“It wasn’t socks,” says Teko.
—When’s the last time you were here, buddy?
—Nine years ago, just like you.
—Get this, get this. Get over here with the minicam, damn it. Look at those holes, those are bullet holes, damn it. Zoom in on them. Zoom in.
The press moves back to yet another redoubt, the police are pushing them back, they’re pushing back the blacks, they’re pushing everybody back, in helmets and joyless eyes sheathed behind aviator sunglasses and ugly batons held at port arms.
—Watts, not Compton. Watts. What’s the fucking difference?
—Yeah, but there are white people in there …
The ghetto the ghetto this ghetto area is taking some of the heaviest damage it’s seen since the Watts riots, ah, nine years ago, Watts riots. Very heavy fire now. We are moving for cover.
THERE’S ONE DOWN AND ONE’S FIRING, HE CAME OUT AND WENT BACK IN, POSSIBLY HIT HE’S STILL FIRING. THREE FEMALES ARE SHOOTING.
They think she’s in there.
Police believe newspaper heiress Alice Galton is in the house with her former captors, the people she’s come to identify as her comrades
she now wishes to be known by the name of Tania
will the strange saga of heiress Alice Galton come to an end here in the Los Angeles ghetto?
They think she’s in there. And they don’t care. Never did. Cinque was right all along: She is a sacrifice, she is a traitor to her class, she is a common criminal. Whatever justifies the rabid fury of this assault is what she is. Alice Daniels Galton, her old name rides on waves of ions and electrons, bouncing off lofty satellites and trundling under the sea in stout cables, carried the world over, flying across the oceans and vaulting distant mountains, uttered with alien accent and inflection. Is she dead? Is she dead at last? Is the ungrateful bitch dead?
Some might say that she’s getting what she’s got coming.
THIS IS SWAT TEAM TWO, REPEAT TEAM TWO. REQUEST PERMISSION DEPLOY FIVE FIVE FIVE INTO LOCATION REAR, REPEAT, REQUEST PERMISSION TO DEPLOY FEDERAL FIVE FIVE FIVE GAS INTO LOCATION REAR, OVER.
Smoke. Fire. Fire. She sees fire. She looks quickly at Teko and Yolanda to see if they see what she sees. Sheets of flame rising from the windows and up to the roof. Teko is shaking. Fire is terror.
“They’ve fired incendiaries! Those fucking—” and he loses language suddenly, a regression to animal wrath, guttural horror.
COME ON OUT. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.
But the guns are still firing from within the house. Yolanda cheers, a sort of throttled scream. She hugs a pillow to herself. Teko pounds on the bed with both his fists, his glasses falling off.
“I wish I were there with them,” he says. “I wish I were there with them. I wish I were there with them.”
Tania stares at the black smoke and fire. The rear of the house is a wall of searing, kinetic color.
Suddenly a woman comes out of the house and is dragged on her belly and handcuffed after a brief struggle.
What’s this! A Negro just came out of the house! A Negro woman has just emerged from the burning house! It’s not we don’t She may have been one of the Negro hostages. The police are taking her to safety now.
The police report later describes how an officer places “his foot firmly but lightly on her back to stop her voluntary and involuntary movement.”
The militant radical SLA members, who seek to violently overthrow the government of the United States, are still firing upon the police. The gunfire is coming at a less constant rate now.
this onetime law-abiding girl who now calls her parents … PIGS!
COME OUT, YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. IT’S ALL OVER. THROW YOUR GUNS OUT THE WINDOW YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.
All are probably dead or dying in there. Hard to believe that anyone could survive such a fiery inferno. Only time will tell if missing heiress Alice Galton is among the dead.
Yolanda rationalizes, “It would serve no purpose to go there … we’d only be killed.” But Tania knows that they all are equally immobilized by nauseating fear as they look at the blaze and the greasy smoke.
The police are working against a background of bordello colors: twilit lavender with the peach and melon tones of the fading May sun and the uncanny flux of light and shade from the fire and smoke.
Getting ready for the final assault. Cops moving ‘em back hard. Can’t say but maybe. Maybe an explosion in the offing. Gas mains and whatnot. Moving back. The bravely professional members of the LAPD doing one hell of a job here today!
Children pressed tight against the walls of the surrounding houses, sightseeing in their own neighborhood. Overhead a helicopter drones. The children stare, openmouthed; the camera zooms in on their faces briefly.
Snipers ready ready on the roofs in case some of the SLA try to make an escape.
Every vision of hell from her Janson’s is conjured up. Tania wishes she could tell Cujo. She wishes she’d paid more attention when she stood jadedly before the Breughels and Goyas of Europe.
The sound of windows bursting, exploding from the heat. It is a molten thing in the shape of a house that glows there on the TV screen.
