Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  “Well,” he said finally, “what can we do for you?”

  The Bag Man hunched forward and wrote. The page said, “Let me stay with you. Work for you. Take care of you.”

  Arty stared at the page for a long time. Then he looked at the Bag Man. “Take off your veil,” he said. The Bag Man hesitated. His hands jigged hysterically in his lap. Then they rose to his head. He lifted off the cap. The veil was tied on. He pulled at a cord and the veil fell down over the front of his shirt. Arty looked. I looked. It was pretty bad. There were a couple of patches of hair growing on one side of his head. The one live eye swiveled and jerked over us nervously. The rest was raw insides bubbling through plastic. Arty sighed.

  “You’ll have to learn to type. This handwriting business doesn’t cut it. We’ll get you a machine.”

  “We didn’t go to his trial?” I tried to remember but nothing came. The last hard picture I had was the lady at the reception desk staring at us as Al carried us out the door of the emergency ward. Arty slumped against his throne and stared moodily at Chick. Chick was lying flat on the floor watching an almost invisible green thread weave intricate patterns in the air three feet above his nose.

  “No,” Arty finally grunted. He straightened and looked at me curiously. “You must have been asleep when the guy from the prosecutor’s office came.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “We were hightailing it for Yakima. Al cancelled all the shows between Coos Bay—where it happened—and Yakima. He wanted to get far away from that parking lot and everything connected with it. We were still in the thirty-eight footer, remember. No add-on sections in those days. We pulled in at one of the big rest areas, still on the Oregon side, to wait for the caravan to catch up with us. They were strung out for fifty miles, Al was going so fast. Lil was nervous and jumping up to look at all of us every five minutes.”

  “This was just before I was born, right?” Chick rolled his eyes toward Arty and the green thread straightened into an arrow.

  “A matter of days,” said Arty. “There were only a half-dozen rigs with us and Al was working the radio on the others, giving out our location, when an official car pulled into the rest area and the guy got out. A tidy beard and a three-piece suit. He took a look at the line and tucked a clipboard under his arm and headed straight for us.

  “Al was sitting in the pilot’s seat watching him. He just said the one word, ‘Police,’ and Lily and I clammed up. The twins were asleep and I guess you were too, Oly. Al got up and let the guy in when he knocked. He sat down but he couldn’t get comfortable with me there, across from him in the booth. Al offered him coffee and the guy refused. He stuck to his papers. He was in a hurry to leave. He wanted us to come back and testify at the trial. Al refused. The guy left. Al started talking guns and security systems. Not long after Chick was born, the guard routine started. The whole thing made Al paranoid as hell. And Lil was dipshit, naturally. I learned a lot from it myself.”

  Arty watched the green thread tie itself in knots in the air and then slither out into a limp line. “I thought I told you to get rid of that bastardly mold,” he muttered.

  “I will.” Chick lay quite still and the thread became a small transparent bubble. “It’s nice stuff, though. Comfortable, peaceful. I like it.”

  19

  Witness

  From the notes of Norval Sanderson:

  Arturo Establishes the Aristocracy of Conspicuous Absences and Superfluous Presences:

  “Consider the bound feet of the Mandarin maiden … and the Manchu scholar who jams his hands into lacquered boxes so his fingernails grow like curling death. Even the Mexican welder sports one long polished nail on his smallest finger which declares to the world, ‘My life allows superfluity.’ I have this whole finger to spare, unnecessary to my labor and unscathed by it!”

  —Arturo Binewski to N.S.

  Impressions:

  Fortunato—aka Chick (origin of nickname?), 10-year-old male child—blond, blue eyes. Totally normal physique of the tall, thin variety. Withdrawn, introverted. Very shy except with family. Occasionally referred to as “Normal Binewski” by Arturo.

  The youngest of the Binewski children, Fortunato evidently serves as chore boy and workhorse for the others. He is generally depreciated for his lack of abnormality and has been made to feel dramatically inferior to his “more gifted” siblings. A reversal of the position a deformed child occupies in a normal family. The boy spends most of his time tagging after Dr. Phyllis, the cult surgeon. The doctor, being a normally formed person, may provide nonjudgmental affection lacking in the boy’s family. The Binewskis and all the show folk in general seem to avoid the subject of Fortunato. He is, perhaps, an embarrassment.

  Why Only Red-Haired Women Work in the Midway of Binewski’s Fabulon

  Note: Male crew members—members of acts, booth tenders, mechanics, etc., are not required to conform to any dress or appearance code. Non-show wives and other female relatives traveling with the show, but not appearing in any way, are not required to meet an appearance code.—ALL female performers and workers directly involved in the Fabulon operation—whether snake dancing or selling popcorn—are required to have red hair of a particular bright, though apparently (or possibly) natural shade. Dyeing hair or wearing a wig of the appropriate shade satisfies the requirements as long as the individual agrees never to appear in public without the wig, etc. The only exceptions are the Binewski females themselves—Crystal Lil, platinum blonde; Siamese twins, Electra and Iphigenia, black hair; Olympia the dwarf, hairless, wears caps of various kinds.

