The Convalescent (20 page)

Elise throws her head back and laughs. “
I’m
not the one who’s gotten chubby, Mother.”

Mrs. Himmel finishes cleaning her glasses with the bottom of her sweater, and then steps forward and slaps Elise. The Waiting Area goes silent. The Sick or Diseased children stop playing and stare at Mrs. Himmel. One of them whimpers. The mothers pretend not to hear or see anything. They hide behind their magazines.

Elise says nothing; she touches her cheek and gets a funny look on her face, like she’s just acquired a piece of knowledge that no one knows but her. She walks to the front door and stares outside at the picnic table.

Mrs. Himmel mutters to herself and returns to her desk.

I think about the note I wrote, and write it again on my writing tablet. I walk over to Elise and hand it to her.

She looks down at me, surprised, and then takes the note:

Your daughter is quite beautiful
.

Although her skin does not possess the same radiance as Dr. Monica’s, the way she holds the note, as lightly as all lovely women hold things, is stunning. What I’ve written on the note is true: Elise really is beautiful.

“Your-daughter-is-quite-beautiful,” she reads, and then looks at me. “I don’t have a daughter.”

But Mrs. Himmel has seen Elise conversing with the Creature. She leaps up and runs over, standing right between us, her arms folded over her chest. Eyeglasses chained around her neck. She snatches the note out of Elise’s hands and reads it, mortified.

“
Out
,” she says.

Adrian returns with her folders. “Really, Mrs. Himmel, is that necessary?”

I’m sorry
, I write, and hold it up.

Mrs. Himmel remains unfazed. Afternoon clouds pass across her eyes. “Out!” she shouts, and points at the door.

I gather my things and follow Mrs. Himmel’s finger toward the picnic table. The sky is growing savagely dark. I look at her as if to say, “But it’s going to rain.”

“Get it together, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says, and slams the door.

I sit on the picnic table and stare across the road at the Big M supermarket. “As if I even
could
,” I want to say, as rain begins needling out of the sky. I might as well climb Mount Massive. And get
what
together? How can you
get it together
when there isn’t anything there to get in the first place?

Why on earth would a person even want to recover when’s there’s nothing worth recovering to?

At that moment, a very tall, very lanky woman saunters around the corner of Dr. Monica’s office. She’s got long blond hair and a mouth so big I can make out her skeleton. She’s wearing high-heeled sandals and a halter-top, and drags one finger along the brick as she walks. It’s Carly Simon. Her face matches the picture on the cassette tape, exactly. She crosses the wet grass and climbs up on the picnic table next to me, swinging her sandals. She looks at me with laughing eyes as the wind whips through her feathered hair. She presses her finger on my nose and tugs at my ears. Her lips swell. “I’ve known you since you were a small boy,” she coos, showing her big teeth. The halter-top has a wide, sloping neck that hangs off one shoulder. Her clavicle’s so sharp it looks like she got a stick in the neck.

I ignore her.

“That’s a nice coat you have,” she says, fingering the wooly lapel. “Was it expensive?” She leans in close and looks at me. Her eyes are heavy with black stuff that falls from her lashes in little flakes.

“Are you horny, baby?” she whispers. She starts prodding me, reaching inside the lapels of the coat. I try to push her off, but she’s stronger than I am. She wraps her arms around me and fiddles with my zippers.

“
Frapfth
!” I cry. “
Beschsmowg
!”

Then it really starts coming down. Carly Simon throws back her head, leaps off the picnic table and begins dances around the soaked grass in her high heels. “Whee!” she cries.

I look longingly into the window of Dr. Monica’s office, and make eye contact with one of the Good Mothers. She sees me out here, getting soaked in the downpour, and although part of her knows that she should say something, she says nothing. She pretends that she never saw me at all. She goes back to filing her nails.

Adrian sees me, as does Mrs. Himmel. “He’s got his coat on,” she says.

Across the street, three Security Guards appear in front of the glass doors of the Big M. They’re arguing, and gesticulate wildly. Shoppers linger in the parking lot to listen. Herman lumbers around the other two in his signature figure-eight until a police car pulls into the parking lot. It drives underneath the
ENTER EXIT
sign, right up to the entrance of the supermarket—

The siren
woot
s.

