William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Asian tourists in black suits cautiously raised point-and-shoot cameras. Children staring upward and rapidly moving their lips as in prayer, bare-shouldered women who showed thigh, women in leather jackets and furs who held almost completed cocktails with a maraschino cherry in each glass marking the icy ruins, bigshouldered men who pushed through the other heads like bulls, chains of old ladies who wriggled between professional ladies in grey blazers who tapped their toes; these were Tyler’s neighbors, and while he did not dislike any of them he would much rather have been on Mars. The faces were waiting faces. At least they were more alert here than inside. They still granted reality priority over its lookalike; something was about to happen, no matter how self-serving and trivial; maybe they would see people instead of virtuellas.

Another celebrity disembarked from a limousine, and the lady next to Tyler said: Who is it?

I can’t see his face so I don’t know, her husband said.

Who’s this Queen they keep talking about? asked Tyler innocently.

It’s Queen Zenobia from Lollipopland! a small girl informed him.

Don’t talk to strangers, said her mother.

Why, I’m not a stranger at all, ma’am, said Tyler brightly. My name’s Henry Tyler, U.S. Marshals. — And he flashed his toy police badge.

Oh! Well, officer, that’s Queen Zenobia from Lollipopland. Say hello to the nice officer, Darlene.

Hello. Are you really an officer?

Yes, Darlene, I really really am, Tyler beamed. He leaned toward Darlene’s mother, winked, and whispered: Vice Squad.

Well, they say this Queen Zenobia is really quite a…

Is that a fact, ma’am, said Tyler in amazement.

Just then a man cried: Ladies and gentlemen! and then a lady in red ruffles who might have been Betty Boop said something so squeaky, echoey and affected that for the life of him Tyler could not understand a word. Everyone applauded, and she introduced the Marquis de Sade: There he is, everyone! Then they all came, Cleopatra, Snow White, Bambi, Barbie, Helen of Troy in a silver miniskirt, the Queen of Sheba, Queen Zenobia, the Wicked Witch of the West, Mata Hari, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland. They came in a coach whose driver wore a red hat like a folded prickly pear lobe, like a giant set of testicles. Tyler thought that he saw Munchkins, but they might have represented some other even more obscene constituency; their hats were a combination of semifilled condoms and Christmas stockings. There was so much feedback on the microphone that he could barely hear their imbecilic song, which echoed in the cold night like death.

Can you see anything? the man beside him said.

No, I can’t, the wife said. And I’m cold and my feet hurt.

Another limousine came, crammed full of big-eyed cartoon animals, and Tyler thought that he would be more ashamed to wear their livery than to hire himself out for sodomy; but he saw a happy smile on the face of the girl beside him, while a man in black just behind craned rigidly at the animals, bugging out his eyes as if he had just been executed. What gave him the right to deride his fellow Americans’ pleasure? Whatever bearing all this might have on his Queen, his love, he ought never attack any harmless means to happiness whatsoever, no matter how sentimental or false it might be. The crowd cheered, clapped, leaned forward smiling; this meant so much to them. The celebrities for their part stretched their faces wide in smiles of yearning love. Cameras and microphones sprouted on monopods above people’s heads. Grinding his teeth, narrowing his eyes, he forced a weakly trembling smile onto his face, according to the best impulses of repentance, but small Darlene saw and whispered: Mommy, why does that man smile so phony like that?

In the outer darkness across the street by the Hotel Tia Maria marched three thousand union souls with their white pickets: We say no way! Brady say, take away. We say no way! They began to trudge and swarm like ants back and forth in the darkness. Brady say, take away. We say no way! Their pale signs bobbed and crossed on the sidewalk. Their line stretched so long under the sky. Because the sidewalk constrained them, they comprised (Tyler suddenly realized) one of the first large entities he had seen in Vegas which had contours. He could actually sense the width of this angry crowd which stretched across the sidewalk and paraded back and forth; he didn’t have to see it on a TV monitor. It meant something. He didn’t know whether he agreed or disagreed with it but at least it was real. The picketers for their part had nothing to look at but the vast pink cliffs of Feminine Circus and then the blue slab under which the huge screen glowed and Jonas Andrew Brady, the big cheese, appeared on it to cry out: The world’s largest sex casino! Can you take a hint? Seven thousand beds! and the picketers raised their signs high, trying vainly to drown him out, yelling: Union! Union! Union! Union! and then AFL! CIO! AFL! CIO! in loud almost bullying voices which would not go away, and some of them were ululating like Arab women.

Tyler went around the back of Feminine Circus and saw a sad man in coveralls who was dragging bags of laundry into a black truck whose side read STERILIZATION. Tyler wondered where the dirty laundry came from when the place wasn’t even open yet.

He said to the security guard who watched him there in the cold emptiness beyond the crowd’s edge: What do you think of those union guys?

They’re making a lot of noise, the man replied, shrugging.

A handshake on the giant screen signaled the first firecracker, and the strikers went crazy, screaming Union! Union! Union! Union! but the crowd in the valet portico paid no attention, and subsequent fireworks annihilated the union message like artillery shells, brightly granular in the black desert sky, sandy crabs and spiderwebs that glowed. Every now and then Tyler could still hear: Union! Union! All right, let’s get the line movin’! Let’s keep it movin’! Union! Union! — The dynamite was beautiful, and blue beams whirred and sliced around in the vast cold sky. Dozens of fireworks shot up from behind a distant hotel with a noise like bull-roarers, polluting the night with smoke, burning the whole sky green; it rained light straight up as the band played “Back Alley Girls.” On the bandshell, Brady laughed into a dozen microphones: What happened? It was just a dream five years ago and now it’s a VIRTUAL SEX METROPOLIS!

… And Tyler swam through the double ranks of costumed weirdos and never-nevers, entering the marble lobby that blended into the gullet tonsilled and tumored with slot machine banks down which everyone milled. This was just how Brady wanted it to be. At that intimate media lunch he’d confided: The name of the game in this part of Feminine Circus is to get a whole bunch of people to walk by a whole bunch of slot machines. Because this is the family area. Now, the adult area will go on line tomorrow; and the name of that game is of course to pack the booths, pack the booths, pack those goddamned simulation booths with real paying customers! Hey, boys and girls, we’re on an upswing! — But while Brady’s stated goal regarding the slot machines had now been reached, the coin-swallowing lips on many of those appliances remained masking-taped, they being freshly born; their equivalent of baby-birdcries was: WAITING FOR PROGRAM DOWNLOAD. Tomorrow morning it would be the same here as it always was now at the Luxor, where a girl said dully: I remember when I first started playing poker here I never liked it, and then she put another quarter in. Of course the Luxor literally did not bear scrutiny. Whenever Tyler (breaking the rule of all wise old private eyes, which was, You can’t pull a real surveillance wthout three people ) stood in one place too long and took notes, a security guard would come to watch. Then, too, the Luxor’s walls so often rang hollow when he tapped them, whereas the MGM Grand was so grand that he couldn’t even find the walls; and here at Feminine Circus he was always lost even when he knew where he was. The crowd came pouring in for free food, congesting the rooms until the waitresses in white aprons who ferried silver trays of new food above their heads could barely get through.