The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Sir, said the nearest blonde, I’m terribly sorry, but Queen Zenobia is terribly, terribly busy.

  Well, I’ll be, said Tyler, open-mouthed.

  You probably will, said the blonde.

  The other blonde, pitying him, said: Never mind. She’s not the real Queen Zenobia. She’s just a stand-in. Mr. Brady is still trying to cast the real Queen.

  Ah, said Tyler wisely. Well, thank you so much for your time. Let me just ask you one thing.

  Mm hm? said the blonde.

  Would Jesus demand that we reject all this?

  The woman stared at him.

  Cain would say it was up to us, said Tyler with a sinister chuckle. And he walked away.

  He felt very hungry, but figures streamed so urgently between the weird cold rainbows in the niches of slot machines that for the moment he gave up the effort to fill his plate. A pharmacist was coming out of an unmarked door muttering: Norpramine, desapramine . . . —Tyler considered that a little strange. Somewhere beneath the triple-decker ledges of silk flowers which ascended to the starry ceiling, a man’s hands almost touched, one being wrapped in a twist of napkin, holding his plate, the other seizing a taco on the plate to bring it to his mouth; Tyler saw only this detail of him without the wholeness. A middle-aged woman stood at the center of an aisle between slot machines, throwing back her head and smiling. There was a lot of talk and happiness, and Tyler wondered if that was because so many machines were off. —They say it’s virtual, a woman said, and another woman said: They say he’s got the Queen. —People walked purposefully, stood speaking to one another, looked into each other’s eyes, and enjoyed the food, which was quite good; Tyler finally snagged a squishy handful of steak tartare. When he caught his breath, he found himself in a large bay in the wall-coast papered with what were in fact very beautiful butterflies and weeping willows (those murals are actually handpainted on real canvas and then put up like wallpaper! one of the guides imparted reverently.) A virtualette identified for Tyler by a change girl as Sweet Pickins’ writhed her six arms above a bank of dollar slots beneath a LOVEBUCKS kiosk whose red telltale of millions kept going up and up and up, by perhaps a dime a second, and from afar Tyler glimpsed friendly monsters passing.

  | 259 |

  There was another kind of virtual reality, too, as the procession of tourists who went up Las Vegas Boulevard from the MGM Grand to the Luxor learned when they reached the corner trodden with soiled fliers, and at this corner a boy stood trying to pass the fliers out discreetly folded so that they didn’t look like what they were. A man accepted one, and as he bemusedly opened it, the silicone-pumped boobs leaped out and he, his wife and the children opened their mouths and then he strode back to the guy and said: Listen, buddy. You, take this back! I don’t want this crap.

  This ad, which Tyler philanthropically retrieved from the unfazed herald of good times, described a young Guatemalan girl (later he forgot whether she was “beautiful,” “eager,” “sexy” or “submissive”)—and no agency, oh, by no means; so of course what he got was a blonde from Alberta in a red Jeep Wrangler; she said that the hundred and twenty-five an hour was just for the agency, and she wanted a tip. He made it four hundred and she sulked because she usually got eight hundred to a thousand, which at first he did not believe. But maybe it was true, because during the half-hour that she stayed and fidgeted, the agency called every ten minutes in amazement that she was still there.

  Usually I’m in and out in five minutes, she explained. That way the guy doesn’t have time to get mad before I’m done.

  What can you do in five minutes? Even a blow job takes longer than that!

  Well, I give him a full body massage, but he has to use his own hand.

  It took him a moment to calculate the sum of these convolutions. —You mean he pays you a thousand bucks to jerk off to you?

  Yeah, she shrugged. I guess you could put it that way. I’m not really a sex girl.

  What are you then?

  Let’s just say when I’m through they usually don’t do it again! she said with the same valley girl smile of the digitized Queen of Diamonds whose lavender breasts got obscured every second by the PLAY 5 COINS sign. —But sometimes I do get repeat customers. It still amazes me. But in Vegas it’s different. This is the big money, man. You get high rollers and they don’t care what they spend.

  I guess that means you’ve got to be going, huh? said Tyler.

