Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  “Did I help?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  • • •

  Arty, wheedling from the sofa, called, “Chick, I’ll bet there’s a lot of that roast beef left over from dinner. I sure would like a sandwich made out of that beef, with mayonnaise and horseradish. What do you say? Will you make me one?”

  Chick, with a comic book under his arm, having worked for hours at other people’s jobs and looking now for just an apple and a visit with Superman—this vegetarian Chick, who will eat unfertilized eggs and milk but never (no, please don’t make him) fish or fowl or four-legged beasts or anything that notices when it’s alive and talks to him about it if he touches it—this Chick knows Arty is being mean, and will force him to move the meat rather than using his hands and a knife, and says, “Sure, Arty, white or whole wheat?”

  He tries. He gets the plate of beef from the refrigerator and casually grabs a knife from the drawer.

  “Chick!” snaps Arty indignantly. “You’re not gonna use a knife, are you?”

  Caught, Chick admits, “I was gonna move the knife.”

  But Arty roars, “Drop all that norm shit! Why did Papa give you that gift if you’re going to piss it away like a norm? Move the meat. Move the meat!”

  And so precise leaf-thin pages of beef separate themselves from the pink roast and arrange themselves with a swoop of mayo and a flip of horseradish on a dancing pair of homestyle whites, and they all come together on a pretty blue plate that glides out of the dish rack to give them a ride over to where Arty is picking his teeth with a fin and watching.

  “There you go,” says Chick.

  “Thank you so much,” says Arty, who is perfectly capable of making his own sandwiches if there is nobody around to do it for him. Arty clamps a fin on the sandwich and takes an enormous bite, watching Chick’s face as he chews. “Dullicious!” he mouths around the mess.

  “Good. I’m glad.” Chick smiles and steps out of the van and walks around behind the generator truck, where he vomits painfully and tries to think of something besides what the cow said to him as he sliced her.

  They were fighting and their door was locked. The thumping woke me. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants or earthquakes. The thin paneling of their cubicle room thonked toward me a fraction of an inch. I could hear them gasping. I ran to their door. The knob wouldn’t turn. The early sunlight slanted in through the window over the sink. A huge body slammed against the door on the other side. They’d wake up Al and Lil. I slid Chick’s door open and his huge eyes were waiting for me. He was afraid.

  “Help me,” I whispered. “The twins are fighting.”

  He rolled out of his blankets and grabbed my arm. His hand was wet.

  “Unlock it.”

  He looked at the doorknob. It turned. The door opened. They were rolled in a knot on the bed with spider elbows jerking out and in, a flailing leg whacking a heel into a thin, pajama-clad back. Their breathing was short and loud and a hand came out of the mess, pulling a long skein of black hair up into the light of their small window.

  “Hold their hands.” I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. “All the hands! All!” I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.

  “Can you hold them?”

  Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly’s face lifted out of a mass of black hair—a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.

  There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn’t do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.

  “You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!” The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.

  Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van’s tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they’d looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.

  “They always bicker,” I said.

  Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. “But they were really trying to hurt each other.” Chick’s head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.

  “I wonder what it was about?” I murmured.

  Chick sighed. His head wobbled. “Iphy said his name in her sleep,” he said.

  Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.

  The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he’d run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.

  “Vicious god, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!”

  Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.

  Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.

  “We have a new turn for our show!” Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a “No” was possible. It was hard for anybody to say “No” to Iphy.

  “We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the ‘Corporal Bogwartz Overture’! Doesn’t that sound great? We practiced this morning! We’ll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it’ll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you’ll love it!”

  Chick was hiding his face behind Al’s arm. Arty’s eyes stayed on Lil’s big spoon, lifting out chicken and putting pieces on plates.

  Al was laughing. “What a picture! Wouldn’t that flatten ’em? Hey, Crystal Lil! How about these girls? Sharp?”

  “Flying,” Lil murmured. “Mercy.”

  Elly was pink with eagerness, her hopeful, fearful eyes fixed on Arty, who said nothing. He rocked slightly in his chair, seemingly interested only in the food that was accumulating on his plate with the help of Lil’s spoon.

  It never happened, of course. Arty quashed it. If the outside world tumbled to it, or even suspected it was not a trick, we’d drown in power plays for Chick. Stay with the straight path of what we were each gifted with.… Did we think Al hadn’t done enough for us, that we had to monkey with his work? Iphy was disappointed but willing to understand. Elly never said anything about it.

  We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins’ glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.

  “Arty wouldn’t hurt anybody.” I was lying vigorously as I snapped away at the smooth-skinned beans. “You’re the one, Elly. You’re jealous of Arty when he’s just trying to take care of family.”

  “Oly, you know Chick would be floating in formaldehyde if it looked like he was going to steal any of Arty’s thunder by being a big success.” Her hands ripped the beans to piec
es, dropping the tips and strings into one bowl and the usable chunks into another. Iphy’s hands did the same task lightly, delicately.

  I pushed on doggedly through my beans. “Arty still thinks Chick can be useful.”

  “Sure,” Elly sniffed. “As a workhorse and a slave. Chick can save us a lot of money. It takes ten men five hours to put up the tops that Chick can put up in one hour by himself. And Chick’s pay is a pat on the head.”

  Iphy sighed, “You should be kinder.”

  Elly muttered at her own fingers, “I’m just taking care of you and me. That’s all I’m thinking about. He hates us. He’s selfish.”

  “Not selfish! Scared! He’s scared all the time, Elly! You know it!” Iphy’s hand lifted in fright, demonstrating Arty’s terror. I shrugged off goose bumps, thinking, I’m scared too. Because I know Arty. I know him better than either of you do.

