“Cheers,” the Indian says.
“Cheers!” says Isaac Asimov.
Carly Simon crawls up from underneath the table and immediately spies the Captain and his shiny muscles. She giggles, chomping her gum in his ear. Her lips are coated in greasy, bright red lipstick that smears onto her big white teeth. Her smile glows, Cheshire-like, in the light of the Industrial. She hangs a thin arm over the Captain. “You’re foxy,” she whispers.
Suddenly it’s getting crowded in here. I shift my body a little to make more room and Mrs. Himmel crackles in: “Lie still, Mr. Pfliegman.”
Pointed, high-heeled shoes tap the floor behind me. Everyone acknowledges Madame Chafouin. She puts her cold French hand on my cheek. “Démence,” she says affectionately. “Madness.”
“Not madness,” the Indian says. “Company.”
“Whatever,” says Madame Chafouin. She reaches for a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke in here,” says the Captain.
Madame Chafouin gives him an icy stare.
“What’s happening?” whines Carly Simon. “Why is this taking so long?”
“Quiet! All of you!” shouts Mr. Asimov.
Around the table, everyone quiets down as the last figure steps into the light. He is older than the rest, with a low, probing brow. It’s a kind face, with a particular beard. He possesses small hands with thick fingers, a sunburned nose, and he’s wearing a baseball cap with a beagle on it. “Sorry I’m late,” he says.
Mr. Asimov sees him and claps his hands with delight.
The bearded man fidgets, standing here among the others, but when he realizes that the hairy little Hungarian is staring at him, that we’re all staring, he knows he has to say something. He steps forward. Everyone listens as he speaks. His voice is soft and high. Unexpected. A voice that betrays a gentle spirit, too gentle for a man who spent his life squatting on alien beaches, digging in primordial pits and holes; a man with a spirit too gentle for his own aggressive species.
“At some period of its life,” Charles Darwin says, “during some season of the year, every organic being has to struggle for life and suffer great destruction.”
“What does that mean?” the Captain says.
Darwin shrugs. “Sometimes waters rise.”
What he’s saying is that under the laws of heavy rain, of wind, of the groaning earth, last night, the Queeconococheecook, for all her effort and restraint, could not contain herself. He’s saying that the broken school bus was picked up and carried on the current, gliding along underwater until it creaked and groaned, collapsing into several disparate pieces, exactly in the manner of a certain flimsy butcher shop twenty-two years ago. He’s saying that neither I nor the Subdivisionists own the field that I live in, that ultimately life cannot own life, and when the waters finally subside, along the soaked banks the Virginians will find a busted tape-radio, a drowned lightbulb, old wet cuts of meat from the Big M supermarket, remains of a splintered bookcase, and an empty tin can of Mrs. Kipner’s Hungarian Goulash. They’ll find a waterlogged copy of a pamphlet on raising hamsters, a book about outer space, one about Hungary, one about water polo, a heavy French dictionary, and the remains of a paperback copy of The Origin of Species, so cheap that at the first kiss of water the pages curled, broke away from their spine, floated for a mile or so downriver, and then disintegrated into the mouth of the Queeconococheecook.
Suddenly the door opens and Dr. Monica enters the room. She walks right up to the X-ray table and everyone fidgets, stepping on each other’s toes to duck out of the light. They quietly groan, pressing up against each other to make room. They hold their collective breath.
Dr. Monica comes right up to the table and places a hand on my forehead. “How are you feeling, Mr. Pfliegman? It looks like you kicked that fever. We’re going to get started now. Oh, but you can’t wear these, though,” she says, and removes my eyeglasses.
Which is fine. I no longer need them. I open my eyes, and, for the first time, look right at her. She sees my eyes and gasps. Instinctively, perhaps protectively, she covers her mouth and slowly backs away from the table.
Darwin tries to explain. “Insects cannot easily escape by flight from the larger animals that prey on them,” he says. “Therefore, speaking metaphorically, they are reduced, like most weak creatures, to trickery and dissimulation.”
But Dr. Monica’s already fled the room.
Mrs. Himmel clicks in. “We’re starting,” she says, and flicks a switch. The Industrial hums to life. My limbs ache like an adolescent’s, the bad leg pounding at the knee. My lungs feel like they’re caked with mud. I breathe in.
