Katherine Dunn - Attic

The lawyer is back. He sits across from me with a little brown table between us. It’s exciting to come out of the tank and sit with a man. The lawyer has a shining suit lizard green flashing blue and violet. He is heavy and comes far out in front of himself so even if our bellies touched his head would be far away. His shoes are dark as mirrors and rings on his fat fingers that don’t even need to bend any more and his dark cigar. He wants to know about money and I sign some things and agree to everything and he says I should have had my glasses all along.

Someone once jumped from the roof here — thirteen stories she fell and spread thin — why do you never hear of them hitting anyone on the sidewalk — I wouldn’t jump to the ground but to the water from the bridge — the bridge is the reason for jumping — going fishing under the warehouses on the Willamette the concrete pipe juts out of the earth and into the water half submerged and the sewage runs out thick and raw and beneath it the carp are feeding — go walking down there through the city streets at dawn with scum fresh dripping down my pants leg smelling like something burned and nothing stirring but the bums on Burnside turning in their doorways — barefoot along the railroad tracks with my hair flipping back and a can of corn in my pocket — stop at the Chink shop for chitlins and then down to the pipe to sit on the end with the water all around and the Crown Flour Mills over me chumming for carp for no reason except the river is lavender pale in the mornings and the fish come up swollen and fat and I scrape them and the gold catches beneath my fingernails — sit long into the day there with the string from my hands running between my big toe and the second toe and then wet and chumming into the water and the hook shining through yellow kernels of corn or pale brown chitlin or sometimes naked hook and I chewing at the bait with my hands wet and cold and my feet pale from when the tugs go by with barges and the wash sloshes almost over the top of the pipe and wets me to the knees — the fish hang heavy on the hook and come up not fighting — their yellow eyes blank and the gills sagging and I hit them once each hard with the butt of the knife over the eyes and the blood comes thin from behind the eyes and they lie beside me still and shining in the lavender — and then I gut them and throw it into the water at the end of the pipe and double my string through their gills and tie them at my empty belt loop and walk back through the busy streets and the people looking and I swinging along pretending to be a wolf and imagining how I look and up to the Ross Island — to the bridge to cross over and stop in the middle and sit for a long time looking down into the water and cut the carp golden and stiffening from the belt loop and swing them on the string all together far out over the water and let go watching them turning in the air till they hit and the splash is always so tiny — so far away — I feel disappointed and climb down and go home to sleep for a long time.

Marty is the key-girl in B tank. She is very tall, maybe six feet three. She has a short brown D.A. and never bothers to wear a uniform but always dungarees and a man’s blue work shirt with the first button open and the sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Her face is horrible. One eye is an inch higher than the other and there are long narrow white scars that pucker at the edges across her cheek from her hair — across the eye and onto the cheek — all the way from the left corner of the mouth to the top of her nose so there is a notch in her upper lip and in her left nostril. Kathy is like a boy trying to act like a man. Marty is like a very hard man. But men never look that hard.

Maybe she is thirty or forty or fifty. No breasts show. Her shoulders are broad and no hips show in how low the dungarees hang like my big brother working in the fields with no shirt on.

She came out with her girl to go down to breakfast with us. Her hand on her girl’s shoulder gentle and owning and the girl had soft glowing hair red as morning and a modest pretty body and I saw her in Keokuk in a car coat and leather handbag with bags of groceries and two grade-school children in a station wagon. She looked softly about her and up gentle into Marty’s one at a time eyes. At the table Kathy and Marty talked and Kathy looked at the girl and nodded respectfully to Marty. The girl ate little bits of food that Marty put on her plate. Once in the morning I saw Kathy and Marty talking together with each one’s outside foot propped in the bars — leaning an elbow on a knee a hand in a pocket heads down smoking gravely talking like two men over a job of work. They hitch at their pants when they sit down and don’t know they have asses.

People come and go from 4 cell, drunks for the night, federal cases in transit to a federal pen, waiting for a hearing they’re gone in a week. I don’t pay much attention. There are a few brief romances. I watch and they go away. Young girls, women in their twenties, thirties, or middle aged women. No old women. Rose says if you go this route you die young or in prison. They say it draws you back. Once you’ve been here you’ll come back. Not me I say and they laugh.

The long balloon is only half blown up and the thin part sticks out from the end and I look and flick it with my finger and it thrums and I put the tip of my finger on the tip of the thin nozzle and push straight in with the balloon turning itself inside out around my finger and push all the way into the fat part of the balloon and now all around my finger there is a hole instead of something sticking out and I think how my hole is like that and I take the finger out and the air pressure pushes the long thing out after me and there is no more hole and I take a very deep breath and hold it pushing with it down into myself and nothing happens and the school bus rattles around me and I look out at the weeds black and thin curling over the snow like the hair on a man’s leg though no man I know and I always wanted to be a male homosexual.

Maybe with women if they put the two holes together like kissing it would make them hungry like kissing but then there would be nothing or only something to put in Kathy is so competent she could make it work but it must not be the same or they would not be so gentle with each other — they are not afraid of each other.

I am afraid of them all — I hate them all — because they are disgusting — because they are not me — and yet look like me — how could I know how dangerous I am without knowing the danger in those things that look like me?

The tubes run out of her stomach below the navel and empty into cellophane bags hanging there — her gums flap — her eyes stare — the hairs on her chin and above her lips are stiff and gray — in the morning we take her from the bed like a sack on sticks and prop her in the chair — I hold the flat spoon carefully so it does not cut her gums — when I put yellow mush into her mouth the bag on the right fills slowly with yellow — If I put red mush into her mouth the bag fills red — I unclip the bags when they’re full and put on new ones — I carry the full bags away from me with two fingers each holding them closed — the chair seat is covered with sponge and there is a hole in the middle — we take her out in the afternoon and put her on the bed — we take away the open-backed gown and wash her all over gently except between the legs where the thing hangs out — it caved in and fell through the hole — turning itself inside out and hangs there raw like a bubble of blood — we search through the wrinkles for her vague belly button and swab around the tubes and rub her with lotion and put ribbons in her hair and she lies staring — mouth open — once in a while her left thumb moves — the man comes in on Saturdays and sits looking at her — he twists the skin on his hands and looks down at the spots that grow larger and darker on his rippling skin.