Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Al had always fancied himself a healer. His hobby was reading medical journals. He collected first-aid kits and drugs. He was an enthusiastic amateur general practitioner, and as soon as we could afford it — years before Arturism was in swing — he bought a small second-hand trailer and set it up as a little infirmary. His fascination with human mechanics certainly came before and probably sparked his idea for manipulating our breeding, and he did have a knack for it. We thought of it as part of his Yankee spirit. He was enthralled by medicine but furious with doctors for hogging the glory just because they’d managed to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall.

With Al’s hobby, the Fabulon had been nearly independent of medical folk. Horst was called in as a consultant on veterinary chores, but Al handled anything human himself. The flame eaters figured him for a genius because he cured the many blisters on their lips and inside their mouths. Over the years he set fractures, relocated joints, diagnosed and treated venereal diseases, and dosed infections from the kidneys to the tonsils.

It was Lil who soothed brows, changed sheets, and read aloud for the sick, but it was Al who did the flashy stuff. He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and rectums with equal zest, and made a grand production of extracting a sliver. He was a masterly stitcher—“scarless wizardry,” as he himself claimed. His career triumph happened the night an elderly lady collapsed in the front row at her first sight of Arty. Al recognized a heart attack, ripped her purple cotton dress down from the throat and clapped disposable electrodes to her chest within seconds of her tumble to the sawdust. He did it right there in front of Arty’s tank with seven or eight hundred people in the bleachers watching. She jolted. Her eyeglasses slid off. She voided her colon rather noisily, and was alive again, if not conscious.

It was the custom for the midway folk to appear on Monday mornings at Al’s clinic if they had complaints. A lot of people said Al “should have been a doctor,” and that his talent was wasted in the Fabulon. Al didn’t see it that way. “I’ve got a captive practice of sixty souls,” he’d say, increasing the numbers as the show’s population grew to eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty.

Then Dr. Phyllis arrived. She drove into the lot one morning and parked thirty yards back from the cat wagon, which happened to be the last trailer in line that day.

She sat at the wheel and looked out through the windshield for a while. I saw her because I was stumping around the cat wagon rehearsing a lead-in talk. I kept on, pretending not to notice but taking in the shiny white van with a pair of tangled snakes climbing a staff painted next to the side door. I could barely see the vague pale figure behind the polarized windshield. We’d been on the lot for two days and were all set up, so the crews were taking it easy that morning, sitting on trailer steps talking and drinking coffee.

Horst was shaving beside his living van, using a portable razor while he looked into the rearview mirror on the driver’s side. Everybody on the lot saw the van arrive but nobody reacted. For all we knew it was an act that Al had hired and not mentioned.

I was thinking she was a snake dancer because of the vipers on the van. I was morbidly fascinated by snakes. The van door opened, a pair of steps flopped out, and she appeared.

She was dressed in white — the uniform, the shoes, stockings, gloves, and of course the snug cap and the face mask. Only her glasses were neutral, clear, the eyes behind them blurred by their thickness.

She stepped smartly down and strode toward the nearest guard. It was Tim Jenkins, a big mahogany weightlifter who had retired from perpetual corporal status in the Marines and had been taken up by Al while his scalp was still visible under his military haircut. Tim was serious about guard duty and clicked his heels as the short, sturdy white figure approached him.

I’d stopped my pacing and was staring, boggle-eyed, at her. I knew it was a woman because of the broad hips and bulging prow. I was figuring her for a Hindu snake dancer — imagining flame shows with reptiles flickering over her gradually revealed flesh, slipping up her arms under the white sleeves, and so on.

I couldn’t hear what she said but Tim nodded and looked at Horst. Horst had been watching everything in his mirror. He flipped his razor through the driver’s window onto the seat of his van and strolled over. Tim was making introductions and Horst nodded and stuck out a hand. The figure in white pointedly jammed her gloved hands into the pockets of her white jacket. Horst let his hand drop and settled back a hair on his heels. Horst strolled away with the lady in white, toward the two Binewski vans. I trailed at a distance.

It was a bright, warm morning in Arkansas, I think, or maybe Georgia. The dust was brick red on my shoes as I leaned on the generator truck and looked down, pretending to mind my own affairs. I could have kicked myself for picking that fender to lean on when I realized that the fractured thrum of the generator would keep me from hearing any conversation. The white lady was waiting outside Arty’s van. She was carrying a thin vinyl briefcase, white. She stood quite still with no nervous movements. Chick’s small face peered from the window of the family van.

Arty came out in his chair. His forehead folded down over his eyes with questions. He doesn’t know her, I thought. He didn’t send for her. He nodded and said something. She spoke, her hands on the white case. Arty guided his chair down the ramp, and she fell in beside him, going slowly away from the vans, talking. She tucked the case under her arm and jammed her hands in her pockets again.

The case didn’t stay where she put it but slid out behind her and floated toward the open door of the family van at an altitude of four feet or so. She whipped around and despite the mask I could tell she was glaring at the flying briefcase. Arty looked over his shoulder, stopped, opened his mouth, and shouted at the van. The case stopped just before it entered the door, turned in midair and zipped back to the white lady at twice the speed it had left her. She reached out a gloved hand, snatched it, and stuck it back under her arm. Arty was talking to her. She nodded. They turned away and, with him rolling and her walking, they paraded up and down and around the lot, talking for a long time.

“I think she’s creepy,” said Electra. Iphigenia bobbed her head gravely in agreement and popped a slice of apple into her mouth. Arty ignored them both.

“How is she going to be paid? Percentage? Salary? Only when somebody’s sick? Or only as long as everybody is well?” Al slid his eyes nervously, trying to be businesslike. Arty was forced to abandon his soup and his pretense of oblivion. He stared around the table at us and then turned to Papa.

“Don’t worry about her money. I’ll take care of it. She’s got a lot to offer us. She’s a stroke of luck for this show. She’s not a school hack, at least. She’s good at what she does.”

Papa looked guiltily into his soup bowl.

Lily smiled dreamily. “It will be nice having an educated lady around.”

Al patted her hand. Arty was concentrating on his soup again, crossing his eyes to sight down his straw. Chick sat beside Lil in the back of the dining booth, smiling and watching the peas lift, individually, from his soup, jerk slightly until the drip of broth fell back into the bowl, and then swoop down to rest in a military row on his plate. Chick never did like peas. I caught Iphy’s eye. She raised her brows and pursed her mouth. Elly wrinkled her nose at me. We girls agreed, silently, that even if we had bubonic plague, the lady in white wasn’t going to lay a finger on us.