The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Ceel? he said, a little awkwardly.

  What?

  Do you feel like making love?

  Celia looked away. —I think sex is wonderful when I feel safe and loved.

  So you don’t feel safe? he said, trying to be angry, but unable to because the bitter taste of guilt remained in his mouth.

  I—

  Oh, forget it, he said. The pear groves were now an indistinct mass of life. Rich orchards looked up at the leveee, merging and blurring.

  Uh, John, listen, I—

  I don’t know, he sighed. Maybe I’m getting too stressed out over nothing. You think I’m a jerk, don’t you?

  Then Celia was stroking his neck and saying: Yes, honey, yes I want to make love with you . . . —and John smiled in happy triumph.

  And so in a wet mustard-yellow sunny fog they came to Locke with its smell of river-rot and old wood, its chamomile flowers, its dark damp plankwork spanning the gap from the weedy levee to the two-storey houses, some boarded up, some leaning, some with laundry hanging and dogs sleeping. The same sensations inspired in his brother by ageing prostitutes slowly going bust were felt by John in this weedgrown old Chinese town whose bleached ideograms hung like crushed moths in the blackened windows. They parked across from the marina and John led her down River Road past the Joe Shoong Chinese school whose walls were pale yellow and grey, their ideograms the color of teahouse smoke.

  Lovely, said Celia.

  You see? said John, waving his hand.

  Ancient dolls grimaced at her from a dark window, and at Locke China Imports there were heart-shaped old doilies. Silver clouds weighed down white clouds. Birds and silent gnats were everywhere.

  John took her to the Dai Loy Museum and paid a dollar for each of them so that beneath the leaking skylight he could show her how the giant, red-and-white-dot-studded dice used to be shaken for illegal gambling games of pai ngow. —You see all those white money chips on the tables? he said. Just think what it would have been like to win!

  Did you ever gamble? Celia asked, amused by his excitement.

  Well, one time Hank and I . . .

  His voice trailed off. There was a cold and moldy smell. He pointed to a row of mahjong pieces laid out on a long black box. Sticks of ivory, black with ideograms and wheels and flowers, seemed to offer Celia some gnomic key to her “situation,” but she didn’t really believe in fortune-telling and anyway John was explaining something to her regarding the rich indigo blueprint of Locke in the old days with its numbered squares of fields.

  She stared down at a dry-rotted old butterfly harp.

  Now we’re going to China Mike’s to meet Ronnie, John said. That’s the whole point of this trip—for you to meet Ronnie.

  They sat at the bar beneath the faded notice which read: WARNING: DRINKING BEER, WINE OR OTHER ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES CAN CAUSE SEXUAL AROUSAL AND MAY RESULT IN PREGNANCY. He showed her the three baseball caps on the antlers of the stags’ heads, the dollar bills on the ceiling. He longed to order beers and greasy fries on the worn bar which glowed unevenly like the river; a second river, a glowing uneven river of copper, ran where the bar joined the floor.

  Look, said John, grinning. There’s Ronnie himself. He’s a real character. Ronnie’s kind of my hero in a way. I remember the time I—

  That would be yours, Ronnie was saying to another customer.

  Smiling, John waited for Ronnie to notice him.

  You’re perfect, Ronnie said to an old Chinese lady.

  Celia had begun to feel anxious. John was drumming his fingers.

  Almost got you with the bloody mary! Ronnie shouted to a tattooed Brady’s Boy.

  Ronnie! John called out at last. Hey, Ronnie!

  Who the fuck are you? said Ronnie.

  John turned white. Horrified, Celia tried to speak. Ronnie glared viciously into her eyes and said: Shut up, bitch! Or do you wanna make the same mistake?

  * * *

  •BOOK XXIX•

  * * *

  Space Invaders

  •

  * * *

  But the Light, since he possessed a great power, knew the abasement of the Darkness and his disorder, namely that the root was not straight. But the crookedness of the Darkness was lack of perception, namely the illusion that there is no one above him.

  GNOSTIC SCRIPTURES, The Paraphrase of Shem, VII, 1, 10–15 (date unknown)

  * * *

  •

  | 437 |

  At the beginning of the new year there were floods in the farmland around Sacramento and dozens of homes went underwater to the eaves. —Those poor people, said Mrs. Tyler, shaking her head. —On the seventeenth Tyler was driving in to San Francisco and the flats just west of the river gleamed silver with mist and water, above which the railroad embankment shrugged its endless shoulder. White pickup trucks dazzled him with their unearthliness. Then above a long narrow green field a green billboard said MENTHOL. Inside garages and greenhouses, stale incandescent yellow glowed like sunlight through worn seashells. The road quivered under him as he sped most pleasantly alongside the divider-hedge.

  It was a very cold January night at Leidesdorff and Commercial, where the triangular sign said A CULTURED SALAD. A man in livery passed, and his shadow stained the clean, empty street-wall which was otherwise hemorrhaging light. He half expected to see John, simply because this part of town was John’s kingdom. Granting the childishness of his conceptions did not dispell them. John did not appear. He felt disappointment and relief. Inside Boudin Sourdough, upended chairs went on and on like a chain of mahogany vertebrae.

  On Washington Street he entered a very brightly lit Chinese ginseng place and had a cup of tea for fifty cents. On the topmost glass shelf lay some human-shaped roots for three hundred dollars a pound, but when he explained that he only wanted to eat some to get strong, the man recommended broken pieces like wood-chips. He bought five dollars’ worth and the man’s daughter put them in a little plastic bag for him. Then he went out, that good dirt taste of ginseng in his mouth, a strange feeling of excitement in his heart as he gazed upon the ruby-scaled snake of night-traffic, the families holding each others’ hands, the wide-striding loners with their paper bags.

  New Year’s Day! A new orbit, new lies, new juries empaneled! The Queen had given him permission to go to Los Angeles; she said that it would do him good. She said that someday maybe he could love the whole world as much as he loved Irene. He asked her whether she knew that he loved her more than he loved Irene, and she said: I don’t care about that. I know you love me. —From his car he saw Irene’s relatives kneeling on plastic bags around the wet grave, scissoring away grass-tufts from the headstone, scrubbing with window ammonia, uncovering the flower-holder from the sod and filling it with water before they lowered the carefully trimmed carnations in. Now they were upraising their golden-foredged Korean hymnals, and they began to sing with closed eyes, the kids merely earnest, the older relations dabbing at their eyes. He wondered if they would prostrate themselves like the family two graves down, the mother in a sky-blue robe, the pigtailed daughter’s dress, snow-white, with bright red, blue, yellow and green stripes, the father in black—that family actually touched their heads to earth, but Irene had not been old enough to gain much ancestral seniority before she died. Besides, that other family appeared to be Chinese; their necromantic rites might be different.

  By now maybe she would have been serving giant won tons with a baby tied to her back with a blue sash—but she was moving farther and farther away from that as it was, her rotten bones partially demineralized.

  He stood on Sacramento Street, lonely and helpless, chewing his chunks of ginseng.

  It was at that moment that time began to come undone for him, as if the Beasts of Light and the Beasts of Darkness were eating each other; and he truly believed that the Queen’s reign must close. A moment later, it seemed, he was harvesting the honey from days long past when Irene still lived; and a moment after that it was already a foggy Easter Sunday
and he found himself trapped in a fair on Union Street, almost every float being an ad for some business. Peruvian musicians, in rain-bowed national or pseudonational dress, sweetly, liquidly piped, so that once again he remembered that hot day in Union Square last July, just after Irene’s suicide. Mostly he remained preoccupied with continuing to display his futile love and loyalty for his Queen. He had memorized her like a poem and now he could recite her; perhaps his mother’s books and all the hours he’d spent browsing at City Lights had done that much for him. He freely acknowledged, of course, that she was but the local solution to a universal equation. Other citizens solved each other’s philosophical and erotic problems in coffeeshops without any reference to her; and a bald man smiled, wrinkling his head all the way to the crown. A brown girl tossed her head, sulkish. It began to rain, and when he tore the already sodden parking ticket off his windshield and drove down Filbert Street, tiny drops appeared between him and the world, like the ominous spheres of the old “Space Invaders” game which John had been crazy about in law school. John had killed those electronic aliens very well. When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall. —That would be a perfect epitaph for John, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers.

  * * *

  •BOOK XXX•

  * * *

  Little Baby Birds

  •

  * * *

  Buddha does not always appear as a Buddha. Sometimes He appears as an incarnation of evil, sometimes as a woman, a god, a king, or a statesman; sometimes He appears in a brothel or a gambling house.

  The Teaching of Buddha

  * * *

  •

  | 438 |

  You feel like takin’ a ride with me? said Lily’s new trick, whose gaze was as hot as the ribbons of sunlight in the Tenderloin street-canyons.

  If I’m pretty for you then that validates me up to Heaven, wept Lily. I could get drunk on validation. Last week I was dopesick and so I got drunk on cough medicine—oh, so drunk!

  Are you drunk now? the trick asked.

  No no no no no, trilled Lily, whose arms were streaked with the long red slit-scars of cut-open abscesses.

