The Convalescent

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. So I pulled him to the side of the road and told him to go on home.”

  This was not exactly true. The woman, in a swell of fear and anger, actually slapped the boy across the face. “Speak!” she demanded.

  But this particular boy does not speak. So she yelled, “Then stay in the damned road for all I care!” and returned to her truck. She started the ignition. Carly Simon started wailing. The truck tore off down the road, and just in time.

  Another car was coming.

  XXI

  YOUR DAUGHTER IS QUITE BEAUTIFUL

  Mrs. Himmel is not at all pleased to see a Pfliegman come in on an UnPfliegman day. She sees me stumble through the front door and groans, “This is all we need.”

  “We’re extremely busy today, Mr. Pfliegman,” says Adrian.

  Dr. Monica is extremely busy. The Waiting Area is hot and loud. The Sick or Diseased children are tumbling all over the place.

  I find a seat next to a girl in an examining gown, waiting for Dr. Monica to prepare for her X-ray. She’s a handsome child with chubby cheeks and long red hair. She’s sitting tightly in her chair, holding a homemade cookie and staring intensely at the Berber carpeting. She looks up at the other, fully dressed children, who are at the moment comparing shoelaces and do not have to go underneath a Big Machine. She sniffs, pitifully. Her mother has given her the cookie for a snack, but she’s not eating it. She holds it limp in her hand, like a boring toy.

  “You don’t want it?” her mother whispers.

  The girl frowns. She takes an unenthusiastic bite and keeps it in her mouth until her mother turns away. Then she spits it out behind the chair.

  I reach through my coat pockets and find an Evermore. It’s my last one.

  I offer it to her.

  She looks, but does not see it: she only sees the hairy little face looking back at her. The unruly beard, the papery cheeks. The weird woolen cap and the filthy pink sweatshirt. The eyeglasses, thick as ice. She sees all of this, and, like any Good Child who can spot a Bad Adult, living proof that there’s a fundamental flaw in what she believes is God’s design, leaps from the chair and climbs onto her mother’s lap, looking at me through squinting, terrified eyes.

  I shrug and peel off the wrapper. Then I glance up—

  Mrs. Himmel is staring at me with her mouth open. She shakes her head in disbelief. She picks up the phone and holds her hand over her mouth as she speaks, as though I couldn’t possibly imagine what she’s telling Dr. Monica: that the Creature is here on a Friday and not a Tuesday; that he’s offering the children candy when they’re all trained not to take candy from such unsavory persons as himself; and that she’s forty-five minutes overdue for lunch already.

  She slams down the phone.

  Moments later, the pediatrician appears in the Waiting Area. She’s not in her usual outfit today. Today, she is wearing a dress. The dress is silk. Red. Soft-looking. She shoots me a brief, exhilarating glance, and then goes to Mrs. Himmel’s window. She says a few things to Mrs. Himmel that I cannot discern because her back is to me and I’m far too immersed in memorizing the heart-shaped contour of her ass to even begin to imagine, but I am marginally aware of the contents of the conversation as Mrs. Himmel’s face goes purple, as her lips curl into a bitter, pusillanimous pucker—

  Dr. Monica gives Mrs. Himmel a box of powdered jelly doughnuts. “I just want you to know how much I appreciate everything you do for us, Mrs. Himmel,” she says, and then returns to her office.

  Mrs. Himmel waits until Dr. Monica is gone, and then grabs the box and opens it. She selects one doughnut and takes a large bite. White powder sticks to the corners of her mouth. A smear of purple jelly threatens to drip out the butt-end, but Mrs. Himmel, a professional, anticipates this emission, and quickly spins the doughnut in her palm to lick the jelly from the hole.

  “Can I have one?” a voice asks.

  Daughter Elise is here. She’s sitting in the far corner of the room next to the ficus, chewing gum and staring vacantly at Vogue. Her long legs are pressed into stylish jeans, and she’s wearing flip-flops to dry her freshly painted toenails. Her hair is glossed with chemicals, styled into a corpulent, complex bun.

  “Ha,” says Mrs. Himmel. “Fat chance.”

  Elise turns a page and mumbles something.

