The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  The railroad age had obtruded itself into Henry Tyler’s boyhood largely through school field trips to the train museum which lurked in the banal commercial cartoon entitled Old Sacramento. John had always liked trains better than he. The boyhood of the two brothers was naturally punctuated by family drives to caves and caverns, Sierra picnics, waterskiing, zoos, rare whitewater rafting trips when finances permitted, factory stores, burger joints. But one can hardly grow up in Sacramento without being aware of the trains. They call at night. They creep to and fro at busy intersections, irritating the drivers who wait in long lines of idling cars. They soak the gravel of the old yards with oil and creosote. The progressive city council fines, squeezes and diminishes them. —We think the Seventh Street punchline is imperative for the development of this city, I’ve heard our mayor say. We’d like an opinion on condemning this site and charging the cost to Union Pacific Railroad. —The grim, sweaty Union Pacific man grips the podium in both hands. He knows that the railroad tracks over Seventh Street are doomed. But once they’re gone for good, they’ll be loved. For now, they’re an annoyance, thwarting the energies of more evolved beings and mechanisms. John, for instance, wouldn’t have shed a tear had all the tracks been ripped out. But on the dresser in his San Francisco apartment he kept a shiny black model of a Southern Pacific locomotive. Irene used to dust it twice a month. Now John wiped it with a handerchief whenever he noticed it, which was far more often than he realized. On the mornings after she had slept there, Celia Caro sometimes emerged from the bathroom wrapped in one of Irene’s terrycloth towels to find him standing with the socks drawer open, holding the toy locomotive in his hand as he polished it caressingly, on his face a sweet and mysterious smile.

  Precisely because they had grown up there, in short, the two brothers found Sacramento to be less than wondrous in its railroad character which blessed them almost subliminally with train whistles on long days and long nights—always fewer and fewer of those, and Mrs. Tyler never heard them anymore; they’d visited her as often as her own wish for chocolate. Tyler himself, who was destined, as we shall see, for spectacular railroad wanderings, remained yet ignorant of his susceptibility to trains, although afterward, when the disaster of the Queen of the Whores fastened on him, in league with certain other financial and emotional disasters, he lost the use of his car and began riding the N Judah and the J Church streetcar lines through San Francisco, becoming fascinated by the shiny, almost blue double tracks, which twisted down through hilly parks and then vanished under the ground. He never asked himself why those tracks lured him. But after a while they were wiggling through his dreams.

  Who knows? Perhaps Tyler’s desperate freeway drives from Sacramento to Los Angeles and back were motivated not only by his love for the dead woman, but also by a lust for long journeys which the clattering songs of Sacramento trains dripped into his blood. In any event, this latest silent departure of his, which Mrs. Tyler would never forget, came between mother and son for the rest of their lives, like an infinitely long freight train backing between them at some midtown crossroads.

