William Vollmann - The Royal Family

And you’re sure he’s dead and not passed out? said the Queen.

L-luh-luh-uh… said Sapphire.

All right, baby. Poor gal. She probably waited and waited for an answer. Maybe she’s still waiting. Justin! Justin!

What? said the tall man.

We’re gonna write this girl, and tell her that the man she loved is dead. Can you take care of it?

All right, Maj, but you gotta gimme the money for an envelope and stamp. I don’t have no stamp money for somebody I don’t even know.

Sapphire, did he have any money on him?

Obediently, the palsied girl displayed the three dollars.

Okay, baby, you gimme a dollar — no, no, give it to Justin over there, that’s right. What a good girl. Come kiss Mama. Okay, now put that two dollars away. Or do you want Mama to keep it for you? You do? Okay. I’m gonna remember. Anytime you want it, you just come ask for it. Well, Justin, you done yet?

Done? What the fuck am I s’posed to say?

Say your man passed away. Say he died in no pain.

How do you know he died in no pain, Maj?

’Cause I know. And even if I didn’t know, the whole point is to make her feel good, don’t you see? So just write it.

Maj?

What?

How you spell dead?

How do you think you spell it? Just write it and stop bothering me. Anyway, it’s more polite to say passed away .

Then why don’t you write it if you’re so all-fired polite?

Well. What’s got into you today?

Just thinkin’ about what you said last night is enough to make anybody feel sour. And when Domino comes flyin’ back here with her claws out, who the hell’s gonna have to deal with it?

Look, the tall man said. You think if the Queen orders me to punch concrete and I break my hand, Queen’s gonna pay for it?

She—

Damn right she will, Domino. She’s the good Queen. And you’re no fuckin’ good. You understand?

Oh, go to hell.

And you know what else? They may drink her spit, but they all gotta kiss my ass, said Justin with satisfaction. I’m the shot-caller around here. And I’m tellin’ you right now, bitch, to go in there and get down on your knees and ’pologize. Know why? ’Cause you was at fault. You wrecked that meeting last night out of your meanness. Maj had to shut youup…

I didn’t wreck anything, cocksucker, so don’t you tell me—

Maj wanna beat up on you, you better let her. ’Cause you just a little fool. Just a little honky fool.

What passed between Domino and the Queen nobody else knew, but when the tall man, pacing anxiously outside, reentered the tunnel at the Queen’s summons, he found the two women holding hands as they sometimes used to do, although the Queen’s face was expressionless and Domino’s wore a look of strain. (Sure, said the Queen, sometimes Domino and me, we get on each other’s nerves, but we stick together, don’t we, Dom? We help each other.)

Once the blonde learned that for her grief was precisely the same as rage, she thought that she would craze and break suddenly, but didn’t, and because she could not let the poisoned feelings out, there was an ache in her chest, a throbbing at the back of her neck, as they sought to expend themselves by wrecking her body a little, making headaches and ulcers and sleeplessness so that the next morning, sick-faced, she’d get up with her swollen pounding heart the only vital force she had, drearily raging through the day. As she contemplated the Queen, something burned even hotter in her chest and she clenched her teeth. And yet she appeared to love her more than ever, and whenever she could ran fingers and tongue across the Queen’s chocolate stomach with all its grooves and wrinkles and adipose sandbars. There were some, such as the tall man, who said that she had merely donned the mask of goodness out of necessity, and was biding her time to betray the Queen and everyone else to the vigs, and perhaps by the mask of goodness they imagined something akin to Sapphire’s face when the Queen or Beatrice had washed her and combed her hair and trimmed it so that when she gazed straight at somebody with her inhuman eyes and parted her lips as if she would speak there might sometimes be for an instant an esoteric illusion of recognition and mutuality before the saliva began wandering from between her kissable lips. Could it be that neither Sapphire, nor Domino, nor the Queen were human? What were they, then? What were they? — But Domino was orphaned, so she must have been human. Isn’t that what being human means? And if she was an orphan, wouldn’t she seek affection’s pristine balm between the breasts of her dear Queen who’d loved her even as she’d raped her, unless of course the Queen didn’t love her? But this issue, which left Tyler almost anguished to contemplate, actually meant less to the blonde because throughout her life she could hardly continue her signatures of belief for longer than a double-flourish, and so the flickering of interpretation between love and no love had grown so habitual to her that the most ambiguous or even antagonistic act could never be proof, just as the best and most tenderest kindness of anyone could soothe her suspicions only briefly before the hairs started up again on the back of her neck and her gaunt soul growled. The pimp from whom the Queen had saved her had beaten, burned and tortured her, and yet because every week or two he’d grapple her head between his immense cruel hands and whisper that he loved her, she couldn’t fix her heart’s compass needle eternally to hatred; she couldn’t believe or disbelieve in anything, but wandered lost even when she was flat on her back and another man and then another was between her legs, urgently raping her dry womb in exchange for cash, whereas when the Queen raped her that night in Lily’s room it gave her pleasure because Sapphire was a true treasure even asleep on the pillow and now that the Queen had revealed her powers many of the other girls, including shy Beatrice, led her aside to groom her and feed her, then use her as they would use any other drug, so that wherever the Queen and Sapphire stayed, nights were punctuated by screams of pleasure as loud as gunshots. They screamed as if they were being murdered and maybe they were. And Domino cast Beatrice aside and came to Sapphire. What if she’d come back to the Queen, then, simply because she was addictive and addicted, and so she needed the retarded girl more than she hated her Queen? What license did the Queen give her to have intercourse with Sapphire? Hadn’t the Queen in effect sold Sapphire down the river by revealing her inborn skill to those who as a result could never again refrain from using her? Or was that revelation just the necessity-worship of a loving mother, so that Sapphire would be preserved once the Queen was gone?

On Halloween morning, two pimpled black women in bathing suits stood at the ticket machine at Civic Center trying to force in change where it said no change, and as one of the whores leaned forward on her high heels to whack the machine’s unhelpful face with the flat of her hand, a huge knife fell out of her armpit and hit the floor. — She wants to kill us all! an old man laughed. — The blade was only silver plastic.

At five o’clock that afternoon, Tyler had already left behind him Vallejo, Vacaville and the occasional weird palm tree. The soft goldengrassed hills resembled the mounds below blonde women’s bellies, while the sky ahead and above was a sharp white, because now that the forest fire season had ended, the weather would remain crisp until the tule fogs began. Tyler itemized facts: He was forty-four years old, he possessed the Mark of Cain and three-quarters of a tank of gasoline; and his mother was extremely sick. John had agreed to stay away this weekend. Evidently he now understood Tyler’s routine quite well, for those calls of his usually reached the answering machine in the early afternoon, when Tyler was likely to be out of the apartment even if he had been out late with the Queen the previous night. Tyler had not been compelled to actually speak with him for weeks. He passed a long supermarket supply truck painted with images of California fruits and salads, then found himself compelled to descend beneath two overpasses which must have marked the boundary between pastoral melancholy and human dreariness, for here he now was back, once again in the realm of malls, factory outlets, auto dealerships — immense square buildings whose ugliness reverberated all the worse than a Tenderloin hotel room’s because their cleanliness and proclamations of stupid merchandising pride proclaimed them to be the products of some plutocrat’s choice rather than of mere abuse and neglect. But who was he, Henry Tyler, to reject anything? Was he himself so entirely free from defects?