The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Hey, pervs! Ticklequick is back! Hv. 75 c.c. vanillaspit (Rodney, guarant’d 12, uncircumc. & hairless) for swap; seek chocopiss from virg. hairless slit 12 & under: MUST BE FRESH. Also NEED NEED NEED photos for swap. PLEASE NO RECOG. HEADSHOTS. Help Ticklequick put lemon on his lips. E-mail Big T!

  Under FBI supervision, Dan Smooth spat into several dozen test tubes to furnish the nectar of fictitious Rodney; in exchange the FBI received and analyzed eighteen test tubes of piss, two of which contained significant levels of both testosterone and alcohol, one of which evidently came from a lactating woman, and one of which proved to be so old (the collector who sent it had perhaps kept it in a jar in some hot garage in the Central Valley for twenty years) that it could not be analyzed; these were discarded, leaving fourteen samples whose levels of estradiol, estrone, estriol, and pituitary gonadotropins were consonant with those of prepubescent girls. Thanks to improvements in laboratory techniques, only two of these were disqualified as nonsecretors, meaning that they were so chemically taciturn that not even the blood group could be read; this left an even dozen samples of young girls’ urine, which the FBI grimacingly permitted Dan Smooth to sniff and crow over, arranging the shining test tubes in order from pale transparent lemon to the rich dark orange-brown characteristic of a pure palladium photograph; and of course Smooth made many such comments as: This one ate asparagus for dinner, I know. Ah, if only I could have been there when she peed! —for, as I mentioned, Dan Smooth followed all three strategies, the latter one being bravado and defiance; he was by his nature kin to the killer, the exception being that he did not kill; and so the FBI ran DNA matches on those twelve test tubes of yellow light and dark, and the ninth test tube granted them a positive lock on Kaylin Kohler’s DNA, which led them to one Eugene Kenneth Brewington, who was convicted the following year, sentenced to death, and, after eight years as a guest of the state of California, at great expense actually executed by lethal injection, as a result of which Mr. Brewington’s attorney fell upon hard times and the district attorney, two FBI investigators, one forensic technician, and one field investigator in Redding received promotions, while Dan Smooth received no public acknowledgment whatsoever, but an obscure government draft for twelve thousand dollars arrived in his post office box one day, and a dispute which he was having with the Internal Revenue Service was abruptly decided in his favor, and he received a permit to carry a concealed weapon and a strange sort of untouchable status within the circles of law enforcement, as if he were one of those captive cobras in Bangkok whose venom can be milked for the greater good; and his cachet was confirmed when a hard gaunt FBI woman wanted to investigate and arrest the other eleven finalists in that competition of gold-filled test tubes, but Ticklequick, arguing that so doing would block his channels of information forever, not only succeeded in protecting his peers but even managed to obtain by special courier about two weeks after Mr. Brewington’s execution those eleven vials of vintage for his supposed delectation; needless to say, they had gone sour in that time, and Smooth’s real motive was simply to destroy that evidence once and for all, since he was well acquainted with three of the eleven collectors, and suspected the identities of two more; by the Golden Rule, so to speak, they would have done as much for him. The FBI woman became Smooth’s enemy, but he for his part was so filled with pride and happiness at the way that everything had turned out that he contented himself with a few mild remarks to her, such as: Is it true that you have an eleven-year-old daughter? I’d love to lick her cunt. —Dan Smooth, needless to say, was not stupid. The FBI woman did not have any children, and he knew that; thus his utterance, which came as naturally to him as any disquisition on the weather, could not be considered as any kind of threat. Since he could not have her friendship, he actively courted and received her hatred, so that when he returned to his house in Sacramento it was in a haze of triumph, magnified by his possession of the eleven test tubes, whose contents he immediately decanted and poured down the toilet. The test tubes themselves, which might contain residue even after thorough washing (although, their official seals having been broken, they were unlikely to find use as evidence) he gave to an acquaintance—not a friend, mind you, not a friend! —who, a former member of an armed anti-government militia in Oakland, now lived in Roseville, pursued a lucrative vocation as a non-union electrician, and on weekends experimented with the manufacture of strange and sometimes illegal handgun cartridges. This man had perfected the exploding bullet, the mercury-tipped bullet, the poisoned bullet; he had even for his own amusement hand-loaded special ammunition designed to murder the shooter rather than the target: within the casing’s coppery blankness lay, in addition to the gunpowder, a distant descendant of C-4 explosive guaranteed upon firing to turn a gun into a rapidly expanding constellation of shrapnel. Such cartridges were difficult to test, but Dan Smooth’s acquaintance had worked it all out in his head. Testing would almost have been cheating; unquestionably it would have evinced weakness of faith. The electrician was happy just to keep his little babies in a regular factory ammunition box; nobody knew their nature but he. When Smooth proposed that he create in his bullet-caster an amalgam of lead and brittle glass which would shatter upon contact with flesh, and when Smooth further informed his acquaintance that this was genuine FBI glass, the electrician grinned happily. Smooth stayed to watch the glass be disposed of. The electrician mixed him a rum and Coke, and then he drove home. It was a hot Sunday afternoon. —The earwax of a ten-year-old child, he muttered with a laugh. He sat in the back yard sweating. His tomato-soup-colored tom-cat slept on the grass beside the corpse of a young bluejay which it had slowly tortured and killed. Smooth did not seat himself before his computer keyboard which resembled a grimy ear of Indian corn; he did not become Ticklequick, because he quite correctly supposed that the FBI monitored all his keystrokes. Besides, all that had been simply to protect the Queen. It had been the Queen, of course, who’d found the killer for him. Like him, she received no recognition from the public; she’d acted simply out of goodness. At FBI expense, Smooth had brought her an immense bouquet of red, white and yellow roses, those being the color of his three favorite bodily fluids.