And then it begins.
XXXI
JUNE 15
It’s the day of the earthquake, the nebula, the agoraphobe. On this day in history, on June 15, 1985, Ján and Janka Pfliegman are speeding down Back Lick Road in their shitty, dilapidated Rambler. The car flies past farmhouses filled with Virginian families behaving themselves, following the rules, up and down; it flies past the grassy fields that line the road; past the muddy embankment of the Queeconococheecook; past interminable clouds that linger over this county like jobless men in front of convenience stores. It flies past schools, churches, public buildings. It flies past a hundred telephone poles. But a few miles ahead, there is one telephone pole that is not standing upright like the others. It leans forward, as though looking for the speeding car that’s about to come roaring around the bend and drive headlong into its spine. The pressure from the accident will not, the experts marvel, break the pole, or even splinter it; instead, the car will set the pole upright. The likelihood that the car would hit this particular pole in this particular way and the pole would not break or splinter or uproot completely is a billion to one.
It is the day of the telephone pole.
It begins in a coat closet. The boy is lying on the wooden floor underneath a dozen wool coats, smelling the sweet, rotting wood, pawing the tails with one hand. The coats are gray with gold buttons. Heavy on the hangers. Outside, Ján and Janka shout his name, looking for him, but the boy lies still. He doesn’t move or even blink. The coats above stop swinging, holding themselves close together as if to cover and protect him, but then the closet door creaks open, the light pours in, and there’s nothing the coats, however big, however heavy, can do.
“Found him!” cries Janka.
They’re drunker than he’s ever seen them. Ján, especially, has a new, wild look. He’s holding the violin in one hand, a bottle in another. He chases the boy from the closet, out of the house that leans both east and west, out into the front yard, yelling here pig, here pig until he catches him.
Janka squeals and claps her hands. “Now what?” she shrieks.
Ján holds the boy by the shoulders and leads him over the horsefield, into the barn, and beyond the regular part to the linoleum part where they keep the white box. “Get in,” he says, and hiccups.
The boy obeys. He tugs his leg a little.
“You can fit,” his father says.
His mother closes the lid, and it seals above him, tight. He hears her laugh above him. It’s a game. The boy starts sweating. He doesn’t know whether it’s toxic amounts of carbon dioxide or just the heat of his own body, but the air around him becomes smaller. The walls close in. Turn the dial, a voice says. Flick the switch! He tries desperately not to think about the fish in the jar behind him, but he can feel it watching him. As if it knows something that the boy does not know. The boy closes his eyes and presses his hands against the inner wall. He produces a sound, a small wail, but they don’t hear him. They don’t respond. They do not know that he is capable of making sound. He has not spoken before, so they wouldn’t know what he sounded like even if he did speak, which he does now:
Janka covers her ears. “Let him out!” she laughs. “I can’t listen to that!”
Ján opens the lid. Inside, the boy is holding on to the walls with his palms. He looks at their faces and doesn’t know which is a worse p
lace to be: inside or out of the box. They take him out. “Hook him to the winch!” they cry, and lift his body up. The hook catches the back of his shirt and they turn the handle. Up he goes on the winch of the Coat Rack. They watch the boy dangle from the hook, sputtering, until they tire of him. They decide to take the Rambler out for a spin through the back roads of Virginia. They drive at a very fast clip: eighty, then ninety miles an hour— There are, it turns out, many ways a Pfliegman can fly. They drive so fast a molting pack of turkeys darts through the forest and doesn’t even see them. There’s just a roar, a flash of brown, the dirt and dust of the road kicked up and spinning in the air, but that is all. The turkeys chatter fanatically. But only a few miles past the turkeys, smoke begins to pour out from underneath the snout, and Ján is forced to pull over. He parks the car at the side of the road.
“What’d you do now,” says Janka.
“Shut up,” says Ján.
Janka swings open the heavy door and climbs out. Ján follows her. He lifts the hot hood with his bare hands.
“Transmission,” he says.
“Great,” says Janka, and she hiccups. “You done it now.”
