Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

I was walking by when Dr. P. walked out of her big new surgery truck and heaved the plastic bag containing Alma’s last flabby upper arm into an ice chest for Horst to dispose of. She dusted her white gloves against each other and nodded to me. “Well, that’s finished,” she announced through her mask. “It took a year and a half. I could have done the whole job in three hours.”

After a while, Alma wasn’t around anymore. Arty laughed when I asked about her. “She’s retired,” he said. “She’s gone to the old Arturans’ home to rest in peace.” I thought he meant she was dead.

As their seventeenth birthday rolled past, the twins were fogged in by some musty hormonal mist. They were goofy, aloof, and up to something. Their bickering graduated from intermittent to constant, but the dignity that they felt appropriate to full-fledged bleeders dictated that the running argument be carried on in whispers.

The twins’ piano teacher, whom Lil had hired by mail, was the greasy Jonathan Tomaini, with his one shiny-assed suit and two pairs of slightly mismatched socks. He took frequent opportunities to explain how temporary this “post” was for him and how thrillingly adventurous it was for a concert performer and graduate of fine New York music academies, such as himself, to doss down on a cot in a trailer shared with twelve sweaty, spitting, cursing, chortling roustabouts who viewed him as one rung lower than last night’s beer farts. He gushed at how brilliantly gifted the twins were—“a privilege to spend this brief hiatus in my career molding and influencing such talent.”

The twins claimed — Elly loudly and Iphy with demure embarrassment — that Tomaini never bathed, only washing his hands up to the wrist and his face and neck as far down as his collar. He was, they said, no fun to share a piano stool with. He had things to teach them, though, and they endured the piano stool for hours every day.

Mama was slipping away from us. Her pill intake was up and her body was changing. Large bones came close to the surface as her woman-softness withered. Her eyes were giving her trouble, the focus softening and shortening. Her walk had changed from a melodic flirt to a gaunt, uncertain lurching with her hands extended in front of her, touching. She rattled in endless detail about our various infancies. She forgot things. She left jobs half done and didn’t notice when someone else finished them for her. She cried easily and occasionally without knowing she was doing it. She slept.

Papa had taken to antacid tablets for his stomach. He carried half-consumed rolls in every pocket and chewed them constantly. He dithered for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four trying to lash his small winter crew into dealing with the flush of business brought on by Arty’s increasingly specialized popularity. The veins in his forehead threatened a stroke while he supervised the production of the expensive and classy “Ask Arturo” poster series. He was happy, though. The work rush let him forget that he wasn’t the boss anymore.

New people kept cropping up and latching on. We were a road show and we lived with the ebb and trickle of faces who appeared, hired on, stayed for a few thousand miles and then, one day, were gone. We Binewskis kept to ourselves. Only the family stayed the same. Hanging out with the swallower’s kids or making friends with the palm reader’s daughter always ended in separation and forgetfulness. We were easy with strangers but never close.

Arty’s growing flock, however, was different. I dreamed one night that Arty cried them into the world. They came out of his eyes as a green liquid that dripped to the ground making puddles. The puddles thickened and jelled into bodies that got up and hung around Arty.

But Dr. P. and the advance man and McGurk, and later Sanderson and the Bag Man and the nebbishes and simps who mooned and crooned around him, were all there because of Arty, no matter what other pretext they might claim. They all belonged to him.

The occasional television crews, doing thirty-second “Day at the Carnival” bits for the evening news, took a while to tumble to what was going on in the center tent. An hour after the first broadcast of a breathless on-the-spot reporter describing bandaged stumps in a wheelchair, the newspaper people started popping up.

After a few months reporters drove out to meet us on the road. Squads with cameras and notebooks and tape recorders waited for us on every new site as we tooled in and parked. A few towns canceled our licenses before we even arrived. The indignant slams just made Arty smile. “Those who want to know,” he shrugged, “will still get the message.”

It wasn’t until one of the redheads brought a copy of Now to Arty’s door one morning that we realized one of the loiterers in the journalistic pack was from that national news magazine. The guy in the lean tweeds had been puttering around the midway for weeks. The ticket peddlers all knew him because he’d flash his photo ID card and mutter, “Press,” trying to slip into the shows without paying. “Press your pants,” the redheads would say — a stock Binewski reply — and he’d laugh and pay up.

The Now story demonstrated his intentions clearly. The fur-chested Norval Sanderson, with his cynic’s eye, bourbon voice, and discreet tailoring, was with us so he could expose the “ruthless egotism that was exploiting the nation’s psychic undertow.”

“Arturism was founded,” wrote Sanderson, “on the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego.…”

Within days, Arty, the clever boy, had turned the attack to his own purposes by distributing ninety-second tapes to every network proclaiming that he was, indeed, the Transcendental Maggot, and that his power to thrive in the decaying frenzy of the planet was available to all those who were willing to accept it.

Norval Sanderson had covered wars, treaties, executions, and inaugurations for two decades. He was sharp and he lacked awe for anything, from earthquakes to heads of state. He was clever. He spent days lounging coolly in the corners of Arty’s life, and he published three explosively controversial interviews with Arty in as many weeks. Arty liked him.

What now remains of Sanderson’s old spiral-bound notebooks, his collection of news clippings, and the transcripts of his interviews with the people of Binewski’s Fabulon is wrapped in black plastic and locked in the trunk in my closet. I take it all out when I want to think back. His fast, meticulous script is fading from black to grey, and the paper is brittle in my hands, but I can still hear his lazy drawl with its built-in needle.

From the notes of Norval Sanderson:

… Suspected earlier that Arturo was being manipulated by someone, probably the father, Al Binewski. I saw Arty as a tool for some functional “norm” who was raking in the cash from the dowries. Spent three hours with Arty today and completely revised my opinion. Arty is in complete control of the cult, of the carnival, of his parents, and apparently of his sisters and brother — though there may be some small spirit of resistance in the twins

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Arty is sporadically self-educated with wide lacunae in his information. National and international politics are outside his experience and reading. Municipal power relationships, however, are familiar tools to him. He has no real grasp of history — seems to have picked up drifts from his reading — but he is a gifted analyst of personality and motivation, and a complete manipulator. His knowledge of science is primitive. He relies on specialists in his staff to provide him with effective lighting, sound technology, etc. He is a skilled speaker on a one-to-one level as well as in the mass-rhetoric situation of his performances. He has a sharp awareness of personal problems in others … professes no ethic or morality except avoidance of pain. Says his awareness is such that he feels the pain of others and is therefore required to alleviate it by offering the sanctuary of Arturism. Obvious horseshit