The Royal Family

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Staring out the corner window in the evening as white cars and blue cars drove very slowly toward him, then vanished beneath the shuddering maple tree, which was wide like Mau-Mau skin sandals, our unnamed hero remembered the innocent girl; it was the recollection of her innocence (which I said was not really innocence) that led him into his interest in retarded girls, which began one Pennsylvania night when he’d become so isolated from his hostess, lost in the forest of candles and crystal, surrounded by people with whom conversation had been exhausted like an old mine, so everyone stared in non-intersecting gazes at the hostess, who, smiling and rigid, nodded big-eyed as the guest of honor (not our lover) slipped a hand across the back of her chair; she parted her lips in wonder at his every word; but, being a good hostess, discovered the silence across the table before it had even fallen; so that while the guest of honor talked on and she nodded like an amiable puppet she was already scheming how to save him so far away across the table — and did she? Well, not until after dinner; there was no human way he could be spared that ordeal. He’d known that before he got there to be seated beneath the painting of Isis with her slender buttocks always in profile on a narrow ledge, raising her hands, groping at the Pharaoh. It had been that way ever since the time he’d spied on his octopus-minded ex-wife, who’d been waiting for him. She was sitting alone on a bench in the night, on the corner of the bench, a marble bench. She was a little hunched, with her arms linked over her purse, and he could see from behind how her blonde hair darkened steadily toward the center of her head until it almost achieved the blackness of her dress, which, being velvety, not shiny, and abetted by the stark white hem, far eclipsed the blackness of her high heels as she sat there on that bench, never moving; until a couple sat down beside her and then she moved a little farther away. After half an hour she started looking at her watch. His hatred grew. He longed for her to leave. But she was waiting for him. She waited for more than an hour. When she finally stood up, he began to cry very quietly in the bushes behind her. Now she’d be going to do the other thing, he supposed. He could see her. She had her face between the other woman’s legs, working at her with soulful sucking sounds, as greedy as a girl probling the long plastic spoon into her cup of slushy-ice on a hot lunch hour, sitting sidesaddle on a bench, hunched over the slushy to help its coolness reach her sweaty throat; in her joy she no longer sees the army of boys who drive their division of golden plastic tanks almost to her toes; when she’s scraped every little crystal of blue-green ice from the cup, she bends down further, claps it to her face, works her tongue as far down the cups insides as she can reach, pig-nosed with that cup between her eyes. That was how it must be with his wife and the other woman. This had never happened and never would, but he needed to believe in it; that was as good a method as any to invent a way she didn’t love him. So he fled as soon as he could, like a gecko fleeing a moving shadow, and the hostess was sorry that she’d asked him to her dinner party because nobody could draw him out, and the women who’d been compelled to sit beside him at that vast and miserable table were more than happy to talk to other men, and he was twitching, blinking and sweating as he got into his car. If you have ever seen a couple at a bar, she smiling with lovely white teeth and with every calligraphic eyebrow-hair, her lashes sparkling with fun, her pupils gleaming, her nostrils stretched wide, while beside her he leans droopy-eyed, his smile a purely sarcastic knife or leaf, and behind him somebody in the darkness chugs another can of beer, then you will know more or less how it had been. It was almost dark. He drove to the outskirts of that town, where American flags hung limper than used condoms, only the brass eagles nailed above doorways hanging firm; and he passed the taprooms and the rusty markets that sold Hershey’s ice cream, and his headlights massaged the portico of the Weed Hotel, turning left onto the two-lane highway whose bus just ahead got bigger and smaller. Finally the bus turned off, and then it was a van just ahead, inside which children were fighting, silhouetted in the dusty window. — Past the fence of three rusty cables at the roadside marked here and there with plastic forks and squashed possums, the grass ran richly down to river-ponds almost as warm as blood in which the teenagers bathed beneath the powerlines. He pulled over by the picnic tables, got out, locked up because he knew the ways of the Pest. Scuttling down through prickers, bending back the soft lavender sneeze-flowers, he slid into his favorite spot, a culvert whose uphill end he’d sealed off with shovelfuls of dirt; there he kept his foam rubber mattress, the moss-stuffed mailbag for his pillow, and when he lay there watching the skinnydipping girls through his binoculars, he could always be counted on to ejaculate like some stupendously stupid night-lit fountain streaming and spilling and guttering through its troughs. How innocent they seemed, too! They were innocent because they didn’t know that he was watching them; their breasts swelled with the same candor he’d seen in sneak-peek photographs. (Yes! His name was Dan Smooth.)

He knew not, this veteran captain, what plan to urge upon himself except the old plans (no fault of his, that old plans were derailed); he’d fall back into the encarnadine trench, taken by persuasion’s assaults! His octopus-minded ex-wife had paid him back for yesterday; he’d pay her back with tomorrow: that is how wars go. Limping down between rocky uncertainties as a cat limps, he wandered through a graduation at Berkley which he’d come to just to see the girls; his resolution had not at all affected the routine of the Economics Department whose young faces were meaty and confident beneath the mortarboards, parents brushing the dust and soot from the shoulders of their dark gowns, Japanese dads focusing their zooms while every mom looked on with full-judged concern. Ignoring sons, he scanned the daughters with salvo upon salvo of loving glances… no use — he’d grown too old! The sun shone with impersonal malice on the cement, none of the young graduates suspecting the dark wretchedness of adult events that would mutilate and eventually destroy them. The profile-line of mortarboard, cheek and gown was very pleasant, but now the graduates doffed their ceremonial vestments and lost their splendor, becoming just like everyone else. — Well, now he’d do what seemed best to him. No luck with young things, incarnadine prizes unripe? Well, he’d light the battle in another way, with the flame-white hair of elder dames! Surely they wouldn’t keep their treasures to themselves… Fishing deathlessly, he soon had something on his hook… That very night he was besieging the middle-aged lady with kisses, undermining her vigilant lips, his tongue the battering ram that assaulted the gates of her modestly clenched teeth which held firm until, sending a clever shot behind her lines, he exploded and dissolved her earlobe in a single lick of slobbery lust; now the gates opened, and ferociously the tongue surged in, pillaging her mouth’s stronghold of all its well-wrought treasures of moans and sighs; dragging her down on top of him to complete the work, he launched grazing passes between her still-clothed thighs. — I really think you’d better… she began; and he kissed down her murmurs until they were both outbreathed… — Stop, she said. — Just one more kiss, he said (expertly conducting his propaganda war). He rolled her on her side, clasping her beyond possibility of escape, and began to suck the spit out of her. His hand rubbing and rubbing until the juice worked out through her pants, he said: You really want me to go? — This is mad, she said. Yes, yes… — Yes what? — Yes I want you to go. — I will, he grinned, any time now. — His other hand had twisted down the front of her blouse to loot her intermediate prizes. The hand between her legs was rasping harder now; he felt the first small spasm of her defeat; and she began clinging to him harder and he said: Should I go or not? and she said: Is this some kind of game? and he lowered his face very earnestly down upon her face and said: Mm hm as he directed more whizzing salvoes across her body to breach her other swirls and brattices, making her breath come thick and hot and fast as she straddled him writhing like a soldier whose belly’s been blown open by a lucky shot, and he said: So, should I go? and she giggled and said: You devil… — The next morning he was with a charming Mexican woman, pressing a Hershey’s chocolate kiss into her hand, saying: Don’t say I never kissed you. — You never kissed me, she said, pouncing on him, and he was kissing her swimmingly and they went out for coffee and eggs and bacon and ham and sausage and biscuits and gravy, cramming it in until at last she leaned back sighing happily and said: I like you because you are so intelligent and analytical! and he put his hand on her sweet arm. — But as soon as he left her to match himself against the lovely young girl champions whom he once could have run down like a hunting dog, he shrank and said: I’m not what I was. — That evening he wandered past the trio playing Smetana in the old Jesuit chapel at Loyola University, the stained glass windows gleaming, everyone sweating, and someone told him (he knew not whether it was true) that the Jesuits hated for the piano to be played. But the trio played until it was dusk, and the yellow windows glowed. The sky was awash with cerulean blue; the evening smelled like grass. He wandered past girls as lovely as the disconnected squares of snowquilt blueness seen between a field of bushy cloud, but he cringed from them; he was afraid now. — My ex-wife’s ruined me! he thought. — He wandered down the dark and dirty streets owned by princesses of darkness. A whore, a whore, and looking at her he knew right away that he’d forget her face even though it was beautiful; she blocked his way on the sidewalk and said hi and he said hi and she wanted to know what she wanted to know, so he must break the bad news; but she took his hand and squeezed it and he squeezed it back for a minute before he walked on, not looking at her, and he’d already forgotten her face, but strangely enough he remembered her hand; it’s a cliché to say that black people are chocolate-skinned, but that hand of hers was the lovely reddish-brown of fresh cocoa shavings—

