Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
“No, Al!” came Lil’s voice from the bedroom.
“Quick, Lil, get a move on!” and I could see Papa bending over the visible corner of the big bed, reaching.
“Al, I’ve got to feed him! He’s awake!”
But Papa was pulling and the cardboard box slid toward him with Mama’s long red gloves attached to it.
“Lily, there isn’t time!”
A thin, monotonous siren wailed from the box as Al lifted it and the reaching red gloves towed Mama along in her limp robe. Papa came through the door toward us and put the box down on the floor next to the side door as Mama rushed behind him, with the light from the bedroom door shining through her pale hair. Papa opened the side door and peered out, and Mama hit the light switch as she leaned over the box. Her pink robe and red-gloved hands dove toward the wadded papers that filled the box around the baby.
Papa said, “Hand it to me, Lily,” as he stepped down to the pavement and turned around to see, as Arty saw, and I saw, Lily tilting oddly, her head against the door frame, her robe spreading open around her, her whipped-cream hair jerking out in thick snakes that tried to escape from her head in all directions. We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama’s gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassière stretched away from her with an ugly, ripping sound, and her feet, in pale lavender socks, stretched wobbling toward the light in the ceiling, and her hair fell in coils over her face. “Mama! Lil! Mama!” we all howled, as her huge blue-veined breasts burst through the brassière and she dove into the cardboard box, falling with her breasts in the box as her arms waved and her head lifted against the pull from the box and her white legs twitched and crawled on the floor beneath the rucked and flapping robe and one lavender sock rumpled its way off her foot.
Then Al was on his knees in the doorway, stroking her head and saying, “Sweet shit, Lily,” through her soft sobbing. Arty grunted, his head craned around the back of the seat. His eyes overran his wide face. I sat on the floor against the cupboard with my mouth and eyes open, and Elly and Iphy sat up in their bunk with bewildered eyes and wide befuddled mouths saying, “Mama,” in a drawn-out complaint. A painful, thin whine came out of my own nose and only one voice was silent, only one of all the Binewskis was not adding to the noise, and that was the paper-padded morsel in the box, who was invisible except for one tiny hand opening and closing in a tangled strand of Lil’s white hair. The baby was not crying anymore. When, for an instant, we were all silent together, we could hear the chuckling smack of his lips at the bruised brown nipple.
It was a minute or two before Lily could sneak an arm into the box and lift the baby up to her as she collapsed onto the floor, and sat with her feet mixing with my feet. One fat arm and the fuzzy knot of head buried in her breast were all that showed of the baby outside his cone of blanket. Al crawled in and sat on the floor beside her.
“What happened?” he asked.
She looked at him with her eyes so wide open that the whites showed all the way around her wobbling blue irises. She laughed shakily. “I guess he wanted to nurse.” She looked down at the little rumpled face and Al stared at a hairpin on the floor in front of him.
The twins, groggy in their bunk, and Arty with his chin propped on the back of his seat, and I, slumped in the corner, sat gawking as Mama’s tired face slowly developed a swelling over her right eyebrow where she’d banged her head on the wall when she dove into the box. She shifted slightly to get more comfortable and her robe slid away from her knees. They were scraped raw, with beads of blood swelling out through the pores.
“Are you saying,” Al stretched out a hand and carefully picked up the hairpin, “that the baby did that? Hoisted you up like that?”
Mama’s eyes snapped with anger. “I told you he was hungry!”
The tiny fist, like a spider on a sand dune, clenched and opened and clenched against Mama’s breast. The suckling sound went on.
Papa was staring at that hand. His lower jaw looked oddly soft and slack beneath his mustache. He got slowly up on his knees and picked up two more hairpins. He found another pin on the windowsill and stood up, looking at the hairpins in his hand. Mama concentrated on the small face at her breast. She seemed calm, forgetful of the tears and the ragged, dangling remains of the brassière.
“Well,” Papa cleared his throat, “we need to think a little bit, Lily. I’m going to drive on up the road. We’ll find a rest stop and pull over for the night.” Mama nodded peaceably.
The twins went back to sleep and I crawled into my cupboard and Arty humped his way into his bunk and Mama and the baby went back into the bedroom. Al drove in the dark until he came to a pulloff surrounded by high black firs. Arty and I stayed awake for a long time listening to Papa and Mama in their bedroom. Papa cleaned and dressed Mama’s knees and put a cold pack on her thick blue eyebrow bruise. He put the sleeping baby into the crib beside their big bed, and they sat watching together and saw the thin flannel blanket curl slowly up in a twisted bundle and then push toward the headboard of the crib, where it lay twitching and scrubbing back and forth all by itself while the baby slept. Arty and I both heard Papa say, “He moves things. He moves things.” We heard Mama start to cry again softly when Papa said, “He’s a keeper, darling. He’s the finest thing we’ve done! He’s fantastic!”
Things were quiet after that, except for what the dark trees were doing among themselves outside. “Poor Arty,” I thought. “He’ll be miserable.”
