Geek Love

Chick is still traumatized by the experience of his trip with Al and by having hurt the young thug. Al is depressed and drinks more than usual. One day, Al tells Chick to feed the carnival troupe’s big cats while he and Horst are away. Chick hates dealing with meat (he refuses to eat it), because he “feels” the life of the animal when he touches meat, even when he manipulates it with his mind. Chick asks Oly to hold his hand and asks her if she can feel “How...dead...the meat is” (108). Chick is sad when Oly says she cannot. 

Oly realizes that she has never asked Chick how he moves things. After struggling to explain, Chick says, “I don’t really. It moves itself. I just let it” (109). Chick tries to explain that it’s like how water wants to move, but it can be diverted by a hole or pipe. Chick says that things want to be in motion and he only guides them, like plumbing.

Elly and Iphy get into a physical fight and refuse to talk about it. Oly wonders aloud what the fight was about and Chick sighs, “Iphy said [Arty’s] name in her sleep” (112). 

The twins begin to talk to each other again and over dinner one night, Iphy excitedly tells the family that they have an idea for a new addition to their act. The girls plan to jump onto their piano and then fly out over the audience, with Chick’s help. Al is enthused, but Elly’s eyes are on Arty, who privately quashes the idea. 

Arty changes his own act over time, becoming less of an oracle who answers questions from the crowd and more of an orator. Eventually he becomes a preacher and, in a sense, his act becomes a church. Arty appeals to the misery and hope that fills the lives of the norms and becomes tremendously popular. As bigger crowds gather for his show, including people who would ordinarily never visit a carnival, Arty begins to take over more and more control of the troupe.

Arty moves into his own van next to the family van. He is increasingly in charge of the carnival and the family: “As Arty got stronger, Al and Lil wilted” (117). Lil hires a piano teacher named Jonathan Tomaini for the twins, rather than teaching them herself. 

One of Al’s main passions has always been acting as the carnival’s lay doctor. When a medical doctor named Dr. Phyllis attaches herself to the carnival one day, Al loses that part of his identity. 

Dr. Phyllis is a mystery, having just shown up one day to treat the carnival’s crew. Oly thinks she is some kind of snake dancer when she first sees Dr. Phyllis’s van, since there is a picture of a pair of tangled snakes on a staff (the medical symbol of a caduceus) painted on the side. No one knows where Dr. Phyllis came from or why she wants to travel and work with the Fabulon. Arty wants Oly to get close to her by doing her chores and listening to her on a day-to-day basis, but Dr. Phyllis will not invite Oly into her van.  

Oly, as the narrator of the novel, says that years later, she found a newspaper clipping in the private papers of Norval Sanderson, a newspaper reporter who later joined the troupe. The clipping details the story of a student at the University of New York who performed abdominal surgery on herself in her dorm room because she believed that “a remote control device had been implanted next to her liver by an unnamed undercover organization […] [though] [n]o such device was found by police” (124). The student was Dr. Phyllis. 

On the twins’ fourteenth birthday, they wake up and see a horse in a pen just outside the carnival site. It’s an ancient horse, with hooves deformed by extreme neglect. Seeing that Iphy is upset by the condition of the horse, Arty sends for Dr. Phyllis and arranges for Horst to bring the horse to the infirmary trailer.  

Lil realizes that she hasn’t seen the twins all morning and she and Al set out to search for them. Oly sees Chick going into Dr. Phyllis’s van after she has examined the horse and Oly worries. Everyone realizes that a dust storm is fast approaching. Arty commands Oly to push his wheelchair back to his trailer. Chick is brought to the trailer by one of the redheads, who tells Oly that Lil has found the twins and that Lil wants to see Oly.  

Oly and the redhead rush through the intensifying wind to the portable toilets, where Lil found the twins. A huge gust topples the toilets and Oly and the redhead struggle through the choking dust to get inside. Lil and the twins are there; Lil has broken a rib. Elly and Iphy were hiding out in the toilets because that morning, they had started their first period and Elly was so upset that she would not come out. The dust storm ends and they all go back to the family trailer and get cleaned up.  

Later, in Arty’s trailer, Oly asks why Arty is allowing Chick to spend time with Dr. Phyllis. Arty says that Dr. Phyllis is studying Chick in exchange for healing the old horse. Oly finds Chick and asks him what Dr. Phyllis is like. Chick replies, “She’s going to show me how to stop things from hurting. Arty says it’s good” (139). 

As they polish the sibling jars in the Chute, the twins talk to Oly about having started menstruating. Iphy is nauseated, while Elly is upset about practical aspects of their change. She asks, “What if we can have a baby? Don’t you ever think about what will happen when we grow up?” (139). Iphy says that nothing will change and tries to reassure her sisters, saying “I’m going to marry Arty and we’ll take care of everybody” (139). Elly is enraged and smacks Iphy in the mouth. Oly leaves them to their fight. 

Days later, Arty calls everyone in the carnival out to see the old horse, which Chick has named Frosty. Dr. Phyllis has amputated the horse’s rotten legs from the knees down and the stumps have healed so Frosty can walk on them. Elly looks empty and old as she looks at the horse and says, “So this is what it’s going to be like” (143). 

Chick tends the horse, takes lessons from Dr. Phyllis, and spends increasing amounts of time with Arty, who switches to a fond-big-brother attitude with Chick. Arty tells Oly that Dr. Phyllis explained to Chick about the parts in the brain that control pain, so he can learn how to block pain in others. 

Arty’s church followers are waiting in large numbers at every town the carnival visits. Al is pleased with the profits, but he realizes that Arty is the true boss of the Fabulon now. The whole family senses that more changes are coming. Oly narrates, “We were accelerating toward something and we didn’t know what” (145).