Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  I always slept curled around her in my cupboard. It made Mama nervous but there was no room for me to turn over so I thought there was no danger that I’d crush or smother her. I didn’t dare put her in a box or drawer separate from me.

  • • •

  “He doesn’t hate her,” Chick said. “How could he?” Chick was holding Miranda in the sink as I bathed her. His arm looped behind her flat little back so she wouldn’t topple over and crack her perfect skull. I was afraid to trust myself bathing her. Her five-month-old fingers grabbed at his moving lips and he kissed them, making slurpy noises. “Mama and the redheads say you should be getting better now, Oly. Not so afraid.”

  My arms disappeared below the elbows, covered by the warm grey water in the sink. Across the lot, Leona the Lizard Girl was floating, still and silent, in the green murk of her jar. Miranda could chortle and hurl a spoonful of pablum at the wall but she would be as helpless as Leona against Arty. I wanted Chick to believe me, to be as frightened and watchful as I was.

  “Baby’s no threat to him.” Chick spoke as though he were answering my thoughts. A bubble of light swelled in me. He was right. That puny tail of hers was no threat to the Aqua Man.

  “Besides,” Chick protested, “he keeps after me to bring Elly back. He says it would be good if she could help with Mumpo. I’ve been working on it but it’s tricky in there. In her head.”

  My bubble fantasy sank into a chilly puddle. So that’s why Chick was so sure of Arty’s benevolence. “Guilty,” I said.

  Chick nodded agreeably, his shiny head bobbing on his scrawny neck above Miranda’s unfathomable curls. “He feels bad.”

  I sponged her puffing cheeks and she opened her gums and clamped down on the sponge, squeezing it happily. “I thought she was coming back.”

  “It’s slow,” he nodded. “It was starting anyway. But I’m trying, a little bit every time. You should go over more. They’re lonely, the twins. It helps if things are busy, exciting around them. Elly notices more.”

  “I help Iphy with the cleaning.”

  “You don’t like Mumpo. You think he’s bad, but he’s not. Take Miranda to play with him.”

  “He doesn’t play. He just lies there and eats.”

  Chick’s golden face fell into a shadow of hurt. “He’s a wonderful baby. He’s different from Miranda.” His face drooped down to rub against her damp hair. “But he’s wonderful.”

  I reached for a towel. “Let’s get her out now.”

  She rose, dripping, straight up from the water and swooped into my arms, crowing.

  “She likes to fly.” I smiled up at Chick, ashamed of insulting his other child.

  “I have to go to surgery now.” He wouldn’t look at me. His face was flushed.

  “We’ll come with you.” I started dressing her quickly.

  “No, Oly. Don’t. It’s hard for me to concentrate when I have to take care of you. I have hard things to do.” I watched him through the window as he walked away. The ragged straps of his coveralls rode his bare bony shoulders as though nobody loved him.

  Miranda was just learning to walk. She traveled from Papa’s big chair to the built-in sofa bench where Chick slept at night. Then she fell, face first, and split her lip. I was crying. She was bleeding and screaming. That was when Arty decided to come calling. It was the first time he had ever seen Miranda.

  It is true that I’d been useless to him since she was born. She changed me. When I did work I was afraid to be close to him because I had something to lose.

  After he wheeled out in disgust, I ran, with the baby still bleeding in my arms, and burst through the door of the surgery. The nurse grabbed my shoulders and hustled me into the waiting tent. Chick was severing a thigh. A critical procedure. She gave me a swab for Miranda’s lip and went back to the surgery.

  He came out in his green scrubs and I flung myself on him. He was thirteen years old. I was nineteen. Miranda was one. He looked at her and she stopped crying. Her lip stopped bleeding. She reached up to him and he lifted her. She sighed and let her head fall onto his shoulder.

  “He called her a norm,” I stormed. “He says he’ll feed her to Mumpo! He wouldn’t even look at her tail! Iphy will laugh all crazy and Mama will pop a pill and Al will swig on his bottle and nobody, nobody can help me but you!”

  His child face rumpled in puzzlement. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  At once a coolness swept over me. A woods-pond stillness filled me. “No!” I shrieked. “No! Don’t!” But it was too late and the anger and pain were small and hard in me, not gone, but distant.

  “Now explain, please,” Chick pleaded. And we walked calmly out through the tent flap and strolled up the grass behind the midway booths, and Miranda fell asleep in Chick’s arms on the way.

  I believe Chick tried. When he came out of Arty’s van he looked a thousand years old. He was the one who had to tell me.

  • • •

  Dear daughter, I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.

  He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you.

  The Arturan Administrative Office arranged everything. They located the convent school. They deposited a lump sum of money in a trust fund to be doled out to the nuns.

  My job was to take you to that cross-cursed old woman—who, don’t forget, had given up children for her God-love long before you or even I came along. I had to take you to her and come back without you.

  My job was to come back directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.

  Arty could have done worse, but he chose not to.

