Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

Now beside me in the gravy-dark hall she pushes the door away from her, open, and a soft white light sweeps out to swallow me. Her shadow blinks across me as she disappears into the light.

The room is gauze-bright from the four tall windows. The light comes through thin white curtains, cool onto grey walls, simple onto the dark gleam of the bare wood floor.

She tosses her purse, drops her sea-green coat, abandons her tall heels in the middle of the empty floor.

“There used to be furniture,” I say in shock. Where does she sit? eat? sleep? I thought I had provided for her.

“It was awful.” She pauses, arms half cocked above her head, pulling at her sweater. She disappears in a wrestling frenzy, reappears breathless, hurling the sweater at a distant empty corner. “It’s all scattered in other rooms in the building.”

The room is bare. Not a stick. Not a single nail protrudes from the grey walls. Only her clothes trail across the black floor like a love romp. Looking rail-thin in the blouse and skirt, she jerks open a white door hiding canvas chairs folded neatly against the back of the closet. A thin-legged folding table. She whips them out and up, furnishing the place. “Wait till you see my tea cabinet,” she says, slapping the swaying loop of canvas meant to cradle an ass. “I’ve been collecting for weeks.” Through another white door to the tiny kitchen stands the old refrigerator, no taller than I am.

“Vine leaves.” She snatches out jars and plastic dishes. “Artichoke hearts. Do you like olives?”

The kettle is on the stove, blue flame curling its bottom. She reaches, her long body high above me and her ribs sliding under thin cloth, upward. “Strawberry, jasmine, mint.” Tea boxes rain onto the counter. “This is all for you.” She is huge. Her heat beats through the inch of air between us. “I have no idea what you like so I’ve been on the watch for anything really special. Just in case you ever came to visit. Now I’m going to get you a dressing gown and you can change in the bathroom.”

The dream lasts only an instant, but in it I have fallen into the cat cage and the tigers are sliding by me, brushing their whole hot length against me. But it is this Miranda, moving liquid past me and out into the big room, miraculously whisking her dropped belongings out of sight, pulling out white painted drawers and doors, allowing glimpses of hidden paraphernalia as she skates, chattering about food, again and again to the resurrected table suddenly crowded with ominous delicacies heaped in small bowls.

A final armload slides onto the table, sketch pads, pencils, a sinister-looking camera. Then she takes half a step back and looks at me through half-closed eyes. A flicker of her father’s deliberate calculation passes across her face. An ice knife sticks in my chest.

“It’s not cold in here, is it?” she asks.

“No.”

“Good.” She moves to the drawers in the wall. “I’ll do some photos first, while you’re fresh, and then sketch until you get tired or fed up.” She flips her voice over her shoulder while bent, rummaging to avoid acknowledging my jitter of fear. She is holding me to my promise.

“The photos will make it easier on you. It hurts to hold a pose for a long time.”

She presents me with a green pajama top and, as I grasp it, she swings open the bathroom door, flicks the light switch, saying, “There are hooks on the door for your clothes … whoops! There’s the kettle boiling.”

In the tall bathroom I stand staring at the door. I can hear her moving on the other side. The pajama top trails on the floor beside me and she is whistling in the kitchen. Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass. She is manipulating me. Pushing me around as though I were nothing but a mobile stomach like the news vendor. She fancies she has me under control. Red anger blisters my guts. She doesn’t see me at all. She doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. I am the watcher, the mover, the maker. She is just like her father, casually, carelessly enslaving me with my love. She doesn’t know the powers that keep me here. She thinks it’s her charm and guile.

“Tea’s ready,” she calls.

I answer thinly, “Coming,” but whirl in a frenzy, shoving the grit of the green pajama into my mouth and biting down to keep from bellowing.

Her drawing is suddenly in front of me, framed and glassed on the grey wall beside the sink. The darkness is ink and the eyes and teeth come out of the dark and the screaming chicken is bulging vainly away, caught as the teeth close tearing into exploding feathers and black blood behind its desperate skull. Drawn with a bullwhip at thirty paces. Quietly, in the white at the bottom, her penciled hand has scrawled “Geek Love — by M. Barker.”

I take off my clothes. I can’t reach the hooks on the door. I drape the clothes over the toilet tank, drop the wig on top, and stand my shoes on the floor beside it. The pajama top hangs to my ankles.

• • •

I sit. She draws. Wearing only my blue glasses I am not cold but my skin rises against exposure, rough as a cow’s tongue. The cups steam upward into the pale air. Our island is the size of two canvas chairs and a small cluttered table. We are marooned in the breathing bareness of the room. Darkness rolls out around us, seeping into the distant softness of the grey walls. The curtains shift slowly in their own whiteness, as though the light pouring through them has a frail, moving substance.

She is gnawing an olive pit and frowning at the sketch pad in her lap. The wild hair torching out of the edges of her face mesmerizes me. The millions of hairs in a dozen smoldering tones are as alien as her size, the outrageous length of her. My mother, Lillian, is seventy inches high. I am thirty-six inches high.

“How tall are you, Miranda?”

She looks up to focus on my chin, frowning, and says, “Six feet,” mechanically before her eyes twitch back to the paper in front of her.

Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond “Good morning.” She is not interested in my identity. She doesn’t notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix — a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.

Downstairs in the first floor front, Crystal Lil sits sliding the magnifying glass back and forth in search of the focal point. The walls around her are slathered with the crumpled glitter of the old carny posters. A dozen glossy young Lilys smile, kick, and reach for the curving gold name, “Crystal Lily,” that arches against midway blue above her. Dressed in white, a paper Lil arches her back against a blue-green sky spangled with stars. Strips of arsenic-green wallpaper peep between the posters.

In my room everything is just as I found it when I moved in. The stuffed furniture molders against the cabbage wallpaper. My real life sits in boxes and suitcases behind cupboard doors. My real bed is not the creaking acre of springs in the corner, but the dark nest of blankets on the floor of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

Miranda rips out the page she has been working on and absently sails it over her shoulder while she eyes a jar bristling with pens. The page settles, belly up on the dark floor, as she begins dashing ink at a fresh sheet of paper.

“What made you,” clearing my throat, “decide to be an artist?”

Her eyes flick at my feet under frowning brows. “No, no. A medical illustrator. For textbooks and manuals …” Her tongue sneaks out at a corner of her mouth as she slaps stroke after vicious stroke onto the defenseless page. “See, photographs can be confusing. A drawing can be more specific and informative. It gets pretty red in there. Pretty hot and thick. But the bastards claim I’m undisciplined, too flashy.…” Whatever she is doing to the innocent sheet has nothing to do with me. She rips it out and drops it, starting immediately on the page beneath.