The Convalescent Read Online Free Page A

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.

IV
EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:
THE SACRIFICE OF ENNI HÚS AND HIS FINE HAT
     
    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