  25

  All Fall Down

  Hopalong McGurk smiles with pearly dentures because my perfect Binewski teeth went down the spout with everything else. Yet the day we lost it all was nothing special. Miranda had been gone a year or so. Late in the morning I was in Arty’s dressing room as usual, coating him with grease as the tent filled and the ropy voice of the crowd came through the wall, thickening the air. Arty lay on his belly on the massage table while I painted him. He watched me in the big wall mirror.

  “Thick in the creases, please. I want to shine.”

  I pushed the rolled flesh at the back of his neck and slathered a handful of grease over the smooth skin. He put his forehead against the bench and arched to pull the rolls out flat. I smoothed and rubbed and the sheen came up onto the back of his skull and crept toward his ears.

  “Do you want the tips on your flippers?”

  “I like it. The whole crowd breathes in when I go like this …” He spread his flippers and winked into the mirror.

  I slid a hand under his chest and heaved. His back muscles rolled in cut slabs, every knob of his incredible spine visible as he bunched to help me. When he was balanced upright on his rear fins, I worked on his forehead and pulled the grease down onto his long eyelids and the flat cheekbones.

  “I want a straight stroke of the white under each brow, down the nose,
and under my lower lip. Not too blatant for the folks up close to the tank.”

  I opened the jar of deli-white and spread his right fore-flipper. The pale glitter was already dry between his web creases. I painted brushfuls of soft gleam onto the fine fan of bones that were almost a hand sprouting from his shoulder. He flexed and spread and the light danced on the webbed flap.

  The flippers on Arty’s hips were graceful. Nearly flat, twisting at their short joints like swans’ necks, smooth and powerful and extending with asymmetrical purpose. The little toelike thing that never had grime beneath its square nail could grip or scratch or turn a page. He twitched as I stroked on white, sending ripples through his whole body.

  “Good. Go ahead and grease it now,” he said.

  The undercoat caught the light in a subtle prism. When it was set, the final greasing had a sheen of its own and kept the white on even through the hour under water with Arty squirming his wildest. The white tipping and streaking were new touches. Arty examined himself in the mirror and his wide mouth wriggled from corner to corner.

  “My, my. Won’t they just lick my jizz today?”

  The sky above Molalla was aching blue but I walked from Arty’s tent to our van in the same air I’d sucked all my life. It was a Binewski blend of lube grease, dust, popcorn, and hot sugar. We made that air and we carried it with us. The Fabulons light was the same in Arkansas as in Idaho—the patented electric dance step of the Binewskis. We made it. Like the mucoid nubbin that spins a shell called “oyster,” we Binewskis wove a midway shelter called “carnival.”

  It was noon and the crowds were building. Arty was in his tank holding elevation services for the Admitted in the big tent. Sanderson was hawking maggots in his elegant kudzu grammar. The redheads threw daring looks from every ticket booth and candy stand. Two dozen simp twisters did their best to shake, shock, and dizzy the change out of all the local pockets. I strolled down the midway, ready for lunch. I thought Crystal Lil was brewing Scotch broth for all her children.

  But then I saw Lily in front of the twins’ van. She opened her long face and yelled, “Chick!” just as Chick pelted past me, elbows and knees pumping toward her. His white hair lashed behind him and I began to run. “It’s Elly!” howled Lil.

  The bedroom door was open. The pink bed was filled with thrashing. One bare leg bent, beating its hard heel into the limp thigh of its mate. A long arm arced out of the snarling hair and flesh and whipped downward, clenching scissors.

  “No!” said Chick, but the glinting fist landed and the heel went on kicking its other leg. “No!” Chick pounced on the bed and two frail arms jerked up out of the long black hair. The furious leg straightened and fell down on the sheets. Iphy’s red-smeared face tipped up between the raised arms and she lay quietly down beside Elly. The bubble pumping red from Elly’s breast flattened and then ceased. The two shining eyes of the scissor handles sat straight up in the shadowed socket of Elly’s left eye.

  “No.” Chick reached for Elly while Lily, on her knees beside the bed, moaned, “Baaaby.”

  “Elly?” said Chick.

  I could see the thing on the floor in front of Lil, the bloody diapered heap of Mumpo.

  “I can’t find her!” The creak of fright in Chick’s voice. A long thin tone whined from Lily’s open mouth.

  “I killed her,” said Iphy calmly. She looked up at the ceiling from between arms stuck to the sheets by Chick’s mind.

  “I can’t fix her!” Chick was crying.

  “She killed my little boy.” Iphy’s voice was flat as Kansas.

  “Mumpo,” said Chick and he lunged off the bed and saw the mess on the floor at Lily’s knees.

  “Oh no,” Chick whispered. “I didn’t feel him go. Mumpo.”

  Lily keened. “I did it,” sobbed Chick. “I brought Elly back.”

  “Arty,” said Iphigenia. Then she died.

  Rooted to the carpet, I stood and watched her go.

