“All right, comrades,” he said. “Let’s get on out of here.” Fahizah spoke, her voice coming from near the kitchen. “We have just enough time to get to the rendezvous, I think.”
“Rendezvous?” said Cinque.
“We were supposed to meet up at the last show at the Century Drive-In.” She added: “Um. You picked it.”
“Well, why the hell didn’t you mention it before now?”
“Well, I. I thought, it seemed like you, like you wanted, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” demanded the Field Marshal.
“Like you wanted us to be quiet, like you needed to think things over.”
Because of a painful corn that had formed on the ball of his left foot, what Cinque had thought over was this: Reverend Borrows liked to treat the smallest cuts with iodine that hurt so bad it felt like you were trying to scare the dirt out. It was a pleasure to him to treat wounds, to sit with his teenage boarder with surgical tape and a blue box of cotton and little brown bottles of stinging ointment between them, disinfecting and bandaging up his cuts and scrapes. Cinque had let him do it too.
It was information of a kind, neither more nor less important than anything else he might think about. Always expecting him to have like these great thoughts, damn.
Reverend Borrows’s daughter was Harriet. If Borrows had let him marry her when he got out of Elmira, everything would be different now. OK, she was only fourteen. But with the reverend’s permission he would have waited around, learned a steady trade, gotten work. Instead he floated to Newark, swum into the waiting maw of Gloria Thomas, twenty-three, drop-dead gorgeous, mother of three.
“Too dangerous. We’ll check out the drops tomorrow. What we need tonight is to get out of here and find a place to stay.”
Was there a hint of discontent in the ranks as they filed out the door in quiet pairs, himself and Gelina, Cujo and Fahizah, Gabi and Zoya? Well?
PATRICIA/MIZMOON SOLTYSIK
Zoya
Once a senior class treasurer … She divided and redivided the money, enjoyed seeing it split into equal parts. No “more or less.” Her best work was done at a desk, in bright light. She liked thinking and plotting. She liked the look of an idea as it took shape on paper. She liked the look of a number in a box or a circle. She wished she had a typewriter. She enjoyed working with reams of paper, generating drifts of ideas from out of nothing. The sheer accumulation, as the stack of papers mounted, as collections of receipts grew fat in a stained number ten envelope imprinted with the address of the Berkeley Public Library. Where she worked for a while and helped organize fellow workers in a labor dispute. This was something she would put on a resume one day, after the revolution, at the very bottom so that people could see what a long way she’d come.
At the library it had been thought that she had difficulty communicating with older workers. She categorically disagreed.
The dispute had ended up with the library’s remaining a nonunion shop. Still, she reminded herself, significant advances had been made.
Leaving stuff like that behind—the receipts, the notes, the drafts, the lists, the correspondence—killed her, not just because the others pointed out that their movements could be tracked exactly if such a rich trove of evidence were to fall into the wrong hands (she had to admit that she didn’t care, instinctively disliked the idea of vanishing off the face of the earth) but because it was a comfort and a relief to watch evidence of herself add up on the record. White drifts of her self, piling up on a tabletop on either side of the blue Smith-Corona portable. She wished for personalized checks, for a business card she could give out. Checks were better; they came back. She wrote graffiti on the walls of the safe houses instead.
And now maybe this was not what she wanted. She had grown used to things not being precisely as she wanted them; that was no longer her life’s objective, so it wasn’t where the problem was located. The problem was not quite knowing what the objective was. Zoya knew armed struggle was not about to happen down here. These people were in love with their Chevrolets and Smoky Joes: so what? They would come around. That wasn’t the problem. Inevitably her mind returned to Gabi. She couldn’t help thinking that Gabi had manipulated her into a situation where the ultimate point was for her to be with Gabi. This was unacceptable, and the word she used to describe it in her thoughts was travesty, a travesty of her beliefs. At the same time, she just had to look at Gabi—shlumpy in her fatigues, apart from the others—to feel an unwelcome wave of guilty feelings wash over her. It was like trying to abandon a kitten and hearing it calling for you from the back alley. Gabi cried from the physical effort of her training. She lumbered through drills, bulky and awkward, and Zoya wished she would just stop. Gabi stubbornly made it plain that her ideological commitment was less than 100 percent, and the fact of her actually having lived among the third world poor to whom her father ministered made everyone suspicious, including, Zoya realized, herself. Gabi had settled in as the butt of the cadre’s jokes. Cin gave her a horrible time. She’d seen her unmet sexual needs become the topic of an evening’s discussion more than once, and Zoya resented the implication that she was the one obliged to satisfy them. The whole focus of Zoya’s involvement in the group now was to keep Gabi from having a negative net effect on operations. Hand-holder. Babysitter. She jollied her and walked with her. Explained why they weren’t on the same team.
