Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

The twins, wide-eyed and wary, were startled too. They had expected “God” Arty. This feeble and betrayed mortal was a shock. Iphy frowned. Elly’s teeth parted but no sound came out.

“I mean,” Arty’s forehead folded in peaks of bewilderment, “you didn’t have to do that.” Seeing him like this I was scared. Had the blood exploded in his head? Had his temper triggered some spasm of the brain that changed him? Our fanged armadillo was suddenly peeled, shell-less.

Elly took a breath and got back on her high horse. “You don’t run us, Arty.”

“Oh, hey!” His voice high and ragged.

“We don’t worship your ass, Arty. Not at all.”

“Is that it? Iphy, tell me. Did she do it to keep you away from me?” He leaned forward, his flippers slipping on the door frame. A blue vein beat like an angry worm above his ear.

Iphy’s shoulders, held tight and high near her neck, relaxed.

“No,” she said. “I wanted to.”

Arty was back in his van by the time I caught up with him. He swung up into his throne and hit a button on the console with his flipper. He shooed me out. Said he wanted to talk to the Bag Man. I knew when he looked at me that this was our regular Arty, ready to kick ass by remote control.

“Arty!”

It was a duet shriek that made me drop Lily’s favorite cup onto the counter, cracking off the handle.

The twins were standing in their open doorway with mouths open and arms spread. “Arty!” they screamed.

The Bag Man’s face swam up from the room behind them. His hands closed on Elly’s shoulder and Iphy’s arm. Iphy looked straight at me with disgust smeared across her face, as the Bag Man pulled them inside.

I followed and saw the twins collapse onto the sofa and the Bag Man standing in front of them writing busily on his notepad. He must have already been there for a while. Slips of paper were strewn on the sofa and on the low table in front of it.

“Arty’s in the surgery watching Dr. Phyllis.” I bent to pick up some scraps of paper from the carpet. “I will be very good to you,” scrawled the Bag Man’s hand.

“Oly,” Iphy’s tired voice made me look up at her. “Oly, would you please go get Arty?” The Bag Man bent toward her, handing her his most recent note.

“What’s going on?”

“He gave us to the Bag Man,” tittered Elly. “We’re supposed to marry the Bag Man to keep us out of trouble.”

I looked at the wad of notes in my hand. I saw, “Arty loves you. He knows that I love you.”

“Creepy, hunh?” asked Elly. She grinned at me, and suddenly the twins were giggling hysterically, holding each other’s arms, rocking on the sofa. Their two long, lovely feet pointed straight out and tapped the floor in hilarity.

They didn’t care how the Bag Man felt, standing there with his bulging veil fluttering around his one blinking eye. They laughed at him, at the idea of him.

Looking at him, I was afraid. When he turned toward me I yelped. His big warm hand clenched softly on the back of my neck and he raised me until my toes barely touched the floor. A high whine pulled out of my throat as he carried me to the door, put me firmly outside, and shut it behind me.

I found Arty in the dark little five-seat theater above the surgery. His silhouette showed against the hot light pouring up out of the glass circle in the floor. I leaned beside him, feeling his coolness as I let my hand brush his bony flippers. He stared, with his chin propped on the rail, down into the surgery. Directly below, a long-haired woman with a white plastic tube mask over her mouth and nose stared up at us. What she saw was a mirror in the ceiling, intensifying the light from the lamps that surrounded it. The woman lay on a white table and was covered to the neck by a white sheet. Next to her head, the small figure of Chick sat, swathed in white, a mask over his nose and mouth, a cap pulled so far down over his hair that it bent his ears out. He wore surgical gloves and was slowly trickling his white plastic fingers through her long brown hair. At the other end of the table was Doc P. in white, hugely foreshortened, her arms heavy in white sleeves that moved in deliberate twitches as she worked. The woman on the table stared serenely at us without seeing. “She’s not asleep,” I muttered at Arty’s ear.

“She chose not to. He can stop the pain without putting them to sleep. He says most of them like to sleep because knowing and seeing are painful.” Arty stuck his lower lip out and slid it along the railing. “It kind of goes along with what I’m always spouting, doesn’t it?”

“The Bag Man says you gave him the twins.”

Arty’s eyes swiveled at me. “Just to fuck.”

“The Bag Man says ‘marry.’ ”

“He’d call it that.”

Below us the long-haired woman’s eyes turned away from us, her head tilting slightly to look into Chick’s masked face. Doc P. was bobbing vigorously at the other end, grabbing tools from the hands of the Admitted nurse, who stood just outside the charmed circle, invisible to us except for the delicate jugglery of glinting tools. Arty watched intently. The climax was evidently approaching.

“A toe?”

“Whole foot.”

With a sweep of her arm, Doc P. flung a messy something toward the bucket on the floor, and accelerated her twiddling of the winking tools.

Arty’s eyes focused on the woman’s face. Chick’s gloved hand rested on her cheek, a small hand. She smiled at Chick. The smile crept slowly from her eyes, its crease sliding under his stubby fingers.

“Does Chick know we’re up here? Can he tell?”

“Don’t know. Never asked. Probably.” Arty let go of the railing and flopped into the plush chair behind him. His eyes closed tiredly.

“Arty?”

“Hnnh?”

“It was dumb.”

“Mmm?”

“You shouldn’t have done that to the twins, Arty. I know you’re sore, but it was stupid. Throwing out the come with the scum, like Papa says.”

His eyes stayed closed and a seedling smile sprouted around his mouth. “Elly will shit bricks to Mars.”

“So will Iphy. Maybe worse.”

“Not Iphy. Iphy can like anybody. That’s why she’s so powerful. It’s easy to fuck up in reading Iphy. Most people don’t read her right at all.”

I leaned on the railing, watching him. His eyes were closed again. I tried to think about Iphy being strong.

“But you’re right.” He screwed his mouth into the shape of a belly button and then let it fall back. “It was stupid. Because you know who is going to puke strychnine over it? Me.”

“Yeah,” I said. The light pool was deserted now. Only the long, empty table lay below us. Arty was grinning at me. A floppy bean-shaped smile with eye crinkles to complete the effect. “How old are you, Toady? Sixteen?” I nodded. My heart was beating at my lungs.

“You bleeding yet? You need a boyfriend? I don’t want you running me through this same grinder, you know.”

I could feel the hot pleasure pumping into my face and couldn’t keep myself from grinning back at him.

“Nah. I’m your girl, Arty, even with the warts on your ass.”

We giggled and he leaned forward toward me. I caught him in my arms, his chest warm against me, his shoulder blades sliding in my hands. He rubbed his head against my cheek as I squeezed him. “You always did have shit for brains,” he chuckled. I felt the convulsion of his chest against me with his laugh. “Think you can still carry me, little sis? Those stairs bruise my ass going down.”

“Oho! That’s your trick, is it? Butter me up?”

I propped him and turned around so he could flop onto my hump, clinging to my shoulders with his flippers.

“Don’t dig your chin in; that hurts!”