  Chick whirled to look at her; his tear-slimed face broke. He threw himself on her, his hands grabbing her face. He jammed his face against hers, screaming, “No!”

  Lil rocked on her knees beside the cooling pile of Mumpo. The high whine came and went with her breath. Chick’s face and hands were buried in Iphy’s dark mane. He said, “Arty.”

  I broke for the door. Arty, I thought. Tell Arty. I hit the ramp as Chick passed me, his blond body hurtling barefoot to the dirt. I chased him. He stopped when he hit the midway. He stamped his feet into the sawdust, gathering himself, staring up the line to where the big tent loomed fifty feet above the booths and rides. “Arty,” he said, and I heard him through the wheezing music from the Mad Mouse as he stood, clenching his fists in the midway, stretching his neck with his eyes closed. No sign appeared around him. The air did not quiver. But silence came off him and the stretch of his neck cords made him old, and the veins blue and hard against his skin, and far down the line Arty’s tent, full of Arty and his cripples, blew upward, incinerating.

  The white rocking air hit us before the sound. I heard nothing, but raised my hands against the rushing air, and the fire came, toppling toward us in falling blocks like the wave in a child’s dream, huge, though the torches were booths and tents no taller than a man could touch with his hand. It came billowing, scorching toward us, and the Chick, in his pain, could not hold himself but reached. I felt him rush through me like a current of love to my cross points, and then draw back. I, with my arms lifted, felt his eyes open into me, and felt their blue flicker of recognition. Then he drew back. He pulled out of my separate self and was gone. He turned away—and the fire came. The flames spouted from him—pale as light—bursting outward from his belly. He did not scream or move but he spread, and my world exploded with him, and I, watching, bit down—bit down and knew it—bit down with a sense of enormous relief, and ground my teeth to powdered shards—and stood singed and grinding at the stumps as they died—my roses—Arty and Al and Chick and the twins—gone dustward as the coals rid themselves of that terrible heat.

  Many died. Many burned. Babes snuffed to grease smears in the blackened arms of their charcoaled mothers. Sudden switches, lean and brittle, had started as dancing children only seconds before. All the dark, gaping corpses, in their fire-frenzy ballet, flexed and tangled in the dreams of the finders. The firefighters and ambulance shriekers who had worked arson-struck tenements and the crashes of jumbo jets puked and retreated, or quit their jobs to grow lettuce, but still dreamed, after wading the ashes of Binewski’s Carnival Fabulon.

  For me there were only Arty and Al and Chick and the twins snatched into nothing—and I with them—grinding, for relief, my teeth into powder.

  The cats were lost but Horst made it. He took care of business while I was in the hospital. He brought me the papers to sign but he made the decisions. I didn’t object. He sent what he could find of Zephir McGurk home to his sons. He cleaned and polished the Fly Roper’s stork-shaped scissors before mailing them to the ex-wife in Nebraska. Horst was the one who identified Arty’s boiled body, no longer beautiful, in the dark char left when the big tank vaporized. He gathered the torn, soggy jar kin from the remnants of their shattered jugs and ushered them, with the rest of the Binewski dead, through what he called “decent” cremation.

  The family living vans weren’t touched by the firestorm. Horst took out everything personal and then sold the vans. Norval Sanderson died in the Transcendental Maggot booth near Arty’s tent, but his van was safe. Horst was quick enough to get the papers, tapes, and journals out and away before the reporters got hold of them. He stored everything and rented a shabby room for himself near the hospital. He was occupied for months with the dismantling and bankruptcy of the Arturan rest homes. He visited me every day except Wednesdays, when he trekked down to the state mental hospital near Salem to visit Mama in her padded room.

  He brought me from the hospital to a small rented room across a dark hall from his own.

  “We might as well stay here, in Portland,”
he said. “Every place is the same now.”

  The Binewski name stank and drew flies. Horst gave my name as McGurk when he rented my room. “Zephir was a good man,” Horst told me. McGurk loved Arty so I kept the name.

  Horst was the one who found Crystal Lil after the firestorm. It was a year or more before he told me about it. By then I had a job recording books for the blind. I had begun building a small life in the strange, stuck world. Horst had met a woman with strong thighs and a Siamese cat. He was moving in with her. He took me to McLarnin’s bar for our goodbye. Horst had a few extra jolts and then told me.

  “I was looking for your papa. It was all over but the screaming. I came around the end of a van and saw him on the ground. He must have just stepped down from the generator truck when it blew. Your grandpa’s silver urn was lying in the gravel beyond him, battered. There was blood on it. I think it was Als.”

  Horst couldn’t look at me. He wound his thick fingers in his grey mustache and glared into his glass.

  “I knew he was dead and I stayed back. I couldn’t go up to him. I sat down in the gravel by the urn but I couldn’t touch that, either. Then, here comes your mama, calling ‘Al’ like it was suppertime. She was off her head. Out of it, you understand.

  “She runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse—pulls her skirt down—hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling at his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore—not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against him and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’ ”