Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  I stared without moving, thinking to myself that the envelope had been an invitation and that, wow, when I got my own van there would be norm guys coming to visit me.

  I’ve sometimes wondered if the Binewski view of the world stunted my sympathy muscles. We were a close family. Our contact with norms outside the show was in dashes and flashes—overheard phrases, unconnected to lives. Outsiders weren’t very real to me. When I spoke to them it was always with a show motive, like a seal trainer using varying tones to coax or command. I never thought of carrying on a conversation with one of the brutes. Looking back I think the thin man was upset and confused. At the time I wondered if Elly had got her way but had been murdered as a result.

  He lowered his head to walk away and saw me. “You brought the note.” He said it flatly, his voice light and even but unfocused as though he’d just waked up. “That was strange.” He jerked his head back at the closed door leading to the twins. “I don’t think I was right. I think I did something … wrong. One of them didn’t want it. She cried and scratched at me. The other one … did.” He shook his head slowly, jabbed his hands into his suit-coat pockets, and lurched down the steps and away, leaving me with the sounds of his shoes fading in the gravel.

  I figured he’d killed the twins but my previous experience in nabbing assassins to protect Arty made me cautious. I went looking for the corpse before I gave the alarm. The door was unlocked.

  I could hear the shower water rushing but I thought he might have slit their throats in there so I leaned on the bathroom door and hollered their names. The water turned off and the door popped open. Elly was wrapping a towel around her hair as she snapped, “What do you want?” Iphy was red-eyed, toweling their crotch.

  “That guy just left, I thought …”

  Iphy lifted her eyes to me like the ghost of a murdered child. “She just sold our cherry!” she cried. “And I was saving mine!”

  “Aah, crap!” growled Elly. I trailed them into the pink bedroom and climbed up on the bed to look at the red streak on the dusty rose sheets while they were rifling a closet for their robe.

  “Anyway!” Elly piped between the hanging clothes. “You keep your toad yap shut about it, Oly!”

  “I will! Jeez!”

  “And Squeak-brain here is going to button up, too. Right?”

  “Elly, stop. Oly can know.”

  “You didn’t have to tell her.”

  They were digging in their own sparsely furnished refrigerator with me peeping around the door before they got squared away about my not being able to tell because Elly would put red-hot needles in my eyes if I did and Iphy couldn’t stop her, and Iphy couldn’t tell because she was just as guilty as Elly. Their soft, bitter bickering was almost soothing if you didn’t listen to the words. They came up with a jug of pink lemonade and grabbed three paper cups and we all went in and sat on the sea-green carpet in the living area.

  “So, was it fun?” I asked. “Or did it hurt?”

  “Sure,” shrugged Elly.

  “Awful,” winced Iphy.

  “I thought there’d be more blood.”

  “I thought he’d stay for a while afterward. You scared him off with your blubbering.”

  “You don’t sound as if it was really fun.”

  “The redheads say it gets better.”

  “Do you think he enjoyed it? Wouldn’t it be awful if he didn’t? Maybe that’s why he ran off so soon. It’d be terrible if he gave us all that money and didn’t like it.”

  “Money?” This last was me. Somehow it hadn’t sunk in when Iphy said Elly had “sold” their cherry.

  “Sure, money.” Elly reached under the sofa and pulled out that same envelope I’d delivered to the judges’ stand. He’d come up to talk to them after their show the day before. He’d asked if he could visit them, said he’d drop by after he finished judging the beauty contest.

  “Is he a schoolteacher?”

  “We don’t know what he does. He was polite. Kind of gentle. I thought he’d be good to start with. He didn’t seem rich so I just said fifty dollars in the note and that he should come after closing.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. It’s just that I was saving mine and he was so heavy on me and it hurt.”

  “Iphy, listen. He wouldn’t have hugged us anyway. They are never going to want to hug us or cuddle up afterward. They are always going to get right out of bed and zip up still wet and go away.”

  Iphy looked down at their knees, her slender hand folding a hunk of the bathrobe nervously in a movement so much like Mama’s that I stared.

