Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“You’ll take three guards. I’ll use the rest. By the time you’re ready to start I’ll be up there watching. O.K.?”

We nodded. Arty hit the start switch on his chair motor with a flange of his right shoulder fin. “I need you bad, now. Don’t fuck me over.”

Chick held my hand as we walked through the dark camp. The big men moved silently behind us. Arty and his crew of fifteen guards had gone through the gate into the Arturan camp.

When we came to Doc P.’s van we stopped at the door. My mouth was dry and my hands were wet. Chick’s fingers gripped my palm hard. We stood staring at the white glow of the big van in the moonlight. I could just make out the twined snake emblem with the communication grid caught in the open mouths of the snakes.

Chick sighed. “She’s asleep,” he whispered. He moved to the door, tugging me along as he opened it and climbed into the dark stench of antiseptic. The light went on and I saw the inside of Doc P.’s van for the first time in the years she had traveled with us. White and stark. No cushions on the metal benches. Chrome on the outsize sink. A metal desk against the wall, the white doors of cabinets glaring in the hard white light.

Chick moved surely. He’d spent chunks of his life here. The bedroom took up the end and the sliding door opened as we soft-footed toward it.

“It’s O.K.,” Chick said. “Tell them to bring the stretcher.”

When I got back he was standing by her head, stroking her short grey-brown hair. I came close to look. Without her white wrappings and her glinting specs she looked soft and dissatisfied. Set grooves of disapproval curved down around her thin mouth. Her nose was shapeless, her skin thick.

“No wonder she wears a mask,” I whispered. Chick laid his hand on her cheek. I noticed that his hands were getting big and bony on his kid-spindly arms. He trailed a finger across her lips. “She’s always constipated,” he said. The guards set the stretcher down and I stepped back to make room. Her cot was narrow, not built in, and it had a thin pad instead of a mattress. I peeked into the white closet as they took her out. It was full of books. The shelves filled the closet from top to bottom and the books were each wrapped separately in a clear plastic bag. I used two fingers to flatten the plastic across a book spine so I could read the title. Some kind of surgical text. I checked a few more. All surgical texts. Chick looked in at me.

“That’s what she taught me from. That’s how she learned. The journals are in the cabinets up front.”

Chick showed me how to wash up while the guards moved her to the operating table.

“Are you gonna lose your dinner?” he was looking at me sharply.

I hung on to his eyes. They were as chilly and soothing as Grandpa’s urn. I giggled greenly, nodding. His mouth twisted in dry exasperation.

“Jeez. Arty just wants you here to make sure I do it. You can’t really help anyway. Go over there.”

He spun me with his mind and I knew it. I was moving into the latrine cubicle and falling to my knees. My stomach came all the way up and out, then snapped back like a frog’s tongue. Then I was back at the sink with liquid soap covering my arms to the elbow and a white mask tying itself over my face and an itchy cap sliding down over my eyes. I giggled, watching Chick’s hands under the rushing tap. “This is why you never have dirty elbows, hunh?”

His eyes grinned at me over his mask but he didn’t say anything.

“Mama thinks it’s weird that your fingernails stay so clean and you never get a crust behind your ears.”

He was busy with the gloves. “Just sit on that stool with the back. You won’t feel a thing.”

But I was terrified. I thought she would wake up. I thought she would rise off the table roaring and take us in her thick hands and break us, and I thought Arty was sitting up above, looking down through the mirror in the ceiling, and he would watch Doc P. eat us and he would chuckle and come down and make a deal with her because that was what he’d meant to have happen all along. I was hanging on to the seat of my stool with both gloved hands, being scared that way, when suddenly I started being scared that she wouldn’t wake up and that this other thing would actually happen. I opened my mouth to speak. “Arghi,” I said, and my little brother Chick looked up at me, frowning between his mask and his cap, and I went to sleep.

• • •

“Why did I have to be there? All I did was get in the way and have to be put to sleep and fall off onto the floor in the middle of everything. I didn’t help at all.”

“Sure you did. You kept Chick from thinking too much.”

“Why didn’t you just put a clothespin on his nose?”

“Trust me, Oly. You were useful.”

From the journal of Norval Sanderson:

“

In the night, while they slept, he went among them and took their swords and shields and stacked them in a ditch by the road. He bound their hands and feet as they lay dreaming. They woke lying in rows on the death cart and their first sight was the body of their leader spread and bound on the great wheel before their eyes, his many wounds dripping into the dust.…”

Which is the way all coups and counter-coups should be accomplished — fast and quiet with only the guilty suffering. I have to hand it to young Arty. He might have made a grand South American general. He went fast and hard through the Arturan camp last night, checking off the names on his “disaffected” list. Seventy people left the camp, escorted by the guards and handed a refund check for whatever they’d paid as an admission fee. Down the road they went, grumbling in their vans and station wagons. but, if they have any sense at all, they know they got off light and lucky

.

If I hadn’t been at the road myself to watch them go I might have speculated otherwise. There will certainly be rumors that Arty was less than fastidious in his techniques — that some were brutalized or even murdered. I might, I say, have considered the possibility myself. But the angry frustration on those faces wasn’t fear. Miz Z. handed out the refund envelopes at the gate, and Arty parked in his chair by the Arturan Administration Office (the camper on the green Dodge pickup) to supervise — a guard beside him and others trotting up and away again for instructions or to report. Altogether an orderly and discreet process. When I wandered up to him he greeted me calmly. “Just quelling this little revolt, Norval,” he said

.

“What about the high priestess? Won’t she fuss?” I asked. It seemed unlike the good doc to give up just because she’d lost her army. The primary weapon she held was her own surgical strike

.

“Dr. Phyllis is being taken care of,” he told me. A guard ran up to say, “That’s the lot,” and Arty headed for the operating theater. I tagged along but he made me wait outside by his chair with the guard while he went up. I stood around listening to the surgery generator hum. Eddie, the guard, sat down in Arty’s chair and dozed. I wandered home, composing imaginary coverage of Arty’s repression of the Great Lobotomy Schism. I didn’t discover Doc P.’s fate until this morning

.

I took a tour of the Arturan camp early and watched the holes in the line close up. All the gaps left by the deserting schismatics — tent spaces, parking spots — that called attention to their emptiness like missing teeth have been sponged away. Miz Z. simply walked the lines and told everyone to move over and fill them. One fight broke out when a novice backed his scrofulous Volkswagen into one of the Harley sidecars, leaving a discernible dent. The other Arturans quickly subdued the irritated Harley owners and the rest of the morning proceeded in untrammeled harmony with much delighted gossiping: “That Arturo! He’s a pisser!” “He showed ’em the road and told ’em they were welcome to it.” “A relief, really. They were disruptive, arrogant. Definitely interfered with my P.I.P.” “Them types wouldn’t be happy anywhere.” “They’ll be causing trouble in some hallelujah bin next.…”