Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

  “She chose not to. He can stop the pain without putting them to sleep. He says most of them like to sleep because knowing and seeing are painful.” Arty stuck his lower lip out and slid it along the railing. “It kind of goes along with what I’m always spouting, doesn’t it?”

  “The Bag Man says you gave him the twins.”

  Arty’s eyes swiveled at me. “Just to fuck.”

  “The Bag Man says ‘marry.’ ”

  “He’d call it that.”

  Below us the long-haired woman’s eyes turned away from us, her head tilting slightly to look into Chick’s masked face. Doc P. was bobbing vigorously at the other end, grabbing tools from the hands of the Admitted nurse, who stood just outside the charmed circle, invisible to us except for the delicate jugglery of glinting tools. Arty watched intently. The climax was evidently approaching.

  “A toe?”

  “Whole foot.”

  With a sweep of her arm, Doc P. flung a messy something toward the bucket on the floor, and accelerated her twiddling of the winking tools.

  Arty’s eyes focused on the woman’s face. Chick’s gloved hand rested on her cheek, a small hand. She smiled at Chick. The smile crept slowly from her eyes, its crease sliding under his stubby fingers.

  “Does Chick know we’re up here? Can he tell?”

  “Don’t know. Never asked. Probably.” Arty let go of the railing and flopped into the plush chair behind him. His eyes closed tiredly.

  “Arty?”

  “Hnnh?”

  “It was dumb.”

  “Mmm?”

  “You shouldn’t have done that to the twins, Arty. I know you’re sore, but it was stupid. Throwing out the come with the scum, like Papa says.”

  His eyes stayed closed and a seedling smile sprouted around his mouth. “Elly will shit bricks to Mars.”

  “So will Iphy. Maybe worse.”

  “Not Iphy. Iphy can like anybody. That’s why she’s so powerful. It’s easy to fuck up in reading Iphy. Most people don’t read her right at all.”

  I leaned on the railing, watching him. His eyes were closed again. I tried to think about Iphy being strong.

  “But you’re right.” He screwed his mouth into the shape of a belly button and then let it fall back. “It was stupid. Because you know who is going to puke strychnine over it? Me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The light pool was deserted now. Only the long, empty table lay below us. Arty was grinning at me. A floppy bean-shaped smile with eye crinkles to complete the effect. “How old are you, Toady? Sixteen?” I nodded. My heart was beating at my lungs.

  “You bleeding yet? You need a boyfriend? I don’t want you running me through this same grinder, you know.”

  I could feel the hot pleasure pumping into my face and couldn’t keep myself from grinning back at him.

  “Nah. I’m your girl, Arty, even with the warts on your ass.”

  We giggled and he leaned forward toward me. I caught him in my arms, his chest warm against me, his shoulder blades sliding in my hands. He rubbed his head against my cheek as I squeezed him. “You always did have shit for brains,” he chuckled. I felt the convulsion of his chest against me with his laugh. “Think you can still carry me, little sis? Those stairs bruise my ass going down.”

  “Oho! That’s your trick, is it? Butter me up?”

  I propped him and turned around so he could flop onto my hump, clinging to my shoulders with his flippers.

  “Don’t dig your chin in; that hurts!”

  “Your hump is bony! Take it easy!”

  I carried him down the narrow stairs to the back of the surgery van, where he’d left his chair and his entourage.

  Miz Zegg was waiting with her hands on the push bar of Arty’s empty chair. A couple of the administrative novices were hovering with her and they all started to twitter when they saw Arty. Miz Z. came scuttling at me, flapping her hands and nattering, “Let me help you, Role Model Arturo!” but I spun around and grabbed the chair arms so it wouldn’t jump away as I leaned back and spilled Arty into the seat. The novices squeaked and grabbed their long white nightshirts at seeing Arty treated so roughly.

  “Don’t call me Role Model!” he snapped. “It’s disgusting!”

  Miz Z., the latest of Alma Witherspoon’s successors to command the administrative office, took a step back and hid her hands in her big sleeves. Arty winked at me and said he’d see me after the show. I gaped in surprise.

