Attic by Katherine Dunn

  Her shoulders slump and she attacks the bugs again smiling vaguely.

  Time moves around me like water. I feel so busy. I would hate to be interrupted. Marie is talking to her sister in Wichita by means of her sweater collar—that has to be listened to. Then there are chants and the bladder to think about. And the cold.

  It’s very late. The voices in the next room died long ago. The new girl comes in. She is very beautiful. She is thin and wears a red coat. She doesn’t take her coat off but perches on the edge of the bunk with her legs crossed smoking nervously. The cigarettes are very pale between her dark fingers. Her lips are as soft and as purple as plums in her black face.

  When Marie and I want to lie down there’s no room for her. She doesn’t want to lie down anyway. She walks about the room smoking until I sleep.

  When the water rushes into my dreams again and wakes me she is gone. I climb over Marie carefully so as not to wake her and go to the toilet. I lift my skirt quickly and crouch to let the water escape. With my skirt up I can see the thigh-links for the first time since they moved off the uniform’s belt. They are still shiny and un-rusted but my thighs are red where they touch and very sore. With my legs so close together the hot water sprays uncontrollably and makes a lot of noise. I press down hard inside myself trying to hurry before something happens. I would like to shit too but I’m afraid there’s not time before Marie wakes up and breakfast comes. Besides, I’d be ashamed to have her see it here and shit over it. I’d hate to know that it was here in the water. So I get up and pull down my skirt. There is no toilet paper. It’s uncomfortable to sit down when your bowels are heavy. No one has ever seen Sister Blendina on the pot.

  —

  Lunch has come and we are eating macaroni and cheese with our plastic forks. The doors rattle and the old man comes in. He looks at me. “Do you have a coat Miss?” No, I left it with my peanut butter and banana sandwich when I went to cash the check.

  “That’s too bad. Well, you’re being moved to Kansas City. You’ve been arraigned by the Grand Jury. Will you come with me?”

  The Grand Jury. And I didn’t even know. I get up and look at Marie.

  Your name isn’t really Marie, it’s Sophie! and there aren’t any Schwinn bugs. I can tell that even without my glasses, and what’s more there wasn’t any Joe outside the window and you don’t really have a transistorized telephone in your sweater collar! I’m breathing very quickly. She looks at me with vague interest and goes back to her macaroni. A smudge on the front of her white sweater shows where she clutched the soles of my boots in her sleep. I turn smiling to the old man but he looks away and opens the door for me.

  The car is warm and the seat soft. The old man is driving and I am sitting beside him. In the back seat is a Negro man who didn’t support his children. He will be spending a year in jail. Next to him is another uniform. We leave Independence on small streets and through alleys so I don’t get another look at the merry-go-round. Without my glasses the countryside is meaningless but I feel very jolly and friendly and even manage to hold most of Dogsbody without sitting on her.

  —

  The black iron Paisley cuts the snow. A fleur-de-lis in tortured iron twists the white sky. Not for us. For them. For those outside. Even here on the thirteenth floor the outside windows tell a grillwork lie of frozen womb and seed forms. Perhaps for the ex-President’s daughter who sometimes takes a helicopter ride.

  Inside the iron is rarefied, alloyed to deal with the alien heat of our presence. Steel—but more natural, allowed to flow in its own nonorganic forms, pure tubes and plates without the strain of assuming mock-living shapes.

  Between us and those cold, shaped façades are the freezing bars and the glass—supercooled liquid. All the steel is painted at the advice of some penologist with a psychology degree. A cool pink. A deceptive pink, to make us think we are remembering the hot pinks and livid reds of the outside while chilling even those memories, embalming the mind’s body in the deactivated fluids of the past.

  We move slowly like marsh grasses in the tide. Rooted, vegetative, bending in the currents, now this way, now that, without resistance. But there is an undercurrent, a more basic rhythm, overpowered but still living. The flooded grass remembers the wind. There are moments when we strike back. If we are vegetables we are also cannibals.

  Soon the gates will open and we will be free to move into the bull pen or stay in the cells as we please. In my cell only Blendina is awake besides me. Her cards move slowly and the other cells are silent.