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During the divorce settlement he came across an unsent letter from his ex-wife to his mother which ran: Sometimes I think that we hide from ourselves how deeply we feel about people. For instance, my husband. I always thought him a little dull and condescending, but at the same time he did me favors and so I thought I liked him until last night when I dreamed that he was chasing me around the house, stalking me with a gun, meaning to kill me, and waking up I realized that I had always feared and hated him.

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So while his powers shrank he fought on, long cut off from his own lines because the others had been defeated long ago, riven into marriage beds by the octopus-eyed girls, or (no better and no worse) they’d won the encarnadine prizes they’d striven for and retired from the lists, licking them over and over in their life’s last caves like dragons greeding over their hoard, licking them out of dull habit, with nothing left to taste but their own stale breath. Oh, no doubt there were a few still left, fighting on ragtag and wild, but in the wars of merciless love, as I’ve just said, to lose is to lose, to win is to lose, and (sad but true) to keep the war hot proves no less to lose, for love-strife is a death where love-life passes us by. In the old days he never would have spied; he liked to think his ex-wife had degraded him down to that, but she was no more than a horrible fire he’d passed through, scorching and scarring him, to be sure; after all, heat was what he’d asked for. Too late? Too late for what? Whatever he might have done or not done, it was getting too late. His penis, speckled and frolicksome like an otter, would soon play no more. He’d perfume it only with sacrilege.

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There was a lady his own age whom he thought stalked him as he stalked her, but when he closed on her, bellied up to her slit, she said: I–I’m embarrassed to say this…

Go ahead.

I–I’d love to let you kiss me, but I can’t be like other women…

… and he saw that another game was ended; she wouldn’t have had him in her sleep.

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He sat at home reading the Neutron Trilogy but he couldn’t concentrate.

He thought of a long and lovely face sipping at a straw. Her eyes were so big they filled up half her face. Her pupils were ripe dark fruits.

The golden retriever bitch lifted her head and panted innocently, open-mouthed, her pink tongue as thin as a slice of fancy ham, and then she lay back down under his chair to let her honeyhaired sides quake while she basked and gnawed on the last stand of ivy which ran along the bottom of the house and which she had previously neglected to destroy. This task done, she looked at him again, perhaps content, perhaps hoping and waiting for something, so he stroked the length of her skull forward and backward with two fingers, until she raised her nose and licked him. She lay down again, and he heard a rustling as she worried lovingly at the dismembered vines of his dream house.

The phone rang. He got up and opened the summer door whose screen the dog had almost finished chewing off and then the cool shuttered peace of his lovely house beat down upon him like a congregation of bats as he went back into the narrowest hallway where the phone was still ringing.

He said hello.

I just wanted to tell you, said the middle-aged lady, that I’ve found somebody else…

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Where were the prizes then?

| 292 |

… They could be called perpetual children. That was the usual way to think of them, two-day piglets puny and shortfurred like monkeys. Some had almost reached adolescence, which hung over them big and shiny like an autumn sunset in northern Canada, crawling brightly, feebly along the ridgetops so that it must be obvious to anyone that darkness will be in sway within half an hour and yet at midnight the sun is still there; others were stammering two- and three-year-olds just on the threshold of complex speech. (Still others, of course, could not talk at all.) In many cases they were sick children. They received medication every day; they had to be guarded against the extra few minutes in the sun or the second chocolate bar that might bring on a seizure. Like children, they lived imprudent and unaware, and could not keep themselves from danger. When they were cruel to one another, their cruelty sometimes partook of craft. But original sin was in everyone’s children. So he kept saying to himself, but his authority over them could not be of as simple and absolute a character as the authority of an adult over a child. Because he hoped that some of them would eventually be able to take care of themselves, he allowed himself to be persuaded by them that this time their choice should be the deciding one, and today they could stay out of the swimming pool, even though he wished that they would go in again. — Well, he was equivocating; he would do the same with a child. (He had not yet seduced his niece.) The real reason that the relationship was problematic was that some of them had passed puberty and were aware of it. A few of them were attracted to him sexually, and sometimes he, despite himself, was attracted to them. Sexual desire, suppressed though of course it had to be (because the Chief Medical Officer was watching from the steel desk, his eyes dull, as if he’d been taking the drugs he prescribed), was the great enemy of the well-intentioned hierarchy. As flesh wanting flesh, he and they were equals; they could satisfy each other, and some were quite beautiful. Their hands squeezed his when he held them; their hair blew in the wind; the women touched their breasts and smiled at him… and then between those half-parted lips the tongue protruded again; the hand pulled away and began to scratch.

The Chief Medical Officer blew his nose, which was as red and glossy as the bloom-phallus of Indonesian sun-ginger. Wrist-angle, neck-angle, the weird glasses-gleam and boniness of life! — I believe in you, Dan! the Chief Medical Officer said. — Then the Chief Medical Officer gave him his charges, slack bodies to animate.

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As the final recreational Thursday drew toward him like a grey station wagon cleaving the hot afternoon, he tore himself off his wailing dreams and began to arm, buying road maps on the sly, calling in a reservation on a travel bungalow across the state line. He was ready to give birth to his own brooding thoughts. Gliding over the slippery backs of days, he snatched handcuffs and tranquilizers, bought the right women’s clothes, honed his smile-flashes sharp to do love’s butchery again. Fortune’s child like us all, he hummed with power like an electric drill only because Fortune had plugged him in. — No, the tense feeling of travelling alone into darkness is no worse than usual, he said to himself. It’s just that I’ve gotten out of practice. — So they got in the sky-blue bus, counselors and inmates; they were going to the fair.

Win, win, win, win! the barkers shouted. Come on over! — The retarded ones cringed or laughed or shrieked for glee, gaping at the stuffed animals of every putrescent color which hung for prizes in love’s abbatoir; they were inside the fence now, tickets paid (a favor they’d never notice), hands stamped. — Group leaders! Group leaders! Pay attention, group leaders! We’ll meet here at five-thirty sharp! Have a wonderful, wonderful time—

One of his charges was absent with a seizure — all the better for him. The other speechless ones could be disposed of with blinding pieces of change — here, for instance, where the phony canoes slammed down the river slide like a horrible torture. Strap them in; no malingering now… Wipe the drool from their chins one last time, give them their meds a little early (a triple dose); slip the carnie man two twenties, presidential side up: Just keep them going round. I’ll be back in an hour… — As for the crowd, they were too busy pretending not to stare at the retards to notice him…

Fingers tight around her wrist. She turned to him full-face, ready to be led; he had the prize. Already the machine was starting up; over its roaring and clattering he could hear the speechless boys begin to bawl in fright. Well, they could bawl all they liked; not one would spill the beans—

Slipping his arm around her waist, he took her past the huddle of grey-clad security guards who lounged chuckling at the crackle of their own walkie-talkies, drinking Cokes, smoothing their greasy hair, glaring amiable at one another through ultradark sunglasses; no, they’d never remember him. He led her through the end of the afternoon swollen with light like some monster California orange, taking her where the heat and glare were fiercest, stalking through unknowing crowds, dodging her silently past girls throwing darts at balloons that resembled multicolored pustules (the girls hoped to win ugly pictures). She grunted softly and dug her feet in, twisting away from him to look back at the silver-studded ferris wheel whirring, gleaming fiercely in the sun. Then he saw that she was listening and sniffing for the scents of the other group leaders’ cargo of differently ableds; some were up there whirling and gaping; just beside it, a number were strapped screaming to the giant pendulum on the pirate ride, raining down puke… — Perhaps it was that that she sniffed and smelled. Did she remember their odors enough to miss them? — A barker was grasping air, wide-eyed, trying to grab him in. — Hey now let’s go now let’s play let’s PLAY! Try it! — She turned her deadly gaze upon the barker, who said: Hey I’m sorry. — He took her away, the barker forlorn and sheepish, and he bought her a butterfinger-flavored slushy which she messed all down her dress and sticky hands, stretching her arms out to him like the bewildered parents stumbling down the children’s rotating tunnel. He went and got electrocuted to win her a giant teddy bear which she went awwwwrr over and rubbed it up and down against her slushy-stained breasts while the yokels gawked, and then she retched, just a little yellow-brown tail sliding out of her mouth, and he wiped her on the bear and she started licking it back up, then she allowed the bear to fall to the cement puke-matted in the hot sun with flies already shooting down like bombers and her cheeks were blue and green where the bear’s dye had come off. They were getting very far ahead of her lines now; they were going so far into his country that she’d never be coming back. The other inmates were long lost, the pirate ride out of sight; at the place where you throw baseballs at beer bottles he found a water fountain and cleaned her face up a little; she slurped up the water and he let her drink until she was satisfied. Then he put her on a segment of a giant green caterpillar, riding beside her with his hand between her knees, and an old lady said to him: You’re disgusting, taking advantage of that retard like that, and she said: Worrrwww wor-rrww. The ride ended full circle and he led her off, stalking deeper and deeper into the fair. Two women were hitting each other with giant inflatable crayons. A man in a white barbeque cap scratched his stubble crosswise and watched her. He drowned her in pools of sunlight, leading her into unknown valleys where the barkers shouted: There he is! — She was hugging her horse now on the merry-go-round, cawing and almost falling off, so he grabbed from his companion steed, saving her as they whirled past SWIRL FRIES ten times a second; her mouth was open. She looked away, writhing her fingers…

| 294 |

Hundreds of ribs and chickens burned on a giant glassed-in grill. Guys in baseball caps stood squirting them with hoses. She stumbled bowlegged behind him, finger-chained by him, her face gaping and grimacing, her tongue out. He bought her a catfish on a stick. The lights were like horrid bathroom fixtures. She stopped dead to stare through glass at the hulking girls in rainbow outfits, turning corndogs in the roaring grease… They saw her and started digging each other in the ribs and pointing, mouthing at her like fishes through the glass; he almost expected her lips to move silently back, but only a thick translucent thread of drool spun out… Hands and tongues behind glass, the green and yellow depths of her lemonade cup, the bulging pale pink nipples of the prize cow hanging straight down from the hairy, veined, and distended bag — all these and more, Virginia, swamped her marshy senses like stamping horses, pounding down the ooze inside her skull and galloping on while her darling forgetfulness oozed clear and fresh back up through the mud, washing it into its old featurelessness — or so he thought until they came to the pen of the giant sow. Giant, pink, and rosy-breasted, she offered many women’s teats ranging along her in a double row, shaved and pink like a tender fat lady; and a big-eared piglet broke away from his littermates nuzzled head to toe; he scuttled down the side of his mother, who twitched her cup-nose lightyears away from her own belly; he came to the rearmost teat and she ground him viciously down beneath her hind leg so that he squealed; but the rest of the farrow, more desperate than deterred, crowded suddenly down the whole long row of teats, grunting and swarming and stepping on each other, screeching like crows, passionately sucking, but at nothing, for she wouldn’t let her milk out; then and only then the retarded girl said: Urrrrwwwh! and the great sow hunched her butt up, raised one abraded ear, turned her weary head, grunted: Urrrrwwwh!, and let go, the dimples in her side rolling like waves, the young ones lining up straight and perpendicular now to nurse amidst that happy tremendous pink quaking—

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He escorted her on, past a stripe-aproned girl waving phosophorescent whips; people’s backs went ahead, walking toward the orange-glowing tents. They were hours late now. The security guards would be looking for them. A Mexican, weary and sweating, turned barbequed turkey-legs on a grill more shiny than the night, the meat glowing like fiesta condoms. He hurried her down the long bright sidewalk eyelashed with pole-lamp shadows, and there was a bench between the dance pavilion and the eggroll-on-a-stick booth where the moon teased her through the trees. He pulled her down on the dark grass white-wizened like an old dog’s coat. Her face was a little blurred by the neon lights. Million-colored reflections of whirling blinked in the stagnant river beside them, lights going down escalators as his fingers strapped her cheeks bone-tight, pulling her easy lips open so that he could thrust his tongue; seizing her hair like reins, he rode her face the way he wanted to; the crossed thighs of the woman on the next bench reflected a winking light… She beat her elbows frantically like a wounded bird. All around them, crowds sleepwalked through the lighted world as if they’d discovered the secret of happiness. The lights of the monorail rose between the trees where insects rattled. Wiping their mutual slobber from her face, he led her past another merry-go-round, now more lurid, the horses’ mouths wide open in silent screams, the studded oval mirrors like blank mouths, the caterpillar statue turning dimly in the moonlight. The moon was over the porker pavilion, the smell of pigshit inside. The bleachers were crowded. He took her down in front to watch the races. A man with a hoarse beery voice was shouting: Go, red pig! Go, red pig! Fuck you in front, blonde bitch! Get down, get down! I said fuck you down in front, blonde bitch! Go, red pig! — and a man in a cowboy hat was easing his wheelchaired wife away from her reproachfully and the drunk came storming down because she was blocking his view. The drunk knocked her down with one fast punch that bloodied her nose and she started flailing silently at the floor, huge-eyed, cracking her head again and again on the concrete while he, the brilliant one, drew out his car keys, locked his fist around them wih the longest one protruding between two fingers; then he stabbed the big drunk square in the eye once, twice, till something popped out. The drunk crashed down, curling tight around himself like a worm. Kicking him in the teeth, he leaped back, lifted her, ran with her until they’d hidden behind the couples with slurpies watching the goat being milked into the coffee can. Then they fled together, hand in hand, past luminous wheels and gears and light bulb blooms and girls screaming in the night like witches being burned; with his dull-eyed bleeding prize he retreated across that battlefield of light. Yellow skeletons of light sucked children up and down as they screamed. Ferris wheels hummed like the reddish filaments of pulsating eyeballs—

| 296 |

Inside she was as purple-pink and delicate as a puppy’s tongue.

