The Convalescent (3 page)

Looking up at me was the biggest beetle I have ever seen.

He was enormous, with a waxy brown shell. He looked like a giant pecan. The beetle had apparently consumed the entire contents of a Mrs. Kipner’s Hungarian Goulash and grown so wide that his thorax stuck sharply into both sides of the can. He was trapped. I moved over to the window to get a better look at him and he blinked at the light. He flapped the hard-shelled blades of his back aggressively. His right eye was bright and healthy, but his left eye hung low, clouded with a white mucous. One of his wings was coated in little white spots, and he kept throwing his head back, in a futile attempt to scratch them. When I tried to reach in and help, he twirled his leafy antennae in a threatening manner, so I went into the fridge, found a rotten tomato, and dropped it into the can. He quickly lowered his pucker into the tomato and made long, satisfying slurping sounds.

I call him Mrs. Kipner.

Once I tried to rescue Mrs. Kipner from the tin can by popping him out with a knife, but he wouldn’t budge. I pressed down too hard, and the knife slipped a little, accidentally shucking off a small piece of shell. He squealed with unhappiness. Every time I came at him with the knife after that he twirled his antennae, so for the most part I keep my distance from Mrs. Kipner. I feed him slices of tomato and keep his tin can open, perched on a windowledge of the bus, so if he ever wants a peek at the big old world, he’ll have a nice view.

But even without Mrs. Kipner, I’m not alone. Not by a long shot. Moles burrow underneath the bus, searching for the heat that travels underground from the generator; wolves bay in the distance, their breath spooling out in long clouds; and then there’s the field itself. The presence of the bus, the human being, his beetle, and his collection of literature has somehow altered its natural state. Grass out here grows like it’s pushed from the earth and fed
by the sky. There’s this one blade of grass that’s taller than I am. She greets me every morning at a window of the bus with an endearing
tap-tap
sound.

I call her Marjorie.

In the summer sun, Marjorie hangs like a palm frond. In the fall, she waves in the wind in a friendly manner, and in the winter rains, she slaps the wide flat of the windows. In the spring, she grows. So you can see that I am not alone.

But there are those who do not understand my small and vibrant community.

“White people,” said the Indian, shaking his head. “You live out here all by yourself?”

He was standing in the center of the bus, leaning one large hip against a passenger’s seat. I couldn’t remember how he even got here. He glanced at the books parked on my bookshelf. “Those belong to you?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

He reached into his bag and produced a copy of Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
. He said he was reading it to understand how white people think. “Turn to page one,” he said.

I turned to page one.

“
The existing forms of life
,” the Indian recited, “
are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms
.” He produced a toothpick and began cleaning his teeth. “My grandfather said white people have no history. As a consequence, they always have to change to fit their environment. It’s how they have survived, and it’s why they can’t be trusted. Saying one thing and then doing another—”

The Indian went on for a while, but I was more excited about the book. New reading material is rather scarce when you live in a field in a bus. I went to the meat refrigerator, reached for my highest priced section, and handed him a blushing, swollen lambshank, the color of spring peaches. He looked pleased. “My grandfather said all white people are made of hate and Elmer’s glue,” he said. “But you don’t seem like a glue sort of fellow to me.”

I tried to laugh, but a cough bubbled up instead. I stumbled over to a passenger’s seat and slumped into it, hacking away. Something wet flew from my mouth and landed smack on top of
The Origin of Species
.

“That doesn’t sound good,” the Indian said. “Would you like something hot to drink? I’ll make some tea.” He stood up and looked for the
food cabinet, but I am a man who lives in a bus. I do not have a food cabinet. “Some hot water then,” the Indian said, and wandered over to the stove. Outside the sky darkened, and thunder rolled above us. The air inside grew hot and thick. The Indian found a rusty pot hanging from a nail and went to the sink. He turned the knob, but the water never came. Slowly, he replaced the pot on the nail, just as it was. Then noticed a pile of envelopes lying next to the sink. “
Rovar Pfliegman
,” he read. “Is that you?”

I coughed again.

The Indian picked up one of the envelopes and turned it in his hands. “It says that it’s from Subdivisions LLC. It looks important. You’re not going to open it?”

