The Convalescent (15 page)

I look down. A piece of skin has lifted away from my elbow and is calmly peeling down one side of my forearm. It’s not like the usual flaky business; this peel is long and white. It looks like a grocery list. She turns my arm left and right.

“That’s odd,” she says. “Have you been spending a lot of time in the sun or something?” she asks.

It’s a stupid question. She doesn’t wait for a stupid answer. Instead, she wheels over to the counter and fusses with some gauze pads and tweezers and bottles of ointment. She produces a small bucket underneath a sink. The lid says
HUMAN WASTE
. Dr. Monica places a blue cloth on a tray that is also on wheels, and then sets up a small buffet of treatments. She picks up the tweezers. “Open your mouth if this hurts, and I’ll stop,” she says. “Okay?”

I nod.

Dr. Monica pinches the top of the skin with the tweezers and begins slowly peeling, glancing up at my mouth the whole time for movement. Which is fine. It doesn’t hurt. When she’s finished, her eyebrows raise as she holds it up and examines it. She deposits it into the bucket. The lid closes all on its own.

“So what’s this all about?” she says.

I don’t know
.

She studies my face.

I honestly don’t
.

“Tell me,” she says. “When was the last time you had a bath?”

A few days ago?

“A few days, huh,” says Dr. Monica. She clearly does not believe me. “Look, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but this is serious, Mr. Pfliegman. You could have some kind of rash or skin disorder. This could be some kind of advanced eczema, pityriasis rosea. It could be a serious fungal or bacterial infection, and I have to say I find it difficult to believe that you’ve taken a bath or a shower in the last few days. You need to be honest with me if you expect me to be able to help you. I can’t help you unless I know your health history, what your genetics are. Your parents. I need to know—”

I
am
being honest
, I write.

Dr. Monica inspects the raw pink patch on my arm and then points to my thigh. She moves a piece of my gown, and her face softens. “Oh Mr. Pfliegman, look,” she says. “Here’s another one.”

She picks up the tweezers and starts pulling off another long white strand, but this time the tweezers get too close, tugging the raw skin. I jerk my leg to one side.

“Does that hurt?” she asks.

I nod.

She puts down the tweezers and goes over to the sink. She runs a sponge under warm water, then slowly prods my skin with it. She moves with care and focus. She uses these sweet little stabbing motions as she cleans both places, then applies Bacitracin. “I’m going to prescribe you an antibiotic,” she says. “In the meantime, is there any change in your regular routine that you can tell me about? Your eating habits?”

I shake my head.

“What are you eating these days?”

I point across the room, to my clothes. She walks over and picks up the trousers. She reaches into the pocket.

A dozen yellow Evermore wrappers scatter to the floor.

“Is this
all
you’ve been eating?”

I nod, and then my head goes swimmy. My limbs feel heavy, like I’ve been consciously holding them in their sockets all day. I slump back against the examining table. I lean on one elbow, and the air that travels in and out of my body suddenly sounds deep. Hollow. My lungs try to open their valves, but the valves are paralyzed. Everything goes purple—

“Mr. Pfliegman,” says Dr. Monica. “Are you all right?”

I grab the edge of the examining table and try to bring the air in, gulping like a dying fish. The potato-shaped lumps on my head begin throbbing. It feels like they’re growing—

“Water!” she shouts. “Get some water!”

I leap off the examining table and make for the sink, but the swivel chair is in the way. My toes crunch into the wood. I grab the tower of paper cups and send them spilling all over the counter, then reach for the faucet but my hand slips off the handle—my head hits the edge of the counter and I slide to the floor and begin shaking.

“Rovar!” cries Dr. Monica. She rushes out of the room.

Lying here, shuddering on the floor of a pediatrician’s office, staring up at the ceiling, a rivulet of spit rolling over my beard, I think about certain dark moments when I consider ending the entire Pfliegman line sooner rather than later. Rather than hanging out in a broken bus for the next four or five dozen years, coughing one’s guts out, waiting like an injured bird to sputter the final sputter, gasp the last gasp, and in one shallow, anticlimactic breath, die off, why not just take care of the whole thing right now? But there is one thing that I have in the world that keeps me from carrying it out. It’s not the meat bus. It’s not Mrs. Kipner or Marjorie, and it’s not even Dr. Monica—

It’s Isaac Asimov.

