Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  “You figured it wrong. The whole thing,” said Arty. He rocked slightly, chuckling. “You’ve got yourself a little old disability there, so you took pleasure in feeling sorry for me. Well. You figured wrong.”

  McGurk was twisting on the bed, reaching his powerful forearms down for the artificial legs. He straightened and jammed the steel ends onto his stumps with a clang. The gun was sweating in my hands.

  “You figured …” Arty was watching carefully now; his eyes swung once to the mirror above his bureau that hid me and the gun on the other side, “… figured we had a common set of interests. Guess you have a hard time with the ladies. Well, I don’t. I’ve got women mooning around begging to take up my slack.”

  McGurk was folding the chrome arm back over the turntable, feeding the control cable back into its hole, carefully closing the case, not paying any attention to Arty. Arty sucked his lower lip in between his teeth and popped it out again. He waved his right flipper vaguely. “You know you’re taking the wrong road on those stumps. You’re like a man with a beautiful voice taking a vow of silence. You’re working hard to pretend they aren’t there and you meet a girl in a bar and don’t tell her about those knees until you get to take your pants off. You ought to tan your thighs and walk on them. Wear silver sequin pads and dance on a lit stage where they can see you. All those soft girlies come knocking on your door borrowing sugar in the dead of night and sliming for you. You could have that. Not as much as I get but plenty … You’re just going along with what they want you to do. They want those things hidden away, disguised, forgotten, because they know how much power those stumps could have.”

  McGurk was looking now, listening. I could see his eyes sliding on the console, the velvets, the soft, deep carpet. I put the gun on safety and stuck it back on its shelf. I flicked the switch as I went out so the lamp on the bureau in Arty’s room would go out and he would know I wasn’t covering him. I got a contract and took it to Arty. McGurk was smoking quietly and staring at the walls. Arty was saying, “… a sensible man doesn’t have to have the top of his head blown off to know the truth when he sees it.”

  McGurk signed on as an electrician. He shook hands with me because he couldn’t with Arty. Then he went out to sell everything he owned, say goodbye to the two teenage sons who lived with his ex-wife, and furnish his station wagon for temporary living so he could follow the show.

  When the blighted stump horse died, our Chick “took on something terrible,” as Mama said. I came out of the Chute that morning with my nose burnt from the smell of glass cleaner, and heard “woo-wooing” of a wet, breathy variety that seemed familiar. They were up on the generator hood by Grandpa’s urn. Chick was sprawled out flat with his face buried in his hands and Elly and Iphy patted him gently while they looked off in opposite directions at the sky.

  I crawled up to help pat Chick. The twins said he’d found Frosty stiff and flat in his trailer. Talking to the fuzzy blond back of Chick’s head and the wet pink fist hiding his face, I said, “Shooty-pooty, Chick, it isn’t your fault. He was old and it was his time and you took such good care of him these past few months. He was probably happier than he’d ever been in his whole life.” But the Chick choked and Elly sniffed and said they’d already told him that but he loved the horse and had to cry. I took offense at her snotty ways and told her Chick loved everything and he was going to be a mess if he cried like that every time a geranium conked out in the redheads’ flowerpots or something. But Iphy was dreaming sorrowfully at the low grey sky and Elly was not to be baited. She just sighed, “Probably,” and went on patting Chick.

  I slid down and went off to practice a funeral oration for Frosty. It wasn’t too bad, though it was never delivered. Doc P. dissected the horse for educational reasons and then had the roustabouts haul the remains to an incinerator.

  Late. The camp dark. Two hours after closing. The family was sleeping and I sat in the kitchen sink looking out through the moon mist at the dark without my glasses. A scraping sound from outside. A step. It was behind me on the other side of the van. I slid to the floor, tiptoed to the door in bare feet, peeped silently through. My breath froze—a movement near Arty’s door. A tall figure moving there.

