Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  The plan has come to him in bits and pieces. His friend Gary Kearse will be arriving soon to take Yolanda first. Guy doesn’t describe it this way, but it will be a dry run to see how things go before Tania goes across. When that happens he personally intends to escort her, posing as her husband; along with his real parents, posing as his fake parents (an interesting concept). Why not just send her with his parents? He can’t fully justify his desire to accompany her. Definitely the sheer star appeal of Tania is a factor. Also the fact that conceivably he can swing the credit for recovering her if she takes it into her head to walk into a state police barracks somewhere and turn herself in. Also he figures that once he’s in New York maybe he can reach for a few strings, sit down with his connections at some of the hipper publishing houses to discuss the Book Project. Also there’s the sense that he’s serving something bigger and more important than himself, though to be honest he is not exactly persuaded of the merit of the SLA’s politics. That doesn’t particularly matter to him, though. Fame, money, and high principles definitely figured into the scheme in that precise order. Also sex, in there somewhere. Sprinkled over everything else, say. He admits (to himself) that he has toyed with the idea of seducing Tania on the road, a visualization of himself as Humbert Humbert. There is a strange reckless something about the girl that tells him she’s game for just about anything and that this sort of willing enthusiasm is still exhilaratingly fresh for her. Anyway, it’ll be him, Tania, and his parents, the very image of propriety barreling down the highway in a twoton boat. Dad of course will be let down when Randi doesn’t turn up for the trip (if all goes according to plan, after Randi’s done boiling over and Guy has a chance to sit down with her and discuss details, she will be leaving in the Bug ahead of time to open the apartment and find a suitably remote hideaway for the summer), but Guy hopes that Tania will prove a sufficient surrogate. So to speak.

  Teko, Guy’s decided, is going to have to stay here in the Bay Area and wait for Guy to return for him, a little payback for the gun-to-the-head incident that otherwise he’s completely forgotten about.

  Now Guy is in a chair, listening to KPFA. Susan has called to say that through friends (friends or “friends”?, Guy wondered. The occulted language sometimes got confusing), she arranged for the delivery of a tape to KPFK, KPFA’s sister station in L.A. The tape contains a lengthy eulogy to the SLA dead recorded by the three survivors. KPFK broadcast the tape immediately after having been tipped off to its presence under a bunch of crap in an alley behind the station.

  Guy loves the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

  Commercial radio is already broadcasting parts of the tape, but left-leaning Pacifica stations like KPFA and KPFK will air the thing in its entirety.

  Guy is aware that Susan is still trying to sell him on the SLA. He admits to himself that despite all his activity and plans, the way that he responds to the tape is going to make a difference, if only in terms of his personal feelings. Things will continue to happen anyway, since he’s already set them in motion, a certain precipitousness for which he is renowned. Repent at leisure, ha-ha. Anyway, he wants to believe, at least, that Tania means what she says. Why will a scripted tape convince him? He doesn’t know. In a way, it’s pretty pathetic. He managed to sit and look into the girl’s eyes, and he had his doubts, but a radio broadcast will tip the balance in one direction or another.

  He leans back in his chair. It’s a thrift shop find, a high-backed dark Naugahyde executive swivel chair that looks as if it would be at home in the corner office of a Hayward law firm. The announcer comes on and does some horsing around. KPFA can get a little smart-alecky, Guy thinks. It often sounds to him like a group of students who have taken over the high school PA. But that’s the Movement for you. Willie Wolfe had probably segued directly from toilet-papering houses on Halloween to pointing guns at savings bank depositors, and Angela Atwood, Pat Soltysik, and Nancy Ling Perry must have been more familiar with their driver’s ed manual than with the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. Is he being glib? Yes, he is being glib.

