Attic by Katherine Dunn
I don’t know if I’ll go live with Jerry Simmons—why not—but the having to talk—and dress—and move around in rooms with people in them—the forcing myself to listen and talk and smile and pretend in all the ways that I’m alive—why couldn’t it be that there would be a bed and I would lie there and when he came not have to turn my head to look at him or move my hips or groan or giggle or bite or pay any attention—why couldn’t he just put it in and do it and then go away without my having to say and do—I would like that—and I could just lie and sleep—I am so tired of not caring—but what could I care for?
In the morning they brought my white blouse with sweat in the seams and black inside the collar and the straight jumper much too tight now and the black boots, pirate boots soft black suède to above my knees with leather laces behind and inch heels and up to the knee so tight and warm but the foot is stiff and I could feel it crackle as I walked. How clean the heels clicking after rubber-soled saddle shoes with no laces. My hair hung straight down pushed behind my ears which I had only noticed lately. The hard bump behind them and the little places in them so smooth with the finger inside and in school I looked at other people and thought the ones whose ears were lower than their eyes were stupid and the ones whose ears were on the same level or above were smart. The tops of my ears are as high as my eyebrows. We sat on a gray wood bench in the Siesta Time 24 Hour Laundry looking at pastel Mexicans in pastel ponchos in fluorescent white light. When I looked down at him I could barely see him he was so dark. It was my period and even with Tampax he tries to run his nose in between my legs. I lie on the bunk trying to cry, trying to feel bad saying over and over how I miss that dog more than anything but it’s no use I don’t miss anybody I’ve ever known or any place I have been and am no longer. I’ve never missed any body or place only good food and warm beds and pleasant weather and not having blisters and things that really touch me not things I have to pretend touch me and pretend I miss when it was really only something I couldn’t say like the bathroom being warm and right next to the room I’m in and here the toilets in the same room and there’s only Blendina so I don’t miss anything. I don’t believe it’s people anytime but being touched in a nice way or feeling the growing in you when they say something nice and when you know they like you and the nice touching and nice growing could go on or be there when you wanted it and here I don’t want it but have what I do want except the sleep. Sometimes I wake up.
I am burning my hair in the old barn in the orchard. The fire is burning on the dirt floor near the doorway. The old school desks stand in a corner on iron rails. Each seat is the front of a desk. Each desk is the back of a seat with empty holes next to the pencil groove. In the high dark corners of the barn old tools hang and the shingles eaten by moss have fallen around them. I am kneeling in the dirt by the fire. My hands are white with the cold and the scissors are white in the smoke. The pages from the book are browning and curling and the flame is invisible in the light from the door. Now with the scissors heavy and sharp—bruising the thumb where I press to close them—bruising the thumb where I pull to open them and my head heavy and my left arm heavy holding the hair—the long hair brown in the dark of the barn and pale in the light from the door falls into the fire—is cut and falls dead from my hands to the fire. First once all over till the hair is short with the long scissor chewing and then all over feeling blind for the tufts and snatches till the hair is furry against the skull and nothing moves in the wind. There is only the soft brush against the palm when I rub the skull. I am cold without the hair and the fire is hot with the hair and sizzles stinking. Now K in the chair in the orchard thinking of snakes in the straight-backed chair in the orchard. At the foot of the hill is the garbage dump with the Goat Woman’s tin trailer and the goats browsing jerkily in the garbage. The winter sun drips through the orchard. The head is cold and the feet in the grass and there is something moving inside me. I ate nothing that could move but in my belly something not me is moving.