  “Aren’t you coming back to see the twins? They really want you!”

  “No.” He shook his head, smiling at me. “I’m not going to lay eyes on them for as long as I can manage.”

  “Arty! You rectum!”

  Miz Z. hustled her novices off a few yards so they wouldn’t be subjected to the interfamilial indecencies that the Great One allowed to his siblings. Miz Z. didn’t know it, but she was going to wait a long time for her turn to get her toes nibbled off. She’d taught business-machine classes in high schools for years and Arty liked the way she ran the office. Arty reached for his chair controls to follow them but I grabbed his ear and glared at him.

  “They sent me to get you. What am I gonna tell them?” He blinked and looked back up the narrow staircase leading to the small room on top of the surgery truck.

  “Well, I figure the Bag Man is still sort of unpredictable. Why don’t you tell them not to struggle too much, not to fight him. I wouldn’t want them to get hurt.” He rolled away from me, and the three office ghosties scurried after him. He was off to another meeting, or a visit to the post-op wards, or an interview with some pipsqueak reporter.

  I couldn’t stand to go back to the twins. The idea of looking at them and telling them “no hope” made me sweat. I trotted through the morning cool. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to fill the shadows between the lines of vans and trailers.

  Mama was at the dinette table in our van, deep in one of her assembly-line projects. Twenty-six blue-spangled aprons and matching headbands for the redheads. Glittering cloth ran between her long white hands to its fate under the chattering needle of her sewing machine. I patted her elbow as I came in and she stretched her neck down, offering her cheek automatically for a kiss. A solitary blue sequin was imbedded in the makeup goo next to her nose. I kissed her and picked off the sequin.

  “Those twins don’t eat breakfast anymore?” she asked. “They worried about fat? I hardly see them.” The needle gobbled at the cloth and Lil’s voice murmured on as I went back toward the big bedroom at the end. The sliding door was half open but the window shades were drawn and the room was heavy with half-filtered heat and the suffocating weight of sleep laden with Lil’s fleshy perfume and Papa’s sweat and leather and tobacco. I went for the shelf on Papa’s side of the bed. Two books slid aside and I latched onto Papa’s blunderbuss pistol. I looked at the safety catch and then stuck the thing into my skirt top, letting my blouse fall loosely over it. The barrel dug me in one spot and the butt gouged me in another. The metal was heavy yet surprisingly warm. I went out past Mama but she didn’t look up.

  The twins were rehearsing. I could tell because the Bag Man was standing at the back steps of their stage truck. As I walked toward him I decided Arty had sicced the Bag Man on the twins just to get the big lump off his own back. The Bag Man started bending and bowing at me while I was still a ways off. I raised a hand and nodded and went up the steps and through the door.

  The twins were alone. Another hour before the redheads showed up for fanny-kick practice. Dance, they called it. I saw the dark, gleaming heads bent over the matching sheen of the baby grand. At least they were staying calm enough to comb their hair and do their work.

  “The whole cadenza should be written. I don’t want any two-bit piano player fucking with improvisation in the middle of my work.” That was Elly.

  “All we have to do is place it at the beginning of the movement so that it’s clearly an integral part.” That was Iphy.

  “I’d rather put rude remarks on the score. Here�
��s Oly!”

  They both looked up from the music paper, which was spread out on the rack in front of them, and stared past me, eyes flickering anxiously.

  “Where’s Arty?”

  I went close to them, one hand reaching to touch Elly’s arm, my eyes glued to Iphy’s face. I couldn’t look away from her.

  When she saw what was in my face her eyes began to die. Their violet deepened to night purple, dull black.

  “He’s not coming.”

  Elly’s hand clipped hard to my wrist. “Did you tell him? What’d he say?”

  I wanted to be a street sweeper working nights in Rio, or maybe a florist in Quebec.

  “He said the Bag Man is dangerous. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight him. Arty said he wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

  They didn’t need to look at each other. They looked at me. Their four hands wandered into a complicated knot in their lap.

