The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  She went to the other end of the counter and started washing glasses.

  Henry, said the Queen, I’m worried about Domino.

  Tyler nodded sadly. —She’s a bad one, he said. I’m worried about what she might do.

  Oh, Henry, how can you say that? She just want to be bad.

  Maybe that kind’s more dangerous.

  But who she gonna be dangerous to? She just make me so sad. I want to hold that little girl in my arms, an’ I know she want to come to me, but she can’t come to me no more.

  And you don’t know why?

  Oh, I know. I know her like I know my own child. That girl fixin’ to betray me. She want to betray her own Queen! And she might do it. But I’d love her even if she cut me up. ’Cause she’s my little baby, the Queen concluded, gazing at Tyler almost challengingly.

  If this were a book I wouldn’t even read the rest of it, Tyler said. Christ and Judas is what it is.

  She want to give herself, but she don’t know how. She want to love, but how can she love?

  Tyler stared into his glass, hardly listening.

  It’s up to her, the Queen was saying.

  Yeah, he said listlessly, unable to think of anyone except the Queen and himself.

  And I’m worried about you, too, Henry, she said.

  Africa, I want to prove myself to you, he said.

  Her fingers curled tightly around his hand.

  He cleared his throat and said: Africa, I’m begging you to let me give myself to you tomorrow. Completely, I mean. I want to sacrifice myself to you. I—I’ve been so unhappy but also so excited . . .

  Hush, said the Queen.

  Africa, last night again I didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. I don’t understand my own feelings. I’m afraid but I want so much to be yours and submit to you and make you love me.

  I already love you, she said.

  I know that, but . . .

  But what?

  I just feel desperate. I don’t know why. I can’t imagine what the future will be. But I’ll be your good boy or your pretty little bitch or whatever you want me to be. You can even hurt me if I can just drink your spit or your piss or rub your menstrual blood all over my face or something . . . I need to please you, Africa. Africa, I need to give you a long orgasm and make you proud of me. Please help me.

  | 221 |

  No such thing as another Irene, huh? said the Queen.

  Her armpits had the dry earth smell of catacombs. Her flesh was dark and soft like smoked leather.

  | 222 |

  Don’t ever hurt me, the Queen said. Are you gonna hurt me?

  | 223 |

  The Queen, a little uncertain, stood, slowly raised her arms, but her elbows were still against her sides in some reflex of shyness or self-protectiveness. She leaned back against the sink. He kissed her cunt for the first time. Now her arms went back, long and dark and shiny against the sink’s steel lip. He danced around her and his shoulders swayed. Her little breasts were free now. He was gently slapping them with his left hand as she had told him to do. She stood upright, let go of the sink, and brought her scarred hands toward him with the same sweet uncertainty.

  His face slowly sank between her legs, and she placed her hands upon the crown of his head in a benediction.

  He heard a crackling sound between her legs.

  Right now her face is so beautiful up close, said Smooth through the suddenly open door. Tell you what. Get up close to her.

  Tyler froze.

  Go on now, Danny boy, the Queen said. Don’t be disrespecting us or Queen’ll have to get mad. Queen’ll get little bit pissed off. Now beat it, Danny.

  The doorway contracted.

  Never mind, sighed the Queen, her knees drawn up, her swaying dark knees . . .

  Her breasts began slowly rising, then bouncing.

  | 224 |

  All night there were squeakings of busy feet in the hall outside, feet which every now and then would pause outside his door; rising from her and going to the peephole he’d see three or four desperate faces waiting and hoping; but they didn’t dare to disturb the Queen; or maybe they were simply too honorable even in their need to do so.