  Then Teko begins. “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.” Guy hates to admit it, but he is growing drowsy as General Field Marshal Teko rails on, sending greetings to obscure or fictitious groups, to “the Anti-Aircraft Forces of the SLA,” to fellow travelers wherever (and whenever) they may find themselves, asserting, curiously, that the SLA fled San Francisco because it is “surrounded by water,” complaining about having been accused of stealing a “forty-nine cents pair of socks” at Mel’s Sporting Goods. “The People found this very difficult to believe when it was pointed out that we had already purchased over thirty dollars’ worth of heavy wool socks and other items.” Listening to Teko argue these points to death, Guy anticipates the long cross-country drive in his company with dismay.

  Guy sits up straight, wide awake, when Teko makes the cogent point, the only point requiring relevance, really, that in their annihilating overreaction to the SLA, the “authorities” (a concept that seems to manage better in the abstract) had bared a fundamental contempt for the “People” (ditto). But Guy slumps again when Teko phases into the cant of affected mistrust, to rant about “white, sickeningly liberal, paranoid conspiracy freaks and spaced-out counterculture dope fiends,” zooming in on the prospect of his own paranoia as he disavows wacky rumors about Cinque’s “having been programmed and electrodes implanted in his brain” (this, Guy knows, is in reaction to the published opinion of local conspiracy oracle Mae Brussell, who is never happier than when she can declare that someone has been brainwashed), followed by Teko’s familiar gleeful repudiation of the idea of white cunts “enslaved by gigantic black penises.” (Guy idly wonders how big Teko’s dick is.) Teko finishes up on a triumphally bum note with a little name-dropping. “As our dear comrade Ho Chi Minh once wrote from an imperialist prison, ‘Today the locust fights the elephant, but tomorrow the elephant will be disemboweled.’”

  By contrast, Yolanda’s segment is short and sweet. There is the usual agitprop stuff, as she talks about “fifty or one hundred or five hundred irate niggers”—leaving her mouth, the word sounds as stiff and uncomfortable as a new and ill-fitting garment—“firing from their houses, alleyways, treetops and walls, with a straight and fearless shot, to bring down the helicopter, the SWAT squad, the LAPD, the FBI.” As with Teko, though, even her rhetorical incapacity fails to diminish what Guy sees as the pointed truth in this haystack of mumbo jumbo. “There’s been a lot of talk about wasted lives, referring to the six dead bodies of our comrades and to Tania, Teko, and myself. There are no editorials written for the wasted lives of our brothers and sisters gunned down in the streets and prisons.”

  So far the eulogy’s been short on tribute and long on exhortation. A belief system, not a group of dead comrades, is being memorialized. But now the moment Guy has been waiting for.

  Hers is a small voice, precise though somewhat enervated, a voice that has been so carefully cultivated to enclose a sense of prerogative that even now, more than four months after having been excised from an orderly life, it still conveys her unreserved faith that her expectations will in the end be met. But shortly Guy can hear in the voice the sort of anguish that wracks and diminishes the speaker. Just as he is flashing She loved one of them, Tania says, “Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

  How could he not have known? Susan had mentioned something about being sad about Willie, but at that point Guy still needed a scorecard to keep track of the names of the players. He supposes that he figured that the black guy was the one named Willie, don’t ask why. Guy considers this a serious lapse on his part. The voice has the quality of an open sore. While her elegy draws upon the same jargon used by Teko and Yolanda, Tania circles again and again to Cujo. The things lovers tend to do.

  Guy suddenly remembers a longish letter he wrote to his big brother, Ernest, making plain his love for a young woman whose name
he claims, falsely, he can’t even remember now. What was he, eighteen? It was a letter he’d wanted to write because he felt that the force of his love demanded not merely its revelation at every opportunity but an accompanying detailed validation as well. He had labored—a letter filled to the margins with encomia and which went so far as to attribute to this girl opinions she had never held and sagacious quotations she had never uttered. That girl was alive, though. He had been writing of someone who eventually just walked out of his life, leaving him spangled in the sun of a morning long dead, chopped to half of what he’d been.

  Come and get these memories, Guy snickers.

