Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“What for?” I felt a fist of fear in my gut.

“I just want to see him!” He spun his chair away with a last look at my face. He disappeared into his room. I had hurt him. I tried to feel the little thing in my own belly. Nothing. But it was there. I’d make it up to him.

Mumpo changed people’s names. Suddenly Iphy was Little Mama to all the redheads and wheelmen, booth rats and artistes . Lily and Al were Gramma and Grampa. Even uncle and auntie jokes made the rounds along with Papa’s licorice-marinated stogies and the bottomless keg on tap in Horst’s van. But Mumpo himself lay like a big sagging pumpkin in the blankets. He was a bottomless craving and he was cunning. Arty saw it immediately. Iphy knew. I knew. Lily and Al refused to notice. Chick knew and didn’t care. Chick loved the big glob.

That first day I poked my head through the twins’ bedroom door and saw everything covered with white sheets and smelling of disinfectant. Lily hunched over the baby where he lay, naked and huge in soft, un-moving mounds on a wheeled metal table, as she sponged him, cooing. Chick was watching Iphy. He sat on the edge of the big bed and held her hand and Elly’s pale useless hand, the arms overlapping so he could hold them both.

“How are they?” I whispered. He grinned the kid grin at me as though he’d walked on his hands or found a frog.

“Bushed. Pooped out. Beat.” They were asleep. Iphy as bloodless as a rain-drained worm. Elly with her mouth ajar and a thin trickle of saliva shining on her jaw.

“I could have made it quicker but Mama said it was important to labor. It didn’t hurt them, though. I didn’t let it hurt them. Did you see him?” His eyes glanced toward the flesh mound. I shook my head and moved over to where Mama could smile at me. She reached out an arm and hugged me. “Isn’t he amazing?” His eyes were open, filled with black. The eyes blinked and squinted suspiciously.

“Could you take him over to Arty? Arty is anxious to see him.”

Chick said it was O.K. and Lily chirruped and twittered excitedly, wrapping the baby to travel fifty feet, and exclaiming over his weight when she hoisted him across her chest.

In Arty’s van she laid the big clump on Arty’s desk and Mumpo’s eyes went sharp and narrow, looking at Arty, and Arty glared at Mumpo and the two male things looked at each other with hate. Lily claimed that Mumpo couldn’t focus his eyes yet but it was wonderful how he seemed to look right at you, though he’s only an hour old and ought to be so tired he’d sleep, and she laughed at how excited Papa was thinking up “Mumpo the Mountain” and other fat-man tags for Mumpo’s show, though you couldn’t be sure with a baby and for all we knew he’d be skinny by the time he was two.

Arty stared at the flesh that oozed from the blankets and finally broke in. “O.K. Take him away. He needs to sleep.”

Lily took him out and that was the last time Arty ever looked at Mumpo.

The stick hit my ear and I yelled into the blanket as I woke up. My right arm jerked and the stick jabbed my elbow and the sting from my ear and my elbow pulled the plug on my nose and eyes so I looked wildly through the swimming murk of my watering sinuses as the white beam from a flashlight in the dark blinded my naked eyes and the stick whapped out of the blur again. “Waa!” I yelled.

Then I heard the unmistakable rasp of Arty, angry, sputtering behind the stick, “Cunt! … Slimy! Twisted bitch!” as the stick wavered toward me and I curled in my cupboard with my arms shielding my eyes, yelling, “Arty!” and the stick kept coming and I got a foot tangled in Mama’s old white satin robe, which I used as a top blanket, and Arty’s voice screeched in the light-smeared liquid blackness, “I’ll break you, you stinking …” and the stick was on its way again and I grabbed for it, snatched at the end as it passed my eyes and was amazed as the whole stick came loose in my hands with a slight tug and Arty wailed “Shiiit!” and I saw the rubber bulb at the other end of the stick and felt a laugh trying to choke its way past my thumping heart because Arty was hitting me with a toilet plunger.

Then the lights went on and Papa was there, hairy-bellied in his pajama pants and Mama blinking and fuzzy behind him. I scrambled for my glasses and jammed them on so I could see Arty crying naked in his wheelchair with the blue veins pumping through the fine skin on his head and the flashlight on the seat beside him with its lens glowing a feeble yellow against the ceiling light.

“What the fuck?” Papa was gasping, and Mama fluttered and I stared through my safe green lenses at Arty, gibbering with frustration in his chair because he couldn’t keep a grip on the stick with his flipper even though his belly rolled in crevices of muscle, though his chest was a plate of bronze, though his ribs jutted with wings of muscle, though he could lift a hundred and fifty pounds with his neck, he still couldn’t hold the stick to hurt me when he needed to.

“She’s knocked fucking up!” howled Arty. Papa had his gentle hands on the smooth gold skin of the Aqua Boy, holding him against the back of the chair, saying, “For Christ’s bloody sake, son,” and wouldn’t let go.

Mama brought a blanket to put around Arty. I crouched deep in my cupboard with the old white satin robe pulled up to my eyes because Arty knew. But he knew and was angry. The stomach thing happened, as though the baby, the tiny frog babe, Miranda, was trying to crawl out and escape by any route possible from his fury. I sat there holding in everything, clenching my ass and my cunt and my jaw and my eyes and praying the broadcast prayer of the godless, “Please, please, no, please.”

Arty got his jaw back in order and resigned himself to draining his anger in words. He told them. “Ask Chick. He told me. She’s stuffed. Knocked up. The stupid traitor.”

Then I saw that Chick hadn’t told him everything. Arty was leaning back in his chair and Papa sank down on the bench by the door trying to get it straight. “Oly, what’s he saying? Is this true?” I never opened my mouth but sat there, curled in amazement at Papa being Papa again for this one groggy moment. “But that’s no reason! There is no excuse,” rapped Papa, “for attacking your sister physically!”

Arty rambled bitterly, “That hunchback bastard redhead guy, the Pin Kid. Moving in on the shit-sucking show, knock up the boss’s daughter … work his way in … get his claws on the money.”

I saw Arty shaking in his blanket, so hard that the wheels of his chair squeaked in minuscule quivers on the floor as he talked.

“He’s drunk or stoned,” came Mama’s voice.

“Drunk? Have you been hitting that stuff?” Papa wheeled Arty away through the door to his own van and I lay down and watched the door close and pulled the white robe up to my chin as Mama folded up on the floor beside my cupboard and looked in at me. Her soft face was crumpling with weakness and the loosening of her fiber, but her hands reached in and touched my face, long, cool fingers stroking my cheeks as she whispered, “Did he hurt you, dove?”

When I shook my head she took a deep breath and went on, “Tell Mama now, are you pregnant?” and I nodded, staring at her through my green lenses, and she nodded seriously back at me. Her pale hair floated raggedly around her head. “Are you glad, dream? Or is it something you don’t want?” Her whole body smelled of cinnamon and vanilla as she leaned forward, asking.

“Glad,” I croaked, and she leaned in to lay her cheek on mine.

Papa came back and patted my head and took Mama back to bed. I lay in the dark listening but they kept their voices low and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was probably my roaring blood that drowned them out. I was happy.