The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  That night she slept with one leg over him, but he lay open-eyed, scheming how to return to his own lines. There was a girl he sought to prey on—not this one who’d defeated him. He lay stifling, panting for her, and the one who’d got him, exulting in her dreams, dreamed she was coursing him again, making him groan between her perfect white buttocks. At last he fell asleep again, only to be awoken by her fingers reconnoitering him, crawling up his leg like crabs. He could see her cruel teeth shining in the starlight. Her smile of exposed belly heaved; her navel blinked. As gently as a mother slows the arc of a swing to pluck her child out, he lifted her leg in his hands, thinking to roll free, but she sprang on him at once, rubbing her crotch against him until his weak-willed penis sprang up strong. When he’d satisfied her again she fell back on the bed’s sweaty battlefield and began to breathe more evenly, her eyes closing, the octopus-tentacles retreating back inside her skull to hug themselves like a ball of dormant roots. Asleep, dead asleep, she straddled the wartorn sheet-ridges in that hot black night whose stars winked out one by one. Now the wily one she’d thought to keep slid away inch by inch, down to the foot of the bed where it was cool by her softly clenching toes. He rose and stood above her; she was his fallen enemy now, and he gloated. Stalking into her bathroom, he closed the door, turned on the light, raised the toilet lid. When he turned to wash off crusted love-gore, his mirror-face knew him, and for the first time he felt that he could trust himself like a holy image; he was friends with himself. Together they’d keep watch, strike, take the incarnadine plunder. They smiled at one another, and the double reached out a palm for him to touch, mirror-cold, glass-hard. Then he sidled out, dressed as silent as a breath, and left behind his grisly work. Unable to wake, paralyzed by the joy he’d given her, she lay still even when the back door opened and shut; only her eyeballs whirred uneasily beneath the sleep-sealed lids—

  | 264 |

  She woke weeping in that empty sweaty bed, already knowing she’d been routed, but her octopus held tight to patience regardless of dismay; it sent shock-troop fingers to caress her fibrulating heart until the frantic beats slowed; then, slithering between her ventricles with an invertebrate’s fluid beauty, it exposed and blotted her sequestered grief. In the bathroom, octopus-fingers wiped her tears and washed her face; ringing themselves with silver and gold, they dressed her in the perfumed garments of a sacred pledge. They found his five fingerprints on the mirror and tasted that spoor, but it was cold. Long tendrils flowered out of her in all directions to find the one she hunted. Eye-suckers, budding optic nerves, reached through the windowpanes and scanned dawn’s streets, greedy to see where he lurked. Octopus filaments bloomed through the telephone wires, and the steady yellow phone light showed that information was being transferred to her ear. By the time she’d made up her mouth and eyes (they’d be her battle-shield’s device), her pet, exhausted by emboldening her, had itself become nervous. Now it was her turn to take in trust those skinny octopus-arms that were swarming in her heart again (not stroking this time, but darkly flickering like a girl’s armpits up her short sleeves); so she damned the quarry aloud, swearing she’d find means to drown him in the dark blood of love. She combed her hair until it shone like the sun’s tiny triple gleams upon a sand-bound ant, patted powder on her cheeks and smiled into the mirror, not to commune, as he’d done, but to command herself; then, studying the loveliness of her throat, the sure wake of golden light on her forehead, her red-waxed lips, new soft sweater crackling with electricity, tight pants, she laughed aloud. She put on two earrings which would catch the sun like fishing-lures. Then she slung her purse over her shoulder and set out, far ahead of the sleeping platoons.

