The Royal Family (74 page)

The day that Tyler drove to the airport, passing many darkly spreading trees and white houses in Daly City on which fog came smearing and smooching down so that the world’s end, the end of all vision, lay very close, it was sunny in the Tenderloin where Justin, tall and lean, grew like a cornstalk in a dark army jacket beside the wall of Jonell’s Bar, his collar pushed up and his cap pulled down, listening and watching while he seemed to be but surveying inner space. The loud sermon across the street remained on an untuned channel of his soul’s radio.

Beatrice said to him: Well, the Christians, they have different beliefs. I doan believe in it. I go with our Queen or with Strawberry. She is a Christian. I go with her, and they sing or they cry, and they speak about that kind of happiness for the dead people.

Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped
SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE—CA
. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. Her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all.

One of the preacher’s lieutenants approached. The tall man raised a single eyebrow.

The lieutenant said: Man, I was paralyzed for fifteen years. I was a drug addict. Man, Jesus healed me.
He healed me!
So I wasn’t sick no more. You listening? Hallelujah!

You seen my forehead? replied the tall man in a gravelly whisper.

What about it, man? We ain’t got
time
for personal vanity here!

Look upon me, boy. Look upon my mark. You seen my mark?

That’s just an abscess, man. Listen to me. When a user gets touched by the Holy Ghost, he ain’t a user no more. He’s free! Amen!

Get the fuck away from me, said the tall man.

Jesus can save you, the lieutenant pleaded. Don’t stay with the Devil. Don’t let yourself be damned.

The tall man rose to his complete and immense height and almost playfully tapped the lieutenant in the chest. The lieutenant fell backward. He shouted: I said forgive him, turn away, praise God! But Brady’s Boys are gonna get him, hear me,
Lord!
Brady’s Boys are coming to town . . .

•

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”

 

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.”

 

G
NOSTIC
S
CRIPTURES
,
The Gospel of Thomas
V, 5, II, 2, 114.20–25 (1st or 2nd cent. ?)

•

I’ll tell you a truth as long and naked as a cocktail waitress’s leg: Tyler did not like Las Vegas. Only for a check with more than one zero on it—or for his Queen—would he have consented to leave home, venturing beyond the white-candied mountains of his Sierras spiced with treetops. There were three new hotels and then there was Feminine Circus, they said. Already as Las Vegas spread her thighs before him like a collage of silicon chips on the tan plain, he saw the black pyramid of mediocrity like a dull jewel, the Sphinx crouching out in front. That was the cheap easy place where he had to go. That was the Hotel Luxor. John and Brady and the rest wouldn’t be caught dead there. They all had suites at Feminine Circus.

The pink ticket said:

$                                $

GRAND OPENING

FEMININE
CIRCUS

TONITE!!!

Free
Free
Free

SEX SEX SEX SEX

No minors permitted beyond
family areas.

$                                $

And indeed, it truly was Sneak Peek Night at Feminine Circus—the largest virtual sex casino in the world (this week, at least). —
But it is amazing what half a billion dollars will do . . .
the C.E.O., one Jonas Brady, was musing aloud at the press conference.
Half a million dollars a day for three and a half years!
—A jungle of people blossomed behind the ropes. Not very far from them, a man whose cardboard sign read
DOWN ON MY LUCK—THANKS AND GOD BLESS
stood frozen beneath the
freeway. If only he had known about the free hors d’oeuvres at Feminine Circus! The cool and concentrated faces of the musicians on their bandstand cast musical intellections down into the empty space of the future, for the sake of which the well-dressed people standing on the curb sipping drinks, the TV cameras and the people who served them, self-important geeks with light meters and duffel bags, glum security men in black suits, politely downpointing the antennae of their walkie-talkies, the police with their Sam Browne belts, hands close against their batons, were all here to do reverence.

Then a long silver limousine pulled up and everyone said: That’s her.

It’s the Queen!
a small child cried in the silence.

A flunky opened the silver door.

We have to have a twenty-foot opening in here! a security man called.

Weary and disgusted, Tyler moved to the back of the crowd, where the biped and her handlers could still be seen on a big granular screen near the righthand stage. John and Celia were there somewhere, he supposed, probably up near the front in VIP seats. He hoped that they were having a good time, and that John was being decent to Celia. For a moment he wondered whether he should try to find them, perhaps by querying one of these men in long coats who held walkie-talkies repeatedly and sternly to their ears; but he but quickly sent that naive idea packing—why would he have any more to say to his brother in Vegas than in San Francisco? Besides, his presence would make John anxious. To hell with it.

Asian tourists in black suits cautiously raised point-and-shoot cameras. Children staring upward and rapidly moving their lips as in prayer, bare-shouldered women who showed thigh, women in leather jackets and furs who held almost completed cocktails with a maraschino cherry in each glass marking the icy ruins, bigshouldered men who pushed through the other heads like bulls, chains of old ladies who wriggled between professional ladies in grey blazers who tapped their toes; these were Tyler’s neighbors, and while he did not dislike any of them he would much rather have been on Mars. The faces were waiting faces. At least they were more alert here than inside. They still granted reality priority over its lookalike; something was about to happen, no matter how self-serving and trivial; maybe they would see people instead of virtuellas.