  Reasons given by those questioned:

  Al Binewski: “Just a visual consistency, like a uniform. Kind of cheerful look that holds the show together. Customers can tell a show employee by their hair color.”

  Crystal Lil: “Al always had a kindness for that color hair. His mother had red hair. And in a crowd we can pick out our girls easily.”

  Olympia: “They always had red hair. I don’t know why.”

  Redhead: “Story I got is that Al, the boss, has a thing against red hair and Crystal Lil makes sure he doesn’t fool around on her by making every girl on the lot wear this damned torch color. I’m a honey blonde naturally. You can probably tell ’cause of my golden complexion. No blotchy redhead skin on me.”

  “The truth is always an insult or a joke. Lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort.”

  —Arturo Binewski to N.S.

  “I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”

  —Arturo Binewski to N.S.

  Excerpts from transcript of conversation with Lillian Binewski—mother—taping unknown to the subject:

  “Of course I remember, Mr. Sanderson. It started with a card from my mother. I forget what holiday it was. Easter, maybe. It was a sweet card with a little poem in it. Arty had been talking to his audience from the beginning but—oh, he must have been six or so—he saw that card and he read it over and looked at me in this wise little way he always had and he pipes up, ‘The norms will eat this up, Lil.’ He used to call me Lil like his Papa. And that night in his last show, when he was on the rim of the tank near the end, he smiled so sweetly and came out with this little poem. They loved it. They went wild. Then, of course, nothing would do but I must scour the card racks for him in every town we came to. And he was PARTICULAR! I’ll say this for him, he was nearly always right. Knew his crowd.

  “Why, there have been times, when I’d slip in at the back during his show and stand watching, that he’d even make ME cry, the clever way he had.

  “Wait! The change you’re talking about! How could I? It was this ghastly town on the coast. Oregon. Just before Chick was born. It was a terrible thing and I always felt that it must have scarred the children. A madman shot at us in the town. It was terrifying. You can’t imagi
ne what it is to realize that there are people at large whose first reaction to the sight of your children is to reach for a gun. But offstage Arty was withdrawn after that. Quiet. Chick was an infant, too, and we were totally taken up with him. He caused a furor in our lives, that Chick.

  “My teeth had been giving me trouble. Chick was three or four months old and we were in Oklahoma. One week we were in the same town with a faith-healing dentist and he was getting our crowds. The midway was just dead until his services were over every evening. Then we’d get the runoff but there wasn’t much. The faith-healing dentist was pumping them dry. They just went home and stared at the wall when he was finished with them. Well, the third night in a row of standing around looking at each other over the sawdust had us all pretty peeved. And I’d been having these teeth pains again so I decided to sneak over to this auction barn where Dr.… I forget his name, was having his healing service.

  “Arty had finished for the night. It was only eight o’clock, but he had about seven people in his tent for the early show and we decided it wasn’t worth the gas to run the lights for another set like that. So I took Arty with me in his chair. Of course I took guards. We didn’t breathe without guards. They were brothers, big boys who had both dropped out of college. I forget their names. But these were nice boys. One of them wanted to geek for us. There was trouble with some women’s clubs at about that time over cruelty to chickens. But they were nasty white Leghorns anyway. Stupid things. Now, I’d never give a Plymouth Rock or a nice Rhodie to a geek. I love a nice Rhode Island Red. They are the finest breed of chicken. They have character. We used turkeys for a while, too, and they’re even stupider than a Leghorn. Albinos they were, blue and red wattles. Al tried out the turkeys because their size made them easier to see in the pit. And white, naturally. The albinos. They take a spotlight so well, and the blood shows so vividly. Now that I think of it, that boy had already been geeking. That’s why he wanted to come along. He’d broken a tooth on one of the turkey necks. The bones are so much bigger than a chicken’s, you know. He was the younger boy. He’d dropped out of Yale, I think, and got Al to take him on. Then his older brother came to get him to come back to college. They both stayed on as boys will at that age. Especially the clean, well-bred boys.

  “And they always want to strip down and crawl into the blood and mud in the geek pit and scream around, chasing the birds and tearing them to pieces. You could say, well, that’s the quickest route. Any other act would take so much time to learn, and that’s true. But those boys just get such a kick out of it, you have to laugh. This boy, what was his name …? He was good. He had long blond hair and a beard and he’d bury his face in the guts and then snatch his face up and snarl and chatter his teeth at the crowd with gore dripping from his beard. Oh, he had a style about him. But he’d broken a tooth. Got carried away, I dare say.

  “And poor little Arty had been so downcast since the shooting I thought it would be a treat for Arty and I’d be with him by himself. He always just flowered with individual attention, Arty did.

  “So we set out. One of the boys pushed Arty’s chair and I walked on one side and the brother walked on the other side of Arty. We weren’t far from the main street. It was a small town but a lot of farms in the area. Actually had sidewalks as I recall. We haven’t been back there. I can ask Al what town that was. He’ll remember. But you know those small prairie towns. Not much paint on the houses, not much grass in the yards. The wind just blisters it off. But the folks are nice, with soft drawls. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of blocks to the auction barn. Summer evening you know, and most folks were up at the dentist’s show. A few stayed out rocking on their porches. I remember the geek boy laughing—we none of us believed in this prayer dentistry—that he hoped it worked because his dad was so sore about him quitting school that he’d cancelled his medical and dental insurance.

