Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  Al had always fancied himself a healer. His hobby was reading medical journals. He collected first-aid kits and drugs. He was an enthusiastic amateur general practitioner, and as soon as we could afford it—years before Arturism was in swing—he bought a small second-hand trailer and set it up as a little infirmary. His fascination with human mechanics certainly came before and probably sparked his idea for manipulating our breeding, and he did have a knack for it. We thought of it as part of his Yankee spirit. He was enthralled by medicine but furious with doctors for hogging the glory just because they’d managed to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall.

  With Al’s hobby, the Fabulon had been nearly independent of medical folk. Horst was called in as a consultant on veterinary chores, but Al handled anything human himself. The flame eaters figured him for a genius because he cured the many blisters on their lips and inside their mouths. Over the years he set fractures, relocated joints, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases, and dosed infections from the kidneys to the tonsils.

  It was Lil who soothed brows, changed sheets, and read aloud for the sick, but it was Al who did the flashy stuff. He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and rectums with equal zest, and made a grand production of extracting a sliver. He was a masterly stitcher—“scarless wizardry,” as he himself claimed. His career triumph happened the night an elderly lady collapsed in the front row at her first sight of Arty. Al recognized a heart attack, ripped her purple cotton dress down from the throat and clapped disposable electrodes to her chest within seconds of her tumble to the sawdust. He did it right there in front of Arty’s tank with seven or eight hundred people in the bleachers watching. She jolted. Her eyeglasses slid off. She voided her colon rather noisily, and was alive again, if not conscious.

  It was the custom for the midway folk to appear on Monday mornings at Al’s clinic if they had complaints. A lot of people said Al “should have been a doctor,” and that his talent was wasted in the Fabulon. Al didn’t see it that way. “I’ve got a captive practice of sixty souls,” he’d say, increasing the numbers as the show’s population grew to eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty.

  Then Dr. Phyllis arrived. She drove into the lot one morning and parked thirty yards back from the cat wagon, which happened to be the last trailer in line that day.

  She sat at the wheel and looked out through the windshield for a while. I saw her because I was stumping around the cat wagon rehearsing a lead-in talk. I kept on, pretending not to notice but taking in the shiny white van with a pair of tangled snakes climbing a staff painted next to the side door. I could barely see the vague pale figure behind the polarized windshield. We’d been on the lot for two days and were all set up, so the crews were taking it easy that morning, sitting on trailer steps talking and drinking coffee.

  Horst was shaving beside his living van, using a portable razor while he looked into the rearview mirror on the driver’s side. Everybody on the lot saw the van arrive but nobody reacted. For all we knew it was an act that Al had hired and not mentioned.

  I was thinking she was a snake dancer because of the vipers on the van. I was morbidly fascinated by snakes. The van door opened, a pair of steps flopped out, and she appeared.

  She was dressed in white—the uniform, the shoes, stockings, gloves, and of course the snug cap and the face mask. Only her glasses were neutral, clear, the eyes behind them blurred by their thickness.

  She stepped smartly down and strode toward the nearest guard. It was Tim Jenkins, a big mahogany weightlifter who had retired from perpetual corporal status in the Marines and had been taken up by Al while his scalp was still visible under his military haircut. Tim was serious about guard duty and clicked his heels as the short, sturdy white figure approached him.

  I’d stopped my pacing and was staring, boggle-eyed, at her. I knew it was a woman because of the broad hips and bulging prow. I was figuring her for a Hindu snake dancer—imagining flame shows with reptiles flickering over her gradually revealed flesh, slipping up her arms under the white sleeves, and so on.

  I couldn’t hear what she said but Tim nodded and looked at Horst. Horst had been watching everything in his mirror. He flipped his razor through the driver’s window onto the seat of his van and strolled over. Tim was making introductions and Horst nodded and stuck out a hand. The figure in white pointedly jammed her gloved hands into the pockets of her white jacket. Horst let his hand drop and settled back a hair on his heels. Horst strolled away with the lady in white, toward the two Binewski vans. I trailed at a distance.