  Why are you like that? At least I’m not a Brady Girl—I’m real, I’m me, I’m—

  Then can I touch you?

  Nobody touches me, mister.

  Oh. So you’re not real, either. Hey, listen, did you ever hear of the Queen of the Whores?

  Wake up, mister, she said, rising. We live in a democracy. And by the way, I stayed an extra five minutes. Do I get a bonus?

  Nope.

  Shrugging, the blonde dialled the agency and said: OK, I’m leaving. He’s not going to give me any more.

  It’s kind of different here in Vegas, he said in his best hayseed voice.

  She lit a cigarette. —The other thing that’s different about Vegas is that in all these hotels, even the real fancy hotels, the windows never open.

  Because the people who lose big money might . . . ?

  Exactly. Same reason there are no long flights of stairs.

  She was already putting her coat on and then she left him—rich, beautiful, contemptuous, and he felt only a little more empty than before.

  | 260 |

  Even divinities such as Jonas Brady need to procure business licenses, and although their articles of incorporation may list for their addresses such public-deflectors as John’s office address at Rapp and Singer (my client does not want to be contacted, John explained), still they need to get financing somewhere, and so for a snoop such as Henry Tyler of Tyler & Associates, Investigative Services, it’s but a fingersnap’s worth of effort to run a T.U. or a T.R. W. or any other number of credit checks, cognizant of the fact that Brady must have filled out a loan application or two in his time. No mention of cottonwood trees, but here on the blue computer screen crawled and quivered electronic proof of a pinball machine franchise, then a conspiracy to market office supplies, then the Sleep-O Hotel chain, each of them affixed in the credit bureau’s memory to a name, an address, a social security number. Back in San Francisco, Tyler had run a Uniform Commercial Code listing and learned that Brady was by definition a big shot: he owned a lot of secured collateral. —And it’s Union Bank, too, he muttered. That’s where John always refers his clients. Okay, and what about the Dun and Brad? LOOKING UP HOST, it says. Oh, come on.

  COLLATERAL: Inventory and proceeds

  FILING NO.: 8714060005

  TYPE: Original

  SEC. PARTY: Union Bank of California, N.A.

  DEBTOR: Feminine Circus Co., Inc.

  * * *

  The public record items contained in this report may have been paid, terminated, vacated or released prior to the date this report was printed.

  * * *

  BANKING 08/96

  Borrowing account. Now owing medium six figures.

  * * *

  HISTORY 08/96

  JONAS A. BRADY, PRESIDENT

  DIRECTOR(S): THE OFFICER(S)

  * * *

  CORPORATE AND BUSINESS REGISTRATIONS REPORTED BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE OR OTHER OFFICIAL SOURCE AS OF 08/96.

  * * *

  Business started 1995 by Jonas A. Brady. 51% of capital stock is owned by Jonas A. Brady.

  * * *

  OPERATION 08/96

  Entertainment.

  ADDITIONAL TELEPHONE NUMBER(S)/CONTACT INFORMATION:

  c/o John Tyler, Rapp & Singer, San Francisco.

  TERMS: Net 30 days.

  TERRITORY: Western United States.

  EMPLOYEES: 7 which includes officer(s).

  Full display complete.

  And the upshot of this investigation?

  Brady was Brady. Brady had committed no crimes. Brady was
an upstanding citizen.

  | 261 |

  The next day more than sixty thousand people went between the outspread legs of the fallen angel of Feminine Circus, which from street level could be apprehended only as an asymmetrical polygon, blue and green, with so many angles bulking, sprawling, stretching and towering, but it did have a feminine head (again, à la Sphinx, like a construction paper cutout); it possessed sapphire blue triangular eyes beneath which people streamed slowly in like H. G. Wells’s Eloi going down to be eaten by the Morlocks. That was the day Feminine Circus was officially open, so they’d turned the sky on over the Sea of Love, filling it with multiple rainbow sunsets. Yes, the heat was on, pipesmoke swirled around the phony trees, and the passionless attended with big change cups between their thighs, watching the whirling oranges and BARs, scarcely looking at whatever money came out, but not unhappy. One man bantered: I put a nickel in, but it’s her machine, so she gets the winnings! —The robot angel Valentina waved goodbye in her pink rocket, curtseyed, and ascended a cable, hung there between sun and moon until people forgot her, and crept inconspicuously back down to repeat the performance another billion times. Another crescent moon crossed the sky slowly, and stars came out. Slot machines sang all around.

