William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Irene said: I told you there’s no use loving a dead person.

Was there any use loving you when you were alive?

Sometimes you’re so mean. Maybe I was mean, too. Do you want me to go? I could just go right now. Maybe that’s what I should do. Is that what you want?

No, said Tyler.

I’m going to go anyway. We’re all going to go now. We’re almost there. Listen, Henry. You need to think really hard now. There’s an answer, I promise. But it has to come from you. If you figure it out now, you’ll be saved.

Can you give me a hint?

There’s no time for hints, Henry! Look, there it is! I’ll tell you this much — it has to do with love…

Then they were in sight of the vanishing point where train tracks became metal rivers veined by the shadows of cottonwood trees just as women’s breasts are veined so richly by blood vessels in infrared photography.

Loving you?

What did I tell you about loving a dead person? That’s all you talk about. Oh, Henry, if you end up being damned I’m going to cry.

Loving Jesus? he said wearily. I refuse to do that. He killed my Queen…

Henry, Jesus isn’t what you think. He doesn’t hate you. He’s not against you. But—

You know what, Irene? I don’t like this guessing game. If what you say is accurate, which means that you know but won’t tell me, then you don’t love me.

You truly believe that, Henry? That means you don’t trust me. That means you don’t love me… Oh, and now it’s too late.

At the exact vanishing point, a fish leaped. Then Irene, the hobo and the train all vanished, and Tyler drowned in sadness.

Time went by, a good long time, and of course he never found the Queen or either of the two Irenes. By then he wasn’t even really trying. In that strange half-season when winter has been outgrown but spring continues grey and bleak we find him standing under the freeway on Alaskan Way South, leaning against a concrete pillar with his hands in his pockets, his skull a reliquary of broken golden beads and tarnished copper thoughts as he looked out at the long grey strata of sky, land and sea in Puget Sound. He was cold and wet, his wool hat wet; he had ten dollars in his pocket, so he wandered up to a sporting goods store to buy another hat but the clerk, Middle Eastern and excitable, shouted: Get out, bum! — That night it rained heavily, almost overpowering the groans and farts of the other men in the shelter, and the next morning it was sunny, windy and cold. He sat on the granite perimeter of a garden strip which abutted the Federal Office Building on Marion and Western, and gazed up beyond the gently swinging traffic lights at the long tight rope of concrete which bisected the world, and a black prostitute in bright white jeans drifted by, smoking a cigarette, peering down at the sidewalk in hopes of miraculous treasure.

Sunlight suddenly struck the concrete ribbon, and transformed the rare people bestriding it into angels. Now it was very sunny and bright throughout the whole world, and Tyler with his wool cap and grubby little duffel bag rose up to become part of the sun.

The sun dazzled the pavement between a bowlegged panhandler’s thighs. Tyler nodded. The man nodded back. He was as old as a Northern Electric train from 1914.

How ya doin’? said Tyler.

Bad, said the other, as Tyler had expected. That was what they always said.

Well, why’s that? cried Tyler in cheery amazement.

Don’t feel too good.

Uh huh.

You got any cigs?

I don’t smoke.

Any change?

Lemme see, said Tyler, his fingers ostentatiously snailing through his pockets. What’s the cheapest place to stay around here?

The cheapest or the cheapest?

The cheapest.

Pioneer Square.

Tyler went there. That night there was another storm. Seattle’s skyscrapers wriggled and swayed in the rain like hollowed out tree trunks eaten by phosphorescent worms.

He awoke with the taste of Irene’s cunt in his mouth.

Merry Christmas, a man said, slipping a twenty-dollar bill into Tyler’s cup.

Is it Christmas already? he said. That’s Christ’s day. I can’t accept that money, sir. I’m a Canaanite. Well, what the hell. I guess I can use it. I never did have principles.

Merry Christmas, the man said again, insistently.

You’re welcome, said Tyler.