  Finally she took his hand and they went out together into the hallway where all the whores were waiting; they raised torches to their Queen’s new happiness, clanking shards of metal and glass; then the tall man smashed a cracked mirror on the concrete floor, while they all shouted.

  | 225 |

  The crazy whore congratulated him with a squeak, saying: And sometimes in our lives we’re gonna have our moments, our intimate time, like a ferris wheel up on top of the world.

  | 226 |

  As soon as his tongue had touched her clitoris, his mouth and throat began to throb with a burning salty reek, her slippery juices etching themselves upon his palate like lye, salty and fishy and rank almost like that very healthy seafood soup which Korean women drink during pregnancy; if he could have convinced himself that it was health instead of death he was drinking, he might have been happier. Later he would swish and swill and gargle mouthwash; he’d put spicy hot sauce on his catfish dinner; but once his tastebuds had cleansed themselves, her taste came back. It was even on his fingers now, although he’d never touched her cunt except with his tongue. When he sucked her, he breathed only through his mouth. His tongue quickly found itself swimming in that rank, salty stuff. Suddenly he realized that he was drinking other men’s semen.

  | 227 |

  Around three in the morning they were awakened by a woman’s sobs.

  I heard a female voice in your room! Strawberry was shouting.

  You did not, he heard the tall man reply.

  Are you fucking around on me again, Justin? Strawberry screamed, horrible and raw. Are you? Are you?

  There’s shit in your voice, said the tall man contemptuously. I don’t like your shit, so wipe your fucking verbal ass.

  Hysterical sobs were silenced by the tall man’s terrifying roar, which made the wall vibrate.

  Oh, leave ’em to it, grunted the Queen. They’re always goin’ on.

  | 228 |

  But you’ve gotta deny me to strangers, she whispered, her nipples round and flat right then like the scarab beetles of ancient Nubia.

  All right, said Tyler.

  I love you, too, baby. Okay, I got to go take care of my girls.

  | 229 |

  All the whores gossiped about Tyler’s visits, which titillated them and allowed them to express natural human malice about their benefactress, but which simultaneously undressed them down to queasiness, because no matter what they might insinuate, they disliked their Queen to be love-greedy, hence imperfect. And yet nobody said anything against Tyler, except perhaps Domino, whose views remained less than clear. He never asked anything of them, and he occasionally made them happy. After he departed, the Queen would sometimes sing strange songs in her cigarette-smoke voice, songs of happiness even though they sounded sad, and to see her other than as sadly, eternally giving frightened them. (Another thing I think is that he’s here and he’s coming to get her but I don’t mean me but something still has to be done, explained the crazy whore. Then she wondered: Is this the kind of thing the Queen does, or is it one of those other things that she’s resisted all along?) They did not know what would become of her and themselves. Of course they knew that nothing in life endures much longer than a piece of colored paper, and yet their own continuing ease of circumstances invited them to believe that this night-by-night life they lived beside her would continue, just as in Sacramento the cool days of spring go on and on as if the hot blast of summer will never come. They watched Tyler far more carefully than he knew, and found him consistent in his doings and impulses, which reassured them somewhat. Gradually they gave up worrying whether he might be an undercover cop. The real reason for his visits, infatuation, was both simpler and more plausible. They all had johns who idolized them and whom they used, despising those men’s love because it was not and cou
ld not be founded on any knowledge of them. It was as if the men’s own hearts bewitched them, tricking them into faith in a whore’s voice or hair or smell. How could the whores bank on that? What if somebody blonder or wetter or slenderer appeared beneath these worshipers’ pillows? Therefore the whores wisely discounted and then unwisely condemned the men who loved them thus. And so they ridiculed Tyler, while hoping that their Queen and they themselves might benefit from whatever he might have to give, and he surely had something; every man possessed some treasure, skill or key which could be made use of.

  I love you so much it hurts me, Strawberry heard him say (and she promptly repeated this to all the others). Sometimes when I look at you or talk to you I get all choked up—

  The Queen smiled at him.

  He swallowed and said: Often at night I dream that I’m kissing you, you know, between your legs . . . You’re so gentle and kind and good, I . . .

  Tilting her head, she slid her middle finger into her mouth and began sucking it, sliding it in and out between her lips.

