Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Thanks,” she is muttering. “Jesus.” She is beaming at me. “You’re the first …” She is wagging her head in wonder. “First time I ever dared show anybody.” I try to balance the glass in my free hand but the whiskey sloshes out over the rim and chills my knees where it falls.

I like Miss Lick. Arty always said that was important.

“Find a way to like them,” he said. “Like them every minute that you’re with them. If you can like them they’ll be helpless against you.”

It’s easy. She is so big and homely and scared. She blushes. When she dresses after her swim, her hair is too soft to control and sticks up all over her head in rooster tails until she greases it and slicks it down. Her eyes are puffy every morning and she is fragile before she has her coffee at the office. She is honest. She wants to do good. All her efforts are toward good.

Miss Lick’s purpose is to liberate women who are liable to be exploited by male hungers. These exploitable women are, in Miss Lick’s view, the pretty ones. She feels great pity for them. Linda’s transformation gave her the idea. If all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness) then they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their talents and intelligence to become powerful. Miss Lick has great faith in the truth of this theory. She herself is an example of what can be accomplished by one unencumbered by natural beauty. So am I.

“You are so lucky,” she said that night. “What fools might consider a handicap is actually an enormous gift. What you’ve accomplished with your voice might never have been possible if you’d been normal.”

Miss Lick, like many otherwise sophisticated people, is unduly impressed by anything connected with mass media. She believes my radio programs are major artistic achievements. She is sure I am a great success.

Miss Lick has already liberated a number of young women. She never uses force or coercion. She uses money. Carina was the first and gave her the most trouble. She waited until Carina had her degree and was settled in her job before she tried again.

“I had to be sure I was right. It’s not something you can do carelessly.”

Carina has never yet told Miss Lick that it was “the best thing that ever happened” to her.

“I admit that still bothers me,” says Miss Lick, her forehead rumpled with worry. “But others have said it. Lots of times. Carina’s stubborn. Damned stubborn.”

After Carina, Miss Lick was tentative, cautious for a while.

“I stuck with thyroid treatments for the next three. I was nervous about a more drastic approach.”

The disks flickered over a secretary, a high-school hurdles runner, a young prostitute — and then their incredible incarnations. All three so fat they could barely move.

“Lulu, the ex-hooker, is my accountant. The secretary is my office manager.” Miss Lick shoved her hands deep in her pockets and stared at the last image on the screen. A mound of dark flesh lies on a pillow. Thin hair straggling in greasy tangles suggests that it is a human head. Finally I see the tiny eyes gleaming out of dents in what must be a drooping heap of cheeks.

“This was Vita. She was seventeen when we started. I felt terrible.… It was a failure.… I misjudged. She couldn’t take it. Tried to kill herself. Pills. She’d been an athlete and this was the wrong route for her. Absolutely the wrong technique. Acid would have been O.K., but not this. Made me realize I had to tailor the treatments. I’ve been working on bringing her back. Her body is close, now. But her head is … And she was sharp.” Miss Lick’s clenched fists were still against her belly but all the rest of her shuddered.

“So she says, ‘Just give me the money and watch my smoke. I don’t need the operation.’ And I told her, hey honey, that’s what they all say and maybe you’d get the degree and the job but the first prick who rubbed your nipples the right way you’d go down the chute with all the rest. Those forty-fours of yours are a matched pair of concrete boots and you either ditch them or stay on here loading bread trucks and wait for the janitor to get so anxious to bury his face in your fat sacks that he offers to marry you.”

Miss Lick is flushed with the rectitude of her argument. The blonde on the screen is a cantilevered mammary miracle in a red T-shirt and tight pants. She bounces majestically as she reaches for big metal trays of plastic-wrapped wheat bread. The disk skids.

“She’s not as smart as I figured. All she’s good for is a technician.”

A thin-shouldered lab coat with a greasy ponytail turns toward us holding a pair of test tubes up to the light. A squinting examination of cloudy fluids.

“She spends all day analyzing horse piss from the tracks. Big day if she finds a jump drug in a sample. But hell. She’s happy. Makes a good living.”

The lab coat is flat. No chest at all.

“Damned good surgeon. Made a mistake and landed in my pocket. He’s lucky to be practicing and he knows it lasts just so long as I say so. I pay him well for my little jobs and I cover his ass. He used to balk and squirm about it but he’s been sewn up for years. He’s got kids, a big house, a country club. Reliable character. Truth is, I think he gets a kick out of it. I watch everything. Used to make me sick but I enjoy it now. An acquired taste but there’s a lot of finesse involved.”

She will not show me the sections of the disks that record the actual operations.

“I’ve got several projects going all the time. Prospects that I’m doing research on. Sometimes after I’ve decided a girl is right and make the approach, it takes a while for her to come around. I’ve had a few rejections. A few. I’m careful. Never a whisper about it though. Never any trouble. I just offer. No force at all. Nothing to complain about. Nothing illegal. Right now I’m interested in a kind of progressive procedure. Start out with a superficial thing — long hair, maybe — and use it as a kickoff. Bigger rewards dangled in front to keep them going.… Interesting. Still experimental, of course, not sure how it will work out in the long run.”

Miss Lick does not mention the Glass House and neither do I.

My new room is unfamiliar and chilly. I lie on the bed and try to learn the way to the bathroom door. A private bathroom here. It’s a much lusher joint than my room in Lil’s house. No hazy perambulations down the hall to the shared can in the middle of the night. But the other is home and I miss it. This more respectable front is what Miss Lick expects of Hopalong McGurk, and I hope it will keep her from connecting me with Miranda. I arrive early at the radio station every day to get my mail and prevent any accidents from the staff’s trying to reach me at my old address.

For a while I told myself that all I needed to do was interfere with Miss Lick’s finances. If she were poor, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to go on with her projects. I looked around her corporate structure for ways to sabotage her pocketbook. Nothing. I’m not clever with business. Couldn’t understand half of it. All I came up with was an idea about incendiary bombs in each of the factories. But they all work on twenty-four-hour shifts and they’re too scattered across the country for me to do it all myself. She’s got her capital snugged away in safe paper unconnected with the travel-grub business anyway.

Then, in the pool one day, I saw her watching the children. Pretty schoolkids training for the club team. They were like otters, playing around the stodgy lap swimmers. I was leaning on the steps at the shallow end, resting. Miss Lick came to the wall and stood up instead of doing her usual flip and push-off. She glared at the girls, her eyes burned red with chlorine and hatred. Long legs flashed, smooth, angular faces laughed at each other. Miss Lick’s head jutted forward from her big shoulders. Her jaw gripped at an odd angle and began to twitch.