I held on to the Darwin tight, suddenly nervous for some reason that the Indian might want his book back, but he stayed focused on the envelope.

“It’s marked Urgent,” he said. “Would you like me to open it for you?”

It was clear that the Indian was looking for some conversation, it was clear that he wanted to open the envelope and chat, but herein lies the rub: I don’t talk. At all. Certainly not since Ján and Janka died, but I’m not even sure I ever really talked before.

I’m no mute—let’s just get this out of the way right now. I don’t speak words, but there’ve always been noises, and as far as I know mutes don’t make noises. I make all sorts of noises. The loud
blat
, the long
shhhhug
, the
murgle
. The heaving
wherge
.

And I’ve always been coughing. My coughs are full-bodied, lung-flattening coughs that give me headaches and nausea. The occasional, errant nosebleed. I once counted the number of times I cough in a day, and it was over two hundred before I fell asleep. That means I cough over a hundred thousand times a year. A million times since I’ve lived in the bus.

Two million times since the death of Ján and Janka Pfliegman.

When he realized that I don’t talk, that I just sit in this bus, coughing, the Indian put the envelope back on the pile. He ran a finger around it one last time. “I’ll leave it here for you, in case you want to read it,” he said, and then a drop of water splashed onto his hand. He looked up. Rain hit the bus all at once. It sounded like beans being poured on a snare drum. “There’s a crack in the ceiling,” he said. Then there was nothing else to say. He climbed down and looked around the bus, nervously. He wiped his brow.

I sat back in the passenger’s seat, watching him. Listening to the pleasant
hum of the meat refrigerator. He could have been nervous about the bus, but I think he was more nervous about me.

Most people are.

I expected the Indian to leave at that point, but instead he sat down next to me, reached into his bag, and produced two cans of beer. He offered me one.

I shook my head.

He shrugged and snapped one open. “I don’t get it,” he said. “My grandfather said white people can’t exist without speaking. He said they’re all just imitations of each other, so it’s like they have to speak to distinguish themselves.” He took a long drink of the beer and roundly belched. “They’re like mirrors or something. Illusions.”

If I could speak, I would have told him about the time a Virginian drove up to my bus with a mirror in the back of his truck. The mirror was big and oval-shaped, framed in gold leafing. He said it was something his ex-wife bought and it’d been hanging in his living room for twenty years and he couldn’t stand the thing. The man looked tired. “The dump won’t take it,” he said. “So I thought you might want it.”

Of course I didn’t protest, so he hauled the mirror out of the back of the truck and laid it down on the grass by my bus. “There,” he said, and wiped his hands. “That looks super!”

After he left, I walked over to the mirror, took one look at what was staring back at me, promptly started gagging, and found no reason ever to look in it again. Weeds quickly engulfed the frame, and now the mirror looks exactly like a gentle frog pond.

Which is fine.

“Hell,” said the Indian, “this bus could be an illusion.” He polished off the beer and stood up, rubbing his stomach. “I don’t suppose you have anything to eat that isn’t raw?” he said. “A sandwich?”

I shook my head. He walked to the front of the bus and opened the door of the meat refrigerator to look for sandwiches. Then he craned his neck around the driver’s seat, but there were no sandwiches there either, so he slung his bag of textiles over his shoulder. He stepped down from the bus and crossed the wet field, swatting at field ticks, and did not turn around to wave. Which was fine.

I rapped a knuckle on the side of the bus to see if the bus was an illusion.

It wasn’t.

But I liked the Indian. I would have liked it if he’d stayed. If he’d stayed, we could have listened to music together. I could have brought out the tape-radio and played some music. Silence, I’ve noticed, makes people uncomfortable, and music always helps.

Most people are not content to listen to the hum of a meat refrigerator.

I suppose it’s just as well, since I only have two cassettes for my tape-radio: Bach fugues and
The Best of Carly Simon
. They were given to me by a magnanimous Virginian who thought I’d get lonely living out here in a bus in a field by myself. I played the Carly Simon once all the way through and then suffered a twenty-four-hour panic attack. So I never listen to the Carly Simon. But I listen to the Bach. I enjoy the way the notes are simple at first, and then become complex. Mrs. Kipner likes the Bach as well; he likes it when the notes get faster, tripping over each other. When this happens, he lifts his head and makes a sound like a tiny drumroll.

