And now this. She shook her head (Cin’s eyes darting toward the rearview, to glare at her reflection, alert as ever for any sign of insubordination). One day Mizmoon had been talking about composting, the next about armed revolution. Was it that facile a set of alternatives? Had there been no sense of a complete overturning of one’s life, much less of a wholesale exchange of personalities, when she’d taken up arms? And Gabi just felt dumb, reciting for Mizmoon (“Zoya, damn it!”): I will cradle youlln my woman hips/Kiss you/With my woman lips. “Stupid little boudoir poems,” was what Mizmoon called them now. OK. All right. Gabi would follow her in good faith. She accepted that this was the love she just had to follow, wherever it led, even as it forsook her, turned on her, spit on her.
Oh, what was she doing here?
“What you having a conversation with your own self back there about, Comrade Gabi?” Cinque sounded mellow enough. He tilted back a pint bottle of blackberry brandy as he drove, his left hand laid atop the steering wheel.
She responded forthrightly. “I was just thinking it was funny, how we’ve come so far together in such a short time. This is never what I’d have imagined for myself just a year ago, but here we are.”
“Funny?”
Cinque still sounded even-toned, but in Gelina’s quick response Gabi read that she’d provoked him somehow:
“I think she means it like we came together so well that it’s hard to believe it’s only been, what, eight months?”
“Well, that’s not ‘funny.’ That’s a vision. On behalf the People.”
“I don’t mean ha-ha funny—”
“Watch you say, bitch. Enough trouble without you calling the SLA funny. You be the only thing funny here. Not funny we separated from our comrades, who may’ve fallen into enemy hands. Not funny we out in the open right now. Damn.”
“I don’t think she meant it that way, Cin.” But Cinque shook Gelina’s hand off his right arm, raising the pint bottle to his mouth.
“Then she ought to watch she says.”
Gabi sighed; she was done talking. She was very tired anyway. Leaning her head against the cold window, she looked out at the dark houses they passed. Inside each was a blossom of life as complex as a flower, beautiful and strange and triumphant for as long as it continued. Her father had taught her that anyone else’s life was unimaginable, that you needed patience, that it was the utmost arrogance to draw assumptions from the disheveled flesh that encased the spirit. Flowers she had taught herself about, drawing and painting them in compulsive detail from a bee’s-eye view, in order to learn something about beauty’s working parts. She looked at Cin, recalling “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another,” the divine injunction that had brought her family first to Africa, and then to South America. What she’d seen there had roused the gentleness in her. She was the most surprised of anyone to find herself holding a gun in her hands. She imagined herself explaining her life to her father, sitting opposite him before a fireplace, describing how similar her work was to his. They each had mugs full of some hot comfort, and her father nodded, nodded, though his eyes displayed the faltering of his understanding. Gabi slept.
ANGELA DEANGELIS ATWOOD
General Gelina
Make memory into a postcard and mail it off and it doesn’t come back to get you.
Postcard one shows a high ranch house in North Haledon, NJ. A picture window to one side of the front door looks out on the house’s twin, opposite. A pair of knotted-together sneakers swings from the power line overhead: the modern-day equivalent of heads on pikes, a form of expression imported from the nightmare crater of Paterson, scant blocks distant. But it loses something in translation. Here it signals boyish exuberance, the Norman Rockwell touch.
Today the driveway is full of cars. There are balloons taped to the English plane tree that shades the front yard. A hand-printed sign that says “Denise & Barry,” with two entwined hearts, is stapled to the trunk. More hand-printed signs, arrows, guide arrivals around the house to the backyard, from which music can be heard, the sound of a Fender Rhodes keyboard that bangs out “Happy Together” from the muzzy depths of its sonic register.
It’s Angel’s sister’s wedding. Angel’s home from the land of the nuts. You seen Angel? What a mouth she’s got on her. Beautiful wedding, yeah, but so what’s up with Angel?