  “Shall I go to Papa? Maybe Horst? Let me get them.”

  The twins were quiet for identical moments like one girl at a mirror. When they spoke it was with the echoing, simultaneous voice that came to them in their rare moments of unity: “Try, but it won’t help.” I nodded, digging under my blouse. “You remember how this works?”

  I set the chunky gun on the shining wood of the piano. It lay there, quiet and nasty. They stared at it. I left before they moved again.

  Papa was in the refrigerator truck counting cases of ice-cream sandwiches. I hollered at him that the twins wanted him and he handed his clipboard to one of the lunks who was loading the case. He came down off the truck with an arthritic creak that drowned out my fantasy of him rescuing anybody. I told him where the twins were and went off to visit Grandpa for a while.

  Chick was asleep on the hood of the generator truck. His face was in the small green pool of shade cast by Grandpa’s urn. The rest of his knobby little body sprawled flat on his belly with his coveralls rucked up to his knees and his socks rumpled down over his sneakers. The skin on his smooth calves looked angry. He must have been asleep there for a while. I pulled his pant legs down to keep the sun off him. He twitched and his baby mouth smacked slightly at the air. The surgical sessions tired him out. The tinkle of music started on the midway. I could hear the whir of a simp twister starting up.

  “Chick.”

  His eyes opened and his lips closed but the rest of him didn’t move.

  “Chick, you’ve got to help the twins.”

  He blinked and sat up.

  “Did you know Arty gave them to the Bag Man?”

  He nodded, stretching and scratching.

  I slid over to where I could lean on the urn. “Wow!” Grandpa was too hot to touch.

  Chick licked his lips. “Arty says the twins are getting married.”

  “They don’t want to, Chick. They hate the Bag Man. Arty’s just doing it to punish them for something. He’s got no right to give them to anybody.”

  “He gave me to Doc P.” Chick was calm, stating a fact.

  “Not the same. You’re just with her for a little while to learn stuff.” He didn’t answer. “I sent Papa over to see the twins but he won’t be able to do anything. Not when it’s Arty’s idea.”

  “No.” Chick lay down with his sweating face in the tiny pool of shade next to me. The metal hood was burning me through my clothes. A little wind came by and touched my ears.

  “Is it nice wearing sunglasses all the time? Is everything green?” He was blinking, getting ready to yawn.

  “Chick! Chicky! You could sleep in the twins’ van on that pretty sofa. Listen! If anybody tried to hurt them you could stop him. Chick!” His eyes popped open, a puzzled crease came into his forehead.

  “Oly, I can’t. Arty doesn’t want me to. Arty already said that I wasn’t to do anything. It’s like when Mensa Mindy, the Horse with the High I.Q., was scared of the fire hoop and Papa said I mustn’t help her. Whatever this is, it’s like that for the twins.”

  The patient, solid explanation drove me, sliding on my belly, down the fender to the ground. He didn’t call after me. I looked back once but he was curled up there on the hot metal with his face in the shade of Grandpa’s urn, sleeping.

  • • •

  Papa shook hands with the Bag Man. “You’re going to be joining the family!”

  The Bag Man grunted and gurgled and milked Papa’s hand with enthusiasm.

  “Fine! Fine!” Papa chanted, trying to pull his hand away and looking around for help. “My little girls in there? I’ll just go speak to them! There! Excuse me! Thank you! Splendid to have you aboard! Talk soon!” and Papa escaped into the stage truck.

  Iphy and Elly, listening frozen at the keyboard, shared a drooping weight of resignation in their common gut. “We knew it was no use,” Iphy explained later.

  “Ah, there you are, doves! My sweet birds! I just met your betrothed outside! Unusual fella!”

  He was too loud, too fast. He flung his arms around them and squeezed them together, planting kisses on their pale matching foreheads. Iphy clutched his hands and spoke softly.

  “Papa, please! Don’t let Arty do this! Help us!”

  “There, dreamlet! Of course I’ll help! Nothing but the finest! We’ll look at the calendar! Shut the whole shebang down for a day! Have a fabulous wedding!”