  Elly peeped seriously into the envelope. “Maybe I was dumb about this. A virginity like ours could be worth a lot. Maybe we should have taken bids. Kind of an auction. Maybe we could still do that. We’ll get better. We can send out flyers. Put it up in lights, ‘The Exquisite Convenience of Two Women with One Cunt!’ ”

  “Arty will be mad. Arty will just die.” Iphy pleated at the robe. I saw how pretty she was and I hated her.

  “He won’t care,” I tossed out. “He does it himself.”

  “Arty?!!?” Their twin voices blended in a harmony of shock.

  “For money?”

  “Well,” now I was confused, off balance. “I don’t think he makes them pay, but … I’m not sure. Does he, maybe, pay them?”

  “Who?”

  “All the girls who come to his door at night in shiny clothes.”

  Iphy’s face stiffened. Elly hooted, laughing. “Norm girls?” Iphy’s lips didn’t move over the words.

  “Yeah. All sorts.”

  “Arty, the preacher!” Elly looked up at the ceiling as she giggled. I decided she wasn’t a bad sort. But I knew about the pain in Iphy’s gut and was glad and ashamed of being glad. If I couldn’t have him, she wouldn’t either. That was enough to go on. At least I could work for him and be close to him. Elly wouldn’t let Iphy do that. I decided I really liked Elly. Her chin dropped down so she could look at me. “Do Mama and Papa know?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Months.”

  Elly grinned at me. Iphy’s face suddenly relaxed into mild questioning. “Elly, we’re never going to do it with anybody old or fat, are we? Let’s not.”

  Sometimes just looking at Al and Crystal Lil I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up. Papa strutted and Mama doddered and neither of them had a glimmer of what seemed to me the real world. I suppose I wanted them to save me from my own hurts and from the moldering arsenic ache of jealousy. I wanted back into the child mind where Mama and Papa lived, the old fantasy where they could keep me safe even from my own nastiness.

  Sometimes when Mama put her arm around me and kissed my smooth skull and called me her dear dove, I almost puked. If I had ever been a dear dove it was in some dream. I still wonder what she would have done if I had been able to tell her. Maybe she could have helped. Maybe she could have saved us.

  I didn’t understand what Elly was up to with her whoring but I was glad because it made Iphy dirty. I didn’t know what Arty was building with his religious trappings but I was happy that he had lots of work for me to do.

  Arty in his tank flashing wildly from glass wall to glass wall with the lights flaming on his gleaming body, light exploding out of the rushing froth of bubbles he beat into being until his whole tank roared with fire—then, suddenly, Arty motionless, floating four feet off the bottom, caught in the soft gold light. Arty talking to the people through the microphones set against the glass. Talking until the people talked back, talking until they cried for him, talking until they called out his name, talking until they roared, stamping in the bleachers.

  Arty in his golf cart, waving a flipper at the crowd on the other side of the chain-link fence. Arty working in his van, receiving guests while I hid quietly in the stuffy security room behind one-way glass with a goofy little gun in my hand just in case. Arty surrounded by books, tap
ping notes with one educated flipper on a humming keyboard. Arty reading, muttering into his phone transmitter, Arty reading all the way from Mesa, Arizona, to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, without looking up, without noticing that the guy driving his rig was battling a stripped gear box the last few hundred miles because the brakes were gone.

  Arty in his shower after the show, grey with the drain of whatever was eating him. Arty lying back against the wall of the shower as I scrubbed him with a brush, his eyes closed, his face smooth and dissatisfied.

  Iphy decided that if I delivered the messages to their prospects I’d eventually tell Arty everything. The twins got their own phone hookup. They also recruited their piano teacher, Jonathan Tomaini, who protested that he was a musician! An artist! Not a pimp! He announced solemnly that he would inform Al immediately.

  And, surprisingly, it was Iphy who sweetly, soothingly explained that if he ever did such a thing they would be forced to scream rape and point all four of their delicately accusing index fingers at him as the culprit. He quieted immediately and Elly gave him her line. He lay back on the blue sofa in obvious defeat and took in every word.