Gelina is stewing in her polyester floral sheath, counting the covered dishes being brought out from the kitchen, where the caterer is working, and laid on the white tablecloths clamped to the three long folding tables near the pool. She catches one of the waiters staring at her unshaved legs, and she gives him the finger.
She’s got a real fuckin attitude today.
You know how many people all this shit could feed? She gestures toward the table, laden with trays and tureens and platters and chaf ing dishes abubble over cans of flaming Sterno. You know how many people are dying so you can eat this shit? Gestures with a lit cigarette, ash tumbling into some macaroni salad. Plus she’s just a little pissed off she’s not maid of honor.
Take it easy, Angel.
That’s Angela.
Her sister: Cries. Cries and cries, how could you?
Her father: You know this is your sister’s day, blah blah blah.
Her sister’s privileged status notwithstanding, Gelina has no intention of just silently taking it. Soon she and her father are toe to toe, arguing intensely. There is a dusky blush to his face as he attempts to preserve decorum. The last time most of these people, the guests, were together was at her mother’s wake. They look on through their crushed recollection of the saintly young daughter in mourning. She ruins the day.
You’ve ruined my special day, says Denise.
How dare you lecture me … as long as you’re in my house … She doesn’t need to hear the end of a single one of these sentences.
The next day she calls Pan Am to change her ticket. She takes a New Jersey Transit bus to the airport and pointedly stuffs the bridesmaid’s dress in the garbage as she walks to the corner.
Postcard two shows the Great Electric Underground. A fake “mod” cocktail lounge on the ground floor of the B of A building, a place for horny businessmen and their pet toupees. About the hippest spot you’ll ever find in a building named after a huge commercial bank. A month after participating in the assassination of the Oakland superintendent of schools, Gelina is finally ready to quit her day job.
Susan Rorvik, a friend she met while in the cast of a Company Theater production of Hedda Gabler, is quitting with her. She was Thea, Susan Hedda. They both are sick of being exploited in order to earn money, and neither of them is willing any longer to work for “agents of the ruling class,” as their five-page parting letter describes their employers, much less in the revealing dresses that accompany the job’s compulsory flirtatiousness. They quit flamboyantly, dropping copies of the letter on the tables of their customers. Who look up in sleepy confusion, seeking the source of these unwanted gifts. Whatzis? Before leaving, Gelina turns around to survey the room. A bunch of affluent white men working on an afternoon buzz amid the weekday torpor of the gray holiday season. Composed. Serene, even. She raises a fist.
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”
Hey—’sChristmastime. Take it easy. A self-congratulatory laugh circulates softly throughout the carpeted room, like a shared secret, or the punch line to a dirty joke at her expense.
She and Susan send copies of the letter to KPFA and to the Bay Guardian. The one never airs it and the other never prints it. Angela moves in with her friends from Indiana, Drew and Diane Shepard, to cut costs and prepare for life underground. She stays in their closet-size spare bedroom, listening every night as they fight. She and Susan fall out of touch.
Cin was funny today, Gelina thought. She watched him, wondering what could be bothering him, as he sort of pitched and yawed behind the steering wheel, peering out into the night as if they were surrounded by a thick fog
, turning to see that the other van still followed them, sighing and muttering inaudibly to himself. She sensed an approaching decision, a big one, judging from his behavior. Actually, she’d spent most of her life thinking about what could be bothering men, what it was that would please them. She wanted to hate her father, but as much as she tried to politicize all the “discoveries” she’d made about her banal upbringing, he was just another dumb daddy aching for the little girl he’d loved. The agitator’s role didn’t come naturally. She was a born conciliator, felt the memory of her sister’s wedding as a bayonet.
And deep down she did think it was a special day. That’s what she’d tell Denise when she saw her again, after.
She was basically a stuffed animal—type person.
Memory is a bayonet. Mail it to some distant isle / with palm trees and a beach / where your daily troubles all will be / safely out of reach. Postcard three: Gelina’s body goes unclaimed for days. Her exhusband finally signs the necessary paperwork to have it shipped for burial.
