Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  “I think what we need is a Band-Aid,” she says.

  “And then how about some chocolate ice cream?” asks Rose, bending and placing her hands on her knees to address the child.

  Where are my grandchildren?

  Outside, her father calls her over. “You eat?”

  “Not yet, Dad.”

  “Lose any more weight, I’ll have to give you a brick to carry, keep you from blowing away.”

  Actually, Susan is feeling bloated; her period has been crawling in her direction for like two weeks, it feels like. But she accepts a plate from her father and holds it out for him to pile chicken and ribs on it. A cousin walks by, holding a weeping two-year-old awkwardly in her arms, saying, “No no no no no no.” The kids are dropping like flies. The strap of the cousin’s pocketbook slips off her shoulder, and her father rushes to help.

  Fresh drink in Uncle Jerry’s hand.

  “Have to admit, when you were growing up I never pegged you as the type who’d go in for radicalism. But then, I bet you never thought your filthy rich uncle in Shallow Alto would turn out to be an old lefty. Thing is, usually what you figure you know about someone is what the person decides you ought to know. But you’d be familiar with that.”

  “Me?”

  “Not you personally, necessarily. Your generation. The ones who distill entire schools of philosophy into what you can fit on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. I see them whizzing around here. Sloganeering. One flat smart-ass sentence fragment, then another, and another, and another.”

  Here we go. Not only does he want to put on his old Mao jacket and get into the act, but the real problem is with her generation.

  “No depth, no meaning. A pretty kind of symmetry. Nincompoop aphorisms, zipping past on the bumper of an old beater, telling me everything they figure I need to know about them and about everything else for all time. Or until they junk the car.”

  “Well hey. Dad there is wearing a WIN button.” She gestures behind her.

  “He is?” Uncle Jerry rears back and laughs. “My God. Well, your father has always wanted to do his part, God love him. I’m fairly certain Howard wouldn’t try to foist an unwelcome point of view on anybody. Of course all that damned button is going to get him is a hole in his lapel.”

  What it must have been like growing up with this sententious prick. Her father’s told her tales of an awkward and myopic boy, not nearly as popular as the athletic younger brother who served good-naturedly as a friend pimp, lay analyst, and punching bag.

  “Because the WIN button has a purely talismanic function. It’s a direct conduit to, communion with, the wishful thinking, the cerebral processes of, the power elite. That’s why there’s only one damned word on it, Christ’s sake. They’d like for us to know that they too want inflation to disappear. A bolt from Olympus. After ten years of Vietnam, at last here’s an enemy we all can root against.”

  “I don’t actually think about it all that much.”

  “Personally I’d be disappointed if you did. Pocketbook issues are for people like your father and me, who supposedly remember when everything was hunky-dory. Yes, when we were growing up, all the mothers would wheel us around in our carriages, going from the butcher to the baker and so on and exclaiming to one another the whole time, ‘My goodness! Everything costs exactly the right amount!’”

  At this Susan laughs, and Jerry takes a slug of his drink and then rattles the ice cubes in his glass.

  “Besides,” he continues, “you have a different enemy to root against.”

  “Who?”

  “People like your dad and me. Look at this place. What do I represent, strictly objectively? Funny thing, you think you know all about the sort of man who owns a place like this. If you really knew about it, you’d blow the whole town up tomorrow.”

  One day, after Angela had disappeared, an FBI agent came to Susan’s apartment to talk to her. She spoke to him long enough to let him know what she thought of him and then shut the door, vaguely aware that in her attempt to sound confident she had come off sounding more like a bratty kid. She stood by the door for ten minutes, convinced the knock would come again. But when she worked up the courage to open the door, no one waited on the threshold.

