William Vollmann - The Royal Family

The place was of a pale green color, with nothing in the halls, and two examination tables. Really it was a processing plant, Domino thought, always firm in her conviction that all authority and expertise on this earth functioned either to withhold good things from her, or else to carefully crank her into the latest meat-grinder; and when she discovered that somebody had left the toilet unflushed, her gorge rose in outrage— this was the sort of place to which they’d compelled her! — but on the other hand, she would soon think nothing of the Queen’s stinking lairs where cockroaches crawled on her at night and the whores’ used tampons had stiffened into rigid dark plumes as of ancient flint knives, so may we agree once and for all that such complaints on her part were almost pleasantries, which is to say that they reflected her normal intercourse with the world?

Everyone did everything together; it was one of those communist places. Everyone undressed together. There were lockers. It would be vacuum aspiration. Everyone woke up in the recovery room. An ocean of white bodies was what she thought (her mind being more pictorially descriptive in those days). No one looked pregnant. Most were with their girlfriends or with their mothers. Her girlfriend asked: Are you sure you want to go through with this, Sylvia? — Look, said Domino. Can’t you see that this is already difficult enough? — All the white bodies looked very young — soft bodies, pale and plump and well cared for. It had not been very long now since Domino had confessed to herself that she was a lesbian, so she was still ashamed to gaze openly upon all those pregnant breasts and pregnant cunts; for she and they were as strangers compressed naked in some elevator; they spoke in low voices when they spoke at all, trying in equal proportion not to look invasively at one another and not to acknowledge the unavoidable invasiveness of those others. The real reason that she was none too forward in getting her eyeful, a fact she afterward jealously regretted, was that her own body, hard and scrawny, already wore its first tattoo, its first abscesses, and that long white highway of a motorcycle wound which Tyler’s finger would trace in that Tenderloin hotel room twenty years hence. It wouldn’t be much longer before Domino adopted Tyler’s mode of self-protective skullduggery in the face of humiliations real or imagined, namely, defiance, but this first abortion happened long ago, when the girl, still almost a child, remained meek in her shame.

She had to pay up front, cash. Then they took her jewelry away. She owned one Apache tear, an old piece of lapis. It was an earring. She’d lost the other one two months earlier when she’d had to run away from a married man’s house. While the other women compliantly twisted off their rings and unhooked their bracelets, Domino scowled and hid the Apache tear in her fist. She wanted something to hold. The general anesthetic wafted her down into darkness. She never heard the ringing clatter when the charm struck the green tiles beneath the table on which she lay. A nurse smiled and picked it up for her while Domino dreamed of nothing, like a thread woven into a heavy rug of darkness.

They gave her a sheet of instructions: Don’t have sex or use tampons. Do you understand? they said. — Whatever, said Domino.

A young woman enshrouded in white blankets walked by, and Domino thought: I’d like to eat her. I’d like to at least see her naked. I’d like to… and then the woman in white was gone.

One for our records and one for the insurance company, said the receptionist.

I don’t have a goddamned insurance company, snarled Domino.

Thank you very much, the receptionist said in a quick, low voice.

The woman in the chair behind Domino inhabited a loose striped dress. She had bare, crossed ankles, a glimpse of red hair. She shifted her legs, kicked off her shoes, hid behind the newspaper. Seeing the domed belly supporting her newspaper, Domino conceived a shocking jealousy of that baby still inside it; she wanted a baby, too. But the Queen had made her do this. And Justin had held out on her and jacked her up too many times; if she’d been able to keep that money she could have raised a baby. It was Justin’s fault. And all the men who used her, and the men who refused to use her, and the whole rotten world with its trolleycar bells and sherry-colored sunset clouds over white-and-silver San Francisco…

A motif in Domino’s life: the clinic. One window looked out in the outer office. After that, there were no windows. How many times will a street-whore go to the clinic in her lifetime? How many diseases, babies, false alarms, abrasions, uterine traumas, inflamations, infestations, ill odors until death?

In Vienna I once wandered inside a medical museum filled not only with such endearing oddities as the porcelain model uterus which of all things most resembled a bat, but also with ghastly things the sight of which destroyed my dispassion. I looked upon the swollen face and oozing blind eyes of a gonorrheal infant, the red sores and breast lesions of a syphilitic mother — real tissue scalpeled out of the dead, now displayed in a manner calculated to induce dread. The museum’s staff did not want me to catch syphilis. Hence they spread an atmosphere of loathsomeness and fear. To be sure, much in the place was of historical interest as well — not least the old prostheses like robot hands of black metal — but then I encountered pickled feet with what looked like bugs growing out of them — surely just some tissue deformity — and bits of tiny bones floating in the formalin, greenly meat-fuzzed. Then came pale grey ovals of other meat floating in other jars. And in one room there dwelled a black-burnt, teeth-clenched skeleton…

Let’s say that a woman becomes pregnant, and the doctor sends her home with “information.” She learns that if she is thirty-five years old, she has one chance in three hundred and eighty-four in giving birth to a child afflicted with Down’s syndrome. At thirty-six, it will be one chance in three hundred and seven. At forty, it will be one chance in a hundred and twelve. Research bears all this out. (We see the cross-section of a vagina, sliced and brown. Inside a spherical paperweight, we find lumps of gristle studded with sores.) The fetus grows into danger. In the medical museum in Vienna we see a tiny white thing, half baby, half shrimp, floating in a jar of death. Another fetus grows into another sort of death. Eighty or a hundred years from conception, it will all be over. Perhaps forty years from now the fetus will have become a middle-aged hooker in black, with high heels and a run in her stocking, a tired woman burdened by a heavy black leather purse.

Her fourth time, the degradation was the nurse pumping her for dollars. Domino had to hide the degradation. She had to hide how she felt. No painting offended the plain white walls. There were no magazines in the waiting room. On her first visit to the place, the nurse held her hand. The second time the nurse was more businesslike. That was when the requests for a tip began worming their way into Domino’s sweaty ears. All she had was a twenty she’d stolen from an old barfly… The doctor had a round face. He was balding, professional, courteous in an old-fashioned way. He called her Miss. Domino liked that. He had no name. Domino had no name. The nurse had no name. — There, that’s it, the doctor said. If you bleed more than two days, give me a call. Later she would remember coming out into blue sky and old buildings — gracious props of God — and she remembered massaging her belly which had already begun to ache. In the middle of that night, when she was fucking a man for money, she hemorrhaged. The man drove her to the emergency room. Later they told her that she had almost died.