William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Oh, I’m so tired of this, said the Queen. Dom, you know you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to stay. You sleep on it, okay? Henry’s waitin’ on me now.

You see? said Domino to the world. Nobody pays attention to me. They just…

She’s a real asshole, Chocolate confided to Bernadette. She thinks just ’cause she be eatin’ out the Queen’s ass she gonna always have that house slave position. Well, she was a plantation nigger once just like the rest of us.

That’s right, said Bernadette. That’s right.

I hate that blonde bitch. An’ she be kickin’ her friends goin’ up every rung of that ladder. Well, in this life we all gotta go back down that ladder, too. An’ it’s harder to kick your friends on the way down, ’cause they be watchin’ to grab you ankle an’ pull you. Domino she calls herself. She be nothin’ but a doggy style ho.

And the two women chattered happily on in this vein, but unlike Domino they took care that their Queen did not hear.

The Queen had agreed to meet him at Zapateca’s Bar on Mission Street, a place he’d never been before, a rather ordinary place whose low dark ceiling was dusted with glitter and smoky atmosphere like some concretion of the loud Spanish-language songs with which the battle-axe behind the bar sang along. At 7:00 on that Tuesday night there were a couple of pool players and a man kissing a woman’s ear at a table and two men at the bar gazed in morose parallels at the brightest spot of all, which was the back-lit shelves of booze bottles, most of which were almost empty.

Tyler sat facing a calendar from the Firearms Training Academy.

Well? she said.

It’s pretty bad, he said.

So you scoped it out for me, said the Queen. You did your job. What a good boy. C’mere, baby.

He got up and kissed her.

Allrightie now, said the Queen, slowly unwinding his gold chain from her wrist. Now tell me what’s goin’ on.

He saw a john whispering something into Beatrice’s ear, and he saw Beatrice slap the john’s fat stomach and gape her half-toothless mouth in a scream of laughter that cut through the smoky sounds; she was immensely pleased with herself.

He buys girls, he said. And then guys come in and fuck ’em and sometimes torture ’em to death. Everybody pretends it’s not real.

You’re so sweet, she said. Henry, you know I love you. What else’ve you been doing with yourself?

Tyler knelt. Slowly he took off her shoes. He massaged her feet

And then all these vigs. He’s behind that, too. There’s a morality sweep going on, said the Queen, standing suddenly, making him stand. — It’s so strange, she went on. Well, not so strange. Moses says thou shalt not kill, but then he stones a man to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath.

I don’t know about that stuff. I don’t understand it. It’s just politics, he muttered, narrowing his tired eyes.

I wish we had more time to plan it and shit. Just for the fuck of it we can… we can… oh, Henry, it’s gonna be over so soon, she said.

Tyler felt a lump in his throat. — I thought you were — well, magic, he said. I mean, that’s—

Sure, but the Chosen People always win. The ones on God’s side. The ones on Jesus’s side. I don’t wanna talk too much. You were good, Henry. We all were.

When Tyler was small, his parents had brought him to some vast city which must have been Los Angeles (funny that he couldn’t remember John’s presence) and he recollected walking with them at night through a crowd of happy people gazing into lighted shopwindows of everything — and it seemed that the lights and happiness would go on forever but suddenly Tyler’s family arrived at a dark desolate place where a man glared at them and they were all alone. Later he understood that all light, everywhere, must burn out, but the reason that the Tenderloin fascinated him was that it combined the dark desolation with the shiny rouged and glowing-skirted merchandise. And now the future was like that, pitch-hued all the way to substancelessness, with an evil substance lurking in between time’s atoms.

Varicose-legged, the ageing Queen sat drinking her beer, her veins like all the rivers. She said: Well, at least maybe we’ll snap our fingers in his face—

He stayed with her all night and she was loving in an absentminded way. At dawn her many children were all asleep in one room in the Layla Hotel down on Seventeenth Street, all except for the tall man, who was making a run with the night’s earnings to get them a baggie of quality white girl, and she herself began yawning, lying weak and passive in his arms on the moldy itchy carpet, so he said he was going to see about some business, went downstairs to the front grating, turned back the springloaded deadbolt, and went out into the rising day, wishing to solve the future before it happened, to save his Queen as he had failed to save Irene, but then suddenly he thought what a relief it would be if the Queen and her entire crew disappeared from everywhere so that he could pull himself back out of the way of his own impending blight; suddenly, even the Queen herself seemed like some nightmare entity who for all her lovingness and splendidness was inevitably ruining him. What if he didn’t want to be ruined? He could call John and apologize. John would save him, if he humbled himself. But then what would he do; which doom would he find instead? What was it that he needed to do, in order to live with himself, and become no longer grey and sneaking? — Ah, he actually thought that his life could be fixed! He thought that only momentarily, of course, and only because at the moment he unlocked the driver’s door of his car he saw in the corner in the hot sunlight a dear little Vietnamese girl laughing and mock-boxing her father. He envied her father, yes he did. Just as Dan Smooth said, he had envious ears! He wanted to be married as his mother had advised, and he wanted to subsequently raise a child lovingly and playfully. Really he wanted the most impossible thing — namely, to be like everyone else, which was what almost everyone wanted, which meant that no one was like anyone else, not Tyler, not his brother, not the Vietnamese child or her father, certainly not the Queen, who of all the people he’d ever met, including Dan Smooth, was the only one who’d sincerely never wanted that, not Irene or Celia, who both did want it most desperately, not Chocolate, who at two o’clock in the morning in that hotel room as the Queen lay in his arms had been haltingly reading out the personal ads from a yellowing newspaper, saying: SBM, what the fuck’s that mean, Maj? Hey, Maj, you asleep? Sor- ree. Oh, single black male. All right. A brother. SBM, thirty-nine years old, well, that’s little old but maybe he’s saved hisself up some money for me to spend. Maybe he’s old enough to be faithful. Spontaneous, honest, caring, but is he handsome? Don’t say nothin’ about handsome. What do you think, Justin?

Must be butt ugly. Just like you, Choc.

Don’t you disrespect me, nigger! Honest, caring, enjoys parties, all right now, all right, swimming, outgoing, down to earth, no drugs, oh, so he’s that kind of asshole.

Then she went out, and was soon lying naked and weary after sweaty sex with a stinking old man, her arm wrapped around her head as if to hug and console it for having been kissed by someone for whom she felt no love, while Tyler drove home, pressed the PLAY button on his answering machine, which related in his brother’s curt voice: Guess you’re out of town. Mom called about an hour ago, and they’re going to send her home tomorrow at the shift change at seven-o’-clock. Anyway, that’s where we are. — I get it, muttered Tyler, throwing out threatening letters from credit card companies. He opened his solitary remaining piece of mail, which proclaimed: