Katherine Dunn - Attic

Then a group of women repeat it — then he says it and they repeat it. Over and over again for three hours every morning. There is a steel screen all around the speakers and there is no way to turn it off. It usually puts me to sleep. The slap of Blendina’s cards goes on. Sometimes I imagine it is the snap of the whip on the shoulders of the women who are praying. I can see them kneeling on the stone floor in their mint green robes. The man passes between them, striking slowly and chanting, striking slowly as they chant. It drives Rose crazy. After it’s been on for half an hour or so each morning she runs to the john and stuffs toilet paper in her ears. She marches up and down the bull pen beating her belly with her fists and crying:

Hail Mary full of fish

The Lord hath fucked thee

Cursed are thee and the

Fruit of thy womb Jesus!

After a while she lies on the floor laughing. Periodically she shouts “Fruit of thy womb, Jesus!” and goes on laughing.

We are all very neat and tidy. There is so little space that if it is at all cluttered you go berserk. All the bunks are made within minutes after we get up in the morning. We are jealous of our bunks. They are all we can claim as property. Two and a half feet by six. The green uniforms are washed in the jail laundry and the one you’re wearing today may be on some other size twelve tomorrow. But the bunks are our own and only friends are allowed to sit on them.

They say if you do much time you come out neat for life. The janitor at a place I once worked in had spent eighteen years in prison in Alabama. He kept the floors shining and each chair sat up to its desk just so. He once told me I was the first woman he’d seen after he got out.

They are looking for the horse carver. It seems one of the horses is missing. They came back in the morning and the pole was empty. It changes the probability — it alters the balance of the machine — it disappoints children. There is a sign on the pole $1,000 reward and they are searching for Geppetto.

The shrinks have joined the campaign. They swim nightly to yachts in the harbor — breast-stroking singly and in groups — sniffing out the bunks of sad-eyed homosexuals and pissing into them — stand barefooted dripping in the narrow aisles waving piss out from under their bellies onto the feather-comforted fags and then dive back and a long swim to the pale little boat and the Yiddish Falange. When dawn comes they argue eclectic electroshock in their black rubber suits and eat horse meat in secret.

The little markets with their German proprietors spring up in every town selling loins and ribs and roasts and horseburger and the students go ostentatiously and serve horse meat to the faculty with all the proper sauces in an artificial ethnos — there is no other word — no innocent word like beef or pork or venison so the little old ladies buy just a pound for my poodle she’s so spoiled and poor mothers feed it to small daughters lying and children sit chewing one bite for the longest time it is so tough and cry in the movies when the horsie gets hurt and in all the small towns and all the medium sized towns people sit in dark places gnawing guiltily at horse meat and indiscreet Miss T. develops a strange laugh and racing legs and an inclination to dive into every fire she sees.

I write my name on the wall behind the bull pen john. There’s a space above the ventilation shaft that can’t be seen unless you’re standing on the pot. The air from the shaft makes the wall black and greasy there. I write it in the dirt with my finger. I flush the toilet once in a while with my foot so nobody will blunder in on me. I started this after they took the Bible away with Patsy.

We all knew she was weird as soon as we saw her. I was sitting in the bull pen just to be out of the cell for a while. The door opened and she came marching in looking straight ahead. We all stared. She was wearing a white cashmere suit and alligator heels. Her hair was cut off blunt at the ears and was a peculiar greasy black color that jarred with the paste of her face. Her eyes were pink and wild. Under her arm she carried a huge white leather Bible. Kathy stepped up when she came in but the matron came in and fastened the door behind her. She motioned Kathy away. It was Mrs. Eliot. We all respected her so nobody said anything. She said “Girls, this is Patsy, she will be staying with us for a while.” She smiled around at us with her rosy old-lady face as though this were a guest and we were to make her welcome. We were all amazed but one or two people said Hiya Patsy and hello and then halted not knowing what to do. Patsy didn’t look as if she knew we were there. Mrs. Eliot glowed proudly. “Kathy, will you be so kind as to bring a uniform to 4 cell for Patsy? About a fourteen I should think.” Kathy wandered off to get the uniform. Patsy had not moved since she came in. Her eyes were fixed straight out on nothing. Mrs. Eliot touched her arm and they marched toward 4 cell. We followed wondering. I heard Rose muttering behind me “Who the hell is she? Lynda Bird?”

Mrs. Eliot turned her into 4 cell just before she hit the wall. Patsy immediately sprawled onto my bunk. I felt a snarl coming up and clamped down, surprised. Mrs. Eliot lifted her quickly saying “I believe that bunk is occupied my dear. Here’s a nice one that hasn’t been taken. Now you make yourself at home and ask Kathy for anything you need. She’ll bring you a nice clean uniform and you can change into that so she can hang up your lovely street clothes so they’ll be fresh when you go. All right? The girls will help you with whatever you don’t understand. Goodnight dear.” She patted Patsy on the shoulder and went off smiling reassuringly at us.

Patsy still hadn’t moved. We stared at her and she stared at the floor. Kathy broke the spell by barging in with her hands on her hips, a uniform slung over one shoulder and a pair of Goodwill saddle shoes with the strings tied together over the other. “Aaah get out of here you sheep!” The other girls broke up and wandered away grumbling. I stayed sitting on my bunk where no one could chase me away.

Kathy flung the stuff on Patsy’s bunk. “Climb into that and give me your duds. Snap it up.” Patsy looked up at her and I could see her whole scalp move back away from her face maybe a quarter of an inch — the eyes were wide and the mouth started to open. I started talking fast, telling her that her clothes were nice and she’d got a nice bunk and what was she in for. I didn’t sell magazines. It’s a real skill to distract someone from a danger they can sense instinctively.

For a while Patsy talked and I asked questions. We became what you might call friends. She had an incredibly whiny voice. It was annoying, always brimming with something painful. It seemed like she was always on the verge of something but never quite into it, tears, a rage, a sulk. She couldn’t say “Pass the butter” without putting into that voice a plea not to be hated.

In my memory her face and Marie-Sophie’s have run together but the impact was the same with both of them. Formless, boneless, gushy skinned, pale eyes tinged pink and never quite steady, always jerking. She could never look you in the eye.

This is what she told me: A year and a half ago her hair had been long and yellow. She had been in town waiting for the bus home. A man drove up and offered her a ride. She knew him slightly. They went to the same church, so she accepted. He drove her out onto a country road and raped her. She said it was a custom car with no door or window handles on the inside, just pushbuttons on the driver’s side. She had struggled and would have jumped out but she couldn’t open the door. When he was through with her he let her out on the road and she walked home. Her parents took her to the police and she told them who it was and what had happened. They brought him in but he just laughed and said she had been willing, that she wanted it and liked it and was over twenty-one and since when was that a crime? There were no witnesses. It was her word against his. The police let him go and told her to go home and not make so much trouble for her admirers or she’d never get married. She went home and cut her hair short and shoe-blacked what was left of it. She put on every girdle she could find and hadn’t taken them off since. She did have shoe-black on her hair. You could smell it, and when she slept it made her pillow black and greasy. She wore seven girdles even when she slept.