  | 265 |

  He was long away by then, in strange shaded places near the church, reaping other girls by the armload, sweeping them down on top of him to do his will. He netted them like birds, kissed them in a roar of lust that rolled their eyes up. They panted shining in his arms. By the time they were able to weapon themselves, he’d rushed off on other forays, and though they tracked him like wolf-dogs, hungry to gulp his blood back into their hollowed hearts, they’d become so crazed in their distress as to break ranks, rounding on each other to dispute the right to sniff his footprints, rending each other’s throats for panicked malice; meanwhile, he was tongue to tongue with some new victim, hypnotizing her to draw him into her house. He went in the front door, exited the back, came in the back door and went out the front, lunging, seeking only to spend himself. But the girl with the octopus mind, more prodigious in pride and lust than any battalion, sought him with rampant cunning. An effeminate boy in suit and tie sat on a shrub-bench with his knees spread like a frog, a cigarette between them. He turned his head in a series of alert little jerks. She bore him home for a little sport, soldiered him, digested him and spat him out—she’d get the one she wanted in the end. Wetting her lips replete, patting her hair, she went out again, and this time almost won him, but he saw her first, and wisely bolted; there was another girl he lusted to strip. Would it surprise you to learn that he caught that one and pierced her well, drinking up her cries of joy? When he’d robbed her of everything but her broken heart, he retreated to his own lines where his best friend slapped his shoulders laughing, bushwhacking east with him along the north rim of the Grand Canyon, descending gulleys between steep tree-islands, then climbing step by slipping step up the slopes of slipping pine needles, breasting sunny walls of poison oak, climbing lichened limestone stairs and squeezing between oaks and pines that smelled like bees’ nests where birds sang and flies twanged like rubber bands and wide white rainclouds watched the two friends from each hill. They could see the canyon blue and red and purple-banded and vast and striated and old, so old, and a cold breeze wrapped itself around a lightning-struck tree behind which salmon-colored shards of limestone lay, and behind them were the great ridges and spurs of the canyon, and the air came rushing upward and there was a sound of seashells. Here they threw themselves down side by side to compose new strategies of covert penetration for future wars, inflaming each other with more longings for girls with eyes of blue enamel, chewing over the memory-fat of other live-plucked girls; but by then the girl with the octopus mind had fished up the latest jilted one, the corpse stripped empty of its encarnadine prize; her she bribed with sumptuous sympathy to tell all; that was how she learned of his habit of kissing girls’ eyes. —Yes, he kissed mine, too, she said to herself; that was the one thing I didn’t make him do. —At once, casting her new friend back into the pit of grief, leaving her to wail and rot, she returned home behind her bulkheads where the octopus was free to show itself; here, in sight of the bed where she’d been defiled, she tinctured her eyes with various drops until they dazzled the day: beautiful craft, the twin irises blue with green rays as light and narrow as minnows, the pupils glittering like polished hematite! Next she painted with cool marine colors her eyelids which not so long ago had been red with weeping. At last she fluffed her lashes out like lethal spears, and their points caught light and glittered. Thus armed, thus horned like a male gazelle, she set out for the front where her enemy roved. She marauded down the sidewalk-lipped trenches of blackness, spying out the porches, decks and lawns that hid behind the breeze-blown trees, hunting the couples sipping slurpies, prowling past the fatsos who swallowed down another Big Gulp, searching everywhere, stalking him with coaxing bombshells wrist-flipped into his mailbox just as a gas grenade might be launched behind the foe’s lines; in the moon-ridden heat of her frenzied nights her fingers scuttered from page to page of the phone book; and so, unsurpassed in mobility, eye-elevated in striking power, she flushed him out like the judgment of Heaven. Instantaneously she closed on him, raking and slashing with those love-lashes of hers, hooking him deep with every lash-point until he hung gape-mouthed like a trout, impaled and bleeding with admiration for her eyes; but just when he seemed defeated he somehow wrenched himself away, and his best friend sprang into the breach to woo her, see if she’d let him sow h
is crop while the other boy stanched his wounds in safety behind the lines. Whirling him aside, she pursued her prey, ripping her gaze through walls and windows to ground him, but he knew full well what to do, shielding himself behind a sweetfaced fat girl who kept pulling her sweatshirt back down her glistening paunch. Soon enough he was sucking out of her all the bird-notes of mounting suspense. Just as some women in anger rip down handfuls of air, so the girl with the octopus mind lashed her furious blood with the wiry tentacles of crazed desire. Like some farseeing bird she found the fat girl stripped and vanquished, sobbing with desire for the one who’d loved her. Another new friend! Quickly, now, spread the snares of friendship! Artfully rubbing her back with tentacles that vibrated and veered, opening her up with tradecraft, she recruited the fool’s intelligence. So it all came gurgling out, in between sobs, how he’d kissed her belly, worshiping the soft bulk as if it were a god . . . That was the next weakness of his she learned about. When she’d finished listening shrewdly, milking her drop by drop, as if for affection’s sake, she whelmed the fat girl back down into the grave of sticky tears, leaving her to moan to her heart’s content. For those who regard solidarity in the wars of love will gain only ordinary prizes. Home she sped to her command post, there by that four-poster bed where she’d killed him once; if she carved out her future the way she meant to, he’d soon be tied there again. Behind the mirror where she kept her war-gear, she ran her glance down the ranks of unguents, selecting at last a bottle whose contents, pressed from the fruits of death, she thought to hang her next sortie on. Up with the sweater; expose the torso’s implacable turrets. Take them in hand, aim the nipples straight ahead, lock into place those gunbarrels of sizzling milk. Now for the lotion, worked in with a fingertip, round and round the aureoles that glistened like target rings; the hard nipples, ready to fire, bulged menacing and pink—an easy trick, once she had him, to make him charge her with milk to machine-gun him with while her belly swelled with new love . . . and she tied on her brightest bikini, knowing that multicolored breasts are far more dramatic than when the bathing suit comes off to reveal the same old lumps of gelatinous flesh like the fat girl’s belly: wait till she locked his mouth on those; the luna-moth green and yolk-yellow of her breast-cups would rush out at him like fast-moving troops! Lipsticking herself with no less care than those Greek athletes getting oiled before the wrestling bout, she set out mercilessly, and the door slammed behind her like thunder. This time she thought he’d not dodge her, no matter if he’d whizzed away in Broncos and Amigos with monster wheels, windows open, smog in, radios at maximum volume. From far away she intercepted his nocturnal emissions. Thinking he’d slipped away for good, he was browsing on girls like a buck deer grazing on the steep sunny slope, slowly lifting his legs, puckering his lips, leaning, stretching his neck most incautiously, while his best friend knelt in the high grass, with the sun brightening his antlers. She charged him very quickly, halting him with her eyes like a back-road poacher with his headlights, spearing him with the tips of her hot-colored nipples that dazed and wounded him right through her breast-cups, whistling into his heart to knock him down so that he convulsed and fouled himself with his own blood and the world went clammy, murmurous, but again his best friend roared and covered him with penile fire until he shook his head stupidly and got away from her one last time, the way you elude a breaking wave by swimming out past it, into the place where waves are only rolls of the sea’s fatty belly, lurching and quivering, lifting you effortlessly on ocean bellylaughs. But he was bleeding badly; everything dizzied him hot and smooth like her sun-girl’s breast.

