Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Papa said, “Hand it to me, Lily,” as he stepped down to the pavement and turned around to see, as Arty saw, and I saw, Lily tilting oddly, her head against the door frame, her robe spreading open around her, her whipped-cream hair jerking out in thick snakes that tried to escape from her head in all directions. We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama’s gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassière stretched away from her with an ugly, ripping sound, and her feet, in pale lavender socks, stretched wobbling toward the light in the ceiling, and her hair fell in coils over her face. “Mama! Lil! Mama!” we all howled, as her huge blue-veined breasts burst through the brassière and she dove into the cardboard box, falling with her breasts in the box as her arms waved and her head lifted against the pull from the box and her white legs twitched and crawled on the floor beneath the rucked and flapping robe and one lavender sock rumpled its way off her foot.

Then Al was on his knees in the doorway, stroking her head and saying, “Sweet shit, Lily,” through her soft sobbing. Arty grunted, his head craned around the back of the seat. His eyes overran his wide face. I sat on the floor against the cupboard with my mouth and eyes open, and Elly and Iphy sat up in their bunk with bewildered eyes and wide befuddled mouths saying, “Mama,” in a drawn-out complaint. A painful, thin whine came out of my own nose and only one voice was silent, only one of all the Binewskis was not adding to the noise, and that was the paper-padded morsel in the box, who was invisible except for one tiny hand opening and closing in a tangled strand of Lil’s white hair. The baby was not crying anymore. When, for an instant, we were all silent together, we could hear the chuckling smack of his lips at the bruised brown nipple.

It was a minute or two before Lily could sneak an arm into the box and lift the baby up to her as she collapsed onto the floor, and sat with her feet mixing with my feet. One fat arm and the fuzzy knot of head buried in her breast were all that showed of the baby outside his cone of blanket. Al crawled in and sat on the floor beside her.

“What happened?” he asked.

She looked at him with her eyes so wide open that the whites showed all the way around her wobbling blue irises. She laughed shakily. “I guess he wanted to nurse.” She looked down at the little rumpled face and Al stared at a hairpin on the floor in front of him.

The twins, groggy in their bunk, and Arty with his chin propped on the back of his seat, and I, slumped in the corner, sat gawking as Mama’s tired face slowly developed a swelling over her right eyebrow where she’d banged her head on the wall when she dove into the box. She shifted slightly to get more comfortable and her robe slid away from her knees. They were scraped raw, with beads of blood swelling out through the pores.

“Are you saying,” Al stretched out a hand and carefully picked up the hairpin, “that the baby did that? Hoisted you up like that?”

Mama’s eyes snapped with anger. “I told you he was hungry!”

The tiny fist, like a spider on a sand dune, clenched and opened and clenched against Mama’s breast. The suckling sound went on.

Papa was staring at that hand. His lower jaw looked oddly soft and slack beneath his mustache. He got slowly up on his knees and picked up two more hairpins. He found another pin on the windowsill and stood up, looking at the hairpins in his hand. Mama concentrated on the small face at her breast. She seemed calm, forgetful of the tears and the ragged, dangling remains of the brassière.

“Well,” Papa cleared his throat, “we need to think a little bit, Lily. I’m going to drive on up the road. We’ll find a rest stop and pull over for the night.” Mama nodded peaceably.

The twins went back to sleep and I crawled into my cupboard and Arty humped his way into his bunk and Mama and the baby went back into the bedroom. Al drove in the dark until he came to a pulloff surrounded by high black firs. Arty and I stayed awake for a long time listening to Papa and Mama in their bedroom. Papa cleaned and dressed Mama’s knees and put a cold pack on her thick blue eyebrow bruise. He put the sleeping baby into the crib beside their big bed, and they sat watching together and saw the thin flannel blanket curl slowly up in a twisted bundle and then push toward the headboard of the crib, where it lay twitching and scrubbing back and forth all by itself while the baby slept. Arty and I both heard Papa say, “He moves things. He moves things.” We heard Mama start to cry again softly when Papa said, “He’s a keeper, darling. He’s the finest thing we’ve done! He’s fantastic!”

Things were quiet after that, except for what the dark trees were doing among themselves outside. “Poor Arty,” I thought. “He’ll be miserable.”

We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground. Papa climbed out of the driver’s seat, threw back the side door, and jumped down. Mama was in the bedroom with the door closed, still sleeping. Elly and Iphy were huddled on their neat bunk with a puzzle. I was trying to read over Arty’s shoulder as I turned pages for him. None of us looked out the windows. We all hated the bleak, flat stretches. Papa had left the door propped open and a rip of wind twisted into the van, missing our pages and carrying dust and the rough sting of sage with it. Papa was out there, walking in the desert.

He’d been silent all morning, and excited. He wouldn’t let any of us sit up front with him. We’d squared away our beds and the twins put out cold cereal for breakfast and handed a mug of coffee up to Papa. Arty had been quiet too.

Papa’s boots crunched on the gravel outside and his head came through the open door.

“Step out here, dreamlets,” he said, then disappeared. None of us wanted to get out into that wind but we went, silently. Arty came last and just slid down onto the step and lay there blinking at the grit in the air. The twins leaned on the van and I stood near them watching Papa. He paced in front of us. Just a few steps in each direction and then back. The wind thumped and whacked at his jacket flaps and lifted his black hair against the grain. He looked away most of the time, out over the plain at the waving stubs of brush and broom. When he glanced at us, between phrases, his eyes were dangerous. We listened gravely.

“Your mama and I have decided to keep the new baby.”

Each of us, he said, was special and unique and this baby looked like a norm but had something special too. He could move things with his mind.

“Telekinetic,” said Arty flatly.

Yes, telekinetic, Papa said. And he explained that it was a thing he didn’t know about, that none of us knew about, and that we’d have to be very careful for a while until we figured out how to deal with it and what it was good for.

“We’ll join up with the show by morning and discuss the situation with Horst. Horst is a trainer and training is what we need. Horst can also keep his trap shut. Now here’s the important thing.” And he said we were to act as though he were just a norm baby, even with people in the show who we liked and trusted.

“The army will want him,” said Arty.

“Well, they aren’t going to get him,” said Papa.

We all had to stick together like troopers, said Papa, and the baby’s name was to be Fortunato, which means Lucky.

Though his body did only the normal cherubic things, Fortunato’s effect on the environment at the age of three weeks was already far beyond that of a hyperactive and malicious ten-year-old. He had to be confined to the cubicle we called our parents’ bedroom. Mama moved everything breakable, shreddable, or toxic out of her room so the baby wouldn’t destroy it or himself. Our tidy van became a heaped bunker. Platoons of makeup bottles and boot-polish cans stuffed the cupboards. All the sequined clothing hung over the twins’ bunk. Lamps, clocks, and framed photos littered Arty’s unmade bed. Papa’s medical magazines and books were stacked everywhere. Mama’s sewing machine moved under the sink with me. I slept with my knees touching my chin.