I am lying on my back on the sidewalk. Beside my head her feet in the old black brogans leaning toward the outside—the wild Argyle socks fallen down at her weak ankles—my right eye looks straight up her skirt to girdle and veins and thin scarred flesh and the left eye goes up to where her elbow is jerking. Her voice goes all around above me circling the people and returning before it drops to me—her arms lift and fall the palms out—she is swearing my virginity—the people pass in fashionable alligator, cordovan and suède—heels clicking efficiently—toes pointing out—I cannot see past my belly—she is handing out the leaflets and shouting—she is telling them to look at me—her skirt lifts high in back as she bends to point at my belly—she is telling them it is Jesus—the traffic lights are clicking—I can hear the shoeshine boys snapping their rags—he looks down at me passing—I can see him for three of his steps looking at me—his shoes are very fine—he wants me right here on the street with my belly and the old dress and she crying Jesus above me—he’s gone and the pains begin again—I press down with my elbows into the concrete and down with my heels bare and my back arches pushing down inside me and the sweat is cool and the sidewalk is hot and my legs spread all by themselves and the thing in my belly moves and the grainy burning in my throat where I cannot vomit and she is jumping and pointing and the sweat is running down between her legs and shining on the plaid in the socks and my neck is tight—all of my face pulling against it—and the muscles in my feet and calves are locked and screaming—I cannot breathe though the air in my mouth wide open is cool and dry all down my throat and the pushing is pushing like the most enormous shit—my knees bend up—my back lifts and the pushing does not stop and there are people watching now and whispering and she is shouting—I can barely see her face she is looking up between my legs where the old skirt has fallen back and everything is wet and hot my hair and the sidewalk beneath me and it is moving and tearing—I am tearing and pushing and she is reaching out with her square hands that do—she is reaching into me and pulling—I see her eyes pale with no lids and her mouth open loose and her saliva dripping and she is pulling it from me red and shapeless and the cord dripping red coils long from me to it and she stands up again with her arms stretched out and the thing red in her hands and the long cord dangling with the sack at the end—she shows them shouting and the red runs down her hands and down her arms dripping off at the elbow and I looking up see the red thing moving in her hands and the people are turning away and she is screaming her hair shaking down onto the red thing—she shakes it between her hands pressing in on it with her hands and twisting it in her hands—my eyes close they are so dry and open and the screaming stops and her face is buried in the red thing in her hands and her hair shakes onto her red hands and I can see her jaws moving—the muscles in front of her ears clenching and I hear the crunching and the sounds from her throat and the tearing and her face lifts bloody to the eyes and her mouth is spewing blood and she swallows long and slow and her eyes lift above the people passing—her lips lifting away from her teeth and her teeth red and running she says Jesus…Jesus…
—
I always remember and believe what I remember. My mother sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper and the mustached man in the billed cap in dots on the first page “Stalin is dead! Why, he died from eating two whole chickens at a single meal. It gave him a stroke. He was always a big eater.” I remembered and said that in school. They laughed. The little girl next door and I sat in the tire swing in front of the house where my brother was born. I said what’s fuck and she said a man gets mad at his wife and kills her and lays her out on her back and her sister finds out and kills the husband and lays him on top of his wife. His brother finds out and kills the sister and lays her on top then her husband kills him and all the relatives find out and kill each other and each one is laid on top of the last one and the pile gets higher and higher until all the friends and relatives are dead and on the pile and that’s what fuck means and go get fucked and get laid and all tho
There was a window behind the judge and no jury but black wood and the lawyer was there and didn’t like me and Joyce was ahead of me with her fur coat and fat cheeks and short curly hair and she got off in her husband’s custody standing in front of the tall desk looking up and the desk was part of the wall and he came to it through another room so there was no way to go around behind it from this room. He didn’t wear a wig but had a skinny face and gray glasses and she took her coat from the rail and a man came to her young and dark and walked out she bouncing. I came up to the desk and a detective was there with something I had written but he didn’t read it. He said what it said but I know it didn’t say that and the young man was there from his job at the upholstery factory and he blushed and said “She got down on her knees to me” and the judge looked at me “You got down on your knees to him?” The Kresge’s manager was there and the words fell in neon and zeon and freon glowing in glass tubes and clinking and crazing and I lied and they lied and the lawyer lied but the judge found me guilty which was true. I don’t understand.
I walk back to the railing and Jerry Simmons is waiting for me. There were movies in Gen. Sci. Class in eighth grade with the shades pulled down and Mr. Armstrong in his crew cut fiddling with the projector. Standard Oil movies of draining African swamps and spraying mosquitoes’ beds with kerosene because the tsetse fly—black man peeking around the corner of a grass house break to same black man lying on the ground shaking under a G.I. blanket in the blazing sun shivering and shaking like mad his eyes white to the tops Walter Cronkite voice droning newsworthily yellow fever malaria—naked woman but she’s black so it’s cool cut to woman with elephantiasis in her legs so full the skins splitting like a frankfurter cut to man—just flash man pushing a loaded wheelbarrow Cronkite voice drones unemotional elephantiasis of the scrotum and then cut to diagrams of the mother anopheles before it hits us that they have just shown us a picture of some poor bastard wheeling his balls around in a wheelbarrow. He trying to look sincere in a madras tie and holey face with used-car salesman in every crease and I walk out with my feet touching the tiles all along the insides and he takes my arm and his slacks have cuffs and they are loose from the waistband with tucks in the front and sides and he has a silver bucking bronc on his buckle and spumoni specks in the charcoal gray of his jacket and his teeth are always showing long and with wide dark spaces between and he shows them flat and square as chisels between long slug lips and has money in his hand. “Get yourself some duds Baby, there’s a room for you at the Senator, pick you up at seven.” I’m on the street walking past a high board fence hiding some construction. Cross the street before the Kresge’s some hotel room with a small window and a toilet behind the door. The bed is too soft. I sink in it. I am too soft. I am on a train alone. I don’t remember the middles here. I am on a train going west and the snow covers the black earth thinly and the train takes three days to get where it is going. Three days and I do not flush while the train is in the station and there are rabbit tracks in the snow as the train passes. I in green plush with my face to the green window and no one sits beside me all the way.
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Katherine Dunn, Attic
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