  There is a certain middle distance at which the island that one is approaching, not having grown larger for a long interval, continues not to grow larger; and yet somehow you can see that it is growing larger. This is how the girl with the octopus mind now felt. She did not rage and tremble; she knew that next time she’d have him. Marshalling her reserves—well-plucked eyebrows, perfect ankles, dimples and fingernails and flashing blitzkrieg shoulders—she streaked on, following his tracks.

  | 266 |

  But once again he was out of reach of her weapons, having been conquered by another, an innocent girl who won him carelessly, almost unknowingly, simply by appearing before him like beautiful death. While the platoons of other hungry girls scoured the streets lipsticked in their reconnaissance cars, turning corners with rolled-down windows to catch unwary boys with the aching lure of a licked lip, the innocent girl mauled him with a look, holding her right hand in her left, cradling her head in her soft wave of hair, gazing at him with steady brown eyes. His will pleaded to turn away, to fatten on less dangerous prey, but a single lethal toss of her hair strangled him into silence. He could not even ransom himself from her; his best friend could not pull him home; she’d infiltrated his machine-gun nests of coldblooded charm, and a raking salvo of light from her eyebrows shattered them into stutters. Continuously firing gorgeousness upon him from her flared nostrils, she sprawled him down without even a smile. He spun as he tumbled, and his neck snapped back; his mouth gaped in a silent shriek. Then she hacked his heart to pieces.

