Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  She was replaced immediately. Dozens clamored for a chance to testify at Arty’s shows. There were thousands waiting, willing to pay, for the right to see and listen.

  I was walking by when Dr. P. walked out of her big new surgery truck and heaved the plastic bag containing Alma’s last flabby upper arm into an ice chest for Horst to dispose of. She dusted her white gloves against each other and nodded to me. “Well, that’s finished,” she announced through her mask. “It took a year and a half. I could have done the whole job in three hours.”

  After a while, Alma wasn’t around anymore. Arty laughed when I asked about her. “She’s retired,” he said. “She’s gone to the old Arturans’ home to rest in peace.” I thought he meant she was dead.

  15

  Press

  As their seventeenth birthday rolled past, the twins were fogged in by some musty hormonal mist. They were goofy, aloof, and up to something. Their bickering graduated from intermittent to constant, but the dignity that they felt appropriate to full-fledged bleeders dictated that the running argument be carried on in whispers.

  The twins’ piano teacher, whom Lil had hired by mail, was the greasy Jonathan Tomaini, with his one shiny-assed suit and two pairs of slightly mismatched socks. He took frequent opportunities to explain how temporary this “post” was for him and how thrillingly adventurous it was for a concert performer and graduate of fine New York music academies, such as himself, to doss down on a cot in a trailer shared with twelve sweaty, spitting, cursing, chortling roustabouts who viewed him as one rung lower than last night’s beer farts. He gushed at how brilliantly gifted the twins were—“a privilege to spend this brief hiatus in my career molding and influencing such talent.”

  The twins claimed—Elly loudly and Iphy with demure embarrassment—that Tomaini never bathed, only washing his hands up to the wrist and his face and neck as far down as his collar. He was, they said, no fun to share a piano stool with. He had things to teach them, though, and they endured the piano stool for hours every day.

  Mama was slipping away from us. Her pill intake was up and her body was changing. Large bones came close to the surface as her woman-softness withered. Her eyes were giving her trouble, the focus softening and shortening. Her walk had changed from a melodic flirt to a gaunt, uncertain lurching with her hands extended in front of her, touching. She rattled in endless detail about our various infancies. She forgot things. She left jobs half done and didn’t notice when someone else finished them for her. She cried easily and occasionally without knowing she was doing it. She slept.

  Papa had taken to antacid tablets for his stomach. He carried half-consumed rolls in every pocket and chewed them constantly. He dithered for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four trying to lash his small winter crew into dealing with the flush of business brought on by Arty’s increasingly specialized popularity. The veins in his forehead threatened a stroke while he supervised the production of the expensive and classy “Ask Arturo” poster series. He was happy, though. The work rush let him forget that he wasn’t the boss anymore.

  New people kept cropping up and latching on. We were a road show and we lived with the ebb and trickle of faces who appeared, hired on, stayed for a few thousand miles and then, one day, were gone. We Binewskis kept to ourselves. Only the family stayed the same. Hanging out with the swallower’s kids or making friends with the palm reader’s daughter always ended in separation and forgetfulness. We were easy with strangers but never close.

  Arty’s growing flock, however, was different. I dreamed one night that Arty cried them into the world. They came out of his eyes as a green liquid that dripped to the ground making puddles. The puddles thickened and jelled into bodies that got up and hung around Arty.

  But Dr. P. and the advance man and McGurk, and later Sanderson and the Bag Man and the nebbishes and simps who mooned and crooned around him, were all there because of Arty, no matter what other pretext they might claim. They all belonged to him.

  The occasional television crews, doing thirty-second “Day at the Carnival” bits for the evening news, took a while to tumble to what was going on in the center tent. An hour after the first broadcast of a breathless on-the-spot reporter describing bandaged stumps in a wheelchair, the newspaper people started popping up.

  After a few months reporters drove out to meet us on the road. Squads with cameras and notebooks and tape recorders waited for us on every new site as we tooled in and parked. A few towns canceled our licenses before we even arrived. The indignant slams just made Arty smile. “Those who want to know,” he shrugged, “will still get the message.”

