“Duck!” cries the Indian.
It’s 3:30 p.m. János Pfliegman is driving around the dusty, curved back roads of Northern Virginia in a shiny red Ford Mustang. He’s looking to move from one place to another place successfully, in a manner not dissimilar to the exodus of the early Hungarians over a thousand years ago, but he would not know that. He has no sense of his heritage or his people. He has no real interest in history, just like he has no real interest in the present. He swats a mosquito on his neck; it leaves behind a bloody smear.
Janka, however, feels a small tug of remorse as they leave. She cranes her neck around and watches the farmhouse disappear around the bend. Her ankles ache. But as they turn the corner onto Back Lick Road, Ján and Janka look at each other, and each of them knows, as they often do, what the other is thinking: the Creature is not coming with them.
I notice, first, the absence of the cough. I’m breathing freely for the first time through new spiracles alongside my abdomen. I take several deep, satisfying breaths. I hold them and release without coughing or obstruction. My antennae swoop in circles as a wet wing smacks the metal arm of the Industrial, sending it spinning. My feet tingle, maneuvering into a hundred smaller joints, ending in a pair of claws that scrape the table, clutching the edge for support. They cannot hold. My thorax turns, and I accidentally slip off the table, the base of my long abdomen bumping the floor. I stand up, and for the first time there’s no nausea— The fore-gut and hind-gut are working as they should be working. I’m glad they cannot see my bug-face in the dark. My strange pointed head, my eyes huge and unblinking. Eyes like black pearls— Then there’s the lust. The absolute, matter-of-fact, irrevocable, insect lust. I scan the dark room for her and spot the fuzzy outline of her white pediatrician’s coat pressed against the table, and how she, along with all of them, cannot tear her eyes away from my spectacular wings— They are so beautiful, it’s difficult for anyone to speak. They shimmer in the pockets of light around the room. Moments of brilliant orange. Flashes of fire. They flip together and apart at their own will. I cannot seem to control their urges. It is their job. Body parts doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
“That’s it,” yells Mrs. Himmel. “I’m coming down there!”
It’s true. The boy is not in the barn, hanging where they left him. As soon as they drove away, he wiggled off the winch from the Coat Rack. The shirt tore, and he fell. He ran over to the white box, picked up the glass jar, and then fled the barn, the farmhouse, making it a few miles down Back Lick Road before coming to the top of a hill, right next to a line of telephone poles, which is where he is now.
The boy clutches the jar tightly to his chest.
A river gurgles nearby. So he crosses the road and walks over a sprawling, weedy field. He follows a narrow path all the way down to the Queeconococheecook. The embankment was once grassy, but the recent flooding ruined it. In his bare feet, the boy steps into the mud. It squishes between his toes. With some difficulty, he unscrews the lid of the glass jar. Then he holds his breath, dumps the watery contents into the river, and watches as the little fish, the hal, gets picked up in the whirling current, spinning in the froth and foam. Then it’s gone. Sent back to wherever it came from. The boy turns and walks away from the embankment, back over the field and up onto the road. But at 3:40 p.m., just as Ján and Janka are driving away from the farmhouse for the last time, the boy stops walking. He looks up at the telephone poles and admires the smaller, bent one. The one that leans forward. He likes bent things. Things wrecked, broken, rusted. Things that have no useful purpose. “Eldridge Cooner never writes about the small things,” said Grandfather Ákos, so the boy usually tries to appreciate any detail of the world around him: the spinning clouds, the wet, everlasting grass, the caterpillar embracing the leaf— But not today. Today he cannot seem to forget being stuffed inside the white box for fun; he cannot forget hanging by his shirt on the winch; he cannot forget the sound of the hal spilling into the cold running waters of the Queeconococheecook.
The boy moves quietly into the center of the road. He looks at the telephone pole and holds out his arms.
He lifts his chin.
A truck nearly hits him. A woman gets out and starts yelling, but the boy does not respond. She becomes angry and slaps him. He barely feels it. In the background, the radio goes on and on: “You’re so vain, you probly think this song is about you…”
The woman returns to her truck and speeds off. Seconds later, the boy spies a shiny red Mustang flying around the corner. He smiles inwardly, thinking how close he is to feeling better, or at least to feeling something, and steps into its path.
But something unexpected happens.
On June 15, 1985, at 3:42 p.m., just as the car is about to hit the boy, Janka sees him standing in the middle of the road and grabs the steering wheel. The car swerves left. The edge of the front bumper knocks him on the leg, turning the boy around to watch as if in slow motion: he watches the red car swerve again, this time to the right, and crash headlong into the telephone pole; he sees how the telephone pole, once bent, now stands up straight, pulling down a neighboring telephone pole six inches. Wires snap. Birds pitch and flutter around them. The hood of the car elbows into two distinct sections. Smoke rises up as though from a campfire.