Today they’d sat on the lawn, and Gabi had cried while she accused Zoya of not thinking to suggest to Cinque that the two of them carry out the errands Teko, Yolanda, and Tania had been sent to complete. Of just plain not thinking. Gabi shook her head, burdened with the inexpressible complexity of her emotions. But they knew each other so well now that Zoya no longer wished to see to a deeper level of Gabi’s character: Gabi was now as much an agglomeration of annoying habits as any stranger, except that she was stupefyingly predictable to boot. When Gabi cried, Zoya always had to fight the impulse to laugh. It was the cruelest thing she’d ever recognized in herself. It was like watching a clown weeping clown tears in clown clothes. Gabi blubbered and snuffled on that retarded Compton lawn and Zoya wanted alternately to laugh out loud and to crush her ex-lover’s skull.
Now she started heading off to her own van, with her own team of Cujo and Fahizah. Gabi reached out and held her by her sleeve.
“Mizmoon,” she said, “happy birthday.” She held up her wristwatch to show that it was past midnight. May 17: Zoya was twenty-four.
“Damn, don’t call me that.”
“That’s your name. You chose it.”
“I choose Zoya.”
“We need to talk.”
You need, thought Zoya, but she looked directly into Gabi’s eyes and raised her chin to indicate that she was listening.
“There’s something wrong here.”
“What do you mean, something wrong?”
“The way we sat. For hours, Trish.”
Zoya cringed. Especially don’t call her Trish. She would choose her names from now on, as often as necessary, swapping whenever one became freighted with outcast meaning.
“So?”
“The police are supposedly coming, and we sit for hours without a word of protest.”
“Protesting what?”
“The just sitting there.”
“Cinque had to work it out.”
“And no one’s allowed to talk while he does it? That’s bullshit, Trish.”
They were whispering in the din of the complaining engines.
“What’s your point? My team’s leaving.”
“Team. You know what this is turning into?”
“What is this turning into?”
“This is turning into like one of those whatchamacallits I read about in Time last year. Cults.”
“Like people in hoods and altars? Drinking blood? You insult me. You insult our hard work, our comrades.” Then, bitterly: “Time.”
“No,” said Gabi, falteringly. “Like the Hare Krishnas. The Moonies.”<
br />
Utopian hucksters, dealing in a new variant on the familiar people’s opiate, with daily sales quotas. Their kind would be put against the wall. A look of disgust crossed Zoya’s face: a slight curl of the lip, the subtlest suggestion of a rolled eyeball. She sensed the presence of the expression and exaggerated it in case Gabi had missed it.
“‘Any comrade may leave the guerrilla forces if she or he feels that they no longer feel the courage or faith in the People and the struggle that we wage.’” Zoya quoted from memory.
Gabi walked off.
It was snug in the little apartment on Parker Street where Zoya wrote the Codes of War with Cinque the previous March. It was a rainy spring, and they worked in the kitchen, with the oven door open to warm the room. In the persistent damp, paperback book covers curled back upon themselves and photographs she’d pinned to the walls rolled up tight as scrolls. They had a series of running jokes about the oven, the oven door. Very funny at the time. Delirious. Everything had a heightened sense of meaning in that brief interlude of revolutionary domesticity. Cin was handy. The circular fluorescent buzzed annoyingly; he went to the hardware store and brought back mysteriously useful items in a brown paper bag, replaced the fixture with an incandescent. Soon they sat in the white silence of a GE Soft White bulb, hunting and pecking, holding the world at arm’s length while it waited for their embrace.
