Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  “This may seem horrible but I’ve actually considered trapping her in the deep end and holding her under. There have been days when I wouldn’t have hesitated if I thought I could get away with it.”

  She looks anxiously back at me, her eyes bulging through the fat pads of her cheeks. I nod my head at her pale green face. The light moves on the surface of the footbath and streaks jump in shades of green across her face. “Oh, I can understand that,” I say, and I grin, nodding.

  Miss Lick is doing her third lap of what she refers to as “butterfly” stroke. She will do seven more “butterfly” laps before she reverts to “breast” stroke. She does each lap in one minute, which means that the pool will be swamped with three-foot waves and a pounding roar for seven more minutes. Breast stroke is quiet even for Miss Lick. The very old woman who does her mile-and-a-half each day in this pool is clinging to the tile gutter at the side. She will hang there, waiting, until the butterfly is finished. The other swimmers, the young ones, who can evidently breathe under water, continue with their laps. Miss Lick’s enormous shoulders have her whole torso free of the water before she splashes back. Her buttocks show briefly like a barrel going over Niagara. I can loll here on the steps at the shallow end, only my legs in the bath-warm water, and watch.

  I’ve taken her on her own hook and I have to be careful. She thinks she’s adopted me, that she’s doing me a kindness, that she’s displaying the magisterial stature of her goodness by spending time with me. I have to watch my ass. She is hideously lonely.

  The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass. I hold it carefully between my eyes and the firelight so the movement of the red flame casts a grain into the brown liquid. The whiskey that I have already drunk sits warmly in my gut and mouth and penetrates the fog in my skull. The corner of my eye registers Miss Lick’s heavy wool socks pointing at the fire over her footstool. I am waiting for my palms to dry, breathing slowly until the clammy seep of my nerves sinks back from the surface of my skin. The whiskey is amazing to me. I wonder why I never realized that I would like it. I wonder why I never tried it before. Liking it so much is dangerous now, and so I hold it and look through it, drinking very slowly.

  Miss Lick has the bottle on a tray beside her chair and is being generous with herself here in the fire dark. She cuts the wood herself, takes an ax up to the family parkland in spring and drags a chainsaw into the woods on weekends to clean up the deadfalls from the winter. One whole storage cubicle in the basement of the tasteful brick apartment building is devoted to split cords seasoning in the dry dark with a deep resin odor. She goes down in the elevator with a canvas sling over her shoulder and brings up one night’s worth at a time. She kneels on the flat granite paving stone in the hearth and nicks off tidy triangular kindling with a hatchet that looks at home in her hand, ticking the slim sticks off a sixteen-inch chunk that rotates quietly under her other hand.

  The chairs are dark, supple leather, as big as rhinos. The drapes are a dark plaid in heavy wool. A plaster bust of Minerva, painted glossy black, sits on the mantel beneath a rack of shotguns.

  “I used to go for birds with my old man,” she says.

  She talks slowly. Dry barks of laughter punctuate the sad parts to show that she is not sentimental and is not looking for sympathy. She has just described her father, her house in the woods outside of town, her employees, the old but reliable machinery that poops out 3 ounces of gravy, 1.8 ounces of niblet corn, 3 ounces of turkey breast, 3.2 ounces of apple cobbler, each in its proper compartment of the plastic trays. She is considering a massive retooling.

  “I’ll get more ice,” I say, with the bucket in my hand, shuffling to the kitchen as she pads heavily toward the brown-tiled bathroom. The kitchen is blank. Clean and empty. A torn bag containing two dark chocolate cookies lies abandoned on one white counter. The refrigerator door yaws outward from its emptiness. Nothing but a half bottle of ketchup in the door shelves. The mouth of the bottle is caked with scab, and in the freezer section are solid stacks of frozen dinners in plastic trays—unlabeled.

  I reach for the lever on the ice-cube dispenser and she is behind me, her big hand swooping past my head to hoist the bucket from me, tuck it up under the spout. Ice rattles out.

