William Vollmann - The Royal Family

He put on his tuxedo, and became at once some some high-shouldered tropical bird with a long and narrow tail.

In the conference suite he found the immortals, the great ones who gazed down upon the rest — representatives of an entire Klavern: the Exalted Cyclops and all twelve Terrors. They sat at the table in their leisure suits, waiting to learn why he’d disturbed their repose. Too rich and high even to be generals in love’s great war, they’d sidelined themselves, devouring the smoke of deathless zeroes; that was their ambrosia, for only mortals may enjoy the incarnadine prize. (In Paris they owned the lapdogs; they were the necktied men beneath the awnings of the brasseries, gazing out at the ambulations of the public of which they were no longer a part.) He delved into their minds to see where their first inclinations lay, but, thunder-browed and flatulent, they sat in their splendor, equally prepared to accept or deny. He explained to them how some kisses suck spit, just as alcohol sucks ink from clogged pens. He spoke to them of what needed to be done, were he to bring his plan to glory. He strove to feed them his craving of sundown times when retarded girls would be ready like goats muzzled so that kids could play (he’d seen them at the fair, trying to rub their muzzles off against the bars of their cages; failing, they became very still and silent).

Next he gave them a multimedia teaser. He flashed image after image of retarded girls drooling with their legs spread, the projector cycling in and out of brightness like a seal’s dark nostrils winking open and shut. One of the gods, incognito in blue sunglasses and a red tie, cleared his throat and worked a calculator, murmuring: Ten percent rooms for conventions, ten for the high rollers, forty percent for tourists on travel packages and forty for individual reservations… Actually if we take the kids — we’ll call ’em “Ringmasters” here — ages three to sixteen… actually a good idea… Then he snapped his fingers and the forensic team were invited in.

The forensicists fed biscuits to a police puppy, watched the whole carousel twice more, and exclaimed to one another:

And the head formation is quite uncharacteristic. It could be Mayan, late Mayan.

Refer it to the Kloncilium…

And then this famous — I don’t think it’s Olmec at all — Henry Manes makes a good point…

Oh, come on, Fred; don’t get hung up on some jade knee-clutcher in Oaxaca…

Knee-clutcher? Well, I grant you it’s jade, but a cache of jade, absolutely classic jade. A lot of the Costan Rican jades are classic Maya.

And the chief forensicist sighed to himself:… Those multi-tiered altars! Altars, oh, my balls! Always studded with monstrous faces; usually too big to chip out; you gotta leave ’em — well, sometimes, it’s true, a guy might find jeweled eyeballs to prise out, or a figurine that could conceivably come loose with a crowbar’s help…

The gods sat yawning, frowning and tittering among themselves. They knew what the clients would be giving up: that special happiness when a girl can sit looking at you nodding very very fast, looking you in the eye, smoothing her skirt over and over where it bridges her succulent thighs. The retarded girls would certainly not do that. But Brady pressed his case with color photographs. Directly addressing the Imperial Wizard (an action not undertaken lightly), he spoke of exotic cretins whose vaginas were as dark and sandy as crocodile-mummies. He mentioned his idea for a certain foil-covered room with small portholes. He didn’t hesitate to describe to them a girl he’d once met in Napoli, a girl with hair the hue of a haystack and greenish-blue eyes who sat staring out the train window with interlaced fingers resting on her purse, her long legs crossed, her green wool jacket buttoned up to her throat, and the hair seemed what most attached her head to her shoulders. He whispered with a wink: What if we cut her hair off?

He knew very well what he was doing. He was like the black boys in low V-shaped boats who sit at water level in the Nile, paddling with their arms like doggish spiders, singing American songs to tourists, then asking for money. He’d sung his song. Now he invited them to sing theirs. They nudged one another and smiled.

Alabama, where I’m from, is always short of jobs, a god said. We’ve been short of jobs forever. This would have been all women, because they’re more dextrous with their fingers. I had this crazy idea that the people in the plant should own the plant. Well, I was thirty years ahead of my time.

California is the Whoredog State, another god replied. We could increase the carrying capacity by ten percent just by bringing in this business.

There’s a Christian businessman down in Cash Flow, Arkansas, who has a very powerful Christian TV station, a god said. This fellow back there, he’s run I don’t know how many of our tapes.

The Queen of the Whores lied to the American people, a god was muttering. The bankers love her.

If the U.S. was not preserved, then Communism would conquer Planet Earth, a god said.

The other gods discussed their own experiences. They called in their associates and Kleagles. Then they swore to their guest to grant him the victory he asked for (in exchange for certain future offerings mutually acceptable); they said it would be done.

The next one was a hydrocephalic girl who stared with little lizard eyes, her forehead bulging like a watermelon; Brady’s scientists caressed it gently to see if it was squishy. Her saliva was light, refreshing, foamy, very faintly nutty like a bottle of Ozujsko Pivo Special (Zagrebacska Pivova). After her, Brady collected two low-eared girls, then a bullet-headed microcephalic with lovely chestnut hair who clenched her teeth and sometimes bit. The slapper kept her in line. Then he acquired a blonde girl with a doll’s face: dull blue eyes and heavy mongoloid lids which must have been weighted like a doll’s, enhanced by the pale cheeks, the slack lips that sucked and drooled; on that same trip he snapped up a girl with Turner’s syndrome (webbed neck, sexual infantilism), and then a bald girl whose head was shaped like a light bulb—

Brady sat on the floors of echoing hardwood rooms that smelled of lemon-wax and laughed because they were his from chandelier to windowed door to lattice-work. Then his voice rang out in commands. The workmen assembled before him, good soldiers when money’s muster’s called. Receiving their orders, they ranged out in their smooth-geared trucks (Ah like to have a good caw undah mah ass, ya know what Ah mean?), scouring the lumberyards and wide-walled warehouses. When the lumberyards were looted, great mounds of bed-timber swelled at the curbside drops, higher than ever the Greeks raised for Patroclus’s pyre. Then they set about the work. At their lord’s command they laid down dark carpets to eat sounds and stains. With speedy rollers they painted the walls pink and yellow and blue — girl-child’s colors, cheerful, artless. Next they swung in the bed-gear on their shoulders, bolting double mattress-decks to sturdy keels, riveting everything down shipshape, studding the joists with rows of molybdenum hex-nuts in all order so that no plank would fail the rocking sailors, hammering down railings and see-through canopies, masting them with headboards, rigging them out with full waterproof sheets until those multistoried sailing ships were ready to be launched upon the seas of pleasure. In all the ceilings of that house they planted cameras to hang down watching wide-angled with a spider’s eyes. Now with powerful shaggy arms they screwed down marble toilets whose inner lids were blazoned with hearts; they heaved marble sinks and golden-glassed showers tight against the walls; cunningly they fitted the tiled nooks with silvered mirrors, slipping them flush like second skins. But all these things, necessary though they might be, would not gladden caged girls’ hearts. So now they hauled in the fabulous toy-chests, the doll-coffers replete with rubbery passive girls. They brought stuffed bears and tigers for the whores to hug, ten-foot fuzzy crocodiles for them to drool over in the rubber-sheeted beds, plastic panels with Buzzy-Scary games, building blocks, wind-up rutabagas, miniature houses with hinged roofs to peer through like gods, ruby-eyed flasher guns, rattattat pistols, modeling clay that was safe to eat, golden trucks and fishes to set their hearts in flame!