The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  | 271 |

  Had the octopus died after all? On their vacations her oiled knees remained first in firm alertness when she slept in her beach chair. Whenever he made what she considered a mistake, she found it out immediately and began screaming at him. No, the octopus was still there. It didn’t know how to be happy. It tried to bask inside her victorious skull, in exactly the same way that some girls sling their bodies back against locked arms, spread palms when they sun themselves; but then it quickly began to squirm again, greedy and anxious . . .

  | 272 |

  Sometimes she shivered with rage at the thought that she’d won a man who was worthless. She preferred his former best friend. (His former best friend had been working for many years as a medical technician when one day he started reading one of those inspirational books that remind you to live each day to the fullest, to remember that today is the first day of the rest of your life, and above all to be sure that you were doing exactly what you wanted to do. Reading this tract, he suddenly yelled aloud: I know what I want! I want to be a used car salesman! —So he did that, and became very happy. When nothing was going on, he’d just say they were jerking off, not really coming; a sale was an orgasm. Now for the encarnadine prize!) But the octopus-minded one knew with all her tentacles that her own husband was no good. Then she’d begin to set him tasks again. One day she decided that it was his job to vacuum. On Monday, he went down to the super’s to borrow the vacuum but the super said that it had been stolen. His wife said: Well then, we’ll have to get a cleaning lady, won’t we?

  No, he said weakly, I can’t afford it.

  You spend your money on pretty things, said she. You can spend your money on this.

  No, no, he said.

  Then you can borrow it from Bertha.

  But I don’t feel comfortable with Bertha. I’ll vacuum but can you borrow it?

  No.

  Okay. Then I’ll do it.

  On Tuesday Bertha wasn’t there. He called three times. On Wednesday it was the same. His wife was going to dinner at Bertha’s. He had spoken to Bertha on the phone and it was understood that he would pick up the vacuum. He went down when he was sure that dinner would be over and it had just started. Theodore was sitting at the head of the table, carving the turkey, and his wife was there and Bertha was just bringing in the brussels sprouts from the kitchen.

  Oh, you have to stay! said Bertha.

  I—I . . . he said, becoming tongue-tied with shame.

  Sit down, beamed the octopus, glowering with pure hatred.

  No, I just wanted to borrow the vacuum . . .

  Can’t it wait until after dinner? snarled Theodore. I mean, we’re eating.

  I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean to—

  No, no, no, give him the vacuum, said Bertha anxiously.

  Everyone stared at him over their ruined dinner. Bertha rushed into the bedroom and got the vacuum. Doing this she awakened the baby, who began to cry.

  Oh, Theodore, said Bertha. There’s something wrong with the vacuum. Can you fix it?

  Theodore leaped up in a rage, knocking over the ruined dinner . . .

  | 273 |

  She had begun to accord her career the attention which it deserved. She was an engineer for a nationwide company which manufactured super-cold smart refrigerators. If she distinguished herself, they’d give her a promotion and they could move back to the west coast. She had a number of competitors for the position, but she knifed them square in the belly; she slit their livers open; she made their guts see the light of day! Her octopus quivered and listened perpetually; it was impossible to surprise her. Those who tried staggered back gushing blood, and their fate was the same as that of the amateurs whom she herself surprised. She drove them all down to death. Catnapping from year to year, tossing restlessly in that murderous marriage bed, she seized the spoils and gathered grander weapons, until at last she won the triumph; he didn’t care. Now they were all set to move into their dream house.

  | 274 |

  They fought about where and when and how, and the next thing they fought about was the printer stand. He suddenly realized that she had moved it into the hall to be trashed. She’d gone somewhere when he noticed. He went outside, and there it was. He brought it back inside. It was his; he was using it and it would be good to have when they got to their dream house. It was ugly and lightweight and practically indestructible. As far as he was concerned it would be fine forever. No doubt she hated it for its looks. But they wouldn’t have any money for awhile. The dream house, as dream houses will, had cost more than expected, and once the closing costs were tacked on . . . If he allowed her to throw it out, he wouldn’t have any ugly chair when they got there. She’d be working, and wouldn’t be available. He wouldn’t have money; he’d just given her his life savings for the down payment on the dream house. So he thought he was entitled to the ugly chair. That was why he brought it back in. When she returned from wherever she’d been, he saw the hatred and anger leap into her eyes.

  What’s this? she said.

