Now, a scant two weeks later, Guy is tooling through the streets of Berkeley, the offering of a substantial portion of an excellent zucchini bread seated beside him, the high splenetic clatter of the Bug echoing against the houses on either side of the street. He skirts the campus now, onto Hearst Avenue, and then, spotting the snarl of worshipful traffic outside the church ahead, turns quickly north, heading up into the hills and the stilted apartment buildings that loom above their open carports like the cut-rate imitations of the good life that they are. The real luxury is found on the serpentine turns that this street, Euclid, takes as it approaches its beau ideal—remote and faintly forbidding inaccessibility—farther on.
He passes a wall on which someone has sprayed THE SLA LIVES. Is it an affirmation of the remaining entity or a memorial to the six who were lost?
On the other hand, he’s afraid he’s going to make something of a bad first impression. Not that this is anything new to Guy. But he’s really got to take a shit; the All-Bran has just scoured him out. You hear about people who decline to shit in other people’s houses; Guy is not one of them. Guy will eliminate whenever he feels the interior clamor. He will eat that last pork chop. He will tell you if you’ve gained weight. He will ask how much you make or what you paid for your house. He will provide an honest opinion of your attire. None of which constitutes the violation of a taboo, strictly speaking, but each has a tendency to make people feel uncomfortable; hence the famous “difficulty” for which Guy is renowned.
The Bayview Apartments. Casa Euclid. The Trollmont. The Oaklander. Grizzly Peak Residences. Albany Terrace Arms. He pulls in a couple of doors down from the building where Susan and Jeff are feeding the fish of a vacationing acquaintance. The latemorning air is still and very warm in the sun. He parks facing up the hill and sits for a moment, trying to remember which way he is supposed to turn the wheels; with his VW, it’s not merely for the sake of appearance. He decides he is supposed to turn them facing out into the roadway and works the wheel, audibly grunting. Then he gets out, and, after putting on the shoulder bag, carries the loaf of zucchini bread under his arm as he walks up the street’s oil-spattered margin.
He’s pretty excited about this.
Guy enters his destination via a dank and shadowy grotto where a rank of mailboxes is embedded in a stucco wall, and gratefully crosses into a sunny central courtyard around which the complex forms an open rectangle, bordered on its open side by spare greenery that separates it from its nearly identical neighbor. On this level are the carports, most of which are empty of cars this pretty Sunday but full of other things: beach toys and cross-country skis and cardboard cartons and stacks of newspapers and barbecue grills and cans of motor oil. Above the carports are the apartments, inscrutable behind the identical hollow-core doors and curtained windows that line the tier. He pauses on the uneven ground, looking for number eleven, then heads for a set of stairs that gives every appearance of having been an afterthought.
He knocks, employing the ridiculously lively shave-and-a-haircut theme. After a silent interval he adds the two bits. More silence. He turns and, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, looks down upon the courtyard. A Ford Pinto pulls into one of the carports, and a middle-aged woman emerges in a pants suit an acute shade of green, keys dangling from her hand, and stares curiously up at Guy.
“He’s away,” she calls, shielding her eyes with the hand holding the keys.
“Pardon me?” answers Guy, raising a cupped hand to his ear.
“I say, he must have gone away.” The woman has begun to mount the stairs. “His car’s been gone for the past few days anyways.” She points at one of the empty carports.
“I’m. Oh. Well.” Guy has no idea what to say. He feels out of his depth, a vertiginous sensation that precedes what he knows will be an inept improvisation. He reaches for his shoulder bag. “Maybe I’ll just leave him a note.” He nods, smiling with tight lips at the woman. Who snorts.
“If he knows how to read.” With that, she fits the key into the lock and lets herself into her apartment.
