The Royal Family (18 page)

He turned into the Tenderloin. Secrets wept behind grilles’ richly patterned speckles of pure silver and pure black, which resembled the pewter beads in the store called Gargoyle on Haight and Masonic. Once Irene had asked him how he went about his work in bad neighborhoods, and he’d said: You go in during the day, figure out where you’re going. And, sure, you’ll go back during the night, but you’re pretty much in a direct line, you know where you’re going, although of course it remains pretty fluid and things can always go south on you.

But I worry about you! she’d said.

Oh, my stuff is all sportcoat and tie, he’d lied.

He drove back and forth on Turk Street, looking for the Queen.

It was very foggy that night outside his apartment. Tyler poured himself a shot of tequila, no salt, no lime, with the phone trapped between right ear and upraised right shoulder as he said: Oh, I’ll hire that stuff out if you make it worth my while. I’m kind of a one-man operation here. To do good surveillance you really need three players on the team. No, my prices aren’t really that competitive. In all honesty, I can’t recommend my services. You might try Stealth Associates. All right. All right. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for calling. Uh huh. That’s right. Good luck.

He tore a details description sheet off the pad and wrote:

SEX   female

RACE  ?? [African-American?]

AGE   ??

No shit, Sherlock, he said with a laugh.

He was afraid to turn off the light. In his mid-thirties, he had by strange starts developed a skin disease which prevented him from thoroughly sleeping anymore. He’d doze off for a couple of hours, and then a sensation as sharp and sudden as being stuck with a red-hot needle would awaken him, his heart clanging with panic. But it was not pain that he felt, but itching. The first dermatologist was too busy to see him for two months, and the second (or, I should say, the second’s receptionist) estimated that it would be at least a month and a half before the meeting of minds, so he went to a G.P. who said that it was scabies and charged him a hundred and twenty dollar consultation fee and wrote
a prescription for an ointment that didn’t work at all. Every night he woke up scratching his legs and stomach until they bled. Sometimes his arms itched, or the insides of his ears. The next doctor said that it was atopic dermatitis, and prescribed a moisturizing cream which worked for about two weeks, until the itching suddenly proclaimed its malicious midnight presence. After that he adopted a routine. For three nights he’d scratch and fight with his flesh. On the fourth, too exhausted to carry on, he’d take a sleeping pill. Soon he became habituated and had to double up his medication and then switch to ever stronger brands. Finally a whore told him to try Vaseline, which worked like a charm. But sometimes he still awoke itching. He was afraid that tonight would be like that.

PECULIARITIES ??

ALIASES Queen, Maj

CONFEDERATES Domino [??], Strawberry [??], Kitty [??], unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??]

That afternoon in the Tenderloin he’d glimpsed the blonde hooker, Domino, wandering into a nasty little watering hole called the Wonderbar, and so under the rubric
SUSPECTED LOCALITIES
he wrote:
Parking garage on Turk & Larkin, Tenderloin core area, Capp St/Mission core area [16th-20th Sts], Wonderbar [??].

His stomach rumbled. He sighed, shook a clattering tombstone batch of frozen spicy chicken drumsticks onto a glass plate, and microwaved them for four minutes. When he opened the microwave, sour orange grease flecked every wall. The drumsticks were overcooked on the outside and frozen on the inside. He gnawed them all down to their icy bony cores and microwaved them again for sixty-nine seconds. By then, he already felt queasy, so he set the plate on the counter and sat down again by the details description sheet.

CONFEDERATES Domino, Strawberry, Kitty, unnamed mentally unstable prostitute [??], Sapphire [??], others to be determined.

Let’s just run Domino through the system, he muttered, opening his fingers above the keyboard, but just then the telephone rang. It was a wrong number.

His skull ached. He dialled his brother’s number. His heart pulsated nauseatingly when immediately subsequent to the second ring John lifted the receiver and said:
Hello?

How’s everything? said Tyler.

Oh, fine. Have you been calling my machine and then hanging up?

No, John. Believe it or not, I have better things to do.

Like what?

Oh, let’s say some guy rear-ends a person and he says I didn’t know it was stopped because the tail-light was off. You can tell whether or not the lightbulb was oxidized. You just photograph it since the lawyers will—

I thought maybe you wanted to listen to Irene’s voice on the tape.

John, is this going to be a friendly phone call?

You made the call, not me.

I get it.

I erased it, Hank. I wiped it out.

You mean Irene’s message.

You may be stupid but you sure aren’t dumb. That’s it exactly. Now it’s
my
voice on the machine.

