The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  After he came, shouting and groaning while she pressed down on him with all her strength, she kissed him deeply and they lay together, glued by sweat, panting. She took his face in her hands and whispered: Are you okay?

  He said: I want you to give me anguish.

  Ohh, she said happily, embracing him. Oh, you’re the one.

  | 241 |

  You know I love you or you don’t know?

  I know, he whispered.

  | 242 |

  He fell asleep in her arms and woke ashamed. Actually his dream had been this: Irene had sat on his face, grinding her pelvic bones hurtfully against his skull, then pissed long and loud into his opened mouth; he was suffocating; he swallowed her reeking, foaming stream; she shifted and squirmed and mashed herself down over his nose—he couldn’t breathe! He was dying! He struggled but she bore down harder; he had a tremendous erection; everything was going red.

  Don’t feel down, baby, said the Queen. I know everything. Lot of men like that. And you never got a taste from her?

  Once, he blurted out, but she didn’t know. I was . . . —and he remembered Irene and John’s laundry basket, and what in his desperation he had found there: the sour smell of life, the sour smell of death.

  He’d dreamed the very same dream before, when Irene was alive, and he’d said to her only: I dreamed about you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

  Irene said nothing.

  I know you don’t love me the way I love you . . . he muttered.

  His face flushed. He didn’t remember the rest. But the Queen knew it all.

  Lie still now, she said, clambering onto his face. He opened his mouth obediently. She gripped his head firmly between her thighs and began to make water in his mouth, more and more and more until he couldn’t swallow anymore; he was retching, and her urine was coming out his nostrils. It felt as though her piss had become his tears. Desperate and confused to the very bottom of his soul, he struggled among square tomblike openings far-spaced in the yellow walls of death, wanting to escape back into pure numb death but the Queen would not let him. It hurt so much! Tear-streams gushed like pale urine from his eyes. He was weeping for Irene and gagging on his own grief; grief was trickling out of his nose; but the grief was really the Queen’s painful water which she was giving him so that he wouldn’t feel so all alone. Her piss was in his lungs now and he was coughing and vomiting but she wouldn’t let go until her bladder had given its last drop. Then she lifted herself off him and sat on the soaking sheet, laying his head on her lap. His chest ached. She stroked his hair while he vomited. —That’s a good boy, she whispered. Queen’s good little boy. Never be ashamed, Henry. Irene’s crying for you, too. Never mind. Never mind. Now you’ve cried my tears, and it hurt you. Never mind, baby. Henry, you’re my baby. Can you breathe now? Try to breathe. You’re gonna feel better now, ’cause you cried so hard and it hurt you. You got punished, and now it’s all right, so never mind. Queen knows everything about you, Queen adores you, Queen’s good little boy . . .

  And, exhausted as he was, he realized that his sadness had been eased. He’d come out from a tunnel into the wide, stinking, sunlit world.

  | 243 |

  Hurt me, the Queen whispered.

  | 244 |

  He hardly slept all night, and in the morning felt headachey and nauseous. He wanted to vomit up the Queen’s urine, but he also longed to retain it. A double cappuccino picked him up slightly, but almost made him puke, so he drove to Muddy Waters with its bad paintings and ordered a double espresso with the brownish-yellow foam in the little cup, and some exciting crazy music that he’d never heard before was playing, causing him to grin and laugh. He was happy. He drank coffee until suddenly his fatigue shattered like windowglass and he was in the world of excitement and joy.

  I will pay you back today, the snowy-bearded panhandler said. I live right here in the neighborhood.

  Don’t worry about it, said Tyler.

  I will pay you back when I see you again.

  Okay. And if you don’t, why, don’t worry about it.

