The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Very good, sir, said the waiter. More wine?

  I understand you’re going to be a father, said Mr. Rapp, blinking sentimentally. Congratulations, John. No, thank you. We have enough for now.

  Thanks for the congratulations, said John, wondering who had told him about Irene’s mistake. —It may be another false alarm. By the way, Mr. Budrys hasn’t gotten back to me yet with the amended tobacco brief.

  Oh, he hasn’t? Well, you know we’re getting pretty close to deadline on that one, John.

  I’ll lean on him, said John.

  Well said! cried Mr. Rapp, clapping his hands. John, you’ll go far.

  But you never did tell us what you’re about, said Mr. Singer. Or did I miss something when I peed?

  I’m about nothing, said John. Exactly nothing.

  Spoken like a full partner, chortled Mr. Singer.

  We think you have the makings of a full partner, echoed Mr. Rapp.

  Well, thanks, said John awkwardly.

  | 23 |

  That afternoon there had been no message from Brady and no other work, so Tyler went back to Larkin Street to observe yellow RX-7s and white Chevys emerge from the Queen’s parking garage, fouling the air. He watched them for a long time, writing their license plate numbers in the lines of his youngest surveillance report, emptily perceiving rather than learning, of which he was tired. The grin of light between a car’s belly and the shiny concrete floor widened as the little wheeled monster rolled closer. The buzzer sounded twice. Across the street, a dirty foot hung out of a dirty sleeping bag; a longbearded man sat upon the sidewalk, gazing pupillessly at another sleeper whose red underwear made his buttocks one with the square tail-lit backsides of cars. The buzzer sounded again. The car came out, its brilliant yellow eyes suddenly impoverished by the day. After that, a shaveskulled guy strung chain across the darkest tunnel. Watching the car go, Tyler spied a black-and-white crawling lazily by, bearing to the police station a silent young man with his chin on two fingers which hid behind the goatish beard; Tyler had seen him selling drugs sometimes on Jones Street. The police car went around the corner and out of the life of Tyler, who continued to sit in the yellow zone, dreaming of nothing with an almost Leninist confidence. Finally he cruised up to Union Square, rolled down his window, inched along in traffic (which, unlike most people, he loved; it gave him time to see things), and studied the giant palenesses of black and white glamor girls in the store windows. He counted the stripes on the awnings of hotdog stands. If he could simply get a name for the Queen, he’d be able to run an extended trace; then he’d surely snatch her social security number, her statewide criminal record, and some address, however worthless. He loved extended traces. It was a white, foggy afternoon crawling with obsequious light, which must have been why the darkness between buildings refused to be worshiped, let alone lovingly touched. He took a spin across the Bay Bridge. Behind him, the trunks of skyscrapers faded into fog regularly notched with greyness where the windows were. Irene had mentioned seeing plum blossoms in Berkeley or Oakland. He drove around for an hour or two, but didn’t spy any. At dusk he returned to San Francisco. The line at the toll booth wasn’t too bad; he struck the Mission in twenty minutes. He wondered what Brady was doing. Under what pretext could he call the man up? No news was not good news in Tyler’s occupation. Thanks to credit card debt, his savings account now trembled not far above zero—absolute zero, when every last financial molecule falls still and silent—but he didn’t want to check his answering machine, which surely bore no offerings of work. Feeling blue, he parked in an alley just off Sixteenth and Valencia, zipped his jacket over the bulge in his left armpit, and wandered into one of those little cafés with excellent coffee and bad art on the walls. A name, a name, and then she’d become real. Maybe the bail bondsmen would know her—but he had to get a name first. There being no reason not to finish this wasted day as he’d begun it, he ordered a bottle of mineral water and sat himself down at a corner table to read the Guardian ads: Women Egg Donors Needed!—Redundant gender description, thought Tyler. The other patrons hunched at their own tables, reading.

  On the bulletin board it said Lesbian Housemate Wanted and SELF-DEFENSE FOR WOMEN and Piano Lessons and Hookers, Watch Out for These Men! Tyler read this last. It was a warning about the Capp Street murders. Two prostitutes from that business district had wound up in dumpsters down by China Basin. A third had gotten away and given a description of the killers.

