William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Now, the tinaculum clamps into your cervix to keep it in place, the woman in blue said.

Domino smiled slowly.

And then we dilate you like this with the flexible plastic canula. There may be a little cramp when that tube goes through. Are you okay?

Domino smiled and licked her lips. — Not really, she said. I got raped by a bad man named Henry Tyler. That’s why I’m here today. He’s a misogynist. He treated me just like I was a piece of meat. Does it look like meat to you down there between my legs?

I’m so sorry, the woman in blue whispered, flushing.

Domino glowed with pleasure.

The doctor turned on the machine, which hummed like a refrigerator, and Domino began to feel intense pain as very dark red bars of fluid came out. The doctor turned the canula around and around. There was a slurping sound. Something was red through translucency against his white gloved fingers.

Is there a cramping? the woman in blue said.

Please hold my hand, Domino said, her legs spread like wings. She wanted to drink the woman’s buttock-juice.

You see, your uterus clamps down when the fetal tissue is removed, the woman in blue explained, digging the canula in, around and around. Fluid ran out of Domino’s cunt.

Now we’re going in one more time to check, the doctor said.

Please don’t let go of my hand, said Domino, staring at the tiny implements. She suddenly felt a sensation as strange as seeing black shoe-heels percussing across a glass ceiling; she couldn’t remember where she’d seen that but she knew she had.

After he puts the speculum in, he’s going to rinse out your vagina with Betadyne, the woman in blue said, very efficient and tall. Later Domino, craving more of the lovely and very tiny novocaine injections, would vaguely remember a cotton ball, and the drip of Betadyne through the plastic hole.

Now put your hand on your tummy over the uterus to calm the cramp, the woman in blue said.

Would you do it, please? whispered Domino through half-closed eyes. Oh, it feels so good when you do it.

I think you may be in a little bit of trouble, the woman in blue said. I’m going to refer you to one of our counselors. She’ll be able to help you.

I want you to do it, said Domino with a sleepy, wicked, toothy grin, and savored the woman in blue’s long slow flush.

Domino’s first abortion had been much easier than that, at least in the spurious fashion which lent itself to sugarcoating in her recollections, so that she could complain about subsequent procedures, saying, in one of her typically obscene mixed metaphors: These assholes just want to fuck women up! They’re butchers! It’s a government plot to sterilize us to save money. And they call this a free country. Don’t even get me started, Maj… — It had been before Christmas, which to Domino was already becoming as irrelevant as all the other holidays because the only presents she’d ever received were those she’d stolen for herself, seizing them from life’s jaws and running somewhere deep and dirty to hide, to gloat. And yet in those days (she was seventeen) Christmas retained the power to disappoint her; in other words, it was not entirely irrelevant yet. The Christmas present one of the boys had given her grew brutishly in her belly. If she didn’t do something fast, it would quicken inside her and then she’d be a murderess. Moreover, she preferred not to be pregnant when she was at home. Not that she wanted to be home, either, but a former friend of hers now on the streets had informed her in weary exasperation that her sister was in jail and her father was dying of liver cancer, so Domino, burdened, hence affronted to her usual point of martyrdom, made up her mind to go back for the last time to see those losers, and it had truly been the last time. She’d dyed her hair brown because she was not yet a fulltime prostitute and it was an experiment of hers to learn whether men would defile her with fewer up-and-down stares of fishy-eyed lust if she denied her blondeness, but the results convinced her once and for all that she was doomed to that, at least until she became a hag, so she’d let blondeness creep back into the roots of her brown hair as she sat in the hotel room trying to be unconscious of that qualmish feeling in her uterus. She was supposed to arrive in Vacaville in three days. Her father would have erected the plastic tree if he were well enough, but there’d be nothing beneath it. (What dully studied comparisons come to mind? Did this hollow celebration of Christ’s birthday thus emblematize His empty tomb? Would seven-year-old Domino, instead of squatting bitterly by the tree in her pajamas all night, gnawing angrily at her blonde pigtail, have done better to gaze up at the ceiling in search of presents? By the time she was ten, she’d already sucked a boy off on a dare, and when his manna spewed into her mouth, she vomited. But her control improved over the years. Just as a soda jerk leans, scraping and twisting the tall stainless steel cup upon the rod, so Domino would waggle her lips and tongue about a man’s organ if she had to, although she rarely denied herself the pleasure of stopping halfway through to engage in negotiations of a deliberately aggressive nature, until the man had lost his erection. After a man had passed his mid-thirties he could not as a rule get hard and soft and hard in quick succession more than three or four times. It gave Domino more than a little satisfaction to leave her customer unfulfilled, frustrated, and [American male socialization being what it was] humiliated rather than angry at his failure — although this was a delicate game; every now and then she got a black eye. — Well, this won’t work, she would tell her customer brightly. I don’t know what your problem is. Maybe you just don’t like girls. As for me, I don’t have all night. If you want to try again sometime, pull up under my window and honk four times.) Her father had sounded surprised and glad when she’d telephoned him collect from the booth on Eddy Street. His surprise reproached her, and his gladness infuriated her. He said he’d meet her at the Greyhound station. — Yeah, that’ll work, the girl said curtly, breaking the connection. She was very conscious of her uterus. It just felt as if it were there. For a month now she’d persisted in hoping that that unsought sensation would vanish, but every morning it grew more present until it stood for already not merely a mass of tissue inside her but an inimical being whose purpose it was to weaken and confuse her, then drag her down. — You’re dead! laughed the blonde, punching herself in the stomach. She asked her aunt to send money. It was about a hundred and eighty dollars. Her aunt reminded her that they had mutually agreed that the previous time would be the last time, but Domino wept most fluently on the telephone, pleading that she’d made another mistake, that this emergency was the worst ever. A year or two later, she would have known enough to lie, using the magic word rape, which opened so many tear-ducts and money-ducts when carefully invoked. She was in the fifth week. A girlfriend came with her — not a friend, merely a girlfriend, a dumb bitch who wasn’t in the life,* because Domino supposed it would be prudent to have someone drive her back. The girlfriend, whose name she could no longer remember, had borne two babies, one when she was fifteen and the next when she was sixteen. Each time she’d refused to open her eyes when the doctor raised up the child before her, raised up the bloody little rabbit. What was the point? They were both carried away for adoption. She said to Domino: Does he love you? to which the blonde replied, rolling a joint: That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard. — Her girlfriend, broodingly sensitive, lowered her eyes. Neither of them had ever gone to an abortion clinic before. The girlfriend was pro-life, but she was a friend, except of course that she wasn’t a friend because even then Domino had no friends.