  In February she and Jeff were watching Newsroom one evening when Angela was identified as a member of the group that had taken an heiress from her off-campus apartment, the SLA. Susan was a little surprised to hear it. She hated those bastards, not just for the stupidity of the Foster murder, but because they’d allowed millions to put a finger, once again, on what it was that bugged them, really pissed them off, about Berkeley. Why, it was a drug-saturated cesspool of free love and women’s lib and black militancy and miscegenation and homosexuality and Communist thought, that’s what. Commentators thundered away. It was the Day of the Commentator. Oh, they loved to thunder, Old Testament voices booming from under shaped haircuts and poly-blend suits. Every opportunity was taken to use the past as a bludgeon, as an indictment against the present. And tourists had started coming over, coming down from the hills, from Piedmont, Walnut Creek, Orinda, straights milling around like drunks in North Beach, boorish and judgmental, snapping photographs of houses and storefronts and making everybody uptight.

  Then one night Susan arrived home at about five-thirty. Jeff was working that day, housepainting, and wouldn’t be home until later. She dropped her keys in the wooden bowl by the front door, got herself something cold to drink, and turned on the old Philco console set she and Jeff had found on the street and humped three blocks to the apartment. The picture was banded top and bottom by thick horizontal stripes of black that seemed to grow wider by the day, distorting the picture with a flattening, fun house mirror effect. Everyone was short. Everyone was stocky. When you were high it was very amusing. When you weren’t high it was like watching TV with a persistently lousy picture. The jingle for a furniture store sang, “Dublin, Berkeley, San Lorenzo, Cupertino, San Jose,” enumerating the store’s outlets. She moved around the apartment, puttering, gathering up the mail, her unbalanced checkbook. She had nothing planned that night.

  The room didn’t feel quite right, the bright paced cadence of sound and controlled shifting of light that she expected from TV wasn’t happening. This awareness came to her on a hypothalamic level, unease seeping into consciousness as a kind of itch. She shifted in her chair, looked out the window. She confirmed that her checkbook made no sense to her. She turned to the TV and was profoundly disturbed by what she saw.

  The picture was grainy and slipped in and out of focus. It was so unsteady that Susan felt the presence of the cameraman. What the camera showed also told the story of his limitations, his human inability to do everything right.

  Stories of the boundaries of craft are necessarily ruinous and unsettling.

  The camera showed a frame bungalow—a poor house, ordinary in its poverty—as purple, deep-shadowed twilight began to fall. Something so homemade to it; formally it reminded her of a pornographic film. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  A voice through a bullhorn: “Ocupiss uh fourtee sixeesix ee fifty fourstree: this izza luzangeles plice,” is what she heard. The cameraman, her unseen protagonist, abruptly thumbed the zoom, and the frame now embraced a much larger area, an area occupied by squad cars and uniformed cops and soulless, armored creatures, carrying automatic rifles, who surrounded the bungalow. The same purple, deep-shadowed uneventfulness. In her limited experience with pornography, Susan had been impressed by its insistence upon the staging of a scene. Deliberate, leisurely, eschewing montage to allow tension to flirt with tedium. Still purple twilight with shadows and people. The picture bobbled a little, as if the cameraman were impatient with the pace of the story. She reached out and flipped the channel to KRON, KPIX, KGO. It was everywhere. Another bullhorned announcement, the deep basso thrum of a helicopter passing over the scene. Pornography, with its endlessly flimsy pretexts.

  “Cupply emerdiately add you woonahbe hahmed.”

 
; The pretexts under which the “true” action commences. Now, what was this that she was watching?

  Abruptly, a mediating voice broke in. “For those of you who are just joining us,” it explained.

  It was the worst news: Angela had been trapped. Caught shoplifting in L.A., members of the SLA had abandoned their car, leaving behind a parking ticket that had helped the police trace their whereabouts. “And now, death rains down on them from all sides, over a pair of stolen sweat socks!”

  Socks?

  She watched with a sense of inevitability. The moment at which the camera lens had changed its focal length to alter the banal street scene, to take in the spectacle of the potential siege that beset it, Susan knew how it was going to end. TV and Vietnam had taught her that much.