  It wasn’t until one of the redheads brought a copy of Now to Arty’s door one morning that we realized one of the loiterers in the journalistic pack was from that national news magazine. The guy in the lean tweeds had been puttering around the midway for weeks. The ticket peddlers all knew him because he’d flash his photo ID card and mutter, “Press,” trying to slip into the shows without paying. “Press your pants,” the redheads would say—a stock Binewski reply—and he’d laugh and pay up.

  The Now story demonstrated his intentions clearly. The fur-chested Norval Sanderson, with his cynic’s eye, bourbon voice, and discreet tailoring, was with us so he could expose the “ruthless egotism that was exploiting the nation’s psychic undertow.”

  “Arturism was founded,” wrote Sanderson, “on the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego.…”

  Within days, Arty, the clever boy, had turned the attack to his own purposes by distributing ninety-second tapes to every network proclaiming that he was, indeed, the Transcendental Maggot, and that his power to thrive in the decaying frenzy of the planet was available to all those who were willing to accept it.

  Norval Sanderson had covered wars, treaties, executions, and inaugurations for two decades. He was sharp and he lacked awe for anything, from earthquakes to heads of state. He was clever. He spent days lounging coolly in the corners of Arty’s life, and he published three explosively controversial interviews with Arty in as many weeks. Arty liked him.

  What now remains of Sanderson’s old spiral-bound notebooks, his collection of news clippings, and the transcripts of his interviews with the people of Binewski’s Fabulon is wrapped in black plastic and locked in the trunk in my closet. I take it all out when I want to think back. His fast, meticulous script is fading from black to grey, and the paper is brittle in my hands, but I can still hear his lazy drawl with its built-in needle.

  From the notes of Norval Sanderson:

  … Suspected earlier that Arturo was being manipulated by someone, probably the father, Al Binewski. I saw Arty as a tool for some functional “norm” who was raking in the cash from the dowries. Spent three hours with Arty today and completely revised my opinion. Arty is in complete control of the cult, of the carnival, of his parents, and apparently of his sisters and brother—though there may be some small spirit of resistance in the twins.

  Arty is sporadically self-educated with wide lacunae in his information. National and international politics are outside his experience and reading. Municipal power relationships, however, are familiar tools to him. He has no real grasp of history—seems to have picked up drifts from his reading—but he is a gifted analyst of personality and motivation, and a complete manipulator. His knowledge of science is primitive. He relies on specialists in his staff to provide him with effective lighting, sound technology, etc. He is a skilled speaker on a one-to-one level as well as in the mass-rhetoric situation of his performances. He has a sharp awareness of personal problems in others … professes no ethic or morality except avoidance of pain. Says his awareness is such that he feels the pain of others and is therefore required to alleviate it by offering the sanctuary of Arturism. Obvious horseshit.

  His power seems to come from a combination of techn
iques and personality traits. He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy. He is enormously self-centered, proud, vain, disdainful of all who lack the good fortune to be him. This is so evident and so oddly convincing (one finds oneself thinking/agreeing that, yes, Arty is a special person and can’t be judged by normal criteria) that when he turns his interest on an individual (on me) the object (me) suddenly feels elevated to his level (as in—yeah, me and Arty are too special and unique to be judged, etc.).

  Just when you feel despicable, and that Arty’s disdain is too great a burden to endure, he offers you the option of becoming his peer.…

  June 14:

  Ticket count 11,724 for this show. Bleachers packed to the top of the tent. Arty in tremendous form—his voice booming through your very bones:

  “I want you to be like I am! I want you to become what I am! I want you to enjoy the fearlessness that I have! The courage that I have! And the compassion that I have! The love that I have! The all-encompassing mercy that I am!”

