Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Arty’s eyes were almost bulging, looking at McGurk. His face was frozen for a long instant and then it folded into a smile and then broke at the mouth and Arty’s whole body shook toward his mouth, laughing.

“I love it!” he howled. “I love it!”

The bleachers are empty and singing around me. Arty is chanting in the boards. I sit on the fifth tier and stare straight at the tank, at Arty, his mouth and nose in the black cup of the speaking tube. Wires are taped to my wrists and to the insides of my knees and to my hump, next to the spine. They lead up to the control booth, where Zephir McGurk is measuring my physical responses to the sound that he has wired to feed through every board in the bleachers.

Arty’s body floats straight out from the speaking tube, glinting mysteriously in the bright green water.

“Peace,” says Arty, and the speakers above the tank lift his voice to the canvas peak of the tent roof. The bottoms of my feet say “Peace,” and the padded bones of my pelvis whisper “Peace” to my bowels. A shiver passes upward into my stomach, and my spine feels “Peace” like fear curling upward to my skull with my shoulder blades flinching around it.

“As I am!” shouts Arty, and my heart nearly stops with the shock of the sound in my body.

Arty pulls away from the face cup and wriggles toward the surface. McGurk is hopping down the steps from the control booth. He is beside me now. Only slightly taller than me on his stumps, he is watching the wires as he rips the tape off my skin.

Arty’s head appears on the rim of the tank, grinning at us. His face is pale and doesn’t look as though it’s connected to his body, which is golden, with slowly flexing flippers gleaming through the glass.

“That seemed a lot better!” chirps Arty. “That flat zone makes it even more effective!”

“Yes.” McGurk holds the ends of all the wires together in one hand like the leashes to a pack of dogs. He examines the sheet of readout graph in his hand. “Yes. With just the upper and lower registers you can make them dance to whatever tune you like.”

It was Earlville, on the Gulf of Mexico. One hundred windless, muggy degrees. Mosquitoes drowned in your neck creases. The only industry in town was the federal penitentiary. The midway was jammed and the show tents bulged with sweating, stinking, bad-tempered drawls. It got dark but it didn’t cool off.

The fat woman surfaced at Arty’s last, hottest show for the day. She was young but her colorless hair was scraggled up into tight separate curls with so much scalp between them that she looked old and balding. She was crying as she stood up on the fifth tier of the bleachers and pushed her clasped hands out toward the tank where Arty was deep in his pitch.

“You, darling,” said Arty, and the feel of “darling” rose up through her puffy ankles and through every buttock in the bleachers. The crowd sighed. The fat woman sobbed.

“You feel ugly, don’t you, sweetheart?” and “ugly” and “sweetheart” thrummed the crowd, and they all gasped and she wasn’t the only one nodding.

“You’ve tried everything, haven’t you?” said the bright floating spirit in the tank. “Everything,” murmured the bones of the people.

“Pills, shots, hypnosis, diets, exercise. Everything. Because you want to be beautiful?”

Arty was building it up now, winding them tight.

“Because you think if you were beautiful, you would be happy?” He had the timing pat. Arty was a master of tone and timing. I leaned on the last steel strut of the bleachers in the aisle and smiled, though I’d seen him do it all my life.

“Because people would love you if you were beautiful? And if people loved you, you would be happy? Is it people loving you that makes you happy?”

Now the pitch drops a full octave into the groin groan. I can feel it even in the support poles. The asses on the seat boards must be halfway to orgasm.

“Or is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don’t love you it’s because there’s something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean you’re all right. You poor baby. Poor, poor baby.”

The place was full of poor babies. They all sighed with tender sympathy for themselves. The fat woman’s nose ran. She opened her mouth and cried, “Hoooh! Hoooh! Hoooh!”

Now Arty was gentle and low as a train a mile off in the night.

“You just want to know that you’re all right. You just want to feel all right.”

And now he dives into the sneer. Arty’s sneer could flay a rhino.

“That’s all you need other people’s love for!”

The crowd is shocked into stillness. Arty grabs their throats while they’re down and starts pumping the tempo.

“So, let’s get the truth here! You don’t want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don’t want to be thin! You don’t want to be beautiful! You don’t want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you’re all right! That’s what can give you peace!

“If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I’d be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I’d worry did somebody love me! I’d have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself!

“And you! You aren’t ever going to look like a fashion queen! Does that mean you have to be miserable all your life? Does it?

“Can you be happy with the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can’t. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.… Now, girl, I want you to look at me and tell me, what do you want?”

Arty expected her to stay tongue-tied and blubbering so he could say the next line. That’s the way it always worked. But this fat woman was so used to blubbering that it didn’t slow her down. She opened her mouth wide and, though I’ve never really stopped hating her for it, I have to admit she was just saying what all the rest of the damp, wheezing crowd was thinking. She screamed, “I want to be like you are!”

Arty stopped dead still. His flippers froze and he began to sink slowly with his face pressed into the speaking mask and his eyes close to the glass staring out. There was sobbing in the crowd. Soft voices murmured, “Yes, yes.” Arty was silent for far too long. Had he had a stroke? Was it a cramp? I started forward, ready to run around behind the tank and up the ladder. Then his voice came.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s what you want.” And I could hear his breath go in, Arty’s breath. Arty could control a mike and he never breathed so you could hear it.

“And that’s what I want for you.”

He didn’t go on with his usual talk. He said that he’d have to think how to give this gift to her. He said they should all come back the next day — though he knew few of them would — because he would have something to say to them.

McGurk didn’t know what to do with the lights. He was flickering a rainbow that made Arty almost invisible in the water. Finally Arty himself hit the switch that blacked out the tank.

The crowd started to trickle away as I ran to the back of the tank. Arty was already out on his platform and rolling in his towel.

“Arty, what’s wrong?” I whispered as I scrambled up the ladder.

“Not a thing,” he said. His face popped out of the towel and he grinned hugely, excited.

“Let’s get over to the shower quick. I want to see Doc P. right away.”

The woman who wanted to be like Arty came back the next day. The crew had just finished sweeping down the bleachers in Arty’s tent and were raking the sawdust. The first show had gone as usual and it was an hour until the last show began.