The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  He knew not, this veteran captain, what plan to urge upon himself except the old plans (no fault of his, that old plans were derailed); he’d fall back into the encarnadine trench, taken by persuasion’s assaults! His octopus-minded ex-wife had paid him back for yesterday; he’d pay her back with tomorrow: that is how wars go. Limping down between rocky uncertainties as a cat limps, he wandered through a graduation at Berkley which he’d come to just to see the girls; his resolution had not at all affected the routine of the Economics Department whose young faces were meaty and confident beneath the mortarboards, parents brushing the dust and soot from the shoulders of their dark gowns, Japanese dads focusing their zooms while every mom looked on with full-judged concern. Ignoring sons, he scanned the daughters with salvo upon salvo of loving glances . . . no use—he’d grown too old! The sun shone with impersonal malice on the cement, none of the young graduates suspecting the dark wretchedness of adult events that would mutilate and eventually destroy them. The profile-line of mortarboard, cheek and gown was very pleasant, but now the graduates doffed their ceremonial vestments and lost their splendor, becoming just like everyone else. —Well, now he’d do what seemed best to him. No luck with young things, incarnadine prizes unripe? Well, he’d light the battle in another way, with the flame-white hair of elder dames! Surely they wouldn’t keep their treasures to themselves . . . Fishing deathlessly, he soon had something on his hook . . . That very night he was besieging the middle-aged lady with kisses, undermining her vigilant lips, his tongue the battering ram that assaulted the gates of her modestly clenched teeth which held firm until, sending a clever shot behind her lines, he exploded and dissolved her earlobe in a single lick of slobbery lust; now the gates opened, and ferociously the tongue surged in, pillaging her mouth’s stronghold of all its well-wrought treasures of moans and sighs; dragging her down on top of him to complete the work, he launched grazing passes between her still-clothed thighs. —I really think you’d better . . . she began; and he kissed down her murmurs until they were both outbreathed . . . —Stop, she said. —Just one more kiss, he said (expertly conducting his propaganda war). He rolled her on her side, clasping her beyond possibility of escape, and began to suck the spit out of her. His hand rubbing and rubbing until the juice worked out through her pants, he said: You really want me to go? —This is mad, she said. Yes, yes . . . —Yes what? —Yes I want you to go. —I will, he grinned, any time now. —His other hand had twisted down the front of her blouse to loot her intermediate prizes. The hand between her legs was rasping harder now; he felt the first small spasm of her defeat; and she began clinging to him harder and he said: Should I go or not? and she said: Is this some kind of game? and he lowered his face very earnestly down upon her face and said: Mm hm as he directed more whizzing salvoes across her body to breach her other swirls and brattices, making her breath come thick and hot and fast as she straddled him writhing like a soldier whose belly’s been blown open by a lucky shot, and he said: So, should I go? and she giggled and said: You devil . . . —The next morning he was with a charming Mexican woman, pressing a Hershey’s chocolate kiss into her hand, saying: Don’t say I never kissed you. —You never kissed me, she said, pouncing on him, and he was kissing her swimmingly and they went out for coffee and eggs and bacon and ham and sausage and biscuits and gravy, cramming it in until at last she leaned back sighing happily and said: I like you because you are so intelligent and analytical! and he put his hand on her sweet arm. —But as soon as he left her to match himself against the lovely young girl champions whom he once could have run down like a hunting dog, he shrank and said: I’m not what I was. —That evening he wandered past the trio playing Smetana in the old Jesuit chapel at Loyola University, the stained glass windows gleaming, everyone sweating, and someone told him (he knew not whether it was true) that the Jesuits hated for the piano to be played. But the trio played until it was dusk, and the yellow windows glowed. The sky was awash with cerulean blue; the evening smelled like grass. He wandered past girls as lovely as the disconnected squares of snowquilt blueness seen between a field of bushy cloud, but he cringed from them; he was afraid now. —My ex-wife’s ruined me! he thought. —He wandered down the dark and dirty streets owned by princesses of darkness. A whore, a whore, and looking at her he knew right away that he’d forget her face even though it was beautiful; she blocked his way on the sidewalk and said hi and he said hi and she wanted to know what she wanted to know, so he must break the bad news; but she took his hand and squeezed it and he squeezed it back for a minute before he walked on, not looking at her, and he’d already forgotten her face, but strangely enough he remembered her hand; it’s a cliché to say that black people are chocolate-skinned, but that hand of hers was the lovely reddish-brown of fresh cocoa shavings—

  | 287 |

  During the divorce settlement he came across an unsent letter from his ex-wife to his mother which ran: Sometimes I think that we hide from ourselves how deeply we feel about people. For instance, my husband. I always thought him a little dull and condescending, but at the same time he did me favors and so I thought I liked him until last night when I dreamed that he was chasing me around the house, stalking me with a gun, meaning to kill me, and waking up I realized that I had always feared and hated him.