And she kept purring and cawing as he spread her thighs apart; she opened her mouth in surprise and grunted when he stuck it in; and she was so beautiful, even more so than the innocent girl, so beautiful that he could see that he was about to come almost right away; when he came it was as perfect as when he used to water the shrubs at the dream house, and from the hose came a rainbow, the gold band the widest, then the blue; when he turned the hose away the rainbow endured for half a second or so and then vanished; it seemed that the last drops falling out of empty air were gold or blue—

| 297 |

The girl lay in the back seat sleeping with her hands over her ears, flushed, glistening with sweat, her bare arms almost white in the sunlight, her hair bleached to the color of old bones. He whizzed her down the freeway between golden grass hills once virgin, now spiked down with wireboned power towers whose cables shattered the sky into meaningless polygons; he was taking her past where the gold and green hills turned yellow and blue. Surer now than all the spurting worms, he could unmask his memories of the long drive in lost years with his octopus-minded ex-wife; how he’d ridden silent and stunned in her hands’ grip, knowing nothing other than that he was being borne away; now he was in charge, rushing an equally silenced prize home to his new lair, his treasure-house of all good things. The hacienda-roofed gas stations and motels rejoiced his heart; he knew they’d trip up any pursuers, while away their eyes to slow them while he continued to speed his loved one to the place where even the sky’s blueness bleached out. There was a spider on the back of his neck which became fingers, and then she was crooning and playing with his hair. He felt her hot breath on the back of his neck. She kept trying to make him pay attention to her. He wanted to pull over and suck the tongue right out of her mouth, but there wasn’t time yet, not till he’d hidden beyond these almond orchards with the real estate developers’ obscene signs already dooming them as they stood; once the trees had been cut down the police would be able to see farther, so he shot her through yellow tunnel light the color of lemon drops while she giggled and played with his hair and started gently smacking the top of his head making bird-noises in rythmn with the slaps; he pressed the gas pedal down a little more to explode them through the new buffer towns walled into compartments by rival developers, each tract with its own replicated roof; that was all that could be seen from outside, the wall rendering these neighborhoods into spurious Babylons of monotony — divine sites for a seraglio; even the inmates wouldn’t know where they were; as for the authorities, they’d but be baffled like thieves in the “Arabian Nights,” eye-wandering that skyline of roofs along the endless road, locking wills with the palm trees that peeked over the wall… She insinuated herself forward between the seats so that he couldn’t see behind him and she tried to take his hand off the steering wheel to play with; when he wouldn’t give it to her she started poking him and giggling. With alert spider-lashed eyes he peered into his rear-view mirror to make sure that no one was stalking him; then he twisted into a rest area, stopped, undid the seat belt, got into the back seat and started kissing her as he’d wanted to do, dragging her down while she flapped her elbows in pleasure; he was wondering how to take her to the bathroom but just then she wet herself, so why bother. He put his hand up her sodden dress and she liked it; then he thought he heard a siren and leaped away from her, wiping his hands; he strapped her to the seat with a lap belt and handcuffed her wrists so that she couldn’t poke him anymore; then it was back to the golden hills crammed with sparkling cars, the yellow fever-hills of dying grass and barbed wire and planes, the hills eaten up by lethal new towns; rising out of his body as he hurtled down the four-lane highway past blondes and Komfort trailers, he achieved the Yum-Yum billboards and American flags bulldozing themselves bigger and bigger until they lost sight of their own emptiness, shouting out long low malls and bungalows to use up the flatness of needless space through which he drove like a pilot down a runway, between earth and air, dusted dry over his sweat; the car stank of her urine even when he rolled down the windows to let in the smells of the long flat green fields while she croaked in terror and distress, not understanding why she was restrained, why she couldn’t have him; she was screaming and he had to roll the windows back up so that no one else would hear, and he heard the creaking of her struggling to get free, so he floored it to bring them faster and more safely past the blinding light of those yellow-green fields; at last he spied out the sought-for skyscrapers on their mutual horizon; he told her that they were almost there and she didn’t understand, crying and slobbering and biting her tongue and lips in a bloody frenzy of sadness as as roared past river-straddling cement bunkers, wolfpacks of houses and bridges and cranes, a dead car on the shoulder, hood up like a penis, sawmills and two-storey office cubes and more billboards and then long grey hot buildings to stupefy the skyscrapers, storage tanks, toxic factories half-camouflaged by palm trees; and, slowing down block by block, he brought her into the “nice” neighborhood where there were fewer gas stations and more houses and trees—

| 298 |

Once inside, he gave her two tranquilizers and rocked her to sleep. Then he locked her into the bedroom. He sprayed the back seat with stain remover and drove it to the carwash. Then he got some Kool-Aid and TV dinners. When he came back, he heard her sobbing and banging her head against the wall. He called her name and she sniffled into silence. Then he went into the kitchen to make her some Kool-Aid. He unlocked the bedroom door. As soon as she saw him come in, she started smiling and grunting and clutching at the folds of her pink dress—

| 299 |

He took her into the back yard to play and the lady in the next bungalow came out and said: Who’s that poor girl?

My sister’s child.

As quickly as he decently could then, he pulled her back inside. He was one with a dog he’d once had that would always snap at cheese-wax thrown out of the kitchen window; getting what it craved into its jaws, the dog would immediately bound into the farthest corner of the yard for safe enjoyment, nothing there but dog and grass and cheese-wax, which left the dog in charge, by default…

| 300 |

Studying the road atlas while she went kaaaaw kaaaaw at the TV, he wondered whether he’d be forced to unblur his ex-wife from memory on this drive, remembering the drive to their dream house when time and again she’d carved out her portion from his heart’s crimson flesh. But his retarded girl, now, she was different; she couldn’t strip him dead and bare; as for her, she came to him already stripped, like a live oyster on the half-shell; he didn’t need to assault her; why, he’d build her a castle, one of those ridiculous Disneyland castles with ice cream cone towers and a gaudy drawbridge of sighs… He’d give her the whole teat: the illuminated fountains, eternal torches, the rush of blinking lights over sad-canted palm-trees… Raising the blinds an inch, he saw that sunset had come to the power poles. No neighbor lady in sight. Watered down creamy clouds wobbled in “presenting” position, like drunken lambs dipped in orange dye. He played with her just as the shoeshine boy rubs the gleaming loafers with a red cloth.

When it was completely dark he drugged her nice and drowsy with a taste of gin and half a sleeping pill. Then he handcuffed her wrists together and led her out to the car.

| 301 |

The road was a weird wingy segment of paleness as he drove her home to her perdition, only the double yellow line in the center real, not the diamond-shaped hazard signs emblazoned with squiggly arrows to warn him of curves and pale trees. She picked at her seatbelt and cawed and tried to flap her elbows. — That’s right, he said, never looking away from the road. That’s right. — Gravel-cuts seized his gaze like something sticky, and the road was only darkness vanishing in a notch of monotony. The car bumped over moonscarred asphalt the color of faded dreams, the darkness hot and unclean—

| 302 |

They were very happy for weeks, until his money was gone — for he was not yet Daniel Clement Smooth, expert witness. She needed to eat. He himself wasn’t so hungry yet. Of course he would have gotten a job if he could, but leaving her alone made her shriek in grief and fear. So he had to work with her, as they said, not against her.