  Oh, that’s kinda neat, a girl said.

  Tyler had made a mistake. He’d judged by the Thursday night crowd. They were not sleepwalkers after all; this was the weekend now and this hotel, this incredible jungle, was alive with gambling monkeys and tigers! He could not believe how many people were passing so quickly in so many directions, drinks and cigarettes in hand; at all times cleaning ladies swept that carpet of phosphorescent flowers, combing the litter into their mouths-on-sticks; one told him: I seen Robinson Crusoe’s and I seen the Sphinx and all them others, but this is the greatest! It’s the biggest, it’s the best, it’s so beautiful! —and Tyler looked around me and saw that it was! —especially after a few drinks. The waitresses in short black skirts wiping tables with one hand, holding round trays of drinks in the other, families marching down the glowing carpet toward the elevators, some with cocktail glasses in hand; the calm, happy heads of the resting gamblers sitting around tables, lights slopping and lushing around, were all so busy that they reminded Tyler of the brochure with Egyptian symbols on it at the Luxor which read: Keno While You Sleep—Play More, Win More! Meanwhile the girl on the loudspeaker was as happy and amazed as if she’d just given birth to Jesus, crying out: Mrs. R. D. Winkler, Mrs. R. D. Winkler, you have a feminine phone call! I have a feminine phone call for Mrs. R. D. Winkler! —for, just as the gorgeous black waitress who used to work at the Horseshoe downtown said: After being down there with all those gamblers, you get used to it. You have to perform. —No doubt that was what Mr. Slapper, the P.R. guy, had in mind when, escorting Mr. and Mrs. Rapp, Mr. and Mrs. Singer, John and Celia, Roland and Amanda into the very spacious and bright cafeteria (where an off-duty Greek goddess picked up a tray and stepped into line), he said (with a smile like the long crack between a cocktail waitress’s puffed-up breasts): First of all, we call all of our employees ringleaders. Feminine Circus was connected with the Big Top until 1969. When you’re onstage, always delivering, you put on your best performance. —Passing couples upturned their heads, looking at everything; nothing in any one part of Feminine Circus was quite the same; that was a triumph in which the little Cupid in the American Girl Lounge seemed to delight, for he moved and twisted in his chair, convulsed his hairy arms, threw back his head and laughed at the stars on the ceiling.

  Then a woman screamed: Ohhhhh! —She’d hit a big jackpot. The coins began to patter out. Crowds clotted behind her and watched as the coins kept coming.

  | 262 |

  Suddenly an arrow comprised of neon lights began to shimmer on the floor, and a siren went off. A melodious female voice said: Ladies and gentlemen, the adult area of Feminine Circus is now open for play. Adults only, please!

  The woman who’d won the jackpot looked around, and found herself husbandless. Masculine Circus, Brady’s playland for heterosexual women, remained a mere blueprint.

  Following the long line of men, Tyler passed through a glowing pink door . . .

  * * *

  •BOOK XVII•

  * * *

  Buying Their Dream House

  •

  * * *

  The introduction of [circumcision] into human customs may have come first from the women during early Mesolithic times; however, the men must have shown considerable resistance to such a barbaric act of symbolic castration . . . It was probably practiced regularly only in the centers where women wielded unusual power. . . . Polygyny without circumcision would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain in a society in which the women expected and demanded to experience regular and frequent orgasmic satisfaction.