  “You just watch it, missy,” Mrs. Himmel says.

  Elise rolls her eyes.

  “Don’t you roll your eyes at me,” her mother says, and wipes the sticky powder on her jeans. “You’re gonna get it!”

  Adrian walks in, carrying a stack of folders. Her red hair is pulled back in a thick ponytail, and she’s wearing a brand new windbreaker, the kind you can unzip and roll into its own portable pouch.

  “I’ve got the twins’ folders for you, Annette,” she says, and places the folders on Mrs. Himmel’s desk, next to the computer monitor.

  Mrs. Himmel sees Adrian and the new windbreaker and stops in mid-chew. She examines the jacket with narrow eyes; how it form-fits Adrian’s sporty figure.

  Adrian sees the doughnut balanced in Mrs. Himmel’s paw and licks her top lip. She yearns for one. No doubt it’s tempting: the powder sprinkled on Mrs. Himmel’s blond, feminine mustache, the undeniable waft of sugar in the air. But then she considers the route the doughnut will take, down the throat, with the aid of Mrs. Himmel’s meaty, elastic tongue, and all yearning disappears as quickly as it came.

  She unscrews the cap of her water bottle and takes a long gug of it.

  One of the Sick or Diseased children, calmly removing the pages from a Time magazine, also sees Mrs. Himmel’s doughnuts. He asks his mother for one.

  She offers him one of Dr. Monica’s sugar-free lollipops.

  The boy will have none of it. He throws it on the floor, breaks loose from his mother, and runs to the front of the reception desk where the doughnuts sit perched like whole cakes. He leans in close, and gently lifts his hand to touch one. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to eat all of it; he only wants to put his finger on the white sugar and have a taste. He’s been watching Mrs. Himmel enjoy the dessert, and there was something in the ecstatic way her tongue leapt out at the jelly before it fell that has driven the boy beyond reason. “Please!” he shouts.

  “No, Billy,” says his mother.

  “But it’s so round,” Billy wails, as though the shape is a problem that needs solving.

  Mrs. Himmel smiles to herself. She enjoys having things that others want. She sips her dry tea and spins around in her swivel chair for a sugar packet. The receptionist keeps a long box of sugar packets on the shelf behind her desk and now selects three, delicately nibbling each packet open with the corner of her mouth.

  I watch the sugar pour from the packets and my tongue goes fat and sticky, filling my mouth. I search the pockets of my coat for another Evermore, but it’s no use—I’m out. The only place to buy them is at the G&P, and that’s halfway across town. I reach around to scratch my back and fidget in my chair.

  Daughter Elise sighs and looks at her watch. “It’s almost three o’clock, Mother,” she says. “Daniel says we have to be there at five.”

  “Relax,” Mrs. Himmel says. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

  “This whole dumb thing is your idea, not mine,” Elise says.

  “Just cool it!”

  “You cool it,” Elise mumbles. She snaps a page of her magazine.

  “Natural Selection,” writes Darwin, “will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young.”

  Then the front door opens. A gaggle of fifth graders stumble in.

  They’re all wearing child-sized suits and dresses. They quickly fill the center of the Waiting Area because there’s no place to sit. A pair of twins in blue are holding hands and weeping. There was a birthday party, and one of the mothers served the children fresh cow milk from the farm to go with the birthday cake. Unfortunately, th
e milk was sour and has made all of the children sick. The mother, once Good, now clearly Bad, is beside herself. The other mothers smile politely but grit their teeth. They pass around knowing looks: the children won’t be attending any birthday parties at that house again.

  The birthday girl stares out the window at the darkening clouds, her yellow dress pulled tight into her fists. A look of quiet rage upon on her face.

  Mrs. Himmel slides on her eyeglasses and begins handing out information sheets and organizing everyone.

  The mothers all thank her, looking grateful.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says, “I’m just doing my job.” But when she’s finished, she walks over to Elise and says, “Well, that’s it. It looks like I’m stuck here. Go to the salon across the street to get your hair done, and then stop by the supermarket. Your father will have to take you.”

  Elise throws her magazine on a side table. “My hair is done, Mother,” she says.

