The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  All the whores had faith. If something happened, they could look after themselves. Later, when everything was over, it would seem in retrospect that those last few months were easier and more pleasant than any other time they could remember. Drugs were cheap and dates were plentiful. They loved their Queen, of course, but without her, life wouldn’t be much different. Their lives possessed a certain wholeness now; they couldn’t imagine that the circle might ever be broken. But on a rainy night not long after that long conversation in the Vietnamese restaurant, the Queen, who on the streets and in warehouses, ghost factories, and crack hotels usually seemed to be as imperially at home as a Korean wife in that household command center, the kitchen, now sat staring moodily into the baby food jar which comprised the bowl of her crack pipe. Tyler was sitting at her feet watching her while big drops rang against the warehouse roof in a fusillade and she sighed and began to pick out bits of toilet paper from the turbid water inside the jar. —Any goldfish swimming around in there? he asked, but she only smiled faintly. Suddenly she dashed the liquid out on the concrete floor. He saw matchheads, a rust-brown powder, a dead ant.

  Henry, I want you to do something for me, she said.

  All right, he said.

  I want you to go to Vegas and find out what that Brady man’s up to. I got a bad feeling. I got a real bad feeling.

  Tyler smiled sadly, unable to reply. He was making a mess of a surveillance job he really couldn’t afford to make a mess of—another potentially lucrative infidelity case in Alameda, which meant that he could have padded hours and mileage; he already had the husband nailed; but the wife wanted photographs and she wanted them now. So much for that client. Anxiety localized itself in his stomach, then metastasized to his heart, and his hands began to sweat. He longed to please the Queen by doing something useful for her, and he also knew that no human being could really do anything useful for her. He wanted Brady’s venture to be innocuous, and he already knew it wasn’t. He wondered how difficult it would be. He was only Henry Tyler; he didn’t have what it took. He felt that he would honestly do more good by staying out of this and letting the Queen go, but if he did, then Irene’s skeleton would be sitting on his face again at night, pissing ants and spiders into his mouth. He knew that no matter what happened he would do the wrong thing. Suspended above his bottomless future, he hung clinging miserably to a stretching rope. He almost couldn’t bear it. His breastbone ached. Let it be cancer, he thought. Then at least it will be over. But he wanted to live. He wanted to be fulfilled. It was all hopeless.

  I know what you’re thinkin’, child, said his Queen who loved him. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.

  Tyler knelt before her and sobbed.

  Just as the tall man’s face gradually lightened from a deep black-brown upon the crown of his shaved head to fresh ocher pits just above his eyes, so the sky, too, dimmed down its darkness, then began to flush in parts. The Queen yawned. Dawn was coming.

  | 257 |

  The day that Tyler drove to the airport, passing many darkly spreading trees and white houses in Daly City on which fog came smearing and smooching down so that the world’s end, the end of all vision, lay very close, it was sunny in the Tenderloin where Justin, tall and lean, grew like a cornstalk in a dark army jacket beside the wall of Jonell’s Bar, his collar pushed up and his cap pulled down, listening and watching while he seemed to be but surveying inner space. The loud sermon across the street remained on an untuned channel of his soul’s radio.

  Beatrice said to him: Well, the Christians, they have different beliefs. I doan believe in it. I go with our Queen or with Strawberry. She is a Christian. I go with her, and they sing or they cry, and they speak about that kind of happiness for the dead people.

  Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE—CA. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. Her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all.

  One of the preacher’s lieutenants approached. The tall man raised a single eyebrow.

  The lieutenant said: Man, I was paralyzed for fifteen years. I was a drug addict. Man, Jesus healed me. He healed me! So I wasn’t sick no more. You listening? Hallelujah!

  You seen my forehead? replied the tall man in a gravelly whisper.

  What about it, man? We ain’t got time for personal vanity here!

  Look upon me, boy. Look upon my mark. You seen my mark?

  That’s just an abscess, man. Listen to me. When a user gets touched by the Holy Ghost, he ain’t a user no more. He’s free! Amen!

  Get the fuck away from me, said the tall man.

  Jesus can save you, the lieutenant pleaded. Don’t stay with the Devil. Don’t let yourself be damned.

  The tall man rose to his complete and immense height and almost playfully tapped the lieutenant in the chest. The lieutenant fell backward. He shouted: I said forgive him, turn away, praise God! But Brady’s Boys are gonna get him, hear me, Lord! Brady’s Boys are coming to town . . .

  * * *

  •BOOK XVI•

  * * *

  The Queen of Las Vegas

  •

  * * *

  Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”

  Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.”

  GNOSTIC SCRIPTURES, The Gospel of Thomas V, 5, II, 2, 114.20–25 (1st or 2nd cent. ?)

  * * *

  •

  | 258 |

  I’ll tell you a truth as long and naked as a cocktail waitress’s leg: Tyler did not like Las Vegas. Only for a check with more than one zero on it—or for his Queen—would he have consented to leave home, venturing beyond the white-candied mountains of his Sierras spiced with treetops. There were three new hotels and then there was Feminine Circus, they said. Already as Las Vegas spread her thighs before him like a collage of silicon chips on the tan plain, he saw the black pyramid of mediocrity like a dull jewel, the Sphinx crouching out in front. That was the cheap easy place where he had to go. That was the Hotel Luxor. John and Brady and the rest wouldn’t be caught dead there. They all had suites at Feminine Circus.