At first, Ján says nothing. He walks away from the car, his hands deep in his pockets. But he only gets ten feet from it before he changes his mind. He rushes back at her and gets her clean in the stomach. Janka bends over and howls. She stumbles back a few steps as Ján stands over her, amused. She stays down longer than she needs to, then lifts her legs and swipes him viciously in the groin. Ján falls to the ground, holding himself. He grits his teeth. “God help me!” he cries, but God is nowhere in the vicinity. They are children. At play. And when the parents are children, the child becomes a butterfly.
“Get back now,” the Captain says. “Everyone make room.”
In the dark, on a table, in a room no bigger than a closet, in a town no bigger than a sneeze, my legs begin to grow. They grow long and lean, thin as needles. An unfamiliar pain enters the left side of my body, digging in sharp. It travels across my body, exiting on the right, and in its place, two appendages, one on each side of my torso, unfurl themselves across the table. As they grow, the ache they carry dissipates. My arms shrink up, elbow-first toward my chin, into small, reduced forelegs. The legs lie still at first, flopped over the edges of the table, but as my body feels the presence of new passages, blood moves quickly into them and they wave awkwardly in the air. The one bad leg has not miraculously healed itself—it will always droop off to one side—but now there are other legs to compensate. I now have six. Six legs, with several knees separating the coxa, femur, and tibia—
Carly Simon screams.
Janka, half-bent, crawls away from the car. She gets about ten feet away and turns to look at Ján. He’s still lying on the ground, curled in a ball, so she stands up and starts walking. She can’t go home because the boy is home, hanging from the winch, and she doesn’t feel like dealing with him. She walks down the road on those brutal clogs until her ankles pinch, and then she takes them off to go barefoot. After a few minutes she comes to a building with a large glass window in the front. Painted on the glass is a circle, and inside the circle is a picture of a galaxy. But Janka doesn’t know that it’s a galaxy. She doesn’t know about outer space. She does not, in fact, notice the logo at all. All she notices are the shiny new cars displayed behind the glass. She throws her feet into the clogs, opens the door, and walks into the place like she owns it. She walks up to the counter like she owns it. “I want a red one,” she tells the clerk. “Like one of the ones in the window.”
The clerk is blond and tan. Conventionally handsome. He’s wearing a short-sleeved, blue-collared shirt. Black trousers with an even cuff. A black belt is neatly cinched around his middle, and he wears an expensive, silver wristwatch. “That’s a Porsche,” the clerk says. “Not a rental.”
Janka scratches her legs. “So?”
The clerk takes a long and steady look at Janka. She’s terrifically short, and about forty pounds overweight. She’s wearing cut-off jeans with strings that hang down her hairy legs like broken cobwebs. A boxy T-shirt. She looks top-heavy, with legs too thin to fit her body right. Her teeth have not been brushed for months, and she’s defensive. She is not, he decides, the kind of customer they want at Galaxy Car Rentals.
“So you can’t rent it.”
Janka reaches into her purse and holds up a credit card. She curls her lip. “Listen,” she snarls. “I can rent anything I want. Or I’m calling the manager.”
The clerk smiles at the little woman. She can barely see above the counter. “About what?” he asks.
“About how you discriminate.”
“Against who?”
“Midgets.”
The clerk sighs and looks at his watch. He works on commission, and it’s been a slow day. It’s already three o’clock. So he takes her out behind the building to a small outdoor lot of less new, less expensive cars. He offers her a worn-out Escort.
“I want a red one,” she hisses. “Brand new.”
Another customer walks in. The clerk looks over his shoulder and winces. “Look, here’s a red one. It has some miles on it, but it’s still pretty new.”
“How much?” she says.
“Twenty dollars for the day.”
“How much for two days?” she says.
“Forty.”
“Three days?”
The clerk looks impatiently at Janka. “It’s the same price every day, ma’am.”
Janka opens and closes the doors several times. She honks the horn. She’s taking her time because she has a bad credit card, and she knows that once she drives the car off the lot she won’t bring it back. Maybe they’ll leave town with it. Or she could give a fake address and they could keep the car in the barn. Either way, it’s a winner. “What kind is it,” she sniffs.
“It’s a Mustang.”
Janka follows the clerk to the counter and smiles sweetly at him as she signs all the paperwork. He gives her the keys. Slipping on her clogs, she practically runs back outside to the car, and starts the ignition.
It howls to life.
