Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

There wasn’t any graceful way to end it. The band stopped, the bald man shouted, “Let’s give ’em a hand, folks.” There was a surge of catcalls. We all scrambled around for our clothes, clutching them to our chests as we hurried down. Of course there was no dressing room. The restroom was on the other side of the club, so we huddled down in front of the stage tugging awkwardly into clothes. I slid my blouse on inside-out, as I discovered later, put on my coat and wig and glasses immediately, and stuffed the chest harness into a pocket.

The bald man was doling out five-dollar bills like stale cookies. He handed two to me. The shame had already started icing up my valves, and those five-dollar bills were the clinchers. It had been a long time since I had blushed, not since Arturo, maybe. But the hot blood scorched me then.

“What’s your name? Can we get you to come down regularly for audition nights? That’s a lot of potential you’ve got. We could work up a nice set using you. We’d up the ante a bit, make it twenty bucks for a turn. We do two auditions a night between the regular acts. You could pick up an easy forty.” He was being perfectly pleasant about it. My wig wasn’t fitting and I couldn’t make out why. I kept pulling at it until I noticed that it was on backward. I turned it around and made for the door. Sidling through the crowd, I crammed my brain with static to prevent myself from hearing what they were saying. Run hide quick, I thought, scuttling down the street.

I paced and thumped up and down my room all night. I couldn’t lie down at all for fear of Arturo and Papa and my own terrible pride.

Miranda is talking on the phone as I come in from work. She lolls against the wall, one long bare leg jutting out through her green kimono. She has a towel turbaned over her fresh-washed hair and she hangs up the receiver as I close the door behind me.

“Hi. Got time to come up for tea?”

“No. Thank you.”

Miranda is a student at the Art Institute. Her aim is to illustrate medical texts. She wants me to pose for her drawings. I never accept her offers of tea. I proceed toward the stairs while scrabbling to hang on to my books and papers. She purses her mouth elaborately.

With a grip on the banister and one foot on the first step I can’t keep from pausing, from looking at her. She drops her lids halfway and eyes me in a deliberately speculative fashion. A small glitch in my gizzard warns me that Arturo used his eyes this way. His eyes were, like hers, long, slanted almond shapes, though of course Arty didn’t have the lashes and brows that Miranda does.

Smiling weakly — does she know or is this just her usual badgering revenge when I refuse her invitations? — I climb the stairs with her eyes following me.

• • •

Olympia Binewski, aka Hopalong McGurk, the Radio Story Lady, is hunched over a book in the glass-walled recording booth at Radio KBNK, Portland. The molasses voice that has earned her living for decades pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles. She is deep in a dramatic rendition of that speculative classic “Pit Might.”

In the story the mind-souls of three theoretical physicists find themselves reincarnated (after dying hideously during their search for Schrödingers demon cat) in the bodies of itch mites inhabiting the pubic hair of a particularly obtuse Los Angeles policeman.

McGurk’s eyes twitch up from the book regularly to check the engineer on the other side of the soundproof glass. He watches meters and the clock. He signals two minutes left and McGurk storms into the climax. The theme music comes up and McGurk signs off, “Until tomorrow …” Falling back from the microphone, McGurk stretches to ease the ache in her neck and looks through the glass.

Miranda is smiling in the engineer’s booth. McGurk drops the book onto the floor instead of into her briefcase. The engineer is propped on the control panel sporting a paralytic grin, his eyes clamped on Miranda’s thorax.

Miranda waves and Hoppy McG. nods, forgetting to put any expression on her face.

I, Hoppy-Olympia, the invisible mom, sit frozen, watching as the engineer talks to Miranda. His hands in the air make typing motions and jerk a thumb in my direction. Miranda nods. The engineer turns to me, walking two fingers in the air. They slip away through the door.

The engineer gives Miranda a tour of the station while I type up the royalty credit for that day’s program. My skull oozes sweat. A vacancy behind my eyes makes me nauseated. What is wrong? Why is she here? Why would she suddenly appear at the workplace of a neighbor who barely acknowledges her “Good mornings” in the hall? Could that senile slut of a nun have broken her word after all these years and told the girl the truth?

I’m in the front office buttoning my coat when they come back. I’ve just remembered reasons she might be in this radio station that have nothing to do with me. She is visiting a friend, applying for a job, or taping an interview as guest stripper on the Night Train Hour . It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

“I’m taking you to lunch,” she chirps at me, as though we did this all the time. I slide into the elevator and lean against the back wall. She follows me, saying, “Thank you so much,” as the doors snuff out the engineer’s anxious grin.

Miranda turns her brights full on me. “I hope you’ll excuse my showing up here. I knew where to find you because I listen to your program. I recognized your voice when I first heard you talking to Looney Lil in the hall. I knocked on your door this morning but you’d already gone. I need to talk to you.”

The phrase ricochets in my skull. “Need to talk.” All these years of silence. I have intended, and do intend, to dog Miranda until my dying day, but I never meant to talk to her. My heart tries to climb out through my ears. She pinks up — flustered at what must be a mild glare behind my blue lenses.

The elevator gapes in front of us and I dart through the slow legs of the lobby loiterers and into the faster legs of the midday sidewalk. I feel her behind me, threading the crowd after me, shortening her stride to accommodate me, coming up beside me at the corner.

Sucking air noisily, I lean forward to discourage conversation. She is wearing dark green, her heels bouncing impatiently beside me. There is no pleasure in having her so close. What does she want?

“How about the grill at the Via Veneto? They do a lunch buffet. Miss McGurk?”

I can’t look at her. I try to civilize my voice. “I don’t eat lunch.”

The light changes, trapping us on an island in the wide street. The cars swarm around us in a sea of stink. She’s caught me on this concrete knob and her harpoon is suddenly revealed, her eyes, her words ripping out of her. “Look, forget that you don’t know me. There are two things. First, you’ve got to model for me.” Her sweet-simp guise is gone. She is green fire above Binewski cheekbones. She means to convince me. The heat of her intention has my throat melting. I want to hold her face in my hands and push her strange hair back from her Binewski forehead. The faces behind the windshields save me. A Binewski never disintegrates in front of the ticket holders.

She is burning away at me, talking fast, her eyes demanding. The anatomy competition is coming up. She has already won two years in a row. The judges will be reluctant to give it to her again. She needs something special, something hot.… Art school. She is talking art school and she is talking to me. These two facts amaze me.