  All this sounds perhaps like farce, so perhaps we should look deeper into Dan Smooth’s soul. About his sexual attraction to children it should be said that for him—in his own mind, at least—it had all begun as a matter of moral and intellectual curiosity. It is easy to disbelieve such an explanation, easy to insist that such but rationalizes his evil urge. But since other people ultimately remain unknowable, we may as well accept their own explanations of themselves as first approximations, barring further examination. He read in the newspaper one day about a father convicted of molesting his son and daughter, who were twelve and eight, respectively. The account, typically dry, grim and brief, merely announced that both children bore signs of repeated abuse, and that the man had been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. The mother was dead, apparently. And suddenly Smooth had a vision of the children crying as their father was handcuffed and driven away. They would grow up in an institution, perhaps separated from each other as well as from their father, perhaps beaten up or raped by other children, perhaps not. They would masturbate constantly, Smooth supposed (because he would). How evil had the father been? Suppose—which probably had not been the case—that he had done what he had done out of love. Suppose that he had fed and clothed them, helped them with their homework, listened to them. Suppose that he had witnessed them in sex play with each other, joining in only out of tenderness. Suppose that they had voiced some childish confusion about the difference between boys and girls, or how babies were made, and he had simply instructed them. Suppose that he had not hurt them. Suppose that he had liked it and they had liked it, too. Suppose that what he had done was good. We might well wonder why Dan Smooth wanted to suppose these things. But we do have to grant him the openness of a born scientific investigator in an epoch of harshly preconceived conclusions.

  Then there was the
married woman who fell in love with her fourteen-year-old foster son. Her husband divorced her. She wanted to marry the boy. He wanted to marry her. When she became pregnant with his child, they threw her in jail for years. Dan Smooth could not understand why.

