The Convalescent (2 page)

“Look at how little he is,” she said.

“Hairy too,” said her husband. “Get a load of that beard. What is he, a midget?”

The woman peered down at me, suspicious. “What
are
you?” she said. “Are you a midget or what?”

Which is fine. I am small and hairy. Fetid-looking. I’m so small, sometimes my meat customers will ask me if I am a midget, to which I respond in my brain, “I’m not a midget, but I’m probably about as close to a midget as a person possibly can be without actually being a midget.”

“He’s a
dwarf
,” said the husband. “Dwarves are hairier than midgets.”

“Whatever he is, I think he’s just charming,” the woman said.

I remain bewildered that someone like me could be considered charming by anyone, but she placed one hand on the side of the bus and whispered in my ear that she had just come back from Disneyland and I was more charming than Disneyland.

I brought out my writing tablet.
Am I more charming than your husband?
I wrote.

She pursed her lips. (Midget’s got a fresh mouth.)

How about clouds?
I wrote.
Am I more charming than clouds?

A magnanimous look filled her eyes. “He must be a mute,” she said, and clucked her tongue. “Poor thing. How sad. Isn’t it sad, George?”

“God’s got a funny sense of humor,” said George.

The woman thought that it was very sad. She took off her sweatshirt and gave it to me. She patted my arm. She whispered, “
Here you go
.”

Which is fine. The Virginians will often take one look at the hairy little man living out of a bus in a field, at the mountain of meat that surrounds him, and then there’s no holding back the magnanimity. I’ve been given many items over the years: boots without laces, a stained coffee carafe. A brand-new silver towel rack, still in its original packaging. Virginians are big on magnanimity. They practically bathe in it.

I bathe in the river behind the meat bus. It’s called the Queeconococheecook. My side of the Queeconococheecook is covered in long green grasses; the far side is covered in mud. I bathe in the river with the Indian’s towels, and then hang them to dry on a clothesline that runs from the top
of my bus to a nearby pine tree. The pine tree has wide, swooping arms, underneath which I keep a bucket for the containment and removal of bodily fluids and other unsavories.

These I deposit into a hole in the ground.

What am I, the Virginians all want to know? I live in a bus. I cut up animals.
Je chie dans un seau
—

I am the last remaining descendant of a line of the worst sort of losers on the planet.

My story begins one thousand one hundred and eleven years ago, across another continent, in another age. It is an age not unlike the age we currently inhabit. It is an age of very rich and very poor. Of men and non-men. Of wars and entitlement.

Wolves
baroo
in the distance.

It is an age when Europe is defined and undefined by changing borders: Charlemagne has drawn lines between the Frankish Kingdoms, but the maps of the East remain lineless. The future countries of Eastern Europe exist only as floats of pale color. Accidental fingersmudges. Places where the ice turns to tundra, where glassy-eyed animals stumble hopefully toward nourishment, where barbarians and nomads roam the landscape in packs with names that sound fictitious: the Borussians, the Mazovians, the Drehgovitians, the White Volhynians, the Avars, the Khazars, the Pechenegs, the Magyars—and of course, the Pfliegmans.

By the year 896, we are living north of the Ural Mountains, hidden amongst ten early Magyar tribes, in a field next to a river leading straight into the heart of the great Black Sea. And this is where the story of the Pfliegmans begins. In a field, next to a wide, tumultuous river.

Luxuriant green grasses coat one side of the riverbank; the other side is covered in slippery, rock-laden, gets-all-over-everything mud.

On the mud side live the Pechenegs, a cluster of barbarians who gather every morning to stand at the edge of their sloppy embankment in their bare feet, mud squishing fatly between their toes, and stare across the river. They stare with a lean, bright hatred. They stare until their bodies overflow with the desire to touch just
one clean blade
, then they bare their sharp teeth and leap into the water, emerging on the other side to wipe their muddy paws all over their neighbors’ fine grasses, kick down the posts of their tents, break all their clay pots, and ravage the weakest among them.