  Kathy, the key-girl, will be first into the bull pen when the gates roll. The other cells are crowded—one girl for each bunk—eight girls in each eight-by-twelve-foot space. The key-cell has only Kathy, because she is key-girl. She is key-girl because she has been here the longest. Except when we go down to the kitchen for meals she doesn’t have to wear the green uniform. She wears Levi’s and a man’s tee shirt.

  She was the first person I saw when I came here. The matron came to get me from the car. She led me through corridors and doors until I had no idea how to get back. There were more doors and the elevator and finally we came here, C tank. A lot of women crowded around the door but I couldn’t see their faces. The only face I could see was Kathy’s. She led me into the key-cell.

  The key-cell is also number one. The “1” is over the door but no one calls it that. There are curtains in the key-cell that hide the bars and close the gate even when it is open during the day. When she took me inside she closed all the curtains. She told me to take off my clothes. I was ashamed because I needed a bath very badly. My clothes were dirty too, from wearing them for days and sleeping in them. When I hesitated she hit my face. Not really hard and then she’s so much smaller than me, but she was looking at me hard and I was so ashamed. I looked at the floor and took off my clothes. I could feel the tears running down my face but I couldn’t say anything. When the skirt came off she saw the thigh-links. She stepped close and put her hand on the part where they had rubbed the skin off. I looked down at her head. I could smell the tonic in her short pale hair. She stopped touching me and smelled her hand. Her eyes smiled at me over the hand.

  —

  I remember praying walking fast on a grass broken sidewalk saying oh dear god oh dear god oh dear god over and over oh dear god let her say yes oh dear god so I could go to the movies and she said yes but I missed the final show in the Davy Crockett series with the Alamo and all the times with just oh dear god oh dear god and the rest unsaid because after all it was pretty silly but what do you pray for except what you want.

  On the lawn in the summer with the hot clouds thick and near and the light came white and bright—quite away from the sun—the light exploding in the clouds and god was long gone but I fell down on my knees knowing it was an angel and oh dear god oh dear god all over again until I noticed it was a searchlight from the used-car lot on the boulevard but I would again oh dear god oh dear god it would just take more now—but I would be a Christian or anything if I could oh dear god.

  On the old couch with the heat turned up all the way surrounded by balloon bread and bologna and mustard and mayonnaise—by milk and Butterfingers and fudge from Van Dyne’s and a stolen Genet in his thickness—in his ripening to rot—reading the perfect prose aloud in the dim room and wanting to go to him—silent with my head shaved and bathe him and feed him and follow him—to reach down with the surplus machete and hack off my foot and I bleeding—it bleeding—eat it—and then a hand—and then to reach in with all the remaining fingers and pull out my eye—to feel myself hideous and plunge unabashed into evil—not for the art—for the evil—I lying deep in it—stretching in it—committed to its purity and the doorbell rings and I plunge up electric to shock them whoever—to devour them and it opens to nuns in black flapping in the doorway.

  Turned me off right away but it was a mistake—they wanted the people downstairs.

  At the mission in the storefront where the gypsies used to live before the health de
partment—the reformed prostitute and the reformed laundry worker with tambourines and accordions in the company of the saints and the folding chairs in ragged rows with an aisle from the glass door with the bell and the old bums their wine-thin bodies sprawled in the back and the reverend who does not and never did—any of those things—you can tell and his slopeassed wife with the tiny purse who plays the old piano behind his music stand pulpit—the reverend and all the women up on the platform—the Mays and Bettys and Pearls who love god for him—to get close to the pale with his jacket long over his flat fly and the reverend is exhorting with his long hands folded yes Jeezusah! and the ugly women are playing their guitars and accordions and the gray wife is banging on the piano with a tight mouth—the women are singing yes Jeezusah! and the old man in the fifth row with the newspapers in his shoes is standing up and leaning on the back of the chair in front of him and the green bottle stands carefully between his shoes and he raises his fist yes Jeezusah and his wine cracked voice rolls on unstopping with the ah sound as he inhales I’ve been a sinner yes Jeezusah I’ve seen this world yes I used to go to the dances yes Jeezusah and the taverns yes and the roller skating rinks yes and I tell you this world is a garbage can yes and it’s full of garbage yes yes—and the green bottles in back tip up against the light and the bare bulbs in the ceiling glow through green glass and the sleepers fart and rumble in the folding chairs yes and the reverend exhorts the ceiling and the reformed laundry worker beats her guitar with one hand and hikes up her six petticoats with the other and nobody pays any attention to anybody else and afterwards there’s coffee and day old donuts and a bed if you testify and they call everybody brother and sister and I always listen because you never know when you might be saved yes.

  —

  I can go to the competitor—the food’s better and you sit down to eat but Salvation Army sermons are always longer and it’s all shame food—all hate food and heavy.

  I’ll bed with Cotton Mather if it’s comfy—see how cozy here with his ass to my belly and Mrs. M. behind me warm—his soft and scudgy name thick on my tongue and whether to or not like when I’m little in bed with my brother and his arm so round and smooth on the pillow I want to bite—to really bite like meat and take a big chunk and if I don’t it’s only because of the hassle and the hits and noise and always that—to bite—not to eat, but to bite—and in lecture hall he is talking not yet an old man and he says the word womb because he is a philosopher and I wonder almost idly how it would be to bite into his lips when they were together like that so smooth on my tongue and to bite through into his tongue thick and soft and feel it jerking and the hot spurts in my mouth and maybe I would open my lips just a little and the warm would run down outside on my chin and if I smiled in the mirror all the red would be thick between my teeth and the teeth would be pale through the red and all that stops me truly is what he would be doing while I was doing that and I hate to have to think of him but it climbs in and prevents me because of the hits and the noise.

  —

  I am in 4 cell. This is the last cell in the tank and it is inhabited by newcomers and overnighters. The people in this cell who are not newcomers or overnighters are still somehow different from the women in the other cells. There are only two of us like that. Blendina and I. Blendina calms everyone. She plays solitaire all day every day. At first newcomers think she’s creepy, then she calms them. I have never heard her speak. I have never seen her sleep. When I fall asleep at night she is playing solitaire. When I wake in the morning she is playing. I have never seen her eat. They tell me that when the rest of us have gone to the kitchen for breakfast the matron brings her a tray. Still, I have never seen it. I have never seen her go to the bathroom. I have never seen her walk. I have never seen Sister Blendina do anything but sit on her bunk in her bra and panties and play solitaire.

  I suppose she is old. Her face could be. Her body is lean and brown except that her breasts sag and her belly sticks out a little.

  Sister Blendina shuffles her cards and lays them out on the bunk between her legs in 4 cell.

  I stay on in 4 cell. It’s a long time since I was a new girl. I’m not sure why.

  —

  High Mass in the ladies’ room at the Greyhound Terminal. Wrapped in Eula’s long coat and mourning veil—she beside me giggling faintly. All the worshipers in line before the free booth—hot bladdered bitches mentally clutching their crotches—little old ladies with kidney trouble shifting from one foot to the other—nobody touching anyone else—side glances proposing blackmail—If you’ll pretend that I don’t pee I’ll pretend that you don’t.

  There’s always one daring lady with a dime—somehow if you pay for it it’s more respectable—she doesn’t have to flush the toilet at the same time she’s pissing so the line won’t hear and have proof that that’s what she went in there for. The free booth patrons sometimes draw their feet up and prop them on the door so they can’t be seen through the cracks—they enter the confessional and disappear in private conference with the divine—the toilet flushes to hide the sound of their departure and they reappear after a suitable period—glowing—nobody knows for sure what they were doing in there. When the lady who was willing to pay comes out the next in line always grabs the door before it can close—this could go on forever—an endless line—a hand forever reaching for the open door and a free ride—until the attendant lurches in on the freeloaders with the key. She locks the door—the lady can’t get out—the uniform sways—her blackly muscled arm arcs upward—golden key between thumb and forefinger—the head tips back—the maw widens—metallic glint in the air—clink of key on tooth—the watery clunk of the glottis—I can watch the key’s progress down the gullet—almost hear it hitting bottom—she says just wait a few hours dearie—when I dump anybody who want to can fish for the key. And the lady in the stall? her children are crying for her—her husband is getting on the bus—her sister in Keokuk is fixing a special dinner—she croons the ode to the john:

  No sorrow goes unsoothed

  By the cool chastity of

  Thy Whiteness—

  From thy Septic depths

  Magnate and vagabond are

  Indistinguishable.