  The curiosity of small children regarding bodily functions frequently presents an erotic component. Smooth’s niece, Darcy, had become fascinated with urination at the age of four. Whenever he came to Atlanta to visit his sister, Darcy wanted to play with him, and he was simultaneously thrilled and frightened by the complicity he read in her smile. If he let himself go, he just might remember something from his own childhood which would draw him into the mirror, where, astonished and conquered by something about himself he’d never before noticed, he’d cry: Aha! —but that never happened. Darcy liked to be carried piggyback. When he lifted her up on his shoulders, she’d wrap her legs tightly around his neck and begin rubbing against him. Sometimes he’d have to go to the toilet, and Darcy cried when he closed the door. He actually had to lock her out. —It’s just a phase that all children go through, his sister said curtly. —When Darcy was five he visited his sister for Christmas, and Darcy’s older sister got the flu, so they left Smooth to babysit while they went to the doctor. Darcy was sitting in his lap watching a cartoon on television, for this happened long before videos, and her body was very little and smooth and soft, and her breath smelled like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She was wearing a red and green plaid dress for Christmas. The hem of it had ridden above her chubby knees. She clamped her thighs around his leg and began to slowly ride him up and down, pretending to look at the television. He did not know what to do. Suddenly she turned her head, and in her eyes he saw that look of darkly shining consciousness, which he had the incredible faith or arrogance to label the look of original sin. He swallowed. Grown women had on occasion looked at him that way, and accordingly infected him with their desire, but never so intensely as this. He did not know what was going to happen, but he knew that whatever happened he would never ever mention to Darcy’s parents. Darcy turned her head back, but she was gazing not at the television anymore, but at her own squiggling crotch. The red and green dress had now retreated into her lap so that he could see her white underpants. Slowly his hand began to move. Smooth could not stop it, and did not want to. His hand descended through the air, inch by inch, and came to rest on Darcy’s soft, pink thigh. The little girl put her hand on his hand and giggled. Then she began to hump his leg faster. His hand swam slowly up her thigh, and now it rested on her panties and he could feel how she was hot and damp there through the flimsy cotton. She opened her legs wider and with both hands pushed his palm firmly against her mound.

  Over a beer in a quiet bar, he told a doctor in San Francisco about it—about that much, at least. The doctor regarded him with the same alertly bristling skepticism of any good policeman, knowing or suspecting the rest, and Smooth, not yet hardened, choked out: I didn’t do anything. But she wanted it, you see. I am sure that she wanted it.

  The doctor said nothing.

  Smooth said: Is that normal?

  Of course what you’re telling me is not normal, the doctor said carefully.

  Could the kid have wanted it?

  Dan, said the doctor, these are dangerous speculations to follow. You know very well that children don’t necessarily know what they want, and that what they want isn’t necessarily good for them. Furthermore, while I’m not a specialist, I would say that if she was consciously aroused and seeking to arouse you as you describe—in other words, if you’re not fudging a little—then she’s already been a victim of abuse. Her father, perhaps . . .

  I know Max pretty well, said Smooth. And he doesn’t bear that mark.

  Child abusers don’t bear a mark, Dan. You can’t tell. I could be one, or for that matter you could be one. Do you understand me?

  But it’s not very good science, you know, Smooth insisted. If they don’t want it, then you can’t do it to them, because it’s abuse. If they do want it, then they must have been abused. That’s what you’re saying, right?

  If ten minutes before dinner your niece wanted to gorge on candy and ice cream, would you let her?

  Maybe on special occasions I would.

  Dan, Dan!

  Why is having sex necessarily bad for a child?

  Oh, come off it, Dan! the doctor shouted angrily, and in his face for the first time Smooth saw the look that he would see in the faces of others for the rest of his life.

  When I was a boy, I used to jerk off, Smooth said. You know that old saying: Ninety percent of all teenage boys masturbate, and the other ten percent are lying. And when my Daddy caught me, he tied my hands behind my back. I had to sleep on my side for a good two years. When I asked him why it was wrong to jerk off, he got angry, you see, the same as you’re angry now, and he said that it was a sin and that it would make my pimples worse and that it would weaken my eyesight and maybe I’d even go crazy. Now, was any of that true?