Well, there was one thing he could think of that she could do.

| 303 |

The man peeled ten sticky five-dollar bills apart, fanned them, and laid them down on the counter. — I like to talk first, he said. You mind if I talk first?

You’d better talk to me then, said Smooth. You see, you won’t get far talking to her.

The man leaned forward earnestly, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and let air out of his mouth with a farting noise. — Well, he said, I was raised never to be ashamed of who I am or what I do, and so I don’t mind telling you that I’m a slapper. That’s my job, and I’m proud of it. I work for Mr. Brady. Have you heard of him? Don’t say you haven’t, or I’ll slap you. I’m hired to slap the babes around when they get out of line — only with an open hand, of course, never hard enough to really hurt ’em or knock ’em down. A good slap is a slap you can see, though, a nice red handprint all up and down the cheek. They don’t take it personally when I do it, because they know it’s just my job. A lot of ’em like me. Sometimes, if I feel there’s a little trust going between us, I kid around with ’em a little bit. I slap ’em on the ass, which coming from me is a compliment. Anyway, that’s all I got to say. Where’s the retard bitch?

He watched the man go in, and the door closed. He heard the man lock the door on the inside. There was a long silence, and then suddenly the sound of a slap. She screamed. Suddenly the screeches were muffled; the slapper must have stuffed her nightie or something into her mouth; then he heard the slaps as crisp and even as metronomic ticktock, heard her grunt trying to scream, heard the bed start creaking.

One of my better ones, the slapper said, coming out. A nice red handprint like a flower.

| 304 |

The men went in and used her until their penises bowed like ducks’ necks. They left little blotches of snow in her golden grass. A boy whose cheeks were burned purple in some industrial accident kept twisting around to look at the bedroom door when he went home. The entrepeneur said to himself: Everyone is defective; to live is to be imperfect. Didn’t I once go kissing with a Mexican girl even though her legs were as hairy as tarantulas? — In these calculations he emulated the sixteenth-century Hochelagans, who were very greedy of wampum, which they used in all their ceremonies. To get it they would kill a man and slit deep gashes in his body, which they then lowered into the river for ten to twelve hours. Upon hauling up the corpse, they could be confident that certain shellfish would have crawled inside these numb white cuts. From their exoskeletons the wampum was made. — He did not particularly enjoy the gashes which the clients were now making in his sweetheart’s soul, but at least she got to eat, lots of canned ravioli and gushy bland Noodle-Oh’s… After a while he had money in the bank; then a taxidermist bought her outright, paid so well he couldn’t refuse; oho, he was getting his own back now in love’s unending war!

| 305 |

The next one was a subnormal Vietnamese girl with a flat golden face and wide black eyes. How he wanted to kiss her and swallow gobs of her heavenly spit! But, in keeping with a more gradualist approach, he presented her with a smooth whiplike twig of sweet birch to chew ten times so as to extract the rootbeer essence (and he counted each slow chew, his eyes never abandoning her eyes, so that she kept shrugging and smiling), and presently she disgorged the green mass of chewed fibers into her hand, and oozed it into his hand, and he popped it into his mouth, chewing and chewing, testing the birch taste overlain by her thick hot saliva, which his tongue prised from the fibers — he did not care about her germs. Her parents had sold her for five hundred dollars. In the end he had to let her go. Too intelligent — and, besides, her ischiocavernosi muscles, which in men allow erection and contract in women to shrink the clitoris, failed to perform as guaranteed. The slapper took her off his hands.

| 306 |

Mr. Brady, inspired by his slapper’s purchases, set out to grasp the money-gods’ knees. (His dreams told him where to go. Sometimes he saw sluggish wormy things behind his closed eyes.) Just as Paris is the city of pampered, rat-faced, self-indulgent little lapdogs whose shampooed beards reach down to the cobblestones, so Los Angeles is (at least in its parochially western way) the city of big money — oh, money with strings attached, mind you; money on elastic cords, money on chains, but investors are like that. Landing in that spread out place of greedy dreams, he always thought (as he never did when driving) of the Beatles singing: There’s a FOG up-on El-AY- ay-ay… because of the disembodied descent, and this time there really was a fog which they never broke through; when he inhaled the air with its customary flavor of burned tires he could feel it stretching hottish-coolish whitish tendrils down his throat and into his lungs; that was how it had been with Smooth’s octopus-minded wife, who’d sodomized every orifice of his soul until he gagged. The fog never really lifted, not on the way to the hotel, certainly not inside the hotel itself with its foggy-dim walls faintly marbled like cunt-hairs on flypaper; Brady threw himself down into the pastel-shrouded bed just to feel something, and sank into nothing silently. Striding across the ankle-deep carpeting, he rolled back the noiseless glass door and went out to stare at pool, palms, fountain, and beach, the soft hues of sand and sky and sea all averaging out to that of the carpet…

He put on his tuxedo, and became at once some some high-shouldered tropical bird with a long and narrow tail.

In the conference suite he found the immortals, the great ones who gazed down upon the rest — representatives of an entire Klavern: the Exalted Cyclops and all twelve Terrors. They sat at the table in their leisure suits, waiting to learn why he’d disturbed their repose. Too rich and high even to be generals in love’s great war, they’d sidelined themselves, devouring the smoke of deathless zeroes; that was their ambrosia, for only mortals may enjoy the incarnadine prize. (In Paris they owned the lapdogs; they were the necktied men beneath the awnings of the brasseries, gazing out at the ambulations of the public of which they were no longer a part.) He delved into their minds to see where their first inclinations lay, but, thunder-browed and flatulent, they sat in their splendor, equally prepared to accept or deny. He explained to them how some kisses suck spit, just as alcohol sucks ink from clogged pens. He spoke to them of what needed to be done, were he to bring his plan to glory. He strove to feed them his craving of sundown times when retarded girls would be ready like goats muzzled so that kids could play (he’d seen them at the fair, trying to rub their muzzles off against the bars of their cages; failing, they became very still and silent).

Next he gave them a multimedia teaser. He flashed image after image of retarded girls drooling with their legs spread, the projector cycling in and out of brightness like a seal’s dark nostrils winking open and shut. One of the gods, incognito in blue sunglasses and a red tie, cleared his throat and worked a calculator, murmuring: Ten percent rooms for conventions, ten for the high rollers, forty percent for tourists on travel packages and forty for individual reservations… Actually if we take the kids — we’ll call ’em “Ringmasters” here — ages three to sixteen… actually a good idea… Then he snapped his fingers and the forensic team were invited in.

The forensicists fed biscuits to a police puppy, watched the whole carousel twice more, and exclaimed to one another:

And the head formation is quite uncharacteristic. It could be Mayan, late Mayan.

Refer it to the Kloncilium…

And then this famous — I don’t think it’s Olmec at all — Henry Manes makes a good point…

Oh, come on, Fred; don’t get hung up on some jade knee-clutcher in Oaxaca…

Knee-clutcher? Well, I grant you it’s jade, but a cache of jade, absolutely classic jade. A lot of the Costan Rican jades are classic Maya.

