The Convalescent (18 page)

Madame Chafouin is polite. She averts her eyes. She reaches into her blazer for a cigarette and lights it, inhaling in experienced, body-deep breaths, then picks up
The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures
. She studies the greasy men on the cover, tracing their bare muscles with the tips of her fingernails. “
Débauche
,” she whispers. She continues smoking and fiddles with the taperadio, but as she does, an inch of ash slips from her cigarette. It falls lightly onto the corrugated rubber flooring and lands directly on Mrs. Kipner, who’s been lingering about her ankles. The ash spreads all over his head, his wings and thorax. Confused, he makes a series of unhappy clicking sounds. He starts flipping his wings like crazy, trying to shake the ash from his body, and accidentally tosses himself upon Madame Chafouin’s foot—

“
Déblatérer
!” she shrieks. She kicks the beetle from her foot and crawls onto the mattress, cursing in words I haven’t learned yet.

Mrs. Kipner soars to the front of the bus, landing backside-first on a passenger seat. His legs jerk and scramble like fingers on a keyboard. I capture him and wipe him off with a sleeve of the Disneyland sweatshirt, but his antennae thrash, menacingly. I look in the meat refrigerator to give him a tomato as a peace offering, but we’re out, so instead I cull a few droppings of congealed grease off the sink and scrape it on the edge of the tin can.

Pleased, the large beetle sniffs the air and then expertly flutters up from my palm, like a small hovercraft, to his perch. He forks the fat with his mandibles and then disappears inside his can to eat.

I return to Madame Chafouin and pick the long peel of skin off the floor.

She wrinkles her nose at it.

I take it outside to dump it, and then I get a good look at the bus. The Subdivisionists really did a number on it. Dents pock the sides like acne, but that’s not all: the grill is bent, the bumper slants to one side, a headlight in the snout is busted, the chalkboard has fallen face down on the grass, and the signs, once piled neatly under the carriage, now erupt from both sides, disturbed by whatever sleeps underneath them at night. From all this rain, the tires are swallowed half-deep in mud, forcing the entire bus to lean precipitously close toward the river. Everything, even the windows all look crooked, all pointing in the direction of the Queeconococheecook—

Madame Chafouin walks to the door of the bus and squats down on the steps. She lights another cigarette. “
Décloîtrer
,” she says. “
To leave the cloister. To return to the world
,” and then shifts her rump. She’s sitting on the letter from the Subdivisionists, wedged beneath the door last night. Balancing the cigarette between her lips, she neatly slices it open with one fingernail. She spits a fleck of ash to one side and reads aloud in clumsy English: “
Final acquisition of all land and buildings and/or Other Properties marked Property of Subdivisions LLC, will occur in twenty-four hours. Any buildings and/or Other Properties not moved in twenty-four hours will be transferred in ownership to Subdivisions LLC
.”

A funny itch suddenly tickles a spot directly between my shoulder-blades. I reach around to scratch it, and that’s when I feel it— Quickly, I hoist up the Frog Pond, leaning it against one side of the meat bus. I turn around.

A long pink stripe of raw skin is running clean down the center of my back. I look mowed.

Madame Chafouin appears in the mirror behind me. “
Dépouiller
,” she says, and clucks her tongue. “
To strip, to skin
.”

But when I turn around to agree with her, all that remains is the lingering smoke from her cigarette. She’s gone. The smoke hangs briefly in the air and then vanishes. A cloud passing into another cloud.

I once read that most people are afraid to live alone because to live alone means to die alone. They have visions of themselves eating their breakfast, enjoying the dripping sluice of a ripe plum, and then suddenly the lights go out and they fall face-first into their pancakes. People, it seems, are less afraid of loneliness than worrying about what other people will think when they’re found in some unappealing, disintegrating state, tongue out, one leg curled underneath the other, internal fluids in a puddle on the floor, etcetera. Most people are afraid that if left alone, they will not be
found
.

Being found is apparently of the utmost importance to people.

