Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

Arty was hurt. I imagined him clambering through the door alone in his chair with the flashlight and plunger to punish me. To hurt me for hurting him. I swelled with enormous love for him. See, I thought, how he has scared us all these years, and he can’t even grip the plunger in that strong, awkward flipper. He needed to hurt me and couldn’t.

He must love me, I thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love. But it seemed true. Unavoidable.

Afternoon. The midway music clanking faintly nearby. Everybody at work but me. I was alone in the van, sick in my cupboard. I was swamped hot and cold with the vicious swim of nausea. The cupboard doors hung open so I could see the gleaming linoleum. Orange brick pattern. I wanted the floor to be blue or grey so it would cool me. The white sunlight through the window hit the bricks with a terrible heat splash that burned through my dark glasses. If I closed my eyes, my head spun and my stomach did its tumbling act. If I rolled over to face the back wall, I smothered. I hugged my knees over my cramping belly and felt sorry for myself. I was almost dozing when I heard a step outside. Chick came in quietly.

“Should have told me, Oly.”

I grunted and stared at his bare, dusty feet kicking the bottoms of his ragged coverall legs. He pulled the curtains and the light greyed mercifully. “You seen Arty?” I asked as his legs reappeared. He crouched on the floor beside me. He stuck out a grubby hand and touched my forehead. “That’s better.” I felt cool and quiet suddenly, as though I’d been floating motionless in a pond for hours.

“He’s working. Still mad.” Chick looked down at me curiously.

I put my hand on my chest where mad Arty had left a ball of sick snakes knotted and jabbing each other poisonously. “This too, please.” Chick frowned at me and the pain narrowed to a single vibrating spot like a bee sting. I tapped my fingers on the pained spot, impatient. “Go on. Keep on. Do the rest, please.”

“I could put you to sleep. Want me to?”

“No. Did you tell him?”

“He didn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just trying to smooth him down. And the Pin Kid is gone.”

• • •

I got up right away and went to the swallowers’ stage, dragging Chick along. We poked our heads in through the rear flap and watched the scuttling shadows on the backdrop as the swallowers went through their act. Their chatter was marked by silences as the swords went down. The swallowers’ oldest girl finished her turn and came rushing out, sweating. I snatched at her arm. “Where’d the Pin Kid go?”

She shrugged, reaching to scratch under her sequined vest.

“Gee, Oly, I don’t know. Daddy’s mad at him. They were supposed to do a turn together. They’ve been rehearsing. But he was gone this morning when we got up. He took his knapsack and bedroll but left his trunk.” She rolled her eyes, perplexed. “He’ll have to come back for the trunk. And he knows we’re breaking down tonight. Maybe he’ll be back before we leave. Maybe he’ll catch us in St. Joe?”

I could see the buckled trunk, drab in the dusty grass against the tent wall with swords and torches collapsing against it. The swallower’s girl tossed her hair back and waved as she made off to the other side of the stage for her second entrance.

Chick was staring at the trunk. I could feel him thinking. The trunk looked abandoned, like letters in an attic, to and from the dead.

“We better go see Arty,” I muttered. Chick nodded, still looking at the trunk.

“Tell them to come back tomorrow.” It was Arty’s voice seeping through the door crack. The bald novice who answered the bell left us waiting so he could see “if the Master has a moment for you.” The shaved head appeared again, smirking consolingly. “I’m afraid the Master …” he started. But I jumped forward, shoving the door wider, hollering, “Arty! You pig shit! Arty!” bursting past the gasping novice with Chick behind me, trotting toward Arty’s desk while I watched his face set in anger and his voice boom, “Get her out! Out!” and the novice’s three-fingered hands closed on my arms, but it was really Chick who lifted me. I knew by the softness, the easiness as I sailed back out through the door and landed on the deck. Chick leaned out and looked at me. “I’ll talk to him. Wait,” he said. Arty’s door closed and I stood waiting. Angry myself, for a change. It was a relief from feeling sorry for myself.

As we moved that night in the dark toward St. Joe, Papa drove with Mama in his co-pilot’s seat. Chick and I huddled in the dining booth and he told me.

“O.K. Now he really does believe me, kind of, because he talked to Horst about the tiger being pregnant and Horst told him it couldn’t happen because she hadn’t been in with anybody. But he’s still pretending he doesn’t believe me. He won’t admit anything. Besides, he’s scared his juice isn’t good. He’s afraid he can’t plant babies. But he says he’s sick of the novices sliming around and he’ll let you come back to work for him.”

“But what about the Pin Kid?”

I couldn’t see Chick’s face in the dark. He waited a few seconds before he answered. A dozen heartbeats.

“He just says, ‘What Pin Kid?’ and then won’t listen. That’s another thing. You’re not to mention the Pin Kid or your baby or any of this to Arty. He wants you to act like always.”

I took Arty his breakfast in St. Joe. I cleaned and dusted and carried messages and shut the novices out of his van completely. I rode on the back of his golf cart to his show tent and waited behind the tank listening to the big St. Joe crowd roaring and sighing like the tide. I scrubbed Arty after the show and rubbed him down and painted him for the next show. I did all the usual things. He was sullen and moody at first but then he forgot and was just like always.

The Pin Kid never came back for his trunk. We never heard anything more about him. When I did think of him it was a pleasure — a fool’s pleasure — that Arty had got rid of him, run him off, scared him away, for fear of losing me. I don’t think Arty had him killed.

Elly was coming back. Iphy tried to hide the change but I sat for hours watching Mumpo twitch and Iphy crooning over him. I saw the differences. When Iphy used both hands to change Mumpo, or to turn him or wash him, Elly no longer collapsed like a spent balloon. She was holding herself upright without Iphy’s arm supporting her. There were also moments when I could have sworn that Elly’s eyes were focused, looking at Mumpo, looking at me, or following the movements of Iphy’s hands. Elly’s mouth stayed shut for longer periods. She drooled less. Once I saw her hand lift deliberately to her swollen, seeping breast.

“I use this little pump on Elly and put the milk into the bottle,” Iphy was explaining. Mumpo lay beside her on the bed sucking noisily at the rubber teat on the bottle. The pale blue milk sloshed and bubbled in the glass as the pull from his mouth drew the level down fast.

“He’s so hungry all the time. It takes both of us to feed him but it’s so awkward holding him and Elly so he can nurse straight from her titties …”

Iphy stole a look to see if I believed that she still had to hold Elly. Elly’s mouth opened and she said, “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”

It was as clear as pizzicato. “Ha ha,” said Iphy, staring at me intently. “She’s been making more sounds lately. Ha ha. Sometimes they’re almost words.”

Perched at the foot of the bed with my feet over the edge so my shoes wouldn’t dirty the sheets, I nodded and said nothing. The bottle ran dry and the deep voice of Mumpo rocked out an echoing belch. The lips of Elly closed primly and her eyes wandered again, soft, not looking while Iphy looked at us all so fast that her eyes must have ached with the whip of their nerve stalks.