Arty and Papa experimented. Arty’s show changed in small ways — a pink spotlight instead of red — or, occasionally, in big ways. It was always a sit-down show, a bench-and-bleacher act. The tank and Arty were the only focus. For a while Arty made a dry entrance. He came out on the platform above the tank before diving in. Then he decided that folks wanted to think that he lived in the water all the time — maybe even breathed water. After that he always made his first appearance in the water. He used a screen in the water for a while, hiding behind it and swimming out into the brightly visible part of the tank when Papa signaled. 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 bundle of costumes in one arm and a bag of popping corn in the other as she stood rigid in the sawdust of the midway and lectured me sternly: “We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say ‘Where is Elly and Iphy?’ We say ‘Where are Elly and Iphy?’ ”
If you stood facing the twins, Elly was on your left and Iphy on your right. Elly was right-handed and Iphy was left-handed. But Iphy was the right leg and Elly was the left leg. If you pulled Elly’s hair, Iphy yelped too. If you kissed Iphy’s cheek, Elly smiled. If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn’t sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate. Between them they ate a small fraction more than one norm kid their size.
Jonathan Tomaini, the greasy-haired music-school graduate who became their piano teacher when they had gone past Lily, claimed that Iphy was all melody and Elly was rhythm exclusively. They were both sopranos.
Arty speculated that their two brains functioned as right and left lobes of a single brain.
Elly punished Iphy by eating food that disagreed with them. Iphy would sink into depressed silence, eating nothing. Elly’s favorite trick was cheese. Iphy hated constipation like cancer.
Elly varied the treatment by gorging on chocolate, even though she didn’t really like chocolate and it made her chin break out in zits. Pimples were very obvious on her milky skin. Iphy loved chocolate and never ate it for fear of pimples. Elly’s eating the stuff never gave Iphy pimples. The punishment was that Iphy had to sleep next to Elly’s pimples, had to live within inches of the molten eruptions.
Iphy felt sorry for everybody who wasn’t a twin. Elly despised me.
When Chick came along, both twins adored him. He was such a meek little feather that he worshiped them. Lil and Al were just loved. But Arty was different. He was separate. He fascinated Iphy and he terrified Elly. Elly’s harshness flared against anyone who might distract Iphy’s attention from her. The rest of us were just fantasy opposition. Arty was dangerous. He flirted with Iphy. He toyed with her.
Elly hated him. She acted, sometimes, as though Arty could tear Iphy away from her.
The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said “Mutant Mystery” and, in smaller letters, “A Museum of Nature’s Innovative Art.” We called it “the Chute.” Like everything else in the Fabulon, the Chute grew and changed over the years. But the Chute had started with six clear-glass twenty-gallon jars, and those jars — each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-button voice tape — were always the core.
The Chute was Crystal Lil’s idea, and she supervised it. She visited the Chute every day before the gates opened and polished the jars lovingly with glass cleaner. Later, when Al wanted to put the stuffed animals in, he had to clear it with Crystal Lil. She insisted on the maze at the entrance so that the six jars remained the climax of the walk through.