I slide down from the picnic table, grab my backpack, and hustle down the street to Mister Bis’s, leaving Carly Simon dancing on Dr. Monica’s front lawn, laughing in the rain, stretching out her middle parts and showing off to the entire civilized world her long and shapely legs.

When he realized that it was Lili and the Giant lying together in that horrible, putrid tent, in their twisted love, my Darling, the Grand Prince completely lost it. He tore the bird-helmet from his head and started whacking us with it. He tipped over the kettle of stew, grabbed a log out the fire with his bare hands, and chucked it across the tent.

“Exile!” he cried. “You’re all exiled!”

He brought the hard apples out from the pockets in his cloak and started hucking them at our kneecaps, and then, when there was nothing left to huck, he removed his gigantic sword from his belt, waved it at the burlap sacks covering his beloved in bed with a monster, cried, “
Hooy Hooy
!” and made directly for Szeretlek’s heart.

Lili, awake the minute Árpád had hurled the burning log, jumped from the burlap and pulled Szeretlek out of the tent, into the rain.

“Whore!” Árpád cried, and slapped her across the face. “How could you
do
this to me?”

“You’re
loony
,” she said.

Then the little children, the ones Árpád had encountered earlier, poured out of the forest. They were all soaking wet, and the boy they had been carrying on their shoulders was missing. Árpád stopped them with one
flat hand. “You there!” he said. “Where is your little friend? The one with the limp?”

The wet children stared at him blankly, as if they’d never heard the sound of human speech. They had clearly already forgotten about the boy, and now were only paying attention to the apples that rolled along the outskirts of the tent. They skirted around his legs and went straight for the fruit, punching each other on the heads and shoulders. One girl got her hands on a particularly fat apple, but a larger boy saw it and the girl got a fist in the eye. Árpád wondered that she did not start to cry, but instead gritted her teeth, jumped onto the boy’s back, and chomped down on his ear. The boy squealed. She squeezed her eyes and bore down and managed to work off a piece of the boy’s ear in her mouth. The boy burst into tears and let the apple roll from his hands. The girl comfortably spit the ear part out, blood greasy on her lips, and scampered over to collect her spoils.

Árpád scowled. He wanted very much to punish them, but they all looked so wretched and beaten that any further punishment would only seem redundant. Despite the fact that Lili had chosen this gigantic
thing
, this cataclysmic
zero
, this creature that came out of these People Who Were Barely People instead of him; despite the fact that he was nearly boiling with animus, Kinga’s words remained in his ears:

“
We are the weakest among you
.”

By designating the Fekete-Szem as the meat cutters, the official butchers of the Hungarian community, Árpád had saved us from expulsion and therefore certain death. Like it or not, we belonged to him. Watching the little girl chomp savagely into her apple, swallowing the bitter fruit in licks and gulps, Árpád realized that if he did not care for us, the lowest common denominator—no matter how filthy or backward or solipsistic—the Hungarians would become a race of monsters. He had seen what had happened to human beings exiled from their communities up North, over the Ural Mountains; he had seen how within seconds the air could freeze them into gray statues; how the wind from boundless plains of the barrens could blow the life-breath right out them.

“
Nature acts on every organ
,” writes Darwin, “
on the whole machinery of life
.”

Árpád knew that he had to somehow protect these people, even if only from themselves. So when Szeretlek crawled out of the tent and fell upon
one heavy knee in front of him and begged, “Please, do not cast them out. It’s not their fault—” the Grand Prince quite agreed.

“Your people may remain,” he said. “But only if
you
are exiled.”

The giant man bit his giant lip. His eyes watered.

Árpád raised one hand. “You will follow the river,” he announced, “until the river ends. If you are ever seen here again, by anyone, you will be cut in half. Or at the very least, exposed to—”

“
Hopeless situations
,” said Lili. She fake-shivered.