What was a house just a few minutes ago is now a funeral pyre for the Symbionese Liberation Army and their twisted beliefs.
proving that those who live by the sword
Whatever else happens the police and FBI have established an unbreakable cordon surrounding this area no one will get in or out!
Tania fingers the stone monkey around her neck. Everything, ending. Everything over.
KEEP BACK FOR THE FIRE DEPARTMENT, THEY WANT TO MOVE THAT APPARATUS IN. THEY HAVE SOME THEY HAVE SOME.
Fire trucks moving in, containing the fire damage before it spreads to other houses
SOME RESCUE EQUIPMENT SMOKE INHALATION AND THAT SORT.
They killed them. They killed him. They killed her. She crawls on hands and knees to the bathroom, closes the door with her shoulder, and then wedges her upper body in the space between the tub and the toilet, feeling the cool of the porcelain and tile against her skin and through her thin shirt. She reaches up to reassure herself: The monkey is still there. She will never see Cujo again. They’ve taken him. She will not know this grief again until she repudiates him in open court. But that is twenty-one months away. What’s in her mind now is what’s always in the mind of the shattered to identify what provides solace but there’s none here. There’s nothing. He’s gone, all gone. Her world is rising black into a darkening sky thirty miles to the northwest. She reaches for the monkey and fingers it. Hope and love leave the earth and rise in rolling dark clouds. Oh God please let his monkey burn with him don’t let them have it.
Yolanda starts banging on the door.
“Come out here, Tania!” she says peevishly. “You’re not being very respectful of our fallen comrades!”
Tania rises and opens the bathroom door and then strides through the room, opens the door, and steps outside, ignoring Teko’s stern admonition. They will cast this in revolutionary terms. Let them cast it in revolutionary terms, this is her loss not the People’s, This is my loss I will not share it. I hold on to it. I’m holding on.
Outside in the parking lot she sees that the walls of the Cosmic Age glow an eerie blue against the twilight: both she and Cujo are in glowing houses, and she has to smile. The solitary trace of their bond, of this catastrophe, that the gathering darkness accommodates is in the coincidence, and, sensing that the charity of signs and omens will be scarce in the days to come, she clings to it tightly.
INTERLUDE 1
Threnody
Threnody (I)
SING OF GRIEF. GRAB the collar of the old shirt you loved and pull until it tears. You didn’t know your own strength. This is the outward part, the rending of garments as they say. Sit in your chair holding that strip of shirt in your hand, one end still attached to an actual article of clothing you actually wear. Your hand ringing,
with a sensation between discomfort and pain, from the effort. That you barely notice. That’s shock.
Then to focus on the smallest of your chores, break it down to atomized movement, elemental gestures as ritualized as ballet. To scrub, to sweep, to put away. It’s a good thing that things go askew by themselves, or rather, that it seems to happen pretty regularly in the course of events; at any rate, that things make themselves available to be straightened by you. Otherwise your fingers would dart out at nothing at all. To file things away, to stack papers evenly, to search for the wrong amount in the checkbook register, tapping the point of your pencil on your scratch pad: you hate being off by any amount. And: mystery novels. And: loaves of banana bread, the sink filled each day with soiled mixing bowls and rubber spatulas. And: God knows what else. You fill time.
But grief requires the daily subterfuge among the unknowing. You take refuge in their callousness, their total lack of caring. Public sympathy is something to recoil from. So you maintain a certain whatever it is you maintain that marks you as normal, as living in a healthy continuum of good-mornings and good-nights and everything in between, world without end. As if you hear a jaunty theme when you bend to get the paper off the front step. You fill the car up—and they don’t know. You buy a paperback, a travel iron—and they don’t know. There’s a virtuousness to this kind of imposture. Your lack of affect is a mighty effort.
It’s as if you felt you could hold in reserve your honesty, the honesty of your grief, a new candor that will be pure and indiscriminate and cruel. When this old world starts getting you down, you can unsheathe it, the true edge of your pain. You feel as if you’ve refrained from such honesty until now out of fear. But what could they do to you that could compare with this? It’s almost as if the real life of your candor can begin, the life that has been kept secret until some outcrop of your being was demolished.
So—now that you know how you’re feeling, what are you going to do about it? You don’t have much time. You’re a little surprised, though not in an angry way, that you’re still doing what people tell you; that the telephone receiver is in your hand and you’re placidly whistling along with the Muzak, waiting for an operator to take your charge card number and sell you an airplane ticket.
You will not ask for a discount.
You will not make a fuss.
It’s just another day of whatever’s left of your life, which as far as you can tell isn’t saying much. You have a body to identify. The hand smarts. And you liked that shirt too.
Well, you’re off the plane now. That paperback’s in your jacket pocket; the travel iron’s tucked away in your luggage. And here they come with their cameras. Here they come, and you wonder why they bother to make it look so orderly in the newspapers, so absolutely stately, why they sit them behind walnut desks on TV and hand them papers to grip while evocative graphics flash over their shoulders; why do they bother when what it is is a sweaty man holding a small tape recorder aloft, when it’s a tall woman lunging with the epée of her microphone to the forefront of the cluster that surrounds you, now, as you walk; when it’s the shouted questions the cluster directs at its nucleus?