It is a sacrifice.
The boy holds his sore knee. The leg will heal, but grossly, leaving him with a debilitating limp for the rest of his life. He hobbles over to the car and sees the driver lying against the left side window. His father’s hand is split neatly from the middle finger to the wrist. His eyes and mouth are open. His nose is twisted like someone turned it with a crank. Blood covers the rest, clothes and body. It glistens on the steering wheel. Pieces of shiny glass decorate his face like someone sprinkled it with sugar. The boy’s first thought is that his father is alive because his eyes are still open. He looks alert, like he’s going to growl to life at any second and reach for the boy’s neck. But his father doesn’t move.
The boy walks around the car to the passenger’s side. He looks at his mother.
Her face is hidden underneath a mass of tangled hair. Her right arm has been sliced at the elbow, and the boy can make out gruesome strings of bone and tendon. He stares at the wound; how similar it looks to the thousand wounds that he’s seen before. The meat separates in the same way from the bone. The Hind, Rump, Loin, Short Loin, Flank, Rib, Plate, Brisket, Chuck, and Shank. The body is different from the spirit. Her shirt is all blood. Her feet are turned at the ankles on the floor of the car, still firm in those unbearable clogs. The boy dares himself to move the pieces of hair and look at her face. Her eyes are also open, and her mouth is open, and she also looks as though she might blink several times and snap out of it. The boy snaps his fingers in front of her eyes, but there’s no response. He leans forward, closer to his mother than he has ever been before, and breathes in. For the first time, he smells her skin. Her greasy head, her hairy neck. He watches her mouth for movement, for the chance that she might recognize her son and whisper all of this terrible life is your fault. Then he looks back at Ján and recalls what Grandfather Ákos said:
“It’s in the eyes, they say.”
The appearance of the Pfliegmans has not changed much over the course of this last, brief millennium. Their skin is the same, weathered and flaked. They have the same greasy hair, brittle bones, toes that reach up and out like tiny fingers. They have a terrible time finding shoes. Wide, uneven eyes, eyes so dark they look black. They are sick a lot, but ignore their sicknesses. They do not know that their sickness is a legacy; that if given love, their decrepit bodies are capable of extraordinary beauty. It is the single missing ingredient. If Ján and Janka had been a little bit wiser, a bit more curious about their people, they might have understood why they, as teenagers, left home and came to Front Lick to start their own butchering business; why the Queeconococheecook, in her unpredictable wrath, flooded; why Nature would not select all of their best attributes (Ján had go
od kidneys, Janka had nice earlobes) for their accidental off-spring, but their worst; why the boy would stare at them every day with those same slippery, terrifying eyes as if to say: “How could you do such a thing?”
Another car comes speedily around the bend. When the driver sees the accident, he stops and steps out. He is tan and blond, wearing a blue collared shirt. One hand he keeps in the pocket of his black trousers, the other hangs to one side, displaying an expensive silver wristwatch. It is the clerk from Galaxy Car Rentals.
“Gosh,” he says. “Golly. You okay, kid?”
The boy nods. “I’m fine,” he says.
The man walks over to the smoking car. “Holy Mother of God,” he says, and skims his hands over his beautiful blond hair. “The card bounced,” he says. “I was chasing them because the card bounced. That’s all.”
The Captain stares at the power of my hind legs. So thin, yet they hold so much weight and heavy movement. The wings flap down and my mouth turns sticky. I need sugar. But there is a second need, from some deeper, sadder part of my abdomen. I wave my antennae and feel the scales on my wings, pigmented in thick, velvety patches, spreading my scent, searching for her, and she, who once smelled like tuna-fish sandwiches, now radiates a thousand smells: it’s her sweat, the cloudy, angelic pheromone, her pale skin, her vegetable hair, the meat of her own dark places. I smell it all and shuttle my numerous legs toward her. She freezes, watching me with careful eyes as I reach down and take her in my creeping arms. She allows me to fall onto her body, allows the orange wings to rise up into a full four-spread, allows me, as my blood pressure surges and the proboscis slowly uncurls, to lightly swipe her lips with mine. Which is wonderful.
“Szeretlek,” I whisper.
Time feels different now. Slower. Seconds churn by like big, interminable hours. Every movement, every pulse, is important. Small and important. I think only about movement, about the present, and leave her in the X-ray room, wide-eyed and stammering, turn my gigantic segmented body, squeeze through the door, and make my way in a very peculiar hopping fashion down the hallway, wings crashing into the walls, knocking down images of bucolic farmyards as I go.
