The Convalescent Read Online Free

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 pleasanthum 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,