Guy removes the yellow pad and a pen from the shoulder bag. He gently lays the zucchini bread at his feet. What’s he supposed to write? Yabba-dabba-doo? Death to the Fascist Insect? Well, you know, we all want to change the world? He looks up and, unsurprisingly, sees the curtain move at the window beside Miss High-Wattage Green’s door. A good bet that his note will be inspected. He writes: “Was here Sun AM. Will try again. G.” He tucks it under the door, leaving half an inch or so exposed so that the woman doesn’t kill herself clawing it out from under there.
Back in the Bug he begins rhythmically contracting his sphincter, trying to stave off the inevitable. Plus give himself more sexual stamina and longer and more satisfying orgasms, to look at it in the long term. Primarily, though, he’s trying to keep the shit up the chute. Usually he can manage to make himself forget about it, but he can tell that today he is on the verge of a rude and unpleasant experience, and he is about to turn the key in the ignition and head back to Oakland when he sees the distinctive tail of the Pinto, like the thalidomide nightmare of European design sensibility, emerge from the driveway as the green woman turns sharply and takes off up the hill. He’s out of the car for one more try.
His note appears to be missing. He knocks. He knocks again, louder. He places his hand on the doorknob. He is feeling nakedly conspicuous and out of place here in this quiet apartment complex. He may as well act as if he belonged here, what the fuck. Besides, he has to get to a toilet right away.
The door opens when he turns the knob. Inside, a smell like that of a pet shop, vaguely aquatic. He spies the enormous aquarium that sits in a corner of the living room. The fish rise, fall, and dart in its soft glow, and he is drawn to them, comes near and watches the neon tetras and the angelfish and whatever else there are in there moving in loose and graceful formation inside the box of lighted water. He spots a toggle on the light ballast that fits over the aquarium’s top, and when he switches it, the aquarium becomes, under the scrutiny of a black light, a lunar landscape, the neon tetras a liquid metal as if forged from the sultry waters of their origin, luminous and mercurial, dancing above the brilliant and depthless gravel in the ultraviolet cartoon of his gaze.
Then he feels it, a hollow clunk accompanying the metallic shock of the thing’s making contact with the back of his skull, and a strange sensation of being probed, as if he were first to be examined by the instrument of his destruction, and also there is the oddly light grip on his shoulder as he is guided, backward, out of the living room and into the kitchen. He moves stiffly and takes tiny steps, feeling the terrain change from shag carpeting to linoleum. He is placed standing amid the cupboards before a small, round dinette table set in front of a sliding glass door, crudely curtained with floral bed sheets, that leads to a tiny balcony. On the dinette table is an army surplus gas mask bag, open, from which the butt end of a revolver and a pack of Tareytons protrude. A spiral-bound notebook lies open next to the bag, a capped Bic inserted in the twisted wire spine.
The butt end of a revolver, protruding, nearby.
A male voice, several feet away: “Well, did you check his bag?”
A woman, closer: “No.” Guy notices that the object against his head moves ever so slightly when she speaks.
“Well, you know. I think I’ve mentioned before. Real, real important.”
“I’m sorry.” The voice is tiny.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”
Butt end, just a quick grab away.
But there is the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and footsteps, and Guy’s shoulder bag is roughly taken from him, and the bag of zucchini bread too.
If there is a gun in the gas mask bag, then this thing against his head definitely is a gun. Because otherwise they’d use the one in the bag. Right?
The man asks, “What’s this?” A small hairy hand holds the bread up in front of his face.
Guy responds: “Zucchini bread.”
>
“You a fucking baker, man?”
“I thought you might want something homemade.”
“I might?”
“All of you.”
“All of us. Shit.” The man chuckles.
“Who do you think ‘us’ is?” The woman presses the gun into his occiput. Guy thinks he is going to shit in his pants.
“I’m Guy Mock. Check the shoulder bag.”
“Did I ask who you were?”
“Well. But I think you’re expecting me.”