  Well, he thought to himself, let’s go take a stroll down Capp Street.

  It was a cool spring night in the Mission. Beyond his coffeehouse, where two girls were snuggling as their fingers pecked out destinations on the electronic highway, two men chatted yawning like sentinels, their hands on their heads, and past them an old lady was panhandling. The old lady had tears in her eyes, and she kept shifting her aching feet. Tyler suddenly thought to himself: She knows as I will never know how hard a sidewalk can be. —She asked Tyler for fifty cents, so on principle he gave her a quarter. A minute later she wandered into the coffeeshop, then back out again as he stood irresolute on that corner, wondering how he could drum up more business; and with no recognition she asked him for fifty cents. He’d asked her name, which was Diane, so he knew to say: Why, hello, Diane! and she jerked awake for a moment, then stumbled away.

  His friend Roberta the stripper just happened to be passing with her shiny new bike, and cried out: Hi, Henry! I saw that! That old woman must be in Nirvana.

  He knew that this was a sarcastic and even hateful remark because Roberta hated Buddhism. —No, he said earnestly. She’s desperate, so she can’t have reached Nirvana yet.

  Hey, I’ve gotta go meet my friend Mollie up on Haight Street, said Roberta. You wanna come have coffee with us?

  Oh, that’s really nice of you, Roberta. I just don’t have any energy tonight. —He was longing for Irene.

  Are you depressed? I’m depressed. My boyfriend really used me. I fucked him because he was in a rock band but after that I fell in love. I would have married him. But then he turned out to be quite the sonofabitch.

  I’m sorry to hear that, Roberta, he said.

  You want to buy me coffee? Actually you don’t have to buy me anything. I have money.

  You’re a nice person, Roberta, he said. I’m sorry you’re having a rough time.

  So, how’s the job? You track down any interesting people? Hey, you can stay at my place if you want. You can sleep on the living room couch. My roommates are pretty cool about it.

  Roberta, do you know anything about the Queen of the Whores?

  I’m just a stripper, not a whore, remember? I mean, I believe in the sacred Whore-Goddess. Maybe that’s what the Queen is. You sure you don’t want to stay over?

  I wish I could, but I have scabies, he lied.

  Oh. Oh! And I’ve been holding your hand! Let me go wash my hands! Nothing personal, but I don’t want to get that again.

  After Roberta left him he entered a clean and pleasant secondhand bookshop which played music from the time when he was young. He browsed through The Patriarchy at Work and Difficult Women and Sisterhood Is Global. There was a cat on the sofa. The pretty Asian girl who was shelving books smiled at him. He wanted to sit down and read for a while. Instead he bought a used Steinbeck paperback and strode out, past the singing panhandlers, the bright lavender hotel doorways that said VACANCY. He saw a tattoo parlor that he didn’t remember from before. —Of course he didn’t get down to the Mission that much. The Tenderloin was more his area. —At a phone booth he called his answering machine, discovering no message from Brady, who perhaps was busy enjoying the carnal knowledge of some cottonwood tree. Down on Mission Street the tall hooded bullies were yelling and the hard girls were bending over the sidewalk, saying: You dropped a rock. Where’s my rock, bitch?—Gonna fix that motherfucker up, save me a little bit, he heard a pimp say. He returned to the subway station’s cold night sun of radiating tiles, stood by the pay phone trying not to call Irene, picked
up the phone, put it down, took a quarter out of his pocket, thought some more, and then walked away with the quarter in his hand. Capp Street was empty—strange, since the beginning of the month was long past, and the whores’ welfare checks long spent; maybe they were scared of the Capp Street killers. On the other hand, this evening had hardly progressed to lateness. Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. He strolled to Seventeenth and Eighteenth; still not seeing any oral or vaginal workers, he turned around and at once somebody began to follow him from the darkness just beyond Eighteenth, dodging between the mountainously laden garbage cans. He felt a prickle of fear. —I know the Queen, Tyler called over his shoulder. —The footsteps stopped. —Well, he thought to himself, what’s in a name?

