The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  * * *

  •BOOK XXI•

  * * *

  Jesus

  •

  * * *

  You offspring of Canaan and not of Judah, beauty has deceived you and lust has perverted your heart.

  Apocrypha, Susanna 56

  * * *

  •

  | 349 |

  On Halloween morning, two pimpled black women in bathing suits stood at the ticket machine at Civic Center trying to force in change where it said no change, and as one of the whores leaned forward on her high heels to whack the machine’s unhelpful face with the flat of her hand, a huge knife fell out of her armpit and hit the floor. —She wants to kill us all! an old man laughed. —The blade was only silver plastic.

  At five o’clock that afternoon, Tyler had already left behind him Vallejo, Vacaville and the occasional weird palm tree. The soft goldengrassed hills resembled the mounds below blonde women’s bellies, while the sky ahead and above was a sharp white, because now that the forest fire season had ended, the weather would remain crisp until the tule fogs began. Tyler itemized facts: He was forty-four years old, he possessed the Mark of Cain and three-quarters of a tank of gasoline; and his mother was extremely sick. John had agreed to stay away this weekend. Evidently he now understood Tyler’s routine quite well, for those calls of his usually reached the answering machine in the early afternoon, when Tyler was likely to be out of the apartment even if he had been out late with the Queen the previous night. Tyler had not been compelled to actually speak with him for weeks. He passed a long supermarket supply truck painted with images of California fruits and salads, then found himself compelled to descend beneath two overpasses which must have marked the boundary between pastoral melancholy and human dreariness, for here he now was back, once again in the realm of malls, factory outlets, auto dealerships—immense square buildings whose ugliness reverberated all the worse than a Tenderloin hotel room’s because their cleanliness and proclamations of stupid merchandising pride proclaimed them to be the products of some plutocrat’s choice rather than of mere abuse and neglect. But who was he, Henry Tyler, to reject anything? Was he himself so entirely free from defects?

  Now he was coming into Dixon. A sign shouted CHEAPER! and he didn’t care. A supermarket truck menaced him with a painting of a lobster-claw. To his right lay black-roofed white houses, all bitterly the same. The parking lot of the steak restaurant was empty. One field was alfalfa-green and the next was straw-colored like a Capp Street girl’s pus. Tyler felt that something very strange was happening to him but he could not explain it. A sign offered an untold quantity of apples for fifty-nine cents. The next sign offered apples four for ninety-nine cents. The sign after that proffered pumpkins and he didn’t see the price. On his left receded the pistachio stand where John had once taken Irene before they were married, and that was when Irene discovered that she was allergic to pistachios. Tyler had heard that story twice. His mother had said that she couldn’t believe anybody could really be allergic to pistachios; she’d insisted that Irene was really just finnicky, like those girls who claim to be allergic to earrings of any metal baser than gold. The sky was grey now like a cloud of dust. He passed fields, billboards and orchards as California began to get darker and darker. He hated that winter darkness. Following the examples of his fellow citizens, he launched twin streams of light from his car’s yellow, goggling eyes. The white water-tower at the University of California at Davis blended in with the sky. Overhead passed a black bird whose kind he was sure he had never before seen, and whose immense black crooked wings reminded him of the Queen’s thighs flexing and twitching on the mattress as she uttered her little cries. A gas station vainly illuminated the earth with harsh yellow light similar to what is seen through shooting-glasses. A yellow sign whined BREAKFAST. It was not breakfast time now and so that sign was useless; maybe that was why he hated it; if you saw a whore you could always feel horny anytime but how many times a day could you eat breakfast? At least he was out of Davis now, and lemon-colored fields relaxed him in the twilight, their wholeness scarcely marred as far as the southern horizon. To the northeast a train was coming out of Sacramento quite rapidly, eating its way into the night.

  Ahead now came a belt of shrubs, warehouses, restaurants and sickening yellow lights. This was West Sacramento. West Sacramento offered him storage lockers, more palm trees, walls, rental cars. Between grey trees and hedges he followed his grey path to the Sacramento River, which he crossed, glimpsing lights lying disclike upon it. A flock of birds wriggled through the night, barely distinguishable.

  | 350 |

  His mother was sleeping.

