Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Lil always fussed over Maple, who looked like a big rumpled sponge. Maple had two eyes but they didn’t relate to each other. Lil said Maple had no bones. She and Al had decided Maple was female because they couldn’t find a penis. Lil also clucked and sighed over Clifford, who looked like a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached. The twins and I called Clifford “the Tray” when Mama wasn’t around.

The Fist wasn’t full term but it was obvious where the name had come from. “I only carried the Fist for five months,” Lil said, and that was her excuse for spending a shade less time on his jar.

Apple and Leona were the two who had lived long enough to die outside Lily’s belly. Apple was big but dull. She looked like a Tibetan cherub. Her coarse black hair grew close to her rumpled eyes. I myself could dimly remember her sleeping in the top drawer of Lil’s big bureau. She never moved anything but her lips, her eyelids, and her bowels. Her eyeballs were still pointing in vaguely different directions. Lil had fed her from a bottle and changed her, washing her limp body three or four times a day. Lil would talk to Apple and rub her and move things in front of her eyes, but there was never any response. Apple grew fat and there was a smell of old urine around her and the drawer. She was two years old when she died. A pillow fell on her face.

Arty always claimed that Al did it. Elly and Iphy would squeal when he said that, and I would shake my head and change the subject, but we never asked Lil and we never brought it up in front of Al.

Leona was the last jar before the exit and had four spotlights focused to pierce the formaldehyde in which she drifted. Lil would linger over the jar and once or twice I saw her cry as she pressed her forehead against the glass and crooned. “We had such hopes for her,” she would sigh. Leona’s jar was labeled “The Lizard Girl” and she looked the part. Her head was long from front to back and the forehead was compressed and flattened over small features that collapsed into her long throat with no chin to disturb the line. She had a big fleshy tail, as thick as a leg where it sprouted from her spine, but then tapering to a point. There was a faint greenish sheen to her skin but I suspected that Arty was right in claiming that Al had painted it on after Leona died.

“She was only seven months old,” Lil would murmur. “We never understood why she died.”

The sign in the jar room was bolted to the wall and had its own spotlight. It was carefully calligraphed in brown letters on a cream background. “HUMAN,” it said. “BORN OF NORMAL PARENTS.”

“You must always remember that these are your brothers and sisters,” Lil would lecture. “You must always take proper care of them and keep the roughnecks from jouncing the jars around on the road.”

The twins and I were expected to share responsibility for the jars if anything happened to Lil. This burden wasn’t even mentioned to Chick or Arty.

Yet it was Arty who discovered that the kids in the jars floated close to the top when it rained and sank down to the bottom when the sky was clear. Al never went into the Chute himself, but he would ask Lil for the weather report every morning when she came back from her visit.

Lillian Hinchcliff Binewski, eight months and two weeks pregnant with the most extravagant experiment in a flamboyant series — Crystal Lil — bored with the bigness of her belly and the smallness of Coos Bay, Oregon, and fed up with the kaput generator that kept the show closed until a new coil could be installed that night, sat (Our Lil) in the foldaway dinette of the thirty-eight-foot Binewski Road King living van and decided to take a small van and drive over to a shopping center to pick up some prestitched silver-sequined stretch material to make matching costumes for the kids. And one for herself after her belly deflated, with a bit of white tulle for a tail.

“Arty honey,” she called, and stubbed her cigarette into the last grime of her breakfast wheat germ where it coated the blue bowl. Arturo, the Aqua Boy, was in the shower and toilet room and it took a minute for him to poke the door open. “Arty honey. We’re going in to that big shopping center. Oly, you help him, baby. We’ll all go.”

The pink-eyed Olympia, six years old and bouncy, put down a copy of National Geographic and climbed up on the side bunk to take Arty’s Dunlop belly-tread off its hook. Arturo was murmuring slyly as Lil tore a long pink fingernail while buckling her sandal. “I can’t hear you, Arty. Be sure to pee before we leave.”

“I said,” Arty slithered up to Lil’s foot and lay looking at her long, elegant toes, “do you think it’s a good idea for us all to go?”

Lil stepped over him and swung open the outside door. “Elly-Iphy,” she shrieked. From the big truck stage next door came the ripple of “Moonlight Sonata” for four hands and an answering shout from Iphigenia. “Come here, doves!” and the sonata cut off as Lil grabbed the ignition keys from the Buddha ashtray on the bookshelf.

Arty said, “I don’t want the tread. I’ll use the chair. It’s easier in public.”

On that sunstruck, restless day, Vern Bogner filled the pickup’s fuel tank at the first station down from the camp. He had stopped there on his way up to buy kerosene for the lantern. The old man at the pump watched the meter flip over and hollered at Vern, “You’re leaving early! Get your limit already?” Vern stared grimly through the windshield. The bed of the pickup was obviously empty. Snotty old cocksucker. Sometimes you just wanted to go up in the woods and sit by a fire and slip around a few beers in peace.

Vern Bogner had been produce manager at the Seal Bay Supermarket for five years, and assistant for three years before that. As Vern explained in detail years later, it was a time when his whole life had begun to slide. Despite his experience, oranges had always been hard to stack. He had built mounds and pyramids of Floridas and tangerines and big and little inny and outy navels by the million but he had never been plagued by so many rolls and drops and avalanches as in the past few months.

His wife, Emily, didn’t like him much lately. And when he came home from work and said “Hi” to his own kids, they just snorted and went on staring at the TV. Vern was not at all sure what was happening to him, but a decade later he could still describe the moment-to-moment sensations of that morning.

The day was muggy hot and the smell of gas mixed with the beer in his belly and lifted in a bitter scrape to the back of his throat. Emily sneered at him too. “Oh, Vern’s got lots of trophies — stuffed green peppers, lettuce heads.” And laughter. Even this scummy old station jock was noticing, rubbing it in. Vern turned his head just enough to catch a glint on the barrel of the 30.06 where it hung on the window rack. He’d been out with his fifty-dollar license four times this year and hadn’t fired a shot.

When he saw the tall sign for the new shopping center, Vern flicked the turn signal. A brand-new supermarket took up one side of the lot. The dime store and hairdresser and the rest were on the other side of the five acres. He liked visiting other supermarkets. He’d take a quick tour of the produce section on his way to the beer. A couple of travelers would get him home.

He had parked and was reaching for the keys when he happened to see a van door open all the way across the lot. A long and distinctly female leg stretched out. It ended in a shiny red sandal with a high heel. Vern paused and waited for the other leg. The legs belonged to an enormous belly, thin arms, and a pile of whipped-cream-colored hair.