Katherine Dunn: Attic

I always remember and believe what I remember. My mother sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper and the mustached man in the billed cap in dots on the first page “Stalin is dead! Why, he died from eating two whole chickens at a single meal. It gave him a stroke. He was always a big eater.” I remembered and said that in school. They laughed. The little girl next door and I sat in the tire swing in front of the house where my brother was born. I said what’s fuck and she said a man gets mad at his wife and kills her and lays her out on her back and her sister finds out and kills the husband and lays him on top of his wife. His brother finds out and kills the sister and lays her on top then her husband kills him and all the relatives find out and kill each other and each one is laid on top of the last one and the pile gets higher and higher until all the friends and relatives are dead and on the pile and that’s what fuck means and go get fucked and get laid and all those other things. I never said anything about it but I thought that was true for a long time. Once in school a teacher said Thomas Malthus when it should have been Jeremy Bentham and a long time afterward I said that and someone showed me in the book and it said Jeremy Bentham and I was wrong because I remembered what they told me and they were wrong.

There was a window behind the judge and no jury but black wood and the lawyer was there and didn’t like me and Joyce was ahead of me with her fur coat and fat cheeks and short curly hair and she got off in her husband’s custody standing in front of the tall desk looking up and the desk was part of the wall and he came to it through another room so there was no way to go around behind it from this room. He didn’t wear a wig but had a skinny face and gray glasses and she took her coat from the rail and a man came to her young and dark and walked out she bouncing. I came up to the desk and a detective was there with something I had written but he didn’t read it. He said what it said but I know it didn’t say that and the young man was there from his job at the upholstery factory and he blushed and said “She got down on her knees to me” and the judge looked at me “You got down on your knees to him?” The Kresge’s manager was there and the words fell in neon and zeon and freon glowing in glass tubes and clinking and crazing and I lied and they lied and the lawyer lied but the judge found me guilty which was true. I don’t understand.

I walk back to the railing and Jerry Simmons is waiting for me. There were movies in Gen. Sci. Class in eighth grade with the shades pulled down and Mr. Armstrong in his crew cut fiddling with the projector. Standard Oil movies of draining African swamps and spraying mosquitoes’ beds with kerosene because the tsetse fly — black man peeking around the corner of a grass house break to same black man lying on the ground shaking under a G.I. blanket in the blazing sun shivering and shaking like mad his eyes white to the tops Walter Cronkite voice droning newsworthily yellow fever malaria — naked woman but she’s black so it’s cool cut to woman with elephantiasis in her legs so full the skins splitting like a frankfurter cut to man — just flash man pushing a loaded wheelbarrow Cronkite voice drones unemotional elephantiasis of the scrotum and then cut to diagrams of the mother anopheles before it hits us that they have just shown us a picture of some poor bastard wheeling his balls around in a wheelbarrow. He trying to look sincere in a madras tie and holey face with used-car salesman in every crease and I walk out with my feet touching the tiles all along the insides and he takes my arm and his slacks have cuffs and they are loose from the waistband with tucks in the front and sides and he has a silver bucking bronc on his buckle and spumoni specks in the charcoal gray of his jacket and his teeth are always showing long and with wide dark spaces between and he shows them flat and square as chisels between long slug lips and has money in his hand. “Get yourself some duds Baby, there’s a room for you at the Senator, pick you up at seven.” I’m on the street walking past a high board fence hiding some construction. Cross the street before the Kresge’s some hotel room with a small window and a toilet behind the door. The bed is too soft. I sink in it. I am too soft. I am on a train alone. I don’t remember the middles here. I am on a train going west and the snow covers the black earth thinly and the train takes three days to get where it is going. Three days and I do not flush while the train is in the station and there are rabbit tracks in the snow as the train passes. I in green plush with my face to the green window and no one sits beside me all the way.

Katherine Dunn was a novelist and boxing journalist who lived and worked in Oregon. She is the author of three novels: Attic, Truck, and Geek Love , which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize. She died in 2016.