Katherine Dunn - Attic

The merry-go-round is arranged so that even at the limits of the horse’s travels up and down it never is not touching both the children. The merry-go-round keeper twists a button and it begins to move. Slow at first and then faster. The children are fixed in place on their seats and platforms and the horses plunge up and down and the whole moves around gaining speed in a circle. The two little girls are still fighting on the floor between two of the plunging horses and each time the merry-go-round comes around I catch and lose sight of them in an instant. With each revolution the waltz music goes up a decibel until all the other sounds are washed away. The parents standing on the ground are all nodding and showing their teeth and the children on the horses are holding very still but moving their lips and showing their teeth. I look up at the uniform for though we are not walking his groin gun is bumping my buttocks in time with the music. He is nodding and showing his teeth but when he sees me looking he stops and shoves me forward giving my shoulder a jerk and digging his thumb into my neck.

We move away from the merry-go-round quickly but just as we reach the street he stops and looks back smiling. Just then the music halts abruptly and all the other sounds in the square sweep back. Over them hangs a scream already seconds old. About-face-double-time-in-and-out-through-the-crowd-we’ve-just-left-back-to-the-merry-go-round-uniform-panting-and-Dogsbody-jouncing-on-my-shoulders-like-chain-mail-;oh-shriek-a-giggle-crane-a-neck-such-a-crowd-hmmm! And in the middle you-and-I old incapacitated Dogsbody so very with this bright young uniform splurging through to the center — the merry-go-round and who knows what Sister Blendina is up to?

And just off the center of the center — which is to say on the floor of the merry-go-round between the now stopped once moving horses — a boy. Or once a boy. Lying on his back, eyes closed — little trousers down around his knees — little buttocks flattened bare upon the floor — blood running from his groin. The uniform knows but he says:

“What happened?” and is deluged by answers:

“The horse behind his — the flaring nostrils — he reached — his thumb caught in the nostrils — oooh! — my poor darling — it ain’t the company’s fault! we give ’em all instructions — one horse went up and the other went down — you see, sir, he’s so short — only five years old — stretched! a broken thumb — and he wasn’t circumcised, I promised his grandfather never to — severed penis, cauterization indicated.”

Because the chain on his waist was too short the uniform could not crouch down without making us both fall so he bent from the waist to pick the boy up — clump over his shoulder — balanced with one hand. “Where ya takin him? — shouldnya call an ambulance? — do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Sure he’ll be all right folks, now don’t you worry. I’m taking him over to the academy. He’s ours now. They’ll fit him out with a laser police special and whip him into one of Mizoorah’s finest. Why fifteen years from now he’ll be strutting around proud as you please and mighty glad all this happened.”

All the smiles and nods and murmuring that goes on is left behind as we march off — me carrying Dogsbody and the uniform carrying the boy. We cross the street and walk up the steps of a large gray building. The boy’s stump is dripping blood on my shoulders so I ask “What place is this?”

The uniform points to the roman caps above the door:

INDEPENDENCE JAIL

While I’m reading it Dogsbody slumps down even worse and her face slips around on mine so I can’t see or hear or even breathe. While I’m pushing the face back into place we move along and some things happen that I can’t be sure of. By the time I can see again, we’re standing in front of a counter with people behind it. The boy has disappeared and the uniform is telling me to take off my watch and glasses and hand over my purse. I do these things slowly leaving the glasses until last because I’m watching one of the women behind the counter. She’s sitting at a typewriter moving her hands very quickly. I can see she has a Dogsbody too — Mizoorah style — but in fine working order. She’s looking at me and it must show badly that mine is out of commission because she doesn’t look the usual hatred of meeting another Dogsbody — just disgust.

I can’t revive Dogsbody. I’ve been sitting in this corner chanting and cajoling and massaging since they put me here this afternoon. Nothing works. I don’t know what to do.

This is a rotten place to try it anyway. I need a small dark closet where I can huddle on shoes and clothes dropped on the floor and jangle coat hangers in time with the chant. But it must be nearly midnight and that bare two hundred watts is still burning in the ceiling. It will probably be on all night.

There is someone else here too. Her name is Marie and she is a barmaid. That’s what she told me. “I’m Marie. I’m a barmaid.” What I can see about her is more or maybe less. She is either an ancient thirty-five or a young fifty or anything in between. She isn’t wearing thigh-links and if she ever had recourse to a Dogsbody it’s had no visible effect.

She’s wearing white sneakers and her legs jump out of them suddenly and disappear suddenly at her skirt hem. The legs are very thin — as though the skin were white rubber pulled tight over the bone with no muscle or sinew or fat in between. At the calf it looks like a hard rubber ball was stuffed in and slips up and down a little as she moves. Her arms are the same way where they poke out of the sweater sleeves, but her torso whispers “hysterectomy.” There’s that peculiar flatness of the buttocks — almost a straight line from the back of the knee to the shoulder — and the phony fecundity of a belly full of slack muscles. She’s got it all bound tight in a girdle so it has the deceptively hard look of a paper bag full of shit, but her breasts are heavy and dead at her navel and I can tell.

There’s her face. I can’t see it well. Her hair is oily and hangs — though short — though the nape of her neck is shaved — because she seems always to lean forward. I can tell that she is thick necked and puffy jowled — but mostly it’s the skin — like soft wet white clay. I know that if I poked her cheek with my finger and drew it away, the hole would stay.

But that’s all I can tell about her face because she’s always bent forward. To smoke, elbows on knees, paunch on thighs, legs spread wide, ashes drifting in the air, walking, always searching the floor, each shoulder pulled forward and down as though she were carrying something heavy in each hand.

The glasses are gone — they have taken them and my world is gentler — less frightening. All images are blurred — the color intense, magical — movement subtle — sounds softer. Renoir is wheeling, wheeling with claw hands as soft and glowing as though my warped eyeballs had been strapped to his own wrists to fasten on the pigment and fix it to the quaking canvas. I’m not blind — I can see the curious chiaroscuro gradient of my hands, and by closing my left eye and looking cross-eyed with my right I can see the fleshy rainbows sparkling on my nose. Marie is slightly grayed — the ceiling is too far — the floor also too far. Texture and form elude me, line either deceives me or does not exist. Depth in space shuffles and twists in the air like perfume.

Only the light burns on and blinds me. Only Marie moves softly about the room and I, looking, like her.

I said the sound, the volume, was lower. It may be the muffling of the concrete. It may be the night. Perhaps it is not the glasses since all my other senses are alive alive.