Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

I went to tell the Pin Kid that he and I were washed up. Kaput. Finito . He was lounging on his bed of nails while he worked some new spots around his belly button with the needles. I hunkered beside him, watching him lift a flap of skin and shove the big pin through, then hold the flap in one hand, twiddling the knob at the needle head idly as he waited for the thin trickle of blood to dry up.

“Ya know, Vinnie,” I said, “I decided to stay with my brother.” It was hard for me. A swallower girl was hanging freshly laundered curtains on the backdrop nearby. Some of the kids were throwing things into the air and not letting them hit the ground, juggling practice, with a scratchy tape blaring Mozart or something.

I watched the gem-sharp face of the Pin Kid absorbed in his own white skin. I looked hard to see if I’d hurt him. Maybe my whole life was set in that instant. I was a sixteen-year-old freak brat. If he’d said anything — a word might have been enough, “Don’t,” or a crease of the brow, a shadow of pain in his eyes could have seduced me. The pain I was looking for in him would have been my excuse, my motive, my escape tunnel to the world beyond the Binewskis.

But he half smiled in puzzlement. His eyes like the pebbled gut of a fast creek, bright and open and empty but willing to be full.

“Well … sure,” he said. As though he’d never imagined anything else for me.

“I mean,” I said, frowning until my glasses slipped and my bare pink eyes popped into the light at him, “I mean always.” I stopped because he was rolling off the nails and he’d forgotten to pull the big needle from his belly skin and the thin red blood was spattering his cut-off jeans. When he turned away from me, reaching for a shirt, I could see the rash of tiny pockmarks from the nail points reddening his lovely arched back, his curving graceful hump with the brightness of blood barely restrained at the surface of his white skin.

“Well, Oly … Well, sure … Hey, Arturo, he needs you.” This Vinnie, the Pin Kid, was a nice boy. Even half-choked with disgust he tried not to hurt me.

That’s when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn’t mean what Iphy’s blood meant. If I loved it wasn’t the same as Iphy’s love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.

Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the prosy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he’d never thought of me the way I had thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.

My new eyes saw the old things. He’d felt the needle in his belly as he’d pulled the shirt over his head. Now his big hands, cleverly knuckled, slid out the needle, dropped it into a tall jar of alcohol, dabbed antiseptic on the two small holes above his belly button. He pulled the shirt down and tucked it into his red-spattered jeans.

“You’re lucky, Oly,” looking gravely out from his deep eyeholes. “My ma cried a lot just looking at me. You’re right to stick by your family.”

He stacked his props in his trunk and slid the nail bed out of the way. His legs were longer than me. His narrow shoulders nipped up near his tiny ears with the swirl of hump arching behind him. He moved as though he were all legs, a smooth bobbing in his gait that poured in through my eyes and settled in my right lung like a pool of ice. I got up while his back was turned and crept away.

From the journal of Norval Sanderson:

Went with Arty this

P. M

. to watch the Pin Act. It’s one of his new days off and he showed up in disguise, dark green blanket up to his neck. Green stocking cap, dark glasses probably borrowed from Oly. The guard was in civvies and there wasn’t a novice to be seen. He rolled up to my booth and nodded and it was a full minute before I realized it was the Worm

.

It delighted him to fool me

.

I’d been raving about the Pin-Cushion but it was the first time Arty had seen him. We stood in the back of the swallowers’ tent and waited for the Pin

.

We were in time for the swallowers’ finale. A blustering logger in front of us explained to his wife how the whole thing was collapsible swords and tricks

.

“They always think the real thing is phony and that the tricks are the McCoy. Never stops amazing me,” whispered Arty

.

I told him the guy got his money’s worth feeling like he’d refused to be suckered. Feeling like he’d outwitted them. Showing off his worldly skepticism to his lady

.

The old swallower did his Ta-Da with five hilts coming out of his mouth in a glittering bouquet and the skinny son did his with the lit fluorescent tube going down his gullet as the lights dimmed and the whole tentful went

“aah”

seeing that pale blue glow shimmering through the jagged shadows of his ribs

.

“Clever bastards, ain’t they?” said the logger

.

When the Pin came on, nobody left. The logger looked a bit pale but stuck it out. Arty was fascinated. “Nice timing, nice,” he murmured once while the young Pin latched a big chrome hook into the permanent hole through his tongue and did a little ragtime step with a twenty-five-pound weight dangling on a chain from his tongue. The Pin walked up the blade ladder, danced on the bed of nails, then started with the pins and needles. Two of the kid swallowers were juggling fire steadily behind him and the Pin timed every move to build the heartbeat. He works with chrome knitting needles, ten and eighteen inches long. Impressive, through the thighs, through the skin of the chest. He’s working a new place on his belly, and the blood trickling out and running down his pale skin to the loincloth is effective. He was quite a sight by the time he started punching the needles through his cheeks and lips. We slipped out before the finale so Arty wouldn’t get caught with his chair in the crowd

.

“Not from a show family? Sure?” he asked as we picked our way back through the midway crowd

.

“Just the apple farmers.”

“He could use a good talker to lead them through. That pantomime stuff is O.K. but a good talker would add a lot.”

I didn’t answer. He was thinking about Oly, young Olympia. I was surprised at the note of pain in his voice. As though he were afraid to lose her

.

“I don’t care. It doesn’t do any good to care, so I won’t.” Chick was as dry and flat as a cow pie. Arty flicked his eyes at him suspiciously and then looked at me. We three were in the Chute for our secret meeting. The guards stood outside in the night mist while, in the deepest room, in the soft yellow glow of the lit jars that held our dead brothers and sisters, Arty told us what we had to do.

Chick slumped against a glass case. I leaned against him, watching Arty shift slightly in his chair, thinking. I tried to read the clenching of Arty’s jaws and the tilt of his gleaming head on his thick neck.

“I don’t usually mind what you think, Chick,” purred Arty. His chin jutted at us, intent, “As long as you do your job. But this time you’ve got to understand. It’s just us three in the pinch. Mama and Papa can’t deal with it. All the guards, all the simps, the Arturans, the show folks, even Horst — they could turn in a flash. They all have their own machines to ride.”

We listened. I could feel Chick’s child bones vibrating against me, shaking to the tune of Arty’s song. “It’s just us three now. The twins have other things to deal with.” Arty waited a beat to see if we’d react to that, complain or accuse. When we didn’t he went on.