  | 62 |

  On his return from Los Angeles, where Irene’s grave was doing well on that hot and smoggy day at Forest Lawn with the lawn mowers roaring, Tyler got rewarded with a vandalism investigation case from the owner of an abandoned factory down on Townsend which was being broken into and smashed up night by night. —Sure, I’ll do it, he said. I figure it’ll cost you seven hundred receipted or five hundred under the table. —That’s cool, said the owner. Let’s go with the five. —Tyler, pleased to make headway against his stale credit card bills, drove straight there. His car still smelled of flowers. The owner, who continuously sweated, met him outside and gave him a key. —Kind of dusty in here, Tyler said. You ever get any transients trying to crash the place? Looks sort of un-slept in, though. —You tell me, said the owner. With these vermin chewing their way into my property, who the hell knows? —I was just wondering if the Queen of the Whores bunked here, Tyler said, always hoping to snare two streetbirds with one strategically sticky concretion of intellect, but the owner shrugged. Tyler rented a hundred-foot ladder from the paint store. Ascending this friend of hangmen and impatient heaven-seekers, he felt as if he were sinking rather than rising, because the spiderwebbed swelter compounded as he went, until he had to go back down in order to tie a rag around his nose and mouth. Outside, a truck horn sounded four times, reminding him of Domino. Because the owner did not seem good for more than the five, now already received, he decided to be efficient for once, and so, choking in the spidercrawling dust, he duct-taped to a ceiling beam two camera bodies, one with a fisheye lens attached, and the other sporting his four-hundred-millimeter lens, which he had prefocused at about five and a half feet above floor level. Now for transmitter, radio slave, cables and strobe. Although he stood eighty-odd feet above the ground, the gruesome air pressed on him almost as heavily, he fancied, as the dirt upon Irene in her casket. Gradually this thought of his, which had arisen only innocently, out of the useless loving care of tomb-tenders, gave rise to others worse and worse, until it seemed indeed as if Irene’s pallid face were swimming down toward him from the silken depths of terror between the ceiling beams. The young girl, long-fingered, rich-eyebrowed bride, where was she now? He would not ask who she was or had been. In previous years, having been hired by families in missing persons cases whose agonizing end he’d never allowed himself to foresee, he’d witnessed the talents of Dr. Jasper, chief medical examiner of San Francisco, hence skilled and rapid cutter (his yellow gloves wet with blood as he swigged from a coffee cup, slicing through a corpse’s shiny fatty neck), who could build a clay face out of a murdered man’s skull-cast, then plant artificial hair and glass eyeballs until the flotsam of a life, cracked and vacated seashell on eternity’s beach, lived again, at least in the longing vision of the father or wife upon whom Dr. Jasper must call to identify the dead. But in the darkness around Tyler the opposite sort of being had been conceived and was gestating into loathsomeness. Start not with the skull of her, but with the living Irene of his memories, whom he could see anytime he wished, simply by closing his eyes. Over her dark-eyed face, somebody had slid a bloated mask and was now packing it full of worms. Could this truly be Irene, the one of whom he dreamed? Which Irene now existed? Who waited for him at the end of his mind’s darkly barren turnings? Suppose it were this new other, this stranger! He forced himself to probe himself, like Dr. Jasper withdrawing a little urine from Irene’s bladder as she lay upon the marble slab; urine hissed up into the cylinder of the long syringe. He needed to know precisely this: Why was death so terrible? He could not even comprehend what he feared. Some people are afraid of nonexistence, and others of the actual process of dying. Perhaps what he most dreaded was the prospect of a marriage between life and death. At City Lights he’d dipped into a history of ancient tortures, one of which haunted him before he’d even discovered the crude engraving on the next page: Kill the condemned one’s sweetheart, then enchain him to her until they both rotted. Perhaps he did not love Irene enough, that he could not bear to be with her in this way. The ladder began to tremble. Understanding that it was he who trembled, he calmed himself, constructing a shell around the vision. This moment, which within other moments would lurk forgotten, nonetheless founded his future. He could not yet accept what he feared, but he had taken the first step toward accepting it. It had come, and so he said: Let it come. And the consequence of his courage—we can’t call it a reward, since it was not nice—was the realization that Irene’s death would attaint the remainder of his life. If he could somehow love, not only her, but also her putrefaction, then perhaps he’d win the victory. For now he could not. And so he squeezed the dregs of Irene from his mind, with the same degree of temporary success as if he had squeezed dry a sponge held underwater—as long as his hand remained clenched, new water could be declined—then descended those vibrating aluminum rungs to a plane more greasily substantial, if no less vile, than the
hangman’s aerie. Directly beneath the cameras he established his vandals’ bait: a clean-swept floor, crowned by a table piled high with lightbulbs. Then he went out and locked up. Beneath the broken window which must surely be their entrance, he taped up a handwritten sign to goad them: STAY OUT, YOU ANIMALS! He drove back to the paint store and returned the ladder. Then he called his answering machine.

  John’s voice, struggling to hold itself back, demanded that he telephone their mother. Brady’s voice inquired after the missing surveillance forms. The voice of his new client, Mrs. Bickford, confirmed her Tuesday afternoon appointment. The voice of a Mr. Okubata proposed a confidential meeting about a marital matter. His landlord’s voice advised him of a two percent rent increase beginning next month.

