William Vollmann: The Royal Family

Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he’s gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened hero. I drink around his death, being no angler by any inclination, and leave him in the weird shallows. The glass set down, I idle beneath the fan, while beyond my window-bars a warm drizzle passes silently from clouds to leaves.

How to die? How to live? These questions, if we ask the dead fly, are both answered thus: In a drunken state. But drunk on WHAT should we all be? Well, there’s love to drink, of course, and death, which is the same thing, and whiskey, better still, and heroin, best of all — except maybe for holiness. Accordingly, let this book, like its characters, be devoted to Addiction, Addicts, Pushers, Prostitutes, and Pimps. With upraised needles, Bibles, dildoes and shot glasses, let us now throw our condoms in the fire, unbutton our trousers, and happily commit

THIS MULTITUDE OF CRIMES.

But seriousness commands us to recognize that it’s the multitude of laws that is responsible for this multitude of crimes.

DE SADE (1797)

The blonde on the bed said: I charge the same for spectators as for participants, ’cause that’s all it takes for them to get off.

I can get a hint, said Brady.

Oh, it’s not a hint, the blonde said. I don’t give a fuck if you stay. You just have to pay me, is all.

That’s exactly why he’s not going to stay, Tyler explained.

I’ll be at the bar across the street, said Brady. Try to not take as long as you did last night. This is getting really old.

My heart bleeds, laughed Tyler. Of course, it always bleeds around now. It’s that time of the month.

Are you a misogynist? said the blonde.

What do you mean?

Do you have it in for women just because they menstruate and you don’t?

I’m going now, said Brady.

I said, do you hate women? the blonde went on.

Have a beer, sweetheart, said Tyler in disgust. The things I put up with.

The door closed behind Brady. Tyler continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment, listening to his footsteps fade down the hall. He heard a door open and a woman begin yelling in Chinese. Then that door closed, too, and he heard Brady’s footsteps a little longer. When they had entirely died away, Tyler sighed and put his legs up. He did not bother to remove his shoes.

I’d prefer a wine cooler instead of a beer, the blonde said. I see you have plenty.

Help yourself, doll.

I’m not a doll. I’m a human being, and my name’s Domino.

Pleased to know you, he said. My name’s Henry.

I used to date a guy named Henry once. He was a real asshole.

It goes with the name.

Whatever. Are you going to get undressed or not?

I am undressed. Do you see me wearing a necktie? My brother wears neckties. He works downtown.

Look. I’ve got other dates to take care of, so can’t we please move things along? Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.

Tyler untabbed his beer and burped. The hard grey beetle-shell of his face seemed to express embitterment, but it was only tension. His narrowed eyes guarded his soul by occluding and devaluing it. Tonight he was vulgarizing himself still further to play some conception of an appropriate part, perfectly aware of his inconsequentiality to the blonde but habit-driven to conform and mimic, just as when, spying on some potentially unfaithful banker in the financial district, he’d wear his old London fog and stand with the suspect’s photograph hidden inside the latest Wall Street Journal. And tonight he was a nasty old whoredog. — Let’s see what you look like naked, he said.

Then she took her dress off, presenting to his secret-loving eyes belly-wrinkles like sandbars, and she took her bra off to let him see her round breasts bulging with silicone, and for him she took off her panties to give to his view her crusty blackish-reddish crotch. Lying on the bed long-legged with her red shoes on, she let him finger-trace the highway of a motorcycle wound, the white island of a bullet wound pigmented with granules or black hairs. Then the pipe’s orange reflection glowed on her cheek as she squatted, inhaled, took the pipe out, kissed him, exhaled her smoke into his mouth: taste of bubblegum breath, her tongue in his mouth, then the numbness and heartracing happiness.

Thank you, he said. That was good of you. (When he said it he meant it. But after all, he thought a moment later, it isn’t as though doing that cost her anything. Everybody has to breathe out.)

You want some gum? she said.

No, thanks.

Well, what do you want?

I was wondering if you knew the Queen of the Whores.

Hell, no, the blonde said.

She lit the pipe again and got on all fours to blow her drugbreath into his mouth, looking very pretty with her buttocks high. Probably she meant to outshine his glimmer of unreadiness, since quick beginnings help make quick endings. She had things to do. He put an arm around her, pulling her toward him as he returned her kiss. Without knowing why, he’d begun to like her, drawn perhaps to the quickwitted, sarcastic rudeness and desperation of her. But business barred him from showing it. Brady wouldn’t have cared if he laid her, but sexually she did not speak to him because he was in love with another woman whom he was not supposed to think of in that way and therefore perpetually did, now imagining the blonde to be her so that the blonde saw his hard face soften and his eyes dreamily open into nothingness as she pressed her mouth tighter against his, believing then, not unreasonably, herself to be the cause. Domino liked the world to think well of her. Gesturing, her arm incredibly jointed yet smooth like her breast, smooth and multi-lit like a wax pear in rainbow light (he knew perfectly well that it was the crack that so pleasantly exaggerated things), she lay on her side, caressing the mattress while her folded shoulder-shadows flickered.

Well, said jocular Tyler, if you did know, who would she be?

She might be me! laughed the whore, throwing herself onto her back with disconcerting suddenness. Then she took his hand and funnelled it down into her crotch.

That’s true, he said, pretending to consider. Why, she might even be me, or Mr. Brady.

That your friend? He sure looked like a loser.

He is a loser. But he pays me.

You gonna pay me?

Yep.

You’d better pay me. I don’t take to being gaffled.*

Now honestly, said Tyler. Do I look like the gaffling type?

As soon as he’d breathed down the clean and bitter smoke well moistened by her lungs, his heart had begun to beat even faster, so that he felt as alertly alive as if he had been terribly afraid instead of being perfumed with delight.