"The one in the pink halter top," he'd say. Or, "They're all cows in this town. Where are we again?"

"Great Falls," I'd say.

"Well, get me that rhino in the sequined jump suit and the ostrich in the red skirt."

I'd stump over to the fence as he drove off to his van.

"Me?" they'd squeal when I waved for them to come up to the fence.

"Me?"

I'd leave them to wait, either in the "green room," as Arty called McGurk's station wagon, or on the propane tank outside Arty's window. It was the only ch.o.r.e for Arty that I preferred letting someone else do.

This particular Lulu was stuck in a filthy January rainstorm for three hours by my reckoning, because Arty was in conference with his chief technical advisor, Doc Phyllis.

"What I'd really like ... " Arty was wallowing on his satin bedspread, wearing only cotton briefs. His fins plucked and smoothed the satin. He rolled the bare skin of his head against the slick, warm fabric and arched his back, digging his shoulder blades into the softness.

"Do tell," murmured Doc Phyllis. She lounged in her chair, one white-stockinged leg and her squeegee shoe flopped over the arm. Her gla.s.ses glittered between her white cap and her surgical mask. She had a straight shot at Arty and was probably dissecting his hip and shoulder joints in her head.

"I'm curious about the possibility of separating the twins," Arty said. Dr. Phyllis grunted.

"Can't be done. I told you that years ago."

Arty yawned, wiggling. "Well, I thought you'd be keeping up with new techniques and developments."

Doc P. was not to be goaded. "Nothing to do with technique. It's the way they're built."

Arty flipped over on his belly and looked straight at her. "What if I was willing to sacrifice one twin to keep the other?"

"Which one?" inquired Dr. Phyllis sweetly.

Arty smiled. "It doesn't matter."

Miz Z. was leaving as I came into Arty's place a few days later. She waved a folder at me by way of h.e.l.lo and I caught the words "Dime Box" on the fly. Arty was in his crisp young executive mode but I asked him about it when she was gone.

"You remember Roxanne? The motorcycle mechanic in Dime Box?"

"Horst's leather-t.i.t girl with the laugh?"

"She's managing the P.I.P. home in Texas. Nine acres outside of Old Dime Box. It's only been open to guests for three months but it's already getting popular."

Doc P. and Chick were on their way over so I went into the security room. I arranged myself on the stool and tried breathing through my mouth to dilute the medicinal smell.

Doc P. was sitting so straight that her plump white spine never touched the back of the dark padded visitor's chair. Chick was lolling on the carpet with one shoe untied and both socks crumpled down. A small pencil stood on its pointed tip on his bent knee. The pencil rocked steadily like a metronome, broke rhythm for a tiny jig, and then lapsed into a four-four waltz in the s.p.a.ce of a thumbnail on his denim-covered knee.

Arty leaned forward against his desk and examined Chick thoughtfully. Arty in his grey vest, Arty in his white collared shirt and black silk tie. Arty with his slim fin bones touching the gleaming wood of the desk. Arty with his pure round skull clearly visible beneath the skin and a blue vein ticking above his ear. He spoke tenderly to Chick.

"Dr. Phyllis tells me that you aren't happy about my plan for the twins."

Chick's eyes flicked briefly away from the dancing pencil to Arty's face, then back to the pencil. Arty lowered his own eyes. "Tell me about it, Chick."

Doc P., with her white-gloved hands asleep in her big lap, blinked calmly at the wall behind Arty and sat very straight in her chair. The pencil fell off Chick's knee to the carpet. Chick sat up and hugged his knees.

"Not good. Not good, Arty. You know."

Arty's face was hot and still with knowing.

"If you do that," Chick stared, amazed, as though he had just discovered a wonder, "I'm not even going to like you, Arty!"

What amazed Chick was no surprise to Arty. Not being liked was familiar ground and all his usual contrivances went into gear. His face slid smoothly into a cartoon of sympathy.

"Why, Chicken Licken, my boy, that's O.K. That's quite all right. Of course your little sensitivities are offended. You can't help being a norm, and I sympathize. But it doesn't matter at all. No, it doesn't matter whether you like me or not, my Chick. Because I like YOU!"

After Chick and Doc P. left I asked Arty what the h.e.l.l he was letting Doc P. do to the twins anyway. He answered in an offhand, easy way that she was just going to "get rid of the parasite." I a.s.sumed he meant an abortion and that it was killing the baby that bothered Chick.

I told him about Chick feeling the baby reach out. Arty leaned back in his chair and gave me a dose of silence. When I remember it now I think he was laughing inside as he watched me argue in a half-a.s.sed and maybe halfhearted way on the wrong track entirely.

"Go away, Oly," he said. He turned to the pile of papers on his desk with an exhausted look designed to put me lower than slug slime. It made me mad.

"Are you swallowing your own line of s.h.i.t, Arty Binewski? Aren't you forgetting that you're just a two-bit freak with a gimmick?"

"Get out," he ripped back at me. I went.

Chick explained sadly that he could not talk to me about the plan for the twins. Could not and would not. "You can make me cry," he said, "but you can't make me talk about that." Ashamed, I left him alone.

Arty wouldn't let me in for a solid week. Miz Z. or one of her apprentices would come to the door and tell me, "Arturo does not wish to see you."

The guards wouldn't let me see the twins during that time. When I brought their meals, Ike or Mike, or whoever was perched in front of the twins' door, would take the tray from me and give me the dirty tray from the last meal. The notes that I slipped under the plates, and once actually into a turkey sandwich, were methodically searched for and found before my eyes-handed back to me without a word. One of the Arturan ladies was inside with the twins. The guard would knock and the ghostie would open the door and trade trays.

Finally I wrote "Uncle" on a piece of paper and gave it to the novice who answered Arty's door. She came back and told me to go in and make sure the twins were eating and not flushing their food.

Arty let me do ch.o.r.es again. He didn't talk to me, though. He was completely taken up with his a.s.s-sucking followers. I didn't try to push him. It had struck me hard that he didn't need me, that he could shut me out permanently and completely and never miss me. He had all those others dancing for him. For me there was only Arty.

He didn't need us.

I watched that message sink deeper and deeper into the twins. Elly had always known it but it was news to Iphy. Not that they talked to me.

They didn't.

I tried to warn them at first. "Listen," I begged, "he's planning an abortion."

They looked at me. Elly barked. A harsh mock of a laugh. "Fat chance," she said. That was the last she spoke to me.

I was the enemy, or as close to the enemy as they were able to get for the time. They were silent when I was there. Elly never spoke. Iphy said "please" and "thank you" when I brought food and did the cleaning for them. They never ate in front of me. They were getting very thin. Their eyes had a bludgeoned depth, burrowing into purple caverns in their faces. They didn't dress. They wouldn't bathe. I didn't tell Arty. I didn't want to bring more trouble on them. As far as I could tell, all they did was sit up against the pillows in their big bed all day. They didn't read or practice or study. But I saw knowledge grow in Iphy's face and harden in Elly's. They knew more than I did.

I never thought about how wide the twins would be, lying side by side. A regular stretcher would leave their heads and shoulders dangling off the sides. Doc P. sent four novices to take a rear door off a van.

We were strapping them onto the door when Elly opened her eyes and looked at me. A fearful question pushed her dark eyebrows high. Her pupil contracted in the purple iris but her lids were heavy and sank, pulling her grooved forehead smooth as they closed. Doc P. bent over to touch Elly's throat with a gloved hand.

"I wonder," I piped nervously, "if this is the same door you did that horse on."

Doc P.'s white-wrapped head swiveled toward me like a turret gun.

"You remember that horse with the rotten feet?"

She nodded at the novices. With one white-robed man at each corner of the door, they moved forward. They had to tip the door onto its side to get it out through the door. The twins hung slack, hair trailing, as they left the van.

Arty was outside, waiting in his chair with a guard beside him in the dark.

"Wait. Put the light on them."

A flashlight clicked a cool white cone into the blackness. Arty leaned forward to look at the sleeping twins.

"What's wrong?" His voice was harsh. "They look terrible! They're sick!"

"What did you expect?" snapped Doc P. "They've been locked inside for months!"

"But their hair. They could bathe." He sounded shrill and fragile. The novices looked at him anxiously.

"Arty." I touched his shoulder and his face turned away from the sprawled sleepers. The light went out and then reappeared further on. Doc P. led the jostling novices down the ramp. Arty's chair followed them and I went along.

We waited outside while they tipped the twins again to slide them through the surgery door. Doc P. stepped down for a last word.

"I'd like to state again that I consider this an improper hour for work of this type. I prefer to work at nine or ten A.M. These predawn hours find the vitality of most patients at its lowest."

"Yeah, well, I wish you hadn't cold-c.o.c.ked them!" Arty's voice was ragged.

"Sedatives."

"Get on with it."

The door closed behind her and Arty's chair began to roll in the dark.

"They'll take a while to scrub up and get ready," he muttered, "but I want to get up in place so I can watch the preparations."

"Ah, Arty!" I groaned, hobbling behind. "We can't watch! Not this!" I was still thinking abortion. "I can't watch it."

But he'd rammed his chair wheel into the truck b.u.mper and was clambering up onto the first step of the narrow stairs that led to the little theater above the surgery.

"You don't have to. I do." He hurried upward.

I went away and paced round and round the home vans, wishing for Mama and Papa, who were snoring in deep counterpoint. I could hear them through the closed windows. I'd slipped the same drops into their bedtime cocoa as I'd put into the twins' milk gla.s.ses.

From the personal journal of Norval Sanderson: Lovable Dr. Phyllis is quite undismayed at having bungled Electra's lobotomy. Having reduced that bright creature to a permanent state resembling the liquid droop of a decayed zucchini, the good doctor is inspired rather than chagrined.

Dr. Phyllis has a voice like the breeze of Antarctica but it is a young voice-younger than her body, perhaps from being used so little and so carefully. Now she is talking more often, to more people. She's become a glacial evangelist in her new cause. I see her stalking the Arturan office staff, lecturing stiffly to the novices, delivering admonitions to the more elevated.

Her message is succinct and pithy: Lobotomy is the ultimate shortcut to P.I.P. Arturo, she claims, is torturing his followers with prolonged, expensive, gradual amputations. He is denying, to those who have striven to emulate his ideal, the efficient, painless, virtually instantaneous access to Peace, Isolation, and Purity that it is in her power to bestow. Why wait? asks Doc P. Why itch in places you've no longer got? Cut once! Cut deep'. Cut where it counts!

And I'm d.a.m.ned if she isn't kicking up quite a ruckus. The novices are mumbling bewilderedly. The elevated are waving their stumps and asking belligerent questions. Doc P. is fomenting radical schism in the Arturan church.

Arty has a revolution to contend with and where is he? Mooning over his lost love - not Elly, but Iphigenia. He's subtle about it. He only inquires half a dozen times a day about her health and whereabouts. The binoculars set to swivel on the tripod in his window are, he claims, for keeping an eye on the flock. Never would he use them to watch the pale Iphy in her painful progress down the row toward the Chute with her swollen belly pulling her forward while she struggles to balance the flabby monster that sprouts from her waist. She sticks one arm straight out for balance and drags that unreliable leg on the other side.

General opinion about Arty varies, from those who see him as a profound humanitarian to those who view him as a ruthless reptile. I myself have held most of the opinions in this spectrum at one time or another. Watching Arty pine for Iphy, however, I come to see him as just a regular Joe - jealous, bitter, possessive, compet.i.tive, in a constant frenzy to disguise his lack of self-esteem, drowning in deadly love, and utterly unable to prevent himself from gorging on the coals of h.e.l.l in his search for revenge.

The estimable Zephir McGurk informs me, in his laconic way over checkers (a game at which his plodding methodical integrity reveals itself una.s.sailable), that Arty had him design a bugging system that tapped the twins' van into a recording device in Arty's console. He can hear every word, every move.

I find this depressing. The idea of Arty sitting and listening to hour after hour of footsteps, pages turning, toilet flushing, comb running through hair. Elly's conversation has been reduced to the syllable mmmmmm and Iphy is not in the mood for song. Her piano is covered with dust (according to McGurk) and Arty is listening to her file her nails.

Doc P. is frustrated by the inefficiency of Arty's method. I mentioned Arty's theory of acclimatization and continually renewed commitment. "One respects," I said, "Arturo's desire for complete understanding on the part of the Admitted. Each elevation being a voluntary step, a considered step, allows those with hesitations to back out at any time."

But she started up on how many hours she'd spent already just taking off my four toes, and she would be hours in surgery on those remaining, and that would bring me only to the first level of elevation, while, if she were allowed to be efficient, she could take me "all the way there inside a single hour on the table."

Her face became quite damp with her effusions, and her final outburst fogged her gla.s.ses. "Now he wants to add on lobotomy at the end! He's talking about sending for all the completions-bringing them back from the rest home a few at a time so I can do yet another job on them! I'm spending eight to ten hours every day in surgery. I'm getting an allergic reaction to my gloves - unless it's the soap. My hands are scaling and my knuckles are swelling."

I knew better than to suggest hiring another surgeon to help her.

She says Iphy is enjoying a fairly normal pregnancy but may be carrying twins. I asked about Chick, who looks terrible lately. She says he's depressed and she's dosing him with B complex, zinc, and jumping jacks. "Exercise is the ultimate panacea ... Oxidation of impurity and so on," says she.

I talked to Chick in back of the cat wagon this morning. An old tire lay flat in the dust and he was bouncing on it, his bare feet planted on opposite sides, his hands on top of his head, his coveralls flying loose on his thin frame. The coverall straps lay on his bare shoulders, emphasizing the skinniness of a neck the size of my wrist. He was polite as always but thinking of something else. His face turned up to me had a starved, ancient look. He said he was "waiting for Iphy." No, he didn't have to work today because Doc was having meetings and giving speeches. (This is the first word I heard of Doc's Surgical Strike.) I wanted to question him about some of the "Chick stories" going around but Iphy sagged up, lugging the drooling Elly. Chick hopped off the tire, said "So long" and ran off to her. He threw an arm around her, tucked his shoulder under Elly's armpit to help support her dead weight. They strolled off, the three. Two? Or do we count the ballooning belly and call it four?

I saw Arty's squad marching down the camp so I went through the fence to catch up. The way he leans forward gives an illusion of speed as the chair hums and groans over the dry ruts and dead gra.s.s in the Arturan encampment. His solemn novices don't dare touch the chair unless he asks them to.

He stopped at the open door of a dusty sedan with white rags draped out of the windows to dry. Inside, on the back seat, lay an elevated male with his arms ending in white-wrapped bulges at the elbow and one leg ending at the knee. The plush upholstery of the car lifts a puff of dust every time the man shifts slightly in the seat.

Arty nodded in at the shadowed face. "Do you have what you need?"

The stump man wriggled, surprised, craning his neck, "Arturo, sir?" His eyes showed their whites in the dimness.

Arty's scalp was bright in the sunlight. "Are you well treated? Do you need anything?"

"Well, that boy that's s'posed to help me ... not meaning to whine but he's always gone. Yesterday, I couldn't help it, I wet myself, and by the time he showed up, d.a.m.ned if I didn't have diaper rash."

Arty chuckled, nodding. "Sounds like you need a replacement. What's that boy's name?"

"Jason. But he's a good boy. Just young."

Arty swiveled in his chair and eyed his entourage. A dozen backs straightened and a dozen faces tried to look bright and eager.

"Who'll serve this elevated man?" Arty asked. The hands shot up - all five fingers spread to show their service status.

"Miss Elizabeth," Arty nodded. The woman stepped forward, her white dress bunching over her thickening body. Her hair bunned on top of her head. Thirty-five. Something burnt out of her soft face.

"As you hope to be served?" Arty asked.

"In my turn," breathed the fingerful, toeful Miss E.

"When that Jason boy shows, send him to me."