From outside there comes the hollow sound, surprisingly loud, of people ascending the staircase. Quick steps, which seem to jar the flimsy building to its very core, move down the walkway and pause outside the door. In the silence it’s as if the room itself had been drawn in with their held breaths, all the isolating span removed from the space the three of them and the gun and Guy’s tortured gut share. The only sound is the aquarium’s humming filter. Then the sound of a key being shaken loose from the others on a ring and then inserted in the lock. The door opens, and Susan Rorvik enters, followed by an older woman, with graying hair and eyeglasses. For an instant Guy wonders why Susan has brought her mother here with her, and how nice, how weird, up from Twentynine Palms, or what is it, Palmdale?, some desert spot, an oasis of aluminum siding and thirsty imported turf, military bases of unknown purpose—covert training of desert assassins, testing of nerve gases that curdle the minutest aspects of human anatomy, dissection of alien visitors—hello, good to see you, glad to know you, ha-ha-ho. Then, as Susan gasps, “Guy!” the other woman removes the wig and the glasses, and Guy stares into the face of Diane Shepard, who is looking past his shoulder.
“God fucking damn it, Teko, that’s Guy Mock. You want her to blow his head off?”
For the first time in about, oh, six lifetimes, a few shrill eternities in the lake of fire, an extended cosmic interval in which that famous solitary ant has carted off the greater part of the Gobi, the Sahara, the Gibbon, one grain at a time, the gun moves off his skull, and Guy turns, pivots carefully with no unnecessary movement of his extremities, to face Tania.
“I’m, like, really sorry,” she says. She blushes.
They sit in the living room, Guy cross-legged on the floor between Susan and Jeff Wolfritz, who has joined them in the apartment sometime during the bathroom interval that restores tranquil immaculacy to Guy’s GI system, with the SLA three lining the couch in the deadeye sepia pose of a nineteenth-century family group. The fish in the tank dive, dart, and coast. For his pitch, Guy settles into the lotus position. An affectation, to be sure, intended to imbue his physical aspect with the wisdom that his staring eyes and receding hairline combine to deny. And that he does, after all, possess to a measurable degree. Plus it stretches out the ligaments in his hips, allowing for deeper and more thrillingly pleasurable penetration during intercourse.
First, though, he has some principled questions.
What about the assassination of Marcus Foster, the Oakland superintendent of schools, who was universally perceived as a progressive influence and whose killing was angrily denounced by the black community and the Left alike?
“Neither of us was in the SLA then.”
“We read about it in the newspapers.”
“I was just an average Berkeley housewife then.”
But did you agree with the Foster killing?
Here Teko lays out a sinuously convoluted rationale, in which he seems to have complete faith, concerning (1) the fascist Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, (2) the imminent implementation of a program in which “bio-dossiers” would have been maintained on all students attending the Oakland public schools, (3) fascist police agents patrolling the halls with shotguns and attack dogs, (4) fascist concentration camps for so-called troublemakers, and (5) Foster’s complicity in all of the above. Plus the program was to be implemented under the direction of a “former police sergeant.”
Guy thinks it’s funny; an entirely new subset of clichés was coming of age. He hadn’t realized that the SLA took its rhetoric literally.
Anyway, after the assassination, Teko and Yolanda bought up all the copies of the Oakland Tribune they could find: to send to friends.
“But then the community reaction was so overwhelmingly negative,” complains Yolanda bitterly.
“Not that the People really liked Foster,” says Teko.
“He was just a fucking fascist,” says Tania.
“They made believe they liked him because they knew the pigs would come down on them if they talked about him the way they really felt.”
It might have been a better idea, the harijan army agrees, to start slow, with confrontational graffiti and broken windows, before moving up to shotgunning Foster and his fascist lieutenant, Blackburn.
Guy thinks, fascist fascist fascist fascist fascist.
OK, then, what about the Hibernia Bank robbery? What was the necessity of shooting two bystanders? Hadn’t you already obtained your objective of “expropriating” funds?
“It became imperative to obtain resources by any means necessary,” says Yolanda.
“It was totally compulsory. We were forced into it since being underground had totally depleted our funds.”
