William Vollmann - The Royal Family

PECULIARITIES??

ALIASES Queen, Maj

CONFEDERATES Domino [??], Strawberry [??], Kitty [??], unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??]

That afternoon in the Tenderloin he’d glimpsed the blonde hooker, Domino, wandering into a nasty little watering hole called the Wonderbar, and so under the rubric SUSPECTED LOCALITIES he wrote: Parking garage on Turk & Larkin, Tenderloin core area, Capp St/Mission core area [16th-20th Sts], Wonderbar [??].

His stomach rumbled. He sighed, shook a clattering tombstone batch of frozen spicy chicken drumsticks onto a glass plate, and microwaved them for four minutes. When he opened the microwave, sour orange grease flecked every wall. The drumsticks were overcooked on the outside and frozen on the inside. He gnawed them all down to their icy bony cores and microwaved them again for sixty-nine seconds. By then, he already felt queasy, so he set the plate on the counter and sat down again by the details description sheet.

CONFEDERATES Domino, Strawberry, Kitty, unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??], Sapphire [??], others to be determined.

Let’s just run Domino through the system, he muttered, opening his fingers above the keyboard, but just then the telephone rang. It was a wrong number.

His skull ached. He dialled his brother’s number. His heart pulsated nauseatingly when immediately subsequent to the second ring John lifted the receiver and said: Hello?

How’s everything? said Tyler.

Oh, fine. Have you been calling my machine and then hanging up?

No, John. Believe it or not, I have better things to do.

Like what?

Oh, let’s say some guy rear-ends a person and he says I didn’t know it was stopped because the tail-light was off. You can tell whether or not the lightbulb was oxidized. You just photograph it since the lawyers will—

I thought maybe you wanted to listen to Irene’s voice on the tape.

John, is this going to be a friendly phone call?

You made the call, not me.

I get it.

I erased it, Hank. I wiped it out.

You mean Irene’s message.

You may be stupid but you sure aren’t dumb. That’s it exactly. Now it’s my voice on the machine.

Well, bully for you.

So if you keep calling my answering machine and then hanging up, I’ll—

You know, John, they have a service for paranoid people like you. Caller ID. It’s finally legal in California now. That way you’ll see the phone number of the—

Oh, forget it, said John. Irene’s voice was giving Mom the willies, that’s all. Let’s just forget the whole topic. Let’s just bury it, so to speak.

Yeah, sure.

Let’s just put a granite headstone over it and sing a few hypocritical hymns.

I thought you were the religious one.

Well, certain things make a guy wonder, Hank. I’m still trying to… Have you been calling my machine?

I’m getting tired of this, said Tyler. (For their honeymoon, John and his bride had gone to London, where Irene had loved Queen Mary’s dollhouse, Madame Tussaud’s, the Changing of the Guard.)

So you’re tired, John said. Well, what the fuck about me?

How’s work?

Oh, fine. This Brady contract is a bit of a snarl, but — Hank, I’m going to put you on hold. There’s somebody on the other line.

All right, said Tyler.

He watched the second hand on the kitchen clock snail around for a full revolution, then another. Gently he replaced the phone in its cradle.

He had a dream that he went to a whorehouse in Chinatown. It was a strangely white dream, so that the crowds of Chinese women and girls toting bulging plastic bags of just-bought produce, and the little boys reading comics, all wore the same tints one sees in San Francisco on a sunny foggy morning, with the low white house-cubes of the Sunset under fog, and the silver tracks of morning enlightening all the pale houses of Noe Valley. Chinese kids in white trousers and white T-shirts banged drums and cymbals lazily with a muffled sound, carrying a dragonhead and subsequent dragontrain which they didn’t bother to get under. Outside City Lights Bookstore they set off firecrackers which flashed white light. In the dream it must have been around noon. Where was he exactly? Perhaps not far from the future headquarters of the Hang On Tong Society, because the tall narrow cave-arch of rainbow graffiti (a white rainbow, of course) weighed him down with familiarity. The place had just opened. He discovered himself to be in a room which resembled a restaurant, although it was not a restaurant, and the waiters were just taking the white chairs down from the white tables. Now the prostitutes entered single file. They were so pure, so impossibly beautiful that for a moment he could not breathe. While they had Asian features, their complexions were paper-white (probably because the previous day Tyler had been studying Jock Sturges’s books of photographic nudes, in which flesh was rendered either paper-white or marble-white). Their loveliness stupefied him. For a long time he couldn’t make up his mind which girl to take. Then suddenly he saw one who was even more beautiful than the rest She stood a little apart from them, and she was white like snow. They called her the White Court. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars to be with her, which was more than he had ever spent, but when he paid white cash at the registration desk, the clerk told him that he had a full twenty-four hours; he didn’t have to leave her until ten minutes before noon the following day. A stunning excitement resonated within him and echoed. This time he would finally get to know another soul. He’d be with her, talk to her, listen to her, memorize every episode of her life, know her in every possible way.

She went ahead to get ready. Then a woman came to show him the way. He was following her when he saw his brother. Tyler wanted to believe that it wasn’t he, because it was so incongruous to see him there and because it ruined his plans. But John addressed him by name. He was sitting at a table working, as always, or perhaps reading the newspaper, which in the dream came to the same thing. It seemed he’d established himself here only for the atmosphere. Tyler said: Well, I guess you know what I’m here for. — Go to it, John said wearily. He chatted with John for a few more minutes, because that was only right. Then he saw that the woman who had been going to lead him to the White Court had already disappeared down the hall. He’d paid, but she hadn’t waited for him. He ran down the corridor, but couldn’t find her.

The whorehouse was beginning to get busy. A young man in a suit said to the clerk: I’ll take the White Court, please. — Tyler realized that his reservation was already cancelled.

Later he went out with another prostitute who was friends with the White Court, an ordinary woman who did not hasten his heart. He asked her what the White Court thought of him. She said: My friend said you didn’t do much with her. You held her hand, but then you did nothing but read the newspaper.

Brady called his machine and said: Know who this is? I think you do. Well, you’re through. No hard feelings, but I’m tired of paying for nothing. I could have found that parking garage without you, and what’s more, there’s never anybody home! I’m sorry for you, so I’m going to tack a little consolation check onto your fee after you send me your bill, but make sure you have receipts to back everything up…

John called his machine and said: There’s something I need to talk to you about. — Tyler erased that message.

His mother called his machine and said: I just wanted to see how you were doing, honey. — He called her but she wasn’t in.