  His room was now the nurse’s room, so he had to sleep in John’s old room. He set down his suitcase as quietly as he could and turned on the light. The bookshelves were crowded by John’s toy trains, the entire Hardy Boys series, and high school yearbooks with photographs of John in them. Tyler had thrown his own yearbooks in the dumpster when he was twenty-four or -five, unable to bear the sight of his own callow, pimpled face. Now he regretted that act a little, not so much because he missed his teenaged self as because he would have liked to gaze at the girls he remembered. Descending the creaking stairs as quietly as he could, he stole the Bible from the living room. He returned upstairs to John’s room, closed the door, then knelt on the hard floor and prayed: Hey, Jesus, if you’re out there and if you have pity on us Canaanites, send some advice my way, would you? I’m kind of at my wits’ end, as the saying goes. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do. Maybe I can turn myself in and give up my Mark and, uh . . . I’m going to open the New Testament now.

  Blindly he parted the covers, then the pages. He lowered his forefinger like doom. He had reached Matthew 12.46, which ran: While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied . . . , “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother, and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

  Well, sighed Tyler to himself, that’s what Beatrice says, anyway.

  Henry? his mother called from her room.

  * * *

  •BOOK XXII•

  * * *

  The Wicked King’s Secret

  •

  * * *

  For I know my transgressions

  and my sin is ever before me.

  Against thee, thee only, have I sinned . . .

  PSALM 51.3–4

  * * *

  •

  | 351 |

  At City Lights the leaves of books hung as limp as those of banana trees on a summer jungle day, and the browsers were more quiet than usual, turning pages ever so slowly, or standing over a table of books, reading the spines, motionless: strange day it was, sunstruck day, the blinking lights around the perimeter of the Hungry I’s sign reduced in power, so that they resembled mere kernels of corn. Tyler read the tale of a wicked King who went conquering successive cities in the desert. From each victory he’d keep a young woman for a concubine, and put her parents, brothers and sisters to death secretly by having them smothered in hot wet Turkish towels, so that, being unrelated to anyone, with no past (her city razed, the rubble smeared across miles of dark stony plain which the King’s troops then scraped and scratched down to the yellow earth), she’d be as pure as an idea. A special caravan transported the bodies, tightly bundled in linen, with the King’s chop-mark printed on the wrappings, so that no one could open them, and no one could find any graves—for to the extent that the concubines had been well chosen, they grew favored, and as they succeeded in gathering about themselves their own troops and satellites, they naturally sought the flesh they’d come from, not only out of love and duty, but also because they longed to be related again, for it is lonely to be a mere formal cunt like Domino, Strawberry, Yellow Bird, Beatrice, Bernadette, Lily, Chocolate, Sunflower, Kitty. They des
ired that their soul-light be clothed in something, so that their obliteration would be undone, and they could live and die again. But although they tossed many a gold ring to the Canaanite runners who loped far back among dead years and cities, seeking paternity or even paternal tombs in that deep red sand aswarm with ants where once there’d been hot and palmtree-walled streets, the runners never found anything except shattered archways and jackal-gnawed bones and on one cool and quiet night a ghost who came to visit them in a pale mask with long dark tresses, its robes constructed with such complexity as to resemble the hybridization of many artificial insects. Then morning came, and once again the air was alive with flies. So the runners turned back and told the concubines that they were alone, that they did not have and never had had any kin. And when the concubines knelt before the King, begging him to at least inform them from which particular cup of bitterness they ought to drink, he could reply to them in all truth: There is no proof that your esteemed parents do not continue in good health! —But the King had a daughter by one of the concubines, and when the girl became fourteen she found—what? Tyler didn’t want to read anymore. It was all too sad, as when one reads old letters and realizes for what seems to be the first time, but can’t possibly be: She loved me! She was sincere, passionate, good; she even wanted me. And now I don’t even know where she is. Does she still think of me? I haven’t thought of her for years. Does she still love me if she does think of me? I hope not and I hope so. —How could these moments, so powerfully articulated with love, have given way to the torpid weariness of the present? He couldn’t understand life.