TANIA CAN’T STAND BEING with these people, she realizes. While Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they ought to leave now or remain through the second feature just in case, she stretches out in the back next to the blanket. The van smells like warm ketchup. The blanket seems to shiver or tremble from time to time. She pats the blanket on the head. “It’s OK,” she says. “You’ll be OK.”
Despite the engaging subject matter of the film, Teko is in favor of leaving. Yolanda is opposed. The details of the argument are sheer static, a kind of buzzing in the front, and Tania ignores them, patting the blanket with Dan Russell under it at regular intervals, as if she were stirring a pot. At one o’clock the movie ends, and dozens of cars start up and switch on their headlights. Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they should leave right away or wait until the numbers of cars jockeying to join the long line have thinned. Teko wants to get started right away; Yolanda wants to wait awhile. The van sits motionless as they gesticulate and whisper fiercely in the front, occasionally bathed in the headlights of the cars outside that slowly turn, gravel crunching beneath their tires. Moths spin in the dusty shafts of moving light.
At last they join the queue and after a while merge with the traffic on the road.
“We need to get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow,” says Teko.
“Can we just kind of scoot by the house? I mean, just to see.”
“See what? They’ve gone. Gotta be.”
“Well they didn’t—when they never showed up at the drive-in I was thinking maybe somehow they haven’t heard about the whole thing, our problem today.”
(Another fight brewing, Tania thinks.)
“That’s absurd. And you have any idea what the risk is?”
“This is the guy who fires off three rounds in a shopping mall talking to me about risk.”
“It’s against all the rules of urban guerrilla warfare.”
“This is the guy who shoplifts a pair of socks talking to me about rules.”
“GOD damn it, it was NOT a pair of socks it was a FUCKING bandolier, do you have it FUCKING straight?” The heel of his hand smacking the dashboard on each emphasized word. Yolanda, who has been driving very slowly in the right lane, pulls over to the side of the road and begins to cry, enormous choking sobs.
“Well can you just get a grip. I mean, until we’re somewhere else? Ow, I hurt my hand.”
“Where else? Where? Bandolier, socks—who cares? You did it, you stupid bastard. You had to go and take it, and now we’re here, going in stupid circles nowhere. I feel lost, I feel totally lost and alone and stupid, stupid, stupid! for listening to anything you ever say.”
“Let me tell you something.”
“Don’t tell me anything.”
“Let me just tell you this, OK?”
“Don’t! Don’t tell me anything!” Yolanda opens her door and is out of the van.
“Oh shit. This isn’t good. OK. We’ll be back. Sit tight.” And Teko leaves.
Tania and Dan Russell are alone in the van. Outside, the scanty traffic speeds down the road, each car making its own clean, distinct noise as it passes, the sound of things going smoothly for someone else.
“You OK?” Tania asks the blanket.
“I’m OK,” says the voice of Dan Russell.
“Don’t be scared,” suggests Tania. “You’ll be OK.”
“I’m not scared,” answers Dan.
“I was scared,” says Tania. “I was really fucking freaked out. Man. They came through the door and they knocked me down and tied my arms and carried me out kicking and screaming. They hit me in the face and threw me into the trunk of a car. I thought I was gonna die.”
“Well. You’ve all been pretty nice to me.”
“We don’t want. See, look: they had to scare me. I mean, my head was so screwed up before you wouldn’t believe it. Plus, you know, they were planning for me to be with them, to learn with them, for a while. While with you we just need to have you with us for a little bit because of the van and all.”
“Would you be being mean to me if I were going to be staying for a while?”
Tania smiles through the dark at the blanket. “No,” she says.
They are quiet for maybe thirty seconds, and Tania watches Teko and Yolanda standing outside on the shoulder of the road. They’re not arguing now; they’re talking, working it out, and she suddenly feels both tremendous loneliness without the others, without Cujo particularly, and unexpected warmth for the two of them.
Dan Russell asks, “When did you decide to go with, join their army deal? Was there a plan with a deadline or something, or did it just like happen?”
