The Convalescent (6 page)

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he said. “I just told you, I’ve got
two
wives.” He took his hands off the wheel and rolled down the window, threw an arm in the air, and shouted, “I have two wives!”

His voice disappeared into the wind.

“You can’t
imagine
how good it feels to say that,” he said. “To be honest, that’s kind of why I picked you up today. To get it off my chest. If I didn’t tell someone, I’d lose it, I swear.”

Then Ted shifted gears, and the car stopped, right in the middle of the highway.

“So that’s it,” he said. “You can get out.”

I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Get the fuck out of the car.”

I scrambled out and shut the door. Ted roared off. I didn’t realize until he was gone, dust spiraling behind the Escort in two long cones, that I was still holding his book. So now I am the owner of
The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures
. I keep the book on my bookshelf with the others because
despite Ted’s marital failings, these men on the cover are the best physical specimens of men that I’ve ever seen. Men with two beefy legs.

The most enviable biceps.

Sitting here in Dr. Monica’s office, my eyes tripping along the pattern of the floral wallpaper border, the television murmuring hypnotically, I think to myself, “If I weren’t sick, I’d have a shot at looking like one of those men.” I’d stand up straight and shave my beard and stick out my chin. The dark holes in my face would illuminate, the lumps on my head would disappear, and my hair would fill out thick and smooth. My eyes would clear up, and I would impress people by how far away I could read roadsigns. My shoulders would right themselves, my ankles would turn from in to out, and my bad leg would heal. I’d be able to walk in a straight line with my head up, not conspicuously studying the ground for any crack or split in the pavement, holes where my foot might catch and send me catapulting to the ground— No! I’d smile with a frown and shake my head good-naturedly and talk about sporting events and the rising price of gasoline. I’d have friends with man-names like Joe or Jack or even the Captain.

Here we are, the Captain and the Creature, standing waist-deep in the waters of the Queeconococheecook! Our shirts are off. I’ve shed my pink sweatshirt and my stylish woolen cap on the embankment. We’re both in Speedos. My body is somehow bigger today: swollen, bronzed. Rippling with meat. My face is shaved clean and my eyes are functioning so well I don’t need eyeglasses. I’m almost
good
-looking. The rapids are strong and the wind blows our hair back and we’re cold. A shimmering white net appears out of nowhere. The Captain looks at me and silently puts on his helmet. A yellow ball floats down river. He grabs it and tosses it high in the air and punches it. It hurtles toward me. I jump high, as though lifted by the water itself.

“Spike it!” the Captain cries.

I raise my arm and the ball crashes into the river. The Captain claps and laughs. “Well done, Pfliegman!” he shouts. “Woo hoo!”

I’d do all of these things if given the chance to be anything other than what I am now: this withered cretin, this gimp, this half-finished mold. This golem.

He who has never been woo-hooed by anyone.

I summon some Manliness to feel less feeble than I really am. “
Rrrr
,” I say.

Mrs. Himmel looks up from her computer monitor. She stares at me. Then she picks up the phone and begins urgently whispering: “I’m sorry, but I don’t like the way he just sits here all day, looking at me. It’s unnerving.”

Moments later, Dr. Monica appears in the doorway of the Waiting Area. She’s holding an enormous baby in her arms. It’s one of the biggest I have ever seen. Its head is nearly as large as her own. Even the limbs look adult. She struggles to move it from one hip to the other as she walks to Mrs. Himmel’s desk. She grabs a long yellow writing tablet and then comes over to me. She hands me the tablet. A pen. “It’s just something to keep you occupied while you wait,” she says, and shifts her weight.

I pick up the pen.
What should I write about?
I write.

She shrugs. “Just write how you feel.”

