William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Henry, I want you to do something for me, she said.

All right, he said.

I want you to go to Vegas and find out what that Brady man’s up to. I got a bad feeling. I got a real bad feeling.

Tyler smiled sadly, unable to reply. He was making a mess of a surveillance job he really couldn’t afford to make a mess of — another potentially lucrative infidelity case in Alameda, which meant that he could have padded hours and mileage; he already had the husband nailed; but the wife wanted photographs and she wanted them now. So much for that client. Anxiety localized itself in his stomach, then metastasized to his heart, and his hands began to sweat. He longed to please the Queen by doing something useful for her, and he also knew that no human being could really do anything useful for her. He wanted Brady’s venture to be innocuous, and he already knew it wasn’t. He wondered how difficult it would be. He was only Henry Tyler; he didn’t have what it took. He felt that he would honestly do more good by staying out of this and letting the Queen go, but if he did, then Irene’s skeleton would be sitting on his face again at night, pissing ants and spiders into his mouth. He knew that no matter what happened he would do the wrong thing. Suspended above his bottomless future, he hung clinging miserably to a stretching rope. He almost couldn’t bear it. His breastbone ached. Let it be cancer, he thought. Then at least it will be over. But he wanted to live. He wanted to be fulfilled. It was all hopeless.

I know what you’re thinkin’, child, said his Queen who loved him. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.

Tyler knelt before her and sobbed.

Just as the tall man’s face gradually lightened from a deep black-brown upon the crown of his shaved head to fresh ocher pits just above his eyes, so the sky, too, dimmed down its darkness, then began to flush in parts. The Queen yawned. Dawn was coming.

The day that Tyler drove to the airport, passing many darkly spreading trees and white houses in Daly City on which fog came smearing and smooching down so that the world’s end, the end of all vision, lay very close, it was sunny in the Tenderloin where Justin, tall and lean, grew like a cornstalk in a dark army jacket beside the wall of Jonell’s Bar, his collar pushed up and his cap pulled down, listening and watching while he seemed to be but surveying inner space. The loud sermon across the street remained on an untuned channel of his soul’s radio.

Beatrice said to him: Well, the Christians, they have different beliefs. I doan believe in it. I go with our Queen or with Strawberry. She is a Christian. I go with her, and they sing or they cry, and they speak about that kind of happiness for the dead people.

Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE — CA. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. Her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all.

One of the preacher’s lieutenants approached. The tall man raised a single eyebrow.

The lieutenant said: Man, I was paralyzed for fifteen years. I was a drug addict. Man, Jesus healed me. He healed me! So I wasn’t sick no more. You listening? Hallelujah!

You seen my forehead? replied the tall man in a gravelly whisper.

What about it, man? We ain’t got time for personal vanity here!

Look upon me, boy. Look upon my mark. You seen my mark?

That’s just an abscess, man. Listen to me. When a user gets touched by the Holy Ghost, he ain’t a user no more. He’s free! Amen!

Get the fuck away from me, said the tall man.

Jesus can save you, the lieutenant pleaded. Don’t stay with the Devil. Don’t let yourself be damned.

The tall man rose to his complete and immense height and almost playfully tapped the lieutenant in the chest. The lieutenant fell backward. He shouted: I said forgive him, turn away, praise God! But Brady’s Boys are gonna get him, hear me, Lord! Brady’s Boys are coming to town…

I’ll tell you a truth as long and naked as a cocktail waitress’s leg: Tyler did not like Las Vegas. Only for a check with more than one zero on it — or for his Queen — would he have consented to leave home, venturing beyond the white-candied mountains of his Sierras spiced with treetops. There were three new hotels and then there was Feminine Circus, they said. Already as Las Vegas spread her thighs before him like a collage of silicon chips on the tan plain, he saw the black pyramid of mediocrity like a dull jewel, the Sphinx crouching out in front. That was the cheap easy place where he had to go. That was the Hotel Luxor. John and Brady and the rest wouldn’t be caught dead there. They all had suites at Feminine Circus.

The pink ticket said:

$ $

GRAND OPENING

FEMININE

CIRCUS

TONITE!!!

Free Free Free

SEX SEX SEX SEX

No minors permitted beyond

family areas.

$ $

And indeed, it truly was Sneak Peek Night at Feminine Circus — the largest virtual sex casino in the world (this week, at least). — But it is amazing what half a billion dollars will do… the C.E.O., one Jonas Brady, was musing aloud at the press conference. Half a million dollars a day for three and a half years! — A jungle of people blossomed behind the ropes. Not very far from them, a man whose cardboard sign read DOWN ON MY LUCK — THANKS AND GOD BLESS stood frozen beneath the freeway. If only he had known about the free hors d’oeuvres at Feminine Circus! The cool and concentrated faces of the musicians on their bandstand cast musical intellections down into the empty space of the future, for the sake of which the well-dressed people standing on the curb sipping drinks, the TV cameras and the people who served them, self-important geeks with light meters and duffel bags, glum security men in black suits, politely downpointing the antennae of their walkie-talkies, the police with their Sam Browne belts, hands close against their batons, were all here to do reverence.

Then a long silver limousine pulled up and everyone said: That’s her.

It’s the Queen! a small child cried in the silence.

A flunky opened the silver door.

We have to have a twenty-foot opening in here! a security man called.

Weary and disgusted, Tyler moved to the back of the crowd, where the biped and her handlers could still be seen on a big granular screen near the righthand stage. John and Celia were there somewhere, he supposed, probably up near the front in VIP seats. He hoped that they were having a good time, and that John was being decent to Celia. For a moment he wondered whether he should try to find them, perhaps by querying one of these men in long coats who held walkie-talkies repeatedly and sternly to their ears; but he but quickly sent that naive idea packing — why would he have any more to say to his brother in Vegas than in San Francisco? Besides, his presence would make John anxious. To hell with it.