  | 267 |

  Thoughts of her visited him all night, thickening like the echoes of her goodbye shouted from the window—her second goodbye, which came after the one by the stairs, when he’d embraced her without kissing her anymore and began to go downstairs and the innocent girl whispered to her cat: Say goodbye to him . . . —down the long stairs he sank to the door which he shut behind him knowing that she was at the top of the stairs watching him; he closed the door and made it sure, went down the outer stairs to the gate and closed it behind him like an astronaut leaving the airlock forever; and he began to walk into the grim loneliness of that street where a hungry man leaned into darkness watching him approach; he knew before he even passed the man that the man would stalk him for blocks; it was then that she called goodbye to him from the window. Tomorrow morning she was going away. The goodness and desperate impatience of her were being formed into some alloy as yet unknown. —(She’d told him that it was all over.)

  In front of his door the girl with the octopus mind was waiting. But she could do nothing to him. He was armored against her with the ultimate armor of obliviousness.

  | 268 |

  The girl with the octopus mind, beautiful, sat in her empty bedroom with the white white walls emblazoning her shadow of need and sadness, and with all the loneliness of nakedness she knew that she was so far away from the army of other girls now that no one could help her on this last battlefield where the vultures already waited to dip their beaks in her decaying heart, and the octopus (which was really her anguish) glared inside her skull so desperately that her mind burst into throbbing flames and it stretched its suckers just as a child stretches his arms out as he begins to weep; then the child throws back his head to let mouth and tongue gape to the heavens; now he’s prepared; in the same hopeless way, the octopus shot its tendrils out in all directions, locking them into rigid pain like a sea-creature dropped living into formaldehyde; the pale-eyed octopus was dying; the girl it was dying inside sat rocking herself and moaning and dialling to make his phone ring and ring, but nothing could drag him out of remembering one night when the innocent girl was in her pajamas.

  Do you think it would be decent for me to go out like this? the innocent girl had said.

  I think it would be decent for you to go out any way. You are so beautiful.

  She laughed quickly. —Thank you, she said.

  She never loved him. Unknowing and uncaring she whipped his heart as if it were a screaming horse. He went home aching. The phone rang, but he didn’t answer it.

  After she’d flown clear, he sat overhauling his semi-obsolete love weapons, patching holes in his armor, stacking up cannister after cannister of glittering heartless love-bullets to bombard her with. Knowing he’d likely have time to fire only once, he brooded over what ammunition would be most likely to kill her heart instantly. His best friend shuddered
to see him so; he thought to divert him with easier targets, unaware girls to strike and crush, but he remained alone, stricken and bleeding ceaselessly. Throwing up his hands, the best friend went out alone. That was his mistake. He wasn’t in his prime anymore. Laughing, he ploughed the enemy down, spearing and shooting all that he could get, but an adept girl finally slaughtered his heart. —We got the dogs so we wouldn’t have a kid, but we have two kids now, he said, kissing his wife’s face.

  | 269 |

  But the one who loved the innocent girl felt no more alone when his best friend was killed and stripped. He was already alone. So the girl with the octopus mind won him. She outraced him, then she outwaited him. She got him in the chest, and down he clanged and crashed. She danced over him as he lay there dead. Then she married him.

  | 270 |

  He never had to cook dinner for himself anymore. His wife did that, busy with her tentacles that were green like an Air King compressed air dispenser. His wife never ate anything that he cooked. If he washed the dishes his wife would go through every plate, until she found some microscopic spot; then she’d wash them all again. So he’d gotten out of the habit of doing the dishes, too. His wife was a professional woman, and when other professional women came over they’d be sure to make some pointed remark to him, such as: Boy, you sure are lucky to have a wife who does everything for you! I would never do all the cooking for my husband! He’d be ashamed if I did.