  | 288 |

  So while his powers shrank he fought on, long cut off from his own lines because the others had been defeated long ago, riven into marriage beds by the octopus-eyed girls, or (no better and no worse) they’d won the encarnadine prizes they’d striven for and retired from the lists, licking them over and over in their life’s last caves like dragons greeding over their hoard, licking them out of dull habit, with nothing left to taste but their own stale breath. Oh, no doubt there were a few still left, fighting on ragtag and wild, but in the wars of merciless love, as I’ve just said, to lose is to lose, to win is to lose, and (sad but true) to keep the war hot proves no less to lose, for love-strife is a death where love-life passes us by. In the old days he never would have spied; he liked to think his ex-wife had degraded him down to that, but she was no more than a horrible fire he’d passed through, scorching and scarring him, to be sure; after all, heat was what he’d asked for. Too late? Too late for what? Whatever he might have done or not done, it was getting too late. His penis, speckled and frolicksome like an otter, would soon play no more. He’d perfume it only with sacrilege.

  | 289 |

  There was a lady his own age whom he thought stalked him as he stalked her, but when he closed on her, bellied up to her slit, she said: I—I’m embarrassed to say this . . .

  Go ahead.

  I—I’d love to let you kiss me, but I can’t be like other women . . .

  . . . and he saw that another game was ended; she wouldn’t have had him in her sleep.

  | 290 |

  He sat at home reading the Neutron Trilogy but he couldn’t concentrate.

  He thought of a long and lovely face sipping at a straw. Her eyes were so big they filled up half her face. Her pupils were ripe dark fruits.

  The golden retriever bitch lifted her head and panted innocently, open-mouthed, her pink tongue as thin as a slice of fancy ham, and then she lay back down under his chair to let her honeyhaired sides quake while she basked and gnawed on the last stand of ivy which ran along the bottom of the house and which she had previously neglected to destroy. This task done, she looked at him again, perhaps content, perhaps hoping and waiting for something, so he stroked the length of her skull forward and backward with two fingers, until she raised her nose and licked him. She lay down again, and he heard a rustling as she worried lovingly at the dismembered vines of his dream house.

  The phone rang. He got up and opened the summer door whose screen the dog had almost finished chewing off and then the cool shuttered peace of his lovely house beat down upon him like a congregation of bats as he went back into the narrowest hallway where the phone was still ringing.

  He said hello.

  I just wante
d to tell you, said the middle-aged lady, that I’ve found somebody else . . .

  | 291 |

  Where were the prizes then?

  | 292 |

  . . . They could be called perpetual children. That was the usual way to think of them, two-day piglets puny and shortfurred like monkeys. Some had almost reached adolescence, which hung over them big and shiny like an autumn sunset in northern Canada, crawling brightly, feebly along the ridgetops so that it must be obvious to anyone that darkness will be in sway within half an hour and yet at midnight the sun is still there; others were stammering two- and three-year-olds just on the threshold of complex speech. (Still others, of course, could not talk at all.) In many cases they were sick children. They received medication every day; they had to be guarded against the extra few minutes in the sun or the second chocolate bar that might bring on a seizure. Like children, they lived imprudent and unaware, and could not keep themselves from danger. When they were cruel to one another, their cruelty sometimes partook of craft. But original sin was in everyone’s children. So he kept saying to himself, but his authority over them could not be of as simple and absolute a character as the authority of an adult over a child. Because he hoped that some of them would eventually be able to take care of themselves, he allowed himself to be persuaded by them that this time their choice should be the deciding one, and today they could stay out of the swimming pool, even though he wished that they would go in again. —Well, he was equivocating; he would do the same with a child. (He had not yet seduced his niece.) The real reason that the relationship was problematic was that some of them had passed puberty and were aware of it. A few of them were attracted to him sexually, and sometimes he, despite himself, was attracted to them. Sexual desire, suppressed though of course it had to be (because the Chief Medical Officer was watching from the steel desk, his eyes dull, as if he’d been taking the drugs he prescribed), was the great enemy of the well-intentioned hierarchy. As flesh wanting flesh, he and they were equals; they could satisfy each other, and some were quite beautiful. Their hands squeezed his when he held them; their hair blew in the wind; the women touched their breasts and smiled at him . . . and then between those half-parted lips the tongue protruded again; the hand pulled away and began to scratch.

