William Vollmann - The Royal Family

What room? said the manager, who obviously didn’t remember him.

I kept my key, thanks.

Don’t talk smart to me, filth, said the manager. What room?

The one with no crack smoke, said Tyler, turning his back on the manager and going up the second flight of stairs to the hall where his room was. A door opened and a man clothed only in tattoos of angry demons leaned out and spat on the carpet. Out of his side-vision Tyler glimpsed a naked old woman straining to pull a dildo out of her ass. Tyler walked down the corridor to the bathroom and looked inside the toilet tank. The letter and the baggie of heroin were both gone. From his pocket he withdrew the fourth and final envelope and set it openly on top of the toilet tank.

In his room the first envelope was still there. But somebody had painted on the bottom drawer of the half-ruined dresser an image of a naked woman whose hair was charred pipe resin or a similar black substance and whose lips were lipstick. Between her breasts ran these lines:

IS WOUND BUT ONCE

No man has the power

to tell where he will

stop at a late

or early hour.

To lose one’s wealth is sad indeed

To lose one’s health is more

To lose one’s soul is such a loss

To lose one’s Queen is all.

He saw another lipstick stain where someone had stood on the bed and kissed the wall.

He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and on his return the night breeze felt good so he approached the street window and saw a whore creeping up the fire escape. She put her finger to her lips when she saw him. He nodded and waited.

I’m so cold, the woman whispered when she reached him. Please please please. I’m alone and I got a room already in the Westman Hotel.

What’s your name?

Barbara.

He looked at her for a long time. — Hey, he said softly, I remember you when your name was Shorty.

I remember you, too. You were living in the Krishna then.

Yes I was! laughed Tyler. I was between jobs then. And you—

Yes. Hey! Guess what! I kicked! I’m not shooting up anymore!

That’s great, he said, half believing her.

So, please…

Maybe later, when I have some money, he said smoothly.

You don’t even have two dollars? I’m hungry.

Here’s a buck, he said. Listen, Barbara—

Aw, what the hell. You can call me Shorty. We go back a ways, don’t we?

OK, Shorty. I need to meet the Queen. Do you know how I can do that?

The Queen! What do you want to meet her for? What’s she got that I ain’t got?

Somebody’s paying me, he said.

Oh, that’s different. You gotta do what you gotta do. Well, I’m in business for myself, so I don’t really know her. But the other girls say she lives underground, you know like in the sewers or under the subway or something, always moving around, but always in the dark like some bug that rules the bug colony. I never went looking for her. They say if she wants you, she’ll find you, but if you go poking your nose in her business she’ll fuck you up. Like seriously fuck you up. But you didn’t hear anything from me, right?

So she’s mean, Shorty?

Talk about mean! That girl is one hundred percent bitch. You look for her, you watch your ass, Okay? ’Cause you’ve been good to me.

Thanks, Shorty, he said, squeezing her in his arms.

That night Tyler dreamed of an extermination machine in the shape of a cubical steel face within which the mouth was a bladed trapezoid. The condemned marched into the mouth one by one. They bowed their heads, reminding him of the way that everyone gazed at his or her tapping shoes at the V.D. clinic. (Once he’d met a client there. Another time he’d been a patient there.) The blades macerated them. He dreamed of this all night, sometimes managing to struggle awake, but it was as though the architect of this machine kept dragging him back down to gaze upon it. At dawn he was sad and anxious. It was just light enough for him to see bloodstains and squashed bugs on the walls. He itched all over. He got up, pissed in the sink, and dressed. Shorty was staying in room number 302. He took the first letter to the Queen and slid it under her door. Then he returned to his room and lay down, trying to sleep and failing. There was piss shining on the vinyl runners of the stairs when he finally went out. A man and a woman were sitting in that estimable liquid. The woman said to her companion: I’ll do it soon’s he gets out of the hall. — You talking about me? Tyler inquired politely, zipping up his fly. — I’m just saying this hall is none too big, the woman said. — Tyler nodded at her. He saw that the man had fallen asleep.

He rang the buzzer on the manager’s hatchway and got his five dollars back for the key.

Hey, if you don’t need that money, you can give it to me, a whore in the hallway said.

And you can do the same for me, he said.

Well, the whore said, scratching her scars, I might sometime do you that favor.

I’ll just hold my breath, honey, said Tyler, swinging open the top grating.

Be careful out there, said the night janitor.

He descended the final stairs, peered through the street grating to make sure that nobody was lurking, and went out. A sad black whore, hooded against the rising sun, was walking slowly toward the bus stop. She gazed back at him longingly. He saluted her, mouthed the word Queen, and went on, passing a parking garage whose cage gaped empty just inside the doorway. There was nobody inside the ticket taker’s heavily glassed booth, which was set reclusively back in the darkness.

No way the Queen’s in a parking garage, Tyler said to himself. It’s got to be just a goddamned letter drop.

Hallelujah, he thought then. I actually believe in the Queen.

He walked and walked, scratching. On South Van Ness near Twenty Second a black-and-white slowly came to a stop, double-parked, and from its two mouths expectorated two cops the darkness of whose uniforms seemed to keep the last remnants of the night. He didn’t recognize either of them. They mounted the painted steps of an unpainted Victorian and rang the doorbell. Their hands were on their holsters.

He thought: I’d better call Mom today and see if she’s had any chest pains. I should call Detective Hernandez in Vice and ask him if he’s heard of the Queen. I should call Brady and ask him for another advance. I should call John and ask if he thinks Mom needs another doctor. I should call Irene.

He took the bus to the Queen’s parking garage, drove home and took a shower. After that, he checked his messages. His throat felt scratchy. Brady hadn’t phoned, but somebody named Marya whose ex-husband owed her child support wanted him to help her track the absconder into the jaws of justice, and his half-friend Roger was in town, his mother had called, John hadn’t called, a possible warehouse surveillance case danced on his tongue; Helena from Seattle, who’d never let him kiss her breasts, wondered aloud how he was doing; the Detective Institute invited him, for a forgivably small stipend, to repeat the seminar on drug abuse recognition; and the landlord was coming to repair the running toilet sometime around noon, which meant closer to three or four. Junk mail faxes crept across the carpet. Tyler ate a freckled banana for breakfast and made himself coffee. Resting his clipboard on his knee, he began to pad his surveillance report, adding line after line of spurious whores going in and spurious cars going out. That would keep Brady happy. He used up three extra forms that way. Then he tuned his television set to channel seven and clicked the remote three times to find out where his missives to the Queen had travelled. He saw a blue dot, a red dot, a white dot, and a dark grey dot. The blue dot and the dark grey dot were still at Sixteenth and Mission. The red dot was at the parking garage at Larkin Street where he had left it. The white dot, which represented the letter he’d slipped under Shorty’s door, had also moved to the parking garage.