  Don’t be so hard on your father, Dan, said the doctor with an ingratiating laugh. You’re my age. We grew up before the sexual revolution. And your father—well, everybody thought that then.

  But was it true?

  Of course it wasn’t true. But that has nothing to do with—

  Yes it does. If a child wants or needs to masturbate, you’re saying that that’s harmless, right?

  Yes, Dan, said the doctor grimly.

  No matter what the age of the child?

  No matter what the age of the child.

  Then if a child wants to have an orgasm, and you help the child have an orgasm—

  And did you have an orgasm when you stuck it up her, Dan? said the doctor wearily. How loudly did she scream? How much did she bleed?

  He never saw that doctor again. The next year he didn’t visit his sister, and the year after that Darcy was seven, and in the middle of the night, when he was asleep in the guestroom, Darcy crept in and almost silently closed the door behind her.

  Let’s speak of accidents. One sunset at a gasoline station in El Cerrito, they gave Tyler a restroom key and when he turned it in the door a woman’s voice cried: Uh-uh-uh! He stood outside, a little ashamed. —Sorry, he said to her when she came out. I didn’t see anything. —That’s okay. You responded real quick. —Wasn’t Dan Smooth in equal measure a bystander and victim of God’s tricks?

  She was wearing her pink nightgown with the dinosaurs on it. He could see its paleness in the dark. Her breath smelled like toothpaste and tomato soup. Gazing at him wisely with shining eyes, she put her finger to her lips as she got into his bed. Instantly she was in his arms, holding him tight as she rubbed up against him, and his penis was hard. He rolled her onto her back, and his hand was on her underpants just like before, and then his middle finger had gone inside her panties, and he brought his hand to his mouth and sucked his middle finger to get it wet and then slipped it between the lips of the child’s vulva, the soft and ever so delicate lips which were to render those of any mature woman so comparatively coarse forever, so rough and hairy and repulsive to him. What was the meaning of how he felt? He was sure that he hadn’t sought this out. He was equally sure that to deny and reject this experience was to do wrong both to Darcy and to himself. He knew that in a moment he was going to slip the panties from the hips of this softly giggling girl. The doctor was wrong. She had never screamed and she had never bled. But then he was equally sure that he was going to send Darcy away. He groaned with anguish, looking into her eyes. Then the doctor’s words crawled inside his skull again like hungry insects, and he thought: I am not sure. I cannot be sure. And to do this and not to be sure is to do wrong.

  Clenching his lips, he sat up and removed his hand from his niece’s pants. He sucked on his middle finger again, just to get the taste. Where was the harm in that? The taste was sweet and rich, like sweet and sour fish in a Chinese restaurant. He almost ejaculated.

  The panties had somehow worked themselves down to her knees.


  You see, honey, it’s time for you to go back to sleep, he made himself say.

  No, Uncle Dan. Can’t I please stay with you?

  I’m afraid if you stay with me we’ll get in trouble.

  I won’t tell, the girl said. I can keep secrets.

  That’s good, honey.

  So can I stay?

  He bit his lip hard.

  Can I?

  So you never tell secrets? he temporized.

  You want to hear a secret?

  Yes.

  She whispered in his ear: I like playing doctor with you. That’s my secret. It feels good. I want to play doctor with you again. Right now.

  Well, honey, go to sleep and we’ll play doctor tomorrow.

  You promise?

  I promise, he lied. His plan was to pack up and leave the house immediately after breakfast.

  The child touched him through the jockey shorts he wore. —I want to play doctor right now. I can’t sleep if I don’t play doctor with you.

  Her little fingers spidered so curiously up and down him. —I want to see it, she moaned. Please, Uncle Dan. I want to see it.

  Once Dan Smooth had seen a pearl, a new pearl, freshwater or saltwater he couldn’t remember, but it was so small and shining and pink. Wet and pink it had been, with a gleam of light on it that changed according to the angle of his glance. It was so new and clean and pink.

  Suddenly Darcy began to wail loudly. —I want to see it! I want to see it!