  The Chief Medical Officer blew his nose, which was as red and glossy as the bloom-phallus of Indonesian sun-ginger. Wrist-angle, neck-angle, the weird glasses-gleam and boniness of life! —I believe in you, Dan! the Chief Medical Officer said. —Then the Chief Medical Officer gave him his charges, slack bodies to animate.

  | 293 |

  As the final recreational Thursday drew toward him like a grey station wagon cleaving the hot afternoon, he tore himself off his wailing dreams and began to arm, buying road maps on the sly, calling in a reservation on a travel bungalow across the state line. He was ready to give birth to his own brooding thoughts. Gliding over the slippery backs of days, he snatched handcuffs and tranquilizers, bought the right women’s clothes, honed his smile-flashes sharp to do love’s butchery again. Fortune’s child like us all, he hummed with power like an electric drill only because Fortune had plugged him in. —No, the tense feeling of travelling alone into darkness is no worse than usual, he said to himself. It’s just that I’ve gotten out of practice. —So they got in the sky-blue bus, counselors and inmates; they were going to the fair.

  Win, win, win, win! the barkers shouted. Come on over! —The retarded ones cringed or laughed or shrieked for glee, gaping at the stuffed animals of every putrescent color which hung for prizes in love’s abbatoir; they were inside the fence now, tickets paid (a favor they’d never notice), hands stamped. —Group leaders! Group leaders! Pay attention, group leaders! We’ll meet here at five-thirty sharp! Have a wonderful, wonderful time—

  One of his charges was absent with a seizure—all the better for him. The other speechless ones could be disposed of with blinding pieces of change—here, for instance, where the phony canoes slammed down the river slide like a horrible torture. Strap them in; no malingering now . . . Wipe the drool from their chins one last time, give them their meds a little early (a triple dose); slip the carnie man two twenties, presidential side up: Just keep them going round. I’ll be back in an hour . . . —As for the crowd, they were too busy pretending not to stare at the retards to notice him . . .

  Fingers tight around her wrist. She turned to him full-face, ready to be led; he had the prize. Already the machine was starting up; over its roaring and clattering he could hear the speechless boys begin to bawl in fright. Well, they could bawl all they liked; not one would spill the beans—

  Slipping his arm around her waist, he took her past the huddle of grey-clad security guards who lounged chuckling at the crackle of their own walkie-talkies, drinking Cokes, smoothing their greasy hair, glaring amiable at one another through ultradark sunglasses; no, they’d never remember him. He led her through the end of the afternoon swollen with light like some monster California orange, taking her where the heat and glare were fiercest, stalking through unknowing crowds, dodging her silently past girls throwing darts at balloons that resembled multicolored pustules (the girls hoped to win ugly pictures). She grunted softly and dug her feet in, twisting away from him to look back at the silver-studded ferris wheel whirring, gleaming fiercely in the sun. Then he saw that she was listening and sniffing for the scents of the other group leaders’ cargo of differently ableds; some were up there whirling and gaping; just beside it, a number were strapped screaming to the giant pendulum on the pirate ride, raining down puke . . . —Perhaps it was that that she sniffed and smelled. Did she remember their odors enough to miss them? —A barker was grasping air, wide-eyed, trying to grab him in. —Hey now let’s go now let’s play let’s PLAY! Try it! —She turned her deadly gaze upon the barker, who said: Hey I’m sorry. —He took her away, the barker forlorn and sheepish, and he bought her a butterfinger-flavored slushy which she messed all down her dress and sticky hands, stretching her arms out to him like the bewildered parents stumbling down the children’s rotating tunnel. He went and got electrocuted to win her a giant teddy bear which she went awwwwrr over and rubbed it up and down against her slushy-stained breasts while the yokels gawked, and then she retched, just a little yellow-brown tail sliding out of her mouth, and he wiped her on the bear and she started licking it back up, then she allowed the bear to fall to the cement puke-matted in the hot sun with flies already shooting down like bombers and her cheeks were blue and green where the bear’s dye had come off. They were getting very far ahead of her lines now; they were going so far into his country that she’d never be coming back. The other inmates were long lost, the pirate ride out of sight; at the place where you throw baseballs at beer bottles he found a water fountain and cleaned her face up a little; she slurped up the water and he let her drink until she was satisfied. Then he put her on a segment of a giant green caterpillar, riding beside her with his hand between her knees, and an old lady said to him: You’re disgusting, taking advantage of that retard like that, and she said: Worrrwww wor-rrww. The ride ended full circle and he led her off, stalking deeper and deeper into the fair. Two women were hitting each other with giant inflatable crayons. A man in a white barbeque cap scratched his stubble crosswise and watched her. He drowned her in pools of sunlight, leading her into unknown valleys where the barkers shouted: There he is! —She was hugging her horse now on the merry-go-round, cawing and almost falling off, so he grabbed from his companion steed, saving her as they whirled past SWIRL FRIES ten times a second; her mouth was open. She looked away, writhing her fingers . . .