  Assassin! I thought. In the instant it took me to get through the door I dreamed a long dream of Arty’s gratitude at my courageous self-sacrifice in saving him. I saw myself wrapped in white, propped on pillows. Arty enters, white-faced and shaken.… That was about as far as I’d got by the time I locked my arms around the thighs of the dark shape in Arty’s doorway and clamped my teeth into a bulge of buttock. The thigh flailed wildly and started to scream as I growled. Fingernails whacked and clawed at my head and scraped at my arms. Breathless shrieks pumped out of the murderer’s throat and vibrated through my teeth in adrenal heroics that lit my skull’s interior with an epileptic torch.

  The light over the door flashed on and shouts closed over me. In relief at being rescued before I broke, though wondering if I would make such a sympathetic figure to Arty if I wasn’t in traction, I released my aching grip. Cloth pulled out of my teeth as big arms lifted and held me against a warm chest and a deep voice cracked, “Jeez, Miss Oly!”

  A piccolo hysteria behind me in the doorway. Then Arty’s sympathetic voice, “Are you O.K.? Come in here and let me look.” My heart turned to steaming oatmeal as I wriggled around to see his dear worried face and the corpse of the terrorist I had foiled.

  Arty wasn’t talking to me. He was in his chair just inside the door, leaning anxiously to examine a jagged rip in the black satin rump of a tall young norm woman whose sobbing face was hidden by a straight fall of blond hair.

  “Killer!” I bellowed, struggling to break out of the blue-sleeved arms of the guard who held me. “She was breaking into your place, Arty!”

  The big chest against my fists rumbled, “Jeez, Miss Oly!” and Arty’s chilly white face snapped an impatient look toward me. His wide lips stretched back over his angry teeth as he whipped out, “A guest. An invited guest simply ringing my doorbell!” Then, gesturing the tall, slim girl inside, he backed his chair away from the door.

  The guard, in embarrassment at my rigid body in his arms, was jabbering, “Sorry, Arty, I brought the lady to your ramp, like always, and I’d just got to the other end of the van when the ruckus started.”

  “Take Oly back to her door, Joe. Goodnight.” The door slammed shut.

  “Jeez, Miss Oly,” said my guard. He turned, opened the door to the family van, put me down just inside, and closed the door on my ice-struck face. I crawled into my cupboard and tried to swallow my tongue or hold my breath long enough to die. I hoped they might give me a half-pint urn and bolt me onto the hood of the generator truck behind Grandpa.

  Chick would come to rest his cheek on my cool metal when he was sad. Mama would polish me every morning before she went to the Chute and blink away tears remembering my sweet smile. Then it occurred to me that they might put me in the Chute in the biggest jar of all and I’d float naked in formaldehyde and the twins would bicker over who had to shine my jar. I gave up on dying and went over to blubbering into my blanket instead—imagining razor-slash scenarios of what Arty was doing with the norm girl and what an asshole I was. I went on blubbering until I slept.

  I kept the norm girl at Arty’s door to myself. Arty wouldn’t talk about it. He liked secrets. Without a good reason, Arty wouldn’t admit that he ate or slept. Information was a marketable commodity to Arty. The guard may have gossiped but he would try to keep Papa from hearing about it. Private arrangements with Mr. Arty didn’t get to Al if a man wanted to keep his job.

  I hung on to it—my embarrassment at being an idiot and my shame at being a patsy. Idiot for jumping a guest while in the throes of melodramatic fancy, patsy for being pulped by pain at Arty’s involvement with a girl, and a norm at that.

  I crept out of my cupboard and peeped through the slats of the louvered window in our door. I couldn’t see much, but several nights of quivering
in my flannel nightie in the dark proved it wasn’t an isolated incident.

  The girl I’d tackled was a stranger, not part of the show. I heard and saw Arty’s door open and blurred figures moving into the light several times before I recognized that it was always a different girl.

  I crawled into my blankets smiling, slept well for the first time in days, woke as cheery as a pinhead, went joking and grinning around all day. Arty wasn’t having a love affair. He was just “fucking around,” as the redheads called it. What had been a blowtorch blackening my brain with sick, helpless jealousy was now just useful information. A love affair would have shut me out. This gave me an opening. I could tease Arty in private. Keeping mum to everybody else would be evidence of my discretion and encourage him to have confidence in me. If a trickle of puke still riled my throat at the thought of Arty with the long-limbed norms, it was at least tolerable. I needed all the ammo I could get.