  “You know what the norms really want to ask?” said Elly. “What they want to know, all of them, but never do unless they’re drunk or simple, is How do we fuck? That and who, or maybe what. Most of the guys wonder what it would be like to fuck us. So, I figure, why not capitalize on that curiosity? They don’t care that I play bass and Iphy plays treble, or whether we both like the same flavor ice cream or any of the other stupid questions they ask. The thing that boggles them and keeps them staring all the way through a sonata in G is musing about our posture in bed.

  “Believe me, some of them are willing to pay a nice price to find out. The clincher is that you get ten points of the profit for your efforts. That’s a little bonus for your salary, isn’t it? Won’t that sweeten the smell just a little?”

  “Ten percent?” he frowned.

  “Ten,” Elly nodded.

  “Gross?”

  “Profit. But we’re not a cheap item. We’re setting a minimum of a thousand dollars for two hours with additional fees for any variations on the traditional.”

  He couldn’t help showing his puzzlement. “I wouldn’t have thought that you needed money. It would appear that you are very comfortably provided for, and your concerts are always well attended.”

  Elly smiled. “At our prices we won’t be dealing with a waiting line.”

  “They’ll be people,” Iphy explained, “who are truly interested in what we have to offer.”

  18

  Enter the Bag Man

  Arty always had a great skin—smooth and tight—never a zit or a boil. Not so much as a wart. He claimed, and it was probably true, that it was all the hours he spent submerged in the heavily chlorinated water of the tank. “I don’t even have itch mites,” he’d say. The time when Chick and the twins and I all had ringworm from mucking with a leopard cub that Horst had picked up cheap Arty didn’t get it and he wouldn’t let us touch him until we were clean again.

  But there were times over the years when Arty’s tank developed an odd, slimy moss that seemed immune to the chlorine. It would start in a tiny patch on the glass behind one of the pumps and spread. It also spread to Arty. I was the one who helped him with his shower after each show. I always soaped him and sponged him but he hated being tickled and he was particularly ticklish directly behind his balls, so that was a spot we often missed. When the galloping green caught on in the tank it caught Arty by the balls and in the shady space behind them. I had to use a scrub brush to get the stuff off him.

  I hated to ask Chick for help. It infuriated Arty and made it seem that I wasn’t worth anything at all since Chick could do everything better than anybody. But on this night Arty was roaring in the tub-shower and thrashing around threatening to bite me as I tried to scrub his privates. I was about ready to drop the brush and holler when Chick opened the door and stuck his head in. “Oly …” he started, but I jumped up and grabbed his hand and pulled him into the bathroom.

  “Take the mildew out of Arty’s crotch!” I snapped.

  “There’s a man outside that I don’t like,” said Chick.

  Arty wallowed irritably in the hot spray from the shower and rumbled at us. “Do this shit-squirting job and then worry about that!”

  “It’s on the back side of the balls, in the wrinkles, and behind his balls almost all the way to his asshole,” I said.

  Chick looked at Arty. A thin trail of green smoke—almost invisible—rose from the tub and hovered above the floor.

  “What should I do with it?” asked Chick.

  “The toilet,” I said.

  “No,” growled Arty. “It might stay in the works and creep up my ass again.”

  “Well …” said Chick. The smoke condensed into a distinct pea-sized puff and wobbled in the air.

  I chuckled. “Put it in Dr. Phyllis’s underwear drawer.”

  Chick looked at me. “Now, Oly …”

  “Take it with you! Get rid of it! Throw it into the middle of the Pacific! I don’t care!” Arty flicked the shower tap off with his flipper and lurched up, catching the rim of the tub with his chin. I hoisted him out and started to towel him dry.

  Chick leaned back against the door and crossed his arms to look at us seriously. “The man outside wants to see you, Arty, but I don’t think you should.”

  Arty rotated his shoulders under the towel. He grunted.