The man sighed and walked away. Then Tyler felt sad and guilty, and decided to catch out to Sacramento to become however peripheral a part of one of those superdark foggy blue nights when the light inside was as bright as lemon peels in drinks and all the whores were singing along with the jukebox as if they were opera stars, and the whores caressed each other, rubbed each other’s necks, and talked about getting the hell out of here, know what I’m saying? and the light outside was Tyler’s light, the rainy streetlight radiance of Canaanites and sad lean men the color of cigarette smoke. So he departed Seattle’s long sagging alleys whose dumpsters sparkled with fresh rain, black puddles in its blackness and the smell of piss. Sensing that the Celestial Vice Cop was tailing him with intent to reduce him into a thinly shrieking ghost like Irene or a silent ghost like his eternally adored Queen, all the way to Roseville he boxcar-flew like one of the many sick lost seagulls one sees in inland places, squeaking feebly in the creosote wind of the Union Pacific yard as the grass bowed and chittered, and he breathed locomotive-clouds as he hid from bulls and preachers behind barbed wire. Over by the auction yard he found a syringe stuck in a crack in a telephone pole, but left it because it was some other wanderer’s treasure. He came to a little grey man who hunched rapidly along between the tracks. When Tyler asked where the vanishing point was, the man said he’d never heard of it. When Tyler asked him where to camp, he said he had no idea. He asked about Irene and the Queen, and the man would not reply. So Tyler thanked the man, who said nothing. An instant later, the man had completely disappeared. Later, when the Reno bound freight began to move, Tyler saw him poke his head out of the back of a grainer car. Tyler himself went west. Thunder crawled over the tracks, pounding him with light and icy drops. He jumped off the train in the yard just south of Coffee Camp which was now sodden and almost deserted, only one hardy speed freak couple living in a dome tent, the others all gone to shelters; the river was flooding; the paths were underwater…

Sometimes he speculated that the Queen and Irene were actually one — that is to say, a double-sided incarnation of Something Else — but on a certain cold and tule-fogged morning he awoke still clinging to his Queen and shouted: I hate Irene! and felt eased of half his pustulent love. So he shouted it again and again. Unripened raspberries sometimes wilted on the vine, the leaves riotous red like an alcoholic’s cheeks. I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! On the fifth anniversary of Irene’s suicide he hopped a train all the way down to Los Angeles to try to find her grave but Forest Lawn now held so many new dead people that he wasn’t sure where it was, and as he tramped around in his dirty clothes and boots trying to find it a security car pulled up, and two guards politely drove him out. (After they had dropped him a good distance away, one guard said to the other: God, that guy stinks worse than any stiff!) As long as he could, he stared back over his shoulder at the columned pseudoclassical white palace that said FOREST LAWN. I hate Irene! Then he kept going down toward San Bernardino, everything bluish grey below him, the mountains like swirls of smoke. There were bands of pressure in his head. The mountains gradually became clearer, and his headache went away. But Irene had blackjacked him, and his head would never be right again. Fifty-odd miles out from Palm Springs he took refuge in a huge freight yard which paralleled the freeway, its grainers and boxcars forming a new horizon with smoggy mountains behind the Burlington Northern. But soon he was hot and out of water. He began to walk down the hot black ribbon of track which lanced on into the desert past the whirling windmills, and by sunset, his throat swelling up with thirst, was standing beneath a big yellow billboard that said HELP US CATCH KILLERS, the desert foaming and boiling with creosote bush and rabbitbrush and sand as pale as steamed milk dolloped on coffee. The heat took his thoughts away from Irene with her vague smile and her bright trivialities. His neck steamed and his brain boiled. Sweat ran from his eyes like tears. He inhaled the hot dry air, moving carefully. A cicada chattered like some distant generator. Then he saw a Mexican lying in the sand. He turned the man over and said: How are you doing? — Not too good, said the Mexican. Too hot. I got sun poison… — Yeah, me, too, Tyler laughed. I figure we both got that years ago. — but then darkness fell down on them to save them, and a long cool train came hollering by to carry them all the way to Indio where before dawn they were drinking their fill from the restroom of a gas station. He never saw the Mexican again. I hate Irene! he shouted. Then everything became white and bright, like coming up out of the ocean into the light — so much light!