  The “yes” sighs up from the crowd like a night wind and I myself nearly weep at being surrounded by pain. I become convinced, for an hour, that Arty is not injuring them but is allowing them to acknowledge the pain in their lives in order to escape from it. A man who had to be a Certified Public Accountant on my left—a big self-contained man in a decent suit and well-groomed beard. The wedding ring glinted on his fingers as his hands gripped his knees. He didn’t shout when the others did. He was silent, focused on the tank and the venomous worm in it. During the “As I am” chorus he was frozen so rigidly that I glanced at his face. He was biting his lip and staring, unblinking, at the pale squirming thing down there in the green-lit water. He didn’t move. But when I looked again, a trickle of blood was slipping down his chin into his beard and his lower lip was still caught in his teeth. There was a rollicking grandmother on my right, wailing and whomping throughout. Her easy tears didn’t touch me at all. It was this thick-wallet with his gleaming, well-kept air who shook me up.

  For hours afterward, wandering through the crowds in the midway, walking in the Admitted encampment, I am swept by the idea, almost believe that having all my limbs amputated will actually free me from the furious scourge of my days. The midway finally shut down at midnight and I recovered a little more sobriety as the lights clicked off. In the dark, at last, I went down the road a half mile to the Roamers Rest Tavern and contemplated my momentary conversion ruefully through the amber lens of Resa Innes’s (proprietress) corrupt bourbon. I kept feeling a tremor in my shins and thighs and spine, from the voice of that ruinous tadpole. I kept feeling the heat of solid thighs packed against me in that sweltering hour on the bleachers.

  I had another pull at Mother Resa’s treacle comfort and remembered the Vesuvius coverage ten years ago. We’d goaded the pilot of the big press chopper into getting us the goods. As we bucketed crazily in the hot drafts around the crater and cleared the lip with a gut-chewing swoop, old Sid Lyman dropped his beloved camera and fell to his knees on the steel deck. Praying. “Good Old” Sid, who cracked abysmal puns while shooting mass graves in Texas, while clicking away at the mutilated children on Cyprus, and while filming six years’ worth of intimate war footage—jungle and desert. There was Sid, helpless as his precious equipment skittered out through the open door of the chopper. All Sid could do, aside from what obviously happened in his trousers, was gibber infant prayers as he stared out into that roaring pit of boiling stone.

  What bothers me is my inability to recall whether I laughed at Sid. If I snickered then, over the crater, I’ve a hunch I’ll pay for it. I asked the flatulent Resa for another tug at Aphrodite’s bourbon teat and hoped, with absurd urgency, that I’d had the sense to bite my lip over Vesuvius.

  This sheaf of news clippings was stapled into Norval’s notebook:

  NIGHT OF CRIME

  AP: Santa Rosa, California

  A sudden crime wave broke out in this coastal city last night, with looting of one large supermarket and three smaller grocery stores. All the thefts took place in the three hours between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M., and Police Chief Warren Cosenti reports that foodstuffs were the only items taken.

  Spokane, Washington

  Eight suspects were arrested inside McAffrey’s Stop and Shop at 114 West Main by officers answering a burglar alarm from the convenience store at 2:30 A.M. The suspects, five males and three females, were apprehended while loading cardboard boxes with foodstuffs from the shelves. All eight were unarmed, dressed completely in white, and refused to make any statement to police. One man, evidently a spokesman for the group, handed police officers a note reading, “We have all taken vows of silence. Do what you will.”

  Reports that several, or perhaps all, of the suspects are missing one or more fingers or toes have not yet been confirmed.

  Spokane, Washington

  County Coroner Jeff Johnson affirmed, in a press conference this morning, that all eight of the burglary suspects who committed suicide last Wednesday night in the city detention cells took cyanide.

  None of the suicide victims has yet been identified, and neither police nor Johnson will comment on the rumors that all of the victims were missing digits from their hands or feet.

