Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“The first year I went to LoPrinzi’s gym and did a series on a body builder. Technical, illustrative, and predictable. Last year I went to the medical school and did a flayed, emaciated cadaver. Classic and totally predictable. I’ve got to show more than a technician’s skills this time. I’ve got to rock them. I’ve got to yank their hearts out.”

Her urgency has my stomach cringing, trying to crawl down my leg. Is this an accident? Is it coincidence that she comes to me? All this time of silent watching, my secret care. My anonymous arm holding the invisible umbrella. Could she know? Is this her way of opening me? Slipping in like the knife that unlocks the oyster? Or does some pulse in her bones, some twist in her genetic coil, lean her toward me in a blind craving? The light changes.

“Look, there’s a bus bench. Come sit a minute.” She sails past revving machines in the intersection, collapses onto the bench and waves me up beside her as she yanks a sheaf of papers from her bag.

“Reduced copies. You don’t get the full effect but you can see that I’m serious.”

The top sheet shows a hip socket, lushly washed, the hard lines impatient and powerful. The second sheet is exposed abdominal muscle, fiercely striated. Then come loving portraits of callused arthritic hands and bunion-twisted feet, a flayed jaw, a joyous nude of the blobby news vendor from the corner. He is hunched on a stool, pudgy hands propped on knees like sagging pumpkins, his acorn head thrown back in surprise on what passes for a neck. I don’t understand the drawings, or why they move me. I want to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love. The drawings are as mysterious to me as the school report cards that the Reverend Mother mailed dutifully every few months. No Binewski ever made pictures. I never had a report card. But I saved Miranda’s, stacked and wrapped with a rubber band in the biggest of the old trunks.

Her long hand taps at the dangling ink scrotum, the nearly invisible penis of the news vendor. “Characteristic of the fat-storing pattern in males,” she’s saying, “the belly seems to swallow the penis from the roots up, literally shortening it …”

“Disgusting!” snaps a voice behind me.

“Fuck off!” yells Miranda. The critic sniffs away toward the corner. Just a passerby. Miranda lays an arm over my hump to protect me. Pointing at the line depicting a rumpled buttock drooping from the stool, she giggles. “One of my teachers says I draw like a mass murderer. I hate that ditsy crap, though. Inchy little lines like the hesitation cuts on a suicide’s wrist.”

I loll in molten idiocy. All this time of not speaking I had figured her for silly, for toad-brained, because she is so near normal. All the years of watching have taught me nothing, and I laugh. Leaning back against her arm, tipping my head as the fat man’s head tips, laughing voicelessly and weak.

She grins at me. “That one works, doesn’t it?”

I’m laughing despite myself. “You seem such a nice girl, too.”

“Ho!” she barks. “Don’t be deceived. I’ve got a tail.”

Something in my face stops her. Her face is suddenly careful.

“That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about.” She watches me. “There’s a story, naturally a long one. But the first and last is that I was born with a tail, like a lot of people, but I didn’t get it nipped off when I was a baby. I still have it. It’s not a big tail, less than a foot long. But most people don’t have any bone in their tails. Mine is actually an extended spur of my spine. That’s why I always wear skirts.”

I am helpless, pinned by her arm and her eyes until she looks away.

“It’s going to rain,” she says. The air is heavy and grey. “Want to go? Come up to my place? I’ll give you lunch and draw you and bend your ear and beg advice.”

“O.K., of course.” I scrabble numbly for my briefcase.

She jounces up, arms wheeling against the sky. “All right.”

I would die to make her smile that way, would whittle my fingers and toes away if only it could make her long Binewski eyes light this way forever. I jump down to the pavement and dive after her through the swirling bodies. Her dark drawings are still in my fist. I stuff them into my briefcase with a pang. Hide them.

Turning the corner into our block Miranda skips once to keep in step. Across the street, high up in the third-story gable of the wood Victorian, a painter leaning off his scaffold to reach the trim watches us, freezing one hand to the wall, his brush hand poised against the blue air.

Am I contaminating her? Polluting my silence? Obliterating my anonymity? Dangling the ax of my identity over her whole idea of herself?

“You turn high RPMs,” she says, double-stepping beside me. “Slightly more than two to my one. But”—she laughs once, a fox bark against the mist—“I’m catching on.” My blankness shows and she tosses her shoulders and arms in a classic Binewski apology. “Strides,” she says.

Our old house, with its front steps propped like elbows on the sidewalk, looks warm for once. The bottom front windows, Lil’s, show a yellow glow. The fourth floor front, otherwise known as Number 41, or The Attic, is lit. Its small dusty window shields the Benedictine on his bed in solitary combat with the rule book. Miranda’s windows, third floor front, are white above the blank-eyed vacant room below her. My room on the second floor is at the back, invisible. My view is the dust-blind rear of the warehouse that squats across the alley. Just below my window, like an Oriental pond, the flat tar roof of the square garage is filled with water and moss because of blocked drains.

Lil is standing at attention in her doorway as we enter. Her old face tilts back to stare at our shadows. “Who is it?” she shrieks.

“Thirty-one,” yells Miranda. Then louder, “Thirty-one!” and Lil steps back to let us pass.

Miranda talks me past my room. I’m ready to panic and quit, dodge in through my door and apologize as I close her out. She is telling me we should go for walks together, that she often has to dance with shorter people and has no trouble adjusting the length of her stride.

It’s been three years since I saw her rooms. Before she came from the train station, still smelling of nuns, I cleaned. It took days, sponging the ceilings, the green wallpaper with its huge white roses like fetal aliens. These were her rooms long before she came here. The first time I visited the building with the fastidiously courteous agent, the big front room, twenty by forty feet, with its tall windows in a row, was marked for her. The bedroom was more normal. The windowless bathroom was claustrophobic. The kitchen was familiar, as though it had been surgically transplanted from a trailer house.

I scrubbed windows and woodwork and the endless cupboards built into the walls. I pounded and vacuumed the heavy stuffed furniture. Everything normal for the almost normal girl.

She was so tall, I thought, she wouldn’t mind the distance to the ceilings. With such long arms, I thought, she will like the big room to stretch in.

The day she arrived I stayed close to my spyhole all morning. It was nearly noon when she came, thundering with two other students up the stairs and past the door where my eye was fixed to the hole.

“You got the place free. Who cares what it looks like,” came a young voice. The jumbled baggage and bodies clattered upward. My ear flattened to the door, trying to sift out which voice was Miranda’s. If she hated the house, the smells, the soggy slump of the neighborhood, what would I do?

She didn’t have much. The three carried all she owned up the stairs in that one trip. All the evidence of her eighteen years on the planet. Twenty minutes later they rushed down again, to register for classes at the art school.