Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Jenny, you’ll think I’m a fool but I can’t. I can’t go in myself.”

“You can’t knock on the door and stand outside and hand in a few catalogues?” Jenny’s eyebrows, plucked to whispers, are expressing delicate but scornful disbelief Ike takes offense

.

“Listen, you knock on Arty’s door and ask him.”

Jenny backs down immediately. “I’ll just leave ’em here, Ike. If Miss Oly goes in you ask her kindly would she take these catalogues to her sisters.”

2

P.M

. Midway swinging noisily in background

.

Crystal Lil trips eagerly out the door of the Big B van with a hunk of sea-green cloth in her hands. Lil has recently gone over to “sensible walking shoes” as part of her “Grandma” image but she hasn’t adjusted to the low heels and still tends to tiptoe. This is the first time I’ve seen her wear her spectacles out of the van. She looks energetic and cheery and has, no doubt, just popped an upper or two. She reaches to knock on the twins’ door and poor Ike, the guard, hauls himself out of his deck chair stuttering

.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am …” and the rest I can’t hear. It’s obvious he won’t let her in to see the twins. She’s incredulous. He’s embarrassed. It’s one thing to turn away a redhead and another thing entirely to refuse the Boss Mom. Her body stiffens as his message becomes real to her. She is suddenly very old, three hundred years’ worth of iron-spined Bostonian motherhood. He withers, shuffling, unable to look at her, apparently referring her to Arty. She marches to Arty’s door with the blue-green cloth trailing, revealing its form as it flaps behind her — a two-necked, four-armed maternity dress, its hem pinned sketchily in place, its seams unfinished. Arty’s door stays closed. No answer. Lil bunches the dress in her fists and lurches back to her own van. Her hair strikes me as grey today, rather than white .

Arty ordered the twins’ tent broken down. Zephir McGurk set to figuring how to use the materials to enlarge Arty’s tent. The twins’ stage truck remained, closed up for travel. The big piano gathered dust.

Crystal Lil was upset. Papa spent hours trying to calm her. She said the twins had been “closed down.” He used the word “sabbatical.”

“They’ll have their hands full with the baby.” He’d say, “Remember how tired you got? They’re strong enough, but, Lily, they’re beginning to show. They can’t be on stage with a bulging belly. We’d have riots in the tents. Investigations.”

“Al, they’re not yet nineteen years old. If they stop working now, they’ll drift. They shouldn’t be idle. And why can’t I see them? They need me.”

“It’s an adjustment period for them. Settling to the idea of motherhood.”

“Sounds like something Arty would say.”

The security booth looking into Arty’s big room was my responsibility again. The cot had been moved out and only the tall stool and the gun occupied the bare cubicle. I could still smell the medicine and sweat and the faint reek of decay that the Bag Man had left behind. I arranged myself on the stool and stared through the one-way glass into Arty’s big room. Gradually my legs, in fact my whole ass, went to sleep. Numb and useless. But I was lucky. It was spewing rain outside and Arty’s cuddler for the evening was sitting on the propane tank under his window holding a soggy hunk of newspaper over her hair. By the time he let her in she would look like a smeared possum rather than the tight-bunned little cunt notcher she was. I forget her name. They were all Didi or Lisa or Suki in those days. He’d pick them out of the norm screamers at the gate when he came through after his show. They’d be jumping and howling for a look at him as he came out the back of the stage truck in his golf cart. He’d lean back, grin lots of teeth around the control bulb in his mouth, and drive past the chain-link fence to let them see him. If he stopped the cart I, or one of the security guards, would get his instructions.

“The one in the pink halter top,” he’d say. Or, “They’re all cows in this town. Where are we again?”

“Great Falls,” I’d say.

“Well, get me that rhino in the sequined jump suit and the ostrich in the red skirt.”

I’d stump over to the fence as he drove off to his van.

“Me?” they’d squeal when I waved for them to come up to the fence.

“Me?”

I’d leave them to wait, either in the “green room,” as Arty called McGurk’s station wagon, or on the propane tank outside Arty’s window. It was the only chore for Arty that I preferred letting someone else do.

This particular Lulu was stuck in a filthy January rainstorm for three hours by my reckoning, because Arty was in conference with his chief technical advisor, Doc Phyllis.

“What I’d really like …” Arty was wallowing on his satin bedspread, wearing only cotton briefs. His fins plucked and smoothed the satin. He rolled the bare skin of his head against the slick, warm fabric and arched his back, digging his shoulder blades into the softness.

“Do tell,” murmured Doc Phyllis. She lounged in her chair, one white-stockinged leg and her squeegee shoe flopped over the arm. Her glasses glittered between her white cap and her surgical mask. She had a straight shot at Arty and was probably dissecting his hip and shoulder joints in her head.

“I’m curious about the possibility of separating the twins,” Arty said. Dr. Phyllis grunted.

“Can’t be done. I told you that years ago.”

Arty yawned, wiggling. “Well, I thought you’d be keeping up with new techniques and developments.”

Doc P. was not to be goaded. “Nothing to do with technique. It’s the way they’re built.”

Arty flipped over on his belly and looked straight at her. “What if I was willing to sacrifice one twin to keep the other?”

“Which one?” inquired Dr. Phyllis sweetly.

Arty smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”

Miz Z. was leaving as I came into Arty’s place a few days later. She waved a folder at me by way of hello and I caught the words “Dime Box” on the fly. Arty was in his crisp young executive mode but I asked him about it when she was gone.

“You remember Roxanne? The motorcycle mechanic in Dime Box?”

“Horst’s leather-tit girl with the laugh?”

“She’s managing the P.I.P. home in Texas. Nine acres outside of Old Dime Box. It’s only been open to guests for three months but it’s already getting popular.”

Doc P. and Chick were on their way over so I went into the security room. I arranged myself on the stool and tried breathing through my mouth to dilute the medicinal smell.

Doc P. was sitting so straight that her plump white spine never touched the back of the dark padded visitor’s chair. Chick was lolling on the carpet with one shoe untied and both socks crumpled down. A small pencil stood on its pointed tip on his bent knee. The pencil rocked steadily like a metronome, broke rhythm for a tiny jig, and then lapsed into a four-four waltz in the space of a thumbnail on his denim-covered knee.

Arty leaned forward against his desk and examined Chick thoughtfully. Arty in his grey vest, Arty in his white collared shirt and black silk tie. Arty with his slim fin bones touching the gleaming wood of the desk. Arty with his pure round skull clearly visible beneath the skin and a blue vein ticking above his ear. He spoke tenderly to Chick.

“Dr. Phyllis tells me that you aren’t happy about my plan for the twins.”

Chick’s eyes flicked briefly away from the dancing pencil to Arty’s face, then back to the pencil. Arty lowered his own eyes.