  A cold mist stung his nose. The back of his neck was stiff and his legs ached. He went into the liquor store in Laurel Heights where adjoining the twenty-year-old, sixty-dollar Ardbeg which was so to John’s taste they also kept the thirty-year-old, equally or almost equally amber, for a hundred and fifty-five dollars. Perhaps John had not seen that yet. It gave Tyler malicious pleasure to assert to himself that John maintained his relatedness to the world through stubborn and jealous possession of fine commodities which could always be vanquished through the primeval domination of ingestion. When the Ardbeg had been drunk, and John had won, he found himself immediately adrift again, like those storybook concubines on their lifelong journey through that desert of destroyed and not-yet-destroyed cities. Certainly Tyler himself, as he fully confessed, had sought the same relatedness by employing first Irene, then the Queen, to be his friendly viands. Perhaps there’d been no harm in it; perhaps he was a criminal. And what if he could give all that up, in order to walk naked into the desert, searching for nothing save self-divestiture? Well, he’d die of thirst, naturally. Strawberry was always complaining of a dry mouth. She would have hopped up and down with excitement to see him here. He smiled sourly. The salesman, big and bald, sat reading a newspaper. —Even you, Henry, the Queen had said. He remembered, and was ashamed of his unbelief. —Next to the Ardbeg, amidst the other glories, thrones and authorities, there stood a bottle of cask-strength Glenfarclas, priced at sixty-five dollars, which was Domino’s minumum price for allowing herself to get sodomized. John and Irene had given him a bottle the Christmas before last, perhaps because the rather sulphurous flavor accorded with John’s supposition of his vulgarity. As he recalled, John had preferred to keep for his own stock eighteen-year-old Glen Morangie with the dullish steel engraving or watercolor or whatever it was, shrunk down and offset, of the distillery buildings, most of which were long and low and abutted what Tyler supposed must be a Scottish firth, with more coast across the water. John, probably trying to do the brotherly thing, had slit the lead foil from around the cork and pulled the cap out with a cheery, squishy, echoey pop. The whiskey had been very mild, pale, pale gold like his supposition of Irene’s urine. But the pressure of the absent Irene upon their fraternal conviviality had been light—not on account of the absence—why, it was heavier than ever now that Irene lay in her grave! but simply because the conversation had that day actually been of interest. John was feeling rather sleek (in retrospect, it occurred to Tyler that the affair with Celia might have entered into its most luxuriant blossoming just about then) and Tyler himself had just gotten paid for a highly succesful skip-tracing job. Indeed, when he thought back on how easy and lucrative life had been in those days, he could almost weep with self-pity, forgetting his immense anguish over Irene, whose face, body, soul, breath and life had tormented him so. Where had she been that day? Christmas shopping for Pammy, Steven and her parents, most likely. And what was her nephew’s name? John, taking the initiative as always, was showing off his liquor cabinet. It was before cigarette smoking had been stigmatized and pipe smoking had come into fashion, so John couldn’t have owned his three mahogany humidors yet. That year he collected mainly single malts. Mr. Rapp had provided initial instruction at the office, and John learned the rest on his own. He poured his brother a learned sip of this, a celestial dram of that—smoky Laguvulin, jet-black Loch Dhu which stained one’s tongue with its rummy sweetness, sherry-flavored Balvenie Double Wood, Highland Park, whose taste he could no longer remember, Ardbeg, of course, with its iodine-peppermint taste, then finally Johnnie Walker Blue, bland and expensive, like John’s ideals—the Blue was not a single malt, actually, but such a delicious and above all prestigious blend at two hundred dollars per bottle that it well deserved its place on John’s glass shelves. John had a book on Scotches and was explaining it all. Tyler let himself be instructed in peatiness and the Speyside virtues.

  The liquor salesman looked up and said: I’m closed.

  Oh, how does that feel? replied Tyler, going out into the mist. A block or two higher, at the ice cream parlor, the music was loud and young. He went in and sat down with a groan, licking his moustache.

  Sir, you’ll have to come to counter for service, said the kid behind the counter.

  Well, let me just walk around the block and think about that, said Tyler. Let me get my goddamned courage up.

  He went out and began to retrace his way. His throat felt scratchy. A lesbian-looking type in heavy-heeled boots clopped hollowly by, the chain links jingling from her ears. In a store window, pink and green irridescent bows hung upon twisted branches, accompanied by necklaces, bracelets and brooches of colored glass. A ceramic dog gazed benevolently into the rain.

  Do you fetch newspapers? Tyler asked the dog. The dog didn’t answer. Had it been capable of movement, its gait would have duplicated that of some fat whore waddling into the pharmacy to buy more condoms.

  Walgreens was still open, as he thought, but just before he reached the entrance, anxious to buy more itching cream, the security guard locked him out, turned his back, and strode over to crack jokes with the last cashier, who was now closing out her register.