  In a fast food restaurant he bought french fries and then entered the men’s room to count his wallet. Two hundred and three dollars. Enough.

  Can you give me a room without too much crack smoke? he asked at the Rama Hotel. Last time there was crack smoke coming in through the wall and I didn’t get much sleep.

  That must have been some other hotel, said the manager, bored and angry.

  Okay, said Tyler. I believe you. I’m sure the room will be great.

  He went up to his room, which cost twenty dollars plus a five dollar key deposit, and sat there for a while. Then he wrote a letter to the Queen of the Whores, politely requesting a meeting. He copied it out four times. Each letter he put in its own envelope addressed to the Queen of the Whores. Before sealing these literary efforts, he took four eyedroppered vials from his pocket. Each one contained a differently keyed locator fluid. Marking them separately with that treacherous spoor, he licked the envelopes shut. He left one on top of the dresser. The second he took down the hall to the bathroom and hid in the toilet tank, taping it underneath the lid, right on top of somebody’s heroin stash. The third and fourth he kept with him. Descending the stairs, he swung the grating open, and peered out into the night. Mission Street was getting worse every month. Two tall men waiting outside snarled at him. His hand was in his jacket pocket where the pistol was. Perhaps they saw the lack of fear in his face (although he actually did fear them), or perhaps they meant no harm, for they let him through. He walked back along the night sidewalk where homeless men rattled their shopping carts, got into his car, drove across town to the Queen’s parking garage in order to add another stultifying line to his surveillance report, dropped the car off there so that no one would smash the windshield, slid the third letter to the Queen under the grating by the third floor, took the bus back, and got off at Sixteenth and Mission where the subway station was now a crack cocaine bazaar. He saw two hulking pairs of shoulders enter the gratinged street door of the Rama, and strode quickly to grab it so that the manager would not have to buzz him in, but the closer he got, the higher loomed those shoulders, and suddenly he was apprehensive again. He wondered whether he might be getting ill. Once his brother had hired him—probably out of pity—to do a little investigative work on a toxic dumping case which was of interest to a certain realty corporation, and late one night as Tyler approached the factory warehouse he’d suddenly been almost overcome by a panic which seemed causeless. He went home, lay down, and was sick for a week. This performance, needless to say, did not endear him to John’s firm. Pacing half a block up and half a block back to give those shoulders time to disappear, he rang the buzzer at the Rama. When the hideous cawing of unlocking sounded, he pulled the grating open. A whore and a pimp stood in the hallway. —It’s not enough, the whore was whining. —You argue with me, you’ll go back in the penitentiary, said the pimp. —Their mouths kissed the long yellow crack-flame as Tyler said excuse me and passed up the stinking stairs to the second grating, whose button he had to lean on for a long time before the manager buzzed him in.

  What room? said the manager, who obviously didn’t remember him.

  I kept my key, thanks.

  Don’t talk smart to me, filth, said the manager. What room?

  The one with no crack smoke, said Tyler, turning his back on the manager and going up the second flight of stairs to the hall where his room was. A door opened and a man clothed only in tattoos of angry demons leaned out and spat on the carpet. Out of his side-vision Tyler glimpsed a naked old woman straining to pull a dildo out of her ass. Tyler walked down the corridor to the bathroom and looked inside the toilet tank. The letter and the baggie of heroin were both gone. From his pocket he withdrew the fourth and final envelope and set it openly on top of the toilet tank.

  In his room the first envelope was still there. But somebody had painted on the bottom drawer of the half-ruined dresser an image of a naked woman whose hair was charred pipe resin or a similar black substance and whose lips were lipstick. Between her breasts ran these lines:

  IS WOUND BUT ONCE

  No man has the power

  to tell where he will

  stop at a late

  or early hour.

  To lose one’s wealth is sad indeed

  To lose one’s health is more

  To lose one’s soul is such a loss

  To lose one’s Queen is all.

  He saw another lipstick stain where someone had stood on the bed and kissed the wall.

  | 24 |

  He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and on his return the night breeze felt good so he approached the street window and saw a whore creeping up the fire escape. She put her finger to her lips when she saw him. He nodded and waited.