There’s also the radio part of the tape-radio, but the antenna broke a long time ago. I put a paperclip in the hole, so now I only get a station that plays German pop songs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, with an announcer who cries, “
Deutsch Hits aus den Fünfziger, Sechziger, und Siebziger!
” I’ve tried placing other items into the antenna hole: a tack, a rolled-up piece of aluminum, but then I get no reception at all. So I don’t listen to the radio too often. Which is fine. If I listened to music it might seem like I was an active part of the community, the general populace.

And this, I am most definitely not.

According to
The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians
, the old history book that is, at this precise moment, leaning slumped to one side of my small bookshelf, as the Magyars throw saddlebags over their horses, don their finest, pointiest hats, and set off into the wilderness, we Pfliegmans perk up from our holes and chatter disagreeably. We do not know much, but we know that we cannot endure the raids of the Pechenegs alone. Hatless, horse-less, and saddle-less, we hop on donkeys and, unbeknownst to the good and civilized Magyars, follow their horses in a long, slow fumble away from the Steppes of Asia, southwestward to the Carpathian Basin.

As they march confidently over the Ural Mountains, through the Verecke Narrows, easily passing the Impassable Forest, we miserably stumble our way up one precarious slope of the Urals, and begin slipping farther and farther behind them. Before now, life was divided into categories of Things That Will Hurt Us and Things That Won’t, but now life’s not so clear. As a consequence, we Pfliegmans fear the whole earth: the forests that sway and whistle in wind, the bad ice that sometimes cracks beneath our feet. Most of all, we fear the Man in the Sky. We fear His frigid winds, His omniscient darkness. We fear His rain.

Our fear is not wholly unfounded: we Pfliegmans fear the rain because we are more prone to sickness than other people. We are prone to all kinds of sickness. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that, as a people, we are just plain
prone
. There was every chance in the world the little Pfliegman tribe would never make it. In
The Origin of Species
, Darwin writes, “
If any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will be exterminated
.”

It is the design of the Pfliegman, it seems, to live according to Nature’s bitchy whim.

Still remaining among us on the journey, however, is the she-Pfliegman who suffered the cruel misfortune of becoming pregnant before we left. She stumbles along the slippery rocks, cutting her fingers on sharp branches as she reaches for support. Nine hundred years earlier, another pregnant woman named Mary followed a similar path, keeping an eye out for the inn or whatever, settling for a barn, but this little troll is not the Virgin Mary; she does not know the story of Mary, nor does she even know that she is Woman. She is a Pfliegman. Right now she’s hoofing it up a mountain, gasping for air, hot with sweat and dirt and body oils. Right now she would
kill
for a frigging barn. The child growing inside of her presses down on the coils of her gut. Breathing is difficult. Fever boils in her throat. She wheezes painfully, looking for the male who made this happen to her, but he’s ditched her for another she-Pfliegman, one who can walk faster than she can. One with swooning, pendulous breasts. If it were possible for her to say it, if she could possibly formulate the words, she might mumble “Mother-
fucker
”; instead, she reaches forward and grabs on to the pelt of one of the Pfliegman men in front of her. She gives him a desperate, pleading look.

Annoyed, he shoves her off.

So when she reaches the crest of the mountain, she stops walking. With relief, with sorrow, she realizes that she cannot continue. She steps out onto a large rock, balances herself and her large belly for a moment, and then, as though nudged by a gentle breeze, pitches herself forward down the mountainside.

Of the half a million early Hungarians on the march, only one, a man riding high up on horseback, happens to glance behind him. He is an
extremely healthy and appealing early Magyar. Muscles pepper his body. He wears a thick warm cloak secured with a strap of leather, and a pointy hat made from fabrics the color of sunset, peaked with a shiny gold button. The world has been easy on this man. He overflows with inner resources. He is happy for his people and often surges with pride. He will throw his hands in the air and cry, “We are a new people!” or “This is an historic journey!” But as he turns his horse around to gaze at the shoulder-shaped peaks of the Carpathians, at the wide, sagacious eastern sky, he watches, in horror, as a pregnant woman tumbles down one side of the mountain.