Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

“You were pink and sweaty and then boom, your face was …”

Laughing, I flop back on the heap so I can look up at her. “I had a brother who used to call me shit-for-brains.”

She grabs at the ancient wheelbarrow that lugs the tools and drags it toward me. “Brother? That’s something. Is he dead? You never mention family. Kind of figured you for an orphan. Born of joy and mirth, like. Something like that.”

She’s reaching under my arms to lift me like a child. I hate having her lift me. She does it too easily. She folds me up tidily in the wheelbarrow and I lean back, trying not to be angry. Her chin stretches like the prow of a Buick as she shakes her head. “Hang on for the ride!” and she runs, trundling me and the barrow, the branches whipping the sky above her and her pink and blinking face grinning like the hilarious moon, all the way to her car.

“If I could think of a way to seal her asshole, I’d do it. And maybe stitch her mouth shut and feed her with a tube going in under her chin.” Miss Lick is half-joking in the elevator. Her hands are shoved flat into the pockets of her suit jacket and she rocks back on the thick heels of her crocodile shoes and rolls a chuckle at the mirror-bronze ceiling of the rising cubicle. “You’ll see what I mean. This little broad hasn’t a hair left, bald as you are. A double mastectomy. And she’s still got that sex thing. If I let her walk from her room to the can, three men would climb out of the light sockets on the way and find holes in her to cram their dicks into.”

The elevator stops and the door sighs open. Miss Lick lowers her voice and mutters down at me, “I’ve been thinking testosterone. You’ll see what I mean.” A silvery grandma-nurse passes us in the hall, nodding her little grey bun and her perky white cap and twinkling, “Good afternoon, Miss Lick!” with only a slight hesitation in her smile for me.

We are visiting Miss Lick’s latest, a nineteen-year-old gymnast with a bent for engineering and a yen to get into the space program. Miss Lick likes the idea of producing an astronaut but is hampered in her efforts by the requirements of the work. “She’s got to be physically functional all the way. It’s a nuisance.”

Jessica H. is in Miss Lick’s favorite nursing home, recuperating from the relatively minor surgery that closed her vagina and removed her clitoris. The girl has pushed her sheets off and is languidly stroking her firm, golden belly with one finger. The bandages look like a diaper. Her chest is blank and nippleless but the scars are almost invisible.

“Jessica!” booms Miss Lick from the doorway. The girl’s smooth, oval head turns casually on the pillow and she looks at us with long, oval eyes, the lids as hairless as sea shells. Then her lush, wide mouth opens slightly in a smile and she is looking at me as Miss Lick bustles with the flowers and rumbles awkwardly, “Want you to meet Miss McGurk. Olympia McGurk. A good pal of mine.”

The girl is smiling gently with cheekbones that could cut your throat and a nose and chin from some old painting that I can’t quite remember. While this face is delicately smiling, the long throat and the flat muscular chest and the round shoulders begin to shake with laughter. With this laugh still going she says to me, “How much did she pay you? A few million, I hope!”

Miss Lick watches me surface and blow. She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool. “It’s amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn’t it?” I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.

She’s right. We each appear totally alone in our lives. I’m the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work. She is the muscular monolith, cut off by brass, stalking around in her old man’s ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch. We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans. We each have a secret family. Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine. All we’ve really lacked is someone to tell. Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper. The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers.

Does she lie to me? She keeps things from me. She wouldn’t let me watch the surgery or treatment sections of her home movies for a long time. Does she keep more aside? Hide more of herself? Horrors she doesn’t trust me with? Titillations she is ashamed of? I sail along thinking she is perfectly open. Her eyes are as wide as a child’s when she talks to me. But maybe I’m the fool. Maybe lying so constantly has burnt my view. Believing that she is fooled, I consider her too simple to lie.

We are alone in the pool. The lifeguard has gone for the night, trusting Miss Lick to lock up. Miss Lick sits on the side, her huge legs drooping into the water. She shudders as I stop to breathe at her end.

“Do you ever,” her eyes circle the echoing green of the big room, “do you ever get the feeling somebody’s watching us?”

My head swivels, searching automatically, though I know that the watcher is me. “You’re just tired and spooky. You need your supper.”

She shrugs it off. Forgets. But does she really know? Is she playing me while I play her?

It rains every night now and the air is soft in the morning. Almost warm. A faint haze, not quite green, softens the iron branches of the trees. Miranda’s anatomy drawings are finished. She has mounted them on cardboard and she stores them in a huge plastic binder.

“I want you to look at them.”

“I can’t.”

“All this time you’ve never looked.”

“Just not at the ones of me. I don’t want to see myself.”

“You look in mirrors. I’m better than any goddamned mirror.”

“It’s not your work. I like your other drawings. This just scares me.”

“I take it personally. This is my best work. The best I’ve ever done. I don’t see you as ugly. I see you as unique and wonderful.”

“It’s hard dealing with you seeing me at all.”

“Miss-fucking-steerious! I’m handing the whole mess in tomorrow morning. The competition results will come out in two weeks, the day before I go into the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“Or whatever. I don’t know where Miss Lick has that work done.”

“I have to get back to work now.”

“The semester ends Friday.”

“Thank you so much for the tea.”

“I’m calling Miss Lick today to arrange things.”

“See you soon.”

“I may not come back here afterward.”

I trotted down the hall with her leaning out of her doorway to talk to my back.

“I’ll be in a nursing home for a while and then I’ll probably move away.”

I’m not even tempted to anger. Time is a rap on the ear with a brass knuckle. I’ve been letting it ride. Having my little cake — chummy with Miranda over tea, chummy with Miss Lick over home movies — snuggling down in a thick-headed fantasy that what little I was doing would make the difference, as if putting across the lie was success. All I had to do was accept mild discomfort in a strange room, sneak up the fire escape to visit Lily and Miranda, and this puny martyrdom would miraculously obliterate the problem.

The next morning I get to the club an hour before the lifeguard arrives and use the key Miss Lick has given me to get into the pool locker room. I lug two gallon jugs of concentrated ammonia in a shopping bag into the dressing room, stack the plastic bottles in my locker, and cover them with the bag.

The door from the locker room into the footbath is solid wood hung in a steel frame. The auger is an ancient handcrank from the landlord’s tool kit in Lily’s basement. On my knees on the cold tiles I open the door slightly to slide a single sheet of the Oregonian underneath. The door swings shut, leaving half the paper on each side to catch the wood dust. I drill the hole under the lowest hinge and within a quarter inch of the frame. The bigger bit enlarges the hole to a one-inch notch in the door’s edge. I wrap the dust in the paper, ready to carry away with the auger.