“We like couldn’t work,” explains Tania.
But what about the shootings?
“Oh, everybody was real shaken up by that,” says Teko.
“It was an overreaction. I don’t see that ever happening again.”
“In combat you have to make these decisions on a split-second basis.”
“They were told, the two men, they were told to lie on the floor like everybody else. They ran instead. And were fired upon.”
That was their split-second decision.
“Exactly.”
“We should have put something out explaining the mistake and saying we were sorry. It’s important for revolutionaries to do that.”
“A serious blemish on an operation that was otherwise extremely well done,” says Teko.
Guy had expected something more from these bright people—the pep chairman and straight A student, the social chair of Chi Omega, and the art history major whose society wedding had been scheduled to take place this very month—more than for the three of them to sit here answering his questions with all the earnest insincerity of entry-level job applicants. They so wanted to provide the “right” answers. They were so convinced that there were right answers, and that he was looking for them. Now the big one:
How about the kidnapping?
“Which one?” More laughter.
“Well, that’s just it. You’re laughing. But there’s something,” Guy says, “about taking people by force, making them come with you under duress.”
Teko and Yolanda look back at him brightly, attentively, though there’s something about them that gives the impression that they’re bracing for a body blow. Guy turns his eyes on Tania. She recedes into the couch, as if she were embroidered on its surface, an anchored superficiality. Her own eyes are steady, and looking at nothing.
“It’s just, it’s everything freedom isn’t, whatever the ‘reason’ may happen to be. I guess you could argue for the political necessity of Foster’s assassination; you could even make a case for shooting those people at the bank, if you really really had to. But there’s something about taking over a person’s life and making it something other than their own.”
“Oh, Dan Russell loved every minute he was with us,” says Yolanda. “I could tell.”
Guy says, “I’m not talking about god damn Dan Russell, and you know it.” He surprises himself with his sudden change of tone.
“What are you talking about?” Yolanda’s face is rigid, lean with anger, and she sits straight up. Mean, Guy thinks. Mean woman.
In the end, Guy leaves, exhausted, without having made a single commitment to these people. Susan walks him to the door, holding his forearm, gripping it as they step out onto the walkway, gripping the arm as they move down the stairs and into the c
ourtyard. She is leaning in, pitching for his aid. She is saying Angela: Angela this, Angela that, invoking—not entirely fairly, Guy thinks—the name of her dead friend. Ultimately, hers is not an appeal to his politics. Guy tries to imagine what it must feel like: to catch fire, and burn. He finally takes hold of the hand hanging on to him, holds it gently in his as a prelude to dropping it and walking away.
He is excited and troubled. The SLA sat there stripped naked—figuratively, anyway—bereft of comrades, friends, lovers, an operative sense of purpose, and all because they didn’t show up. What’s more, they lost the revolution. We can’t forget that they lost the war, even if not many people happened to notice it, that’s what it was to them—the Naga banner their battle flag, “Death to the Fascist Insect” their rebel yell—and in the end they were massacred by the state for having waged it, massacred in an act of lawlessness under color of authority. As General Teko carefully pointed out, most of the people in that house had not been charged with any crime before being surrounded; they were as innocent as the day they were born, were, in effect, martyrs to the cause, although they were at war with fascist Amerikkka (which word Guy noticed Teko had found a distinct way to pronounce), and Guy stayed with Teko despite this minor sophistry, thought he was right on, but then Teko had gone into some strange obsessive rap about Gigantic Black Penises and White Cunts and Bourgeois Fear while Yolanda and Tania accompanied him with this fake black churchy thing (“Tell it!” “Uhnhhuhnh!”), so Guy had carefully sorted through his memories until he located one of a breathtakingly cold swim he’d taken in Lake Tahoe one morning in early summer, of devouring the contents of a picnic basket after having emerged shivering from the jeweled water, one of many pointless reminiscences that spangle his consciousness, and it tided him over until Teko quit with all the dick talk.
Trance Page 17