  I’m so cold, the woman whispered when she reached him. Please please please. I’m alone and I got a room already in the Westman Hotel.

  What’s your name?

  Barbara.

  He looked at her for a long time. —Hey, he said softly, I remember you when your name was Shorty.

  I remember you, too. You were living in the Krishna then.

  Yes I was! laughed Tyler. I was between jobs then. And you—

  Yes. Hey! Guess what! I kicked! I’m not shooting up anymore!

  That’s great, he said, half believing her.

  So, please . . .

  Maybe later, when I have some money, he said smoothly.

  You don’t even have two dollars? I’m hungry.

  Here’s a buck, he said. Listen, Barbara—

  Aw, what the hell. You can call me Shorty. We go back a ways, don’t we?

  OK, Shorty. I need to meet the Queen. Do you know how I can do that?

  The Queen! What do you want to meet her for? What’s she got that I ain’t got?

  Somebody’s paying me, he said.

  Oh, that’s different. You gotta do what you gotta do. Well, I’m in business for myself, so I don’t really know her. But the other girls say she lives underground, you know like in the sewers or under the subway or something, always moving around, but always in the dark like some bug that rules the bug colony. I never went looking for her. They say if she wants you, she’ll find you, but if you go poking your nose in her business she’ll fuck you up. Like seriously fuck you up. But you didn’t hear anything from me, right?

  So she’s mean, Shorty?

  Talk about mean! That girl is one hundred percent bitch. You look for her, you watch your ass, Okay? ’Cause you’ve been good to me.

  Thanks, Shorty, he said, squeezing her in his arms.

  | 25 |

  That night Tyler dreamed of an extermination machine in the shape of a cubical steel face within which the mouth was a bladed trapezoid. The condemned marched into the mouth one by one. They bowed their heads, reminding him of the way that everyone gazed at his or her tapping shoes at the V.D. clinic. (Once he’d met a client there. Another time he’d been a patient there.) The blades macerated them. He dreamed of this all night, sometimes managing to struggle awake, but it was as though the architect of this machine kept dragging him back down to gaze upon it. At dawn he was sad and anxious. It was just light enough for him to see bloodstains and squashed bugs on the walls. He itched all over. He got up, pissed in the sink, and dressed. Shorty was st
aying in room number 302. He took the first letter to the Queen and slid it under her door. Then he returned to his room and lay down, trying to sleep and failing. There was piss shining on the vinyl runners of the stairs when he finally went out. A man and a woman were sitting in that estimable liquid. The woman said to her companion: I’ll do it soon’s he gets out of the hall. —You talking about me? Tyler inquired politely, zipping up his fly. —I’m just saying this hall is none too big, the woman said. —Tyler nodded at her. He saw that the man had fallen asleep.

  He rang the buzzer on the manager’s hatchway and got his five dollars back for the key.

  Hey, if you don’t need that money, you can give it to me, a whore in the hallway said.

  And you can do the same for me, he said.

  Well, the whore said, scratching her scars, I might sometime do you that favor.

  I’ll just hold my breath, honey, said Tyler, swinging open the top grating.

  Be careful out there, said the night janitor.

  He descended the final stairs, peered through the street grating to make sure that nobody was lurking, and went out. A sad black whore, hooded against the rising sun, was walking slowly toward the bus stop. She gazed back at him longingly. He saluted her, mouthed the word Queen, and went on, passing a parking garage whose cage gaped empty just inside the doorway. There was nobody inside the ticket taker’s heavily glassed booth, which was set reclusively back in the darkness.

  No way the Queen’s in a parking garage, Tyler said to himself. It’s got to be just a goddamned letter drop.

  Hallelujah, he thought then. I actually believe in the Queen.

  He walked and walked, scratching. On South Van Ness near Twenty Second a black-and-white slowly came to a stop, double-parked, and from its two mouths expectorated two cops the darkness of whose uniforms seemed to keep the last remnants of the night. He didn’t recognize either of them. They mounted the painted steps of an unpainted Victorian and rang the doorbell. Their hands were on their holsters.