William Vollmann - The Royal Family

A Mrs. Bickford called his machine to request a confidential appointment. Tyler wrote her number down.

A drunk called his machine and said: Goddamn you old goddamn you old goddamn.

The landlord called his machine to let him know that the toilet was working very nicely, in case he hadn’t noticed. He called the landlord’s machine and said thank you.

At Judgment Day we’ll all slide our jellyrotted flesh back onto our bones just as a street-whore slips her undies back on while she’s sitting at the edge of the bed, getting ready to go; and then time will crash like the hotel door splintering under the blows of God’s cops who’ve come to execute their bench warrant — back to the Hall of Justice for summary judgment, so that Satan can boil the flesh back off of us forever! Can there be judgment without pain? I would say not. Until the verdict, the soul must wait in fear; fear is a sort of pain. And Tyler, whose apartment windows were already fog-darkened, waited and waited for some exception to absolve him from rules, before the ultimate judgment devoured him. Lodging his pistol beneath his left armpit, he rose, dimmed down the brightness of his computer monitor because he had never felt like spending forty dollars on a screen saver, turned off the kitchen light, turned on the bedroom light, donned his windbreaker, locked up the apartment, descended the wet grey stairs, and drove away. He wasn’t desperate, merely bored. He wanted to do something new. Some homeowners study grass-seed, until lawnsmanship comes naturally; thus they while away the time before decomposition. Renters tend to be disinclined toward that solution. As for Tyler, rolling into North Beach, passing the purple neon waterfall behind the sign for Big Al’s, he decided that he ought to take up reading again. It might distract him. He admired his mother for all her book-knowledge, although she knew little of life, which was probably better anyway. In his past at home there had been much quarreling with raised voices, in the streets so many possessed souls attacking bodies, uttering demonic screams. No matter whether you sought the world out or hid from it, something would get you. — His friend Ken the wedding photographer used to jocularly shout at the cronies of some bridegroom: He’s been married so many times he’s got rice scars! and that was funny, but when he thought about it, it actually became not so funny because all the living had scars and then they got wounds, and more scars, and more wounds, until they died. That was a given, but didn’t anything lie beyond that? His mother was happy enough reading. She’d garnered wisdom of a harmless sort, like a philatelist’s, and taught him how to get it for himself. Tenderly he remembered the evenings that he’d sat beside John on the sofa and she’d read to them both from the Narnia books, the dog looking up, interestedly twitching its legs, and in bed he’d close his eyes and see the characters running silently upon the stageboards of his inner skull, while John cleared his throat in the darkness next door. Later his mother had bought them the whole set of Hardy Boys novels with their matching spines, and he had enjoyed them even more than John. He owned a gift for telling how the plots would turn out. Perhaps it was then that he wanted to be a detective. Use iodine fumes to reveal indented writing, he learned. Chloral hydrate is knockout drops. The Hardy Boys had made interfering with other people’s business into something exciting and brave; they never had to fill out surveillance forms, and their adversaries were always evil, unlike the Japanese banker’s wife in the Nikko Hotel who’d screamed and tried to cover herself when she’d seen his long lens against the window, while her lover fled to the bathroom; imploringly she clasped her hands; what had she ever done to Tyler? After that, he’d always felt sick when he took infidelity cases, the gaping mouth of the banker’s wife remaining impressed on his brain’s pavement like skid marks on an accident scene (they actually begin disappearing within minutes, which is why the well-prepared detective photographs them through a polarizing filter). And yet no unpleasant taste had troubled his soul when he’d brought Irene to the Kabukicho restaurant that time so long ago now, making use of the Japanese banker’s embossed silver card! Maybe he could not afford unpleasant impressions. Why, in that case, did he feel so downcast now? Turning down Columbus, he achieved the Susie Hotel with the four red ideograms upon its sign, and cool greenish-yellow brightness upstairs behind the curtained windows. He made a right, and fortune granted him a parking place in front of some littered apartment complex or housing project behind an immense gate. A pay phone hung in a steel box out front. He called his answering machine. No messages.

With John’s Minox in one well-zipped jacket pocket and his pistol in the other (his armpit had gotten sore), he entered City Lights to seek out the ink-scented whiteness between the thighs of books, and just across from the register stopped to survey the tall, narrow surrealism shelf of paperbacks: The Heresiarch, Maldoror, Irène’s Cunt, My Last Sigh, The Tears of Eros, The Jade Cabinet… For sentimental reasons he opened Irène’s Cunt and read: Irène is like an arch above the sea. I have not drunk for a hundred days, and sighs quench my thirst. That made him feel almost happy — why, he could not have said. But he was well accustomed to situations in which not all the facts could be explained.

In the checkerboard-floored poetry room where people sniffled and shuffled (the turning pages, surprisingly, were silent) he gazed out the window at the sparkling barbed-wire stars of neon rushing round the Hungry I outside (LOVE MATES, said the sign), accompanied by more neon, cars, and whistlers. A couple faced the wall of poetry, and the man said: Honey, one of the greatest, uh, Mexican writers is Carlos Fuentes. Have you read him? — The woman sighed. — I tried, she said.

A young blonde clutched her throat as she wandered in silence from Bao Ninh to Edward Lurie; when she squatted down to touch the spine of Dreams of the Centaur he saw a single strand of grey hair in the back of her head. It seemed to him that if he only found the right book to suckle from, he would be saved.

Another woman seated herself at one of the little round tables, pulled at her lower lip, and waited, or thought. Outside, a bus ground by. Someone uttered a quiet laugh. The shadows of browsers moved upon the floor.

With his hundred dollars’ worth of books in a paper bag he strolled up Columbus that hot night and found a new smoothie place with blue and pink tinted surrealist Rubenesque nudes on the walls, naked angels swimming in pastel clouds. A yawning old Chinese man passed the open window, and then, emerging strangely from the glare of a hotel sign, a drunk yelled: Smoothies, man! reached in, yanked a flower from a potted plant, and looped onward in the direction of City Lights, swinging the neck of his bottle with the same happy expressiveness of possession as the young lesbian a moment later who neared and vanished, twining her fingers ruthlessly in another girl’s hair.

I don’t want anything sweet, Tyler said to himself. Let me get something that’s good for me.

For a dollar twenty-five he ordered a urine-sample-like cup of wheatgrass juice, as emerald as ferric oxalate; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like liquid grass. — Well, I hope this does something, he thought.

The beverage, thick and bubbly like spit, vastly bored him. He gulped it down quickly and went back to the car. No messages on his answering machine. A police van hunkered black and blocky at the corner, its antenna bent back timidly. He did not feel ready to sleep. Why not drive? Tonight the Broadway tunnel was bright and empty, only one stern cyclist with blinking red lights at his heels to share with Tyler that echoing dismalness. At Polk and Broadway a traffic jam compelled one driver to yell: Fuck, fuck, fuck! — Tyler made a face. Fillmore: hill and hill, and then twin light-lines with car-lights in between, black bay ahead, and then the lights of Marin — Tiburon or Sausalito? He suddenly wasn’t sure. On Lombard Street two men were grinning and heil Hitlering at passing cars. Chestnut: He stared back into the glowing red traffic eye… Without much reason he swung left on this street, passing the Horseshoe Tavern where John had once bought him drinks, and then a juice bar where he used to meet John and Irene; here was the bank machine on Pierce where Irene used to come before she went shopping; here was the Chestnut Street Grill, which John said was no good (Tyler had never tried it); Laurel’s toy store, Scott, Divisadero, then apartment buildings rising fog-colored in the dark… He was wasting his life.