Geek Love (43 page)

The holster is under her suit jacket, on the hook. I yank a bench close and climb to reach the gun. Jump back to the door on tiptoes with the fat gun heavy in one hand. I reach for the knob to twist open the deadbolt and dodge as the door gushes open against me. The gas comes out and I choke and fall to my knees with fire in my eyes and a rake in my nose and throat.

She is huge, lying across the doorway. Her breath sounds high and it bubbles. Her white arms have tumbled over her red bloated face. She moans, a small sound from the wet heap of her chest. I drop the gun and pull her long arm by its wrist, crying, “Mary! Help me. Mary, move. Come on, Mary. Oh, Mary, I'm so sorry.” And I am sorry and I don't care if she wakes and kills me if only she will wake up and move. I never meant this. I never wanted to hurt her. I only needed for her to die. Not this pain. Not this fear.

“Mary!” I yell, yanking on the heavy arm. “I didn't mean it like this.” Miss Lick's eyes pop open, staring upside-down and furious. Her wrist flicks loose from my hands, swatting me, groping for me as I fall clattering against the forgotten gun on the floor. Her hand snaps onto my throat, hot and hard. A white light comes on behind my eyes as she lifts me above her with my right hand fluttering at her fingers on my throat and my left hand heavy with the gun. I am rising, until my ears explode and I begin a long, slow fall at the end of her arm, toward the tile floor, watching the sudden black hole where her right eye was, her big legs flopping in the footbath and the sputtering roll at the crotch of her tank suit as a dark liquid runs onto the tile. Her hand is still huge on my throat, but she's gone. I'm alone.

News article from the May 18 Portland Oregonian:

Two women whose bodies were found huddled in the footbath of the Thomas R. Lick indoor swimming pavilion of the Timber Athletic Club following a hazardous fume alarm this morning were apparently victims of murder and suicide. Portland Police Detective M. L. Zusman, directing the on-site investigation, told reporters that both women had apparently died of gunshot wounds and that a gun had been found at the scene. The exact cause of the deaths will not be confirmed until the completion of post-mortem examinations by the Multnomah County Medical Examiner.

Investigation at the scene was delayed by the presence of irritating fumes from an unidentified gas present in the pool and locker-room area. The gas is currently undergoing laboratory analysis for identification. Fumes were first noticed by a janitor who entered the pool area for regularly scheduled cleaning at 8 A.M. Firefighters who responded to the alarm discovered the two bodies.

“At first we didn't know who did what to who,” said Detective Zusman. “But a note was found on the scene. Or rather a notebook which seems to give an account of the incident up to a certain point.” Contents of the note have not been revealed. The names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of their families. It is not known whether the victims were members of the prestigious private athletic and social club. TAC spokesmen refused to discuss the incident until more information is available. The Lick Pavilion will be closed until the police investigation is completed.

Earlier reports that one of the bodies was that of a handicapped child have since been contradicted. Police confirm that both victims were adults.

Delivered by regular mail, May 19:

My Dear Miranda,

Since you were a year old you've been told you were an orphan. This was not true. Your father died when you were very young but I, your mother, have been watching over you until now. I am your mother, I, the dwarf in Room #21.

Your name is not Miranda Barker but Miranda Binewski. Barker was the ironic label chosen by the Reverend Mother Aurora when you were still in diapers and first entered the convent school.

You will have a lot of questions. Enclosed are two keys. The long key is to my room, #21. On the floor in the closet is a big leather trunk. The short key will open the trunk. The top tray inside is full of your school records, photographs, sixteen years' worth of letters from Reverend Mother Aurora and Sister Lucy. They're addressed to me and they report on you. That should be enough to convince you that I'm not imagining our relationship out of drugs or lunacy.

The big manila envelope in the top tray of the trunk contains the deed and tax records for the house and all my financial papers. The deed is in your name. You can withdraw from, or write checks on, the trust account. You will also find the papers for the vault where all the other Binewskis currently rest. Please note that cremation is a family tradition. Beneath the tray is all the record there is of my history and yours.