  She learned a thing or two about “false consciousness” that evening. Her horror at the televised firefights from Vietnam had been contrived and casual, her disgust less debilitating than a stubbed toe. But the sense of dread that filled her watching the black smoke pour out of the blazing house once the cops were done with it; the lifelessness, or, rather, the sense of the recent elimination of life, that emanated from the place as, crackling, its ceiling collapsed and its walls crumpled; the open glee of the reporters; the knowledge that Angela was gone, leaving a charred log they could pin their judgmental misconceptions on: It all had her shivering as if with fever and retching.

  What impressed her, later, was the clarity with which she received the message, for the first time in her life, that when terrible events occur unexpectedly, even a forcefully lucid awareness of the chain of their causation does not rob those events of the power to astonish. The guns, the armored men, the breathless reporters, the scene’s redolence of inevitability: Even in their contribution to the swelling anticipation, none of those things matched the flight of the first bullet, its seeming spontaneity despite all the evidence that the machine of the state had ordained its firing.

  Now Angela’s in the ground and Susan has been dreaming every night of pets in danger; of children she knows with certainty are her own slipping out of her grasp and falling; of her father alone, his heart failing, his delicate aging body breaking—dreams of perfect anxiety that fill her nights. She would have thought she’d thrash in the bed under the influence of such dreams, but she lies still, feels in her tight chest and beating heart and irregular breaths as she comes awake in the predawn a sense of surfacing from beneath the weight of dark water. She lies beside Jeff, knowing that sleep is finished for the night, that the day begins now, begins here. Now, what do you do? Proximity alone doesn’t place you at the epicenter of “struggle.”

  On May 31 the Weather Underground bombed the attorney general’s office in L.A., for “our brothers and sisters” of the SLA. The unacceptable group had finally gained some limited entree among the Left. Encouraged, Susan threw herself into organizing a memorial rally for the group, to be held at Ho Chi Minh Park on June 2.

  “I think that would be kind of an extreme reaction, Jerry.”

  “Well, as I said, you don’t spend much time in Palo Alto.”

  “Even if I did.”

  “Oh, really?” Jerry smiles, rattles his cubes. “Well, all right, Miss Principled Assistance.” He smiles, frowns. “Look, the people to whom you’re providing this principled assistance are responsible for some spectacularly stupid rhetoric. And you weren’t far behind them the other day, I have to say.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “This is not a strictly literary assessment. I mean their behavior, I mean their ideology and politics, I mean the whole chimichanga.”

  “Well, what about the behavior of the pigs?” spits Susan.

  “Pigs?” Jerry rattles the cubes. “Go on.”

  “I’m waiting tables,” Susan says, finally. “That’s the day job. Just, you know, taking people’s orders, making sure the kitchen gets it right.”

  “You’re going to tell me you’re a waitress.” Uncle Jerry’s tone is nasty all of a sudden.

  “The tips are great,” says Susan, and turns away.

  Her father is laughing with someone, trying to remember the words to the Fargo Central High School anthem. As she comes near, he reaches out, without looking at her, taking her gently by the arm, drawing her into the conversation. When he has her close, he turns to her.

  “The football team was called the Midgets, Susan. The Midgets!”

  His face is happy, as if he were sharing a joyous surprise. Who wouldn’t be happy about this? Rooted for a team called the Midgets. She’s heard it all before, eaten it up. Summers at Camp Cormorant. Headed downtown to N.P. Avenue on Friday nights and tried to talk to girls. Joined the navy and flew gull-winged Corsairs in the PTO. Nobody complained about those flight paths. Hadn’t everything been hunky-dory? Come back home, move to the Golden State, raise a family, teach high school English, coach sports. It’s not like Uncle Jerry: the dilapidated leftism, the showy contempt for the trappings of his military contract millions, even the bookish allusions. It’s clear to Susan that Jerry is not what he wants to be, that he feels trapped in his own life, that he is not “advising” her so much as urging her to take notice of him.