  “Let him be a preacher. Let him have all those creeps sucking around him. They’ll puff him up. But he’d better leave us alone, and Chick too. And you can tell him that, Oly. There, take all these beans to Mama!”

  “Be nice, Elly,” I pleaded. “Just be nice.”

  “I’ll be nice,” she muttered dangerously. “You’d both let him cut your throats before you’d complain!”

  • • •

  Without any of the family taking much notice, Arty became a church. It happened as gradually as the thickening of his neck or the changing of his voice. From time to time one of us would remember that things hadn’t always been that way. It wasn’t that Arty got a church, or created a religion, or even found one. In some peculiar way Arty had always been a church just as an egg is a chicken and an acorn is an oak.

  Elly claimed that it was malice on Arty’s part. “He has always had a nasty attitude toward the norms. Iphy and I like them except for the hecklers and drunks. They’re good to us. Papa tends the crowds like a flock of geese. They’re a lot of work and a bit of a nuisance but he loves them because they’re his bread and butter. Mama and Chick—and you too, Oly—you three don’t even know the crowds are there. You don’t have to work them. But Arty hates them. He’d wipe them all out if he could, as easy as torching an ant hill.”

  “Truth” was Elly’s favorite set of brass knuckles, but she didn’t necessarily know the whole elephant. If what she said about Arty was “true,” it still wasn’t the whole truth.

  Arty said, “We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rat’s-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity.”

  The first time I remember him talking like that was one very rare night when he had an ear infection and couldn’t do his act. I stayed with him while the rest of the family worked. He sat on the built-in couch in the family van surrounded by the popcorn he’d spilled, the kernels getting smashed into the upholstery as he bounced around talking and dipping his face into his bowl of popcorn and nipping at hot chocolate through his straw. I laughed because he had butter smeared around his eyes as he pumped this piffle at me.

  I was crushed when Arty ousted me from the Oracle. Originally, I had been the one who sorted through the question cards and actually went on stage to press the face of the chosen card against the side of the tank while Arty hovered, bubbling on the other side, to read it and then shot to the surface to give the answer. Then Arty decided he wanted a redhead to do it. He had them parade in a giggling line outside their dorm wearing shorts and bras so he could choose the best figure. He said the crowd would have more respect for him if he was waited on by a good-looking redhead. “They’ll wonder if I’m balling her, decide that I am, and think I must be a hell of a guy if this gorgeous gash puts out for me even though I’m so fucked up. If it’s Oly waiting on me, they figure it’s just birds of a feather.”

  I still took care of him after each show, but for a long time I sulked and ignored the act.

  The Aqua Boy changed again. For a while, he answered only generic questions distilled from the scrawled bewilderments and griefs that piled up on the three-by-five cards. Then he stopped answering at all and just told them what he wanted them to hear. Testifying, he called it.

  What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That’s what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. You might figure a mood like that would be bad for the carnival business but it worked the opposite way. The crowd streaming out from Arty’s act would plunge deeper into the midway than all the rest, as though cantankerously determined to treat themselves to the joys of junk food and simp twisters to make up for the misery that had just been revealed to them.

  Arty thought about the process a lot. Sometimes he’d tell me things, only me, and only because I worshiped him and didn’t matter.

  “I think I’m getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they’ll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull’s-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it’s the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn’t happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don’t get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it’s more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it’s a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I’m working on it. I’ve got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I’ve got to come up with a hope.”

  Arty had the advance men make up special flyers to hit certain churches. “Refuge!” they blared. “Arturo, the Aqua Boy!” and then a list of our dates and sites. Though Arty never mentioned anything resembling a god, or an outside will, or life after death, church groups started showing up. In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates, ignoring the lights and sights of the midway, and find their way to Arty’s tent. They paid their price and sat numbly in clumps on the bleachers waiting as long as it took for his show to begin. When it was over, they would leave the grounds together, ignoring everything.

  “Too poor to play,” Papa said.

  “The one buck they’ve got, I’ll get,” said Arty. But it wasn’t the money that excited him. It was that those who never would have come to the carnival came just for him.

  Mama was dreamily pleased. “Arty’s spreading his wings,” she said, nodding to herself. But his wingspread took in more than the bleachers in his own tent. And all this time he was taking over more and more control of the carnival itself, and becoming more obvious in the orders he gave.

  10

  Snake Dance—Immaculate

  I was eleven years old that year. Chick turned six and the twins were approaching their fourteenth birthday. Arty was sixteen and in a hurry.

  He got his own big van with a platform to connect it to the family van. No fuss about it. Papa just shrugged when Arty had him write out the check. The guards lugged the furniture from the dressing room behind Arty’s stage, and I arranged it. Mama busied herself mov
ing Chick into Arty’s long-abandoned cubicle in the family van.

  As Arty got stronger, Al and Lil wilted. Each week they seemed softer and browner at the edges. Lil was scatty and vague more often. You could catch her any hour of the day with her collection of pills and capsules shuttling in and out of the handbag she kept by her. She did her work but she got thinner and her breasts began to droop. Her clothes didn’t hang on her in the old smooth way. Her makeup was a little blurry to begin with and tended to slip by lunchtime. Long before closing each night the mascara and rouge would slide into thick smudges. There was something missing in her eyes.

  This was the year she decided she had taught the twins all that she was able, and hired the fancy piano man to teach them. Arty claimed that this was the cause of her frail weeping. The twins said it had started after Chick was born and had simply increased.

  We didn’t ask for Papa’s opinion. Al was listless one minute and irritable the next. He’d go out to give orders in the morning and find that Arty had already passed the word for the day. He’d nag and snap and stand over the crews while work was being done. He took to spending more time with Horst and to showing up half buttoned into his tailcoat and with his mustache unwaxed for his Ringmaster routines. Then Dr. Phyllis appeared.