  I brought it back.

  Where are you going to put it?

  I don’t know. Where do you suggest? he said wearily. (All evening he’d been following her suggestions.)

  Out, she said flatly. We’re not taking it.

  Look, he said. I don’t have to justify everything I take. You went and put it out without consulting me. It’s mine, and—

  No, it’s not yours. We found it together, in the garbage. I tell you, we’re not taking it! You just want to get the moving costs up. You don’t care. It’s not your money anymore. The costs keep going up with every stupid thing you try to save—

  I’m not getting rid of it, he said then. (He’d hardly ever noticed it before.)

  Now she started screeching at him. He bore it as patiently as he could, for as long as he could. His stomach began to ache. Then he told her to stop. That pleased her. Now that she’d gotten a rise out of him, she could abuse him in earnest.

  He was sitting at his desk. She was standing by the table, yelling.

  Please stop now, he said.

  You sonofabitch, she said. You fucking sonofabitch.

  She went on like that for a while.

  I’m asking you for the last time to stop, he said.

  Now a crisis was approaching. That was what she longed for. She refined the cruelty of her insults as she increased their volume. He did everything he could not to hear, but he heard just the same.

  I’m almost at the breaking point, he said. Please stop, or I’ll push you out the door.

  You leave, you fucking sonofabitch.

  He could actually push her out, but that would only make a public scene, and anyway he didn’t want to be brutal. He just wanted her to stop. There was no use talking to her and she wasn’t going to shut up. He couldn’t bear it. He could leave himself, but he was very tired and had nowhere to go. Now that his money was gone, he couldn’t stay in a hotel. She was going on and on, and he snapped. On his desk, ready to hand, was a textbook of hers. He looked at it. He was very angry now, and could barely control himself.

  If you don’t stop now I’m going to throw something, he said.

  Go ahead. Throw the ugly chair. Then you’ll break it and I’ll throw it out.

  Will you shut up?

  Listen to that. The man who never does anything tells me to shut up.

  He picked up her book knowing now that he was going to throw it, terrified lest he throw it directly at her and hurt her. He couldn’t stop himself from throwing it anymore. He aimed at a chair near her and launched it and saw it hit the chair with a grand thud. The binding ripped. She swooped down on it and cried in a heartrending voice: You ruined it!

  She set it down on the table so gently. (She never touched him like that.) Then she ran to his bookshelf and snatched one of his rarest books.

  Well, he thought to himself, now she’s going to throw that. I might as well resign myself.

  She ran up behind him glaring an
d raised it over his head. He wondered if she would bring it down on his face or whether she’d shatter the computer screen. He stared away stonily.

  She slammed it harmlessly down on the carpet.

  How’d you like it if I broke your book in two? she wept.

  She went into the bedroom and he heard her weeping—a weird, not unpleasant musical wail of ooh-oohs that almost made him smile. It went on for half an hour. He knew that if he didn’t go in there she’d add to her hoard of resentments, citing coldhearted abandonment (that had happened before), but if he did go in he’d become the lightning rod of more abuse. So he sat staring at the blank screen of his computer. There was no place to go.

  After a while she came out, crying more loudly now, to get Scotch tape to repair the book. She came near him, wailing inconsolably for her poor dear book. No doubt she wanted to make sure that he was paying attention. So he braced himself and went in.

  Can I comfort you or make it up to you in any way at all? he said.

  Get out, you sonofabitch! she screamed. Fucking sonofabitch!

  All right, he said.

  She followed him out, screaming.

  Please leave me alone, he said. I got out, didn’t I?

  She went back in and slammed the door and cried for a while. Then she came out and rummaged in his tool box a foot behind him, loudly. He didn’t look. She took something. Then he heard a loud thud. She’d thrown the ugly chair down on the floor and was trying to smash it with his hammer. It was comical. He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from laughing. Finally something broke. It was the shaft of the hammer. She cried out and flung the pieces into the garbage and left the chair lying by the door, an upside down monument to battle. He felt affection for the sturdy thing. It was his heart’s proxy, just as her book had been; she could not destroy it.