  Zephir McGurk was a do-it-yourself electrician from the same independent school of thought that spawned Papa’s medical hobby. McGurk made do. He read journals and magazines and catalogues from supply houses to feed his ingenuity, but he was an innovator. Even if a thing had been invented and perfected thirty years before, McGurk was inclined to build his own rather than buy the gimmick from somebody else. McGurk was valuable. His pay was minimal cash and what Arty called the “overflow” of curious females.

  He slept in the back of the old but well-kept safari car. He did his work in the utility trailer that housed the power tools and spare parts. He set up a compact and efficient workshop. If he wasn’t in the workshop he was asleep or in Arty’s show tent. He never socialized in the midway or dropped in on any other act. Zephir was a focused man. Arty was his apple. Arty was the work he’d been given to do.

  “It would be good to have some way to spell out my messages in lights,” Arty might say.

  “Maybe,” McGurk would say slowly, his head already tumbling possibilities.

  Arty went to visit him in the workshop. This flattered McGurk deeply. If Arty was in an energetic mood he’d have me strap him into one of his treads and would lead the way to the workshop with me trailing. He’d go up the step and climb up on the workbench and talk companionably with McGurk.

  Other times he’d stay in his chair and sit outside the door with McGurk perched on the step to talk. McGurk had stowed his prosthetic legs in a trunk. He’d gone over to fancy strap-on pads on his thigh stumps. He wore blue or brown leather for his workaday stumps, but he got a pair made of iridescent green satin, embroidered with silver vines, for wearing in the control booth at the top of the bleachers where he worked the sound-and-light board for Arty’s show.

  It was McGurk who invented Arty’s speaking tube—a plastic form that fitted over Arty’s nose and mouth. When Arty tongued the button inside, a rush of air expelled the water from the face mask so Arty could breathe and talk into the mask at the same time. The thing stuck up against the front plate of the tank on a long gooseneck that linked it to a gaudy (but phony) console in the bottom of the tank. It actually hooked into the sound system. Arty talking under water was an astonishing improvement over propping his chin on the top of the tank to rap into the microphone. The crowd loved it.

  When McGurk built the button receiver that hid in Arty’s ear and let him hear the sound system, the crowd, and messages from McGurk in the control booth, Arty offered the electrician his own van and a good raise. McGurk shook his tidy head and politely turned it all down. “I’ve got my routine set,” he said. He went on sleeping in his station wagon.

  McGurk cooked for himself. He was a fussy vegetarian. He was roasting carrots in an oven in the workshop the day he came up with what we later called “The Singing Buttock.” He was peering through the oven window at the sliced carrots in a dish. “What if,” he asked, “every board in the bleachers was wired for sound?”

  Arty was lolling on top of the workbench looking at a sheet of McGurk’s doodles for a new colored-light plan. He rolled back his head and squinted at McGurk’s broad shoulders. McGurk with his back to you was an imposing specimen even with his shirt on. The oven pinged and he took the dish out with a mitt.

  “Why?” Arty wanted to know. McGurk dropped the mitt beside the carrots and leaned his big brown elbows on the workbench. He had his private knife and fork wheeling through the carrots and whipping quick chunks of steaming root into his mouth. He always ate standing up. Three bites went through methodical milling and swallowing before he finally let his eyes drift up to Arty.

  “Sound is physical. I’ve been watching Miss Oly …” He nodded to where I perched on his work stool. “Her ticket talking got me thinking. Sound is a vibration. It carries through matter. When you hear, it’s not just with your ears. A sound actually affects every cell of your body, making it vibrate and pass that vibration to all your other cells. That’s why they say a sound is ‘piercing’ or a scream ‘goes right through you.’ It does. It actually does.” He stopped with his fork in midair and looked at Arty. Arty was watching him, waiting. Arty didn’t say anything. McGurk sighed and took a piece of carrot from the fork and chewed it. I watched it go down his thick-muscled gullet.