  “Are these dinners from your plant?”

  “Turkey, dressing, pumpkin custard, whipped spuds, gravy. I don’t like cranberries.”

  “Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “Twenty-six Thanksgivings in here. That’s all I eat. Nine hundred calories each. So why am I so big?”

  The freezer is sighing out vapor. She slips the door closed and stands staring at the gleaming cold cooking range with its dark oven glass.

  “Lately I’ve been eating popcorn instead. Want some?”

  She sits on the footstool in front of the fire, long-handled wire screen basket in her hand. The hard yellow kernels in the basket are sliding and bouncing as she quivers her wrist deliberately. The coals below the big chunks of wood flicker black and red and a soft glare reaches up to the basket. The first kernel of corn hisses and jumps, flowering suddenly into a speck of white, then the birdshot peppering as the rest of the kernels go. She watches carefully.

  She has a two-quart steel bowl full of popcorn in her lap—a shaker of brewer’s yeast on the tray next to the Irish whiskey. She is slowly scooping up popcorn in a big soup spoon and sliding it into her mouth.

  “I use a spoon because the yeast sticks to my fingers,” she says. “It’s gritty.”

  I lift my glass, full again, and stare through liquid at the fire.

  She talks. People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. They begin out of simple courtesy. Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities. That’s how it starts. But I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener. They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault. They stretch out their dampest secrets because a creature like me has no virtues or morals. If I am “good” (and they assume that I am), it’s obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise. And I listen. I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care. They tell me everything eventually.

  The popcorn is long gone, the fire is dying, and she has decided to show me her life’s work—“My real work,” she says—and I feel quite calm, carrying my glass and following her. We have brought the bottle with us but decided we could dispense with the ice. The room has no windows. We have come in through the only door, which is disguised as a locked closet in the bathroom. Only her key will open it.

  She gives me the only chair, solid wood, no cushion. A working chair. The whole room is set up for only one person to move in. It is small and lined with racks holding film disks and video cassettes. The screen fills one whole wall. The rest is a battered desk and a bank of filing cabinets. She plods from rack to control panel, talking calmly. She has dropped the rough cheer of her poolside manner. Her tongue is slightly thick in her mouth but she is, I can tell, herself. Her big somber face is intent. She talks as she works.

  “People always assume I’m a lesbian. I’m not. I have no sex at all that I know of. No interest, no inclination. Never have. But it’s understandable that I give that impression. It doesn’t bother me.”

  The screen fills with the image of a woman bent over a computer panel. She seems unaware of the camera. Her hands move rapidly over the control board. She picks up a pedestal microphone and speaks into it. Her face turns toward the camera eye for the first time. She stares past me. Her face is puckered with scar tissue, one eye nearly obliterated by the alien smoothness. Her mouth is distorted into a pulsing gash on one side of her face. As she turns back to the keyboard I notice that she has no eyebrows or lashes and she is wearing a short, curly brown wig.

  “This is Linda,” said Miss Lick.
“I went to school with her. She was pretty. Her family comfortable but not rich. A nice girl. Miss Popularity. She put everything into baton twirling, and dates. She was a cheerleader every year from the seventh grade on. Average student. The boys were all over her. She was the oldest of five. Her brothers and sisters were quite a bit younger. She adored them. When we were sophomores she was a princess for every dance and festival. I wasn’t one of her good buddies. Never spoke to her. Then one night in the winter of our sophomore year she was babysitting for the little ones while her parents went out. They were all sitting in front of the fireplace in the family room in their nightgowns. They were roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories.

  “I’ve thought of this so often, visualized this scene. Linda had long hair all the way to her ass. They had all bathed and she was brushing her hair dry and entertaining the little ones.”

  On the screen the woman at the computer reaches for the spewing readout. The machine is vomiting fold after fold of perforated paper, thickly printed. She scans it quickly, folding it in front of her in a mounting pile as it rolls out.