  Where are you from? asked the trick, who was now driving her down Valencia Street past the Slanted Door where John sometimes came at lunchtime for the Vietnamese chicken salad.

  I come from an ugly place, said Lily. I hope you don’t come from hell because I—I—

  We’re almost there now, said the trick.

  They passed the Mission district police station whose welcoming doorway said JUVENILE DIVISION (Lily had been there many times), and at Twenty-First just past Val 21 where John, seeing many trendy diners, had irritably insisted to Celia, who’d wanted to go home and lie down: This is a hot spot. I’m going to have a look! the trick turned left, crossing Mission, then Capp Street where Strawberry was working, then South Van Ness where Domino, blonde and dazzling, stood facing traffic with her hands in her hair, and then everything got darker and emptier.

  I wish I was the prettiest and best, said Lily. Maybe I’m one of the top girls, but on account of a lot of financial stuff am I so down, so down to earth. Not to say I’m past the bloom. You know how Beatrice always has that expression on her face and how Domino always has that expression on her face? They think I’ve gone psycho. It’s frozen on my face. But what makes me simmer down just slightly, and then I go back to normal, is my Queen. She always hugs me or kisses me or gives me a suck, and then I want to give her a suck to make her feel good and show her that I love her. I don’t have a minor psychosis. I’m a neurotic fuck but I don’t have any psychosis. I’m on a hit list, but I don’t have any psychosis. I am so dumb, so dumb, I am the stupidest person in the world and it really pays off. Some people really like to fuck with me because some people just like to fuck hoes.

  Okay, said the trick. We just have to turn in this alley here . . .

  | 439 |

  Lily’s dead, may she rest in peace, said Beatrice. They found her stabbed seventeen times in her throat. Our Mama she told me one of her titties got cut off . . .

  Lily? laughed Domino, who was flying on crystal meth and could not bear to come down. She had already risen almost as high as the sky. Who was Lily to ballast her with sadness? —Don’t worry about her, laughed Domino. She’s not worth worrying about. Once I went on a date with Lily and her date, and my date didn’t have enough money, so fuckin’ Lily paid for both of them to get in—

  That was so very nice of her, said Beatrice.

  It was really stupid. Lily made about five bucks and I made twenty-five, she sneered.

  But, Domino, Lily she is—

  I’ll tell you a good one about her, the blonde scuttered on, hating to think about death because one day death might get her, too. She’s so desperate she smokes packets of sweet-and-sour sauce that she steals from that Chinese restaurant near the Thor Hotel . . . What scum!

  She’s dead, Domino. Mama saw her.

  You saw some other slut by the same name. Lily’s too stupid to die. She’s always telling us she’s stupid. She admits it. And if she did croak, who the fuck cares? Get out of my light, Bea—you stink! When’s the last time you took a bath?

  But later, when the meth wore off, Domino came into the Queen’s presence where she could no longer escape or deny her sisters’ tear-shining faces even though the Queen stood very straight, upraising her chin with her hands clasped behind her back as if she were some old Nubian figurine whose arms had been broken off by centuries or vandals. Then, expressing what others considered mere mercuriality but which was really an almost holy empathy with her surroundings, Domino also cried. (Even Tyler would be infected by this surprising outbreak of sadness, which he certainly would not have felt had he simply never happened to see Lily again. This taught him the vanity and egotism of grief, which so often comprises nothing except childish rebellion against the closing off of possibilities.)

  We got to give the bitch a funeral, said Chocolate. That was one messed up bitch, but that was our bitch. That was our sister.

  Where is she? said Domino.

  Cops took her someplace, maybe to Dr. Jasper’s office. You know who Dr. Jasper is?

  Yeah, I know.

  I think maybe her Mama was still alive . . .

  I hate this life, Domino said. I hate my life.

  What the fuck’s your life got to do with this? This is somebody else’s tragedy here. This ain’t your tragedy.

  The Queen gestured impatiently, and all fell silent.

  Can we see her again, Mama? asked Beatrice.

  Never mind about that, the Queen said. Close your eyes tight and you’ll see her.

  Sapphire, touching the Queen’s face wide-eyed, finally understood that something might be amiss and began to whimper fearfully. All the whores saw how the Queen’s arms trembled as she embraced the idiot girl. Domino began to sob loudly then. —Let’s not allow those fuckers to take her away, Maj! she shouted. Let’s go get Lily and—

  Never mind, Dom, the Queen whispered. Gonna have a nice little going-away party for her, I promise . . .

  Bernadette got excited and said: Can we take the night off like we did when Sunflower passed away?