Crouching, Árpád entered the tent. A dozen pairs of eyes blinked and looked up. There was barely room on the dirt floor to walk, and the ceiling was so low Árpád had to squat to move anywhere. He had never seen so many living beings occupy such a small space. The creatures that stared back at him had big, thick knees, spindly arms. Hair so matted it looked glued to their heads. The straw sleeping mats were shredded or torn; there were no tables and certainly no chairs for anyone to sit on, and as a consequence all of the creatures were lying on their backs, holding their ankles, grunting. Worst of all, Árpád noted, was the stink of the place. There were no dried-meats hanging from the dried-meat-poles, but the smell of blood hung in the air like its own, animal perfume. A little fire glowed in the hearth, over which a stew boiled, filling the place with a rancid, oppressive stench. The air flap at the top of the tent wasn’t open, and so upon entry, the foul smoke seemed to grab his throat and squeeze. When the creatures saw him, they hooted, then quickly went back to chewing their feet. One of them ripped off an entire toenail with his mouth, hobbled over to the kettle and spit it in the stew.

Árpád shuddered. “Who is the leader among you?” he cried.

One of them, a sunken male, cackled. He crept over to Árpád and
touched his fine cloaks, and the others quickly followed. Their hands were stained. Fingernails caked in black circles of dried blood. They stroked him with their waving fingers, pressing his cloaks against their muddy cheeks, but they did not appear dangerous. When he elbowed them off, they scattered off, whimpering. When he accidentally clocked one of them on the head, the creature fell on the floor and farted loudly.

A wave of snickering trickled through the tent.

Then Árpád noticed an old woman sitting on the hearth by the fire. She was watching him with one eye, nursing the stew with the other. It was the same woman who had handled the watery delivery of Szeretlek, the one who bit down on Aranka’s nose to save the child’s life. Thirty years had traveled through Kinga’s body at the speed of three whole lifetimes. Most of her hair had fallen out; what remained on her scalp was just a coarse, gray halo. She had spent so much of her life squatting in the tent that her back had settled crooked; it rose up and arched behind her neck. Her skin clung desperately to her face, and her eyes were swollen from the burn of perpetual smoke. When she noticed Árpád staring at her, she unfurled her long and sinewy tongue, and pointed it right at him.

“You there!” he cried.

The old woman hissed.

The noise sent shivers through Árpád’s entire body. “I can feel my own bones,” he thought. “Just to look at her makes one feel dead.” Were it not for his desperation to find Lili, he would have grabbed the woman, tossed her out of the tent, and, in a fury fueled by the resentment of the mere existence of these hopeless faces, smashed the entire place to pieces— Instead, he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Who
are
you?”

Kinga giggled, her tongue hanging sloppily out of her mouth. She smiled large in Árpád’s face. Her teeth were splintered and her breath smelled orange. Wormy. Árpád felt his throat tighten with nausea, and he immediately dropped her. Kinga slapped one of us on the head to make a space for him on the hearth.

The creature squealed, disappearing into the writhing mass.

Árpád sat down, closing his eyes to ease the sickness. When he opened them, the woman was looking at him with a peculiar expression. She reached one of her bony hands all the way into her mouth, to the back of
her throat, and then, as though picking out a stubborn grain of food, she removed an entire, bi-pronged tooth.

She held it out to him.

The Grand Prince’s mustache quivered. But he took the tooth and held it between two fingers.

Kinga gestured for him to drop it into the stew.

Not knowing what else to do, Árpád held his breath and dropped it in. This woman, he realized, was a
táltos
. A shaman. A being embodying both the real and the unreal, the body and the spirit. The dead and the undead. He watched as she pulled back a sleeve of her cloak and stuck one of her bare arms into the stew. Amazingly, it appeared to give her no pain, and after a few minutes of slow stirring, she found the tooth. With a dripping arm, she examined it. “You are a
big
and
important
person,” she said, and swatted him playfully on the knee.

Árpád scowled. He did not like being touched by this woman. He was about to leave when she grabbed his cloak. “You’re looking for someone,” she said.

He sat back down. “I am.”

“A girl.”

Árpád gasped. “Do you know where she is?”

