Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

‘What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?’

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.

But since I’ve been working there I don’t feel the same way about my tail. Now I think, in a way, it’s kind of marvelous.’

I’ve wished to be more special.’ ‘Not normal?’ ‘Never.’

Throwing my wig on the floor and stamping. Why does she make me so angry? My rage terrifies me. I am a monster. I would rip her to shreds. I would swing her up by her round pink heels and snap her long body until that bright, hairy head smashed against the wall. Falling on my knees, shaking. Tangling my hands to keep from breaking something. Sudden gratitude for the nuns, realizing that if she had stayed with me all the years of her growing up I would have murdered her — the arrogant, imbecile bitch, my baby, beautiful Miranda.

She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces assembled before she was born. She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.

‘Move your lips, for shit’s sake!’ howled Papa, or ‘Stop with the mouse farts and project!

‘Don’t shake your head at me! These books teach me a lot. They don’t scare me because they’re about me. Turn the page.’

‘She was only seven months old,’ Lil would murmur. ‘We never understood why she died.’

The young man nodded to the woman in uniform who sat next to Arty but didn’t touch him. ‘Some loony. Just crazy. He’s moaning that he missed.’ The young man closed one side of the door. ‘Just rocking in the back of the cruiser saying, “How could I miss?”’

The window glass vibrated, telling him ‘… solutely right, right, you were absolutely … and she was pregnant again … right … you did the … decent … right’

I liked her for grieving over this regular baby. It made me feel important and loved. I thought she would have really cried if she’d had to give me up.

Papa enjoyed it all too obviously. And we suspected, each of us, blackly and viciously, that Papa preferred his norm kid to us. With Chick he was free to go anywhere. We could live only in the show.

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.’

I can never be inconspicuous in person. A hunchback is not agile enough for efficient skulking. But my voice can take me anywhere.

If all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness) they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their talents and intelligence to become powerful.

She set Arturism up like a traveling fat farm for nuns. Though she herself had lucked onto Arty while flat broke, all who came after paid what she called a ‘dowry.’ Arty said, in private, that the scumbags were required to fork over everything they had in the world, and, if it wasn’t enough, they could go home and get their ears pierced or their peckers circumcised and see what that did for them.

I become convinced, for an hour, that Arty is not injuring them but is allowing them to acknowledge the pain in their lives in order to escape from it.

‘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?