Cin had a penciled list of addresses he consulted now and again, but apparently something at each of those locations disturbed him, because although he would slow the van as he approached them, he never stopped except once, on which occasion he’d gotten out and stood for a while on the dark lawn before a small house, the wind ruffling his jacket, before climbing back into the idling van, shaking his head. Something about this man today: not talking. Gelina held her wrist to the window to read her watch under the passing streetlights. Close to 3 a.m. There was zero traffic out at this hour, and the unmuffled engines made a lot of noise. Cin signaled a turn and headed the van toward Slauson, a big road where they wouldn’t seem as conspicuous as they did crawling through residential streets. Behind Gelina, Gabi was sleeping, mouth agape and with her cheek pressed unattractively against the window. The only people she liked to watch sleeping were children. Through the rear window she saw the other van turn onto the avenue and begin to follow a few lengths behind. They rolled through a landscape of raw cinder-block meanness, past empty service stations, liquor stores, pawnshops, and check-cashing places. A used car lot sat behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and multicolored plastic bunting that flapped noisily in the warm breeze. A patrol car heading in the opposite direction cruised toward them. Cin stared straight ahead, the muscles in his jaw bulging. Gelina tried to look unconcerned and happy. The two cops in the cruiser slid jaded eyes over them in the instant in which the two vehicles passed each other and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, apparently making the same decision about the van containing Cujo, Zoya, and Fahizah.
TANIA HAS BEGUN TO drop off to sleep when Teko speaks sharply to her, telling her to check her weapon to make sure there isn’t a round in the chamber. She knows there isn’t, but recognizing that this is to be a command performance for their captive, she chambers a round, and she’s pleased that he watches avidly as she then easily ejects the bullet, removes the clip from the weapon to reinsert the cartridge, and then rams the clip home. She handles the rifle with the little showy flourishes that her familiarity with it will allow. All its working parts engage with satisfying clicks and snaps.
“You know,” says Tania, offhandedly, “I heard a lot of bullshit about that bank robbery.”
“Did you?” asks Dan, politely.
“It was totally, I don’t know. Much ado about nothing.”
“Well, I mean. I guess people were interested that you seemed to be doing something like a bank robbery. I mean after being kidnapped and stuff.”
“But not that. Stuff about me being like tied to my gun so I couldn’t put it down and go, Help, help, save me. About the others pointing their guns at me. I mean, what is that? I’m so obviously a committed, you know, guerrilla.”
“Well, I guess since you got kidnapped people thought maybe you wouldn’t want to, um, rob the bank with your, you know, kidnappers.”
“Tell people that I said I did the bank robbery out of my own free will.”
“Tell the press,” emphasizes Teko.
“OK,” says Dan.
You can mount these hills, climb toward the stars hanging high in the dark. The canyon roads remind Tania of the coast-bound highways back home, 84 and 92. The winding drives to those foggy, rocky beaches. Teko is hunched over the wheel to take the unfamiliar turns, giving the impression of great physical exertion. 92 she could drive in her sleep, she thinks, and she closes her eyes to greet the phosphene memory of the Denny’s and Charley Brown’s signs that lit the way until the road narrowed where it had been blasted out of the hillsides to form a high, perilous terrace over the coastal valleys of bush lupine and redwood. She thinks of 280, “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway.” Sometimes, heading to Eric’s apartment after school, when they’d first begun dating, she would downshift on the tight curve of the Sand Hill Road exit ramp, avoiding any contact between her foot and the brake pedal while she cycled through the gearbox as the car climbed to the end of the ramp. Eric had an apartment down the Peninsula in Menlo Park, a cute IMMAC. 1BR, rumpled and full of books and papers, somehow looking collegiate and manly instead of monkish and bookwormy. He was brilliant and handsome and perfect. She was sixteen.