  Mrs. Himmel stands back and examines it. “It is?”

  “I did it myself.”

  Mrs. Himmel snorts. “This is a professional modeling shoot, Elise. This isn’t prom.”

  The women gather together bundles of outfits and hair accessories and hair chemicals. Elise hoists a backpack full of makeup onto her shoulder in one hefty tug. Mrs. Himmel spits on her thumb and nabs a fleck of dust that has fallen on the daughter’s cheek.

  The daughter, annoyed, whacks the hand away.

  “Will you just let me?” Mrs. Himmel says.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Mrs. Himmel removes her horn-rimmed glasses and breathes on them. “If I left you alone for one second, you’d gain ten pounds,” she says. “You’ve gotten awfully chubby, Elise. You’ve got to be taking better care of yourself and watching that figure.”

  Elise throws her head back and laughs. “I’m not the one who’s gotten chubby, Mother.”

  Mrs. Himmel finishes cleaning her glasses with the bottom of her sweater, and then steps forward and slaps Elise. The Waiting Area goes silent. The Sick or Diseased children stop playing and stare at Mrs. Himmel. One of them whimpers. The mothers pretend not to hear or see anything. They hide behind their magazines.

  Elise says nothing; she touches her cheek and gets a funny look on her face, like she’s just acquired a piece of knowledge that no one knows but her. She walks to the front door and stares outside at the picnic table.

  Mrs. Himmel mutters to herself and returns to her desk.

  I think about the note I wrote, and write it again on my writing tablet. I walk over to Elise and hand it to her.

  She looks down at me, surprised, and then takes the note:

  Your daughter is quite beautiful.

  Although her skin does not possess the same radiance as Dr. Monica’s, the way she holds the note, as lightly as all lovely women hold things, is stunning. What I’ve written on the note is true: Elise really is beautiful.

  “Your-daughter-is-quite-beautiful,” she reads, and then looks at me. “I don’t have a daughter.”

  But Mrs. Himmel has seen Elise conversing with the Creature. She leaps up and runs over, standing right between us, her arms folded over her chest. Eyeglasses chained around her neck. She snatches the note out of Elise’s hands and reads it, mortified.

  “Out,” she says.

  Adrian returns with her folders. “Really, Mrs. Himmel, is that necessary?”

  I’m sorry, I write, and hold it up.

  Mrs. Himmel remains unfazed. Afternoon clouds pass across her eyes. “Out!” she shouts, and points at the door.

  I gather my things and follow Mrs. Himmel’s finger toward the picnic table. The sky is growing savagely dark. I look at her as if to say, “But it’s going to rain.”

  “Get it together, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says, and slams the door.

  I sit on the picnic table and stare across the road at the Big M supermarket. “As if I even could,” I want to say, as rain begins needling out of the sky. I might as well climb Mount Massive. And get what together? How can you get it together when there isn’t anything there to get in the first place?

  Why on earth would a person even want to recover when’s there’s nothing worth recovering to?

  At that moment, a very tall, very lanky woman saunters around the corner of Dr. Monica’s office. She’s got long blond hair and a mouth so big I can make out her skeleton. She’s wearing high-heeled sandals and a halter-top, and drags one finger along the brick as she walks. It’s Carly Simon. Her face matches the picture on the cassette tape, exactly. She crosses the wet grass and climbs up on the picnic table next to me, swinging her sandals. She looks at me with laughing eyes as the wind whips through her feathered hair. She presses her finger on my nose and tugs at my ears. Her lips swell. “I’ve known you since you were a small boy,” she coos, showing her big teeth. The halter-top has a wide, sloping neck that hangs off one shoulder. Her clavicle’s so sharp it looks like she got a stick in the neck.

  I ignore her.

  “That’s a nice coat you have,” she says, fingering the wooly lapel. “Was it expensive?” She leans in close and looks at me. Her eyes are heavy with black stuff that falls from her lashes in little flakes.

  “Are you horny, baby?” she whispers. She starts prodding me, reaching inside the lapels of the coat. I try to push her off, but she’s stronger than I am. She wraps her arms around me and fiddles with my zippers.