“Have you seen the body?”
“Have you been in touch with the other parents?”
“We understand those bodies are burned beyond recognition!”
“Do you think this is just deserts for the Hibernia bank robbery?”
“Do you plan to sue the police?”
“Who taught your child to want to overthrow the government?”;
—can you react for us, please, can you drop the unwavering pose of dignified solemnity, can you give us something raw, the way bone answers the knife that opens the flesh, something we can show people? Something we can use to sell cars, and the deodorant soaps that make our elevators friendlier places, and piping food in trays that’s as good as having a loving family? Can you?
Threnody (II)
Would you have guessed, Mr. Galton, that burned corpses possessed so many specific traits? Would you ever have suspected the need to catalog them?
But then, some of these traits exist only in the realm of perception. They are not, in other words, the traits of burned corpses at all, but the peculiarities of your own imagination as it struggles to compare new horror with what’s already known to it.
Well, for example: upon being ushered into the autopsy room for your “VIP tour,” didn’t you think, Mr. Galton, that the SLA corpse that lay on its side partially covered by a green sheet looked like a roast tucked sweetly into a hospital bed? Until you drew closer, at least, and could see the lungs and the heart through the cavity formed when the back, rear rib cage, and spinal column had burned away?
What made you want to see these things?
Well, but what about those traits that can be explained scientifically? Those lungs, that heart, for example. Were you surprised to learn that this is typical, that even the most badly burned corpses routinely present with organs that are more or less intact? That the fluid level in the organs and body cavities prevents total incineration?
Not that you could use those organs for transplants, or anything. Even if they hadn’t been cooked through as thoroughly as if they’d been baked in a clay pot, there is the matter of the carbon monoxide, which generally is to be found in the blood and tissues. CO saturation is in fact one of the first things to look for in the bodies of burn victims.
The quest for scientific knowledge justifies itself, doesn’t it?
More science: Did you consider the materials in your own sports jacket and shirt, the iridescent weave of your necktie, did you feel these things between your fingers, when you learned that ignition generally starts with the victim’s clothing? When the bits of shiny crystalline matter running from just below the neck and spreading around the gaping crevasse that had been burned into the body were pointed out to you? That was what remained of the victim’s shirt. The new synthetics go right up. Stick like napalm.
Not that cotton is much better. Whatever you do, Mr. Galton, avoid cotton pajamas.
How about the zeal with which the pathologist and the two technicians who wandered in during the course of your “VIP tour” competed to explain the so-called multiple wick effect? Was there something healthy and American about this competition in how best to describe a theory that posits that only those body parts covered by clothing will burn?
With their high-spirited verbal jousting, they truly brought the subject to life!
The idea is that separate articles of clothing act as multiple wicks when the subcutaneous layer of body fat liquefies and soaks into them.
This is supposed to encourage burning over a long period, which explains the very severe combustions that occur at relatively low temperatures—like, for instance, when one falls asleep while smoking.
The clothes maintain the fire, and the victim burns to a crisp.
Here the pathologist had reached out and rapped on the friable flesh of the corpse. Remember?
Did you both want and not want to look? Did you find that the wretched tissue was so removed from the condition of human flesh that the dread had been incinerated along with all traces of the young woman it had been? Did you wonder which one it was?
Did you recall the infant your daughter once had been when you gazed upon the body drawn tight into the fetal position, its arms and legs pulled close to the torso? And what exactly did you think it was that you were observing, Mr. Galton?
No, Mr. Galton. Not rigor mortis—but good try.
Because of the characteristic resemblance to a boxer crouched and guarding his midsection, this is known as the “pugilistic pose.” It too is typical of burned bodies; the sustained exposure to the heat of a fire causes the major flexor muscles of the limbs to contract, drawing them toward the body.
Were you very surprised to hear Dickens and Bleak House cited in a Los Angeles County autopsy room? Were you? And did you wonder, briefly, if a strangely inappropriate attempt was being made to impress you
? Were you, in any case, relieved to learn that science has shown that there cannot possibly be such a thing as spontaneous human combustion since the temperatures necessary cannot occur spontaneously or without an evident source of fuel? You may rest assured.
And had you been wondering about the frequency of accidental or incidental cremation? Was it news to you that the burning of a body doesn’t usually result in cremation, which technically is the body’s actual reduction to ash and bone fragments, about six or so pounds of them? It is amazing, is it not, that despite an experienced pathologist’s occupational encounters with many bodies over the course of a long and satisfying career usually none of them has met with the sort of sustained exposure to a steady, high temperature necessary to produce total incineration.
Trance Page 11
