Geek Love: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Katherine Dunn

Author:Katherine Dunn [Dunn, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307794482
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Zephir McGurk was a do-it-yourself electrician from the same independent school of thought that spawned Papa’s medical hobby. McGurk made do. He read journals and magazines and catalogues from supply houses to feed his ingenuity, but he was an innovator. Even if a thing had been invented and perfected thirty years before, McGurk was inclined to build his own rather than buy the gimmick from somebody else. McGurk was valuable. His pay was minimal cash and what Arty called the “overflow” of curious females.

He slept in the back of the old but well-kept safari car. He did his work in the utility trailer that housed the power tools and spare parts. He set up a compact and efficient workshop. If he wasn’t in the workshop he was asleep or in Arty’s show tent. He never socialized in the midway or dropped in on any other act. Zephir was a focused man. Arty was his apple. Arty was the work he’d been given to do.

“It would be good to have some way to spell out my messages in lights,” Arty might say.

“Maybe,” McGurk would say slowly, his head already tumbling possibilities.

Arty went to visit him in the workshop. This flattered McGurk deeply. If Arty was in an energetic mood he’d have me strap him into one of his treads and would lead the way to the workshop with me trailing. He’d go up the step and climb up on the workbench and talk companionably with McGurk.

Other times he’d stay in his chair and sit outside the door with McGurk perched on the step to talk. McGurk had stowed his prosthetic legs in a trunk. He’d gone over to fancy strap-on pads on his thigh stumps. He wore blue or brown leather for his workaday stumps, but he got a pair made of iridescent green satin, embroidered with silver vines, for wearing in the control booth at the top of the bleachers where he worked the sound-and-light board for Arty’s show.

It was McGurk who invented Arty’s speaking tube—a plastic form that fitted over Arty’s nose and mouth. When Arty tongued the button inside, a rush of air expelled the water from the face mask so Arty could breathe and talk into the mask at the same time. The thing stuck up against the front plate of the tank on a long gooseneck that linked it to a gaudy (but phony) console in the bottom of the tank. It actually hooked into the sound system. Arty talking under water was an astonishing improvement over propping his chin on the top of the tank to rap into the microphone. The crowd loved it.

When McGurk built the button receiver that hid in Arty’s ear and let him hear the sound system, the crowd, and messages from McGurk in the control booth, Arty offered the electrician his own van and a good raise. McGurk shook his tidy head and politely turned it all down. “I’ve got my routine set,” he said. He went on sleeping in his station wagon.

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