But my Darling, I want to say, it’s difficult for Pfliegmans to write how we feel because we are not now, and never have been, a sentimental people. After all, it’s difficult to romanticize anything when one is so hungry one licks one’s own arms for the salt. When one can fit one’s fingers underneath each wing of one’s own ribcage. When one’s own limbs feel as though they don’t fit the rigid frame of one’s own body. To understand this bus-dwelling creature, this Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, you need not know how he
feels
, you need only understand the history of his people—

Dr. Monica turns to the babe’s mother. “Give him two drops of Tylenol before bed,” she says. And then, considering his size, adds, “Perhaps three.”

The babe hears Dr. Monica’s voice and lifts his large head, his face contorted in hot agony. He finds her pear-shaped breast above him and reaches for it, smooching and bobbing his mouth, and then arrogantly kisses it. He turns his head and looks at me.

He smirks.

I imagine throwing myself down on my stomach. I imagine crawling slowly toward him, reaching for his giant infant ankles. I Can Bring Him Down—

My Darling, My Pediatrician. Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans—she felt savagely alone. Most Pfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.

We called them
hal
.

If a baby had been born
hal
north of the Ural Mountains, we would have picked it up and scuttled it over to the river and dropped it in, sending the little fish back where it came from. But now we were no longer living next to a river.

We were nowhere near water at all.

“
After the sacrifice of Enni Hús
,” writes Anonymus, “
a curious dry spell descended upon the Carpathian Basin
.” As the rest of the Hungarians worried about their crops, we Pfliegmans were extremely pleased with ourselves. We sauntered confidently around camp, soaking up the sunlight, muttering “Enni Hús, Enni Hús” so often that it didn’t take long for the Hungarians to hear our strange chants, miss their good cousin, see us licking our lips, and totally misunderstand what happened. They logically concluded that because we had no meat of our own, we had kidnapped Enni Hús and cooked and eaten him.

In whispers, they began calling us the
Fekete-Szem Hentes
, the Black-Eyed Butchers from the Black Sea—

But Aranka needn’t have worried. Her baby would not be born
hal
—far from it. One morning, late in the year 897, she was lying on the ground of the Pfliegman tent when her body finally seized, torquing the infant. She grabbed her belly with both hands. Her water broke and she began kneading, dough-like, into her unapologetic Pfliegman cervix. The water came fast, like a faucet, and did not stop. Aranka looked down, saw it rushing from her body, and unleashed a low and awful moan.

We Pfliegmans heard the moan and stirred from our various angles of repose. We clicked our fingernails and scampered over. We prodded Aranka to turn her body, looking for the baby as if it would be born from her back. She tried pushing us away, but we swirled around, tugging her hair, smelling her moist skin. She lifted her head for air, taking in short, horrible breaths as the baby shifted inside of her—
That’s it
, she thought,
it will take me—
when the flaps flew open and six women from the Hungarian tribes entered, marching straight into the center of the tent.

“Out, Cretins!” one of them shouted.

The Hungarian woman was small, with ill-fitting limbs that had never seemed to broach adolescence, and yet no one questioned her authority. She clapped her hands, and in a flurry, dozens of little Pfliegmans scurried outside.

She knelt down next to Aranka and ran her hands over the massive arc of the great white belly, noting immediately the problem with the water. A strange look passed her face. She whispered something to the other women: “Get back,” she said. “Make more room.” Then she leaned into Aranka’s
ear. “Do not speak,” she said. “Not a word. If the child hears you, he will want to stay close to you, so you must not make a sound. If you keep it all in and hold your breath, he will pop out like a cork. Yes? Good. Now, what is your name?”

“
Aranka
,” the mother whispered.

“That’s a good name,” said the woman. “It means ‘gold.’ My name is Kunigunda, but you may call me Kinga. Now let’s get a look at this sonofa-bitch
kisbaba
. We need to move you up higher. Up onto the hearth. Careful of the water,” she said, and looked curiously at the water that continued to flow from between Aranka’s legs.