Her parents called him Toothbrush for the mustache; it was the most beautiful mustache in the world. They thought he was poor and after her money, though he was the son of a Palo Alto stockbroker; she would have given him everything or lived with him in a tent. They thought he was a weakling (her mother asked, “Where did all the real men go?”) when he was actually a champion all-around athlete; she saw him as an Adonis. They thought he was effete, an irrelevant aesthete, though he’d been trained in physics; to her he was a practical man of action. They thought he was a radical, a bomb thrower, though he was a McGovern liberal; together they’d change the world.
Then she got tired of proving the point. She sat and watched as he twirled the dial and then fell into silence to begin his indiscriminate TV watching. Every night the same. She heated up food in cans and pouches and poured it onto plates and bowls. Then she talked on the phone, or studied, and watched him watching TV. Every night he would bask in the television’s cold shifting light that lent him the pallid aspect of a corpse. And then one night.
She entered the kitchen, and the doorbell rang. The doorbell rang, and Eric headed for the door. Eric headed for the door and slid it open.
Oh, she thought. This is pretty weird. “Put the chain on,” she said. Eric responded with the slightest dismissive shrug.
Slid it open to confront a girl who said there’d been an accident.
Alice thought that she meant she’d hit her MG and became pissed off.
She said there’s been an accident; can she use the phone? She backed up and hit a car. She pointed down at the ground, to indicate the parking garage beneath.
There was a strange vibe coming from this girl, emotion shredding that voice on the doorstep, a wayward pitch that marked a seeming contradiction between what this girl was saying and what she meant, and what she was doing and what she would prefer to be doing, and this agitation was beyond that warranted by a low-speed fender bender.
She pointed at the ground to indicate the parking garage downstairs. Eric glanced down the hall at the telephone, a green wall model, peering at it as if to see if it was capable of being used by a stranger seeking help on a winter’s evening. When he looked down the hall, he looked right through Alice. It’s her last memory of him.
The girl outside shifted her weight, Eric turned back after checking out the phone, and from deep inside Alice actual expressions from the xenophobic nightmare of her mother’s phrasebook began rising up, free-floating, to seek their application in this circumstance: drop out, druggie, going to hell in a handbasket, hippie, take some responsibility, nigger lover, have they no shame, undesirable elements, each sounding fluent and expressive to her though she felt no anger, only the pull, from the next room, of the neglected television making her impatient with this interlude.
>
And then the door was shoved open entirely, and the two men came in, with guns.
She tries to imagine, for the hundredth time, Eric aiming a rifle at a living target.
There was a time when Alice thought it was possible that a poem or a song could save every faltering affair in the universe; there was a time when Alice thought she would use it, as she might an incantation, on a night when the TV finally ran out of things to say.
Tania wryly quotes to herself: Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys upon the Life of the People!
NANCY LING PERRY
Fahizah
Fahizah noticed in the rearview that the instant after passing them, the pigs swung into a wide arc to make a U-turn and began following them from about twenty yards behind. It was a quiet and ominously piglike move, and she was sure the pigs’ eyes glowed red at the moment they’d targeted them, like pig androids in a pig killing machine. Fahizah checked her speedometer to make sure she was within the limit, whatever the hell that was around here. Thirty? Eighty-seven? Quarter past three? Huh? She was actually going about forty-two. Holy shit. She realized that she was sort of near Whittier College. The memories came seeping back into her pounded consciousness. Not a happy year, the one she spent there, but it presented her now with a golden opportunity to exercise classic revolutionary deceit: She was on her way to Whittier College, OK, pig? Go ahead and call Pig Central and find out if what she said wasn’t true. She could tell all about the local landmarks: the library, the college theater, the fire-breathing stanwixauropodinoose … and … and … they better believe her, man. The cruiser followed them, flat and menacing. She would shoot their pig faces off. She would steal their pig badges and pig guns from their faceless pig corpses. She thought: Fahizah: the name means one who is victorious. Was her mouth moving? She raised a hand from the steering wheel to touch her lips and found them muttering, in silence, independent of her thoughts, whatever the hell they were.
Trance Page 6