  The pink ticket said:

  * * *

  $ $

  GRAND OPENING

  FEMININE

  CIRCUS

  TONITE!!!

  Free Free Free

  SEX SEX SEX SEX

  No minors permitted beyond

  family areas.

  $ $

  * * *

  And indeed, it truly was Sneak Peek Night at Feminine Circus—the largest virtual sex casino in the world (this week, at least). —But it is amazing what half a billion dollars will do . . . the C.E.O., one Jonas Brady, was musing aloud at the press conference. Half a million dollars a day for three and a half years! —A jungle of people blossomed behind the ropes. Not very far from them, a man whose cardboard sign read DOWN ON MY LUCK—THANKS AND GOD BLESS stood frozen beneath the freeway. If only he had known about the free hors d’oeuvres at Feminine Circus! The cool and concentrated faces of the musicians on their bandstand cast musical intellections down into the empty space of the future, for the sake of which the well-dressed people standing on the curb sipping drinks, the TV cameras and the people who served them, self-impor
tant geeks with light meters and duffel bags, glum security men in black suits, politely downpointing the antennae of their walkie-talkies, the police with their Sam Browne belts, hands close against their batons, were all here to do reverence.

  Then a long silver limousine pulled up and everyone said: That’s her.

  It’s the Queen! a small child cried in the silence.

  A flunky opened the silver door.

  We have to have a twenty-foot opening in here! a security man called.

  Weary and disgusted, Tyler moved to the back of the crowd, where the biped and her handlers could still be seen on a big granular screen near the righthand stage. John and Celia were there somewhere, he supposed, probably up near the front in VIP seats. He hoped that they were having a good time, and that John was being decent to Celia. For a moment he wondered whether he should try to find them, perhaps by querying one of these men in long coats who held walkie-talkies repeatedly and sternly to their ears; but he but quickly sent that naive idea packing—why would he have any more to say to his brother in Vegas than in San Francisco? Besides, his presence would make John anxious. To hell with it.

  Asian tourists in black suits cautiously raised point-and-shoot cameras. Children staring upward and rapidly moving their lips as in prayer, bare-shouldered women who showed thigh, women in leather jackets and furs who held almost completed cocktails with a maraschino cherry in each glass marking the icy ruins, bigshouldered men who pushed through the other heads like bulls, chains of old ladies who wriggled between professional ladies in grey blazers who tapped their toes; these were Tyler’s neighbors, and while he did not dislike any of them he would much rather have been on Mars. The faces were waiting faces. At least they were more alert here than inside. They still granted reality priority over its lookalike; something was about to happen, no matter how self-serving and trivial; maybe they would see people instead of virtuellas.

  Another celebrity disembarked from a limousine, and the lady next to Tyler said: Who is it?

  I can’t see his face so I don’t know, her husband said.

  Who’s this Queen they keep talking about? asked Tyler innocently.

  It’s Queen Zenobia from Lollipopland! a small girl informed him.

  Don’t talk to strangers, said her mother.

  Why, I’m not a stranger at all, ma’am, said Tyler brightly. My name’s Henry Tyler, U.S. Marshals. —And he flashed his toy police badge.

  Oh! Well, officer, that’s Queen Zenobia from Lollipopland. Say hello to the nice officer, Darlene.

  Hello. Are you really an officer?

  Yes, Darlene, I really really am, Tyler beamed. He leaned toward Darlene’s mother, winked, and whispered: Vice Squad.

  Well, they say this Queen Zenobia is really quite a . . .

  Is that a fact, ma’am, said Tyler in amazement.

  Just then a man cried: Ladies and gentlemen! and then a lady in red ruffles who might have been Betty Boop said something so squeaky, echoey and affected that for the life of him Tyler could not understand a word. Everyone applauded, and she introduced the Marquis de Sade: There he is, everyone! Then they all came, Cleopatra, Snow White, Bambi, Barbie, Helen of Troy in a silver miniskirt, the Queen of Sheba, Queen Zenobia, the Wicked Witch of the West, Mata Hari, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland. They came in a coach whose driver wore a red hat like a folded prickly pear lobe, like a giant set of testicles. Tyler thought that he saw Munchkins, but they might have represented some other even more obscene constituency; their hats were a combination of semifilled condoms and Christmas stockings. There was so much feedback on the microphone that he could barely hear their imbecilic song, which echoed in the cold night like death.

  Can you see anything? the man beside him said.

  No, I can’t, the wife said. And I’m cold and my feet hurt.

