William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Now he was coming into Dixon. A sign shouted CHEAPER! and he didn’t care. A supermarket truck menaced him with a painting of a lobster-claw. To his right lay black-roofed white houses, all bitterly the same. The parking lot of the steak restaurant was empty. One field was alfalfa-green and the next was straw-colored like a Capp Street girl’s pus. Tyler felt that something very strange was happening to him but he could not explain it. A sign offered an untold quantity of apples for fifty-nine cents. The next sign offered apples four for ninety-nine cents. The sign after that proffered pumpkins and he didn’t see the price. On his left receded the pistachio stand where John had once taken Irene before they were married, and that was when Irene discovered that she was allergic to pistachios. Tyler had heard that story twice. His mother had said that she couldn’t believe anybody could really be allergic to pistachios; she’d insisted that Irene was really just finnicky, like those girls who claim to be allergic to earrings of any metal baser than gold. The sky was grey now like a cloud of dust. He passed fields, billboards and orchards as California began to get darker and darker. He hated that winter darkness. Following the examples of his fellow citizens, he launched twin streams of light from his car’s yellow, goggling eyes. The white water-tower at the University of California at Davis blended in with the sky. Overhead passed a black bird whose kind he was sure he had never before seen, and whose immense black crooked wings reminded him of the Queen’s thighs flexing and twitching on the mattress as she uttered her little cries. A gas station vainly illuminated the earth with harsh yellow light similar to what is seen through shooting-glasses. A yellow sign whined BREAKFAST. It was not breakfast time now and so that sign was useless; maybe that was why he hated it; if you saw a whore you could always feel horny anytime but how many times a day could you eat breakfast? At least he was out of Davis now, and lemon-colored fields relaxed him in the twilight, their wholeness scarcely marred as far as the southern horizon. To the northeast a train was coming out of Sacramento quite rapidly, eating its way into the night.

Ahead now came a belt of shrubs, warehouses, restaurants and sickening yellow lights. This was West Sacramento. West Sacramento offered him storage lockers, more palm trees, walls, rental cars. Between grey trees and hedges he followed his grey path to the Sacramento River, which he crossed, glimpsing lights lying disclike upon it. A flock of birds wriggled through the night, barely distinguishable.

His mother was sleeping.

His room was now the nurse’s room, so he had to sleep in John’s old room. He set down his suitcase as quietly as he could and turned on the light. The bookshelves were crowded by John’s toy trains, the entire Hardy Boys series, and high school yearbooks with photographs of John in them. Tyler had thrown his own yearbooks in the dumpster when he was twenty-four or — five, unable to bear the sight of his own callow, pimpled face. Now he regretted that act a little, not so much because he missed his teenaged self as because he would have liked to gaze at the girls he remembered. Descending the creaking stairs as quietly as he could, he stole the Bible from the living room. He returned upstairs to John’s room, closed the door, then knelt on the hard floor and prayed: Hey, Jesus, if you’re out there and if you have pity on us Canaanites, send some advice my way, would you? I’m kind of at my wits’ end, as the saying goes. I don’t get what I’m supposed to do. Maybe I can turn myself in and give up my Mark and, uh… I’m going to open the New Testament now.

Blindly he parted the covers, then the pages. He lowered his forefinger like doom. He had reached Matthew 12.46, which ran: While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied…, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother, and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Well, sighed Tyler to himself, that’s what Beatrice says, anyway.

Henry? his mother called from her room.

At City Lights the leaves of books hung as limp as those of banana trees on a summer jungle day, and the browsers were more quiet than usual, turning pages ever so slowly, or standing over a table of books, reading the spines, motionless: strange day it was, sunstruck day, the blinking lights around the perimeter of the Hungry I’s sign reduced in power, so that they resembled mere kernels of corn. Tyler read the tale of a wicked King who went conquering successive cities in the desert. From each victory he’d keep a young woman for a concubine, and put her parents, brothers and sisters to death secretly by having them smothered in hot wet Turkish towels, so that, being unrelated to anyone, with no past (her city razed, the rubble smeared across miles of dark stony plain which the King’s troops then scraped and scratched down to the yellow earth), she’d be as pure as an idea. A special caravan transported the bodies, tightly bundled in linen, with the King’s chop-mark printed on the wrappings, so that no one could open them, and no one could find any graves — for to the extent that the concubines had been well chosen, they grew favored, and as they succeeded in gathering about themselves their own troops and satellites, they naturally sought the flesh they’d come from, not only out of love and duty, but also because they longed to be related again, for it is lonely to be a mere formal cunt like Domino, Strawberry, Yellow Bird, Beatrice, Bernadette, Lily, Chocolate, Sunflower, Kitty. They desired that their soul-light be clothed in something, so that their obliteration would be undone, and they could live and die again. But although they tossed many a gold ring to the Canaanite runners who loped far back among dead years and cities, seeking paternity or even paternal tombs in that deep red sand aswarm with ants where once there’d been hot and palmtree-walled streets, the runners never found anything except shattered archways and jackal-gnawed bones and on one cool and quiet night a ghost who came to visit them in a pale mask with long dark tresses, its robes constructed with such complexity as to resemble the hybridization of many artificial insects. Then morning came, and once again the air was alive with flies. So the runners turned back and told the concubines that they were alone, that they did not have and never had had any kin. And when the concubines knelt before the King, begging him to at least inform them from which particular cup of bitterness they ought to drink, he could reply to them in all truth: There is no proof that your esteemed parents do not continue in good health! — But the King had a daughter by one of the concubines, and when the girl became fourteen she found — what? Tyler didn’t want to read anymore. It was all too sad, as when one reads old letters and realizes for what seems to be the first time, but can’t possibly be: She loved me! She was sincere, passionate, good; she even wanted me. And now I don’t even know where she is. Does she still think of me? I haven’t thought of her for years. Does she still love me if she does think of me? I hope not and I hope so. — How could these moments, so powerfully articulated with love, have given way to the torpid weariness of the present? He couldn’t understand life.