  The thirteenth floor of this building is the Jackson County Jail. It is a submarine in the belly of a whale. The whole floor is a single unit of metal set in stone. Four rooms in the submarine. A, B, C, and D tanks. A and D tanks are men’s tanks. One of them is colored, the other is white. B tank is the colored women’s tank, though there are some white women in there. C tank, our tank, is the white women’s tank. There are no colored women here. I am writing this on the wall in back of my bunk with a pencil stub I found under the toilet. The lead is thin and shiny on the pink steel.

  I am now accustomed to not having my glasses. I’ve decided that there is no lucidity of vision, only consistency of distortion.

  The first week I spent here I always had a black eye and at least one bloody nose a day. If Marge hadn’t been here then I don’t know what would have happened. She came in the same day I did. She was big and blowzy and good-natured. We fought them together.

  There were only four of them and only sometimes were they trying to force us to have their sex. Mostly I think we still smelled of the outside and the scent made them furious.

  We’d crouch with our backs in the corner and scratch and kick at them. It was dreadful silent fighting, only heavy breaths coming irregularly and once in a while the sound of a blow. There were times when I couldn’t stop laughing and that made them ferocious. Even when I was very young I giggled when my mother whipped me.

  —

  There was once a wonderful dragon who lived on the top of a mountain quite some distance from here. This dragon shit peanut clusters. He pissed lemonade. When he had a cold his nose ran marshmallow cream. His ears had taffy in them instead of wax. Instead of the usual smelly sludge his belly button was full of caramel. He sweat honey, if he heard a sad story he cried pineapple syrup, and
if he slept on his tummy at night there might be a big pool of sweet whipped cream between his legs in the morning.

  Now this was a very cheerful, quiet kind of stay-at-home dragon who didn’t go around breathing fire or making trouble for anybody but just sat in his cave on the top of the mountain watching the sun rise and set and producing enormous quantities of peanut clusters and whipped cream and all the rest. It happened that the dragon never ate anything at all but once a year—at no particular time but whenever he felt like it—he would take just a thimbleful of pure water and drip it onto his tongue.

  Since people had found the dragon so generally amiable and since he rarely said anything at all and there was never anything to argue about, there had over the years come to be quite a village built around the dragon’s cave. The people spent most of their time carting off the sweet things that came from the dragon. This kept the dragon’s yard tidy and what they couldn’t eat themselves they sold to other towns and so became very fat and well-to-do.

  After several hundred years had passed with this arrangement very comfortable for all concerned, it happened one day that the dragon looked around for his thimbleful of water and, quite by accident you understand, somebody had put vinegar in it by mistake—now there is nothing wrong with vinegar in its time and place but when it is the time and place for sweet clear water vinegar will not do.

  The dragon reached down and took the thimble and daintily tossed the clear liquid back onto his long blue tongue—he gasped and choked and coughed and when he coughed a spurt of flame came shooting out about a hundred yards and burnt up a little boy who had been standing by the dragon’s foot cutting devil’s food cake out from under the dragon’s toenails—the flame also scorched the dragon’s shins and set him dancing about yowling and coughing and whipping his tail until every house on the mountain fell down into itself from the shaking—with every cough the dragon burned a half a mile of whatever was in front of him and hurt his throat terribly. The more it hurt the more he coughed and the more he coughed the more it hurt. The people ran screaming in the streets and the streets caved in from the dragon’s bouncing and if they were in a field or under a tree they were burnt to little smears of charcoal whenever the dragon coughed—all that day he coughed and all that night and for a whole week all of every day and all of every night until from the ocean to the right and the ocean to the left and as far as anybody could know to the north and the south every living thing was burned and broken—bugs and birds and grass and trees and people and cows and all the houses and all the cars and all the land lay naked and black and the dragon stood alone on the top of his broken old mountain and gave one last tired cough that didn’t burn anything except one little yellow hair that liked to grow in the caramel crust just below the dragon’s belly button and the poor dragon was so tired that he lay down right there on his back with his legs in the air and fell sound asleep.