  “Frapfth!” I cry. “Beschsmowg!”

  Then it really starts coming down. Carly Simon throws back her head, leaps off the picnic table and begins dances around the soaked grass in her high heels. “Whee!” she cries.

  I look longingly into the window of Dr. Monica’s office, and make eye contact with one of the Good Mothers. She sees me out here, getting soaked in the downpour, and although part of her knows that she should say something, she says nothing. She pretends that she never saw me at all. She goes back to filing her nails.

  Adrian sees me, as does Mrs. Himmel. “He’s got his coat on,” she says.

  Across the street, three Security Guards appear in front of the glass doors of the Big M. They’re arguing, and gesticulate wildly. Shoppers linger in the parking lot to listen. Herman lumbers around the other two in his signature figure-eight until a police car pulls into the parking lot. It drives underneath the ENTER EXIT sign, right up to the entrance of the supermarket—

  The siren woots.

  I slide down from the picnic table, grab my backpack, and hustle down the street to Mister Bis’s, leaving Carly Simon dancing on Dr. Monica’s front lawn, laughing in the rain, stretching out her middle parts and showing off to the entire civilized world her long and shapely legs.

  XXII

  EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:

  EXILE

  When he realized that it was Lili and the Giant lying together in that horrible, putrid tent, in their twisted love, my Darling, the Grand Prince completely lost it. He tore the bird-helmet from his head and started whacking us with it. He tipped over the kettle of stew, grabbed a log out the fire with his bare hands, and chucked it across the tent.

  “Exile!” he cried. “You’re all exiled!”

  He brought the hard apples out from the pockets in his cloak and started hucking them at our kneecaps, and then, when there was nothing left to huck, he removed his gigantic sword from his belt, waved it at the burlap sacks covering his beloved in bed with a monster, cried, “Hooy Hooy!” and made directly for Szeretlek’s heart.

  Lili, awake the minute Árpád had hurled the burning log, jumped from the burlap and pulled Szeretlek out of the tent, into the rain.

  “Whore!” Árpád cried, and slapped her across the face. “How could you do this to me?”

  “You’re loony,” she said.

  Then the little children, the ones Árpád had encountered earlier, poured out of the forest. They were all soaking wet, and the boy they had been carrying on their shoulders was missing. Árpád stopped them with one flat hand. “You there!??
? he said. “Where is your little friend? The one with the limp?”

  The wet children stared at him blankly, as if they’d never heard the sound of human speech. They had clearly already forgotten about the boy, and now were only paying attention to the apples that rolled along the outskirts of the tent. They skirted around his legs and went straight for the fruit, punching each other on the heads and shoulders. One girl got her hands on a particularly fat apple, but a larger boy saw it and the girl got a fist in the eye. Árpád wondered that she did not start to cry, but instead gritted her teeth, jumped onto the boy’s back, and chomped down on his ear. The boy squealed. She squeezed her eyes and bore down and managed to work off a piece of the boy’s ear in her mouth. The boy burst into tears and let the apple roll from his hands. The girl comfortably spit the ear part out, blood greasy on her lips, and scampered over to collect her spoils.

  Árpád scowled. He wanted very much to punish them, but they all looked so wretched and beaten that any further punishment would only seem redundant. Despite the fact that Lili had chosen this gigantic thing, this cataclysmic zero, this creature that came out of these People Who Were Barely People instead of him; despite the fact that he was nearly boiling with animus, Kinga’s words remained in his ears:

  “We are the weakest among you.”

  By designating the Fekete-Szem as the meat cutters, the official butchers of the Hungarian community, Árpád had saved us from expulsion and therefore certain death. Like it or not, we belonged to him. Watching the little girl chomp savagely into her apple, swallowing the bitter fruit in licks and gulps, Árpád realized that if he did not care for us, the lowest common denominator—no matter how filthy or backward or solipsistic—the Hungarians would become a race of monsters. He had seen what had happened to human beings exiled from their communities up North, over the Ural Mountains; he had seen how within seconds the air could freeze them into gray statues; how the wind from boundless plains of the barrens could blow the life-breath right out them.