  Another limousine came, crammed full of big-eyed cartoon animals, and Tyler thought that he would be more ashamed to wear their livery than to hire himself out for sodomy; but he saw a happy smile on the face of the girl beside him, while a man in black just behind craned rigidly at the animals, bugging out his eyes as if he had just been executed. What gave him the right to deride his fellow Americans’ pleasure? Whatever bearing all this might have on his Queen, his love, he ought never attack any harmless means to happiness whatsoever, no matter how sentimental or false it might be. The crowd cheered, clapped, leaned forward smiling; this meant so much to them. The celebrities for their part stretched their faces wide in smiles of yearning love. Cameras and microphones sprouted on monopods above people’s heads. Grinding his teeth, narrowing his eyes, he forced a weakly trembling smile onto his face, according to the best impulses of repentance, but small Darlene saw and whispered: Mommy, why does that man smile so phony like that?

  In the outer darkness across the street by the Hotel Tia Maria marched three thousand union souls with their white pickets: We say no way! Brady say, take away. We say no way! They began to trudge and swarm like ants back and forth in the darkness. Brady say, take away. We say no way! Their pale signs bobbed and crossed on the sidewalk. Their line stretched so long under the sky. Because the sidewalk constrained them, they comprised (Tyler suddenly realized) one of the first large entities he had seen in Vegas which had contours. He could actually sense the width of this angry crowd which stretched across the sidewalk and paraded back and forth; he didn’t have to see it on a TV monitor. It meant something. He didn’t know whether he agreed or disagreed with it but at least it was real. The picketers for their part had nothing to look at but the vast pink cliffs of Feminine Circus and then the blue slab under which the huge screen glowed and Jonas Andrew Brady, the big cheese, appeared on it to cry out: The world’s largest sex casino! Can you take a hint? Seven thousand beds! and the picketers raised their signs high, trying vainly to drown him out, yelling: Union! Union! Union! Union! and then AFL! CIO! AFL! CIO! in loud almost bullying voices which would not go away, and some of them were ululating like Arab women.

  Tyler went around the back of Feminine Circus and saw a sad man in coveralls who was dragging bags of laundry into a black truck whose side read STERILIZATION. Tyler wondered where the dirty laundry came from when the place wasn’t even open yet.

  He said to the security guard who watched him there in the cold emptiness beyond the crowd’s edge: What do you think of those union guys?

  They’re making a lot of noise, the man replied, shrugging.

  A handshake on the giant screen signaled the first firecracker, and the strikers went crazy, screaming Union! Union! Union! Union! but the crowd in the valet portico paid no attention, and subsequent fireworks annihilated the union message like artillery shells, brightly granular in the black desert sky, sandy crabs and spiderwebs that glowed. Every now and then Tyler could still hear: Union! Union! All right, let’s get the line movin’! Let’s keep it movin’! Union! Union! —The dynamite was beautiful, and blue beams whirred and sliced around in the vast cold sky. Dozens of fireworks shot up from behind a distant hotel with a noise like bull-roarers, polluting the night with smoke, burning the whole sky green; it rained light straight up as the band played “Back Alley Girls.” On the bandshell, Brady laughed into a dozen microphones: What happened? It was just a dream five years ago and now it’s a VIRTUAL SEX METROPOLIS!

  . . . And Tyler swam through the double ranks of costumed weirdos and never-nevers, entering the marble lobby that blended into the gullet tonsilled and tumored with slot machine banks down which everyone milled. This was just how Brady wanted it to be. At that intimate media lunch he’d confided: The name of the game in this part of Feminine Circus is to get a whole bunch of people to walk by a whole bunch of slot machines. Because this is the family area. Now, the adult area will go on line tomorrow; and the name of that game is of course to pack the booths, pack the booths, pack those goddamned simulation booths with real paying customers! Hey, boys and girls, we’re on an upswing! —But while Brady’s stated goal regarding the slot machines had now been reached,
the coin-swallowing lips on many of those appliances remained masking-taped, they being freshly born; their equivalent of baby-birdcries was: WAITING FOR PROGRAM DOWNLOAD. Tomorrow morning it would be the same here as it always was now at the Luxor, where a girl said dully: I remember when I first started playing poker here I never liked it, and then she put another quarter in. Of course the Luxor literally did not bear scrutiny. Whenever Tyler (breaking the rule of all wise old private eyes, which was, You can’t pull a real surveillance wthout three people) stood in one place too long and took notes, a security guard would come to watch. Then, too, the Luxor’s walls so often rang hollow when he tapped them, whereas the MGM Grand was so grand that he couldn’t even find the walls; and here at Feminine Circus he was always lost even when he knew where he was. The crowd came pouring in for free food, congesting the rooms until the waitresses in white aprons who ferried silver trays of new food above their heads could barely get through.

  Tyler could not shake off a certain respect, even pride (strange to say) in the vastness of this place! It was an American place, big and colorful and hollow; probably ninety percent of the people on earth would give anything to spend money in places like this. The reflection of a flashing star above a quarter slot (more favored by the “average gambler” than nickel, dime or dollar) beat within a forgotten glass of wine as if it were a heart. Two media blondes in short red skirts sat side by side at a Jackpot Jungle and a Home Run, drinking margaritas. —No, we’re not virtualettes, they kept telling everybody, we’re real!

  Tyler approached these ladies and said: Excuse me, but could you help me get Queen Zenobia’s autograph?