  Yet from the curdled political outlook that led her father to vote—enthusiastically, and twice—for Nixon, to mutate from a New Deal Democrat into the sort of man who casts a ballot in the spirit of retribution, from the disconnected fear and anxiety that have netted her mother a set of annoying habits, a penchant for imagining the worst, and an open prescription for Miltown, from all these things she can see that somewhere down the line everything went to shit for them too. They were still the same people, fair and loving, nothing had changed to turn them into monsters, but they radiated disappointment, this sense that somehow American life was basically just a bust. It makes her sad for her father, all of a sudden. Sad for him that he knows something, has intuitively fathomed it even from way out in that scrubbed high desert country, knows the same thing that she knows and can’t quite figure out what to do about it. Votes for Nixon and buys a porch light that responds to shadowy movement, out there in the dark, snapping on abruptly.

  And she’s figured out what to do about it?

  They’re not a kissy-kissy family. They do not effusively express their affection for one another. Deep Scandinavian reserve, tempered on the bitter plains of America’s hinterlands. But Susan seizes her father now, throws her arms around him, kisses him again and again.

  Someone cornily applauds. Someone cornily says, “Hear, hear!”

  “I love you, Dad,” she says.

  “Well,” he says, his face lit with a kind of bashful pleasure, “that’s just fine.”

  Ho Chi Minh Park, June 2, 1974:

  “Keep fighting! I’m with you! We’re with you!”

  Susan saw flashbulbs popping, the Mickey Mouse—eared profile of spring-loaded Bolexes fitted with four-hundred-foot magazines and the bosomy swelling of Canon Scoopic 16s, cameras panning across the hirsute crowd, the short-sleeved, short-haired men who operated these devices looking as incongruous as nature photographers amid a flock of agitated exotic birds.

  She felt the thrill of fame.

  Roger shakes her awake; they’re parked outside her apartment building. She thanks her cousin and turns away to climb the outside staircase to her apartment, groping in her handbag for her keys. She sees the package leaning against her door. It’s a book in a brown paper bag, The Art of the Stage. She’s pleased with its familiarity, and then she opens it and sees Angela’s equally familiar writing, the name Angel DeAngelis (a little halo over the first g) and a Bloomington, Indiana, address. A slip of paper falls from between the book’s pages.

  Are you with us?

  Meet me in the park tomorrow.

  “Oh, yes,” says Susan.

  GUY MOCK HAS A way of bouncing into a room like Tigger. That’s whom Randi thought of once, trying to compare the man’s energy to someone or something, an effortless flash of similitude that her brain awarded her,
another small fraction of the distance toward understanding this person she’d been dealing with since, oh, 1963. It was, yes, Kennedy was president.

  She’d told him this and he said that the man who did Tigger’s voice was a fascist.

  He said, “You have to watch out for that voice because it’s all over the place in disguise.”

  Randi thought about that one, about watching out for a disguised voice.

  “Would you need special equipment, Guy, or what?”

  A dismissive wave. “It’s Cap’n Crunch, it’s Toucan Sam, it’s the Pillsbury Doughboy, and for all I know it could be the little guy in the rowboat stranded in the middle of the toilet bowl, or Armstrong on the moon with his giant step and his baby step unless you actually believe they managed to shoot something with that kind of a payload into space, which is a physical impossibility. But he is a total fascist, and a stool pigeon to boot. An undercover informer.”

  Randi wondered if there was any other kind of informer.

  “He lulls people into this total lack of suspicion, granting command performances. Doing the nostalgic breakfast voices of these sugary cereals that set off some pinball array of lights in your brain.”

  The voices of cereals? And what about the man in the toilet? thought Randi. But she hadn’t said anything.

  Now he bounces into a room, specifically a kitchen, filled with cardboard boxes, each bearing a label of woolly specificity, “KITCHEN STUFF.” Three of them are open on the floor, islanded away from the greater stack amid snarls of paper tape and crumpled pages from The New York Times. These were where the skillet and spatula and silverware and plates and cups and coffeepot and salt and pepper shakers came from.

  Guy and Randi have just moved back from New York, where they went to live after Guy had gotten shit-canned by Oberlin. For a while Oberlin could quasi-deal with a so-called radical director of athletics, but when Guy opened that big mouth of his to attack Bear Bryant, the shit really hit the fan.