Dr. Monica is correct: there is indeed something wrong with my stomach. Inside, it coarcts and bifurcates into two stomachs, the fore-gut and the hind-gut, bulging into a long, impressive abdomen that grows fatly down the table, shredding the adult-sized examining gown, moving away lengthwise from my body in ten even and distinct segments. I am growing in all directions now. The fingering, obstinate pain is gone. Chest down, my body glows, big and round. Healthy. A glistening sheen covers my skin, coated with a brush of soft, dark hair. My neck broadens into a thick thorax and suddenly tightens, making it impossible to turn my head.
Mrs. Himmel clicks in. “Remain still, Mr. Pfliegman.”
Two quick, club-ended antennae sprout from the strange lumps on my head, tossing my stylish woolen cap onto the floor, which the Indian quickly grabs and throws into his bag of textiles.
“Damn fine antennae,” says Isaac Asimov, chugging his beer. “Damn fine.”
Then Dr. Monica comes back into the room. She walks briskly over to the table to make adjustments. There is a blank look on her face. Not unkind; professional. She is doing the job that she has to do.
Mrs. Himmel presses the button and crackles in. “You should leave, Monica,” she says. “It’s not safe.”
Dr. Monica looks up at the window and protects me from Himmel’s view. “You’re wrong. I’m staying,” she says, and begins placing longer pads over my gigantic abdomen. Her gold cross shines.
Behind her, my forehead grows upward into two pointed and furry labial palps, the pink and raw skin hardening into scales. My mouth and nose spiral out into two long straws. It is a strong and perfectly formed proboscis. Coiled like a watch-spring.
“Beautiful,” breathes Darwin.
Even the Captain’s rooting for me. “Attaboy, Pfliegman!” he says. “Woo hoo!”
But suddenly it’s become very uncomfortable to be lying
down this way. I shift my entire body in one gigantic motion.
Mrs. Himmel crackles in. “Don’t move, dammit!” she commands, as the wet roots appear, heart-shaped, across my back.
“Make more room!” cries the Indian.
When Janka reaches Ján, he’s recovered somewhat, sitting on the side of the road cross-legged, holding his ankles, not unlike the way Szeretlek awaited the Hungarians in the inner courtyard of St. Gallen. But of course, this is no monastery courtyard. This is a millennium later, in a ditch on the side of the road in Front Lick, Virginia, and the man is most certainly not a giant in heart or mind. Mosquitoes loiter around his head, taking pot shots. He sees the red car drive up and rises excitedly. “Where’d you get that?” he says.
“It’s a Mustang,” she says. “Get in.”
They switch places. Ján drives. “This is a helluva nice car,” he says, and whistles.
“Did I do good?” says Janka.
He kisses her sloppily on the mouth. “You did good,” he says.
They turn the car around and take off down the road. They’re stopping by the farmhouse to get a few things before they leave. A few shirts. Some kitchenware. The boy. But after packing their things, they go out to the barn and discover that he’s gone. He’s not where they left him. They go back into the farmhouse and look in his room. They look inside the coat closet. It’s empty.
“He’s probably just out in the horsefields again,” says Janka.
“I’m sick to death of looking for anything in those horsefields,” says Ján.
They stand there, for a moment, in silence, then agree they’ll come back for him later. As soon as they can set up their butchering shop somewhere else. As soon as they get settled.
They return to the Mustang.
Wet and heavy, the wings take over, flipping me over to give them the space they need to stretch out from my body. My abdomen presses against the edge of the table, and then the swelling starts to go down. Fluid pushes into the veins of the wings. Mrs. Himmel leans on the intercom: “If you don’t stop moving, I’ll come down there,” but Dr. Monica shakes her head. “Ignore her,” she says. “Just concentrate,” so I concentrate on the wings. They rise up from the table like four large flags. The larger, more triangular fore-wings appear first, dripping a sticky fluid all over the X-ray table— Then it’s the hindwings. They reach out, wet from my body, assembling like tectonic plates, millions of scales shimmering against the light of the Industrial. They are so tall, I can feel the tips brush the ceiling— All orange, with veins of running black that delta into spots of white— How beautiful they are, everyone marvels. How they shatter the light! Even Madame Chafouin nods in approval. The wings crack open slightly, like the binding of a book, and then, quite involuntarily, flap down.