And the chief forensicist sighed to himself:… Those multi-tiered altars! Altars, oh, my balls! Always studded with monstrous faces; usually too big to chip out; you gotta leave ’em — well, sometimes, it’s true, a guy might find jeweled eyeballs to prise out, or a figurine that could conceivably come loose with a crowbar’s help…

The gods sat yawning, frowning and tittering among themselves. They knew what the clients would be giving up: that special happiness when a girl can sit looking at you nodding very very fast, looking you in the eye, smoothing her skirt over and over where it bridges her succulent thighs. The retarded girls would certainly not do that. But Brady pressed his case with color photographs. Directly addressing the Imperial Wizard (an action not undertaken lightly), he spoke of exotic cretins whose vaginas were as dark and sandy as crocodile-mummies. He mentioned his idea for a certain foil-covered room with small portholes. He didn’t hesitate to describe to them a girl he’d once met in Napoli, a girl with hair the hue of a haystack and greenish-blue eyes who sat staring out the train window with interlaced fingers resting on her purse, her long legs crossed, her green wool jacket buttoned up to her throat, and the hair seemed what most attached her head to her shoulders. He whispered with a wink: What if we cut her hair off?

He knew very well what he was doing. He was like the black boys in low V-shaped boats who sit at water level in the Nile, paddling with their arms like doggish spiders, singing American songs to tourists, then asking for money. He’d sung his song. Now he invited them to sing theirs. They nudged one another and smiled.

Alabama, where I’m from, is always short of jobs, a god said. We’ve been short of jobs forever. This would have been all women, because they’re more dextrous with their fingers. I had this crazy idea that the people in the plant should own the plant. Well, I was thirty years ahead of my time.

California is the Whoredog State, another god replied. We could increase the carrying capacity by ten percent just by bringing in this business.

There’s a Christian businessman down in Cash Flow, Arkansas, who has a very powerful Christian TV station, a god said. This fellow back there, he’s run I don’t know how many of our tapes.

The Queen of the Whores lied to the American people, a god was muttering. The bankers love her.

If the U.S. was not preserved, then Communism would conquer Planet Earth, a god said.

The other gods discussed their own experiences. They called in their associates and Kleagles. Then they swore to their guest to grant him the victory he asked for (in exchange for certain future offerings mutually acceptable); they said it would be done.

| 307 |

The next one was a hydrocephalic girl who stared with little lizard eyes, her forehead bulging like a watermelon; Brady’s scientists caressed it gently to see if it was squishy. Her saliva was light, refreshing, foamy, very faintly nutty like a bottle of Ozujsko Pivo Special (Zagrebacska Pivova). After her, Brady collected two low-eared girls, then a bullet-headed microcephalic with lovely chestnut hair who clenched her teeth and sometimes bit. The slapper kept her in line. Then he acquired a blonde girl with a doll’s face: dull blue eyes and heavy mongoloid lids which must have been weighted like a doll’s, enhanced by the pale cheeks, the slack lips that sucked and drooled; on that same trip he snapped up a girl with Turner’s syndrome (webbed neck, sexual infantilism), and then a bald girl whose head was shaped like a light bulb—

| 308 |

Brady sat on the floors of echoing hardwood rooms that smelled of lemon-wax and laughed because they were his from chandelier to windowed door to lattice-work. Then his voice rang out in commands. The workmen assembled before him, good soldiers when money’s muster’s called. Receiving their orders, they ranged out in their smooth-geared trucks (Ah like to have a good caw undah mah ass, ya know what Ah mean?), scouring the lumberyards and wide-walled warehouses. When the lumberyards were looted, great mounds of bed-timber swelled at the curbside drops, higher than ever the Greeks raised for Patroclus’s pyre. Then they set about the work. At their lord’s command they laid down dark carpets to eat sounds and stains. With speedy rollers they painted the walls pink and yellow and blue — girl-child’s colors, cheerful, artless. Next they swung in the bed-gear on their shoulders, bolting double mattress-decks to sturdy keels, riveting everything down shipshape, studding the joists with rows of molybdenum hex-nuts in all order so that no plank would fail the rocking sailors, hammering down railings and see-through canopies, masting them with headboards, rigging them out with full waterproof sheets until those multistoried sailing ships were ready to be launched upon the seas of pleasure. In all the ceilings of that house they planted cameras to hang down watching wide-angled with a spider’s eyes. Now with powerful shaggy arms they screwed down marble toilets whose inner lids were blazoned with hearts; they heaved marble sinks and golden-glassed showers tight against the walls; cunningly they fitted the tiled nooks with silvered mirrors, slipping them flush like second skins. But all these things, necessary though they might be, would not gladden caged girls’ hearts. So now they hauled in the fabulous toy-chests, the doll-coffers replete with rubbery passive girls. They brought stuffed bears and tigers for the whores to hug, ten-foot fuzzy crocodiles for them to drool over in the rubber-sheeted beds, plastic panels with Buzzy-Scary games, building blocks, wind-up rutabagas, miniature houses with hinged roofs to peer through like gods, ruby-eyed flasher guns, rattattat pistols, modeling clay that was safe to eat, golden trucks and fishes to set their hearts in flame!

The doors locked only from the outside, because it would be ruinous to offer retarded girls the keeping of keys.

Brady put the slapper on salary. It became one of his recreations to watch that tall, easygoing fellow standing in the corner in ducky and tails, smiling and squeezing a rubber ball, or ever so delicately touching the flats of his hands together.

He informed the backers in L.A. that he’d even come in under budget, and they upwardly adjusted his benefit package in the most laudable possible way. They sent out feelers. They printed up stock certificates in Fraktur type. Everything was peachy. Maybe they’d go public in two years.

At last they brought them in from their cages, pretty girls, sweet girls, girls who filled the rooms with the scent of hot milk…

| 309 |

The golden-clad croupiers were patting the red tables in a dozen motions, each arm fanning out from an almost stationary body so that these employees resembled octopi. Their customers waited unsmiling for cards and chips to be presented to them, and I remember that Jack Williamson science fiction story called “With Folded Hands,” about an overly leisured future in which human beings are not allowed to do anything that might be dangerous or sad or bad for them; attended by robots all the way to the cemetery, they sit and await the next course in a banquet of sanitized irrelevancies, like the inmates of an old folks’ home. That nightmare story brooded with me for years, and here it was — worse, in a way, because in Williamson’s story the robots were well-meaning and gave people only the very best, whereas here they gave you the least they could get away with to hide the hollowness.

| 310 |

The slapper drowsed and drank ice water from tall thin glasses. Brady’s agents fanned out across the hot wide streets, putting up flyers for Feminine Circus in blistering parking lots and the ivied shade beneath freeway overpasses, making discreet calls at the pay phones between the wigwag roofs of fast food factories, wending cannily among the long low chiropractor’s office style architecture that bulged with air conditioners. When their friends asked them what they did for a living now, the agents replied: I’m in limbo; I’m with recruiters! I ask for a decent wage, and the guys want something for ten K or less! Well, it’s a soft market right now. You have to do a little of everything. I spent the last six or eight years of my life doing one thing. — The agents learned the ways of sunglare on dusty windshields and the windows of phone booths, so bright as to bring tears to their eyes. It was straight comission. A few among them, the good ones, grew into cool offices where only their sluggish fingers had to move like snails on hot lawns after a morning’s rain; they got results. Yes, Vagina, another dinner with the publicity people in purple Feminine Circus windbreakers… (There’s one fellow in this town who’s not a believer, an agent reported. He takes down my fliers. So I don’t acknowledge him. To me he doesn’t exist. The Bible says, if there’s a nonbeliever among you, put ‘em away. But I don’t go out of my way to be mean to him, either.)

