Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Tell me about it, Chick.”

Doc P., with her white-gloved hands asleep in her big lap, blinked calmly at the wall behind Arty and sat very straight in her chair. The pencil fell off Chick’s knee to the carpet. Chick sat up and hugged his knees.

“Not good. Not good, Arty. You know.”

Arty’s face was hot and still with knowing.

“If you do that,” Chick stared, amazed, as though he had just discovered a wonder, “I’m not even going to like you, Arty!”

What amazed Chick was no surprise to Arty. Not being liked was familiar ground and all his usual contrivances went into gear. His face slid smoothly into a cartoon of sympathy.

“Why, Chicken Licken, my boy, that’s O.K. That’s quite all right. Of course your little sensitivities are offended. You can’t help being a norm, and I sympathize. But it doesn’t matter at all. No, it doesn’t matter whether you like me or not, my Chick. Because I like YOU!”

After Chick and Doc P. left I asked Arty what the hell he was letting Doc P. do to the twins anyway. He answered in an offhand, easy way that she was just going to “get rid of the parasite.” I assumed he meant an abortion and that it was killing the baby that bothered Chick.

I told him about Chick feeling the baby reach out. Arty leaned back in his chair and gave me a dose of silence. When I remember it now I think he was laughing inside as he watched me argue in a half-assed and maybe halfhearted way on the wrong track entirely.

“Go away, Oly,” he said. He turned to the pile of papers on his desk with an exhausted look designed to put me lower than slug slime. It made me mad.

“Are you swallowing your own line of shit, Arty Binewski? Aren’t you forgetting that you’re just a two-bit freak with a gimmick?”

“Get out,” he ripped back at me.

I went.

Chick explained sadly that he could not talk to me about the plan for the twins. Could not and would not. “You can make me cry,” he said, “but you can’t make me talk about that.” Ashamed, I left him alone.

Arty wouldn’t let me in for a solid week. Miz Z. or one of her apprentices would come to the door and tell me, “Arturo does not wish to see you.”

The guards wouldn’t let me see the twins during that time. When I brought their meals, Ike or Mike, or whoever was perched in front of the twins’ door, would take the tray from me and give me the dirty tray from the last meal. The notes that I slipped under the plates, and once actually into a turkey sandwich, were methodically searched for and found before my eyes — handed back to me without a word. One of the Arturan ladies was inside with the twins. The guard would knock and the ghostie would open the door and trade trays.

Finally I wrote “Uncle” on a piece of paper and gave it to the novice who answered Arty’s door. She came back and told me to go in and make sure the twins were eating and not flushing their food.

Arty let me do chores again. He didn’t talk to me, though. He was completely taken up with his ass-sucking followers. I didn’t try to push him. It had struck me hard that he didn’t need me, that he could shut me out permanently and completely and never miss me. He had all those others dancing for him. For me there was only Arty.

He didn’t need us.

I watched that message sink deeper and deeper into the twins. Elly had always known it but it was news to Iphy. Not that they talked to me. They didn’t.

I tried to warn them at first. “Listen,” I begged, “he’s planning an abortion.”

They looked at me. Elly barked. A harsh mock of a laugh. “Fat chance,” she said. That was the last she spoke to me.

I was the enemy, or as close to the enemy as they were able to get for the time. They were silent when I was there. Elly never spoke. Iphy said “please” and “thank you” when I brought food and did the cleaning for them. They never ate in front of me. They were getting very thin. Their eyes had a bludgeoned depth, burrowing into purple caverns in their faces. They didn’t dress. They wouldn’t bathe. I didn’t tell Arty. I didn’t want to bring more trouble on them. As far as I could tell, all they did was sit up against the pillows in their big bed all day. They didn’t read or practice or study. But I saw knowledge grow in Iphy’s face and harden in Elly’s. They knew more than I did.

I never thought about how wide the twins would be, lying side by side. A regular stretcher would leave their heads and shoulders dangling off the sides. Doc P. sent four novices to take a rear door off a van.

We were strapping them onto the door when Elly opened her eyes and looked at me. A fearful question pushed her dark eyebrows high. Her pupil contracted in the purple iris but her lids were heavy and sank, pulling her grooved forehead smooth as they closed. Doc P. bent over to touch Elly’s throat with a gloved hand.

“I wonder,” I piped nervously, “if this is the same door you did that horse on.”

Doc P.’s white-wrapped head swiveled toward me like a turret gun.

“You remember that horse with the rotten feet?”

She nodded at the novices. With one white-robed man at each corner of the door, they moved forward. They had to tip the door onto its side to get it out through the door. The twins hung slack, hair trailing, as they left the van.

Arty was outside, waiting in his chair with a guard beside him in the dark.

“Wait. Put the light on them.”

A flashlight clicked a cool white cone into the blackness. Arty leaned forward to look at the sleeping twins.

“What’s wrong?” His voice was harsh. “They look terrible! They’re sick!”

“What did you expect?” snapped Doc P. “They’ve been locked inside for months!”

“But their hair. They could bathe.” He sounded shrill and fragile. The novices looked at him anxiously.

“Arty.” I touched his shoulder and his face turned away from the sprawled sleepers. The light went out and then reappeared further on. Doc P. led the jostling novices down the ramp. Arty’s chair followed them and I went along.

We waited outside while they tipped the twins again to slide them through the surgery door. Doc P. stepped down for a last word.

“I’d like to state again that I consider this an improper hour for work of this type. I prefer to work at nine or ten A.M. These predawn hours find the vitality of most patients at its lowest.”

“Yeah, well, I wish you hadn’t cold-cocked them!” Arty’s voice was ragged.

“Sedatives.”

“Get on with it.”

The door closed behind her and Arty’s chair began to roll in the dark.

“They’ll take a while to scrub up and get ready,” he muttered, “but I want to get up in place so I can watch the preparations.”

“Ah, Arty!” I groaned, hobbling behind. “We can’t watch! Not this!” I was still thinking abortion. “I can’t watch it.”

But he’d rammed his chair wheel into the truck bumper and was clambering up onto the first step of the narrow stairs that led to the little theater above the surgery.

“You don’t have to. I do.” He hurried upward.

I went away and paced round and round the home vans, wishing for Mama and Papa, who were snoring in deep counterpoint. I could hear them through the closed windows. I’d slipped the same drops into their bedtime cocoa as I’d put into the twins’ milk glasses.

From the personal journal of Norval Sanderson:

Lovable Dr. Phyllis is quite undismayed at having bungled Electra’s lobotomy. Having reduced that bright creature to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of a decayed zucchini, the good doctor is inspired rather than chagrined

.

Dr. Phyllis has a voice like the breeze of Antarctica but it is a young voice — younger than her body, perhaps from being used so little and so carefully. Now she is talking more often, to more people. She’s become a glacial evangelist in her new cause. I see her stalking the Arturan office staff, lecturing stiffly to the novices, delivering admonitions to the more elevated