Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Dr. Phyllis cowed Al. After that first day he never questioned her presence, or her credentials. He wouldn’t even try to ask where she’d come from or what she’d been doing before she joined us. He dithered and protested that she was a “lady” and a good medic, and “By the blistered nipples of the Virgin,” he didn’t need to know any more than that. The twins and I shook our heads at how little fight he put up when his private passion was usurped. I nagged him to ask questions because, if he didn’t come up with some information, Arty would make me try. It seemed that despite his long conversation with her Arty didn’t know much more about her than the rest of us did.

I was putting Arty onto the little elevator platform that ran up the outside of the family van one morning when he cocked a wink at me and said, “I guess you’ll have to get old Doc P. to let you look through her microscope.”

I put a foot on the platform beside him, grabbed the lever, and we went slowly up.

It was a sunny morning. Warm. I don’t know where we were — a small valley. All around the camp were deep pastures cut by streams with rough hills beyond. The highway sliced through and ran toward a small town, whose chimneys we could see above the trees. There were songbirds racketing in the scrub oaks on the slopes. The honk of a pheasant drifted up from the long grass. Arty wriggled off the elevator onto the roof. He liked to sunbathe up there when he could. Al had put a low rail around the top of the van so Arty wouldn’t fall off, at the same time he installed the elevator.

Arty stuck his toe into the elastic of his trunks and worked them down until they sagged off him. He rolled over and arched his back, tilting his belly to the sun, stretching lushly.

“Yep,” he said, “Little Oly had better do her stuff on Doc P.”

“Here’s your fly swatter.” I put it beside him with the handle close to his head, where he could reach it. Arty was, as he claimed, “fly Mecca,” and he hated them.

“Don’t ignore me, Oly,” he murmured as I rubbed suntan oil on his chest.

“I won’t do it. I don’t like her.”

“Oly, you like her. You like her a lot. She’s a fascinating, intelligent woman and you can learn from her.”

“Right,” I said, capping the bottle.

“Give her an ear to pour into. Nobody does that better than you.” He turned his head to watch me step onto the elevator.

“Don’t piss on anybody from up here,” I said. “Papa got really mad last time.” I lowered myself, looking away from him, looking at the brown creek that eased through the grass behind the van.

Three hours later I was hauling Dr. P.’s garbage to the camp dumpster and cursing her and Arty and myself in a thin blue vapor of rage that hissed through my nose with every breath. She had accepted my offer of help coldly and stood over me while I pumped the hydraulic leveler for her van. She gave me rigid orders about clipping the weeds and grass all around her van and then made me go over the whole area with a rake for litter. Then she introduced me to the garbage. She had very strict ideas about garbage. Each full bag in the can beside her van had to be slipped inside another bag and wrapped in a particular oblong shape and tied with string in a proper square knot. Three of these small parcels went into one large bag, which was then wrapped and tied with the same knot. Then the large parcel could be carried to the camp collection.

She considered it proper that I, or someone more efficient, should be dispatched by Arty to do her chores. She wasn’t at all grateful.

When I got back to her van the door was closed again. I hadn’t yet managed to get inside. I pushed the door buzzer. Her voice scratched out of the speaker, “Yes.”

“I’m finished with the garbage, ma’am.”

“That’s all for today, then. Have a bath and pay special attention to cleaning under your nails. Report back tomorrow morning.”

A month and several towns later I still hadn’t set foot in her van. I’d filled her fuel and water tanks, emptied her septic system, gift-wrapped her garbage every day, and in each new site I’d leveled her van, policed her area for litter, and generally kissed her cold and pendulous buttocks for nothing.

In the meantime she had taken over Al’s precious infirmary trailer.

The sick call was cut in half. Al kept up his Monday-morning exams of the family but they were conducted in our dining booth. He didn’t have the old zest for it. He went on tapping and listening and demanding news of our bowel movements. He still lifted our eyelids and peered into our throats and ears and scowled at our nails and rubbed blue gunk on our teeth and, for those of us with hair, checked for lice and ticks, but he didn’t have his old glow of joy in doing it. He was sneaking behind her back.

I found this clipping years later in the private papers of the reporter Norval Sanderson, who joined the show sometime after Dr. P. Norval had resources that we Binewskis lacked. When he wanted info on someone’s past, he could tap records and microfilm files from any newspaper in the country.

(UPI) A coed at the University of New York was admitted to St. Theresa’s Hospital today after having performed abdominal surgery on herself in her dormitory room.

University authorities revealed that Phyllis Gleaner, 22, a third-year bio-chem major, pressed an alarm buzzer in her dormitory room, which summoned the building’s custodian at 4:30

A.M

., Tuesday. Responding to the buzzer, custodian Gregory Phelps found the student lying on a sterile table, wrapped in bloody sheets and surrounded by instruments.

“She was weak but conscious,” said Phelps. “She told me not to touch anything in the room but to call an ambulance. She said the room was sterile and she didn’t want me touching anything. She was very strong on that. I could see blood all over and from what I saw in the mirrors around her I didn’t want to upset her so I went and called the emergency number.”

Police surgeon Kevin Goran, M.D., examined Gleaner’s dorm room after she was removed to the hospital. “It was a makeshift but functional operating theater,” said Goran. “She had instruments for fairly major abdominal surgery, and an ingenious arrangement of mirrors, which allowed her to work inside her own abdominal cavity.”

Emergency staff at St. Theresa’s reported that Gleaner was conscious and coherent when admitted, but was very fatigued. “She was not really in shock,” said Dr. Vincent Coraccio, staff surgeon at St. Theresa’s. “What was remarkable was the competence of the work. She’d gone all the way in and was finished, evidently, but she got too tired to close the incision. That’s when she called for

help. All I had to do was stitch her up. A very tidy job.”

Gleaner administered local anesthetics to herself throughout the surgical procedure. Her statements to the hospital staff indicate that Gleaner believed a remote-control device had been implanted next to her liver by an unnamed undercover organization. Gleaner believed that the device was being used to monitor and direct her activities. She performed the surgery in an effort to rid herself of the device. No such device was found by police in searching Gleaner’s dormitory room, nor by the medical staff in treating Gleaner.

The clipping was stapled in Sanderson’s notebook. One page of his sprawling hand revealed the rest of his Doc P. research.

In an article appearing two days later, the same reporter revealed that university officials attempting to contact Gleaner’s family discovered that the background on file was fictitious. She had not attended the schools that she claimed. Her records were forged and falsified. No relatives or friends could be located in the small Kansas town — Garden City — she claimed as her home. The university was embarrassed, particularly since Gleaner’s academic record at that institution was brilliant. Her professors acknowledged that she was a reserved individual and denied any knowledge of her private life. They affirmed that her work had been consistently excellent. Classmates claimed little knowledge of Gleaner. She was aloof from everyone