Another celebrity disembarked from a limousine, and the lady next to Tyler said: Who is it?

I can’t see his face so I don’t know, her husband said.

Who’s this Queen they keep talking about? asked Tyler innocently.

It’s Queen Zenobia from
Lollipopland!
a small girl informed him.

Don’t talk to strangers, said her mother.

Why, I’m not a stranger at all, ma’am, said Tyler brightly. My name’s Henry Tyler, U.S. Marshals. —And he flashed his toy police badge.

Oh! Well, officer, that’s Queen Zenobia from Lollipopland. Say hello to the nice officer, Darlene.

Hello. Are you really an officer?

Yes, Darlene, I really really am, Tyler beamed. He leaned toward Darlene’s mother, winked, and whispered: Vice Squad.

Well, they say this Queen Zenobia is really quite a . . .

Is that a
fact,
ma’am, said Tyler in amazement.

Just then a man cried:
Ladies and gentlemen!
and then a lady in red ruffles who might
have been Betty Boop said something so squeaky, echoey and affected that for the life of him Tyler could not understand a word. Everyone applauded, and she introduced the Marquis de Sade:
There he is, everyone!
Then they all came, Cleopatra, Snow White, Bambi, Barbie, Helen of Troy in a silver miniskirt, the Queen of Sheba, Queen Zenobia, the Wicked Witch of the West, Mata Hari, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland. They came in a coach whose driver wore a red hat like a folded prickly pear lobe, like a giant set of testicles. Tyler thought that he saw Munchkins, but they might have represented some other even more obscene constituency; their hats were a combination of semifilled condoms and Christmas stockings. There was so much feedback on the microphone that he could barely hear their imbecilic song, which echoed in the cold night like death.

Can you see anything? the man beside him said.

No, I can’t, the wife said. And I’m cold and my feet hurt.

Another limousine came, crammed full of big-eyed cartoon animals, and Tyler thought that he would be more ashamed to wear their livery than to hire himself out for sodomy; but he saw a happy smile on the face of the girl beside him, while a man in black just behind craned rigidly at the animals, bugging out his eyes as if he had just been executed. What gave him the right to deride his fellow Americans’ pleasure? Whatever bearing all this might have on his Queen, his love, he ought never attack any harmless means to happiness whatsoever, no matter how sentimental or false it might be. The crowd cheered, clapped, leaned forward smiling; this meant so much to them. The celebrities for their part stretched their faces wide in smiles of yearning love. Cameras and microphones sprouted on monopods above people’s heads. Grinding his teeth, narrowing his eyes, he forced a weakly trembling smile onto his face, according to the best impulses of repentance, but small Darlene saw and whispered: Mommy, why does that man smile so
phony
like that?

In the outer darkness across the street by the Hotel Tia Maria marched three thousand union souls with their white pickets:
We say no way! Brady say, take away. We say no way!
They began to trudge and swarm like ants back and forth in the darkness.
Brady say, take away. We say no way!
Their pale signs bobbed and crossed on the sidewalk. Their line stretched so long under the sky. Because the sidewalk constrained them, they comprised (Tyler suddenly realized) one of the first large entities he had seen in Vegas which had contours. He could actually sense the width of this angry crowd which stretched across the sidewalk and paraded back and forth; he didn’t have to see it on a TV monitor. It meant something. He didn’t know whether he agreed or disagreed with it but at least it was real. The picketers for their part had nothing to look at but the vast pink cliffs of Feminine Circus and then the blue slab under which the huge screen glowed and Jonas Andrew Brady, the big cheese, appeared on it to cry out: The world’s largest sex casino! Can you take a hint? Seven thousand beds! and the picketers raised their signs high, trying vainly to drown him out, yelling:
Union! Union! Union! Union!
and then
AFL! CIO! AFL! CIO!
in loud almost bullying voices which would not go away, and some of them were ululating like Arab women.

Tyler went around the back of Feminine Circus and saw a sad man in coveralls who was dragging bags of laundry into a black truck whose side read
STERILIZATION
. Tyler wondered where the dirty laundry came from when the place wasn’t even open yet.

He said to the security guard who watched him there in the cold emptiness beyond the crowd’s edge: What do you think of those union guys?

They’re making a lot of noise, the man replied, shrugging.

A handshake on the giant screen signaled the first firecracker, and the strikers went crazy, screaming
Union! Union! Union! Union!
but the crowd in the valet portico paid no attention, and subsequent fireworks annihilated the union message like artillery shells, brightly granular in the black desert sky, sandy crabs and spiderwebs that glowed. Every now and then Tyler could still hear:
Union! Union!
All right, let’s get the line movin’! Let’s keep it movin’!
Union! Union!
—The dynamite was beautiful, and blue beams whirred and sliced around in the vast cold sky. Dozens of fireworks shot up from behind a distant hotel with a noise like bull-roarers, polluting the night with smoke, burning the whole sky green; it rained light straight up as the band played “Back Alley Girls.” On the bandshell, Brady laughed into a dozen microphones:
What happened? It was just a dream five years ago and now it’s a VIRTUAL SEX METROPOLIS!