The Convalescent (24 page)

It looks nice
, I write.

“Thank you,” she says, opening my folder. She brushes a leaf of hair from her face.

Where are you going tonight?

Dr. Monica looks at her watch. “Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “You’re not being completely forthcoming with me.”

Aren’t I?

“What are you doing here? You don’t have a temperature, and you look fine to me.”

Do I?

Dr. Monica sighs, and tosses my folder on the counter by the sink. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pfliegman, but I can’t stay for this. It’s been a difficult day, and I really do have somewhere to be.”

I slide down from the examining table, turn around, and part the examining gown for her. I show her my back.

“That’s not good,” she says.

I climb back up on the table.
NO
, I write.

“Let’s have a look.”

Dr. Monica stands up and snaps on the rubber gloves. She begins prodding. She places her hands flat on my back and examines the skin at the shoulders, rubbing all the way down each of my arms. The full breadth of my torso. She whistles. “So this has never happened before?” she says. “Nothing happened to instigate it?”

I shake my head.

She sits down in front of me, my folder poised on her lap. “Mr. Pfliegman,” she says, “Why do you have to stay in that bus? Can’t you at least move back into your old house? The farmhouse? Isn’t that an option?”

No
, I write.
That is not an option
.

“Why not?” she says.

The animals are there
, I write.

“What animals? The animals you butcher?”

No
.

“Then what animals?”

It’s better not to discuss things like this
.

“I completely disagree,” she says. Her eyes flutter. “I think things like this are
exactly
what we should be discussing. Your parents, for example. Where did they—”

Give me something
, I write.

“What do you want?” she says. “A drug? No drugs.”

I shake my head.
Sugar
.

“Definitely no sugar,” she says. “Water.”

Dr. Monica goes over to the sink and runs tap water into a paper cone. She hands it to me. I reach for it, and a sharp pain suddenly enters the left side of my body. It tears its way across my abdomen, and exits on the right. It feels like I’ve been sliced in half. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and I start coughing in dry, fiery bursts. Dr. Monica’s got me firmly by the shoulders. This time it’s not a ploy—the pain holds constant.

“Mr. Pfliegman? Are you all right?” But I can’t shake the coughing— Dr. Monica takes my hands in her hands. “Write it down,” she says gently.

Shaking, I pick up my pen.

“I want you to try and visualize each pain specifically,” she says.

I give her a quizzical look.

“It’s what I ask the children,” she explains. “It helps to try and visualize what’s hurting you. Like it’s an enemy that can be conquered. If your pain were a person, for example, what would the person look like?”

If I could speak, I know what I should say. He would have a small, pointed face. Dark hair and eyes the same color as mine. The same thin, lame muscles. He would be wearing those creamy slacks, the shirt with a long collar and an anachronous paisley print, those shiny Italian shoes— But it isn’t him. The person I imagine has no discernable face. Instead the person I see behind my eyes is a young man with bright blond hair. He wears a short-sleeved blue dress shirt. Fancy black trousers with even cuffs. A black belt neatly cinched around his middle. He keeps one hand in one pocket of his pants, and the other hangs casually to his side, showing off a glittering silver wristwatch. It’s nice out. The wristwatch shines in the sun—I swear that I’ve never met this man before in my life, but when Dr. Monica asks me this question, there he is, standing before me, as still and brutal as my own reflection. How can this be? How can I imagine the worst about someone I’ve never met?

Dr. Monica looks at me. “Mr. Pfliegman, I want to try something.”

I thought you had somewhere to
be
.

She’s quiet. It is a dangerous line, the line between the Creature and his Pediatrician. There are many, many unspoken rules. Certainly the Creature knows that if he confessed everything to her, if he confessed that his sicknesses are not always as terrible as he makes them out to be; if he confessed
that he has spent whole hours gazing at the lines of her rump as though they were sculpted from fine marble; if he confessed that because of this rump, he has in the past helplessly suffered Thoroughly Benevolent But Nonetheless Highly Unsavory Erections in the company of Sick or Diseased children; if she knew that the car accident which killed Ján and Janka Pfliegman was not an accident at all, but something else entirely, there is no question that she would banish him from her office. If she knew what her hairy little convalescent was recovering into, she would stare at him, open-mouthed, and back away in cold fear. She would refuse to see him at all.