  In the morning he found that she’d set it outside again. He brought it in. But she got her way in the end, of course—

  | 275 |

  They started from Massachusetts where fog-wisps grew like grass on the surfaces of the ponds because it had just rained and he asked her: Are you a happy creature? and she said: Yep. —Then talk like a happy creature, he commanded. —Beep beep beep beep beep, she said. They drove through the hot afternoon rain and crossed into New York where it wasn’t yet hazy; descending into a bowl of dark green and light green trees, they swallowed a blue mountain in their rear view mirror. The mountains there were infinitely thin, each progressively more sky-colored and transparent, until the farthest one was only the sky. As they neared them to eat them up, the mountains swelled, hardened and darkened to viridian. And then they were eaten and fell behind. They crossed the Hudson River, which was blue-grey and wide, and pierced the sumac walls to eat more mountains. Double-decker porches, towns and green tree-hills steadily lowered before them like horses’ heads. Almost Pennsylvania. His wife ignored him like a sun-reddened girl smoothing her hair with a close-eyed smile. She’d walled herself into one of those temporary worlds used by people on beach towels, every sunbather alone. The tree-miles stretched leaves overhead, clutching at him and her on the narrow turns. Now at this deer crossing they began to get away from bleached Hudson River colors, into mists and browns, denser forests, leaves slicked down over more leaves like a teenager’s hair, and the glimpse he got of a river through the trees was strange to him like the misty cornfields, none of which she saw; she was driving. Wide-porched general stores rolled over for them but she never stopped. She drove over squashed roadkills sticky and grey; she devoured the plastic cow on the roof of the steakhouse and shat it out through the rear view mirror and then they were in Pennsylvania. On the BBQ billboard, the man’s face was covered with sauce. He thought: Now if I blew her head off, if I made her face explode into a thousand bits and blotches and spray blood all over the ceiling and still be screaming after it was apart; if I beat her and raped her and cut her; if I burned her, tortured her, smashed her, crushed her, ground her into the floor, chopped her up, smeared her into nothing like one of these roadkills; if I disarticulated every dead bone and broke it over my knee like a dry stick, would my face be happily covered with her gore like that? —Grand hazy schoolyards, wild tiger lilies, multitopped mulleins like chandeliers. —Music, she said to him without looking. He put on a Japanese chromium dioxide tape for her, and it was the soundtrack of his life’s movie: calm, instrumental, intellectual muzak. Hopeless to ask her to stop at the Snake Farm—yes, they whizzed right by that; for him only a glimpse through the open door where the cages were stacked, cratelike affairs of used barnboard, very dusty . . . They hurtled past quick round-edged tree-gaps cut by power poles, and devoured the sudden sunny flashings of meadow and ridge. It was after a rain at dusk, and the sky was a magnetic blue; the yellow headlights of approaching cars sparkled like tears, and the road wound back and forth like the final drawn-out convulsions of some pompous symphony, the trees now becoming jungle-dark blotches of steam and crime . . .

  They stopped at a hotel, and she switched on the TV immediately and lay smiling at it in the huge cold bed so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. The next morning they enjoyed together the innocent delight of speeding past the solemn personages in station wagons who chew chicken legs while they drive. His wife’s head was nodding and smiling to the music of the new cassette; her index finger tapped itself on the steering wheel; she sang la- la-la-la-la. As far as he could see, cars rolled along in parallel, as if pulled by the same string.

  | 276 |

  Green fields and red barns sped across his eyes like sleep as his octopus-minded wife drove them west past roadkills more rare, flattened and hairless than before. The grass along the median strip was browner and drier. He saw twin white horses by a stagnant pond. Just as a moth squashed on the windshield is at first a splash of gorgeous yellow-green, but gradually darkens as it coagulates until it is little different from the yellow painted line at the road-shoulder’s edge, so his anxieties baked hard hour by hour on the bloodcaked grill of his heart. Fearing he’d already met the worst, he tried to embattle himself more proudly, as if he could turn the tables again the way he had that first night, when she’d had him and slept, and then he’d stood above her, to go back among the other girls. But no, she was his day’s eternal nightmare. Speeding sunpoints rushed from leaf-spike to leaf-spike of the corn like falling dominoes. In Indiana, where the irrigation lines were as rickety as drunken airplane struts, they devoured rolls of yellow grass, racks of snubby drooping trees. They ate up brown hay cylinders and rubbery green mud together. The radar detector never beeped, not even at seventy-five miles an hour. He wondered what had been in those cages at the Snake Farm. He peered up through the bays of cumulus clouds, finding birds and bugs. Purple cloud-udders hung over them. Someday her breasts would turn ancient and hang down like that, purple, wrinkled and veined; they’d resemble his balls—proof of the homology of the sexes. Would he still be her slave then? Maybe he’d get lucky, and she’d have a car accident. They were now approaching Gary, rusted and trestled, a tower with fire coming out like an orange windsock; they ate smoke and bridges and more fire, leaving soot and emptiness behind them. The smells of oil and gas and sulphur throbbed inside his skull, and she turned the air conditioning up a notch, not that that would do any good, but what was the use of saying anything to her; she was as impervious as these white round oil tanks that led them into forests of transformers and power poles; in a split second they slurped up a polluted pond, lipsticked with algae bloom; then they were on the Illinois side, choking down huge rusty tanks as big as apartment houses, condensers, beaked downpointed bird-skeleton machines, funnels, gallowses a dozen storeys high, poles bearing resistors like antlers; they snacked on things like a tin man’s arms coming out of buildings; he ate the ones on the right; she ate the ones on the left; the things were spotted with corrosion like birdshit. Now came the brick tenements, incinerator chimneys, and like a dream the thin blue skyscrapers of Chicago rose so far away.

