Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

My father’s name was Aloysius Binewski. He was raised in a traveling carnival owned by his father and called “Binewski’s Fabulon.” Papa was twenty-four years old when Grandpa died and the carnival fell into his hands.

experimenting with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes.

Their firstborn was my brother Arturo, usually known as Aqua Boy. His hands and feet were in the form of flippers that sprouted directly from his torso without intervening arms or legs.

My sisters, Electra and Iphigenia, were born when Arturo was two years old and starting to haul in crowds. The girls were Siamese twins with perfect upper bodies joined at the waist and sharing one set of hips and legs. They usually sat and walked and slept with their long arms around each other.

I was born three years after my sisters. My father spared no expense in these experiments. My mother had been liberally dosed with cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic during her ovulation and throughout her pregnancy with me. It was a disappointment when I emerged with such commonplace deformities. My albinism is the regular pink-eyed variety and my hump, though pronounced, is not remarkable in size or shape as humps go. My situation was far too humdrum to be marketable on the same scale as my brother’s and sisters’.

The dwarfism, which was very apparent by my third birthday, came as a pleasant surprise to the patient pair and increased my value.

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

“I was ashamed of it. You know, as a kid. The nuns would tell me it was a cross to bear and a punishment for my mother’s sins. I want to just tell you the truth, not purple it up this time. The nuns were good to me. I loved them. In a funny way the fact that the religion never quite took in me has to do with the tail. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I don’t even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I’d wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others.”

You must have wished a million times to be normal.” “No.” “No?” “I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.” “Not normal?” “Never.”

“It is not simple surgery in her case, but it would make her life much easier,” the nurse was soothing me. “You must imagine what her life among normal children would be like. She will shower and dress and swim in a group setting where it will be impossible to hide. Children can be very cruel.”

“Don’t you get dreams?” I asked him. “Don’t you get scared reading those at night? They’re supposed to scare you.” “Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that’s what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys—that’s you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath—that’s me.

If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn’t sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate.

The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said “Mutant Mystery” and, in smaller letters, “A Museum of Nature’s Innovative Art.”

My own eyes and nose were running and the burn on my hump was like a big bee sting flaming poison up through my neck and all the way down to my butt. It was interesting to see the tears coming out of Arty’s eyes. I had never seen that before. I never thought of him crying. My own shaky breath and the taste of tear snot on my lip were familiar. Easy. Even the burn on my hump was exactly my size. But Arty’s way of crying was new to me. His body was crying but his brain wasn’t. The eyes above his tears were as sharp as ever. The blood from his shoulder was sliding faster than the clear fluid from his eyes, but to me the tears were more alarming.

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!”

“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.”

It was becoming apparent that Chick himself had only one ambition and that was to help everybody so much that they would love him. That’s where my problem began. Chick left me chewing dust in the slave-dog department. He could do everything better than I could and he never made snide remarks. He was a lovely brat. That

For obvious reasons “show-off” was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning “sweetheart” into a thumb in the eye.

“We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rat’s-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity.”

People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. They begin out of simple courtesy. Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities. That’s how it starts. But I am like a stranger on the bus and they get hooked on having a listener. They go too far because I am one listener who is in no position to judge or find fault. They stretch out their dampest secrets because a creature like me has no virtues or morals. If I am “good” (and they assume that I am), it’s obviously for lack of opportunity to be otherwise. And I listen. I listen eagerly, warmly, because I care. They tell me everything eventually.

All you really want is to know that you’re all right! That’s what can give you peace! “If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I’d be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I’d worry did somebody love me! I’d have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself! “And you! You aren’t ever going to look like a fashion queen! Does that mean you have to be miserable all your life? Does it? “Can you be happy with the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can’t. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.

The fur-chested Norval Sanderson, with his cynic’s eye, bourbon voice, and discreet tailoring, was with us so he could expose the “ruthless egotism that was exploiting the nation’s psychic undertow.” “Arturism was founded,” wrote Sanderson, “on the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego.…”

“Maybe I was dumb about this. A virginity like ours could be worth a lot. Maybe we should have taken bids. Kind of an auction. Maybe we could still do that. We’ll get better. We can send out flyers. Put it up in lights, ‘The Exquisite Convenience of Two Women with One Cunt!’

