William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Yeah, but I found her. She exists. She—

Okay. Then you lost her. Listen, buddy, gotta go, but let’s have a drink sometime. Happy trails, eh?

He tried the National Death Index, current up to three months before, and by then it had been four months, and she wasn’t there, not on that computer-web version, at least. (Irene was there.) Well, why should the Queen be there? He called the San Francisco Department of Health but they didn’t have any death certificate, either. (They had one for Lily.)

Well? the tall man had said.

All right, Tyler had said. (She had been missing for less than twenty-four hours back then.) — So if she’s arrested on the street, she’ll be brought in and booked, and they’ll keep one copy of that booking in the jail and send another copy to the state and another copy to the FBI. I guess we’d better not go to the FBI, so that leaves the state and the jail. Now, Mr. Cortez checked out Eight-Fifty Bryant and found nothing, so we’ll go to the state. You have any quarters? Lemme make a few phone calls…

You don’t even have any quarters? Man, you are solid horseshit.

Well, we’re billing a hundred and fifty, two hundred grand a year, but usually they don’t pay in quarters, Justin. Still, if you have the patience it’s kind of good. In other word, you’re doing twelve—

Will you stop babbling like a fucking crackhead bitch?

Ordinarily they pay in million dollar bills, laughed Tyler. He left the tall man and broke a five on a shot of whiskey at Jonell’s bar. He got three dollars back. One he used for a tip, and the barmaid brightened. When he asked her to transform the other two bills into quarters, she smilingly obliged. He tried to smile back, but couldn’t.

What’s wrong? she said.

Oh, just a minor emergency, he chuckled, showing his stained teeth. He went back into the darkness near the men’s restroom where the pay phone was and began calling various minions of the state of California, confident of imminent success.

Later, when he stepped back onto the street, the tall man was gone and three drunken Brady’s Boys laughed at Tyler, shouting: God save the Queen! His car was in the towing yard, so he took the bus home and stayed up all night trying to do an extended trace…

The Queen of the Tenderloin is really three people put into one person who’s the illegitimate son of the Queen of England, explained the crazy whore, whose eye-blinks were more numerous even than late afternoon Tenderloin pigeons. In the thirties she was a teenager and then a movie star. In the forties she married the Duke of Windsor by mistake. But when she was aspiring to be a movie star she abandoned seven children. My grandmother is one of those children. That’s why I’m dyslexic with a not very well formed thyroid gland connected to my urine by electricity. And the name of the Queen, the one and only true Queen, is and always has been Domino. You know why? Well, first of all, the strongest woman of all is a male that’s stuck in a female’s body. Then there’s the second sort of men who just dress as women, just to snoop around and see what men do to women. Isn’t that lucky for them? But Domino’s the first kind. She has a penis. She rapes me. She’s my Queen.

The Hotel Liverpool on Turk Street had been taken over by Romanians since the last time he’d stayed there, which had been a good six or seven years ago. Tired burly middle-aged men worked in Reception and mopped the floors. When he saw somebody mopping the floors he was impressed. Upstairs, of course, the same old carpet lingered on, fuzzed, linted, worn and grimed, with pale stain-islands of urine and beer and toothpaste. Thirty-five by the day, one forty-five by the week. His room was spacious. On its blue walls some creative tenant with a felt tip marker had portrayed whores in fishnet bras and fishnet stockings, and then all around the lintel marched well-rendered ants and spiders. There was an attached bathroom with a tub and toilet; on its walls one of the middle-aged men had too frugally attempted to whitewash away those magnificent insect studies, but as only one coat of paint had been employed the great spiders still lurked, more cunning and sinister now than ever, because they seemed to be hiding themselves in ambush.

He opened the window to let the smell out. The room quickly filled with flies.

It wasn’t a bad place, though. The lock on the door was solid, and the dresser had all its drawers.

He went out to search for the Queen, street by street. The Tenderloin was nothing but a blighted, darkened, stained place in his heart. Shadows oozed beneath the signs of the Oriental massage clubs. Returning in the darkness, he learned where the entomological inspiration on the wall had come from, for upon that sea of mildew called “carpet” sailed a goodly fleet of cockroaches.

Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, night. His throat was raw; maybe he was crying in his sleep. Night, then night. (When the crazy whore finally believed and accepted that the Queen had been taken, she cried: No hope for my electricity! then threw herself headfirst out of a fourth-storey window.) Early in the morning his sleep was ended by the cheeps of a backing truck almost drowned out by rain, while somewhere nearby the new Queen was butt-fucking the other girls with dildoes. He parted the grimy curtain and saw that the streetlamp still burned; at that instant a pale seagull occluded that fierce yellow globe and then flew on up Mason Street. His eyes watered and he sneezed. A fly crawled on his hand. On the street, a man shouted. A pigeon uttered its liquid purring from some nearby window-ledge. Two leaners stood under the awning of the Greek food place because it was not yet seven-thirty and so the Greeks didn’t know or care that their home island was being used by non-payers. He listened to the rain. The sidewalk sweepers were all wearing yellow raincoats. The streetlamp was the same color. He had a sore throat.

His mind fled down long halls made longer and spookier by the peephole’s lens. He yearned for the lamp’s warm shadows.

It rained all day. Finally he flicked the switch and watched the lamp’s groping wings of light and shadow upon the wall’s sad blue sky.

That night Red was loudly singing: Baby, baby, oh-h-h-h-h, bay-bee in the street-garbage. Someone had smeared an immense brownish-red turd across the sidewalk where Red pranced.

Halloween dawned rainy. He feared Halloween because it was the day of the dead. Now that his Queen was gone, she wouldn’t be able to protect him anymore from Irene’s ghost. He found a Gideon’s Bible, but it spoke to him artificially, like Irene’s drab voice on the telephone toward the end, her sad voice which told him nothing; which was why for her, because she had never really let him into her heart, he’d begun to cultivate dislike, even hatred, thinking to kill his love and make the sadness go away, the result being that he ached for her when he thought of her, and whenever he saw her was cold to her (as was she to him) and he longed to get away from her; his wish being gratified, he then immediately despaired once again. By seven o’clock the bearded old panhandlers with top hats and cane were already leaning or squatting under papered-up windows, sharing cigarettes, rubbing their eyes, too hung over to sing. In the hallway a new tenant, longterm most likely from all the trouble he was going to, had been banging and creaking already for over an hour, trying bullheadedly to fortify his door with screw-eyes and padlocks.

Just before eight the sun came out. The tops of the grubby old brick buildings looked almost handsome in that new light. Somebody was vacuuming. A black-and-white eased softly round the corner, stalking criminals and undesirables. A man crept across the sidewalk, his face and cigarette angled straight down.