  A lot of the time I—well, I don’t even think about you sexually. I just wish I could help you and make you happy, because, uh, I—

  C’mere, said the Queen. Sit down or kneel down, I don’t care which. Close your eyes.

  And she took her glistening brown finger from her mouth and on his forehead traced in saliva the secret Mark of Cain, which is the symbol of infinity.

  | 230 |

  He could see night by night how her heart opened to him, like one of those tightly wadded crumples of paper which falls into water and slowly swells, loosens, blossoms into a paper rose—even though it’s all unreal and underwater . . .

  | 231 |

  All night he lay in the Queen’s arms, sometimes sleeping, dreaming good dreams or bad. The bad dreams did not frighten him. It seemed that for the first time in many years he was able to stare down his own monsters. There they were; maybe someday he could even kill them. He clutched the Queen more tightly, until she groaned in her sleep. Wondering how she would change him, feeling already changed, he rode the long night into dawn. Clothed in calmness, he resolved to seclude himself no longer in fantasies, but to be grateful for all he had, and act usefully and respectfully.

  | 232 |

  Sparkles of sweat like mica upon a naked back, the Queen’s back, swelled into silvery droplets fragrant with cocaine and sadness; he drank them. Sometimes he felt the two of them to be not fully human, reaching, screaming. Legs up in the air, almost stridulated like crickets’, heads dipping down to genitals and back again, carried Tyler along, sometimes irresistibly, sometimes merely mechanically, so that whenever he went out from the Queen, covered with her odor, and began to think again, he’d say to himself: Our legs were not me. My legs were not me. My tongue and hands and penis were not me. So where was I? —Then he understood that he had been not only literally but also spiritually inside his Queen. He’d been hers. He’d lost himself to her. He’d been nowhere and everywhere. Walking past a no-name sashimi restaurant on Geary Street, he peered in the window and saw Japanese childrens’ skinny faces getting even thinner when they sucked at drinking-straws. This proved not that ingestion created hollowness, but only that one had to hollow oneself out in order to ingest. Legs went up, his or hers he could no longer tell, because sensation crackled through all of them with electric velocity. Were the dark hands or the pale hands his? When he was inside her cunt, there was no cunt anymore, and no cock, the hole being filled, the protuberance hidden; as it said in the Bible, they were one flesh. Her cunt was his. Where did she end? Lost in the cave of enlightenment, he had to grabble his way without that ambiguously useful perceptual eye known as consciousness; later he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, what he and the Queen had done; an hour or a night, it felt the same. Her eyes became the smoky barlight and slow headlights as smooth on the wet streets as lubricated condoms. (No condom, no problem! laughed Dan Smooth.) Where does anything end? Beneath a street-whore’s come-on of easy love lies a manipulative need, beneath which again waits a real ache for love. One night he was wandering upper Jones Street around Clay or Washington, rainy and almost silent, with only the cables humming and a distant car soughing like wind, and he could not remember who he was. Then he said: I believe in my Queen. I love my Queen. —The next thing he could remember, he was in the Mission district, which shone so brightly on a Saturday noon beneath a pastel sky. Was the Queen wise? How could he doubt it? The Queen of Spades, the black queen, the death-queen, the scary card, the wisest card in the deck, always turned up in whatever hand he got dealt—she loved him; she was his angel—sentimental slush! A piss-soaked bra lay in front of the Thor Hotel. He did the proper thing. He picked it up and carried it next to his heart as an offering to the Queen. He had no nightmares about Irene anymore.

  | 233 |

  The Queen would not be happy about this, Smooth whispered gleefully.

  The video showed rainbow milk.

  So that’s the Queen doing it with Henry, huh? said Domino with a brutal laugh. Too fuckin’ much!

  They sat giggling at the strange, lurid bodies, strange movements as of grasses bowing in the wind, the man bowing and praying between the woman’s buttocks, leaning forward, leaning back. The couple’s arms became bloody amoebic pseudopods, hands flying out from their bodies, then rushing inwards to clutch at flesh once more.