  |
277 |

  The plan of his octopus-eyed wife was to sleep that night at the condo of one of her colleagues who designed smart microwaves whose black glass jaws slammed shut on refrigerator foods shrunken hard like cold turds, then spat them out transformed into hot and lethal nourishment; she and the octopus-minded one had once charged boys together, splitting their heads open with needle-sharp eyelashes, ripping the boys’ struggling tongues from their mouths to suck on. He thought the colleague had liked him once. Maybe he’d lock her in flirtation’s skirmishes, stinging her heart just a little with temptation, winning a drop or two of blood, not the full encarnadine prize. So he smiled, the Amtrak rolling beside them in a fury like a caterpillar on its tiptoes, and his wife didn’t notice him smiling; he knew she wouldn’t; and they munched unspeaking on idle smokestacks still laddered and ringed for nothing; his wife yawned and ate a Metro train that came smashing down a hot wind among the weedy shrubs; she ate the shrubs, too, for garnish; in that hot breathless breeze he ate the smell of pavement and diesel-smoke; a child spread his hands in the diesel van ahead; the tail-light winked like the eye of an insect pimp. With their bulging bleary eyes he and his wife ate the freeway miles littered with glass, half-melted scraps of tires, hubcaps; a faint fishy breeze condensed on a passing car and he ate that for dessert . . . The traffic stalled. On the opposite side, across the barrier, a redbrown-skinned woman in a sleeveless blue dress raised her arms above her head to stretch, and he was almost close enough to smell the musk in her armpits—no reason why he’d never see her again, but he wouldn’t; he’d been stripped of his gear years ago. He gobbled up a fenced-off little beach on the right, whose trash cans everywhere cast interlocking shadows between which people lay “sunning” themselves and trying to cough; while his wife drank up the unearthly lake-shimmer beyond, silent and metal-eyed; yes, she drank that pale pale blue’s green. —Park and lock. —The colleague met them at the door to her engraving-hung condominium (ceramic leaves, a view of dark trees and bricks, brass fittings on the windows) whose floors creaked threateningly beneath his tread, making everywhere he stood a lost island. Her piano was barnacled with multitudes of figurines so fragile that too potent a breath would sweep them to ashes. Her clocks, terrier-faced cushions, chandeliers and bone-white knicknack excresences prohibited him from touching anything. The colleague embraced his wife. She looked at him as if he smelled. She’d arranged a little reunion for his wife, an intimate little party, a nothing fancy under the chandeliers. Here came the designer of smart showerheads who kissed his wife, perhaps a hair too fondly; here came the two ladies who were installing smart microphones for the Justice Department; then the famous man they’d all learned from, the gallant old one who’d married young; he’d made his money in smart syringes and smart toxics, but now in his semi-official retirement he dabbled in smart rosebushes; his young wife was the only other one there who wasn’t an engineer, so after an hour of their shop talk he leaned across the table and said to her smiling: So, how have you learned to cope with these conversations? —Oh, she replied, so far (she’d been shifting her head from side to side as if out of boredom, but she kept doing it while she was answering him and he saw that she was doing it to follow what they said, nodding like a graceful snake) so far, she said, I try to listen and learn. If you don’t mind, I’m trying to listen right now.