The media relations spokesman for the Feminine Circus supply office gave interviews and explicated everything most helpfully to the American people: A pimp commits an illegal act, he’s kicked out immediately. This is a professional procuring organization. And, remember, all we procure are ONES AND ZEROES. Those girls are not real. They’re a miracle of modern technology, is what they are — gigabytes and trilobites just to digitize their smiles! And since they’re not real, nobody’s getting exploited, and there’s no disease to worry about.

Can you tell me why you want to repeal the federal income tax? asked the interviewer.

That is the goal. A whole basis for the collection of income to the government would have to be arranged. One way would be to have virtual prostitutes raise the money.

What’s your position on illegal prostitution?

Illegal, immoral, unhealthy, unsafe! Don’t do it, America! Come to Feminine Circus and indulge your fantasies in a safe, healthy and tasteful manner.

(Tasty is right! laughed vulgar Brady.)

There were a few picketers, it’s true, but the Associate Vice President of Marketing, Mr. Marlowe W. Slapper, explained: I do know that the circles they move in are definitely of an anti-sexual nature.

So you don’t believe that there’s any substance to these protesters’ claims?

Protesters as a class will sit there and lie, said the Associate Vice President of Marketing. It’s hard to debate someone who lies. If you want to really look at this, you take some objective fact of theirs and check it. For instance, what about this red herring they raise regarding coercion, of retarded girls being forced to perform fellatio? Me, I never met a whore who didn’t enjoy giving head. And, like I says, they’re not real anyways.

Mr. Slapper, don’t you feel that the name “Feminine Circus” is a bit unfair to women? asked a journalist. Shouldn’t the name encourage women to come and play also? I mean, right now, isn’t Feminine Circus mainly for men?

We’re in the final phases of a pilot program to introduce a special division for female customers, Mr. Slapper explained. For health and safety reasons we’ve decided to keep areas separate, as indeed we’re required to do under federal law. You wouldn’t want coed bathrooms, now, would you? No coed orgasms, either, because that would be prostitution. The way we have it planned, the men will go and do their thing among the bits and bytes, and the women will do a similar thing in their own area. Of course free daycare and a shuttle service will be provided.

(Leaning back in his chair, Mr. Rapp narrowed his eyes and grimaced, studying John as if he were the most important entity in the world. He nudged John and said: You remember what Engels used to say? Do quote Engels, son. It sounds so good when you say it.

(John smiled and said: For savagery — group marriage; for barbarism — pairing marriage; for civilization — monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.)

The Senior Vice President of Sales raised his wineglass and quipped: I have one of the easier jobs on the property. My job is to fill seven thousand beds a day. Double beds.

Every week there was a glowing article about Feminine Circus in the entertainment section.

| 311 |

Now the famous men rose to the occasion, gathering in the foyers to meet the ladies belly-to-belly, nose-to-anus, tongue-to-armpit — whatever their own honor cried for. The senator was there, jovially uptilting an Alsatian beer. The junked-out salesman was there. Last night he’d wanted a hooker, and he’d gotten a hooker. She took him into the hotel room and the pimp said: you’re fucking my wife! — The salesman pulled a knife. The pimp pulled a knife, too, and held it to his throat for about five hours. Now the salesman wanted a nice slow fat retard girl to slap around a little, before he stuck it into her mouth. That would put him right with the world again. After all, she wasn’t real anyhow. He was a good man; he always paid cash. — The successful dentist was there, laughing and shouting: If she finds out…! while the mortician stood waiting sweet-eyed beneath the lighted paper cylinders, which is to say the red and white corrugated glow-in-the-dark leeches; when his turn came, the customer support specialist drew him down beneath the rows of translucent stalactites and fluorescent macaroni which continually winked and blinked; she took his hand as gently as an easy death and pulled him down the velvet passageway to the second sinus where the halfway-approved clients sat at kidney-shaped marble tables, six men each, either ignoring each other as if on the bus, or smiling at each other, freeze-dried instant friends. (To the press the bellman would only say that everything was great, that they had a commitment to their employees.)

Everything I don’t even wear I send to the dry cleaner’s! the dentist was shouting.

Ah, replied the mortician, sipping his beer. You can do that, pal — indeed you can — but once the shirt’s starch is gone it never comes back again…

You’re going to get me pissed off, said the dentist in a low voice. You won’t like it when I’m pissed off.

That’s your privilege. That’s the privilege of your urine. But when you’re lying on my marble slab, colder than a frozen clam, how much urine will you work up then?

Hey, asshole, why are you even here? Why are you talking that way? You’re here to do a root canal on those girls, just like me. What do you keep going on about dying for?

Dying? said the mortician. Oh, dying. That was a great movie. It came out of nowhere. I remember when I saw it in Westwood, on the way to the dry cleaner’s.

| 312 |

The mortician’s number was called just after the senator’s. The hostess took him down the spiral velvet corridor, deeper and deeper into good repose. In a circular room that smelled like cherry cough drops, they sat him down at a video screen to watch the play of the overhead cameras in the girls’ rooms (the busy rooms being blacked-out like air raid Saturdays); so he watched the prey, rubbing his hands, watched a girl banging her head against the wall, twisting in her urine-soaked bed; another, hyper-sexed, squatted masturbating with a toy snake’s head like a good washerwoman twisting and massaging the wet garment against itself; a third rushed blindly blundering from wall to wall like a trapped bottle-fly; a fourth lay catatonic with her stuffed giraffe; a fifth crouched over the toilet, splashing her hands in and laughing; a sixth was trying to dance to the nursery rhyme muzak that the establishment piped in like the will of God; and the mortician said: Number six looks lively enough. That’s very good. You see, I love life.

| 313 |

The backers in L.A. thought that there ought to be a floor show. Feminine Circus stock had just gone public and was rising fast. Brady decided to hire a starlet to be Queen of the Whores. At that time he remained unaware that there was in fact a real Queen of the Whores, and had he known he wouldn’t have cared. The slapper found an enthusiastic girl named Babycakes Reed who could croon Lotte Lenya-esque songs as she strode about the stageboards, licking the head of the cordless mike and hiking up her black sequin gown.

| 314 |

Gluing himself like a ruby to the silver rail, the successful dentist had brunch at Feminine Circus. The waiter opened the champagne bottle with a deep echoing pop. The dentist’s orange juice glass remained eternally filled; his champagne glass was poured very slowly by a black paisley arm that waited until the foam stopped. On the table, a white orchid nuzzled his hand. Outside the curved window, palm trees, a waterfall… Babycakes Reed (or one of her fifty lookalikes) had just given him her autograph. Her stage name was Queen Zenobia. The successful dentist browsed among the mountains of bread and the row of silver reliquaries, each the size of a small child’s casket, whose tops slid open at his command to show hash browns, pork chops, sausages and bacon, ravioli, potatoes au gratin… Then there was the fruit mountain, the calving ground of waffles, the omelette stand, the towering eagle made of ice, the parlsey-floored sashimi terarium.

The last red thing is not a bicycle like the first blue thing, said the dentist.

He’d heard that from the mortician and was trying to figure out what it meant.

Oh, that tricky dog! he shouted, eating another omelette.