  The White Nile deli on Bryant Street, patronized mainly by construction workers, made excellent roast chicken sandwiches. Tyler had long forgotten who’d told him about the place. He never went out of his way to eat there, but over the years now adding up to decades he’d inserted many pushpins into his mental map of San Francisco, and relied upon them, being a creature of habit, and habit comforted him even more now that Irene was dead: at least the White Nile was still the same. He bought the house special, which they wrapped up for him in white paper for ten cents more than last time. Almost immediately, he realized that he had no appetite. He imagined Irene telling him to eat in order to take care of himself. Then his stubbled jaws slowly moved, and he swallowed. After that, removing once again from its casket his embalmed sense of duty, he drove to a parking lot two blocks away from the factory, reclined his seat, laid out his receiver and radio control unit on the dashboard, then read from the Gnostic Scriptures, which he had purchased at City Lights. He read: Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this, neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. Again he saw Irene’s face. A worm was born from her nostril. If the Gnostics were correct, he must not reject this. But it was like standing idly by when somebody called her a Chink. He could not believe that the worm did not hurt her, and that he could not help. No doubt she was faded in her coffin, but he’d do what he could to help her look after herself. When it was too dark to see, he merely waited, almost enjoying the background hum of his receiver unit. Not long before midnight he heard a clang, then voices simultaneously echoing, angry, high-pitched and indistinct. Something smashed. The voices became louder. —That ain’t money, not even raw money! a boy was saying. You don’t know shit about money! —Another voice said: Something’s on the table over here. —When Tyler could hear them quite well, he pressed the square button on the radio control unit. In the factory, the flash fired once like a shocking warning. That would make the kids look up. —What the fuck! somebody screamed on the receiver. How many times in his career had he heard such Jeffersonian eloquence? Machine-gunning the strobe, he snapped off thirty-odd frames of film with his remote auto winder, which was slaved to the round button of the radio control unit. Meanwhile he’d started the engine. Of course they threw bricks and rocks, trying to knock the cameras out, but the strobe would have destroyed their night vision. He got some blurry shots which the factory owner later said weren’t good enough to convict, and one excellent frame of the enraged face of a brick-thrower. By then he was approaching the factory window with his headlights on bright and the passenger window down. As the vandals came leaping down in separately silhouetted panics, he leaned out and recorded them on his third camera’s police film, clicking and clicking away until they began throwing bricks at him. Conviction material! Then he shifted into reverse and sped away.

  The cops got two of them. The factory owner, vindictive in victory, but perhaps Tyler would have done the same, prosecuted them for malicious mischief. They’d already cost him eight thousand dollars, not counting Tyler’s fee. One boy got off, but the other was already “in the system,” as lawyers love to say: two prior convictions for graffiti, and a current bench warrant for probation violation. They threw him in jail for thirty days until his hearing, then administratively revoked his probation. He served six months more behind bars. The factory owner told all this to Tyler, who would rather not have known. And yet he did not believe himself to be guilty of anything. He despised the random, cowardly nihilism of the vandals. Moreover, he hadn’t called the police when they were inside the factory; he’d given them a sporting chance. Perhaps that was the source of his qualmishness: He had taken no stand. But must he take a stand on everything, everytime? It had been just business. And the factory owner was satisfied.

  | 63 |

  Somebody warned him most threateningly not to take Mrs. Bickford on as a client. Narrowing his eyes, he met her on Tuesday as scheduled, but she didn’t want to hire him anymore; she was too scared, she said. He gave her the name of a battered women’s shelter and wished her luck.

  Somebody wanted him to shadow some jurors. —I’d like to help you out, said Tyler in his most friendly voice, but I have all the work I can handle right now. Have you tried Pinkerton’s? Somebody said they specialize in shadowing jurors. I think it’s in their code of ethics.

  Somebody down at H.R. Computer in Palo Alto wanted him to try to obtain a chip from their competitor, RoboGraphix. —Well, now, you know that’s illegal, said Tyler. How much can you pay?

  Twenty thousand.

  Are you recording this call?

  What if I tell you I’m not?

  I wouldn’t believe you.

  What if I told you I was?

  I’d figure you were trying to entrap me.

  So you don’t want the twenty thousand?

  I don’t break the law, period.

  And I’m not asking you to break the law.

  Dandy, said Tyler. Glad we got that crap out of the way.

  By the way, I’m not recording.

  I am, Tyler lied with a laugh.

  Look, Mr. Tyler, if you—

  Do they manufacture on site?

  Yes, sir.

  Gallium arsenide? That’s a pretty toxic process, I understand.

  I believe so.

  Well, let me do some looking around. I’ll call you back.

  He called up his friend Rod on the force down in Palo Alto, and Rod said that the job wasn’t a sting that he knew of. Be careful, though, was Rod’s unsolicited and unnecessary advice.

  He called up RoboGraphix and asked the secretary to send him a copy of the press release on the SBD-9000 chip.

  What chip is that, sir? said the receptionist.

  I’m on assignment for Computer Currents to write an article about you, said Tyler. It’s all over town that you have a fabulous new chip coming out.

  Just a moment, sir. I’ll let you speak with one of our technical staff.

  Yeah, who’s this? said the next voice on the line—a weary, suspicious, middle-aged male voice.

  Yes, sir, my name is Charles Ångstrom, you know, as in wavelength, and I’m freelancing a piece for—

  Yeah, who you with?

  Computer Currents.

  Who’s your editor over there?

  Who am I dealing with, sir? said Tyler in his silkiest voice.

  This is Hal Nemeth in the technical department, the voice said.

  Well, Mr. Nemeth, I’ll be frank with you. I’m writing this article on spec. I have some friends in Silicon Valley who tell me that what you guys are about to release is pretty special . . .