William Vollmann - The Royal Family

All right, I’m going to call up Room 201. —Five thousand for misdemeanor assault, he reported cheerfully a moment later.

Motherfuckers, said the tall man mechanically.

What happened this time, Justin?

Some john pulled a knife on her, so she socked him. That bitch got balls.

Well, cash or credit card?

Stolen credit card okay, Mr. Cortez?

No one can say you don’t have a sense of humor.

I got that when I fell wrongways from my Mama’s ass. Now, Mr. Cortez, Queen only gimme three hundred today.

Someone needs to cosign, then, returned the bondsman with smiling wariness.

You want me to go bothering the Queen for this?

I floated you last time, Justin.

No, last time I went to Mr. Norris.

Okay, but we’re still outstanding for fifty. That was for Lily.

That bitch was supposed to pay you back. That no-good lowdown he-she crackhead bitch…

Be that as it may, I can’t make a living floating people. Now if you want to get the Queen in here I’m sure we can work out a payment plan. I’m as anxious as you are to keep this friendly.

Queen’s your best customer, said Justin.

That she is, replied the bondsman, making no movement.

Beaten and grinning, the tall man counted fifty ten-dollar bills onto the desk.

Do you have fifty more to settle Lily’s account?

I’ll take care of her, Mr. Cortez. I guarantee that.

Well, don’t be harder than you have to. I’d hate to see Strawberry or Beatrice coming down here to bail you out again.

Yeah, at Eight-Fifty Bryant all the girls an’ bitches, they be talkin’ about your kind heart day and night, said the tall man sarcastically.

I’m sure they love you, too.

I was just curious, said Justin. How often you get heat from some nigger or somebody can’t pay?

Everyone’s your friend in this business, said Mr. Cortez complacently. I was just explaining that to somebody when you came. Everyone knows everybody. Everybody loves everybody. Life is great. And speaking of which, my old friend, I need your check stub or California I.D.

The tall man, stricken by a momentary and (he realized) entirely senseless bitterness, flipped his laminated card down beside the money, with almost the same motion as a boy skipping a stone across a river.

The threatened dissolution of the royal family, as we have seen, alarmed its members no less, for all that they were themselves much of the cause. As soon as they began to admit the seriousness of the matter, they withdrew to varying degrees into fear and greed, laying up secrets, opportunities, connections and bad faith promises like outcast ants stealing grain from the treasury of their sunken, gravid queen, in order to prepare for separate winters. Why? Because they feared that their sovereign could protect them neither from their enemies nor perhaps from each other.

The miracle of authority has always astonished me even more than that bizarre miracle of money whereby an ever deferred promise printed on a piece of paper is believed by people no more trusting or disinterested than the Queen’s children. In the case of authority, many follow one. Again, why? Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in order to answer this question. He concluded that authority (at least of the secular variety) is an unwholesome fiction, that although Napoleon thought himself in charge of his soldier-ants come to plunder the Russian hives, the potency he possessed to command came from something external to himself. Or, to put it even more plainly, the Emperor of the French was stupefied by his own egotism into believing that he had made history, when really the only history-maker is history itself. I don’t quite accept this, for the obvious reason that thousands of lives might have run uncut, had Napoleon never seized power. History expressed itself in him, no doubt, but without him history would surely have been compelled to express itself differently.

And yet in the case of our royal family, Tolstoy’s deterministic view enlightens the understanding. For it might well have been that the Queen owned no supernatural powers whatsoever, that her spit and piss had never gotten anybody high, and that, like money, she represented only a promise among her children to love one another. Why shouldn’t it be, that if I owe you a hundred dollars, you and I could meet in the presence of an authorized functionary of the Federal Reserve, then burn that hundred-dollar bill, because all three parties agreed that you would be entitled to help yourself to a hundred dollars’ worth of gold from Fort Knox at any time of day or night? But it doesn’t seem so. Money is a promise ultimately too absurd to be believed. We require symbols, verification, materiality, just as churches require altars. And now it seemed that the Queen’s promise could no longer verify itself.

It was Sapphire who renewed the promise for at least a little longer.

I do not propose to “explain” her, because I do not understand her. But I love her more than any of the other characters in this book, except perhaps for Domino, and I refuse to refrain from praising her: Should astronomers and ethicists ever succeed in proving that God resembles her, then lost and weary Cain won’t need to flee anymore.

One cloudy autumn day when on Second and Howard Streets near Allied Gasket Company the steel gratings took on the color of the clouds, Tyler’s rent became late. He wished that he could tell someone, but his only friends now were the royal family, none of whom paid rent at all except by the day; his worries might exasperate them. Moreover, it might well be that by continuing to live in this place filled with things, this rich place to which he literally held the key, he was continuing to commit disloyalty to his Queen, who had raised him up out of the hell into which his addiction to Irene had cast him; shouldn’t he go into the streets to behold her always, especially now when her reign would so soon end? And yet he was afraid, not so much for himself, who no longer cared for much in the world, as for the Queen’s other children who were already so jealous of him for sitting always at her right hand. Moreover, couldn’t he love her wherever he was? If his apartment, telephone, computer, bed, books and car were a detriment to him, wouldn’t she have said so? He’d never asked her because he feared to ask her. He feared that if he so much as mentioned his money troubles, she might think that he was occupied with other matters than she herself. Well, he knew she wouldn’t think that, because she knew everything. Still he was afraid to broach any material matters. All his many fears came from the realization that his body must soon be destroyed — how soon, he didn’t know. And out of that fear he continually wished that his telephone would ring with lucrative offers. But suddenly he began to fear that when the phone rang he would be obliged to greet his landlord, so he got into his car for a roll downtown and up the hill to Post and Sutter where he saw Chocolate entering the Little Corner House Restaurant, laughing and joking with one of her johns; she didn’t see Tyler, who continued up Bush, Pine, California, where it was high and hot. A cable car blocked the intersection. As always, the city got quieter the higher he ascended. He turned right on Clay Street. The Transamerica Pryamid broke the sky. Behind crouched the Bay Bridge like a many-legged dinosaur knee deep in ocean. Crossing the trolley-tracks of Powell Street he spied three big-breasted young girls holding iced cappuccinos and felt no desire for them because he was with the Queen now who filled his heart with a blissful muteness. He no longer sought to express himself; he did not want to plough greener pastures.