Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

My frozen face doesn’t alarm her. She rolls on expansively. “Same thing. People put it down because the whole thing had that weird end, but it wasn’t too long after Linda’s fork in the road and I saw the connection, all right. I’d have run off and joined up with that particular carnival myself if my old man hadn’t needed me in the business. Do you remember Arturo?”

I can feel my head bobbing slowly up and down. I have no sense of what my face is doing. Could I be smiling? Does she know? She flicks a hand at me, inviting a response.

“So what did you think of all that? Arturo.”

My throat and mouth are crackling dry and painful. My voice comes out like a rusty chain. “I loved him.”

She is delighted. “Ha! I thought so. Probably had a little itch yourself. Wouldn’t have minded tagging along on that comet tail, yourself?”

I feel myself nodding, helplessly.

“You’re not in a hurry, are you? I’ll drive you home. I want to show you another one.”

My eyes pull away from the blank screen. Miss Lick is at the disk rack. I reach for the bottle on the desk. She is going to show me the whole thing. The brown liquid runs right up to the rim of my glass before I can stop it. I set the bottle back carefully. Two deep breaths. I’m having a little difficulty telling the difference between the whiskey and my fear. Miss Lick’s glass is empty. I lift my glass and pour three-quarters of the Irish into her glass.

“Oh, thanks. Now this one …” She is hiking a big hip onto the desk behind me — reaching for the glass. I turn to watch the new scene.

Cars blur the screen — windows, door handles streak past. Then the focus sets. We are across the street from a standard type-C tenement. Garbage leaning against a rusted scrap of wrought-iron fence, a bunch of kids loitering on the steps of a shoddy building. A man wobbles past on the sidewalk, waving his hands and talking to himself. The lens tightens and closes in on a girl and boy on the bottom step. The girl is leaning back against the railing, arching her breasts up at a pimpled boy with a cigarette in his lips. He is trying to look cool and aloof. The girl has black hair, rooched cunningly into coils by her ears. Her face is a Byzantine dream. She purses her lips and blows a smoke ring into the boy’s face. Her eyes slant narrowly in a hot half smile.

“This is Carina. Half black, half Italian. Poor as shit. A dropout but she tested high in aptitudes. Her father disappeared when she was five. Mother a welfare lush picking up a little extra by peddling ass in the dark to johns too old to care or too drunk to notice what she looks like. Specializes in head since she lost her last teeth. She used to refuse dirt trackers but she had to give in on that a few years before this film was taken. Looks like Carina’s headed the same way, doesn’t it?”

The back of the chair catches my hump wrong and my legs are going to sleep from dangling over the hard edge of the seat. I swig at my glass and move my feet tentatively to keep the blood flowing. The glass is empty. Miss Lick’s huge warmth moves close to me with the bottle, filling it. I drink again. Miss Lick is sitting on the desk, tapping her heels against the side. Her big feet in the thick work socks slide in and out of the corners of my vision. I’m afraid to look at her face.

The camera is in an operating theater. A lone masked figure all in white leans over a sheeted body on the table. The camera zooms toward the face of the figure and then the image skids.

“We’ll skip to the pertinent stuff.” Miss Lick is pushing levers on the control box. The image staggers and then blurs past in a fizz of color. I run a hand over my face and wipe the sweat on my skirt. My wig is slipping toward my left eye and I can’t seem to straighten it one-handed.

The screen settles heavily in a small bright room. Yellow walls. Lace curtains. A shelf of books. A desk. The lens slides down to reveal a bed below the camera. Tidy with cushions, the spread matches the curtains and a dark-haired girl is sitting on it with a portable console beside her. She is dictating into a hand mike, using long fingers to spread the pages of the book on her knees. The girl drops the mike suddenly and flops back against the cushions. She raises the book and reads. Her face is corrugated with deep purple gutters of scar. Her lips are twisted, nostrils distorted. Only her eyes and something in the barely discernible bone beneath the raddled flesh seem familiar. The film scutters berserkly. Miss Lick sighs as she pumps the control lever.

“It was acid. But she was completely anesthetized.” I am looking at the dark wood doors of a large chapel. The doors burst open and girls in graduation gowns rush out, their mortars precarious on soft hair.

“The day she graduated from college. Me still worried. She had my heart wrapped in barbed wire.”

A purple face appears in the excited crowd. The gowned figure comes straight down the steps and reaches up to snatch off the mortarboard. She marches straight toward the camera. The focus wobbles as she nears us.

The next view is a drab office with venetian blinds on the windows. The scar-faced girl is at one of the three desks. She is holding a sheaf of paper in one hand and a microphone in the other.

“She’s a translator. An enormous gift for languages. But she worked here for a year before I was able to get the camera in. Intelligence Bureau. Tight security. A slip would have cost her the job.”

“It’s Carina,” I said. The glass was against my lower lip and the name dropped into it and broke.

“Yes. She’s twenty-six now. Second in command in her office. Fluent in five languages.”

The screen is placid and grey. Miss Lick is sliding the disk back into its file slot. I hold the glass away from me and watch the level of the liquid. It is quivering but not a lot.

“You got the idea from Linda?” I ask it calmly, curiously.

“From what happened to her. Not her idea. My idea. But it only clicked because of the Arturans. Not that I’m a disciple. More of an apostle.”

Miss Lick is firm on this point, shoving all the disks straight with the side of her hand, tapping them into symmetry.

“Carina was my first.” She stops and stares at the wall. I can see her remembering. Doubt and worry form in faint nostalgia between the bulges of her face. “She was bitter. Stubborn for a long time. Despite the money. Despite clothes and school and private tutors. I did everything I could. I was worried for years.”

“What about the mother? Did she …?” I raise my eyebrows at Miss Lick over the glass.

She snorts and nods. “An annuity. She was delighted. I took the precaution of collecting a little evidence on her in case she ever thought she could use more money. I was lucky. Got an infrared disk of her rolling some poor bastard one night. He died of exposure. It was January!”

“I’m impressed with the camera business. Do you handle all that yourself? Do they really not know they’re being taped?”

She nods, a faint flush rising up her heavy jaws.

“Old hobby. There’s a lot involved if you want to be unobtrusive. Interesting techniques for surveillance and plants.”

I want to go home and think. She doesn’t trust me completely yet. She skipped the operation scene. Didn’t want me to see the close-ups of the acid working on Carina’s face — the fuming mist of chemical burn rising from the bubbling flesh. She isn’t sure I’d understand that, or tolerate her pleasure in the sight.

But I can’t leave yet. I have to reassure her that she hasn’t made a mistake by revealing herself to me.

“You know that all my life I have been in a position to understand what you are doing.” I look straight at her — pour deep honesty out through my pink eyes. Pitch my voice into the nether regions for her. She is staring at me anxiously. I smile the smile at her, the warm one. She is lumbering toward me, her hands stretched out to me like two naked babies, her great face cracking and melting in relief. She is pumping my hand up and down in the hot smother of her big paws. I feel as though my hand is wrist-deep in a fresh-killed chicken.