William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Hey, pervs! Ticklequick is back! Hv. 75 c.c. vanillaspit (Rodney, guarant’d 12, uncircumc. & hairless) for swap; seek chocopiss from virg. hairless slit 12 & under: MUST BE FRESH. Also NEED NEED NEED photos for swap. PLEASE NO RECOG. HEADSHOTS. Help Ticklequick put lemon on his lips. E-mail Big T!

Under FBI supervision, Dan Smooth spat into several dozen test tubes to furnish the nectar of fictitious Rodney; in exchange the FBI received and analyzed eighteen test tubes of piss, two of which contained significant levels of both testosterone and alcohol, one of which evidently came from a lactating woman, and one of which proved to be so old (the collector who sent it had perhaps kept it in a jar in some hot garage in the Central Valley for twenty years) that it could not be analyzed; these were discarded, leaving fourteen samples whose levels of estradiol, estrone, estriol, and pituitary gonadotropins were consonant with those of prepubescent girls. Thanks to improvements in laboratory techniques, only two of these were disqualified as nonsecretors, meaning that they were so chemically taciturn that not even the blood group could be read; this left an even dozen samples of young girls’ urine, which the FBI grimacingly permitted Dan Smooth to sniff and crow over, arranging the shining test tubes in order from pale transparent lemon to the rich dark orange-brown characteristic of a pure palladium photograph; and of course Smooth made many such comments as: This one ate asparagus for dinner, I know. Ah, if only I could have been there when she peed! — for, as I mentioned, Dan Smooth followed all three strategies, the latter one being bravado and defiance; he was by his nature kin to the killer, the exception being that he did not kill; and so the FBI ran DNA matches on those twelve test tubes of yellow light and dark, and the ninth test tube granted them a positive lock on Kaylin Kohler’s DNA, which led them to one Eugene Kenneth Brewington, who was convicted the following year, sentenced to death, and, after eight years as a guest of the state of California, at great expense actually executed by lethal injection, as a result of which Mr. Brewington’s attorney fell upon hard times and the district attorney, two FBI investigators, one forensic technician, and one field investigator in Redding received promotions, while Dan Smooth received no public acknowledgment whatsoever, but an obscure government draft for twelve thousand dollars arrived in his post office box one day, and a dispute which he was having with the Internal Revenue Service was abruptly decided in his favor, and he received a permit to carry a concealed weapon and a strange sort of untouchable status within the circles of law enforcement, as if he were one of those captive cobras in Bangkok whose venom can be milked for the greater good; and his cachet was confirmed when a hard gaunt FBI woman wanted to investigate and arrest the other eleven finalists in that competition of gold-filled test tubes, but Ticklequick, arguing that so doing would block his channels of information forever, not only succeeded in protecting his peers but even managed to obtain by special courier about two weeks after Mr. Brewington’s execution those eleven vials of vintage for his supposed delectation; needless to say, they had gone sour in that time, and Smooth’s real motive was simply to destroy that evidence once and for all, since he was well acquainted with three of the eleven collectors, and suspected the identities of two more; by the Golden Rule, so to speak, they would have done as much for him. The FBI woman became Smooth’s enemy, but he for his part was so filled with pride and happiness at the way that everything had turned out that he contented himself with a few mild remarks to her, such as: Is it true that you have an eleven-year-old daughter? I’d love to lick her cunt. — Dan Smooth, needless to say, was not stupid. The FBI woman did not have any children, and he knew that; thus his utterance, which came as naturally to him as any disquisition on the weather, could not be considered as any kind of threat. Since he could not have her friendship, he actively courted and received her hatred, so that when he returned to his house in Sacramento it was in a haze of triumph, magnified by his possession of the eleven test tubes, whose contents he immediately decanted and poured down the toilet. The test tubes themselves, which might contain residue even after thorough washing (although, their official seals having been broken, they were unlikely to find use as evidence) he gave to an acquaintance — not a friend, mind you, not a friend! — who, a former member of an armed anti-government militia in Oakland, now lived in Roseville, pursued a lucrative vocation as a non-union electrician, and on weekends experimented with the manufacture of strange and sometimes illegal handgun cartridges. This man had perfected the exploding bullet, the mercury-tipped bullet, the poisoned bullet; he had even for his own amusement hand-loaded special ammunition designed to murder the shooter rather than the target: within the casing’s coppery blankness lay, in addition to the gunpowder, a distant descendant of C-4 explosive guaranteed upon firing to turn a gun into a rapidly expanding constellation of shrapnel. Such cartridges were difficult to test, but Dan Smooth’s acquaintance had worked it all out in his head. Testing would almost have been cheating; unquestionably it would have evinced weakness of faith. The electrician was happy just to keep his little babies in a regular factory ammunition box; nobody knew their nature but he. When Smooth proposed that he create in his bullet-caster an amalgam of lead and brittle glass which would shatter upon contact with flesh, and when Smooth further informed his acquaintance that this was genuine FBI glass, the electrician grinned happily. Smooth stayed to watch the glass be disposed of. The electrician mixed him a rum and Coke, and then he drove home. It was a hot Sunday afternoon. — The earwax of a ten-year-old child, he muttered with a laugh. He sat in the back yard sweating. His tomato-soup-colored tom-cat slept on the grass beside the corpse of a young bluejay which it had slowly tortured and killed. Smooth did not seat himself before his computer keyboard which resembled a grimy ear of Indian corn; he did not become Ticklequick, because he quite correctly supposed that the FBI monitored all his keystrokes. Besides, all that had been simply to protect the Queen. It had been the Queen, of course, who’d found the killer for him. Like him, she received no recognition from the public; she’d acted simply out of goodness. At FBI expense, Smooth had brought her an immense bouquet of red, white and yellow roses, those being the color of his three favorite bodily fluids.

All this sounds perhaps like farce, so perhaps we should look deeper into Dan Smooth’s soul. About his sexual attraction to children it should be said that for him — in his own mind, at least — it had all begun as a matter of moral and intellectual curiosity. It is easy to disbelieve such an explanation, easy to insist that such but rationalizes his evil urge. But since other people ultimately remain unknowable, we may as well accept their own explanations of themselves as first approximations, barring further examination. He read in the newspaper one day about a father convicted of molesting his son and daughter, who were twelve and eight, respectively. The account, typically dry, grim and brief, merely announced that both children bore signs of repeated abuse, and that the man had been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. The mother was dead, apparently. And suddenly Smooth had a vision of the children crying as their father was handcuffed and driven away. They would grow up in an institution, perhaps separated from each other as well as from their father, perhaps beaten up or raped by other children, perhaps not. They would masturbate constantly, Smooth supposed (because he would). How evil had the father been? Suppose — which probably had not been the case — that he had done what he had done out of love. Suppose that he had fed and clothed them, helped them with their homework, listened to them. Suppose that he had witnessed them in sex play with each other, joining in only out of tenderness. Suppose that they had voiced some childish confusion about the difference between boys and girls, or how babies were made, and he had simply instructed them. Suppose that he had not hurt them. Suppose that he had liked it and they had liked it, too. Suppose that what he had done was good. We might well wonder why Dan Smooth wanted to suppose these things. But we do have to grant him the openness of a born scientific investigator in an epoch of harshly preconceived conclusions.