  MARY JANE SHERFEY, M.D., The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality (1973)

  * * *

  •

  | 263 |

  In addition to his cottonwood business, Mr. Brady was, as we see, an impressario. Why should I beat around some whore’s bush? He was the founder, chief executive officer, and fifty-one percent owner of Feminine Circus Enterprises, dedicated to the philosophy that love is the first and final cause. When I looked him up in Who’s Who in Retail Management, I read a competitor’s description of his face: “as vividly ugly as a fast food parking lot at night when a security light glares down on the pitted asphalt.” But the competitor, who was bankrupted by Feminine Circus, was hardly handsomer. Let’s not get in the way of love; let’s not halt love’s caravans, sexual traffickings. Love’s poison makes us strut like birds; then a woman’s ten outstretched fingers slide slowly down a man’s back. What comes of it? Wait nine months, till the baby sits serene on its mother’s lap, utterly contented by the writhing of its fingers. Is that love? Now the creature walks; again and again the mother bends faithfully down to the child whose hand she holds. Not much longer, and the child pulls away to be swallowed up in child armies. In the playground love marches with little boys stalking birds slyly, to pelt them with sand; when the birds scatter, little boys throw sand in little girls’ eyes instead, loving their screams. As soon as the weeping’s over, back come the boys, grinning, sand dribbling between clenched fingers, and the girls suspect no evil; being only at the beginning of life’s tortures, they haven’t yet learned to read the malignancy of other faces. Some never do. We call them retarded. This is the story of Brady, Tyler, and the Queen; but first it’s the story of a man who loved retarded girls, loved them with the tranquil smile and faraway glance of a doctor, not the other way at first, the way people leap up to watch a car accident, and I will tell you what happened on his journey for dear love when the world divided into armies.

  (Could you allow me a driblet of authorial commentary right here, please? I merely want to say how embarrassed I am to introduce a new character so late in this novel—moreover, a character without a name. Dan Smooth and the FBI both know who he is, but his name is one hundred percent irrelevant; he’s but a puppet, a placeholder for our plot, a supplier to the grand machine known as Feminine Circus. I’m of two minds as to whether we even need him at all, and if I let his name slip, he might take up more than his allotted space, or possibly we’d get attached to him. Most of the chickens and pigs I’ve eaten didn’t have names.)

  Growing up in hot California towns, our hero didn’t yet know himself because trees hung heavy and silent, obscuring the children from their shadows; overhanging roofs nipped the light like hatched clamshells, eating children every evening when the bicycles came home. He and his best friend used to masturbate together at his house or his best friend’s house because that was how the soldiers in love’s fight impelled each other, lying side by side in the stench of suspended breathing, not yet driven to attack for the booty of breasts and soft thighs; in those days when it was just beginning he knew only his self and his craving that he had to release with both hands. His best friend said that a special way was
to hang naked from pull-up bars until the penis swelled and jetted; he never tried that. That autumn when the rains fell like blood he began to think beyond the fact of his yearning, trying to imagine what girls’ bodies must be like, how to kiss without butting noses, which way the slit went, who opened whose legs which way. The ransom that he’d soon take drew him to devour any distance between himself and girls; he glared at his best friend for getting in his way. Mustered armies faced off at school, watching, wanting, not yet grappling the veterans’ tricks of fawning and pleasing; they knew only desperation. —Some say it’s but compensation, this awardment of flattery’s skills, for the sagging breasts and soft-ons which veterans must bear, but that’s not so, for the great captains, soul-takers, hymen-breakers, phallus-notchers, own both tricks and strength. They take the prize night after night. —His best friend joined that detachment, learning how to scan the swish of skirts, seeing which leg was past, which leg to come, but our hero, less lucky, was doomed to fall victim to one of the girl-captains who charged, mauled him to the ground and bridled him with the golden bridle. Her brain crawled like a balled-up octopus, writhing with need, straining to possess him forever. Suckered attractions burst from her eyeballs, flickering like lashes to lure him in; they licked out of her ears, eavesdropping on his every word’s weakness; they pried her lips apart into a smile, stretched down into her fingertips to caress the world hummingly, and then, full-bent, bowstringed her invasion. Stalking him even as he hunted others, she gobbled up his shadow, gained nourishment from that meal, crouched behind his unwary heels. There is no one quite so self-absorbed as a girl squeezing out her blackheads in front of the mirror. Yet even then she never stopped thinking of him, prizing him from the corner of her eye. He looked back at her and heard her high loud laugh and was embarrassed that others would hear. Discerning that he meant to flee, she closed in on him with licking and sucking little kisses, and struck him down into her conical mound of brown ring-ivy.