On the grassy side, the Magyars are not without flaw: historians have described them as “a people devoted to leisure, given over to vanities, and extremely libidinous.” While in a matter of a few short years they will embark on a campaign of incursions so deadly, so horrific, that all of Western Europe will pee its pants at the mere whisper of their name—
De sagittis Hungarorum libera nos, Domine—
for now they are utterly without interest in incurring any incursions at all. They are perfectly content to do nothing but make love in their fields of long grasses. To admire each other’s hair. These are the world’s future Hungarians.

Thoroughly a peace-loving people.

Ultimately, they decide that anything is better than having one’s goddamn clay pots broken for the millionth time, so one evening the heads of all ten tribes agree upon exodus. Already their people have many skills. They can ride horses, shape iron, make pots, and build huts. They fight with swords, with bows and arrows, and they all speak the same language—a unique Finno-Ugric language, closest to Vogul and Ostak—and they practice animal husbandry, caring for their own horses and cows and pigs and sheep. The early Magyars are underdogs, but underdogs with a
purpose
: they will leave this grassy spot to seek another river. They will search for safe and fertile flanks of land to call their own. After all, having one’s own land means a person is getting settled. Establishing himself. They all close their eyes that evening imagining whole fields of useful, prosperous dirt—

We Pfliegmans, however, are incapable of imagining anything.

From the get-go, Pfliegmans were outcasts in a country made of outcasts. We were then, and probably always have been, whole ages behind the progress of the company we kept. When men were bashing rocks together
to make tools, Pfliegmans were slithering from the ocean, coated in a greenish muck; when men were grunting, sneezing, and lighting fire, hirsute Pfliegmans lay recluse in a dark musty corner of a cave, hissing; when men began wearing pelts and eating meat and painting walls, Pfliegmans were stealing pelts to make fun of the pelt-wearers and would return to a cold cave
hungry again, goddammit
; when men began forming languages and speaking in recognizable tongues, Pfliegmans snorted and threw their heads in the mud in protest; when men began eating with forks, Pfliegmans licked their dirty nails; when men were building factories to work in and homes for themselves to live in, Pfliegmans rolled in the grass, deliciously; when Edison illuminated the world, Pfliegmans squealed and covered their eyes; when Ford made the world go faster, Pfliegmans stood at the curb, fearing for their lives, gaping at the shiny wheels, which explains why my father, János Pfliegman, who, one Christmas morning in 1984, after receiving a VCR as a Christmas present from my mother, spent four minutes examining the buttons and one minute examining the manual before bashing it in the face with an elbow—

But I digress.

Despite the fact that most historians only acknowledge ten tribes who migrated over the Ural Mountains that year; that the very word “Hungarian” is not a derivative of “Hun,” as so many people stubbornly and incorrectly assume, but actually stems from the Finno-Ugric word
onogur
meaning “ten arrows,” one for each tribe—despite this, I’m here to say there was an eleventh tribe. A tribe known for tripping over their own feet. For growling menacingly at perfectly friendly strangers. For stealing other people’s food. We are a tribe that suffers yearlong, incendiary illnesses, and our presence will be eclipsed by the history books. We participate in none of the world’s major events, and we have no official leader, as we know nothing of leaders and followers. We blink with uncertainty at quick-moving objects. We clean ourselves with our own tongues.

We are the Pfliegmans.

As the Magyars throw saddlebags over horses, don their finest hats, and set off into the wilderness, we are huddled around a dirt pile, trying to scurry up a fire for the scrap of deer we’ve stolen from a nearby tent. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is blowing the ashes. His wife, the she-male, is humming softly. Look at them:
they’re emaciated. Their muscles are butter on the bread of their bones, bones that point out from their skin painfully, like they’re being pierced from the inside out.

The male Pfliegman removes the deer from the fire and takes a large bite. It’s too hot; he spits it on the ground. The female smacks him on the head for being so foolish and wasting perfectly good meat.

“
Monga
,” she admonishes, and grabs it.

The male Pfliegman punches her hard on the shoulder. “
Thpits!
” he replies, and grabs it back. He eats it and swallows, despite the burn. The roof of his mouth singes, dislodging from itself in one long peel—

This is the woman-Pfliegman’s fault.

