William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Why are you here , exactly? said Connie.

I ask myself that every day, said Tyler. I hope I figure it out before they bring me to Dr. Jasper here.

Well, you only have a one in four chance of ending up in this room, said Connie. More than six thousand deaths every year get signed off elsewhere in the county.

I’m not from this county anyway, said Tyler. I mean, I was, but not now.

Could you step to one side, please? asked Connie.

Where are you from? said Tyler.

Moldavia, said Connie.

Oh, how is it over there?

Fine, said Connie.

And how is it over here?

All right.

Well, I guess we’ve covered all the bases, said Tyler. If it’s all right over here, then why don’t you want me to end up here?

I really don’t care, to be honest, Connie said. You can step back closer now if you want.

Nicely done, he said.

Sorry it smells in here, said Connie. The next one over there is a little bit decomposed.

Something to look forward to. Are you near the Black Sea?

Sort of.

Echoing Connie’s first unanswerable question, Dr. Jasper slashed Dan Smooth open from each shoulder to the chest, and then down to the base of the belly, in an immense, bloodless letter Y. The skin and fat was a good finger’s breadth thick. Steadily Dr. Jasper peeled and skinned away that human hide, announcing to his invisible audience: The exterior genitalia is male comma circumcised period. There is a one-and-one-fourth- by three-and-five-eighths-inch scar.

They had brought Irene to this room which smelled like the Hotel Liverpool, which is to say like garbage, she not falling into the ranks of the six thousand who’d died unsuspicious deaths. Perhaps she’d lain naked and cut open on this very table: one chance in six. But the fat beneath Irene’s skin and inside her breasts would have been yellowish — white, most likely, not bright orange as was Dan Smooth’s. (And the Queen, had they brought her here, too, or was she still alive somewhere?) Inner color was no mystery. It all depended on blood content, Dr. Jasper would later explain.

Then the knife went grating across the rib cage, and Connie was pressing the whirling blade of a stainless steel saw across the top of Dan Smooth’s head, her bloody gloves slowly whitening with bone dust.

The river now behind him, the new county a tabula rasa of free opportunity, he bore right, the white round bulk of a storage tank glowing in the night like Dan Smooth’s skull. Another right, and he was parking in the lot above the launching slip. Quietly he walked down to the water, listening to the crickets. His father had courted his mother here. On the other shore, an ugly red light hung in the sky, brighter and steadier than any star — the eye of some radio tower, he supposed. He didn’t remember it, although doubtless it had unwinkingly overseen every river night for years. The pale cube of a houseboat was not quite as still as that, and its moonlit reflection even less so, continually decaying and renewing itself. The night was beautiful and smelled of water.

An impure mixture of emotions polluted his chest. He admitted that he had always turned away from Smooth, in death as in life, that he had been disgusted by the man and in equal measure afraid of him, that his omnivorous needs had nonetheless most cheerfully taken everything which Smooth, who had done him only but good, had ever offered him; in sum, that Smooth’s death afforded him not only a car, but relief. Yet, having confessed (if only to the river and to himself) his selfishness, which had gone beyond exploitation almost to cruelty, he now with unfocused surprise discovered within himself a sincere grief, too, which stank within his soul like one of Dr. Jasper’s partially decayed patients — no doubt because it was tainted with the greenish bile of guilt. First his life had been full of Irene; then briefly the false Irene had accomodated his despair, afterwards, of course, the Queen had had him. He felt that only now was he coming to possess himself. — But how had he done wrong? — By worshiping only his own desires, came the answer. — But that was one reason why I loved them all, he protested, to help them! — a fact undeniably true — but what had he ever done for Smooth, who’d wanted to be his friend? From the prostitutes he’d taken only the worst maxims, the ways of giving not himself, but his mere shell, like that gorgeous scarlet and yellow mantle of flesh which Dr. Jasper had undone with his scapel and thrown open across Smooth’s shoulders. Hadn’t the ancient Athenians, the rich ones, gotten interred in cloaks of scarlet? That came back to him, maybe from Plutarch… John would know for sure. It had been so long since Tyler had done anything worthwhile, even reading, which was not worthwhile in and of itself but could dispose one to worthwhile acts. And for a moment, but only a moment, he felt that he had awakened from a long and flabby sleep. But he didn’t want to wake up anymore. — My days are late and wasted, he thought to himself. Better to float back into the river-night. The Queen had been awake; perhaps Smooth had been, too, between or behind repulsive dreams. (The Queen done offed him, said a Polk Street runaway, a scrawny little blond boy, in unshakeable and malicious ignorance.) Had Irene killed herself out of knowledge or out of dreamy fear of knowledge? Tyler, however, wanted to live life selfish and unaware like everyone else he knew — but none of his desires and pretensions were licit. After all, this had been precisely the situation of Dan Smooth.

I must remember, he said to himself distractedly, that he helped me, never did me any harm…

A sudden, incoherent anxiety lurked at his ear, as meaningless as his tears.

So only the Queen had been awake, then. So awake, and hence so tired! For a moment he could almost hear her rich, hoarse, lilting voice.

The skyscrapers of Sacramento, such as they were, rose white and stubby above the dark trestle bridge over which he had just driven, which made a tolerable frontier between the moon-clouds and the long thin water-fingers of orange light. Entering the wooded darkness alongside the river, he began to walk toward the bridge, loaded pistol in the pocket of his big, baggy jacket, and suddently saw a silhouette, stocky and hunched, which stood upon the riverbank, never turning round, although it must have heard his footsteps. The cool air was growing cold.

He walked on, and the tramp rose up behind him and said: What’re you doin’ down here? Fishin’?

Walking, he said. How about you?

Just spendin’ the day out, the tramp said.

He and John had caught some perch here when they were boys, so he said to the tramp: Any perch here?

Nope, said the tramp, walking away.

Ahead, between the trees, he saw a pale light, but when he got to that spot, thinking to see a homeless camp, he found nothing there.

A train whistle, rich with sadness of the longing rather than the despairing kind, drew him on until he stood beneath the bridge, almost blind to the moving of the darkness, which rumbled and squeaked westward; but at strange intervals he’d be granted the sight of vertical light-bars marching by. This train was as endless as darkness — solid it was, heavy, groaning, hissing; while beyond and below its empty purposefulness the river bled and bled from severed fingers of light, and another man stood silhouetted on the shore-sand, gazing down at a lantern, while two silhouettes went fishing. The rump of the last freight car dragged behind it a chain of silence. Foliage reappeared through the trestle’s hollow segments, and the signal rang mutely like a desk-bell at a bank or hotel lobby, while at that moment a real bell began to toll across the river. Tyler looked at his watch, but couldn’t read the dial.