Árpád spun his cloaks and faced her. He lifted the lid of the bird-helmet. “And as for
you
,” he seethed, “you will make a life for yourself here, among these meat-cutters. These feet-suckers. You will watch over them and take care of them until I return.” He inched closer to her, lifting himself up to his tiptoes, his mustache dancing with anticipation. “And then you and I shall be reunited, Love Button,” he whispered. “And we shall be very,
very
happy.”

Árpád’s officers waited outside as Lili and Szeretlek prepared for his departure. Inside the tent, the scene was somber. We Pfliegmans felt the heavy presence of authority and murmured quietly amongst ourselves. We watched Lili and Szeretlek pack up his things. One of us occasionally let out a weeping cough. Another sneezed. Another chewed off a hangnail too close and sniveled with self-pity. There was not much to pack: Szeretlek owned nothing beyond his cloak, his undershirt. Lili threw her head back, loudly worked a nubble of phlegm from her sinuses, and spit it professionally across the tent in one clean
thip
.

“This sucks,” she said.

Szeretlek shuddered with love. “
Szeretlek
,” he said.

“Me too, babe.”

The enormous man gazed at her face, moving his head all the way down her torso, kissing each fold of her stomach, all the way between her rolling, dimpled thighs. “I’m not good enough for you,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Lili. “You’re awesome.”

“But I’ve been
exiled
,” he whined. “How will I possibly be of use now?”

The Giant did not know how to hunt or fish, and he certainly wasn’t much of a farmer. His only unique talent seemed to involve the blunting
instrument with which he had clocked innumerable cows over their innumerable heads. What use, he wondered, is a large man with a soft brain?

“I can haul rocks,” he said, miserably. “I can dig holes.”

“You can leg wrestle,” said Lili. She threw herself on top of him, pinned him to the ground, and locked her bare legs around his. “And you
belong
here.” She grabbed her crotch and grinned.

Szeretlek stared at her, and his chin trembled. “I’ll be so lonely.”

“You’re not alone,” said Lili. “You have me. You have
Ember az Égben
.”

“Who?”

“The Man in the Sky.”

Szeretlek thought about it for a second, then grabbed Lili’s waist and buried his head in her stomach. “I don’t
want
to go!” he cried.

Lili pulled her hair back and began turning it into two thick braids. “You don’t have to,” she said. “These men aren’t going to stay here forever. Just go for a few days. Follow the river for a day or two, and then turn back. By the time you get home, they’ll be gone and no one will ever know.”

Szeretlek sat up. His eyes were blotchy and puffed, but he blinked with hope. “Do you think it would work?” he said.

“Why not?”

He wiped his long cheeks. Things looked considerably brighter. “I never thought of that,” he said, and punched her on the arm. “You’re
smart
.”

“No,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

Lili folded up the burlap on the floor for him to wear as a coat, and she packed him a heavy bag of ját. As Szeretlek watched her, he was filled with a sweeping, unmitigated desire. He grabbed her thick waist and tossed her onto the dirt floor. Lili locked her legs in, and they both laughed as they wrestled. Their laughter echoed around the tent.

We Pfliegmans heard the laughing and hung back. We shook our wobbly heads. We knew that to laugh was a dangerous thing: laughing meant that one was enjoying oneself, and to be enjoying oneself only meant that later on, at some horrifying, unanticipated moment, one would not be enjoying oneself at all. Far better, we believed, to celebrate nothing and keep the pain constant, than to feel your body rise up, lifted high by the Man in the Sky’s nimble fingertips, to only then be released, plummeting to the hard earth below. This had happened to a few of us before, this lifting and
dropping. Every once in a while, one of us would rise up in the tent, hover in the air for a moment, then fall back down again, landing clumsily on some crucial appendage. So while we may not have been the most capable, the most intelligent of the early Hungarian tribes, when Isaac Asimov was nothing more than a twittering future prospect, a modern
táltos
bearing hunky white muttonchops, we Pfliegmans innately understood the laws of weakness, of gravity. We understood that what rises must inevitably fall.

Szeretlek rose from Lili’s arms and strode outside to greet Árpád’s officers. Standing in front of him was a large and healthy horse, as it was the custom among the proto-Hungarians that if a man was to be forever banished from the country, he should at least be given a ride.