  Tyler wanted to give away everything he had. He was so proud, because his Queen loved him. He felt as if he had been cured of an incurable wound. For Canaanites, such moments are the most treacherous.

  | 245 |

  So many girls in the rain like black rubber butterflies! It was Friday night in the Tenderloin, and Justin leaned up against a grating, glaring. —Gun up! said the Queen. Keep yourselves sharp, now. —Long black and blonde hair waterfalls illuminated the hearts of heat-seeking men; ivory legs glistened in the rain. (It’s those legs that just jump out! Brady always used to say. —Wet, bare legs. But Domino, sideways against the wall, bent herself into a backward letter C, her breasts and belly jutting out.) There was Beatrice, leaning up against her private piece of streetwall with one knee up and the sole of her foot planted firmly against that wall as if she were a competition swimmer getting ready for the referee’s signal to push herself into the water of her life, racing to be the first to reach that same sad finish line which Sunflower and Irene had already crossed. Heat-seekers auto-crawled down from the heights of Jones Street, looking out across a plain of lights toward the horizon and then descending with the regularity of cable cars, lizard-silver in their swift inclinations. Heat-seekers emerged from the financial district, their wallets full of cash. Heat-seekers came from Chinatown. They sought wordlessly or garrulously, but they all sought without knowing why, each of them an animal, a body like some monstrous imbecile-prostitute at Feminine Circus, some speechless being deep red and swollen like a pregnant sow.

  Take Sapphire to the little girls’ room, would you, Bea? said the Queen. Sapphire’s got to pee.

  Let’s go, angel; doan be scared, said Beatrice, taking the retarded girl’s hand. Sapphire went with her trustingly to the alley.

  A Ford Escort pulled up for Chocolate. The man inside said: How do you stay so beautiful?

  I just keep prayin’ it up, the black woman chuckled, leaping in.

  All right, muttered the tall man. I got that sonofabitch’s license plate number in my head.

  A black-in-white rolled by, and the Queen waved at the open passenger window and said: How you all doin’, officers?

  Shaking their heads in disgust, the cops rolled on.

  Justin, go on by the parking garage and get our messages, please, said the Queen.

  Just lemme . . .

  Do as you’re told, Justin.

  Swearing, the tall man strode off. He came back and said: Vigs. That’s all they talk about now. Rumors of vigs and more vigs.

  All rightie. We got enough trouble night by night. Thank you, Justin.

  Maj, I got a bad feeling about these vigs.

  Okay. We’ll talk about it later. In private.

  You gonna let me go now?

  Where to? This here’s the busy time.

  Gonna make a run. Gonna score a big rock of white girl.

  Who wants white girl? laughed the Queen, and all the prostitutes eagerly raised their hands, like schoolchildren who knew the answer to the most important question of all.

  I’m sick of that shitty yellow rock you’ve been bringing back, Domino said. We can hardly get high off that stuff.

  Know what we call that kinda crack? laughed the tall man. Call it Oriental girl.

  Are you prejudiced? What the fuck do I have to be around prejudiced people for?

  Chill out, Dom, said the Queen.

  Don’t you tell me to chill out! I don’t like it when you pay forty dollars for a twenty dollar feeling. I never would have copped from that connection again.

  Oh, lordy, said the Queen.

  Chocolate returned from her trip around the block. She gave the Queen five for the general fund, and the tall man ten for crystal meth. Now she was whispering into the Queen’s ear, relating how a free agent named Feather had passed on a complaint about the management of the Mehta Hotel on Mission Street, whose managers insulted both the hookers and the tricks th
ey brought. —Shit, that’s fucked up, Chocolate commiserated. Somebody I know is gonna hear about that. Why the fuck they gotta do that? Specially when it’s us girls that be bringin’ ’em in their money. ’Less that’s how they get down, she chuckled. —All rightie, sighed the Queen. I’ll look into it.

  Another black-and-white came. The Queen waved; the cops waved back. When Beatrice waved, too, the tall man snarled: Don’t suck up to the bulls. —Beatrice, scared and silent, ran to embrace the Queen. —Mama, I were be very happy, she said. —There was an air of sweetness and patience in her face, with its red-brassy cheeks.

  All rightie now. That’s my good little girl.

  Maybe on November the twenty-sixth, I’m gonna make a party, said Beatrice. I’m gonna be nineteen. Maybe I can ask my Mama for this.