  “Linda’s hobby was sewing. She’d made all the children’s nightgowns and her own as well. She didn’t use flame-retardant material. She was young, you know. Not thinking. Her mother didn’t ask about it. Never occurred to her.”

  The scarred woman on the screen rips the end of the printout from the computer, picks up the stack, and gets up from her chair. She turns her back and limps out of the camera’s range.

  “Well, to shorten the tale, there was a fire—spark caught in one of the little ones’ robes. Up it went. Linda saved the child, caught fire herself in the process—ran outside to keep from lighting up any of the others. Went up like a torch, I understand. Long nightgown, long robe, her hair. She was in the hospital for a long time. Lots of grafts. Amazing how much damage was done.

  “She refused a lot of the plastic surgery. Expensive. She felt guilty. Her parents had all those little ones to bring up. She said she’d get it done later when she could earn it herself. Parents tried to persuade her but she was fierce about it. When she came back to school she was as she is now, scarred from stem to stern. Different girl entirely from what she had been. Old pursuits, interests, wiped out entirely. Friends tried to be polite but she made them nervous. Boys all gone west as far as she was concerned. Interesting to see the change. She seemed to have taken in the situation completely while she was still in the hospital. Turned her head around. She studied. All that old energy of hers turned to books. Realized, you see, that she couldn’t rely on being cute and catching a man—that the life she’d expected was out of reach. But she didn’t give up. She made another life—all brain stuff. I admired her. We got to be friends. Still see her. She’s a chemical engineer. Done some innovative research. Won prizes. She’s told me time and again that the fire was the best thing that could have happened to her.”

  The camera sweeps over the lifeless computer room. Another camera takes over. An office. The woman in the wig faces the camera. She is sitting at a desk comparing the printout with another sheet of paper. Her forehead only wrinkles on one side. Then we are in a kitchen. Same woman without her white lab coat. She is wearing a bulky sweater, reaching into an open microwave oven and pulling out a plastic-covered tray like the ones in Miss Lick’s freezer.

  The tape ends and the screen goes to grey static.

  “It’s not that surprising when you think about the precedents.” Miss Lick is philosophical. “Crippled painters and whatnot. Remember the Arturans roaming the country years ago?”

  My frozen face doesn’t alarm her. She rolls on expansively. “Same thing. People put it down because the whole thing had that weird end, but it wasn’t too long after Linda’s fork in the road and I saw the connection, all right. I’d have run off and joined up with that particular carnival myself if my old man hadn’t needed me in the business. Do you remember Arturo?”

  I can feel my head bobbing slowly up and down. I have no sense of what my face is doing. Could I be smiling? Does she know? She flicks a hand at me, inviting a response.

  “So what did you think of all that? Arturo.”

  My throat and mouth are crackling dry and painful. My voice comes out like a rusty chain. “I loved him.”

  She is delighted. “Ha! I thought so. Probably had a little itch yourself. Wouldn’t have minded tagging along on that comet tail, yourself?”

  I feel myself nodding, helplessly.

  “You’re not in a hurry, are you? I’ll drive you home. I want to show you another one.”

  My eyes pull away from the blank screen. Miss Lick is at the disk rack. I reach for the bottle on the desk. She is going to show me the whole thing. The brown liquid runs right up to the rim of my glass before I can stop it. I set the bottle back carefully. Two deep breaths. I’m having a little difficulty telling the difference between the whiskey and my fear. Miss Lick’s glass is empty. I lift my glass and pour three-quarters of the Irish into her glass.

  “Oh, thanks. Now this one …” She is hiking a big hip onto the desk behind me—reaching for the glass. I turn to watch the new scene.

  Cars blur the screen—windows, door handles streak past. Then the focus sets. We are across the street from a standard type-C tenement. Garbage leaning against a rusted scrap of wrought-iron fence, a bunch of kids loitering on the steps of a shoddy building. A man wobbles past on the sidewalk, waving his hands and talking to himself. The lens tightens and closes in on a girl and boy on the bottom step. The girl is leaning back against the railing, arching her breasts up at a pimpled boy with a cigarette in his lips. He is trying to look cool and aloof. The girl has black hair, rooched cunningly into coils by her ears. Her face is a Byzantine dream. She purses her lips and blows a smoke ring into the boy’s face. Her eyes slant narrowly in a hot half smile.