Well, bully for you.

So if you keep calling my answering machine and then hanging up, I’ll—

You know, John, they have a service for paranoid people like you. Caller ID. It’s finally legal in California now. That way you’ll see the phone number of the—

Oh, forget it, said John. Irene’s voice was giving Mom the willies, that’s all. Let’s just forget the whole topic. Let’s just bury it, so to speak.

Yeah, sure.

Let’s just put a granite headstone over it and sing a few hypocritical hymns.

I thought you were the religious one.

Well, certain things make a guy wonder, Hank. I’m still trying to . . .
Have
you been calling my machine?

I’m getting tired of this, said Tyler. (For their honeymoon, John and his bride had gone to London, where Irene had loved Queen Mary’s dollhouse, Madame Tussaud’s, the Changing of the Guard.)

So you’re tired, John said. Well, what the
fuck
about me?

How’s work?

Oh, fine. This Brady contract is a bit of a snarl, but—Hank, I’m going to put you on hold. There’s somebody on the other line.

All right, said Tyler.

He watched the second hand on the kitchen clock snail around for a full revolution, then another. Gently he replaced the phone in its cradle.

He had a dream that he went to a whorehouse in Chinatown. It was a strangely
white
dream, so that the crowds of Chinese women and girls toting bulging plastic bags of just-bought produce, and the little boys reading comics, all wore the same tints one sees in San Francisco on a sunny foggy morning, with the low white house-cubes of the Sunset under fog, and the silver tracks of morning enlightening all the pale houses of Noe Valley. Chinese kids in white trousers and white T-shirts banged drums and cymbals lazily with a muffled sound, carrying a dragonhead and subsequent dragontrain which they didn’t bother to get under. Outside City Lights Bookstore they set off firecrackers which flashed white light. In the dream it must have been around noon. Where was he exactly? Perhaps not far from the future headquarters of the Hang On Tong Society, because the tall narrow cave-arch of rainbow graffiti (a white rainbow, of course) weighed him down with familiarity. The place had just opened. He discovered himself to be in a room which resembled a restaurant, although it was not a restaurant, and the waiters were just taking the white chairs down from the white tables. Now the prostitutes entered single file. They were so pure, so impossibly beautiful that for a moment he could not breathe. While they had Asian features, their complexions were paper-white (probably because the previous day Tyler had been studying Jock Sturges’s books of photographic nudes, in which flesh was rendered either paper-white or marble-white). Their loveliness stupefied him. For a long time he couldn’t make up his mind which girl to
take. Then suddenly he saw one who was even more beautiful than the rest She stood a little apart from them, and she was white like snow. They called her the White Court. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars to be with her, which was more than he had ever spent, but when he paid white cash at the registration desk, the clerk told him that he had a full twenty-four hours; he didn’t have to leave her until ten minutes before noon the following day. A stunning excitement resonated within him and echoed. This time he would finally get to know another soul. He’d be with her, talk to her, listen to her, memorize every episode of her life, know her in every possible way.

She went ahead to get ready. Then a woman came to show him the way. He was following her when he saw his brother. Tyler wanted to believe that it wasn’t he, because it was so incongruous to see him there and because it ruined his plans. But John addressed him by name. He was sitting at a table working, as always, or perhaps reading the newspaper, which in the dream came to the same thing. It seemed he’d established himself here only for the atmosphere. Tyler said: Well, I guess you know what I’m here for. —Go to it, John said wearily. He chatted with John for a few more minutes, because that was only right. Then he saw that the woman who had been going to lead him to the White Court had already disappeared down the hall. He’d paid, but she hadn’t waited for him. He ran down the corridor, but couldn’t find her.

The whorehouse was beginning to get busy. A young man in a suit said to the clerk: I’ll take the White Court, please. —Tyler realized that his reservation was already cancelled.

Later he went out with another prostitute who was friends with the White Court, an ordinary woman who did not hasten his heart. He asked her what the White Court thought of him. She said: My friend said you didn’t do much with her. You held her hand, but then you did nothing but read the newspaper.

Brady called his machine and said: Know who this is? I think you do. Well, you’re through. No hard feelings, but I’m tired of paying for nothing. I could have found that parking garage without you, and what’s more, there’s never anybody home! I’m sorry for you, so I’m going to tack a little consolation check onto your fee after you send me your bill, but make sure you have receipts to back everything up . . .

John called his machine and said: There’s something I need to talk to you about. —Tyler erased that message.

His mother called his machine and said: I just wanted to see how you were doing, honey. —He called her but she wasn’t in.

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.