William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Everything I don’t even wear I send to the dry cleaner’s! the dentist was shouting.

Ah, replied the mortician, sipping his beer. You can do that, pal — indeed you can — but once the shirt’s starch is gone it never comes back again…

You’re going to get me pissed off, said the dentist in a low voice. You won’t like it when I’m pissed off.

That’s your privilege. That’s the privilege of your urine. But when you’re lying on my marble slab, colder than a frozen clam, how much urine will you work up then?

Hey, asshole, why are you even here? Why are you talking that way? You’re here to do a root canal on those girls, just like me. What do you keep going on about dying for?

Dying? said the mortician. Oh, dying. That was a great movie. It came out of nowhere. I remember when I saw it in Westwood, on the way to the dry cleaner’s.

The mortician’s number was called just after the senator’s. The hostess took him down the spiral velvet corridor, deeper and deeper into good repose. In a circular room that smelled like cherry cough drops, they sat him down at a video screen to watch the play of the overhead cameras in the girls’ rooms (the busy rooms being blacked-out like air raid Saturdays); so he watched the prey, rubbing his hands, watched a girl banging her head against the wall, twisting in her urine-soaked bed; another, hyper-sexed, squatted masturbating with a toy snake’s head like a good washerwoman twisting and massaging the wet garment against itself; a third rushed blindly blundering from wall to wall like a trapped bottle-fly; a fourth lay catatonic with her stuffed giraffe; a fifth crouched over the toilet, splashing her hands in and laughing; a sixth was trying to dance to the nursery rhyme muzak that the establishment piped in like the will of God; and the mortician said: Number six looks lively enough. That’s very good. You see, I love life.

The backers in L.A. thought that there ought to be a floor show. Feminine Circus stock had just gone public and was rising fast. Brady decided to hire a starlet to be Queen of the Whores. At that time he remained unaware that there was in fact a real Queen of the Whores, and had he known he wouldn’t have cared. The slapper found an enthusiastic girl named Babycakes Reed who could croon Lotte Lenya-esque songs as she strode about the stageboards, licking the head of the cordless mike and hiking up her black sequin gown.

Gluing himself like a ruby to the silver rail, the successful dentist had brunch at Feminine Circus. The waiter opened the champagne bottle with a deep echoing pop. The dentist’s orange juice glass remained eternally filled; his champagne glass was poured very slowly by a black paisley arm that waited until the foam stopped. On the table, a white orchid nuzzled his hand. Outside the curved window, palm trees, a waterfall… Babycakes Reed (or one of her fifty lookalikes) had just given him her autograph. Her stage name was Queen Zenobia. The successful dentist browsed among the mountains of bread and the row of silver reliquaries, each the size of a small child’s casket, whose tops slid open at his command to show hash browns, pork chops, sausages and bacon, ravioli, potatoes au gratin… Then there was the fruit mountain, the calving ground of waffles, the omelette stand, the towering eagle made of ice, the parlsey-floored sashimi terarium.

The last red thing is not a bicycle like the first blue thing, said the dentist.

He’d heard that from the mortician and was trying to figure out what it meant.

Oh, that tricky dog! he shouted, eating another omelette.

He liked the mortician now. When he’d gone too far inside that paralyzed girl with Niemann-Pick’s disease, until she became turquoise like a seal rushing underwater, the mortician had come with a little stinger kit of embalming chemicals to make it look like natural causes. (Not that she was real, of course, but when you ordered take-out, that virtual blood stayed on your living room floor. — We need to sacrifice the unprofitable giveaways, said Brady.) Later the mortician had even rerouted her from the crematorium, preserved her perfectly, and plasticized her. After that, the dentist started giving the mortician free X-rays and cleanings — professional courtesy, he called it. He got the senator to sponsor a pro-undertaker’s bill in Congress. They all stuck together like dogs fornicating in epoxy. They loved each other.

The successful dentist laughed. — Yes, I’m just bursting with seminal fluid!

As for the lord of it all, Dan Smooth, as for him who’d killed so many hearts (but that was a long time ago, those days of thick-and-fast), he swindled himself into nothingness (aside from the occasional tryst with a certain retarded girl named Sapphire), whereas Brady sat in a hightower suite which was loaded with blue hydrangeas. Three perfect pears, a grapefruit half as big as a basketball, and a leopard-spotted banana reclined in a silver vase, cushioned softly from the metal’s preciousness by leaves. — Message for Mr. Brady, apologized the concierge every ten minutes. Beside the banana stood a foot-high stack of the latest newspapers from around the world. Inside the credenza lurked a modem pre-dialled to the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Then there was a sliding panel behind which special cameras and telescopic lenses gave him a twenty-four-hour view of the guts of Feminine Circus, the engine room ceilinged with vast pipes shuddering, messes of heavy boilers, gauges, boilerplates; the utility halls of burning hot corrugated metal, the disposal rooms manned by illiterate, moustached, oily-fingered crews who ran and sweated in sandals, hauling shrouded bundles to the grinder well, the Lobotomy Factory’s diesel-powered unshielded belts turning, their condensers sucking up the desert water table; then more shuddering pipes, whirling spools, grey shouts he couldn’t hear… On the table where the third phone squatted, he sat drawing up new price lists, idly flipping through personnel figures. His accountants projected a thirty-two percent margin on property without the theme park; the theme park could make forty-five or fifty percent.

A phone rang. — Yup, he said. No, that girl isn’t available anymore. She retired. — You’ll take your business elsewhere? Fine; take it and shove it. — What? You’re reconsidering. Well, reconsider.

The maid was cleaning the bathroom mirror. She had to reach way up to clean the top, and when she did that, her breasts wiggled and her buttocks swayed. She was a Mexican with four children. — Nice stuff, said Brady.

A phone rang. — Well, he said, the Wall Street projections are that we’ll make $7.50 to $7.75 a share. No, the other big players today are mainly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia. The Arabs are history. They go to London. They don’t come to Las Vegas anymore. All right. Be my guest. I’m raising my offering price tomorrow.

A phone rang. — Circus line, Brady speaking, he said. Yeah, we do. How many? No, we don’t do consignments. We buy outright. No, it’s irrevocable. Yeah, we pay five dollars a pound, that’s raw weight. Stripped. No high heels, no panties, nothing. I’ve been around the block, Buster. I’ve seen that trick with the weighted high heels. I’ve seen one on the open market where the seller even gave her lead suppositories — all three holes — just to make another ten bucks. Needless to say, we wouldn’t touch that company’s business with a ten-foot cottonwood dildo. On the other hand, I’ve seen the aproctous ones, you know what I mean? They don’t last long enough. You’re looking at it the wrong way. Think how much your staff saves when we take the pieces off your hands. No, it’s immaterial whether they’re sterilized; we doublecheck that ourselves. And their relatives can’t visit; I’ve seen that trick before, too. Once we have ’em, they’re virtual; they don’t exist. Pay the doctor off — are you kidding? You think we’re some fly-by-night business? Just forget the whole thing. Forget it, I said.