  All wrapped up in Teko’s world-in-flames rhetoric, Tania’s naked mourning somehow seems even more poignant than it might have otherwise, as if she were struggling to express herself through tone of voice, through emphasis and cadence, alone. Now slow. Now monotone. Now barely audible. Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. It’s very difficult to listen to this oration and not be convinced that Tania means what she’s saying. Even if the cause was something she embraced halfheartedly, the love of Cujo justified any level of involvement. Cujo’s own involvement was total, ultimately a self-disappearing act. Guy wonders: Did Cujo imagine his death? But of course: all SLA rhetoric is steeped in the language of suicidal devotion to the ideals and goals of the SLA. Those ideals and goals are less precisely stated than the penalties for having trespassed against them. The goal is to defeat the pig, to kill the fascist insect. Guy sits listening to the tape broadcast over foundation-supported noncommercial radio, turning over in his mind the ways he can apply it to the authorized story he’ll try to peddle to Macmillan or Viking or Doubleday, and he knows that Teko, and certainly Yolanda, are aware that the fascist insect will never die, but that they already have attained something even better: They’re handling the biggest star in America. FROM HEIRESS TO TERRORIST. It almost rhymes.

  The way she keeps coming back to the subject that haunts her. It just wipes him out.

  Cujo was the gentlest.

  Cujo taught the truth.

  I loved Cujo.

  Cujo was beautiful.

  Cujo’s name meant something beautiful.

  Cujo’s life meant something beautiful.

  I never loved anyone like I loved Cujo.

  Cujo never loved anyone like he loved me.

  When they took Cujo from me, they ripped me off.

  Cujo and I were always talking of important things.

  I hate my parents, and love Cujo, by the way.

  Cujo gave me something to share—and I keep it.

  Her boilerplate devotions to the other members of the dead army sound earnest enough, as if she were trying to shut them inside a group of little boxes that have been neatly hammered together by Teko and Yolanda. When she talks about Cujo, Guy gets the feeling that she is trying to praise him back to life. Guy thinks, Love without a soul to receive it is like a ghost. It’s an odd thought for him, but there is such a haunting, searching quality to her voice. It is the inconsolable living who haunt the memory of the dead. Though that first blush, the idyllic inseparability, has long ago faded from his affair with Randi, Guy still tries to imagine what it would be like to know that she had died, to watch it from a distance as smoke signals hoisting the whole weight of their lives together into the air. The desolation.

  Suddenly Guy is eighteen and on that dappled plaza, watching a girl walk into the morning fresh.

  ONE LAST THING:

  Canary pads. A child’s delight. Her father brought them home for her and her sisters in his briefcase, along with ballpoint pens, paper clips, typewriter erasers, reams of twenty-pound bond. The agreeable fact that they came from Daddy’s office, not from a store. Though that would have been all right too. Tania feels that if history has tossed her and this yellow pad together in this place at this moment, it is her own history. It’s an oddly comfy feeling, if false, the one this urban guerrilla has in the rear kitchen, piebald with sun and shadow, of the apartment on Euclid Avenue.

  She works diligently, in shifting natural light. Though the others are waiting, she loses track of the time it takes. It seems a long time since she’s worked on a composition. From the other room comes Teko’s murmuring voice. There is an oddly familiar quality to the murmuring. Tania realizes, with only the mildest surprise, that Teko is imitating the tone and cadence of Cinque’s voice. He is recording his part of their collective eulogy to their fallen comrades, her own contribution to which she is now composing. She hears Yolanda loudly and contemptuously correct his pronunciation of W.E.B. DuBois’s surname. “Shit!” says Teko.

  She bends to the work, her hand pleasantly cramped. Occasionally she massages it in the softening light. She reflects that sometimes dusk can seem later and more urgent than any part of the night, courting as each day does the petty grief over its own loss on the blushed horizon. It is too late. Tania feels that the last fading plumes of her trust in the world evaporated in the sky above Los Angeles, along with her old measure of herself. The true self is here at this table, transformed and annealed, and she takes care to make plain that her tribute is intended not merely to lay the dead to rest but as an annunciation.