  “This is Carina. Half black, half Italian. Poor as shit. A dropout but she tested high in aptitudes. Her father disappeared when she was five. Mother a welfare lush picking up a little extra by peddling ass in the dark to johns too old to care or too drunk to notice what she looks like. Specializes in head since she lost her last teeth. She used to refuse dirt trackers but she had to give in on that a few years before this film was taken. Looks like Carina’s headed the same way, doesn’t it?”

  The back of the chair catches my hump wrong and my legs are going to sleep from dangling over the hard edge of the seat. I swig at my glass and move my feet tentatively to keep the blood flowing. The glass is empty. Miss Lick’s huge warmth moves close to me with the bottle, filling it. I drink again. Miss Lick is sitting on the desk, tapping her heels against the side. Her big feet in the thick work socks slide in and out of the corners of my vision. I’m afraid to look at her face.

  The camera is in an operating theater. A lone masked figure all in white leans over a sheeted body on the table. The camera zooms toward the face of the figure and then the image skids.

  “We’ll skip to the pertinent stuff.” Miss Lick is pushing levers on the control box. The image staggers and then blurs past in a fizz of color. I run a hand over my face and wipe the sweat on my skirt. My wig is slipping toward my left eye and I can’t seem to straighten it one-handed.

  The screen settles heavily in a small bright room. Yellow walls. Lace curtains. A shelf of books. A desk. The lens slides down to reveal a bed below the camera. Tidy with cushions, the spread matches the curtains and a dark-haired girl is sitting on it with a portable console beside her. She is dictating into a hand mike, using long fingers to spread the pages of the book on her knees. The girl drops the mike suddenly and flops back against the cushions. She raises the book and reads. Her face is corrugated with deep purple gutters of scar. Her lips are twisted, nostrils distorted. Only her eyes and something in the barely discernible bone beneath the raddled flesh seem familiar. The film scutters berserkly. Miss Lick sighs as she pumps the control lever.

  “It was acid. But she was completely anesthetized.” I am looking at the
dark wood doors of a large chapel. The doors burst open and girls in graduation gowns rush out, their mortars precarious on soft hair.

  “The day she graduated from college. Me still worried. She had my heart wrapped in barbed wire.”

  A purple face appears in the excited crowd. The gowned figure comes straight down the steps and reaches up to snatch off the mortarboard. She marches straight toward the camera. The focus wobbles as she nears us.

  The next view is a drab office with venetian blinds on the windows. The scar-faced girl is at one of the three desks. She is holding a sheaf of paper in one hand and a microphone in the other.

  “She’s a translator. An enormous gift for languages. But she worked here for a year before I was able to get the camera in. Intelligence Bureau. Tight security. A slip would have cost her the job.”

  “It’s Carina,” I said. The glass was against my lower lip and the name dropped into it and broke.

  “Yes. She’s twenty-six now. Second in command in her office. Fluent in five languages.”

  The screen is placid and grey. Miss Lick is sliding the disk back into its file slot. I hold the glass away from me and watch the level of the liquid. It is quivering but not a lot.

  “You got the idea from Linda?” I ask it calmly, curiously.

  “From what happened to her. Not her idea. My idea. But it only clicked because of the Arturans. Not that I’m a disciple. More of an apostle.”

  Miss Lick is firm on this point, shoving all the disks straight with the side of her hand, tapping them into symmetry.

  “Carina was my first.” She stops and stares at the wall. I can see her remembering. Doubt and worry form in faint nostalgia between the bulges of her face. “She was bitter. Stubborn for a long time. Despite the money. Despite clothes and school and private tutors. I did everything I could. I was worried for years.”