  That’s how you get a different effect, Smooth explained. You can do all kinds of stuff by that . . .

  Domino’s mouth opened. She was fascinated by the seething bloody flashes.

  Puddles of blue milk oozed together. Blue animals struggled with one another. Crumpled aluminum foil was moving and oozing up and down, the woman’s legs limp and sweaty on the man’s shoulders.

  Now for Domino at least the footage began to grow tiresome, and she yawned and scratched at the long motorcycle scar on her leg while on Smooth’s television set two pairs of legs folded and knelt, revealing buttocks, rainbow crystals, flashing blue lines, stains on microscope slides, ice-maps. Two shapes approached each other and pulled away, bowing and weaving like water-plants. Green milk and heartbeats, blue milk running down breasts, holes and fissures swimming like X-ray fishes, all these entities imbued the pair’s sexual act with preciousness, just as in the Tenderloin after dusk every passing car momentarily transforms the pavement into a mirror of gold.

  We’re all animals, you know . . . Smooth was saying thickly.

  What do you want me to do now, blow you?

  Smooth made a face. —You’re too old for me, Domino. You’ve grown cunt-hairs. Just sit there and entertain yourself.

  But you’re going to take care of me, right? You’re going to pay me something . . . ?

  Only if you’ll listen to me talk about glistening assholes.

  Talk about yourself then, said Domino, bored.

  What kind of asshole do you have, sweetykins?

  Oh, the shitty kind I guess. Don’t ya remember?

  I have a really good feeling about this now, said Smooth. And there he goes. See how happy he’s making her? I almost want to cry. Maybe we should never have done this, Domino, but I always wanted to watch him with Maj. I was their matchmaker, you know. I brought them together. I love Maj. I love Henry . . .

  I love money. When will you pay me?

  Closeup. Closeup. Weird that the shape of those little lips makes such a difference, Smooth said.

  Are you a misogynist? said Domino, whose voice sometimes contained the cool jingle of cablecar bells.

  A misogynist? Sure.

  I thought so. And you attack little kids . . .

  Naughty, naughty! chuckled Smooth. I do not attack them. They attack me. They . . .

  He was remembering how when his next-door neighbor’s child was nine she still wanted to ride on his neck, so he lifted her up onto his shoulders and she clamped her hot thighs around him. Later he was carrying her through the grass with her pressed up against him front to front, her arms around his
neck, her legs around his waist, and his folded arms against his stomach to make a seat for her. He couldn’t resist. He opened his arms and slid one hand under each of her buttocks. Saying nothing, the child clung to him more tightly, so he slid his right hand up under that pretty pink dress and began to rub her vulva, whose lips he could feel much more distinctly than a grown woman’s, because there was no hair. The child began to writhe in his arms, gripping him more and more tightly. She uttered strange cries like those of the retarded girl Sapphire. Then she sighed happily and laid her burning head upon his shoulder. That had been the best moment of Dan Smooth’s life.

  I keep quiet about what I do, usually, he said to the blonde. You understand me, I think. You know that I . . .

  It’s very isolating, Domino agreed. You know, I was very sexual as a girl and couldn’t talk about it.

  Now this one is not so obvious, said Smooth. Watch how she moves around. I don’t know how to describe how she moves. It’s like eating chocolate while admiring stained glass windows in some fabulous church, you know, some . . . Now watch this. Watch how she kind of hops around.

  The video continued with one long white leg up, and a strange crow, a diver, an astronaut, a black pelican’s beak darting in and out between white cliffs.

  In silence, Domino and Dan Smooth listened to the Queen’s husky moans: Ohh, oh, oh, ohhh, oaah, aoh, uh, oh, oh, uh, uh, I’m coming, I’m o-o-o-oh, uh, uh, uh, uh!

  Wow, said Domino with her crooked little smile. I was never able to make her come like that. When she comes she comes.

  Yeah, sighed Smooth.