“Hey!” cries Mrs. Himmel, but I ignore her. I throw all my weight on one foot—tarsus—and then I throw it all on the other. The wings expand into fans that scrape and bend on the ceiling. They wave and waft behind me as I tug them down the hallway, past the Good Mother and Stevie, who throw themselves against a wall. I turn every facet of my compound eyes to look at them, thousands of lenses linked to the optic nerve—
They scream.
I scuttle to Mrs. Himmel’s desk where she keeps her rows and rows of sugar packets. There are other sugar items as well—cookies and broken pieces of cake and a berth of individually wrapped chocolate bars, but they hold no appeal. I swipe the sugar packets to the floor and crush them with my forelegs until they open, white granules spilling out over the Berber carpeting. I bend down and try to drink the sugar, but it’s too dry. The granules stick to the tip of my straws—the sugar, it seems, must be fluid— I look up. The entire office is staring at me.
Spotted, orange wings fill the Waiting Area.
Mrs. Himmel comes hurtling down the hallway, and I quickly move back behind the reception desk. She picks up a broom from the closet and holds it in her meaty hands like a rifle. She threatens, Caw, caw, caw! I back away from her in large, uneven steps. My wings involuntarily beat down, crashing across her desk, snapping the telephone wire, shoving her computer monitor to the floor. She chases me back into center of the room where the wings have the space to explode from my body, beating in swoops, elevating me a few inches off the floor. There are flowers on the wall and I try to suck them, but they’re not real— A confusing, wincing noise chatters behind me, and I spin around to blue flashes of light flickering from a box hanging from the ceiling. I jab at it with a leg but it doesn’t stop. Something pushes against my backside, and I turn back around and stare at a thousand fractured images of a fat woman with a broom, jabbing at me. Shoo, shoo she cries, but I’m hungry. Libidinous. The need to eat and procreate is so overwhelming, I break the hinges to the door and press myself outside where everyone, the Police and the Security Guards and the Subdivisionists and the Mothers, are all standing in a semicircle, clutching each other.
One mother screams and runs across the street, her babe in her arms, but the others can’t move or even look away as I flutter up to the picnic table and stay there, out in the open air, beating my wings to stir the smells, the first of the summer sun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great deal of thanks goes to my parents, Thomas and Susan Anthony, for their unbending encouragement and support; Jim Rutman, for his extraordinary diligence and camaraderie; Eli Horowitz, who worked so tirelessly to help me better see what this book could become; also Dave Eggers, Anthony Schneider, and everyone at McSweeney’s, for the great honor of selecting me for the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award; Jacob Magraw-Mickelson, for creating such an accurate, jawdropping cover; Alan Cheuse, Susan Shreve, Stephen Goodwin and Richard Bausch, for giving me the first year of this book at George Mason University; Elena Vizvary, for taking me to Budapest; Michael Jones and Katalin Vescey at Bates College, for their wisdom of all matters Medieval and Hungarian, respectively; and a special thanks to the following people who all assisted in ways large and larger: Robin, Tom Hop, MacGregor, Maya, Tiné, Spitzy & Dave, Struve, Chicken, Amy, Ben, Tracy, Courtney, and my sisters, Kate and Julie. Finally, this book would not have been possible without the time and sustenance afforded to me by the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation.
INFLUENCING LITERATURE & RESEARCH
The Origin of Species: Charles Darwin, Modern Library paperback edition, 1993; National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies: Robert Michael Pyle, consulting lepidopterist, Chanticleer Press, Borzoi, Knopf, New York, 1981; Your First Hamster: Peter Smith, T.F.H. Publications Inc., The Spinney, Parklands, Denmead, Portsmouth, England, 1996; Home Butchering and Meat Preservation: Geeta Dardick, TAB Books Inc., Blue Ridge Summit, PA, 1986; The Complete Book of Water Polo: Ralph W. Hale, editor, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986; The Collapsing Universe: Isaac Asimov, Walker and Company, New York, 1977; Cassell’s French Dictionary, Concise Edition: J.H. Douglas, Denis Girard, W. Thompson, editors, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1968; The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat: Paul Lendvai, Ann Major, translator Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2003; Magyars in the Ninth Century: C.A. MacCartney, Cambridge University Press, 1930, reprinted 1968; Gesta Hungarorum (The Deeds of the Hungarians): Simon of Kéza, ca 1280 AD, László Veszprémy and Frank Schaer, editors and translators, Central European University Press, 1999; A History of Hungary: Péter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák, and Tibor Frank, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994; The Story of Hungary: Arminius Vámbéry, New York & London, Knickerbocker Press, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1886; History.com, “The History Channel: ‘On This Day in History.’”
Jessica Anthony, The Convalescent
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