  Velva, North Dakota:

  Police responding to a burglar alarm at 3 A.M. Monday found the big plate-glass window of the Velva Coop Supermarket shattered and whole shelves emptied of goods in what appears to be …

  This headline was cut from the Hopkins, Minnesota, Clarion:

  GROCERY WAREHOUSE RANSACKED

  Police Suspect Carnival Link

  On a handbill circulated among Arturans and carnival staff, Norval Sanderson had underlined this passage:

  … To eliminate food shortages arising from the increased number of the Blessed, our Beloved Arturo has established a special kitchen truck and mess tent to serve three wholesome meals per day to each and every one of his followers. Novices who have not yet begun Shedding must obtain meal cards from their group leaders. Guests and visitors will be charged a nominal fee for meals.…

  I laughed when I found this among Norval’s notes. I remember the tizzy we were in when this handbill was written. I suppose we weren’t far from Hopkins, Minnesota, because it was the Hopkins cops who were snooping around.

  I was helping Lily pin up the hem on a new satin coat for Arty. We were in the kitchen of the van. Lily had her sewing machine on the table in the dining booth and Arty was sitting beside it on the table. I was chalking the hem and Lily had her mouth full of pins when the door jerked open and the twins stormed in with Chick.

  “Cops,” they said. The twin’s faces had matching looks of thrilled horror. Chick nodded gravely. “Papa’s angry. The cops want to talk to Arty.”

  Arty had been stretching up tall for his fitting and he sank back on his hips and got a pin in his rump. “Rar!” He jerked forward. Elly giggled, Iphy reached for him, and I fell off the bench. The radiophone buzzed and it was Al from the office. Chick was right. Papa was very angry.

  That was the first we heard of the marauding that Arty’s followers had been up to. It seems they were hungry. A lot of them didn’t have any money left after turning everything over to Arty. Trailing around after him they had no way to earn any. But none of us had given any thought to how they would all eat. Some of them had been sneaking meals with the show crew but that infuriated the cooks. The midway staff would beat them up or, at the least, throw them out if they suspected who they were. The cooks had stuck up signs on the mess tent saying, “Midway Staff ONLY!”

  The cops arrested five novices that day and impounded the old school bus that they lived in. Behind its white curtains the bus was stacked with cases of canned goods intended for the good people of Hopkins. The police kept us there for a couple of days before they let us go.

  Al hired two more cooks and some kitchen helpers, bought another kitchen truck, and relegated a couple of old tents to the followers for dining halls. He fumed, and Arty too was angry
at having to spend the money to feed them all. Norval Sanderson took notes and collected clippings and asked questions.

  16

  The Fly Roper and the Transcendental Maggot

  Norval Sanderson was a curious man. He wanted to know everything. When he had exhausted all the Binewskis for the day, or was bored with the antics of the Admitted, he would stroll into the midway and continue his casually relentless examination of every event, phenomenon, skill, artifact, and personality that caught his eye. He wasn’t pushy. He was as patient and flexible as water on rock.

  He was fascinated by popcorn machines and by the way cotton candy was spun. He charmed the redheads with his attentive interest in their uncountable chores and their extravagantly fascinating life stories. He was intrigued by the engines of the simp twisters and he plagued the mechanics with his probing about the drive lines and exhaust systems of the machines.

  Sanderson engaged the customers in conversation and could discover astounding details about the truckers, lawyers, pea pickers, sea cooks, insurance peddlers, students, and factory workers who happened to be pitching coins at the ring toss or standing in line for the Roll-a-plane as he ambled by.

  He never got tired of the midway. He scrupulously rode each of the simp twisters once when he first started haunting the show. After that he only watched them. But the games and the acts, the booths and the vendors didn’t get old for him. He turned the game managers into exuberant braggarts by inquiring about the details of their work and expressing amazement at their skills.

  Al’s old front men told him how to find the district attorney or sheriff or mayor or police captain in each town who could be paid off with the proceeds of one fixed game, as a prophylactic against investigations of the roulette wheel and the baseball toss. They told him how to place posters, how to pry a license out of a reluctant bureaucrat, how to rent a site for a song, and all the comes and tells and scams of their craft.