  “Papa, listen! No. No. We don’t want to marry him! We hate him! We’re afraid of him! Arty is trying to force us—to punish us! Papa, don’t let him do it!”

  Now Papa, imprisoned in the four white arms, was wriggling to escape.

  “Oh, my sweetlings! You’re mistaken! Your brother talked the whole thing over with me early this morning. He means the best for you. Given it a lot of thought! This Bag Man—Vern, is it? Don’t know him, myself. Seen him tagging after your brother, of course. Arty swears by him! Solid as Gibraltar! Loves you dearly! Do right by you! Natural fears, girlish hesitation! Even your mother! Thought of doing a bunk on our wedding day! Where would I be? I ask you!”

  He was a large, determined man with many years of experience in slippery maneuvers. They couldn’t hold him. He was still talking fast in the bombastic shorthand of the huckster as he sidled toward the exit.

  “Papa,” they chorused, “help us!”

  “Adore! Adore you, my butterflies! Your mother will be so proud!” and he was gone.

  The twins sat back down on the piano bench. Iphy, who told me this later, says they were both thinking about the gun.

  “We didn’t really expect any help from Papa. But we’d stuck that gun into the storage space in the piano bench. You know how the top lifts up? We were sitting on that gun and the idea of it seemed to crawl up inside us like a snake between our legs.”

  I hid, sulking in my cupboard under the sink with Mama’s sewing machine gabbling a few feet away. Mama was not alarmed at my hiding in there with the door shut. She was glad of the company and talked fitfully to her hands, needing no answers. She was mainly preoccupied with lunch and the way the meal symbolized the breakdown of the family.

  “Nobody shows up. They wander in three hours late, sniffling and expecting … But I am not running a short-order house.… That Chick is ill and I know it and Al and all his pills and potions can claim to heaven that there’s nothing wrong but you cannot fool a mother about her own … drifting … caught up in alien currents leading mercy knows where.… Next thing we’ll get a telephone call and never even notice they left.”

  I was going over the list of possibilities. I wondered about Horst or a few of the old wheelmen, or even the redheads. Papa’s cronies, Horst included, would never interfere with Binewski business. If I went to the redheads they might do something. I fantasized marching legions of angry women in high heels and bulging blouses. Then I imagined Papa standing in the dust of the midway with his arms crossed on his chest watching them come toward him and waiting for the exact moment to bellow, “You’re all shit-canned! Pick up your checks!”

  What made me really sick was that I didn’t want the twins to be
rescued. I was glad Arty was mad at them, delighted that he didn’t want to see them, cock-a-hoop delirious at the thought of them utterly out of the running for Arty’s attention. Big, festering chunks of my heart glowed with a dank cave light of celebration at their lovely talented lives trapped by the Bag Man.

  The Twin Club girls who collected the Elly and Iphy posters, autographs, and photos, the duos of vapor-skulled gigglers who showed up in souvenir twin shirts and homemade twin skirts, what would the twin fans think of their glamorous idols being humped by the tube-faced Bag Man? Gross! Gawwwd!

  But I hated myself for that gloating. The pleasure terrified me. What if I were really a monster? What if they were really miserable and I didn’t do my best to help? What kind of thing would that make me?

  “One-thirty, dove!” called Mama. I crawled out of the cupboard and went off to the dressing room to grease Arty for the two o’clock show.

  “He must have shut down all the alarms and had Arty give the high sign to the guards. Elly grabbed the gun when we heard the outside door. We sat there in bed waiting for the bedroom door to open. She was ready to use it, but he knocked.

  “It was a shy knock … three gentle taps … and then the door opened slowly and he peered around it. He waved hello. I felt sorry for him. He seemed so shy. Elly waved the pistol and hollered that she’d shoot. But he just came in slowly, kind of bobbing and bowing apologetically with every step. He sat down at the foot of the bed with his veil puffing in and out and his one sad eye peeping at us. He took out his note pad. There was a message ready on the first sheet. He tore it off and handed it to me. It said, ‘I love you. Please let me be tender to you.’