  “He writes notes,” said Chick. “He can’t talk and he’s lost his face.”

  “Yah, yah,” sneered Arty.

  “He stayed through both your shows and then went to talk to Horst. Horst says he asked about the twins and Oly and Mama and that he claims to have met you before.”

  Arty looked to see that I had the bottle of oil and then punched the door open and rolled into his room with the towel wrapped around him. He was climbing onto his massage bench when he said, “Tell the guy to wait. Bring him in fifteen minutes and then get yourself into the security room and keep an eye on him. How big is he?”

  “Big,” said Chick. “But slow.”

  “Oly will stay with me,” said Arty, and he stretched and wriggled his flippers and waited for me to start oiling him.

  Chick’s face crumpled in sour worry from the chin up but he turned and went out with the compressed pill of mold floating behind him like a pup.

  • • •

  Arty was sitting in his big chair, dressed in dark wine velvet and sipping at the straw in his tonic water when Chick brought the man in. He was as tall as Al and very lean. He stopped just inside the door, his one eye fixed on Arty, and dipped his knees in what must have been a bow. His face was covered by a grey cloth that fell from inside his baseball cap and drooped into his open shirt collar. Only his right eye peered out at us.

  “Mr. Bogner,” said Arty.

  I pushed up a chair for the big man and he moved toward it and folded into it slowly and with great care. I remembered a story about a miser who had a deep dent in the top of his head. The rain had filled it with water and there were goldfish in it. The miser moved very carefully and slept sitting up so as not to spill his private fish preserve.

  The masked man balanced a pad of paper on his knee and looked at Arty. I stood close, fiddling with a spray can of Paralyzer. The lamp on the bureau went on and I took half a step back so Chick would have a clear view of the big guy through the mirror.

  I flinched when he lurched forward and began scribbling on the pad. He ripped the sheet off and held it out to Arty. I took it and held it for Arty to read. The script was a fast block print, very legible. It said, “I’m glad to see you again. I shot at you in a parking lot ten years ago.” He was leaning forward, his one eye sweeping its gleam over us both eagerly. His baseball cap was dark blue and the bill was pulled down. The top of his veil was tucked under the left side of the cap so he looked like a game of peekaboo. The veil bulged at his neckline in a bag that
seemed to swell and fall back with his noisy breathing. He was literally a Bag Man.

  Arty was still and staring, no expression on his smooth, wide face, only his eyes weren’t blinking and were wider open than usual. He was holding his breath. I couldn’t read the Bag Man’s eye. It moved and light came off it, but there was no flesh to crinkle around it and tell me what the eye meant. I got a grip on the Paralyzer and dug my heels into the carpet.

  Arty let his breath out. Then he took some in. In a half-joking and familiar tone he said, “Now, why ever did you do that?”

  The Bag Man blinked and bent over his knee, writing fast with his pen scratching and jumping in his big weathered knuckles. He ripped the sheet off and handed it to me and then kept on writing. The paper said, “Things were slipping on me—oranges at first—then everything. My wife and kids had no respect for me. I started going up to the woods with my old man’s 30.06 on weekends but I never did any hunting. Just sat by the fire and cleaned the rifle and had a few beers.”

  • • •

  He didn’t remember much of the trial, though he was quite clear on being booked. The photographer and the fingerprinting struck him as dull. He felt that he should struggle or shout, cry, anything to make the proceedings important. But he was too tired, and looking into the faces of the uniformed men going about their work made him anxious not to disturb or trouble them. “Who knows what their wives are like?” he thought. Sitting in the cell alone, he decided that he had done something that couldn’t be put right. He lay quietly on his bunk and tried to think. On the second day a man came who claimed to be Emily’s lawyer. Emily was filing divorce papers.

  The trial was vague and boring. He remembered an old woman, very neatly dressed and sharp-voiced. She was sitting on the chair next to the judge’s bench and she said, “… If you ask me I’d say it was a charitable instinct for mercy. I felt the same way. I’m not one who’d say it was a wrong thing to do.”