  “Greetings to the People. This is Tania. Now that the fascists have assassinated our six brothers and sisters the pig media waddles up to the trough to feast upon their brutalized remains. The lies and falsehoods they are spreading about our comrades are beyond even what we had thought them capable of. Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known. In the short amount of time we had together he sought only to teach me the truth that had been kept from me throughout my life among the pigs. In the end he gave his own life for the People willingly and without hesitation. Some pig probably got a medal for shooting him down, but beware, pig: the name Cujo means ‘unconquerable.’ You may have destroyed his body but his spirit lives in the hearts and minds of the People. I never loved another individual the way I loved Cujo. I don’t mean the bourgeois love that seeks houses and fancy cars. I mean a mutual love based on the struggle for the People. They can’t take that from me. When the pigs stole Cujo from me I understood at last how it felt for thousands of beautiful sisters and brothers in Amerikkka when they were ripped off by the pigs of their loved ones. We mourn together! Let our guns sing our grief!

  “Gelina said it all with her beautiful words but she was burning inside with a fire to destroy the fascist insect. She came a long way to become the guerrilla warrior who died fighting the pigs. She taught me how to forget the past, to wash the blood off my hands, and make a fresh start as a revolutionary. How we laughed together, cried together, loved together, hated together. She loved the People as much as any of us.

  “Gabi embraced all, she will be remembered as one of the true mothers of the Revolution. She was patient and gentle—but also a merciless killer whose shotgun barked pure death from its maw. She was murdered trying to wring justice from the fascists using the only method pigs can understand.

  “Zoya died on her birthday. It is the sort of death that gives a fierce and passionate life like hers meaning. She was pure death, icy and meticulous, unflinchingly delivering vengeance upon those who would deny the People their freedom. She taught me how to kill—now she’s taught me how to die.

  “Fahizah understood the importance of her own righteous example. She understood the timidity of the middle-class, cringing, hamburger-eating pig and how that fear could paralyze. Her solution was to refuse to hesitate: shoot to kill, and ask questions later. She loved the People, and freedom, and she always will be loved.

  “Cinque saw the future as a beacon up ahead and he steered us there tirelessly, his strong Black hand upon the tiller of freedom. He gave us the gift of himself, when he could have been with his beautiful sisters and brothers. He taught everyone that Black people and whites could be comrades, that the fight for freedom is color-blind. He was hard on us, a strict teacher and a stern leader, but he always let us see that it was his love for the People that drove him. He alw
ays told us that it wasn’t how long you live that matters: it’s how you live. When he was assassinated by the cowardly pigs he proved that in dying for the People’s freedom his life had the highest meaning imaginable. On February 4, Cinque Mtume saved my life.

  “The SLA goes on under the leadership of General Field Marshal Teko. As a fully functioning cell of the Malcolm X Combat unit of the SLA we are prepared to function autonomously. The pigs articulate no more than their own fear and alarm when they report that we are leaderless and broken.

  “In the end, a small fire team of committed urban guerrillas faced down an army of cowering pigs, who could find only one way to defeat them: by setting fire to them with incendiary grenades. Perhaps in underestimating the commitment and bravery of the fallen SLA soldiers they had only their own cowardice to guide them. Now they call them suicidal: what a joke. Only the corrupt fascist insect would mistake courage for suicide. There was no surrender then, nor will there be now. Be forewarned, pig!

  “Gabi’s father understands and it gives us solace. To hear him speak so plainly and understandingly of our purpose even through his personal grief, you can see where she got her courage and strength. Likewise General Teko’s mother. Cujo’s father. What a difference between them all and the pig Galtons! One day, just before … uh … Cujo was talking to me about how my parents fucked me over. I was jealous, but happy for him, when he told me that his parents were still his parents because they’d never betray him or try to make him into who he wasn’t. He said that my parents were really Malcolm X and Assata Shakur: my true parents will never betray me either.

  “The pigs probably have the little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night.

  “So, pigs. You’ve killed another brave Black leader. But in tearing that one hair out of your pig head another thousand will bloom in its place! Cinque lives! The People will unite and when they do the pigs will never be able to burn them out the way they could a handful of revolutionaries.