Tania shrugs. “I just started listening and learning from like the day I was taken away, and I started changing my views about things. It was a real process, the way I see it, though I guess it seems like a real sudden change. But first it seemed like my dad wasn’t trying real hard to get me back, so I start wondering why isn’t he interested in complying with the spirit of the ransom demands, blah blah blah. I mean, he’s cheaping out in this kind of totally obvious way when, you know, my family’s got more money than God: let’s face it. So they helped me, my comrades, they helped me see that these are all signs of like a hidden agenda, that there’s serious pressure coming from somewhere to keep me from coming home because they don’t want to be seen as giving in to the SLA demands.”
“They who?”
“The pigs,” answers Tania.
“Oh,” says Dan.
“Because they’re really, you know, the People’s demands. And so they gave me all sorts of shit to read and talk about. We do a lot of studying you know. This was like George Jackson and Malcolm and Soul on Ice. Blew me away.”
“Oh,” says Dan.
“And plus it was getting pretty obvious that the FBI and police are going to be gunning for me, what with all the statements flying around the press where they’re just assuming that I haven’t been even really kidnapped, even, like it’s just this ruse, and the pigs are grilling Eric—you know who that is?”
“Your fiancé?”
“Ex. Who had totally nothing to do with it, which I didn’t either I might add. Anyways, and then my mom accepts her being reappointed by Reagan to the UC Regents, which is this totally bogus inflammatory thing and in such bad faith under the circumstances I just basically thank the reasonableness and patience of the SLA for not killing me right on the spot.”
Dan nods judiciously.
Outside, Teko and Yolanda have walked a little ways, hand in hand, and appear to be talking calmly. Tania sighs. Then she pats the blanket, which asks anyway w
hy are the three of them on the run. And she sighs again and tells about Mel’s, and about how she fired on the store, and about all this driving around, and car switching, and how it was they decided on Dan’s van, and then about Mel’s again: the shots, the gun jumping away, how it was the first time she’d fired using live ammunition, and Dan asks her how it felt.
“It was a good feeling,” says Tania emphatically. “It was a good feeling to see my comrades come running across the street.”
He just meant the actual what do you call physical act of the shooting. How did it feel to shoot the gun?
The doors open, and Teko and Yolanda get in.
“We’re going to drive by Eighty-fourth,” says Teko. “Everybody stay down back there.”
The house on Eighty-fourth appears, sitting dark as they approach it. Not that there was any electricity to begin with. But the other cars have gone from the driveway and are not parked anywhere on the street, and the heavy surveillance drapes have been removed from the front windows. Teko sits behind the wheel staring rigidly ahead, proceeding at a steady 25 mph, while Yolanda and Tania both study the empty house as openly as they dare when they pass. Teko rounds the next corner with deliberate care, signaling ahead of time and decelerating into the turn. Then he gives the van gas, gradually bringing its speed up, heading for the anonymous arteries.
CAMILLA HALL
Gabi
What could be a more trusted component of American sensory experience than the feel of getting into a car for a long trip, the familiar abbreviation of the body as it settles into its seat? Gabi could have closed her eyes and imagined that she was heading just about anyplace as they set out into the ghetto night of Los Angeles. A little more than a year before she’d driven west from her parents’ in Illinois to reunite and reconcile with Mizmoon, who’d flown to Denver to meet her. Life aboveground was so near at hand. Even today she could feel the familiarity of the enveloping seat during that trip, her car clean from its months inside her parents’ garage, and well tuned, and an air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangling from the rearview—her father’s idea—emitting its overpowering aroma. Taking turns at the wheel, driving back to the Coast, they read aloud to each other from magazines with campy quizzes and grave stories about failed marriages. They stopped, got out, stretched, and walked around. Fill ’er up, ladies? Her plain round face behind its eyeglasses was anonymity itself. Her most political act was the writing of faintly erotic lesbian poems. And Mizmoon, flying into Stapleton, opening little cellophane packages of peanuts and counting out money to buy headphones from a smiling woman in a pillbox hat, she herself must have looked more like a stewardess than a radical.
Trance Page 5
