Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Dr. P. and Chick kept Alma in the infirmary. Arty went frequently to park his chair in the observation room at one end and sit staring through the glass at her bandaged body lying on the second bed from the end.

Once a week, on Sunday mornings, Arty would flick on the intercom and watch Alma’s face through the glass as his voice pumped at her from the speakers. She was always overjoyed to hear him. She called him “Aqua Man” and said she was fine and when could she have more of herself taken away? “I can’t tell you what it means to me each time they clean a little more away, even a little toe. Once it’s gone I feel what a weight of rot it was for me. Oh, Aqua Man, you are so kind to me. I thank the stars in heaven for leading me to you …” and so on like that. She’d blubber away, a pen pal to the core. Her message was always How soon would they take her feet off? When would they take her hands? Could she, by a special dispensation from His Wateriness, skip the feet and have Doc P. just take off her whole legs one at a time? They were such a burden to her and she was in such a hurry to be like HIM.

Arty didn’t talk about it but I could see it meant a lot to him. The whole thing had me fuddled. Why should this Alma make him happy? He’d never been that way about any of his visiting night girls — at least not by the time I brought in his breakfast the next morning. He was working harder than ever, reading more, vomiting nervously before each show—“To clear my head,” he claimed. He schemed and planned with McGurk for hours every morning, playing with lights and sound. But I’d never seen him smile the smiles he smiled in those days, great soft openings of his face with no biting edges at the eyes.

We were up in Michigan when Alma started testifying. She was down to her nubs by then. Her legs were gone from the hip and her arms ended at the elbow. She looked better. Her front still flopped but she’d been eating Dr. P’s Vegetarian Nutri-Prescription for months. Her skin had some tone and she’d dropped a few chins along with her limbs. More of her face was visible and her wispy hair seemed to have less expanse to drift away from. She was chipper, and she proved that “feeling good” about herself, as she called it, didn’t make her any less irritating than being pathetic. There was a difference, though. Where she had been wetly repellent she was now obnoxious.

“I should say she might feel good about herself, the great lazy lump,” said Lil. “Lying up there being fed and waited on. When does my Chick get to play? A child his age needs frolic and silliness, not mooning about spooning green gruel into that blob and worrying over her every minute for fear she might feel a twinge of pain! All my other children had time to play even though they worked every day.”

• • •

I had nothing to do with Alma. To my recollection I never spoke to her directly after the first time in Arty’s tent. But I watched her. To give them both credit, Alma was terrified of Doc P. and said nothing but yes’m and no’m whenever the good doc was around. And Alma worshiped Chick. But Chick was her painkiller so I figured her love for him had the same virtuous weight as an addict’s for his drug.

Alma’s testimony started in the Michigan factory towns. The redheads would wheel her out onto the stage beside the tank before Arty made his appearance. Alma’s twittering bat voice fed down through a button mike on her white robe and McGurk bled a little timbre in before he shot it out through the speakers.

“My name is Alma Witherspoon,” she’d begin, “and I just want to take one minute to tell you all about a wonderful thing that happened to me.…”

The rodent squeak chittered in her chest and her stump arms waved in the white spotlight and the bright green tank gurgled, huge, beside her on the dark stage. The funny thing was that it worked. By the time Arty exploded in a rush of bubbles from the floor of the tank, the folks in the stands were ready for him, dry-mouthed and open. And those certain few in the bleachers, those stone-eyed kettles boiling with secret pain, received her message. Those who had been waiting finally found a place to go.

That’s the way it began. It was Alma “Pen Pal” Witherspoon who actually founded what came to be known as “Arturism” or the “Arturan Cult.”

There were just a few converts at first, but Alma took over the process of organizing with a smug zest that made me want to kick her.

She was all humility and worship to Arty — a kind of “Kiss the Ground on Which Your Blessed Brown Balls Drag” smarminess. But with the converts she reigned as a high priestess, prophet, and mega-bitch. She originated the concept of “Artier than Thou.” She ordered, organized, and patronized. The redheads, who had to wait on her and wheel her around in a replica of Arty’s chair, hated her. Soon there were enough of the “Admitted” to give Alma a full-time staff. The redheads went thankfully back to balloon games, popcorn, and ticket sales.

Not that Arty was ever less than In Charge. Though he appeared only in his tank and did no trivial fraternizing, he knew everything. Most likely the whole thing in all its details was Arty’s invention. He gave orders to Alma by intercom.

She sat in her commandeered trailer office chirping earnestly into the box on her desk and listening reverently to replies. Her method of passing orders on to the lesser members was as snooty as that of any conveyor from on high.

She set Arturism up like a traveling fat farm for nuns. Though she herself had lucked onto Arty while flat broke, all who came after paid what she called a “dowry.” Arty said, in private, that the scumbags were required to fork over everything they had in the world, and, if it wasn’t enough, they could go home and get their ears pierced or their peckers circumcised and see what that did for them.

The thing grew. Arty’s fans — or the “Admitted,” as Alma insisted on calling them — began to trail after the show in cars and vans and trailers of their own. From a half-dozen simple characters wandering the midway with white bandages where fingers or toes had been, there grew a ragtag horde camped next to the show everyplace we stopped. Within three years the caravan would string out for a hundred miles behind us when we moved.

Papa hired more guards and had the Binewski vans wired for security. After a month of phoning and looking and asking, Papa bought the biggest tent any of us had ever seen and set it up around Arty’s stage-truck.

Dr. P. got a big new surgery truck with a self-contained generator. Two of the big trailers were converted to post-operative recovery wards. Chick was with Dr. Phyllis from early morning until supper every day. He was getting thinner and he fell asleep at the table leaning on Mama night after night.

“When does he play?” she would ask, her eyes blinking at the air directly in front of her.

Papa talked to Arty and Arty passed the word to Doc P. Dr. Phyllis didn’t like it, but two hours each day, one after breakfast and another before supper, Chick was ordered to play where Mama could see him. She started reading fairy tales to him during the morning hour. In the afternoon he dutifully pushed toy cars around the floor of the family van, making motor noises, so Mama could hear him as she made supper.

Having established the chain of command, having petrified two dozen finger-and-toe novices into doing all the paperwork, Alma shed her left arm to the shoulder. She spent hours crooning to herself on her infirmary bed with the screen drawn around her for privacy. Her voice grew frail and she stopped testifying.

She was replaced immediately. Dozens clamored for a chance to testify at Arty’s shows. There were thousands waiting, willing to pay, for the right to see and listen.