Together the six women moved the stones of the hearth to create a flat surface, over which they tossed assorted pelts, burlap. All the loose accoutrements of the miserable Pfliegman mundane. They hoisted Aranka up on top of the pile and watched as the water came faster now. They grabbed a few bowls and moved them beneath her to catch it. The bowls quickly filled. The women moved Aranka’s legs back to inspect the source and a long lace of green slipped from her body. It fell into one of the bowls with a quick, wet slap. One of the women grabbed a poker from the hearth and lifted the green thing. It hung long off the poker, dripping like a soaked feather.

“It’s algae!” she cried.

The women all gasped. Kinga put her finger to her lips and shushed them, and then she took Aranka’s hand. She leaned in close, offering up soothing whispers: “How wonderful you’re doing, Mother. Keep going, there’s been some real progress now.” But as the labor wore on, the baby, perhaps resenting the fact that his mother wanted him to leave a happy warm place for the Carpathian Basin late in the ninth century, only burrowed himself deeper inside her. The water was now running even faster, spilling out from between Aranka’s hairy legs in a fat and even spout. The floor of the tent turned to mud. Spongy. Viscous. The women groaned and lifted their feet, and when the ground had absorbed all it could possibly absorb, the water began to rise. Quickly it became ankle-deep.

The women looked at each other. “The water is still coming,” they whispered. “Perhaps there is no child. Perhaps there is only water.”

Then one of the nurses gasped. “Look!” she cried. “A fish!”

Aranka, in a daze, heard the women talking. She lifted her head,
breathing in sharp, uneven breaths, and looked down just in time to watch herself giving birth to a silvery, spoon-shaped fish. Certain that her child had been born
hal
and there was nothing to be done, she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to carry her to a place far more sane and comfortable. She found herself standing on the wide grassy embankment of the river where she once lived. She dunked her toes into the water, and it cooled them. Her body felt light, almost weightless, as though she might rise, as though the sun itself were pulling her up with two warm hands. From far off, a tinny voice rang in her left ear, but she deliberately ignored it. Why go anywhere? Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she looked at the sky and admired cloudshapes.

The women, meanwhile, covered their mouths and watched carefully as a small, narrow fish, a fish the color of metal, slithered out of her body and fell into the rising water. The fish wiggled for a second, then, in a quick line, deliberately darted outside the tent. The women waded over to the flaps of the tent and peeked out at the Pfliegmans scurrying up the embankment. “It’s everywhere,” they said. “It’s a deluge. The water is filling the land.”

“Wait,” Kinga said, and watched as another fish came, slipping from the mother’s body, and then came another. “There’s more now! Help, all of you!”

The women tugged their skirts through the water back to the body. They pulled out whole pieces of furry, arm-length algae, but it was difficult to manage and slipped easily from their hands. One of the nurses grabbed her dress and held it up as the top of the water licked her knees, as fish slapped her ankles. She looked at Kinga. “This creature is giving birth to a
river
.”

“We don’t know that,” said Kinga. “Not yet. Now get to work! All of you!” Kinga pressed her hands against Aranka’s face and then noticed Aranka’s rolling eyes. She grabbed her head. “Mother!” she cried. “Do not leave this baby behind!” She snapped her fingers in front of Aranka’s face. She pinched her cheeks. The little she-Pfliegman did not respond. And yet the water still came. It rose higher now, and nearly reached their waists. The women all tried to jump up onto the hearth. “Do something!” they cried. “We’ll all be dead and drowned!”

“No one is drowning,” Kinga said. “Grab the poker.” With one hand,
she held the mother’s chin so she could not breathe, then leaned down and firmly bit her on the nose. The nose was oily and soft, but Kinga held tight. She motioned for the poker.

The woman tossed it across the water.

Kinga caught it, and immediately stabbed Aranka, deep in the shoulder.

Flung from her grassy embankment back to the tent where she could only see the strange, wide orb that was her vastly pregnant belly, heaving like it was its own, separate animal, Aranka forgot her earlier promise to Kinga not to make a sound, opened her mouth, and cried out: