Free Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Page A

Arty got sick of waiting and had a big tube tunnel run up through the tank floor so he could wait dry in the back and make a dramatic swoosh entrance when the lights came up. Arty spewing upward in a burst of luminescent bubbles with a thrumming fanfare of recorded music. It got the crowd going.
     
    Eventually Arty grew bored with the Gilled Illusion of Aqua Boy, and in his Arturan phase enjoyed parading before his throng (at a distance, in a golf cart) on dry land, but he stuck to the submariner identity for a long time.
    As he bitterly pointed out, he wasn't extravagant enough looking to hold a crowd for twenty minutes (the length of the show in those early days) by just lolling around and letting them gawk. He had to do something. The seal tricks of his infancy soon palled on him. Swimming was useful. The bright tank in the dim tent was a focus. The water and his floating form were soothing, hypnotic. People stared at the tank and his undulating figure as they would at a bright fire. The tank made him exotic but safe. “They can relax,” Arty theorized, “because they know I'm not going to jump up into their laps.” (Arty tended to be snide about laps, not having one of his own.)
    “It's a fiendish waste to get 'em into a beautiful sucker zone of mind and then not do anything with them,” Arty would lament. So he learned to talk. He recited rhymes, quoted the more saccharine philosophers, commented on human nature. The standard approach, and the line Papa always wanted Arty to take, was jokes, comedy, a creaking stand-up patter that would seem unique coming from the Aqua Boy. But Arty wouldn't go for it. “I don't want those scumbags laughing at me,” he'd snarl. “I want them amazed at me, maybe scared of me, but I won't let them laugh. No. Oh, a little chuckle because I'm witty, sure. But not a running line.”
    Arty's few jokes, the brief crackling relief from a mystic format, were always dry and biting and directed outward, away from himself.
    The misty cauldron of the act was a constant. “They want to be amazed and scared. That's why they're here,” Arty said.
    Gradually, inevitably, he discovered the Oracle. “The guy who asks the question and thinks he hears an answer is the guy who makes an Oracle.” He'd been reading books on Oriental philosophy and was spouting it solemnly over the lip of the tank one day when a pale woman on the bleachers stood up and asked him whether her fifteen-year-old son, who had run away months before, was alive or dead.
    Without thinking at all, without missing a beat, he whipped out, “Weeping at night alone and yearning for you, working like a man in daylight, silently.” She burst out bawling and hollering, “Bless you, thank you, bless you, thank you,” as she crawled out over a row of knees and left snorking into her hanky.
    She must have told her friends because the next two shows were pimpled with shouted questions from the bleachers and Arty's vague, impromptu answers.
    He had the redhead who sold the tickets hand out three-by-five cards for people to write questions on. The act took on a distinct odor of palm reading and advice to the love-or-otherwise-lorn. Papa had thousands of “Ask Aqua Boy” posters printed and slathered up everywhere we went.
     
    I never knew the twins very well. Maybe Arty was right in claiming I was jealous of them. They were too charming. The whole crew loved them. The norm crowds loved them. In towns we passed through regularly pairs of young girls would come to the show dressed in a single long skirt in imitation of the twins. Arty wasn't delighted with their popularity either, of course. But he had a way of splitting them. To me they were inaccessible. They didn't need me to do anything for them. Iphy was always kind to me. She was kind to everybody. But Elly was careful to keep me in my place. They were self-sufficient. They needed only each other. And Elly, rest her hard and toothy soul, ruled their body.
    I remember Lil with a