But the line has not been crossed this afternoon. Dr. Monica, thick-skinned, cracks a smile. “I suppose I do have somewhere to be,” she says. “But it’s not a big deal. We’re just seeing a movie. To be honest, I don’t even like movies. Isn’t that funny?” She sighs, fingering and twisting the cross around her neck. “I’m just not any good at this dating business. Never was.”

Ange, valsant sur les bouts du doigt de Dieu
.

She slowly pulls on her rubber gloves. “Just relax, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “We’re in no rush. There’s no rush at all.” She walks over to the sink and runs the faucet, wetting a sponge, then opens a cabinet and removes a small blue bottle. It’s some kind of lotion. She squeezes an inch of it onto the sponge and says, “This is just a clinical dermatological cream. It might feel a little like clay as it dries, but it’s good for you. It pulls toxins from the body, and will clear away all that dry skin.” She starts moving the sponge over my body. The lotion is light blue, the exact color of the bottle, and odorless. She coats my arms, chest, back, and even my face with it. “This should help loosen things up,” she says. She spreads it all over my cheeks and beard, under my eyeglasses. It feels oily, and it burns.

“It can burn at first,” Dr. Monica says. “But the burning goes away after a minute.” She deposits the old sponge and produces a fresh one, along with a small stack of fresh handtowels. “When we wash it off, it will pull some of this dead skin away, okay? This stuff can be a little messy sometimes, so we’ve got to use these,” she says, and pats the towels.

I look up at Dr. Monica, startled. She’s never used “we” before. I stare at the dry sponge, nervously.

“Okay, let’s see what’s going on here,” she says, and begins wiping.

As soon as she touches me, globs of lotion and skin begin to slide off my arms, my shoulders. Dr. Monica tries scooping it up with the sponge,
but there’s so much of it. She throws the sponge in the sink and scoots the
HUMAN WASTE
bucket to the examining table with her feet. She flicks the wet pieces from her hands into the bucket, but misses— They splatter to the floor. “Oh my God,” she says, and quickly cups her hands around my chest as she tries to catch another jellied peel. It gets all over her gloves, her arms. The astonishing dress. She darts around the examining table and somehow maneuvers a wide, gelatinous piece off my back. She carries it slowly, like a ticking bomb, to the bucket— It collapses apart in her hands. Dr. Monica looks at my skin, pink and shining, and wipes her eyes with her wrists. “That’s it,” she gasps. “I think that’s it. It’s over,” but then she remembers my face.

Trembling, she lifts a finger and touches my beard.

In one piece, it slips from my chin and falls onto my lap, quivering like a hirsute jellyfish.

As usual, Dr. Monica is entirely correct. I am not being completely forthcoming with her. But how could I possibly? How could I explain to her that the reason for my illnesses both is and is not biological? That my body is chained to a legacy of a thousand other crippled bodies that lived and died over the last millennium? That perhaps the Pfliegmans, the foul, ineffective few, were not as ineffective as we had always thought? After all, wasn’t it for the protection of us—the weakest among them—that the Hungarians fled the wrath of the Pechenegs? Weren’t we, therefore, the ones who drove them into the Carpathian Basin in the first place? Weren’t the Pfliegmans, in that sense, actually
necessary
for their success? Isn’t it for the protection of the weakest members of our race that all good change happens in the world? Isn’t it true that if we do not care for the least among us—no matter how filthy or backward or solipsistic—we will become a race of monsters? What some historians and other official-sounding officials try to call “progress,” all the while asking themselves whether history should be written this way or that, we Pfliegmans have never asked, knowing full well, deep within our rotted cores, the sacrifice that we must make for the survival of the greater good. “
Throughout nature
,” Darwin writes, “
one species incessantly takes advantage of, and profits by, the structures of others
”—

“We have to get you to a hospital,” Dr. Monica says. “I’m going to call the hospital.”

No hospitals
, I write.

“Why?” she asks.

You’re my doctor
.