“You know what the norms really want to ask?” said Elly. “What they want to know, all of them, but never do unless they’re drunk or simple, is How do we fuck? That and who, or maybe what. Most of the guys wonder what it would be like to fuck us. So, I figure, why not capitalize on that curiosity? They don’t care that I play bass and Iphy plays treble, or whether we both like the same flavor ice cream or any of the other stupid questions they ask. The thing that boggles them and keeps them staring all the way through a sonata in G is musing about our posture in bed. “Believe me, some of them are willing to pay a nice price to find out.

Vern never did have much sense of humor, and after he’d transformed himself, by this clumsy method, into what was known ever after as the “Bag Man,” he was downright maudlin. He spent a year in the hospital and had a lot of surgery. But there are limits to what even an imaginative plastic surgeon can do.

Fortunato—aka Chick (origin of nickname?), 10-year-old male child—blond, blue eyes. Totally normal physique of the tall, thin variety. Withdrawn, introverted. Very shy except with family. Occasionally referred to as “Normal Binewski” by Arturo. The youngest of the Binewski children, Fortunato evidently serves as chore boy and workhorse for the others. He is generally depreciated for his lack of abnormality and has been made to feel dramatically inferior to his “more gifted” siblings. A reversal of the position a deformed child occupies in a normal family. The boy spends most of his time tagging after Dr. Phyllis, the cult surgeon. The doctor, being a normally formed person, may provide nonjudgmental affection lacking in the boy’s family. The Binewskis and all the show folk in general seem to avoid the subject of Fortunato. He is, perhaps, an embarrassment.

The only exceptions are the Binewski females themselves—Crystal Lil, platinum blonde; Siamese twins, Electra and Iphigenia, black hair; Olympia the dwarf, hairless, wears caps of various kinds.

INELIGIBLE FOR ADMISSION GROUNDS Convicted Felons Already freaks Mentally Deranged or Retarded Unable to make informed decision Under Age 21 (later 25) Unable to make informed decision Over Age 65 Already freaks Chronically Ill Already freaks Congenitally Deformed Already freaks Accidentally Mutilated Already freaks Also excluded, unconditionally, are any who can’t provide minimum dowry.

ADMITTED WHO BECOME INELIGIBLE FOR FURTHER PROGRESS: Mentally impaired Unable to make informed decision Chronically ill Already freak—poor surgical risk Physically weak, deteriorating Already freak—poor surgical risk REST HOMES: Theoretically all the Admitted end up at the Arturan rest homes. Administration claims two in existence with plans for twenty more.

Mama often said that fat folks went out of style because every tenth ass on the street now was wider than the one in the tent. Folks could see it free on any block. Giants were also out of work owing, according to Mama, to basketball and the drugs they fed to babies to make them tall enough to play the game. “It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.” Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.

I realized, if there’s one thing a healthy, beautiful, utterly normal boy does not do, it’s fall in love with half of a pair of Siamese twins. “That’s how I learned. It’s O.K. for me to love a norm like that. But if he comes to loving me it’s because I’ve twisted him and changed him. If he loves me he’s corrupted. I can’t love him anymore. I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt.”

I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, “lived,” unless that place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires. When I first stood in such a house I was struck by its terrible solidity. The thing had concrete tentacles sunk into the earth, and a sprawling inefficiency. Everything was bigger than it needed to be and there were so many shadowed, dusty corners empty and wasted that I thought I would get lost if I stepped away from the door. That building wasn’t going anywhere despite an itchy sense that it was not entirely comfortable where it was.

That was when I first recognized a need to explain myself. That was the time when I realized that the peculiar look on people’s faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question: “What the hell happened to you?” They needed to know so they could prevent it from happening to them. My answer was simple, too. “My father and mother designed me this way. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects.” For a while I told people this. I was proud of it. It was the truth. Only a few folks ever actually asked—little children, drunks, or people so old that they exempted themselves from the taboos of courtesy by pretending senile irresponsibility. I got interested. I’d throw the answer even when the question wasn’t voiced but was only lightly etched in the flesh around the eyes. I’d smile calmly and announce it to the kid at the gas pump, or the garbage collector, or a lady with a shopping bag at a street light.