Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Arty’s few jokes, the brief crackling relief from a mystic format, were always dry and biting and directed outward, away from himself.

The misty cauldron of the act was a constant. “They want to be amazed and scared. That’s why they’re here,” Arty said.

Gradually, inevitably, he discovered the Oracle. “The guy who asks the question and thinks he hears an answer is the guy who makes an Oracle.” He’d been reading books on Oriental philosophy and was spouting it solemnly over the lip of the tank one day when a pale woman on the bleachers stood up and asked him whether her fifteen-year-old son, who had run away months before, was alive or dead.

Without thinking at all, without missing a beat, he whipped out, “Weeping at night alone and yearning for you, working like a man in daylight, silently.” She burst out bawling and hollering, “Bless you, thank you, bless you, thank you,” as she crawled out over a row of knees and left snorking into her hanky.

She must have told her friends because the next two shows were pimpled with shouted questions from the bleachers and Arty’s vague, impromptu answers.

He had the redhead who sold the tickets hand out three-by-five cards for people to write questions on. The act took on a distinct odor of palm reading and advice to the love-or-otherwise-lorn. Papa had thousands of “Ask Aqua Boy” posters printed and slathered up everywhere we went.

I never knew the twins very well. Maybe Arty was right in claiming I was jealous of them. They were too charming. The whole crew loved them. The norm crowds loved them. In towns we passed through regularly pairs of young girls would come to the show dressed in a single long skirt in imitation of the twins. Arty wasn’t delighted with their popularity either, of course. But he had a way of splitting them. To me they were inaccessible. They didn’t need me to do anything for them. Iphy was always kind to me. She was kind to everybody. But Elly was careful to keep me in my place. They were self-sufficient. They needed only each other. And Elly, rest her hard and toothy soul, ruled their body.

I remember Lil with a bundle of costumes in one arm and a bag of popping corn in the other as she stood rigid in the sawdust of the midway and lectured me sternly: “We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say ‘Where is Elly and Iphy?’ We say ‘Where are Elly and Iphy?’ ”

If you stood facing the twins, Elly was on your left and Iphy on your right. Elly was right-handed and Iphy was left-handed. But Iphy was the right leg and Elly was the left leg. If you pulled Elly’s hair, Iphy yelped too. If you kissed Iphy’s cheek, Elly smiled. If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn’t sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate. Between them they ate a small fraction more than one norm kid their size.

Jonathan Tomaini, the greasy-haired music-school graduate who became their piano teacher when they had gone past Lily, claimed that Iphy was all melody and Elly was rhythm exclusively. They were both sopranos.

Arty speculated that their two brains functioned as right and left lobes of a single brain.

Elly punished Iphy by eating food that disagreed with them. Iphy would sink into depressed silence, eating nothing. Elly’s favorite trick was cheese. Iphy hated constipation like cancer.

Elly varied the treatment by gorging on chocolate, even though she didn’t really like chocolate and it made her chin break out in zits. Pimples were very obvious on her milky skin. Iphy loved chocolate and never ate it for fear of pimples. Elly’s eating the stuff never gave Iphy pimples. The punishment was that Iphy had to sleep next to Elly’s pimples, had to live within inches of the molten eruptions.

Iphy felt sorry for everybody who wasn’t a twin. Elly despised me.

When Chick came along, both twins adored him. He was such a meek little feather that he worshiped them. Lil and Al were just loved. But Arty was different. He was separate. He fascinated Iphy and he terrified Elly. Elly’s harshness flared against anyone who might distract Iphy’s attention from her. The rest of us were just fantasy opposition. Arty was dangerous. He flirted with Iphy. He toyed with her.

Elly hated him. She acted, sometimes, as though Arty could tear Iphy away from her.

The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said “Mutant Mystery” and, in smaller letters, “A Museum of Nature’s Innovative Art.” We called it “the Chute.” Like everything else in the Fabulon, the Chute grew and changed over the years. But the Chute had started with six clear-glass twenty-gallon jars, and those jars — each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice tape — were always the core.

The Chute was Crystal Lil’s idea, and she supervised it. She visited the Chute every day before the gates opened and polished the jars lovingly with glass cleaner. Later, when Al wanted to put the stuffed animals in, he had to clear it with Crystal Lil. She insisted on the maze at the entrance so that the six jars remained the climax of the walk through.

The stuffed animals in their lit glass windows were the usual humdrum collection of two-headed calves, six-legged chickens, and the mounted skeleton of a three-tailed cat. The only live exhibit was a trio of featherless hens that Al picked up from the chicken rancher who had bred them to save plucking costs on his fryers. He couldn’t sell them because customers were used to the pimply “chicken skin” of birds that had their feathers yanked. They didn’t trust the smooth-skinned look. These three were cheerful, baggy-fleshed creatures with floppy combs and wattles. They lived for two years before Lil found them, heaped dead in a corner of their cage, done in overnight by some microscopic enemy of innovation. Al had them stuffed and they stayed on in the same cage. One bent over, with head extended as though about to peck at the straw that would never again need changing. One stood alert, with its round yellow eye cocked at the passersby and its right foot curled as though in the act of stepping forward. The last sat cozily in a corner with one wing spread and its head tucked underneath, apparently looking for lice.

Lily would take her pills after breakfast and then go over to the Chute with her cleaning gear. She left the dark green floors and walls to the power-vacuum crew but the glass she did herself. Sometimes I would help, sometimes the twins. Mostly Lily did it herself. She would do a quick, decent job on all the glass windows in the maze, but her true purpose was her visit to the “kids” as she called them. The jars were Al’s failures.

“And mine,” Lil would always add. She would spray the big jars and polish them. She would talk softly, all the while, to the things floating in the jars or to whoever was with her. She remembered the drug recipe Al had prescribed for her pregnancy with each one, and reminisced about the births.

There were four who had been born dead: Clifford, Maple, Janus, and the Fist. “We always say Arty is our firstborn but actually Janus was the first,” Lil would say as she peered into the fluid that filled up the jar, examining the small huddled figure that floated upright inside.

Janus was always my favorite. He had a down of dark hair curling on his tiny scalp and a sweet sleeping face. His other head emerged on a short neck at the base of his spine, equally round and perfect, with matching hair. This rear brother squinted in perpetual surprise at the tiny buttocks under its nose. The four sets of minuscule eyelashes fascinated me and I wondered how the two would have gotten along if Janus had lived. Would they have bickered like Elly and Iphy? They could never have seen each other except sideways in a mirror. Probably the top head would have controlled everything and made his poor little butt-brother miserable.