In
The Collapsing Universe
, the last book on my bookshelf, Asimov writes: “
It is the gravitation force, and only the gravitational force, that holds the universe together and dictates the motion of all its bodies. All the other forces are localized. Only the gravitational force, by far the weakest force of all, guides the destinies of the universe
.”

One morning, as I was sitting in my lawnchair outside the bus, the book fell out of the sky and landed squarely on the grass in front of me, inches from my feet. Startled, I leapt from my chair, but the meat customer in front of me did not jump or flinch. She picked up the book and read the cover. She looked at me and said, “God knows you done something terrible.”

When Dr. Monica returned to the office yesterday, she brought Adrian and Mrs. Himmel. Mrs. Himmel was holding an oxygen tank. The women all peered down at me. Dr. Monica had never witnessed a seizure before—I can’t imagine that that sort of thing happens very often at her office. I can’t imagine too many of the Sick or Diseased children turn purple and knock over furniture and spill themselves all over her nice clean floor.

I tried to stand up. “Really,” I gestured. “I’m fine,” but Dr. Monica pushed me back. She took the oxygen container from Mrs. Himmel and began strapping on the mask. I smiled up at her, grateful, and then looked at the receptionist, leaning on the doorjamb, her arms folded over her swollen, domesticated bosom—

“
Faker
,” she mouthed.

It’s pouring out. Only one customer has come to the meat bus. I’m about to roll up the awning and pack it in when someone pulls up in a rusty sedan and parks at the edge of the field. It’s a housewife. She’s been to the meat bus before, but she only comes when no one else is around. She crosses the wet grasses in the rain, dragging two pallid-looking boys behind her. They’re soaked, and cling to her arms and legs as though someone is about to take them away from her. When she reaches my lawnchair, she unfolds a
wet five-dollar bill from her purse and gives me a tired look. “What’ll this get me?” she says.

Up close, her cheeks are heavy, laced with white pimples. Her hair is wrapped in a kerchief in the exact manner that Janka used to wear her own kerchief, cinched tight at the neck. I motion for the boys to stand under the awning, out of the rain, and then hustle inside the bus. I reach underneath a seat for the cardboard box holding the Carly Simon cassette tape, load it up with hamburger, four steaks, and two pork chops, and then lower it down from the window.

The housewife takes the box. “That’s too much,” she says. “The Big M would charge me sixty dollars for all that.”

For second I think she might refuse it, but the boys grip her tight— She lifts up the bill, limp as a leaf. I take it, and she does not thank me.

Which is fine.

When things do not belong to you, it is so easy to give them away.

But then the woman looks into the box again. “Boys, go back to the car,” she says. They shuffle off across the wet field obediently. The woman reaches in and holds up the Carly Simon. “Cain’t eat this,” she says, and hands me the tape. Then she holds up one of the domes of hamburger. Squeezed into the far right corner is a bright red label: B
IG
M.

I accidentally left it on.

The housewife steps out from under the awning, into the rain. She gives me an angry, bracing look. “Why don’t a butcher cut his own meat,” she says.

There happens to be a very specific reason why.

A few hundred years ago, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the Dodo bird had lost its ability to fly. It had lived undisturbed on the island for so long, eating the fruit that fell from the fruit trees, that there was simply no need. So when a Dutch penal colony invaded the island, bringing rats, pigs, and monkeys along with the convicts, the flightless Dodo was the first to go. On November 22, 1681, at 12:29 p.m., the last of the Dodo, sick and alone, lowered its curved beak, coughed pitifully, and then expired.

Go east to the United States, all the way to the eastern seaboard, and
over to Martha’s Vineyard. On November 22, 1932, the last remaining heath hen, a sickly looking, wood-colored bird that resembled the prairie chicken, stood on the beach at Aquinnas, the wind ruffling his feathers. He was looking for his friends, but there were no friends left. At 12:29 p.m., he stared out at the great blue expanse of ocean.

“
Gaw
,” he said, morosely, and then fell over.

Also on November 22, at 12:29 p.m., a motorcade turned the corner of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, making an easy left-hand turn past a school-book depository. Seconds later, some other bloodsuckers winked at each other, cocked their rifles, and took aim at the motorcade. It was 1963.