Please take care of Crystal Lil. Her medical records and prescriptions are in the white folder in the big envelope. The trash goes out on Thursday nights and her bills need to be paid on the fifth of each month. She is your grandmother.

After twenty careful years of not revealing myself to you, I find it hard to reverse the process. For all you lacked in a parent, I hope you can eventually forgive me. I can't be sure what the trunk will mean to you, or the news that you aren't alone, that you are one of us. Yet I hope that someday you'll come to collect us all from the shelves of the vault. Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

With love,

Olympia Binewski

(Known as McGurk)

Katherine Dunn

In Her Own Words

My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards, and palms. My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter. My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was two and I have never met him and have no memory of him. The story is that my older brother, 13 or so at the time, ran him out of the house with a kitchen knife for speaking roughly to our beloved Mom.

I was born in Garden City, Kansas, on the day the UN. treaty was signed, October 24, 1945, the only girl in a family of boys who spoiled me and taught me to swim, use a slingshot (for keeping one's distance in a fight), climb trees, and ride motorcycles. We were migrant workers during my early years-following the crops from farm to farm picking strawberries, beans, cherries, oranges, walnuts-living out of a car sometimes, tenant farming sometimes, holing up in government housing or rentals in the winters or when someone in the clan got a real job.

We're a tribe of storytellers and jokers. No family meal was complete unless one of us managed to deliver a punch line just as a sibling took a mouthful of milk so the laugh could spray the table.

We seemed to learn to read from the Saturday Evening Post, which my mother bought every week no matter what, and read out loud to us.

I was six or so when I decided to be a writer. There was a sick cat-we assumed it was rabid-in the neighborhood one summer day, and my big brother, Spike, was delegated to kill it so the little kids could go outside. I watched from a window as he snuck out the back door with his slingshot and a pocket full of ball bearings. He fed us rabbits and squirrels and pigeons with that slingshot. But this time I saw that foaming, staggering cat wobble out from behind a stack of old tires, and my brother drilled him clean between the ears. The cat dropped without a twitch, but that night, lying in bed (I can still see the airplanes on the blue wallpaper), I realized what death was and felt the whole aching universe zooming outwards. I suddenly knew I would die-end completely. And the real tragedy was that all the wonders I'd seen and smelt and felt would die with me. I couldn't bear it. And from that moment to this I've struggled to record as much of it as I can.

I was an ugly kid and had a deep, huge voice. My nickname was “Froggie” or “Toad” when people were pissed at me. I turned it into an asset by going into speech competitions, debates, and interpretive readings in high school. I'm the only kid in the immediate family who graduated from high school-my brothers saw to that.

Each of us had wild early times. I was big on running away and had adventures that ended with me being fetched home from juvenile detention centers up and down the Pacific coast. The November after I turned 18, within a day or two after J.F.K. was shot in Dallas, I was arrested in Independence, Missouri, for trying to cash a bad check. I was working with a traveling door-to-door-magazine-selling crew (my first cult experience) and ended up in the Kansas City slammer for a few weeks. I got out with a felony conviction, a two-year bench parole, and an incurable case of heebie-jeebies about jail. I never wanted to go back to THAT. I saw myself at a fork in the road, where my choices were a life of petty and extremely unglamorous crime, or getting my shit together in a major way. Despite my shaky school career, I'd always been a lunatic reader. I had pretensions of intellect, and had been scribbling diaries and stories and poems all my life. I enrolled at a local state school (Portland State University) and used a year's worth of good grades and professorial references to apply to Reed College in Portland. Reed took me in, gave me a scholarship, a warm room, three meals a day, and a chance. I'd been scuffling, slinging hash, and modeling at the art school, living in rooming houses. Reed was heaven. In my third year there I won a Rockefeller writing grant and a Music Corporation of America writing grant to work on my first novel, Attic. I took the money and ran off to Central America with my boyfriend. We later traveled the Southern U.S. and Canada, then ran out of money and holed up in Boston, where I wrote Attic while working three part-time jobs a day-proofreader for a printing house, invalid's companion, and Sugar Daddy wrapper at a Cambridge candy factory. I lived in a fog, waiting for a five-minute break to hide in a restroom and scratch into my notebook all the scenes that were playing in my head.