  It was a bright, warm morning in Arkansas, I think, or maybe Georgia. The dust was brick red on my shoes as I leaned on the generator truck and looked down, pretending to mind my own affairs. I could have kicked myself for picking that fender to lean on when I realized that the fractured thrum of the generator would keep me from hearing any conversation. The white lady was waiting outside Arty’s van. She was carrying a thin vinyl briefcase, white. She stood quite still with no nervous movements. Chick’s small face peered from the window of the family van.

  Arty came out in his chair. His forehead folded down over his eyes with questions. He doesn’t know her, I thought. He didn’t send for her. He nodded and said something. She spoke, her hands on the white case. Arty guided his chair down the ramp, and she fell in beside him, going slowly away from the vans, talking. She tucked the case under her arm and jammed her hands in her pockets again.

  The case didn’t stay where she put it but slid out behind her and floated toward the open door of the family van at an altitude of four feet or so. She whipped around and despite the mask I could tell she was glaring at the flying briefcase. Arty looked over his shoulder, stopped, opened his mouth, and shouted at the van. The case stopped just before it entered the door, turned in midair and zipped back to the white lady at twice the speed it had left her. She reached out a gloved hand, snatched it, and stuck it back under her arm. Arty was talking to her. She nodded. They turned away and, with him rolling and her walking, they paraded up and down and around the lot, talking for a long time.

  “I think she’s creepy,” said Electra. Iphigenia bobbed her head gravely in agreement and popped a slice of apple into her mouth. Arty ignored them both.

  “How is she going to be paid? Percentage? Salary? Only when somebody’s sick? Or only as long as everybody is well?” Al slid his eyes nervously, trying to be businesslike. Arty was forced to abandon his soup and his pretense of oblivion. He stared around the table at us and then turned to Papa.

  “Don’t worry about her money. I’ll take care of it. She’s got a lot to offer us. She’s a stroke of luck for this show. She’s not a school hack, at least. She’s good at what she does.”

  Papa looked guiltily into his soup bowl.

  Lily smiled dreamily. “It will be nice having an educated lady around.”

  Al patted her hand. Arty was concentrating on his soup again, crossing his eyes to sight down his straw. Chick sat beside Lil in the back of the dining booth, smiling and watching the peas lift, individually, from his soup, jerk slightly until the drip of broth fell back into the bowl, and then swoop down to rest in a military row on his plate. Chick never did like peas. I caught Iphy’s eye. She raised her brows and pursed her mouth. Elly wrinkled her nose at me. We girls agreed, silently, that even if we had bubonic plague, the lady in white wasn’t going to lay a finger on us.

  Dr. Phyllis cowed Al. After that first day he never questioned her presence, or her credentials. He wouldn’t even try to ask where she’d come from or what she’d been doing before she joined us. He dithered and protested that she was a “lady” and a good medic, and “By the blistered nipples of the Virgin,” he didn’t need to know any more than that. The twins and I shook our heads at how little fight he put up when his private passion was usurped. I nagged him to ask questions because, if he didn’t come up with some information, Arty would make me try. It seemed that despite his long conversation with her A
rty didn’t know much more about her than the rest of us did.

  I was putting Arty onto the little elevator platform that ran up the outside of the family van one morning when he cocked a wink at me and said, “I guess you’ll have to get old Doc P. to let you look through her microscope.”

  I put a foot on the platform beside him, grabbed the lever, and we went slowly up.

  It was a sunny morning. Warm. I don’t know where we were—a small valley. All around the camp were deep pastures cut by streams with rough hills beyond. The highway sliced through and ran toward a small town, whose chimneys we could see above the trees. There were songbirds racketing in the scrub oaks on the slopes. The honk of a pheasant drifted up from the long grass. Arty wriggled off the elevator onto the roof. He liked to sunbathe up there when he could. Al had put a low rail around the top of the van so Arty wouldn’t fall off, at the same time he installed the elevator.