  “I always liked the cattle smells, hay and milk and dung. We knew the place by the flies. And there was a crowd.

  “That dentist had ten little boys in a white-voice choir. Very sweet and eerie. Remind me to let you listen to the twins’ tapes when they were doing white voice. The transition was hard on them, getting the tremolo after their blood flowed. They’re still good but their mature voices just don’t have the purity and control that their white voices did. Arty can still white voice if he wants to, but Oly never did have a white time. I swear that child cried for titty in a full-throated contralto. Chick still has a pure little white voice. Sometimes I pass where he’s sitting or hear him in his shower and I think for a moment that he’s still a toddler and I should go make sure he isn’t drinking ammonia or something. Isn’t it odd that the girls should lose their white voice and both the boys can still use it? Sometimes I say to Al, ‘Why is that …?’

  “Oh no, Arty didn’t sing at the dentist. It was the choir and a few witnesses. Older folks, big jolly men with guts over their belts standing up next to the dentist showing big gold smiles. It seems God doesn’t use porcelain or amalgam or fancy plastic. He fills strictly with gold. And some big old farm women who should have known better.

  “The dentist was down in the auction pit with his microphone. Nice-looking man. White hair and spectacles and a quiet suit. He had a wonderful voice. We stayed in the aisle in the back because of Arty’s chair, which was good because it gave us a better view than if we’d been up on the bleachers. The dentist was asking questions. ‘Do you believe God can heal?’ and the crowd was nice and they liked him and they said, ‘Yes,’ a big yes. ‘Do you believe God can heal YOU?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you believe God can fill teeth?’ And when the dentist asked, ‘Do you believe God can fill YOUR teeth?’ we all said yes to be courteous. It was fun that it was somebody else’s show and we could just go along like paying customers for once.

  “Then everybody was praying wild with their mouths open and their hands waving. The dentist had a good backup line that it might not happen at that very moment. It might take a couple of days or even weeks. Still there were plenty of folks whooping right away that their big hole was filling up with gold. They were bouncing around looking in each other’s mouths and blessing Jesus. There was no folderol about getting new teeth. God was a decent dentist. He’d give you a well-fitted denture but he wouldn’t grow you a whole new set.

  “We laughed all the way back to our lot but, actually, I never did have any more tooth pain. Eventually all my teeth went and this set of plates does me well. But I never had any pain. Arty would ask me about it and we’d laugh but he seemed to think about it. He had Oly letter a little card that he taped on his wall. The thing read, ‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’ Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.”

  Arturo to N.S.:

  “Why? You’re asking me why? You tell me, Mac! I’m not really in a position to know. You are. Me, I have suspicions. I suspect people are suckers for a prick. I suspect folks just naturally go belly-up for a snob. Folks figure if a guy acts like he’s King Tut and everybody else is donkey shit, he must be an aristocrat.”

  Arturo to N.S.:

  “Consider the whole thing as occupational therapy. Power as cottage industry for the mad. The shepherd is slave to the sheep. A gardener is in thrall to his carrots. Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You’ve seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn’t matter. We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him.”

  ARTURISM: A quasi-religious cult making no representations of a god or gods, and having nothing to say about life after death. The cult represents itself as offering earthly sanctuary from the aggravations of life. Small chalked graffiti, said to be the work of the Admitted, are found in many locations after the Binewski car
nival has passed through. The phrase “Peace, Isolation, Purity” (or sometimes initials P.I.P.) seems to be the slogan. Many commercial posters distributed in advance of the show read, “Arturo knows, All Pain, All Shame, and the Remedy!”

  A fee, called a dowry, is required for entering the novice stage. The sum varies depending on the novice’s resources but the minimum seems to be around $5,000. Novices are required to serve for at least three months and sometimes as long as a year as workers for the cult. Typists, bookkeepers, and organizers are given longer work periods than laborers. One of the most important tasks of the work period is serving and caring for cult members who have already had major portions of their limbs amputated.

  The Admitted must furnish their own travel and living arrangements. All that is offered in return for the dowry is free access to Arturo the Aqua Man’s shows, and the surgical amputations performed by the Arturan medical staff. Since the medical staff travels with the carnival, the Admitted must follow the carnival.

  The camp of the Admitted is separated from the carnival camp by a portable electric fence and a series of manned sentry posts.

  The administration is loosely conducted in a large camper perched on the back of a pickup truck.

  The medical facilities consist of a well-equipped surgery in a large truck trailer with its own power supply. Two large truck trailers are equipped with monitoring devices and furnished as post-op recovery rooms. Each trailer has ten beds. A smaller eight-bed infirmary trailer is always parked near the doctors mobile living van, which houses an examining room.

  Only one surgeon on the staff, reportedly aided by a skilled anesthesiologist. Am currently trying to locate credentials and licensing for the surgeon, a woman who goes by the name of Dr. Phyllis.

  Most nursing chores, feeding, bathing, linen changes, bedpan provision, etc., are performed by novices in the order.