Kinga laughed so hard that she began to cough. The cough growled through her body, reaching elbow-deep as if to clean it. A marble of spit flew from her mouth, staining the front of Árpád’s cloak like birdshit.

He grimaced.

“You are a good leader,” she said, wiping her mouth. “For the most part, you are very good, and very kind.” Light flickered across her face. “But you have forgotten some of your people.”

Árpád was surprised. “Who?” he said. “Who have I forgotten?”

Kinga waved her hand around the tent. Árpád followed the hand to the hundreds of faces blinking back at him. The worst sorts of faces, with flaked skin and buttery hair—but it was the eyes which were the most difficult to look at: big and black. When they were upon you, it was impossible to tell what expression they meant to convey. Suddenly it came to him. Árpád remembered who these people were. “You’re the Fekete-Szem,” he said brightly. “The meat-cutters. The butchers.”

When Árpád said “butchers,” a rumble of disapproval grew in the tent.

“There is a
little
more to us than that,” said Kinga. She removed the ladle from the soup and licked it. She held it out to Árpád, intimating that he should have a taste.

Árpád held up one hand. “No,” he said. “
Please
no.”

Kinga grinned a mouthful of yellow, splintered teeth. She gagged as she spoke, her tongue slipping out of her mouth. “We were there,” she said, “when you led your people away from the land-mongering Pechenegs and into Carpathia; we were there when you became the leader of an entire nation, when your armies went out on the first barbaric raids. By designating us as the meat cutters, the official butchers of your new community, you have saved us from expulsion and certain death, it’s true—but then you abandoned us. Despite our new trade, we still live here, on the outskirts. We spend all day butchering for your people but are only given the most marginal of all marginal payments: hoofs, tongues, intestines. The occasional collop.” Kinga sucked in her tongue and continued, “Look around you. Look at the filth that surrounds you. Can you assure us that we will survive? Are you prepared to take care of us? Are you prepared to look into the mirror and see us looking back at you? Are you truly interested in creating a civilized state? A place where your people—
all
of your people—may live a comfortable life?”

“But I already made you butchers,” said Árpád.

The old witch spat and pointed a bony, scolding finger at him. “Thirty years ago, the Pechenegs swam across a river to wipe their muddy hands on your grasses, kick down the posts of your tents, bust all of your precious clay pots, and to ravage the weakest among you.”

Árpád blinked. “So?”

“So
we
are the weakest among you.”

Then she rose from the fireplace and pointed at a mountain of burlap behind her on the dirt floor. She lifted one of the pieces, revealing an enormous arm wrapped around another arm, an enormous leg around another leg. In an altogether ribald congregation of fat and sweat and massive, leg-wrestling thighs, Lili and Szeretlek lay pressed together, sleeping.

Kinga grinned. “And the weakest force,” she said, “guides the destinies of the universe.”

I decide that I have to go to Dr. Monica’s today, even though it’s a Friday and not a Tuesday. Even if I have to wait until the end of the day to see her.

It’s freezing out. The middle of my back feels tight and small. Extremely painful. I loosen the straps of my backpack and drag my leg across the field. Along the way, a cluster of fat moths flutters up from a cold pocket in the ground. They bop around my knees. I swat at them until I see that one of the moths is different from the other moths. This moth is gray-blue, with slightly inverted, heart-shaped wings. It’s not a moth at all, but a butterfly, posing as a moth.

“
The mockers and the mocked
,” Darwin writes, “
always inhabit the same region—the mockers are invariably rare insects; the mocked in almost every case abound in swarms
.”

The butterflies that live in the field are orange with black spots and slender, upbeat antennae. They arrive in the warm months and then move south before winter. But here it is, barely a week into April, and this fog-colored butterfly appears. He flutters weakly, ghost-like, over the wet grasses, in and out of the heavy wings of the fat brown moths that envelop him, until he disappears in the thither. I follow the moths out of the field and into the
forest to look for them, but by the time I reach the highway, the posse and their imposter are gone.

A car drives by. I wonder if the car will stop and the driver will get out and offer me a ride—this time I do believe I’d take it—but the car doesn’t stop.