Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

I look back. She is poised, her milk-veiled eyes aimed in my general direction, her head tilted back, listening. “You’re welcome,” I say, and she goes back into her room.

I climb all the way up to Miranda’s door and knock. Then I hear a soft male voice laughing inside and turn away. She opens. “Miss McGurk!” smiling. “You’re sent by fate to try munching Gorgonzola and artichoke-heart salad while listening to …”

As she tries to pull me in, I try to pull her out into the hall. “Could I just speak to you for one moment?” She shrugs and steps out, folding her arms, looking down at me with her eyebrows pinched in concentration. “Something is wrong with Lily.”

Her eyes spring open and she sets to move quickly, “Is she hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?”

Gratified, I pat her arm, “No, no. She’s acting a little odd.”

Miranda hoots. “How can you tell?”

“No. She’s acting strangely. I can’t be here for a bit. I have to work. Could you keep an eye on her? Tonight? Just stroll down and listen for her breathing. You can hear her in the night if you put your ear to her door. She has a heavy sigh in her sleep. And if you can’t hear her, or if she sounds strange …”

Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. “Sure. I’ll check on her. I’m not working tonight. Don’t worry.”

Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, “Miranda?” and then her door shuts quietly.

I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pass down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily’s closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.

I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil’s door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.

I sulk all the way back to the tinhorn apartment. I want my own moldy room with its pale stench and its frail, maniac noise. The new building seems lifeless, incapable of decay. Its halls are narrow and pharmaceutically bright. Each floor is the same as all the rest. The only sound is the faint hum of the elevator. The orange carpet from the hall spills under my door, flooding the whole apartment. The rooms are low and square and it feels rented because I refuse to actually live here. In my home the air reeks of dust and jumbled layers of life, and it is dim unless you are right next to a window.

Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her.

What a bouncer she would have made! Shy as an egg, but so disguised. I can’t help it. She charms me. To see her hunched over her plastic tray — chin shoved straight at the big screen, her paw pokes a fork in the air, and she laughs, “Hu-hu-hu,” through her bulging cheeks.

“Smart little shit, I’m tellin’ ya!” she says after cleaning her cheeks with a gulp. “Lookit ’er drive that sucker!”

The young woman on the screen is bent over a complicated hunk of shiny machinery. The driving Miss Lick finds so admirable is a sure-fingered dial-twiddling and button-tapping.

Miss Lick scoots back in her chair and lunges for another flabby forkful of limp turkey from her compartmentalized supper.

She loves this — carrying our Lickety Split food trays back through the discreet door in the big bathroom to her home-movie theater, perching on straight chairs with the trays on our knees, watching the screen full of Miss Lick’s girls. She adores the reruns, and nearly cries at the “before” footage, angry grieving for the misery of their lives before she rescued them. She is hypnotized by the surgery or treatment flicks, chewing slowly, nudging me with an informative elbow and a nod when a particularly smooth bit of scissor or saw work is goring its way across the screen. Now that she allows me to see these segments, she is anxious to impress me. But her joy is in the work shots of the “successes.”

“Look at that! Know what she’s doing? Reading the rings of rat-assed Saturn! Can you imagine? Six years ago the only rings she knew were for slipping over limp cocks to make ’em rise!”

The young woman in the white coat reaches for the paper that is spewing from a printer. She turns toward us and the light to read. She smiles, a sudden grin of utterly cheerful mischief flashing out of her intense flesh.

I want to ask what it is that she hasn’t got anymore. The lab coat hides her chest. Was it breasts? Two new figures appear — a plain woman and a spavined boy, twenty or twenty-one years old. They stand at attention in front of Miss Lick’s girl as she speaks.

“Teaching ’em! See that? She’s got these fuckers trailing after her!”

Miss Lick’s big hand bunches and jabs my thigh sideways in hilarious friendship. “Eh? Eh?”

My tray flips forward, spewing goo, and she’s on her knees choking with apologies as she plucks up the gobs and wipes up the smears. “Creeping Christ! I’m such a clod! Are you all right? Hey, I’ll have a fresh new one for you in thirty seconds flat. Just sit. No, no, I’m going to.”

She tears me up. I sit here laughing at her. She is a galumphing dugong, an elvish ox, a sentimental rhino.

“They’re like my kids, all of them.” She sniffs, her thick forehead creasing, anxious that I should understand and approve.

“Did you, no offense now, but did you ever wish you’d had kids? Not the man bit, but the kid bit? No? Well, you’re right, I know it. You’re right. But you want to make a difference. A person wants to feel as though they’ve accomplished something.”

She mooches around for my approval. She’s a sullen buffalo with the world but she’s a child to me. She is bigger than Papa. She could break me with two fingers. But she can be small around me. She can chatter to me though she sticks to brusque efficiency with everybody else. Oh, she is solicitous and protective with her girls, but never childlike. It’s because I like her. Arty was right. She soaks it up like booze and it turns her to water, makes her defenseless.

Am I the first person who’s ever liked her? It makes me sad. She’s pretty lovable, after all. She knows how to enjoy things, and she’s so decent it’s scary.

There she sits, sprawled in a hard, straight chair, hour after hour. It never occurs to her to drag in a soft chair for herself. She thought about cushions for me, though. Draped my straight chair with towels from the bathroom because one day in the pool she saw red lines on my hump. I’d been leaning on a locker. She never forgot. She always makes sure I’m comfortable.

“So why don’t you bring in an armchair for yourself?” I asked her.

“What? Too much trouble. I don’t need it. I’m padded.”

She’s wearing flannel pajamas and a floppy bathrobe. Her potato feet stick out, the soles jammed against the tile floor, propping her in the chair as she reaches, sorting through the film disks. Her chubby toes sprout, wiggling, from the main tuber.

“Got a new scout flick today.” Her approach to the scouting tapes of potential recruits is different, intense, questioning, critical, analytical, running them again, backing them up to replay a gesture, a frown, a smile.

“This slut tried a one-handed pigeon drop on me. As soon as she discovered this bag, brown paper bag, under her ass on the park bench, I smelled old tuna. She screeches ‘For heaven’s sakes!’ I sat there watching the real goddamn pigeons crapping on the lawn, listening to her go on about ‘Where could all that money have possibly come from?’ and then finding a little brown envelope of snapshots. Twelve-year-old sucking a Doberman’s dick, and she’s miscarrying with righteous indignation and trying to get me to pay attention and all the time I’m thinking, ‘This is where I’ve got to at last. I’m looking like a gobbling pigeon, just like all the drooling biddies shuffling on the mall.’ It makes me bitter. I reached in my wallet and pulled out a hundred. ‘Now, honey,’ I says, and I hand it to her, watching her eyes freeze as she shuts up. ‘You take this so you don’t get your ass kicked when you get back to the slimy pimp that runs you. Save us all trouble and time.’ She starts up protesting, waving this lunch bag of funny money at me. ‘Believe me, sweetheart,’ I says, ‘you’re not cut out for this business.’ I went back to the office and crabbed at people all afternoon. Anyway, I saw her again in the Park Blocks while I had the equipment.”