  Arty stuck his toe into the elastic of his trunks and worked them down until they sagged off him. He rolled over and arched his back, tilting his belly to the sun, stretching lushly.

  “Yep,” he said, “Little Oly had better do her stuff on Doc P.”

  “Here’s your fly swatter.” I put it beside him with the handle close to his head, where he could reach it. Arty was, as he claimed, “fly Mecca,” and he hated them.

  “Don’t ignore me, Oly,” he murmured as I rubbed suntan oil on his chest.

  “I won’t do it. I don’t like her.”

  “Oly, you like her. You like her a lot. She’s a fascinating, intelligent woman and you can learn from her.”

  “Right,” I said, capping the bottle.

  “Give her an ear to pour into. Nobody does that better than you.” He turned his head to watch me step onto the elevator.

  “Don’t piss on anybody from up here,” I said. “Papa got really mad last time.” I lowered myself, looking away from him, looking at the brown creek that eased through the grass behind the van.

  Three hours later I was hauling Dr. P.’s garbage to the camp dumpster and cursing her and Arty and myself in a thin blue vapor of rage that hissed through my nose with every breath. She had accepted my offer of help coldly and stood over me while I pumped the hydraulic leveler for her van. She gave me rigid orders about clipping the weeds and grass all around her van and then made me go over the whole area with a rake for litter. Then she introduced me to the garbage. She had very strict ideas about garbage. Each full bag in the can beside her van had to be slipped inside another bag and wrapped in a particular oblong shape and tied with string in a proper square knot. Three of these small parcels went into one large bag, which was then wrapped and tied with the same knot. Then the large parcel could be carried to the camp collection.

  She considered it proper that I, or someone more efficient, should be dispatched by Arty to do her chores. She wasn’t at all grateful.

  When I got back to her van the door was closed again. I hadn’t yet managed to get inside. I pushed the door buzzer. Her voice scratched out of the speaker, “Yes.”

  “I’m finished with the garbage, ma’am.”

  “That’s all for today, then. Have a bath and pay special attention to cleaning under your nails. Report back tomorrow morning.”

  A month and several towns later I still hadn’t set foot in her van. I’d filled her fuel and water tanks, emptied her septic system, gift-wrapped her garbage every day, and in each new site I’d leveled her van, policed her area for litter, and generally kissed her cold and pendulous buttocks for nothing.

  In the meantime she had taken over Al’s precious infirmary trailer.

  The sick call was cut in half. Al kept up his Monday-morning exams of the family but they were conducted in our dining booth. He didn’t have the old zest for it. He went on tapping and listening and demanding news of our bowel movements. He still lifted our eyelids and peered into our throats and ears and scowled at our nails and rubbed blue gunk on our teeth and, for those of us with hair, checked for lice and ticks, but he didn’t have his old glow of joy in doing it. He was sneaking behind her back.

  I found this clipping years later in the private papers of the reporter Norval Sanderson, who joined the show sometime after Dr. P. Norval had resources that we Binewskis lacked. When he wanted info on someone’s past, he could tap records and microfilm files from any newspaper in the country.

  (UPI) A coed at the University of New York was admitted to St. Theresa’s Hospital today after having performed abdominal surgery on herself in her dormitory room.

  University authorities revealed that Phyllis Gleaner, 22, a third-year bio-chem major, pressed an alarm buzzer in her dormitory room, which summoned the building’s custodian at 4:30 A.M., Tuesday. Responding to the buzzer, custodian Gregory Phelps found the student lying on a sterile table, wrapped in bloody sheets and surrounded by instruments.

  “She was weak but conscious,” said Phelps. “She told me not to touch anything in the room but to call an ambulance. She said the room was sterile and she didn’t want me touching anything. She was very strong on that. I could see blood all over and from what I saw in the mirrors around her I didn’t want to upset her so I went and called the emergency number.”