He liked the mortician now. When he’d gone too far inside that paralyzed girl with Niemann-Pick’s disease, until she became turquoise like a seal rushing underwater, the mortician had come with a little stinger kit of embalming chemicals to make it look like natural causes. (Not that she was real, of course, but when you ordered take-out, that virtual blood stayed on your living room floor. — We need to sacrifice the unprofitable giveaways, said Brady.) Later the mortician had even rerouted her from the crematorium, preserved her perfectly, and plasticized her. After that, the dentist started giving the mortician free X-rays and cleanings — professional courtesy, he called it. He got the senator to sponsor a pro-undertaker’s bill in Congress. They all stuck together like dogs fornicating in epoxy. They loved each other.

The successful dentist laughed. — Yes, I’m just bursting with seminal fluid!

| 315 |

As for the lord of it all, Dan Smooth, as for him who’d killed so many hearts (but that was a long time ago, those days of thick-and-fast), he swindled himself into nothingness (aside from the occasional tryst with a certain retarded girl named Sapphire), whereas Brady sat in a hightower suite which was loaded with blue hydrangeas. Three perfect pears, a grapefruit half as big as a basketball, and a leopard-spotted banana reclined in a silver vase, cushioned softly from the metal’s preciousness by leaves. — Message for Mr. Brady, apologized the concierge every ten minutes. Beside the banana stood a foot-high stack of the latest newspapers from around the world. Inside the credenza lurked a modem pre-dialled to the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Then there was a sliding panel behind which special cameras and telescopic lenses gave him a twenty-four-hour view of the guts of Feminine Circus, the engine room ceilinged with vast pipes shuddering, messes of heavy boilers, gauges, boilerplates; the utility halls of burning hot corrugated metal, the disposal rooms manned by illiterate, moustached, oily-fingered crews who ran and sweated in sandals, hauling shrouded bundles to the grinder well, the Lobotomy Factory’s diesel-powered unshielded belts turning, their condensers sucking up the desert water table; then more shuddering pipes, whirling spools, grey shouts he couldn’t hear… On the table where the third phone squatted, he sat drawing up new price lists, idly flipping through personnel figures. His accountants projected a thirty-two percent margin on property without the theme park; the theme park could make forty-five or fifty percent.

A phone rang. — Yup, he said. No, that girl isn’t available anymore. She retired. — You’ll take your business elsewhere? Fine; take it and shove it. — What? You’re reconsidering. Well, reconsider.

The maid was cleaning the bathroom mirror. She had to reach way up to clean the top, and when she did that, her breasts wiggled and her buttocks swayed. She was a Mexican with four children. — Nice stuff, said Brady.

A phone rang. — Well, he said, the Wall Street projections are that we’ll make $7.50 to $7.75 a share. No, the other big players today are mainly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia. The Arabs are history. They go to London. They don’t come to Las Vegas anymore. All right. Be my guest. I’m raising my offering price tomorrow.

A phone rang. — Circus line, Brady speaking, he said. Yeah, we do. How many? No, we don’t do consignments. We buy outright. No, it’s irrevocable. Yeah, we pay five dollars a pound, that’s raw weight. Stripped. No high heels, no panties, nothing. I’ve been around the block, Buster. I’ve seen that trick with the weighted high heels. I’ve seen one on the open market where the seller even gave her lead suppositories — all three holes — just to make another ten bucks. Needless to say, we wouldn’t touch that company’s business with a ten-foot cottonwood dildo. On the other hand, I’ve seen the aproctous ones, you know what I mean? They don’t last long enough. You’re looking at it the wrong way. Think how much your staff saves when we take the pieces off your hands. No, it’s immaterial whether they’re sterilized; we doublecheck that ourselves. And their relatives can’t visit; I’ve seen that trick before, too. Once we have ’em, they’re virtual; they don’t exist. Pay the doctor off — are you kidding? You think we’re some fly-by-night business? Just forget the whole thing. Forget it, I said.

He hung up, smacking fist in palm with savage triumph. He led the ranks of fighters now.

| 316 |

The senator came back. The mortician came back. (Babycakes Reed got a raise.) The successful dentist came back. So did the short lesbian with round glasses and long hair and the New York boy, stubbled and self-bared, who loved his toy company. At the Carnal Arcade the barker was shouting: You win, you win! and the New York boy’s boyfriend cried: You’re kickin’ butt! Keep it up! — (The impregnation tables were only marginally profitable, just a convenience for the customer.) One middle-aged woman afflicted with gargoylism was in high demand, as a result of her swollen lips. The lesbian took her. The lesbian loved every minute. The lesbian said: She’s as greenish and sweet as an Egyptian orange! — The junked-out salesman came back. Just last night, he’d gotten a hooker at the Nitecap. He drove with her all the way to Daly City. Then he found out she was a boy. He got so mad he smashed his own TV with an axe. So he was ready now for a close-and-kill at Feminine Circus; he wanted to kick those retard cunts around a little, teach ’em what buying and selling was all about. When he explained his needs, the customer support specialist took him to a hunched little cretin girl without breasts or body hair. At the state fair there’d been a blackheaded goat who whirled its ears and head around, splaying its legs, shitting, looking for escape; again and again the tail lifted, and green pellets like shot tumbled out into the hay. Before he was half through with her, the cretin was like that, squealing in sadness and terror—

| 317 |

Too withdrawn, the doctor said. A little reserpine. But not too much.

That’s good; that’s good, the doctor said.

No, the usual fee will be fine, the doctor said. I’m always glad to help. Really a very interesting operation you have here. Just think of the research!

Ah, there’s a transitional period, of course, the doctor said. But when they begin to appreciate the opportunity they have, to interact with other females in their own ability range…

| 318 |

Babycakes Reed wants another raise, said the slapper.

Give it to her.

In which sense, boss?

Give her the raise.

| 319 |

Wild-eyed, shock-haired, she glared at the successful dentist with window-shadows blocking apart her face like savage pigments, and snot-slugs hung from her nose like ivory ornaments, and pearls of drool streaked down her lower lip like jeweled labrets, and sperm trickled out of her ear like bone earrings of some fantastically meaningless shape; she was hugging a fuzzy toy python around her neck and it was like an exotic fur collar — perfect! he shouted; per- fect!

When the dentist came out, he walked just a bit more rollingly, like a man in bulky coveralls.

| 320 |

Sorry to bug you, boss, said the slapper, but Babycakes Reed wants royalties on the salaries of all her lookalikes.

Tell her we can’t do that.

She’s gonna be a pain in the ass about it, boss.

Give her a pain in the ass — no, better not. She’s high-profile. She might sue. See if you can dope her up and get her fired.

She’s wise to that one.

All right, send her in.

| 321 |

Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Brady, said Babycakes Reed. I know you must be busy.

Yeah.

I surely do it appreciate it, Mr. Brady.

Listen, Babycakes, we’ve given you what you asked for up to now, but if you keep being greedy I’m going to have to cut you loose.

Why, Mr. Brady!

Don’t you Mr. Brady me. Your shit is the same color as mine. I know that for a fact. I’ve got video cameras in all the restrooms.

Mr. Brady, I’m sorry to say that if you take that line with me I’ll be forced to employ a lawyer.

I’m sure you will, Baby. Now why don’t you get out of my office.

It was a week or so after that that the slapper told him about the real Queen of the Whores. Brady decided to hire her. Otherwise, he’d capture and lobotomize her; what a fine novelty fuck she’d make… That was why he’d hired Henry Tyler for what (to be honest) had also been a little slumming vacation. Later, he realized that moral crusades were good for business.