I'd planned conversations with editors since I was ten, sitting in a tree behind the Sparks, Nevada, library. So, when David Segal at Harper & Row accepted Attic, I took it for granted-took the money and went off to Greece with that same boyfriend to write Truck, the second book, for Harper & Row. This traveling, you understand, was the segundo backpack variety. Hitchhiking when necessary, hopping buses and trains. Renting single rooms in sleazy dives and eating out of a tin can, doing laundry in the shower. Not sightseeing so much as trying to disappear. I wasn't a hippie. In fact I despised them as fatuous ninnies who might be right but for all the wrong reasons. I was trying to escape from being an American during the Vietnam war. From 1969 to 1975, we were mostly in Europe, with just a couple of disastrous trips back to the U.S. to pull money together. My son was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1970.

Soon after Truck was published I got this lightning bolt -- a Montessori moment -- when I realized that I didn't know how to write. I'd been cranking the stuff all those years only semiconsciously. I opened my mouth and it poured out. It was about as deliberate and artful as belly-button lint. I was a product of that era which abhorred formal training as interference with natural expression. I'd studied history, philosophy, behavioral psychology, and biology but never had a writing class. As revelations go, this was a drag. I decided to give myself (this is the gauge of my ignorance) ten years to learn how to write.

We'd been scared out of Spain by the Lisbon earthquake in '69, and I got scared out of Ireland when a car bomb went off in Dublin and took a few-score people with it. It was a street I walked daily with my little boy. I'd been a cock-a-hoop IRA sympathizer until then. I retired to my bed with galloping nausea and diarrhea in raw-assed terror. As soon as I could get up, I booked tickets for the States.

I went on turning out the bales of grunting, pretentious stones, a dreadful novel, miles of rolling ponderous Latinates. I stopped submitting anything to anybody because even I knew it was still lousy. I worked dingbat jobs to keep peanut butter on the table, slung hash and booze to pay the rent.

For years I was the Story Lady of Radio KBOO in Portland-every Saturday morning at 10:00 A.M. I read anything from Lewis Carroll to Harlan Ellison, Kafka to Raymond Chandler. I was Red Ryder and the program was called Gremlin Time.

It was November 18, 1978, as I recall, when the Jonestown suicides took place. I'd discovered the Nazi concentration camps when I was a kid leafing through old Life magazines in somebody's attic. Those images are still burnt into the backs of my eyes. I was slinging breakfast in a diner the day a customer walked in and showed me the Jonestown headlines. They hit me like a bullet in the chest and I still wake up shaking and sweating occasionally.

1979 was the year that the Geek fell into my lap one day in the Rose Garden in Portland's Washington Park -- in very much the manner that Aloysius Binewski conceived his idea of designing children. I saw lines into the mysteries that puzzled me the most. I started work on it immediately, recognizing that this story could be the joining point where all I had tried to learn could finally connect with what I only half -- jokingly call my “lyric mode.” I proceeded cautiously-with long pauses, months away to make a living. But the story surrounded and engulfed me continuously.

In Portland, in 1980, I went to my first live boxing match. I'd always kept an eye on the sports pages and TV matches. But the shock waves of emotion that roared off the fighters stunned me. I was hooked. There has never been a better set topic for a writer.

I'd never even considered journalism -- not that I looked down on it, but I had no notion of it as “writing.” Besides, I still wasn't sure I could lay out a simple declarative sentence and the idea of having to abide by the facts was terrifying. But I started writing about boxing for the local alternative newspaper. It was intoxicating and addictive and the editors taught me a lot. I rediscoverd my own American language, and the joys of Anglo-Saxon. I stopped trying to run away from my background and re-embraced it with, maybe, a little too much gusto.