The Convalescent (7 page)

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: Gy
r, 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.

“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
.

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
.