  ’Course you can have a party, child, said the Queen.

  Fuck, you look thirty, said Domino.

  The same black-and-white came circling back, and this time the cops didn’t wave. Strawberry, high on crank, informed the world: Two five-o’s come an’ slam me down on the street and I do jail time for trying to knife them—oh, my lymph nodes!

  Shut your face, the tall man said.

  Heads up now, everybody, said the Queen. How you all doin’, officers?

  Just fine, Maj. You’re going to have to break up the party. These girls are blocking traffic. If we see you here in ten minutes we’re going to have to write you up.

  Lordy lordy, sighed the Queen. Okay, officers. Justin, can you help Sapphire? Beatrice, I want you to run down to that place, you know that place I was tellin’ you about . . .

  Sapphire turned her head quickly and shyly, smiling with her pale face, and even while she smiled her tongue was hanging out.

  | 246 |

  Pull in here, pull in here, pull in here, said Domino impatiently; and the dark car crept into the sunset fog.

  Are you going to tip me? she added.

  Here’s five more, said the trick. You were really good. You’re always so good.

  You just need a little petticoat government, that’s all, the blonde explained. And did you buy me anything?

  Didn’t have enough . . . the trick whispered.

  See you, the blonde laughed, jumping out of that long black car. A condom fell out of her purse.

  Wait! called the poor desperate trick.

  She ran across the street to the tall man, shouting: Justin, Justin! That sonofabitch keeps asking about you. Get his license plate number. Get his—

  But the car was already speeding away.

  | 247 |

  Last week, Thursday or Friday, they hurt that girl up there, Beatrice was saying. They hurt her, and she was bleeding and everything. Why the police doan do anything about the ones taking money away from people that works? They just want us to be stealing and for us to do nothing.

  Vigs, said the tall man bitterly.

  Who were they, honey? said the Queen. Come an’ whisper in my ear.

  They talk about some Mr. Brady, I think I see him before, the fat man with big money, one time I give him a nice blow job . . .

  Brady’s Boys, huh? said the tall man. I heard about them in Chicago. Fuckin’ vigs.

  | 248 |

  The tall man, like the security guard at the War Memorial Opera House, who always locked his hand upon his head, leaned the resultingly reinforced elbow against a pillar, thrust his belly out and waited for time to go by, believed less in anticipating events than in seizing them when they began to appear like crow-dark ghosts and specters. From the window of darkened hotel rooms he watched light ooze down the immense brick and stone hips of the Tenderloin like a woman’s skirt slowly falling down around her fleabitten ankles. In the mouths of the Queen’s many tunnels he awaited doom. —I can’t get a fix on it yet, he muttered. Just how those godamned citizens tryin’ to fuck us up . . . Sometimes he squatted against the wall of the 101 Restaurant, watching. Abruptly, as if he could see his enemies, he rose and walked off, pulling the whore Strawberry by the hand.

  The next morning he was walking up Eighteenth and at South Van Ness saw a cop arresting a Latino boy who pleaded: Yes, I know, but I’m sorry; you gotta trust me! and he walked on feeling terrible for the boy.

  They’re all vigs, he said later. Vigs and citizens and everybody but us, all of ’em, all just one set, vigs and pigs . . .

  | 249 |

  Lily, peering at everyone in a half-blind fashion like an old welder, said brightly: That corner, right there, was where they found the two girls. And I saw them, too. You know, with their hands and their heads and their mouth kind of screaming. So you saw how they died.

  It’s only a dream, said Smooth. Like eating pure chocolate. Nobody really dies. But nobody ever gets to eat pure chocolate. It’s always cut with strychnine. But the dream, now—

  Stop eating goofballs, said Strawberry. You’re a goof.

  It’s like they never ate peanut butter, Smooth explained. And I’m passing out peanut butter.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, said Strawberry.

  What is real? Smooth asked her. What is true happiness?

  The whore didn’t answer.

  I said, do you know what real happiness is?

