Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“Water in your nose?” she asks, pumping her huge pillow hand gently against my hump. “Did you swallow some?”

Looking up through my smeared green lenses I see a roll of fat covering the artery in Miss Lick’s throat.

When I refuse to go to dinner at her house Miss Lick wants to carry me up to my apartment and tuck me into bed. “God, I’m so thoughtless!” she groans as she wheels the big sedan through the dark streets. “I act as though you’re a goddamned mountain like me!”

“Not at all,” I squawk, with my fingers clutching the soft leather of the front seat. “Not at all,” I repeat, grabbing with one hand at the dashboard and the other at the armrest to keep from hurtling into the dark well of legroom as Miss Lick stops for a light.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come up with you? I could make you some soup. I know you don’t eat.”

“Not at all.” I fiddle with the door handle, and the door eases open at last and a crack of cool air slips in, dulling the hot reek of her chlorine flesh in the car. “I’m going to unplug the phone and crawl right into bed. I’m recording early tomorrow.”

Her big hand touches my hump as I slide toward the pavement. “Let me give you a lift to the radio station in the morning,” she urged.

“Not at all.” I can barely think anymore. If I don’t get away from her I will disintegrate and ruin everything.

“Thank you so much. I’ll see you in the pool tomorrow evening,” and I grab the car door with both hands and slam it on her goodnight and turn away, steering at top speed for the lobby entrance because she never pulls away from the curb until she sees me safe inside.

This building is new and Miss Lick could put a fist through my front door as easy as belching, which she does glibly. Miss Lick can belch every syllable of the name “Harry Houdini” on demand and enjoys being asked. Still, I lock the flimsy veneer behind me and then unplug the phone. I told her I was going to bed and I can’t risk a busy signal if she rings to check on me.

It is garbage night for Crystal Lil. I have to go home. Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins. I use the footstool to stare into the mirror over the sink in the all-new bathroom. Straightening my wig, adjusting my glasses, I smirk snidely at myself because it serves me right for being such a flabby clot as to lose my nerve. Getting all choked up with sympathy for Miss L. A good two-mile walk in the dark and cold will teach my knees and ankles a little respect for discipline and self-control.

Fatigue makes me giddy. By the time I get to the alley behind Lily’s house, my head is floating several feet above my body and I have a bitter tendency to giggle. I can see myself and the view is pathetic. I don’t dare use the front door in case Miss Lick is pursuing her surveillance hobby.

The old dwarf rolls up the cat-shit dark stairs of the decrepit garage to get to the roof. Her feet hurt and her knees are pleading for a transfer to Bermuda. “Eeh,” grunts the frog-faced albino. Her hip joints have gone past red-hot to a temperature unfamiliar even to the flap-titted hunchback. “Hunh,” says the bald-headed mother of morons, as she stops to lean against the open door to the roof.

The air is grey, lit by a street lamp at the end of the alley. The garage roof is flat and attached at the rear to the tall wood house. The rain pops and silvers on the slimed pool of water that fills the center of the roof. The house fire escape sinks its feet in the roof tar. Miss Oly, the third or fourth Binewski child, depending on whether you count heads or asses, takes off her blue-tinted spectacles and rubs the sweat from under her bulging pink eyes and off the bridge of her wide, flat nose and then hooks the glasses back over her ears and settles them in place. Raising the entire flesh of her forehead and skull for lack of eyebrows, Ms. Binewski proceeds, with anxious care, to roll bowleggedly away from the cat stench of the stairway, around the edges of the rain pool, making for the first length of the cast-iron fire ladder. There she goes, humping up the damp, sooty rungs. She stops climbing and hooks her chin over the rung in front of her to rest for three breaths, thinking it may be time to get a cane. Or maybe a pair of canes hefty enough to help a burst toad of an elderly cretin up such flights of carpenterial fancy as those cat-slimed stairs in the garage without having to reach out and touch each sodden step with a hand.

She, this Oly, has reached the first slat landing of the fire escape and is hauling her thick carcass onto it with her spider arms and resting again — or, more accurately, peering through the dirt-fogged window of the room that looks out of this arse-alley backside of the noble West Hills, and, if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed glasses she’s wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.

No, she claims she’s not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeballs. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is “her” window and the big dusty room on the other side is “her” room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished.

There, is she crying again? Or is she only realizing that if she had washed that smog-clogged hunk of glass anytime in the last three years she might actually see her reading chair and her hotplate sitting on the cupboard and the cupboard doors that open into the blanket nest where she sleeps with the doors snugged shut and her knees tucked up to her chin. This failure in the service of transparency is disheartening to the delicate mucous linings of the amphibious Miss Oly. Picturing her cranky joints curled in her own warm nest causes further heat and discharge from her cherry-pink eyeballs.

Quietly she slips the lock, pushes the window upward, snakes through into the warm dark, and feels the cushion-thick carpet beneath her brogans. She smiles her frog smile and considers calling a taxi for the trip back since surely she has punished herself sufficiently for what was, after all, an understandable weakness. Next time, she muses, I’ll simply stick my hand in boiling water.

I go downstairs and yell, “Garbage!” three times at Lil’s open door before she sits back from her magnifying-glass approach to the evening game show. Her white head moves, groping with ears and nose more than her sad, jellied remnants of eyes. Each time I look at her the white hair is paler and thinner, like spun glass above her mummy-grey scalp.

“Garbage?” she screams.

“Garbage!” I bellow.

She launches from her chair, leaping upward, neck extended, the tender underside of her jaw exposed in a flesh wedge aimed at heaven. Sailing the room, tacking from chair to table to cupboard, hand over hand, she locates her two wastebaskets and the tidy, plastic-wrapped bundle beneath the sink, clutches them to her breast, and turns toward the doorway, searching for me. I step in just far enough to grab the stuff. She opens her arms, letting it all go down to me. This is our Thursday ritual. To complete it, she will nod and turn away silently. I will lug the stuff to the junk closet at the end of the hall, where the big black bags of garbage from the roomers sit. Then I will drag all the bags out to the sidewalk, stacking them in the plastic barrels that sit there all week. That is all. We’ve done it this way for years. By the time I climb the stairs back to my room, Lil will be resubmerged in her struggle with the magnifying glass and the TV screen. Beyond the chant of “Garbage” we never speak. But tonight she cracks the mold. She follows me to the door of her room, leans there, waiting as I drag the big sacks past her. As I open the big front door onto the wet night, she calls out, “Thank you,” in a clear, unbroken voice.