today, on March 18, 1983, two years and three months before he will die in a terrible car accident, Ján and the boy are walking along the side of Back Lick Road. They have been wandering the horsefields behind the barn for hours, looking for a violin that they did not find. They climb the stairs to the front porch. “I’m going back out,” Ján says, without looking at the boy. “Get in there and help your mother.”

  The boy watches his father walk back down the road to the horse-fields, hopping around the weeds, and then slips inside the farmhouse. He ducks past the kitchen, where his mother, Janka, is stirring tomato soup at the stove.

  Janka is short, and sloppily fat. She is only slightly taller than the stove itself, and has to stand on a footstool to cook anything. All day she waddles around the kitchen wearing an oversize men’s golfing shirt that says VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS GOLFERS. Janka stops stirring and reaches down to scratch her legs. Her legs are hairy, pocked from plucking. She spends hours in the bathroom trying to manage them. When a tickle appears at the back of the boy’s throat, he moves quietly away from the kitchen doorway. He covers his mouth to keep from coughing, and moves up the stairs to his room unseen. He lies on his bed, picking at his sweaty clothes. Janka buys all of his clothes two sizes too big at the secondhand store, where she also buys his toys. Toys broken, with parts missing, discarded by the sticky hands of Other Children. One day the boy climbs off his bed and plays with an Indian doll, holding a small sack. The sack is filled with miniature towels and clothing. Assorted textiles. He plays with the toy, and the next day he comes down with a prickling fever. He lies in bed gulping air for four days, as images of the fever-carrying Indian appear in and out of his brain. He vows never to touch any of the toys again. But Janka scolds him for not playing with them. She comes into his room and sees him lying motionless on the bed and scowls, “I don’t know why I buy you a damn thing, Rovar.”

  They named the boy Rovar. It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced RO-vahr. It means “insect.”

  Today, as he lies in bed watching a fly hurtling around the edges of the windowscreen, the boy wishes he were an insect. If he were an insect, he thinks, he would be invisible. O, to be a fly, a flea, he thinks, observing the small things about his room. The things that insects observe. The curl of paint on the windowledge. The jagged fray of the blanket. The sound of bees throwing themselves at the windowscreen. He pinches his arms and watches the hairs rise up. He presses his fingers on his eyeballs until globes of light appear behind the eyelids, each taking the triangular shape of the wings of a butterfly—

  “Shit!”

  The boy props himself up on his elbows and looks out the window. His father stomps onto the front porch, thumbing mud from his shoes. It’s gotten dark.

  The violin will not be found today.

  It belonged to Grandfather Ákos. The old man came to visit the farmhouse only once, three years ago, when the boy was nine years old. Ján had told him that Grandfather Ákos was very rich, but the old man didn’t look rich. He was a bus driver, and pulled up to the farmhouse in a yellow school bus. He wore a big wool coat that made him look, the boy thought, like a vagrant. His grandfather was thin, with knees that jutted out from the top of his shins like small lightbulbs. His face was shaped like Ján’s, small and pointed, but flaked with age. On his chin he sported a white goatee that looked like he’d just kissed a sticky cloud. He carried no bags or luggage, just a violin case, shaped like a small side of beef.

  When Grandfather Ákos stepped down from the bus and saw the boy for the first time, he dropped the case on the grass. He looked at Ján and Janka.

  They said nothing.

  He beckoned the boy forward. He took his chin between his fingers, holding it as though examining an egg: “Mi ennek a neve?” he asked. “What is the name of this?”

  Janka scratched her legs. “We call him Rovar,” she said.

  Grandfather Ákos smiled at the boy. His mouth was full of rotted, ill-spaced teeth. “That’s not a good name,” he said. “I will call him Kis Ákos. Little Ákos.”

  “Now look here,” Ján said.

  But Grandfather Ákos ignored him. He spent his visit sitting outside on the front porch in his wool coat, eating lemons, his favorite food. He peeled them with his rotten teeth, and unfolded the Lick County Gazette over his lap like a blanket. He liked to read a section in the newspaper called “Today in History, by Eldridge Cooner.” It was merely a list of events that have all happened on the same day over time, but the old man loved them. He would read them out loud, and the boy never left his side. He would sit next to him on t
he front porch for hours, waiting for the lemon peels to drop. Waiting to be called Little Ákos. Once Grandfather Ákos spit a lemon seed into the palm of his hand and showed the boy. “Notice, Little Ákos,” he said.

  In his palm, the seed was white and shiny. It looked like a diamond. The old man grinned at the boy, and the grin looked wicked. “Eldridge Cooner never writes about the small things,” he said.

  After the newspaper had been read, he would reach into the violin case, then stand up and play underneath the porch light. His arms swooped as he grabbed and pulled at the strings. In his small hands, the instrument made high-pitched crying noises that ached over the horsefields, setting off the wolves. He was a terrible violinist. One evening, as he played, Janka couldn’t take it anymore. She ran out from the kitchen, grabbed the instrument from his fingers, and threw it off the porch. The violin whistled through the air and landed, invisibly, in the long weeds of the horsefields. Crickets exploded into a chattering mayhem.

  Grandfather Ákos said nothing. He stared, motionless, into the dark fields. Mosquitoes zizz ed above his head, drunk on the porch light.

  “I’m sorry,” said Janka.

  For a long moment, Grandfather Ákos did not move or speak. When he finally set his eyes upon her, they were round. Black. Janka stepped back into the hallway of the farmhouse. “I’m sorry,” she said, but the old man leaned in. Something shifted beneath the shoulders of the wool coat—