  Police surgeon Kevin Goran, M.D., examined Gleaner’s dorm room after she was removed to the hospital. “It was a makeshift but functional operating theater,” said Goran. “She had instruments for fairly major abdominal surgery, and an ingenious arrangement of mirrors, which allowed her to work inside her own abdominal cavity.”

  Emergency staff at St. Theresa’s reported that Gleaner was conscious and coherent when admitted, but was very fatigued. “She was not really in shock,” said Dr. Vincent Coraccio, staff surgeon at St. Theresa’s. “What was remarkable was the competence of the work. She’d gone all the way in and was finished, evidently, but she got too tired to close the incision. That’s when she called for help. All I had to do was stitch her up. A very tidy job.”

  Gleaner administered local anesthetics to herself throughout the surgical procedure. Her statements to the hospital staff indicate that Gleaner believed a remote-control device had been implanted next to her liver by an unnamed undercover organization. Gleaner believed that the device was being used to monitor and direct her activities. She performed the surgery in an effort to rid herself of the device. No such device was found by police in searching Gleaner’s dormitory room, nor by the medical staff in treating Gleaner.

  The clipping was stapled in Sanderson’s notebook. One page of his sprawling hand revealed the rest of his Doc P. research.

  In an article appearing two days later, the same reporter revealed that university officials attempting to contact Gleaner’s family discovered that the background on file was fictitious. She had not attended the schools that she claimed. Her records were forged and falsified. No relatives or friends could be located in the small Kansas town—Garden City—she claimed as her home. The university was embarrassed, particularly since Gleaner’s academic record at that institution was brilliant. Her professors acknowledged that she was a reserved individual and denied any knowledge of her private life. They affirmed that her work had been consistently excellent. Classmates claimed little knowledge of Gleaner. She was aloof from everyone.

  Gleaner has consistently refused to make any statement or to answer any questions about her self-surgery or her falsified background. Her only comment, relayed through a nurse’s aide, was that the university had no cause for alarm since her tuition and fees had always been paid.

  11

  Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes

  The twins turned fourteen in Burkburnett, Texas, during a Panhandle sandstorm as red as a drinker’s eye. Birthdays were the only holidays the Binewskis noticed and we celebrated them with all the gusto we could muster. But that fourteenth for the twins was in a rough spot. Wichita Falls had denied us a permit and the front man—new to the job, and a reptile anyway—was scared to tell Al. We didn’t find out until the police met us a
t the lot and escorted our cavalcade out of town, with Al cursing melodically all the way to our next scheduled stop, which was Burkburnett. Burkburnett hadn’t decided whether we could have a permit or not. We put up in the railyard next to the slaughterhouse and slept with the whish and thunk of the oil pumps for night music.

  There were oil wells everywhere. The soil had been abandoned to dust and lizards, and the backyard of every wind-blistered bungalow in town had thrown over ideas of shade or geraniums in favor of the whiskey promise in the mutter of those green grasshopper pumps. Every pump was set in concrete and snugged in by a barb-topped chain-link fence eight feet high. There were pumps in the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour liquor store. There were three pumps on choice plots surrounded by the artificial turf that covered the Terra Celestial Memorial Gardens boneyard. A dozen ravenous steel insects sucked at the shit-caked loam in the mile-square meatfield of empty pens where the beeves, when there were beeves, milled waiting for the knife. The white board fences of the paddocks were guarding only oil pumps that week. The packing plant was closed down.

  Past our corner of the meat yard the town began, or ended, in a blasted heap of storefronts leaning on each other to face a million miles of Texas rushing straight at them over the mindless, moundless plain.

  The twins woke up bickering. I could hear Elly’s harsh whispers behind the screen. Then Iphy, who never really learned to whisper, “Not better than you. It’s different, Elly. Please. Just for our birthday.” It was the same old quarrel. Iphy wanted to sit next to Arty at breakfast. Elly always insisted that they sit in the left side of the dining booth so that she was between Iphy and Arty, who always sat in his special chair at the end of the booth. Elly hated the giggling that hit Iphy when she sat next to Arty. Arty didn’t seem to care. I was the one who helped Arty with his food.