“But I’m just a pediatrician, Mr. Pfliegman. I know colds and flu and ADD—I’m not a dermatologist.”

But it has to be you
, I write.

Dr. Monica wipes her eyes again and looks at me. “Why me? You aren’t even honest with me, Mr. Pfliegman.”

What do you mean?

“Your parents?” she says. “Your health records?”

I don’t answer.

Dr. Monica looks up and down at the hairless little Creature occupying her examining table. Her face softens. “Okay, then, but you’ll have to wait. I have to get this all cleaned up and see a few other people.” She goes to the cabinets and removes several square boxes of gauze and unfurls the bandages. “You’ll need to cover up first,” she says, and starts wrapping the bandages around my body. She winds them around my neck, my shoulders. My chest and back.

As she’s working, I notice my folder lying open by the sink, and lean forward to read it:

“
Pseudomaniacal tendencies
,” it says. “
Invents various illnesses for personal attention
.” And at the very bottom, printed out in painstakingly deliberate letters: “
PHYSICALLY, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH HIM
.”

Dr. Monica finishes quickly, snapping her scissors and applying thumb-sized pieces of medical tape. “How does that feel?” she asks. “Is it too tight?”

I don’t answer.

She tidies up my face in silence, snipping underneath my nose, my eyeglasses, barely leaving room to see or breathe.

“Look at him, Adrian,” laughs Mrs. Himmel. “He looks like the Invisible Man!” She has to hold her sides. Apparently to keep from rolling off her office chair. “The Invisible
Midget
,” she howls.

Adrian covers her mouth with both hands. Her eyes water.

It’s brutally hot in the Waiting Area. The Sick or Diseased children are sluggish, lying flat on their backs all over the room. They seem to be barely breathing, barely feeling well enough to do anything at all. They look drugged. When they see me enter, their eyes widen at the bandages, but that’s all they can muster. The
BANG THE DRUM
! boy looks at me and slides off his chair.

“What happened to you?” he asks.

I saved a child from a burning building
.

“You did not,” he says. “You were in the back the whole time.”

Spiders
, I write.
They were living in my beard. Pesky
.

“No,” he says, and laughs.

All of my skin fell off
, I write.

The
BANG THE DRUM
! boy shouts across the Waiting Area to his mother: “All of his skin fell off!”

At this, the children perk up. They give another curious glimpse at my wrapped face, my eyeglasses hovering over the wrapping, and then lie back down again. The
BANG THE DRUM
! boy spies my writing tablet, and remembers the cowboy picture.

“Draw me a soldier,” he says.

I pick up my pen and draw him a picture of a soldier with tall boots, a feathered hat. A military sash.

“That’s just a man,” he says. “Give him a gun.”

I give the soldier a large, handsome rifle.

The boy touches the page with light fingers. “It’s good,” he says. “But now give him some bullet wounds.”

I start attacking the soldier. The bullet wounds look more like the soldier’s wearing polka dots, but the boy gets excited. “Get him!” he cries. With tiny circles, we shoot the hell out of that soldier. We shoot until there isn’t any space left and the soldier is completely blacked out. The boy looks at me and grins. He sways in front of me, as though to imaginary music. “I’m going to have a baby sister,” he says.

Really
? I write.

“It’s very good for Mother.”

Why is that?

He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Because that baby will be healthy, of course,” he says, and runs back to his mother. She puts the magazine down on the side table and draws him in, holding his face with both hands.

“This is a Human Kiss,” she says, and pecks him on the mouth. Then she rubs her nose against his nose. “This is an Eskimo Kiss,” she says. “And
this
is a Butterfly Kiss.” She places her face right next to his face. She flutters her eyelashes. He giggles warmly.

“Oliver?” says Adrian.

The
BANG THE DRUM
! boy and his mother stand up and follow her out of the Waiting Area. On his way out, he waves to a friend lying flat on the carpet. “Bye Brian,” he says, but Brian doesn’t wave back. He’s too hot. He’s wearing corduroy pants and a long-sleeve shirt, and his hair is sticking wet to his forehead. He looks like a washed-up starfish. He watches Oliver leave, then rolls up from the floor and stands in front of his mother. “I’m hot,” he whines.