  “I was thinking,” McGurk said, finally, “that you use your voice real well. I was thinking, what if your voice wasn’t just coming at ’em from the air but was vibrating up from the soles of their feet and through their asses up their spines. I was thinking what it would be like if they felt what you had to say because the boards they were standing and sitting on were wired to carry that vibration of your voice.”

  Arty’s eyes were almost bulging, looking at McGurk. His face was frozen for a long instant and then it folded into a smile and then broke at the mouth and Arty’s whole body shook toward his mouth, laughing.

  “I love it!” he howled. “I love it!”

  The bleachers are empty and singing around me. Arty is chanting in the boards. I sit on the fifth tier and stare straight at the tank, at Arty, his mouth and nose in the black cup of the speaking tube. Wires are taped to my wrists and to the insides of my knees and to my hump, next to the spine. They lead up to the control booth, where Zephir McGurk is measuring my physical responses to the sound that he has wired to feed through every board in the bleachers.

  Arty’s body floats straight out from the speaking tube, glinting mysteriously in the bright green water.

  “Peace,” says Arty, and the speakers above the tank lift his voice to the canvas peak of the tent roof. The bottoms of my feet say “Peace,” and the padded bones of my pelvis whisper “Peace” to my bowels. A shiver passes upward into my stomach, and my spine feels “Peace” like fear curling upward to my skull with my shoulder blades flinching around it.

  “As I am!” shouts Arty, and my heart nearly stops with the shock of the sound in my body.

  Arty pulls away from the face cup and wriggles toward the surface. McGurk is hopping down the steps from the control booth. He is beside me now. Only slightly taller than me on his stumps, he is watching the wires as he rips the tape off my skin.

  Arty’s head appears on the rim of the tank, grinning at us. His face is pale and doesn’t look as though it’s connected to his body, which is golden, with slowly flexing flippers gleaming through the glass.

  “That seemed a lot better!” chirps Arty. “That flat zone makes it even more effective!”

  “Yes.” McGurk holds the ends of all the wires together in one hand like the leashes to a pack of dogs. He examines the sheet of readout graph in his hand. “Yes. With just the upper and lower registers you can make them dance to whatever tune you like.”

  14

  The Pen Pal

  It was Earlville, on the Gulf of Mexico. One hundred windless, muggy degrees. Mosquitoes drowned in your neck creases. The only industry in town was the federal penitentiary. The midway was jammed and the show tents bulged with sweating, stinking, bad-tempered drawls. It got dark but it didn’t cool off.

  The fat woman surfaced at Arty’s las
t, hottest show for the day. She was young but her colorless hair was scraggled up into tight separate curls with so much scalp between them that she looked old and balding. She was crying as she stood up on the fifth tier of the bleachers and pushed her clasped hands out toward the tank where Arty was deep in his pitch.

  “You, darling,” said Arty, and the feel of “darling” rose up through her puffy ankles and through every buttock in the bleachers. The crowd sighed. The fat woman sobbed.

  “You feel ugly, don’t you, sweetheart?” and “ugly” and “sweetheart” thrummed the crowd, and they all gasped and she wasn’t the only one nodding.

  “You’ve tried everything, haven’t you?” said the bright floating spirit in the tank. “Everything,” murmured the bones of the people.

  “Pills, shots, hypnosis, diets, exercise. Everything. Because you want to be beautiful?”

  Arty was building it up now, winding them tight.

  “Because you think if you were beautiful, you would be happy?” He had the timing pat. Arty was a master of tone and timing. I leaned on the last steel strut of the bleachers in the aisle and smiled, though I’d seen him do it all my life.

  “Because people would love you if you were beautiful? And if people loved you, you would be happy? Is it people loving you that makes you happy?”

  Now the pitch drops a full octave into the groin groan. I can feel it even in the support poles. The asses on the seat boards must be halfway to orgasm.

  “Or is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don’t love you it’s because there’s something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean you’re all right. You poor baby. Poor, poor baby.”

  The place was full of poor babies. They all sighed with tender sympathy for themselves. The fat woman’s nose ran. She opened her mouth and cried, “Hoooh! Hoooh! Hoooh!”