We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground. Papa climbed out of the driver’s seat, threw back the side door, and jumped down. Mama was in the bedroom with the door closed, still sleeping. Elly and Iphy were huddled on their neat bunk with a puzzle. I was trying to read over Arty’s shoulder as I turned pages for him. None of us looked out the windows. We all hated the bleak, flat stretches. Papa had left the door propped open and a rip of wind twisted into the van, missing our pages and carrying dust and the rough sting of sage with it. Papa was out there, walking in the desert.
He’d been silent all morning, and excited. He wouldn’t let any of us sit up front with him. We’d squared away our beds and the twins put out cold cereal for breakfast and handed a mug of coffee up to Papa. Arty had been quiet too.
Papa’s boots crunched on the gravel outside and his head came through the open door.
“Step out here, dreamlets,” he said, then disappeared. None of us wanted to get out into that wind but we went, silently. Arty came last and just slid down onto the step and lay there blinking at the grit in the air. The twins leaned on the van and I stood near them watching Papa. He paced in front of us. Just a few steps in each direction and then back. The wind thumped and whacked at his jacket flaps and lifted his black hair against the grain. He looked away most of the time, out over the plain at the waving stubs of brush and broom. When he glanced at us, between phrases, his eyes were dangerous. We listened gravely.
“Your mama and I have decided to keep the new baby.”
Each of us, he said, was special and unique and this baby looked like a norm but had something special too. He could move things with his mind.
“Telekinetic,” said Arty flatly.
Yes, telekinetic, Papa said. And he explained that it was a thing he didn’t know about, that none of us knew about, and that we’d have to be very careful for a while until we figured out how to deal with it and what it was good for.
“We’ll join up with the show by morning and discuss the situation with Horst. Horst is a trainer and training is what we need. Horst can also keep his trap shut. Now here’s the important thing.” And he said we were to act as though he were just a norm baby, even with people in the show who we liked and trusted.
“The army will want him,” said Arty.
“Well, they aren’t goin
We all had to stick together like troopers, said Papa, and the baby’s name was to be Fortunato, which means Lucky.
Though his body did only the normal cherubic things, Fortunato’s effect on the environment at the age of three weeks was already far beyond that of a hyperactive and malicious ten-year-old. He had to be confined to the cubicle we called our parents’ bedroom. Mama moved everything breakable, shreddable, or toxic out of her room so the baby wouldn’t destroy it or himself. Our tidy van became a heaped bunker. Platoons of makeup bottles and boot-polish cans stuffed the cupboards. All the sequined clothing hung over the twins’ bunk. Lamps, clocks, and framed photos littered Arty’s unmade bed. Papa’s medical magazines and books were stacked everywhere. Mama’s sewing machine moved under the sink with me. I slept with my knees touching my chin.
Six of us could live comfortably in the thirty-eight-by-ten-foot van only by dint of religious housekeeping. The mess wore us down. We hated it. Obviously training had to begin immediately for this seventh member of the family.
With some well-placed hints from big brother Arturo, my ingenious father hit upon the expedient of glycerin and black tape for wiring Fortunato’s little buttocks to a miniature electric train transformer and a battery pack. Whenever Fortunato broke dishes or pulled hair or lifted Lil in the air and held her against the ceiling, Papa would gently turn on the power. In a matter of days, however, the precocious Chick, as we called him, learned to unplug the transformer and whip Papa’s curly pate with the cord.
Deprivation techniques were substituted, Clyde Beatty style, but Fortunato had to sleep in a heavy wire cage during that experiment because, when Lil refused to nurse him, he would simply yank her toward him and reenact his debut performance.
The raw potential of Fortunato’s abilities spurred my parents to research. By the time Chick was four months old. Al introduced the behavioral principles of B. F. Skinner and reinforcement theory successfully replaced deprivation.
Mama finally dared to bring him out of the Chick-proof bedroom. It was several weeks more before she could actually step out of the van with the baby in her arms and walk through the camp without his moving every bright-colored thing in sight.
7
Green—as in Arsenic, Tarnished Spoons, and Gas-Chamber Doors
The real trouble, as usual, was Arty. He’d always been jealous. He didn’t mind me so much because money was the gauge of his envy and I didn’t make any.
The twins, however, drove him wild. After every show he would hook his chin over the edge of his tank, spraying me with the overflow, to demand the number of tickets sold at the gate. “How many?” he’d holler. But it didn’t matter—thirty in Oak Grove, three hundred in Phoenix, a thousand in Kansas City. What he really wanted to know was how he had done compared to the twins. If they had as many or more in their audience he was furious.
Sometimes in those days he would flash to the bottom of the tank and sulk, holding his breath for incredible minutes, eyes bulging outside the sockets so they hid the lids entirely.
When I was five and first took over the duty of helping him after his shows, he terrified me with this tactic. He muttered, “I’ll die. I might as well,” and I wailed and hopped in agony as he sank, staring through the glass.
I ran shrieking to Papa. He clapped his cheek and bellowed at me not to humor Arty when he was “playing prima donna!”
I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him. At last he blinked and sighed and let his breathing become visible and growled for his towel.