That was another kind of extinction.

And then there’s the boy. The skinny, obeisant boy. The apodictic age of ten. The morning of November 22, 1985, Ján enters his room and pulls him up from the cot with one arm. “Go get that thing you write on,” he says, and hiccups.

János Pfliegman has decided that it’s time to begin educating his son in the ways of meat. He brings the boy out to the barn, where he’s lined up pictures on the outside wall, one for each of the animals: Cow, Sheep, Pig. Each picture is covered in lines that map the bodies into trapezoids of standard cuts of meat. The boy is supposed to be homeschooled. There was once even rumor of a social worker, but the social worker never came. At her own desultory, apathetic whim, Janka shows him letters and numbers, and every year she fills out a form for the school. She licks the envelope and mails it. “You’d get killed over there,” she tells him, as though school is a distant, foreign war.

This morning Ján points to the butchering pictures and explains each of the trapezoids in long and slow syllables, occasionally tripping over the Hungarian like a crack in the sidewalk. He starts with the cow, gesturing to all of its parts, stern to bow: “This is the Round,” he says, “and this is the Hind, Shank, Rump, Loin, Short Loin, Flank, Rib, Plate, and Brisket.” He hiccups and points at the pig. “In the
disznó
, it’s the Ham, Fat Back, Loin,
Szalonna
, Ribs, Plate, Boston Butt, Picnic, Jowl, and Foot.” He gestures coolly to the lamb. “Now you.”

The boy picks up his writing tablet. János watches him. His eyes squint. His face looks amused, but there is always the possibility for anger. The boy’s throat feels tight; he can barely breathe for fear of getting it wrong.
He may as well be in a war, he thinks, and holds the pen steady. He writes
Leg
, and then
Rump, Loin, Rib, Breast, Shoulder, Shank
.

Ján checks his work. He’s pleased. He even smiles a little. “That’s good. That’s right,” he says, and kicks opens the door to the barn.

János Pfliegman sells his meat out of a small shop on Back Lick Road near the Queeconococheecook River—very near, in fact, to the field where I live now. The shop is a fragile mish-mash of boards and nails. Like a house made from a deck of cards, it is purely for display, and one month before János dies in a horrible car accident, the river will flood and drown it. The Queeconococheecook is a beautiful force, the lifepulse in this neck of Virginia, and wide masses of land will drown in the deluge. People will lose whole farms. Without Grandfather Ákos’s assistance, the flimsy meat shop is Ján and Janka’s only means of income, but the Queeconococheecook does not care about means of income; at the first mild pressure, the shop will collapse. The water will lift it up and deposit it in several incongruent pieces a few furlongs down the river, erasing any memory of their first and only commercial venture.

The shop is where the selling happens, but all the butchering, the beef/lamb/pork-chopping, always happens in the barn. Half of the barn is a regular, barn-like barn with splintery wooden rafters. Sheets of sunlight slide in through the cracks, and Ján keeps the pigs, cows, and sheep in this half. Today, using easy language and a gentle hand, Ján selects one of the pigs from its pen. He walks it though a narrow linking passageway which leads from the pens into a separate area. This part of the barn is floored with a peeling, floral linoleum. Iridescent track lighting hangs above in long, tragic bulbs. It
zuzz
es randomly. In the corner is a white box-shaped unit. Sensing that this barn-place is something very different than the other barn-place, the pig kicks its hooves outward and bucks up and screeches. The screeches are loud, as loud as the turkeys that roam the Virginia shrubbery in molting packs, but Ján says no one hears it. “Soundproofing,” he says, and raps his knuckle against a wall of the white box. He assures the boy that the animal feels nothing. He fingers the metal knobs. “They’re placed into the squeeze,” he explains. “The squeeze holds them tight, forcing them to walk into the center of the white box. Cain’t move that way,” he says.

The boy stares at the white box. It looks like a refrigerator, turned on its side.

Is that a refrigerator?
he writes.

“Carbon dioxide unit,” says Ján. He turns the dial and flicks a switch and the large pig ambles into the box. From somewhere around the back, a generator kicks in. Vents start running. They only have to wait forty-five seconds.