William Vollmann - The Royal Family

On Mission and Fifteenth he saw Beatrice with a little bag of bananas, and she greeted him gladly, so he put his arm around her and asked where she was off to. She said: In Mexico my people teach me how to feed the dead ones who we love. Now I want to do that for Mama my Queen.

What do they do?

They make like a little house and fill it with fruits and mole and stuff for the dead people. You have to go in the window.

Where are you going to do that?

In the tunnel, you know, by South Van Ness.

I get it.

Because I believe.

You believe that the dead people come?

Maybe I doan know if I believe or if I doan. My Mom does, my first Mama, but she passed away. There are signs that tell you that the dead people arose. Like the animals are nervous, or a little bug running like around for the food. They say the bug is the dead person coming back for his stuff. If you eat before the dead, you get a stomach-ache.

And then noon and sunny and cool were the labels for this moment of Tyler’s life. The smell of piss and dirt from the pigeon-trees in front of the bus terminal were almost garden-fresh; piss-rain even if from drunks and unclean persons had brought out the good smell of soil even in that abused earth studded by cigarette butts. Downtown’s cubescape coolly shadowed the emboldened Halloween ghouls already creeping out from under the tombstones which roof the collective unconscious — let’s be psychoanalytical! The woman at the Greyhound desk was witch-garbed. Two Brady’s Boys came as themselves, standing shinyshoed, the senior partner telling the other: You don’t wanna cover the same pattern. You have a sector. We’re working P Sector today. — But Tyler hardly ever saw Brady’s Boys anymore. Having accomplished their mission, they’d dwindled away. (He thought about burglarizing their headquarters to search their files, but by the time he’d gotten his courage or recklessness to full steam the office had closed.) The film guy downstairs at Adolph Gasser’s had come as a robot comprised of silver-painted cardboard boxes, his circuit-board heart upon his breast. Up First Street came a woman dressed as a cow, with an immense pink rubber udder suspended from her crotch, the many nipples thrashing like keys upon a jailor’s belt.

A thin black boy in goggling sunglasses clung to a fire hydrant in the style of a praying mantis.

As he stared at the hydrant, Tyler felt himself begin to succumb to a terrible sense of filth and death because he had passed through here for too long; that was all anyone could do in that world, pass through: stay, and it ate you; go, and you were gone; and while you were there your alternatives were the stale and stuffy stench inside or the smell of piss outside — actually, it wasn’t that bad; he was forgetting the Vietnamese restaurants, the sheer beauty of the night women decked out for maximum sexual recognition; in other species that was most often the role of the male — but he could not deny that whenever he came out of one of those hotels he felt as if he just escaped being stifled, or as if he could practically unpeel from his face, like the gauze curtains in some bar which halftoned the passers-by into quasi-silhouettes, a film of congealed malice and despair; and whenever he went back inside, it was worse. Still, he had bars. Who could fail to value the Cinnabar’s late afternoon goldenness, its warmth like the inside of a whiskey bottle? — And I don’t mind being unable to explain it, said the television; would you call this a miracle? — Outside, rotten bananas, gorgeously black and yellow like some scrambled tiger, lay on top of the pay phone.

The Queen was gone, but the world did not end. The Tenderloin half opened one eye, smelled itself, scratched itself, and went back to sleep. (I’m the last to go to sleep and the first to get up, bragged a sad vig; he was almost the last of the Brady’s Boys.) Time will not stop. Living in the past is as illegal as possessing a fellow citizen’s rap sheet. Once upon a time, the Tenderloin used to be the Barbary Coast with its Chinese opium dens, which now have gone, obliterated in the great fire after the quake of 1906, and now the Tenderloin, too, with its danger and its hard, vibrant blackness has begun to slip away. Japanese high-life hotels and jazz clubs punctuate the streets. And Capp Street without the Queen, that was like some old Roman amphitheater revivified by the shouts and laughs of little Arab schoolgirls. Time-blasted columns rise everywhere around them, and, like the thistles and flowers, the girls don’t care. They form in a circle and dance around their teacher to cassette music played loud on a ghetto blaster, singing Arab disco songs. San Francisco without the Queen forgot the Queen. She’d been an interesting chapter, to be sure, as unforgettable while she lasted as the sensations of unlucky johns who sat clutching their balls, clipboards on their knees as they waited for the pain to pause so that they could complete their health questionnaires. — Wait a minute, said the lady behind the glass. Her muffled voice called the petitioners back and back. Children cried in the corner, playing with plastic toys which stank of anger. A little boy screamed. Domino was there too. She experienced a fiery feeling whenever she made urine. She pushed her blonde hair up, wrinkled her forehead and scowled at the baby. She was thinking about some money which she’d heard was hidden under a certain old man’s mattress. She wondered whether she could get him to stand up beside the bed so that he wouldn’t notice while her hand explored the boxsprings. Of course she could hold him close to her and give him a good suck to distract him while she… Meanwhile Chocolate smiled and swirled her high heels, her eyes getting bigger and more frightened by the moment. Chocolate was wearing a black rayon windbreaker which she believed made her look glamorous. It stank of the streets. She got up when her name was called, slung her purse over her shoulder, brushed her hair back with one hand, stuck out her chin and approached the appointment window where a plastic bottle and a key attached to a theftproof plastic block were waiting for her. She took these items to the women’s toilet, which she unlocked with the key, then entered. Groaning with pain, she pissed into the plastic bottle. Then came the doctor, then the prescription, and three days later she’d forgotten all about it.

His uninvited guest, the FBI man, sat down in the chair once occupied by Irene during that ill-fated chicken dinner so long ago now when John had advised him to find another girlfriend and Irene had remained so sad and silent. Tyler could scarcely prevent his face from splitting open with rage, to see another person sitting in her chair. It seemed like desecration to think of Irene in front of this intruder, so he tried to think about something else. Into his mind came an image of the genital-less child on the family sculptural column of the Pacific Stock Exchange. The hypocrisy of that rendering charged him with a salutary Canaanite bloodlust; he longed to sink his teeth into the FBI man’s throat.

They gazed out the window at the fog for a while, and then the FBI man said: May I ask you something?

Shoot, chuckled Tyler. Or is that the wrong thing to say to a G-man?

What do you honestly think of Dan Smooth?

I honestly think that he has sacrificed himself and others for something beyond human comprehension. You can put that in your case report.

Let’s keep this on the level, the FBI man said. You want to worship snakes or hug a tree, you can do that on your own time. I don’t have a problem with that. This is a free country. But come down to earth for a minute, Henry. Let’s talk about Dan Smooth. First of all, anything to do with kids will get to me. I just love kids.