Later that night, holding his sore mouth, he watches her body lying underneath a pelt, the scrawny-boned back shifting, the hard-knobbed breasts rising and falling, and he feels hotly, overwhelmingly cheated. He leans forward and smacks his wife on the back of the head for not being greater than she is, and then he leaps on top of her.

Between them, this night, they conceive a boy. A Pfliegman boy who will one day save the lives not only of his own people, but those of the entire Hungarian nation. A Pfliegman whose own child will begin the line of Pfliegmans who defy the simple laws of evolution and survive for little more than a thousand years until, one by one, we each drop off, and only a single near-midget, living across an entire ocean, selling cheap meat out of some bus in some field of some weedy armpit of North America, remains.

I may be the last remaining Pfliegman, I may live in a bus in a field, and out of this bus I may sell meat for a meager-yet-adequate living, but I’m not one of those introverted scoundrels. I don’t sneer at the beautiful, I don’t wax philosophic, and I’m not without a
glimmer
of urbanity: I have electricity, for example. I have a bed.

I wear a stylish woolen cap.

The cap was a given to me by a meat customer so impressed with the girth of his rump roast that he removed the hat from his own head and placed it, gently, on mine. My bed is a mattress flopped over two passenger seats at the back of the bus, made of arching springs that knuckle my back in a pleasing manner. Outside the bus an old battery-powered generator shudders, charging the stove, the meat refrigerator, and a lightbulb which hangs over my bed in a single dangling strand. The lightbulb illuminates a small bookshelf which holds a modest collection of literature: a shiny pamphlet titled
Your First Hamster
, by Peter H. Smith;
The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures
, by Captain Jerry Aldini;
Madame Chafouin’s French Dictionary (Concise Edition)
, by Madame Chafouin;
The Collapsing Universe
, by Isaac Asimov; and
The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Pagan Hungarians
, by a writer known just as “Anonymus.”

I keep these books on the bus because although I have read and returned nearly every book in the Lick County Library, these books came to me instead of me to them. I obtained
Your First Hamster
one afternoon when a customer brought her six-year-old son out to the field to buy some meat. The boy stared at me while I wrapped his mother’s rump roast. He tugged her arm. “Is that a
kid
?” he whispered. “A kid with a
beard
?”

“Shhh,” his mother said.

“This place is weird,” the boy said. “I want to go to a normal store. I want to go to the Big M.”

“That’s not polite, Michael,” she said, and turned her back.

Michael looked at me and stuck out his tongue.

So I stuck out my tongue.

The boy’s eyebrows raised, then he burst into tears. His mother spun around to see me standing with my tongue out. “I came here to be
charitable
,” she said. “But now we’re leaving, and I’m not going to buy a single thing. What do you think of that?”

I rolled my eyes. I wagged my tongue. I opened my mouth, and gagged a little.

“You are a
horrible
man,” she whispered. “A horrible, horrible little man!” She grabbed the boy and ran back to the car. They sped off down Back Lick Road. I looked down and saw that the boy had left the pamphlet behind on the grass. On the cover was a picture of a clean, soft, apricot-colored hamster, perched on the branch of a tree. I picked it up.

“
Dwarf hamsters
,” it said, “
are being seen more and more in the United States. Their petite size and charming ways point the way to an ever-increasing popularity
.”

I’d never thought about taking care of a hamster before, but ever since that moment, I’ve considered having one for company. There’s something in the photo that makes me long to hold the tiny creature. To nuzzle him against my hairy cheek. To let him crawl down my arm and back up again.

But I don’t really need company. Although it may seem as though I’m alone, I’m really not; I am surrounded by a whole community of living and nonliving things, and each plays a small but vital role in the sustenance of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman, and Pfliegman’s Meat Bus as a whole.

* * *

About a year ago, I came across a cardboard box at the bottom of a dumpster of a Mrs. Kipner’s Family Restaurant downtown. The box was packed with nonperishable canned goods. There was Mrs. Kipner’s American Beans-n-Wienies, Mrs. Kipner’s Bavarian Tomato Beef Stew, Mrs. Kipner’s Hungarian Goulash. I carried the box back to the bus, and unpacked it. That’s when I noticed that one of the cans felt light. Empty. I cranked open the lid.