Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

I was next door in the ticket booth of the twins’ tent snagging the take out of the till drawer into a bag, and punching in totals. A finger tapped the SOLD OUT sign in the barrel window in front of me.

“All sold out!” I hollered, and locked the cash bag.

“There’s a dame in Arty’s tent!” It was the crew foreman, shrugging at me. I took the cash bag and went with him.

She was sitting up on the fifth tier, where she’d sat before, but now she was the only one. The heat in the tent was heavy and dead. She had a shopping bag beside her and she looked ready to collapse. Her face was dark red. Her eyes were blood-spatter over yellow. She had a little face set into a big pillow of a head, and her arms and legs stuck out of a dress that would have been loose on a linebacker but looked like cheap upholstery on her. She was just sitting, staring at the unlit tank, listening to the gurgle of the pump that aerated and filtered the water.

I climbed up toward her. She looked at me, got a ripple of fear on her face, and grabbed at her shopping bag.

“Hi,” I said. She clutched her bag and nodded, warily. She expected to be chased. I expected to chase her. “I work with this show, can I help you?” I stood still at the end of the tier and didn’t go any closer. She flapped her jaws and then came out with a tiny shrill voice.

“I’m just waiting for the Aqua Man. I’m going to pay but there wasn’t anybody to sell tickets. I’ll pay when the ticket booth opens.”

Her eyes ran over me cautiously. I was wearing one of the blue sailor dresses that Lil made for me. The blue matched the lenses of my sunglasses. I wasn’t wearing a cap so the woman’s eyes spent a lot of time on my bare skull.

“I’ll sell you a ticket right now so you won’t have to worry about it,” I offered, helpfully. I had a roll of tickets in my pocket, and I needed to make sure she wasn’t going to pull an automatic out of her shopping bag and perforate Arty. She fumbled out money.

“You were here yesterday, weren’t you?” I asked.

“He spoke to me,” she said, counting out coins. “He said to come back. He would help me.”

I sat down next to her and watched the heat rash on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees and in the folds of her chins as she talked. She had got herself into a terrible jam, she said, and it had made her realize … She was from Warren, Ohio, and her mother was a schoolteacher but had died last year. She took a photo album out of the shopping bag and showed me a picture of a fat old woman.

“What kind of a jam are you in?” I pushed. If she had strangled her old mother I was going to have her escorted to the gate, heat rash and all.

“It’s a man,” she said coyly. I couldn’t help looking at her with suspicion. She bubbled into tears right away. I looked at the photo album in her lap. She had drawn pink daisies on the cover. I figured she was the type who would doodle LOVE in big, loopy letters and dot her i’s with hearts. Her name was Alma Witherspoon. She was twenty-two riding hard on fifty-five. It seems she was a pen pal. She’d always been a pen pal. Seems she’d got the address of a twenty-to-life bank blaster a year or so before. He was up the road in the Earlville Federal Pen. She’d sent him a photo of one of the cheerleaders in her high school. After her mother died she moved down here so she could send him fresh cakes and cookies.

“We’re in love,” she said. It sounded like L VE. “He wants to marry me!” she moaned. “And the warden has agreed! But I thought we’d do it by telephone and now the warden says I have to go out there and do it in his office and Gregory will see how I really look!” So she needed to see the Aqua Man. She didn’t know anybody in this town. She had no relatives left to turn to. Her heat rash looked contagious. I gave her a show ticket and got away from her. “You just wait here for the show. Nobody will bother you.”

I took the cash bag to the safe and went over to help Arty get ready. I told him about Alma Witherspoon while I greased him. He lay on the massage bench and nodded. His eyes were eager. He had a funny half smile the whole time.

“She’s probably been spinning whoppers to her pen pals for years about being beautiful and popular.”

“No relatives? No friends?” he asked.

“So she says.”

“Good,” grinned Arty. He stretched and rolled his back under my kneading fingers.

I was doing my talk in front of the twins’ tent, “Siamese beauties linked in harmonious perpetuity …” I always had a great time with “perpetuity”—it was a word you could play like a flute, rolling it up a full octave and whistling “Dixie” on that last syllable. The crowd was pretty good and most of them were already inside; the last twenty were shuffling in line for tickets.

That’s when I saw Alma Witherspoon go by with two of the redheads who helped out in Arty’s tent. The tall women beside her made Alma look even wider. She rolled along with her shopping bags and her purse and her photo album all folded sweatily into different rash-angry creases of her dreary body.

Alma couldn’t have made a penny as a pro. She didn’t weigh as much as a single leg of “Eleven Hundred Pound Jocko!” or “Pedrita the Plump!” but she wasn’t healthy. Jocko and Pedrita were the proudest people who’d ever worked for the show, according to Papa. Alma Witherspoon had the pride of a squashed possum.

“… Twin musicians! Twin miracles!” I rolled on, watching the redheads gently guide the wobbly Alma up the ramp to the shower van parked behind the Games of Chance. She put her foot on the top and heaved lopsidedly upward as the door opened. I could see the startled jerk of Alma’s wispy head as she saw the staunch white-clad figure in the doorway. Dr. Phyllis nodded, her white mask flashing glare into her thick glasses. Her white glove lifted, beckoning. Alma Witherspoon stepped into the shower.

“There is no shock. There is no danger of infection. Young Fortunato’s techniques eliminate that entirely.”

Dr. Phyllis watched Arty as she talked; her eyes swiveled behind her pool-deep lenses, probing for an argument that would change his mind.

Arty was looking through the glass window at the sterile infirmary where Alma Witherspoon lay sleeping, with Chick perched beside her on a three-legged stool. Chick was wrapped in one of Dr. P.’s white coats with the sleeves rolled up. His glowing face was bent toward the pillow. His eyes grazed lovingly over the sodden grey folds of Alma’s cheeks and chins.

“Did you look at that chart I gave you? The healing rate on that spiral fracture was triple the normal expectancy for a patient that age.… Arturo? Are you able to comprehend what I am conveying?” Dr. P.’s thin, perfect diction entered the ear in a surgical manner. Arty, who had been absorbed in his view of the lumpy sheets and the doughy mound on the pillow, turned to her calmly.

“Doc, I know you can cut her down all at once. I know it would be more efficient. But I want her to have a lot of chances to change her mind.” He turned back to look through the window again. He relaxed against the back of the wheelchair. His face was easy as he looked at the creature asleep in the next room. His mouth looked soft. There was a sleepy pleasure about him, almost peaceful, almost warm. There was, oddly, a look of Chick on Arty’s face. Arty was happy. He was deeply happy and it was, in some way I didn’t grasp, all because of moldy Alma Witherspoon having had all her toes cut off and then, when she’d recovered from that, having begged for the privilege of having her feet and legs nipped away as well.