  I thought we were talking about those dead girls, said Strawberry. Now, Mr. Smooth, I don’t mean to disrespect you, and the Queen says you’re okay, but I hope that dead girls don’t have anything to do with your happiness.

  Can dead girls give head? said Smooth. Are they young enough? Are their little lips fresh enough?

  God, mister, you are twisted.

  Dan Smooth of course had the run of the new Sacramento coroner’s facility with its one hundred and eighty single or double tables and its special gurneys for decomposed patients, so he had seen a few things. He admired and complimented the ultraviolet lights which were used to decontaminate the room between autopsies by breaking down corpse-DNA into meaningless atoms of putrescence.

  In his opinion the double homicide referred to by Lily was of the same bemusing order as the coroner’s policy on freezing bodies, which is why Lily herself thought him to be freezing cold. But Smooth said: Do you believe in the resurrection of Lazarus? And, if so, do you believe that Lazarus truly wasn’t better off dead? Do you believe that Sunflower’s in Heaven now? Do you believe it’s right what she did?

  Hey, said Strawberry. I knew those girls. Those girls didn’t wanna die.

  | 250 |

  Only a few people ever saw the Queen and knew her when they saw her, and in those anxious days when the vigs began to arrive in force like gnawing vermin blind-set on uprooting every hotel in the Mission, every brickwork old massage parlor in the Tenderloin, they glimpsed her even more rarely, which is why some gaunt harsh old street men began rumoring that she was already gone; meanwhile she continued to do what she always did, hovering like a light above the waters so that no soul which rented out its flesh had to be alone any longer. Like the improverished old people in Sacramento who lurked air conditionless in their homes with the blinds pulled down against the glowing sun, she hid from vigilante-radiance, fulfilling her purpose on the dark landings of hotel stairs, wearing castoff clothes which sometimes crawled with lice or scabies; Tyler’s flesh was inflamed, scratched and bleeding now like that of all the rest of her crew; and Domino once with her saturnine humor hypothesized that the real Mark of Cain comprised scratch-marks behind the knees or around one’s crotch. The Queen smiled at this almost with docility, and Beatrice, uncomprehending, flapped a stained T-shirt up and down upon her unwashed breasts to cool them down, burning as they were with the bites of hungry insects and of lonely men. And that little figure with the old, old face, sitting on the bed in this hotel room for which Beatrice’s trick had paid for an entire night, then used merely for an hour as he had used Beatrice, then departed, giving the key into Beatrice’s hands with his own variety of secondhand kindness, that witch, that arch-Canaanite, that ancient Maj sighed, and said: Domino, go and get that T.V. in the hallway there. Bring him
in and we’ll talk to him about his happiness.

  And so the half-toothless old transvestite, thirty-two years of age, came in and sat down on the bed between Domino and Beatrice and said: I came to San Francisco and started whoring at sixteen. Most of the people I started out with are gone or dead. There are only three of them around now.

  Oh, come on, said Domino. Doesn’t that go for any group of people in sixteen years? She was actually trying to brighten him in her backhanded way. After his initial pleasure that somebody actually wanted him he’d become uneasy, almost alarmed. He could not comprehend why these women had requested his presence. —You got any bump? he whispered. I sure could use a little bump to bring myself like back into focus . . . —The blonde, who now grinned uproariously at the notion that she might under any circumstances give away drugs to strangers, felt as a rule entirely at home in the company of transvestites because they weren’t men anymore, so they did not want to use her sexually, and since they were also not quite women, they hardly competed with her for men. Exhausted by her own hatreds, she was pleased to express friendliness or even helpfulness, as she did toward, for instance, children, whenever they did not annoy her. And this quasi-female, skinny and ill, displayed sufficient signs of acquired immune deficiency for her to pity him and actually think good about him as she would of someone already safely dead.

  This here, this my sister, said Beatrice with a big black-toothed grin, formally introducing Domino. —And that one over there, that’s our Mama. And she defends us and doan never hit us, so we love her so much.