Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

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His power seems to come from a combination of techniques and personality traits. He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy. He is enormously self-centered, proud, vain, disdainful of all who lack the good fortune to be him. This is so evident and so oddly convincing (one finds oneself thinking/agreeing that, yes, Arty is a special person and can’t be judged by normal criteria) that when he turns his interest on an individual (on me) the object (me) suddenly feels elevated to his level (as in — yeah, me and Arty are too special and unique to be judged, etc.)

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Just when you feel despicable, and that Arty’s disdain is too great a burden to endure, he offers you the option of becoming his peer

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June 14:

Ticket count 11,724 for this show. Bleachers packed to the top of the tent. Arty in tremendous form — his voice booming through your very bones:

“

I want you to be like I am! I want you to become what I am! I want you to enjoy the fearlessness that I have! The courage that I have! And the compassion that I have! The love that I have! The all-encompassing mercy that I am!”

The “yes” sighs up from the crowd like a night wind and I myself nearly weep at being surrounded by pain. I become convinced, for an hour, that Arty is not injuring them but is allowing them to acknowledge the pain in their lives in order to escape from it. A man who had to be a Certified Public Accountant on my left — a big self-contained man in a decent suit and well-groomed beard. The wedding ring glinted on his fingers as his hands gripped his knees. He didn’t shout when the others did. He was silent, focused on the tank and the venomous worm in it. During the “As I am” chorus he was frozen so rigidly that I glanced at his face. He was biting his lip and staring, unblinking, at the pale squirming thing down there in the green-lit water. He didn’t move. But when I looked again, a trickle of blood was slipping down his chin into his beard and his lower lip was still caught in his teeth. There was a rollicking grandmother on my right, wailing and whomping throughout. Her easy tears didn’t touch me at all. It was this thick-wallet with his gleaming, well-kept air who shook me up

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For hours afterward, wandering through the crowds in the midway, walking in the Admitted encampment, I am swept by the idea, almost believe that having all my limbs amputated will actually free me from the furious scourge of my days. The midway finally shut down at midnight and I recovered a little more sobriety as the lights clicked off. In the dark, at last, I went down the road a half mile to the Roamers Rest Tavern and contemplated my momentary conversion ruefully through the amber lens of Resa Innes’s (proprietress) corrupt bourbon. I kept feeling a tremor in my shins and thighs and spine, from the voice of that ruinous tadpole. I kept feeling the heat of solid thighs packed against me in that sweltering hour on the bleachers

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I had another pull at Mother Resa’s treacle comfort and remembered the Vesuvius coverage ten years ago. We’d goaded the pilot of the big press chopper into getting us the goods. As we bucketed crazily in the hot drafts around the crater and cleared the lip with a gut-chewing swoop, old Sid Lyman dropped his beloved camera and fell to his knees on the steel deck. Praying. “Good Old” Sid, who cracked abysmal puns while shooting mass graves in Texas, while clicking away at the mutilated children on Cyprus, and while filming six years’ worth of intimate war footage — jungle and desert. There was Sid, helpless as his precious equipment skittered out through the open door of the chopper. All Sid could do, aside from what obviously happened in his trousers, was gibber infant prayers as he stared out into that roaring pit of boiling stone

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What bothers me is my inability to recall whether I laughed at Sid. If I snickered then, over the crater, I’ve a hunch I’ll pay for it. I asked the flatulent Resa for another tug at Aphrodite’s bourbon teat and hoped, with absurd urgency, that I’d had the sense to bite my lip over Vesuvius

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This sheaf of news clippings was stapled into Norval’s notebook:

NIGHT OF CRIME

AP: Santa Rosa, California

A sudden crime wave broke out in this coastal city last night, with looting of one large supermarket and three smaller grocery stores. All the thefts took place in the three hours between 1

A.M

and 4

A.M

., and Police Chief Warren Cosenti reports that foodstuffs were the only items taken.

Spokane, Washington

Eight suspects were arrested inside McAffrey’s Stop and Shop at 114 West Main by officers answering a burglar alarm from the convenience store at 2:30

A.M

The suspects, five males and three females, were apprehended while loading cardboard boxes with foodstuffs from the shelves. All eight were unarmed, dressed completely in white, and refused to make any statement to police. One man, evidently a spokesman for the group, handed police officers a note reading, “We have all taken vows of silence. Do what you will.”

Reports that several, or perhaps all, of the suspects are missing one or more fingers or toes have not yet been confirmed.

Spokane, Washington

County Coroner Jeff Johnson affirmed, in a press conference this morning, that all eight of the burglary suspects who committed suicide last Wednesday night in the city detention cells took cyanide.

None of the suicide victims has yet been identified, and neither police nor Johnson will comment on the rumors that all of the victims were missing digits from their hands or feet.

Velva, North Dakota:

Police responding to a burglar alarm at 3

A.M

Monday found the big plate-glass window of the Velva Coop Supermarket shattered and whole shelves emptied of goods in what appears to be …

This headline was cut from the Hopkins, Minnesota, Clarion:

GROCERY WAREHOUSE RANSACKED

Police Suspect Carnival Link

On a handbill circulated among Arturans and carnival staff, Norval Sanderson had underlined this passage:

… To eliminate food shortages arising from the increased number of the Blessed, our Beloved Arturo has established a special kitchen truck and mess tent to serve three wholesome meals per day to each and every one of his followers. Novices who have not yet begun Shedding must obtain meal cards from their group leaders. Guests and visitors will be charged a nominal fee for meals

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I laughed when I found this among Norval’s notes. I remember the tizzy we were in when this handbill was written. I suppose we weren’t far from Hopkins, Minnesota, because it was the Hopkins cops who were snooping around.

I was helping Lily pin up the hem on a new satin coat for Arty. We were in the kitchen of the van. Lily had her sewing machine on the table in the dining booth and Arty was sitting beside it on the table. I was chalking the hem and Lily had her mouth full of pins when the door jerked open and the twins stormed in with Chick.

“Cops,” they said. The twin’s faces had matching looks of thrilled horror. Chick nodded gravely. “Papa’s angry. The cops want to talk to Arty.”

Arty had been stretching up tall for his fitting and he sank back on his hips and got a pin in his rump. “Rar!” He jerked forward. Elly giggled, Iphy reached for him, and I fell off the bench. The radiophone buzzed and it was Al from the office. Chick was right. Papa was very angry.

That was the first we heard of the marauding that Arty’s followers had been up to. It seems they were hungry. A lot of them didn’t have any money left after turning everything over to Arty. Trailing around after him they had no way to earn any. But none of us had given any thought to how they would all eat. Some of them had been sneaking meals with the show crew but that infuriated the cooks. The midway staff would beat them up or, at the least, throw them out if they suspected who they were. The cooks had stuck up signs on the mess tent saying, “Midway Staff ONLY!”