Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

shit! That's astounding! Tell me ... ”
    “I have to leave.” Reaching down for the pajama top, uncramping my legs to climb down to the floor, padding toward the bathroom door.
    “Hey, I'm sorry, I've taken most of your afternoon, you must be beat ... You'll come again, won't you? How about tomorrow? I'll work up some of these sketches and be ready for some more-developed stuff tomorrow.”
    Alone in my room with the door finally closed I stand gaping blankly at the grimy window. I had no right to pretend surprise. The nun told me when I first took her there. Horst the Cat Man was leaning on the fender of his van at the gate and I was inside in the visitors' room. I sat hugging Miranda, the toddler -- not yet a year old -- still in roomy diapers. Trying to talk through my tears to this clean-faced nun, who had seemed so warm and reassuring over the phone.
    “What do you mean, a tail?” Her eyes cooled instantly. She tugged at the back of Miranda's diaper. “Is she retarded?” Miranda clouded at the strange touch, looking anxiously at me. When the diaper dropped to her pudgy knees she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and began to cry.
    “Just a little tail,” I was saying.
    The nurse came in, chipper, with a clipboard full of forms. She held Miranda expertly, dancing her on a chair while I sniffed and scratched at the forms. The nun muttered softly to the nurse. The nurse sang “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Climbs Up the Water Spout” and peeked surreptitiously down the back of Miranda's diaper.
    We went to the infirmary, where the nurse chattered rhymes as she stripped the oblivious and chortling Miranda. Probing, listening, peering with tiny flashlights, counting digits, and finally tickling the curl in the tail until Miranda laughed out loud and I turned to grey stone.
    “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.”
    “No,” I snapped. “She keeps it. You won't touch it.”
    They asked me again five years later as I stood watching Miranda through the window of the visitors' room.
    “She prays to be rid of it. How can you deny your own child a chance at a happy, normal life?”
    I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the play ground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me. “She's happy,” I said. “You've told me so and I see it. She keeps her tail.”
    But she hated it.
    I crawl into my cupboard, pull the door shut, and lie curled in the dark, thinking about Miss Lick. I've seen hobbies like hers before.
     
    It is dark when I wake up. I stick my head under the cold-water tap for a while. Then I put a sweater on, then my coat, and a wool watch cap on over my wig, and stump out past the TV voice from Lily's door to catch the Number 17 bus for downtown.
    Huddled under the sick fluorescent glare of the empty bus, I stare at a cardboard warning tucked into the rack above the windows. It says, “Don't get too comfortable.”
    The doors sigh to let me out on the echoing mall. I head north toward Old Town and the Glass House. I make one stop in a phone booth. There are several Licks in the books but no Mary or M. It's probably a fake name anyway. Nobody who can afford her kind of hobby could afford to have it known.
    The neon clock in the window of the tattoo parlor says nine. Two blocks later I am scouting doorways across from the Glass House parking lot. A shut-down leather shop on the corner gives me a view of the parking lot and the side door as well as a long angle on the front entrance. A heap of garbage bags at the front waits for the morning pickup. Five steps lead up to the door. I sit on the top step and watch the lot fill up slowly. The cars spew out cheerful groups and giggling pairs. Mostly men. I count. Sixty