The Royal Family

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At the beginning of the new year there were floods in the farmland around Sacramento and dozens of homes went underwater to the eaves. — Those poor people, said Mrs. Tyler, shaking her head. — On the seventeenth Tyler was driving in to San Francisco and the flats just west of the river gleamed silver with mist and water, above which the railroad embankment shrugged its endless shoulder. White pickup trucks dazzled him with their unearthliness. Then above a long narrow green field a green billboard said MENTHOL. Inside garages and greenhouses, stale incandescent yellow glowed like sunlight through worn seashells. The road quivered under him as he sped most pleasantly alongside the divider-hedge.

It was a very cold January night at Leidesdorff and Commercial, where the triangular sign said A CULTURED SALAD. A man in livery passed, and his shadow stained the clean, empty street-wall which was otherwise hemorrhaging light. He half expected to see John, simply because this part of town was John’s kingdom. Granting the childishness of his conceptions did not dispell them. John did not appear. He felt disappointment and relief. Inside Boudin Sourdough, upended chairs went on and on like a chain of mahogany vertebrae.

On Washington Street he entered a very brightly lit Chinese ginseng place and had a cup of tea for fifty cents. On the topmost glass shelf lay some human-shaped roots for three hundred dollars a pound, but when he explained that he only wanted to eat some to get strong, the man recommended broken pieces like wood-chips. He bought five dollars’ worth and the man’s daughter put them in a little plastic bag for him. Then he went out, that good dirt taste of ginseng in his mouth, a strange feeling of excitement in his heart as he gazed upon the ruby-scaled snake of night-traffic, the families holding each others’ hands, the wide-striding loners with their paper bags.

New Year’s Day! A new orbit, new lies, new juries empaneled! The Queen had given him permission to go to Los Angeles; she said that it would do him good. She said that someday maybe he could love the whole world as much as he loved Irene. He asked her whether she knew that he loved her more than he loved Irene, and she said: I don’t care about that. I know you love me. — From his car he saw Irene’s relatives kneeling on plastic bags around the wet grave, scissoring away grass-tufts from the headstone, scrubbing with window ammonia, uncovering the flower-holder from the sod and filling it with water before they lowered the carefully trimmed carnations in. Now they were upraising their golden-foredged Korean hymnals, and they began to sing with closed eyes, the kids merely earnest, the older relations dabbing at their eyes. He wondered if they would prostrate themselves like the family two graves down, the mother in a sky-blue robe, the pigtailed daughter’s dress, snow-white, with bright red, blue, yellow and green stripes, the father in black — that family actually touched their heads to earth, but Irene had not been old enough to gain much ancestral seniority before she died. Besides, that other family appeared to be Chinese; their necromantic rites might be different.

By now maybe she would have been serving giant won tons with a baby tied to her back with a blue sash — but she was moving farther and farther away from that as it was, her rotten bones partially demineralized.

He stood on Sacramento Street, lonely and helpless, chewing his chunks of ginseng.

It was at that moment that time began to come undone for him, as if the Beasts of Light and the Beasts of Darkness were eating each other; and he truly believed that the Queen’s reign must close. A moment later, it seemed, he was harvesting the honey from days long past when Irene still lived; and a moment after that it was already a foggy Easter Sunday and he found himself trapped in a fair on Union Street, almost every float being an ad for some business. Peruvian musicians, in rain-bowed national or pseudonational dress, sweetly, liquidly piped, so that once again he remembered that hot day in Union Square last July, just after Irene’s suicide. Mostly he remained preoccupied with continuing to display his futile love and loyalty for his Queen. He had memorized her like a poem and now he could recite her; perhaps his mother’s books and all the hours he’d spent browsing at City Lights had done that much for him. He freely acknowledged, of course, that she was but the local solution to a universal equation. Other citizens solved each other’s philosophical and erotic problems in coffeeshops without any reference to her; and a bald man smiled, wrinkling his head all the way to the crown. A brown girl tossed her head, sulkish. It began to rain, and when he tore the already sodden parking ticket off his windshield and drove down Filbert Street, tiny drops appeared between him and the world, like the ominous spheres of the old “Space Invaders” game which John had been crazy about in law school. John had killed those electronic aliens very well. When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall. — That would be a perfect epitaph for John, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers.