Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Your hump is bony! Take it easy!”

I carried him down the narrow stairs to the back of the surgery van, where he’d left his chair and his entourage.

Miz Zegg was waiting with her hands on the push bar of Arty’s empty chair. A couple of the administrative novices were hovering with her and they all started to twitter when they saw Arty. Miz Z. came scuttling at me, flapping her hands and nattering, “Let me help you, Role Model Arturo!” but I spun around and grabbed the chair arms so it wouldn’t jump away as I leaned back and spilled Arty into the seat. The novices squeaked and grabbed their long white nightshirts at seeing Arty treated so roughly.

“Don’t call me Role Model!” he snapped. “It’s disgusting!”

Miz Z., the latest of Alma Witherspoon’s successors to command the administrative office, took a step back and hid her hands in her big sleeves. Arty winked at me and said he’d see me after the show. I gaped in surprise.

“Aren’t you coming back to see the twins? They really want you!”

“No.” He shook his head, smiling at me. “I’m not going to lay eyes on them for as long as I can manage.”

“Arty! You rectum!”

Miz Z. hustled her novices off a few yards so they wouldn’t be subjected to the interfamilial indecencies that the Great One allowed to his siblings. Miz Z. didn’t know it, but she was going to wait a long time for her turn to get her toes nibbled off. She’d taught business-machine classes in high schools for years and Arty liked the way she ran the office. Arty reached for his chair controls to follow them but I grabbed his ear and glared at him.

“They sent me to get you. What am I gonna tell them?” He blinked and looked back up the narrow staircase leading to the small room on top of the surgery truck.

“Well, I figure the Bag Man is still sort of unpredictable. Why don’t you tell them not to struggle too much, not to fight him. I wouldn’t want them to get hurt.” He rolled away from me, and the three office ghosties scurried after him. He was off to another meeting, or a visit to the post-op wards, or an interview with some pipsqueak reporter.

I couldn’t stand to go back to the twins. The idea of looking at them and telling them “no hope” made me sweat. I trotted through the morning cool. The sun wasn’t high enough yet to fill the shadows between the lines of vans and trailers.

Mama was at the dinette table in our van, deep in one of her assembly-line projects. Twenty-six blue-spangled aprons and matching headbands for the redheads. Glittering cloth ran between her long white hands to its fate under the chattering needle of her sewing machine. I patted her elbow as I came in and she stretched her neck down, offering her cheek automatically for a kiss. A solitary blue sequin was imbedded in the makeup goo next to her nose. I kissed her and picked off the sequin.

“Those twins don’t eat breakfast anymore?” she asked. “They worried about fat? I hardly see them.” The needle gobbled at the cloth and Lil’s voice murmured on as I went back toward the big bedroom at the end. The sliding door was half open but the window shades were drawn and the room was heavy with half-filtered heat and the suffocating weight of sleep laden with Lil’s fleshy perfume and Papa’s sweat and leather and tobacco. I went for the shelf on Papa’s side of the bed. Two books slid aside and I latched onto Papa’s blunderbuss pistol. I looked at the safety catch and then stuck the thing into my skirt top, letting my blouse fall loosely over it. The barrel dug me in one spot and the butt gouged me in another. The metal was heavy yet surprisingly warm. I went out past Mama but she didn’t look up.

The twins were rehearsing. I could tell because the Bag Man was standing at the back steps of their stage truck. As I walked toward him I decided Arty had sicced the Bag Man on the twins just to get the big lump off his own back. The Bag Man started bending and bowing at me while I was still a ways off. I raised a hand and nodded and went up the steps and through the door.

The twins were alone. Another hour before the redheads showed up for fanny-kick practice. Dance, they called it. I saw the dark, gleaming heads bent over the matching sheen of the baby grand. At least they were staying calm enough to comb their hair and do their work.

“The whole cadenza should be written. I don’t want any two-bit piano player fucking with improvisation in the middle of my work.” That was Elly.

“All we have to do is place it at the beginning of the movement so that it’s clearly an integral part.” That was Iphy.

“I’d rather put rude remarks on the score. Here’s Oly!”

They both looked up from the music paper, which was spread out on the rack in front of them, and stared past me, eyes flickering anxiously.

“Where’s Arty?”

I went close to them, one hand reaching to touch Elly’s arm, my eyes glued to Iphy’s face. I couldn’t look away from her.

When she saw what was in my face her eyes began to die. Their violet deepened to night purple, dull black.

“He’s not coming.”

Elly’s hand clipped hard to my wrist. “Did you tell him? What’d he say?”

I wanted to be a street sweeper working nights in Rio, or maybe a florist in Quebec.

“He said the Bag Man is dangerous. Don’t struggle. Don’t fight him. Arty said he wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

They didn’t need to look at each other. They looked at me. Their four hands wandered into a complicated knot in their lap.

“Shall I go to Papa? Maybe Horst? Let me get them.”

The twins were quiet for identical moments like one girl at a mirror. When they spoke it was with the echoing, simultaneous voice that came to them in their rare moments of unity: “Try, but it won’t help.” I nodded, digging under my blouse. “You remember how this works?”

I set the chunky gun on the shining wood of the piano. It lay there, quiet and nasty. They stared at it. I left before they moved again.

Papa was in the refrigerator truck counting cases of ice-cream sandwiches. I hollered at him that the twins wanted him and he handed his clipboard to one of the lunks who was loading the case. He came down off the truck with an arthritic creak that drowned out my fantasy of him rescuing anybody. I told him where the twins were and went off to visit Grandpa for a while.

Chick was asleep on the hood of the generator truck. His face was in the small green pool of shade cast by Grandpa’s urn. The rest of his knobby little body sprawled flat on his belly with his coveralls rucked up to his knees and his socks rumpled down over his sneakers. The skin on his smooth calves looked angry. He must have been asleep there for a while. I pulled his pant legs down to keep the sun off him. He twitched and his baby mouth smacked slightly at the air. The surgical sessions tired him out. The tinkle of music started on the midway. I could hear the whir of a simp twister starting up.

“Chick.”

His eyes opened and his lips closed but the rest of him didn’t move.

“Chick, you’ve got to help the twins.”

He blinked and sat up.

“Did you know Arty gave them to the Bag Man?”

He nodded, stretching and scratching.

I slid over to where I could lean on the urn. “Wow!” Grandpa was too hot to touch.

Chick licked his lips. “Arty says the twins are getting married.”

“They don’t want to, Chick. They hate the Bag Man. Arty’s just doing it to punish them for something. He’s got no right to give them to anybody.”

“He gave me to Doc P.” Chick was calm, stating a fact.

“Not the same. You’re just with her for a little while to learn stuff.” He didn’t answer. “I sent Papa over to see the twins but he won’t be able to do anything. Not when it’s Arty’s idea.”