Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“No.” Chick reached for Elly while Lily, on her knees beside the bed, moaned, “Baaaby.”

“Elly?” said Chick.

I could see the thing on the floor in front of Lil, the bloody diapered heap of Mumpo.

“I can’t find her!” The creak of fright in Chick’s voice. A long thin tone whined from Lily’s open mouth.

“I killed her,” said Iphy calmly. She looked up at the ceiling from between arms stuck to the sheets by Chick’s mind.

“I can’t fix her!” Chick was crying.

“She killed my little boy.” Iphy’s voice was flat as Kansas.

“Mumpo,” said Chick and he lunged off the bed and saw the mess on the floor at Lily’s knees.

“Oh no,” Chick whispered. “I didn’t feel him go. Mumpo.”

Lily keened. “I did it,” sobbed Chick. “I brought Elly back.”

“Arty,” said Iphigenia. Then she died.

Rooted to the carpet, I stood and watched her go.

Chick whirled to look at her; his tear-slimed face broke. He threw himself on her, his hands grabbing her face. He jammed his face against hers, screaming, “No!”

Lil rocked on her knees beside the cooling pile of Mumpo. The high whine came and went with her breath. Chick’s face and hands were buried in Iphy’s dark mane. He said, “Arty.”

I broke for the door. Arty, I thought. Tell Arty. I hit the ramp as Chick passed me, his blond body hurtling barefoot to the dirt. I chased him. He stopped when he hit the midway. He stamped his feet into the sawdust, gathering himself, staring up the line to where the big tent loomed fifty feet above the booths and rides. “Arty,” he said, and I heard him through the wheezing music from the Mad Mouse as he stood, clenching his fists in the midway, stretching his neck with his eyes closed. No sign appeared around him. The air did not quiver. But silence came off him and the stretch of his neck cords made him old, and the veins blue and hard against his skin, and far down the line Arty’s tent, full of Arty and his cripples, blew upward, incinerating.

The white rocking air hit us before the sound. I heard nothing, but raised my hands against the rushing air, and the fire came, toppling toward us in falling blocks like the wave in a child’s dream, huge, though the torches were booths and tents no taller than a man could touch with his hand. It came billowing, scorching toward us, and the Chick, in his pain, could not hold himself but reached. I felt him rush through me like a current of love to my cross points, and then draw back. I, with my arms lifted, felt his eyes open into me, and felt their blue flicker of recognition. Then he drew back. He pulled out of my separate self and was gone. He turned away — and the fire came. The flames spouted from him — pale as light — bursting outward from his belly. He did not scream or move but he spread, and my world exploded with him, and I, watching, bit down — bit down and knew it — bit down with a sense of enormous relief, and ground my teeth to powdered shards — and stood singed and grinding at the stumps as they died — my roses — Arty and Al and Chick and the twins — gone dustward as the coals rid themselves of that terrible heat.

Many died. Many burned. Babes snuffed to grease smears in the blackened arms of their charcoaled mothers. Sudden switches, lean and brittle, had started as dancing children only seconds before. All the dark, gaping corpses, in their fire-frenzy ballet, flexed and tangled in the dreams of the finders. The firefighters and ambulance shriekers who had worked arson-struck tenements and the crashes of jumbo jets puked and retreated, or quit their jobs to grow lettuce, but still dreamed, after wading the ashes of Binewski’s Carnival Fabulon.

For me there were only Arty and Al and Chick and the twins snatched into nothing — and I with them — grinding, for relief, my teeth into powder.

The cats were lost but Horst made it. He took care of business while I was in the hospital. He brought me the papers to sign but he made the decisions. I didn’t object. He sent what he could find of Zephir McGurk home to his sons. He cleaned and polished the Fly Roper’s stork-shaped scissors before mailing them to the ex-wife in Nebraska. Horst was the one who identified Arty’s boiled body, no longer beautiful, in the dark char left when the big tank vaporized. He gathered the torn, soggy jar kin from the remnants of their shattered jugs and ushered them, with the rest of the Binewski dead, through what he called “decent” cremation.

The family living vans weren’t touched by the firestorm. Horst took out everything personal and then sold the vans. Norval Sanderson died in the Transcendental Maggot booth near Arty’s tent, but his van was safe. Horst was quick enough to get the papers, tapes, and journals out and away before the reporters got hold of them. He stored everything and rented a shabby room for himself near the hospital. He was occupied for months with the dismantling and bankruptcy of the Arturan rest homes. He visited me every day except Wednesdays, when he trekked down to the state mental hospital near Salem to visit Mama in her padded room.

He brought me from the hospital to a small rented room across a dark hall from his own.

“We might as well stay here, in Portland,” he said. “Every place is the same now.”

The Binewski name stank and drew flies. Horst gave my name as McGurk when he rented my room. “Zephir was a good man,” Horst told me. McGurk loved Arty so I kept the name.

Horst was the one who found Crystal Lil after the firestorm. It was a year or more before he told me about it. By then I had a job recording books for the blind. I had begun building a small life in the strange, stuck world. Horst had met a woman with strong thighs and a Siamese cat. He was moving in with her. He took me to McLarnin’s bar for our goodbye. Horst had a few extra jolts and then told me.

“I was looking for your papa. It was all over but the screaming. I came around the end of a van and saw him on the ground. He must have just stepped down from the generator truck when it blew. Your grandpa’s silver urn was lying in the gravel beyond him, battered. There was blood on it. I think it was Als.”

Horst couldn’t look at me. He wound his thick fingers in his grey mustache and glared into his glass.

“I knew he was dead and I stayed back. I couldn’t go up to him. I sat down in the gravel by the urn but I couldn’t touch that, either. Then, here comes your mama, calling ‘Al’ like it was suppertime. She was off her head. Out of it, you understand.

“She runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse — pulls her skirt down — hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling at his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore — not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against him and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’ ”

Mumpo was not quite three years old when he died. And you, Miranda, were two, stringing beads and eating vanilla wafers in Sister Lucy’s nursery. But you were nine years old before the doctors let me bring Crystal Lil home to the house on Kearney Street.

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, “lived,” unless that place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires.