Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

I toddle along behind. Twenty feet between us is complete protection from her noticing. It intrigues me to see people pause and stare after her as she lunges on her desperate way. Some wide-minded type with a textbook under his arm, surprised at his own stifled impulse to backhand her for using him as a trapeze, a little ashamed, gawks in her wake. Then he turns and sees me, humping along and looking directly into his eyes. The double image scars him. My mother, on the street alone, can be written off with the gentle oddities of rambling mumblers, drunks, and beggars, but when I come twenty feet behind, there is an ice moment. Even the smug feel it. They go home and tell their wives that the streets of Portland are filled with weirdos. Their dreams weave a bent linkage between the wild old woman and the hunchbacked dwarf. Or they think we are residents of an institutional halfway house, or that the circus is in town.

A few times a week, apparently convinced that she is in Boston, Crystal Lil struggles up the hill to a big house on Vista Avenue. She runs at the wrought-iron fence, galloping her hands along it, searching for something. Then she stands with her mouth hanging open, an elastic strand of spittle bridging her jaws, and waits on the sidewalk in front of the door. Probably she can’t actually make out the shape of the dormer windows, but she waves at them. Occasionally she grabs a pedestrian and shouts, “I was born there! In the Rose Room! Mama gave us tea in the solarium!” When her captive escapes, she lapses into murmuring. She doesn’t register that the Georgian brick is now an expensive condominium. She waits for some old dog or servant to wander out and discover her with tears of joy, the prodigal come home after all these years. Maybe she dreams she’ll be taken in and cosseted by her own mother, tucked up cozy in a virgin bed. Only the slim professional men go in and out, sidestepping her skillfully. Eventually she wanders back down the hill to her room on Kearney Street.

Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She takes long green beans out of the bag and snaps them into inch-long chunks that drop into the pan. I pause on the stairs, marveling at how she came by those green beans.

Lillian in the supermarket, terrified and angry, her long hands running over shelves, knocking down cans, grabbing at last a box and muttering, reaches out to grab an innocent shopper, thrusts the box into the woman’s face, shrieking, “What is this! Tell me what this is!” until the shopper, in irritated charity, says, “Cornflakes,” and shakes loose.

• • •

Lily in summer, with the street dirt rising into the thickening heat, lifts her window and shoves two grimy geraniums from the inside of the window to the outer sill. Later that afternoon, Crystal Lil rushes down the sidewalk, grabbing every moving human by the collar, caterwauling, “Thief! Little bastards! Stole my plants! Thief!” And sure enough the pots are gone, only two faint rings left in the dirt on the sill.

Jingle of keys. High-pitched burbling in the hall. Lillian delivering the mail. She is supposed to leave it on the table in the downstairs hall. Or, at most, slip it under the doors. Sometimes she uses it as an excuse to come into the rooms.

Once Miranda, frenzied on the floor with her lover, did not answer Lil’s knock. The two, beneath a sheet in the brick heat of summer, sweating into each other, lay still, hushed themselves, and were shocked when the door opened and Crystal Lil staggered in, touching walls, grabbing tables, making her way to the heaped sheet itself, where it tented in the middle of the floor, patting the edges, barely missing the tangled legs of the lovers, who lay silent, watching her greedy investigation. After making a complete round of the room she found the table again, put the envelopes on it, and groped her way out, closing and locking the door. Miranda told me this when she was trying to befriend me in the hall, trying to talk me into posing for her drawings.

Miranda seems preoccupied with deformity. She has lured the fat man from the corner newsstand up to her rooms several times to model for her. There is no obvious reason for such a fascination in her own life, even if her living does depend on that tiny irregularity of hers. She is strong and straight. Her spine and legs are as long as history. It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her toward all that the world calls freakish.

Miranda is hard to follow. Her stride is as long as Crystal Lil’s but without the detours and distractions. She is also alert and mine is not an inconspicuous figure. I usually lose her within a few blocks. Either she leaves me choking in the dust or I have to duck and hide from her swiveling face. I’ve managed to follow her all the way to work twice in the three years she has lived in this building.

• • •

One evening, leaving the radio station, where I had worked later than usual, I saw her at an intersection. She was wearing dark green, a cocktail dress and jacket. She wears simple clothes to her classes at the art school so I was struck by the difference. Her makeup was dramatic and her body moved strangely, unfamiliarly in high-heeled sandals with only thin gold chains to keep them on. I followed her without thinking about it. Of course I would lose her but I took pleasure in the eyes of men on her body. She was apparently going to work. I trailed along all the way down to the Glass House Club. She was slower in her high heels. I watched her pick up an envelope from the doorman. She went around to the employees’ entrance and I slipped into the club itself.

The ceiling was an enormous mosaic of mirrors. The walls and carpet were dark. Small islands of light from the table lamps fractured and multiplied in the reflections. The room was large and crowded. There were a few women, but mostly men, several hundred, the tables filled, and the aisles between filled with people standing with glasses in their hands.

I stayed at the back of the room, slid onto a chair against the wall, and only stood up for the show.

A very thin girl was first, her skin tight to her bones with as little muscle intruding as I’ve ever seen on someone who could still sit up. She pranced around in a gauze veil and undid a few beads as the band concentrated on their bass line. The finale of her act was to pull a comb out of her tightly rolled hair and let it fall shimmering pale down her back, give it a shake, and turn around so we could see that it hung down to the floor (whistles). Then she ground her hips around until she faced us and undid the bead that held her G-string in place. Her pubic hair began to unroll in the same way, a crisp version of her head hair (table pounding), until a soft cloud of nearly white hair billowed out from her crotch, waving all the way down to her knees, the crotch hair and head hair blending. I wondered if she had to depilate the rest of her body. The bald man was chanting into the microphone, “Yes, it’s real, folks, give it a tug there, Denise. We’d let you come up on stage and pull the little lady’s hair for yourselves, boys, just to verify it’s genuine, but state law forbids, and you’ve got to admit, a few souvenir hunters could put poor Denise out of business.” She swayed her hips and the long hair flicked from side to side. “How do you find her in there? I want to know!” And Denise sauntered smiling offstage, more or less to the beat.

Paulette, the pre-transsexual, was beautiful and slender, with perfect breasts. Paulette’s act flourished until the removal of her G-string revealed a shriveled penis and scrotum. The boos drowned the bald man’s announcement that Paulette would be leaving for Tangier the following month and would return in December as a real girl.