All this over a few tickets one way or another when he was ten years old. I knew he wouldn’t take to the Chick.
Nearly dawn. The show was closed down. Lil and Papa were asleep. The twins were snugged in their bunk snoring. Fortunato, the Chick, lay silent in his crib with the blanket twitching around him in his dreams. But at this end of the van twelve-year-old Arty sat propped against the table looking over the ticket-count sheets. I crouched on the floor with my back to the cupboard doors. If he was angry I would pop open one of the doors and creep inside bawling, shut myself into the blackness and pull my cap down over my eyes so I could cry into the wool, and pull Lil’s old sweaters over me. He shook his head. The yellow light gleamed on his skull and I began to sniffle a little. He threw a look at me—sharp—I gulped down my snot and grinned at him feebly. He turned back to the ticket sheets. His voice started slow and soft.
“Now, you know very well what I’m seeing here.” He wasn’t looking at me but I nodded, ready to cry. He was looking at the papers in a sad, doubtful way. His voice dripped regret. “Nobody expects you to bring in the kind of money that I do.” I shook my head. That would be absurd. “Or even,” he pursed his mouth, “what the twins manage.” I put my eyes down onto my knees and sighed, my whole worthless body quivering. “It isn’t your fault that you’re so ordinary. Papa accepts the responsibility for that.” The moment of silence told me that he was looking at me. I could feel his eyes on my hump.
As I cried he pointed out the discrepancies. When I did the talking for his show the tickets were 15 to 50 percent less than when Al did it. We both knew that Al only let me do it when we were in Podunk burnt-out towns for a quick stopover and that the sales were down all through the midway in those places. Still, there was some ghastly truth in Arty’s needling. Some probing of my guilt that was right no matter how he lied about it.
Then he would threaten me with the “institution,” which was the place that I would be sent to if I didn’t shape up. “No matter how generous and kind Papa and Lil are—they wouldn’t have any choice,” he would say. His sympathy and understanding washed around me with razors caught in the flow. Arty’s depiction of the “institution” scared me more than death or snakes. The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance.
“We don’t have to keep new kids,” Arty sneered. “Sometimes we don’t keep ’em and sometimes they don’t last.” He was in his mean lecturing mood, twisting his head to look at me over the back of his chair as I pushed him through the grey dawn to visit the dog act. “You don’t know about the ones before you,” he warned. “The ones that died. Papa and Mama don’t talk about them, but I remember.”
“I help Mama with the jars in the Chute.” I grunted, shoving hard to force the chair wheels through the sawdust. Arty snorted and shook his head. “There were three before me and two more before the twins. There was another one just before you. That’s why Papa let her keep you, because the other one died just before. It gets her down. You wouldn’t have been a keeper if the other one had lived. She gets low when she loses one and it bothers Papa to see her like that.”
He was trying to make me cry but I didn’t care. I was happy to have him talking to me. He’d been cranky and sullen for a long time. He went about his work, did his shows, ate, slept, read books, and didn’t talk much except when he was laying weasel trails for Mama and Papa.
“Which one was it? Just before me?”
Arty rolled his eyes and dropped his voice. “Leona.” He drew it out like a moan, watching me. I ducked my head and pushed his chair. Leona with the alligator tail would definitely have been a keeper. Leona would have had her own show tent and glow-in-the-dark posters in silver and green. Arty mused wistfully, “Papa was very excited about Leona. He thought about showing her in a tank. He was hoping she’d stay hairless but he could have depilated her if she’d started sprouting. He even thought about putting her in with me. Papa saw the billing as tadpoles. Different stages of tadpoles.?
He was light and airy about it. I stopped pushing and walked around to face him for a minute. He was nodding and blinking, pretending nostalgia for poor Leona.
“That must have scared you, Arty.” I grinned.
A slow smile spread gradually across his rubbery mug. He wriggled his forehead at me, for all the world like Papa dancing his eyebrows. “Poor Leona. She just went to sleep one night and never woke up. Mama was just about crazy when she found her the next morning.” Arty’s round, wide head did its snake dance, turning on his neck in mock grief, and I knew the taut slide of his skin over tendon and meat, and loved the shadow dip of his bones underneath and the wide smooth roll of his lips.
What I felt was fear. Arty saw it in my face and slid into his whip-master act fast. “Onward, Jeeves,” he snapped. “To the dogs!” I scuttled back to push, wading through the sawdust and keeping my butt muscles clenched to avoid filling my pants.
“Is it O.K. if me and Arty play with Skeet?” I asked. The dog reek from the trailer door might have been Mrs. Minuti’s breath. She swallowed and tried to focus through her hangover. Her hair was short and spiky with a clot of last night’s supper caught above her ear. She pulled her nightgown out from her chest and belched softly. “Sure,” she nodded. She didn’t complain about the hour or the fact that Skeet was her star poodle because we were the boss’s kids and dog trainers are easy to come by. She disappeared inside the trailer and Arty stared tensely at the open door. The dog came scratching around the doorway and jumped down beside me, with his long leash trailing up to Mrs. Minuti’s shaking hand. She gave me the leash and told me not to let him wander loose.