Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“It was in Oregon, up in Portland, which they call the Rose City, though I never got in gear to do anything about it until a year or so later when we were stuck in Fort Lauderdale.”

He had been restless one day, troubled by business boondoggles. He drove up into a park on a hillside and got out for a walk. “You could see for miles from up there. And there was a big rose garden with arbors and trellises and fountains. The paths were brick and wound in and out.” He sat on a step leading from one terrace to another and stared listlessly at the experimental roses. “It was a test garden, and the colors were … designed. Striped and layered. One color inside the petal and another color outside.

“I was mad at Maribelle. She was a pinhead who’d been with your mother and me for a long while. She was trying to hold me up for a raise I couldn’t afford.”

The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. “It just struck me — clear and complete all at once — no long figuring about it.” He realized that children could be designed. “And I thought to myself, now that would be a rose garden worthy of a man’s interest!”

We children would smile and hug him and he would grin around at us and send the twins for a pot of cocoa from the drink wagon and me for a bag of popcorn because the red-haired girls would just throw it out when they finished closing the concession anyway. And we would all be cozy in the warm booth of the van, eating popcorn and drinking cocoa and feeling like Papa’s roses.

Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, “Forty-one!” meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil’s confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, “What! What!” into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.

I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.

Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves her door open to the hallway.

Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image among the dots. When I come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.

Being called “Manager” explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.

When Crystal Lil howls, “Twenty-one!” which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. “Thank you!” I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knobby and a faintly iridescent green — shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don’t trust Lil’s blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.

When Lil calls, “Thirty-five!” up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When “Thirty-five” comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same “Thirty-five” always answered the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.

This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn’t give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me for surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can’t be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.

We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just “Number Twenty-one” to Crystal Lil. Or “McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one.” Miranda is more colorful. I’ve heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, “The dwarf in Twenty-one,” or “The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one.”

I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.

Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar’s.

Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter’s face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.

Lillian Hinchcliff Binewski — Crystal Lil — is tall and thin. Her breasts hang in flaps at her waist but her carriage is still erect. She has the long-faced, thin-nosed stamp of the Protestant aristocrat. She never goes out without a hat, usually a tweed hiker with the brim pulled so far down over her pink glasses that she is forced to throw her head up and back to catch what faint light and movement her eyes are willing to deal with. Draped with a few dead rodents she could slip unsuspected into cucumber luncheons.

Following Lily is easy. Her long Bostonian body lurches from one touch point to the next at an impressive clip. She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming. She never passes any vertical shape without grabbing it and feeling it to make sure what it is. Telephone poles, stop signs — she runs at them, catches hold as though just saved from falling, gives them an exploratory rub with each hand, and then, tossing her head back, pushes off toward the next upright shadow that smears across her eye. Lily also uses humans this way. I have seen her move through twenty blocks of crowded noontime sidewalks, swinging from one startled pedestrian to another, grabbing one by a shoulder, patting in examination, while stretching out an arm to snatch at the breasts of the next one in her path. When someone takes offense, snaps or swears or pushes her away, she reels only momentarily before the next body presents itself and she hurtles on, using body after body as handholds through the air.