Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  Tania personally can’t get enough TV The repeats on the local stations, punctuated by endless commercials for technical training schools, seem more in sync with the life of the great waning city outside the windows than what she sees on the news. They track the tale of being at home during the workday, which is a secret sort of life, scandalous in a pint-size way to remain at the edges while everybody else makes for the bustling center. Ricky tells Lucy he’s heading to the club, and the next thing you know a frizzy-headed Puerto Rican—looking guy is turning from an oscilloscope to ask, in an accented English that both recalls and skewers Ricky Ricardo’s, “How did I get this great career?” Technical Career Institute, is the answer. Offering certificate and degree programs in the rapidly expanding fields of Electronics; Computer Technology; Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration; Building Maintenance; Computerized Accounting Systems; and Office Technology. Free set of tools when you graduate. Then Lucy’s back, getting Mrs. Trumbull to watch Little Ricky while she tries to work her way into the act, again. Waaaahh. That sexy single strand of pearls around her neck. They sit and talk, drag slices of toast through slicks of yolk remaining on their breakfast plates, as the credits crawl over the gray iridescent swollen heart that floats in the middle of the screen, suspended there by love supreme and the blasts of hot air rising from the rhumba beat of the theme song.

  Back at the apartment, Joan lays the bags of pot on the kitchen table.

  “Any trouble?” asks Yolanda.

  “No trouble,” says Joan.

  “Pearl?” Yolanda uses Tania’s new code name.

  “No,” says Tania.

  “Are you sure no one saw you?”

  “We said no.”

  “I just need to know, Joan. While we’re waiting for Teko, I’m ranking officer.”

  “So next time you should go yourself.”

  “As the one in command it would be irresponsible of me to expose myself that way.”

  Joan repeats, “Expose yourself?” Tania snorts.

  “Oh, very mature. But that’s not even the point. The point is I don’t think a debriefing is uncalled for after an operation.”

  Joan rolls her eyes. “Operation. We’re buying some grass, for Christ sake.”

  “I really don’t see why you have to like challenge my authority,” complains Yolanda.

  With a slight shift of her body, Joan shuts her out.

  Yolanda says, “Pearl.”

  Yolanda says, “Pearl,” considering the name.

  “That name,” says Yolanda thoughtfully, “doesn’t suit you.”

  “Well, leave it to Teko to pick out a bunch of crappy names,” says Yolanda.

  She turns to study Joan.

  “I think it would go much better with your personality, Joan. It’s a very Oriental-sounding sort of name anyway.”

  “Joan goes OK by me with my personality,” says Joan.

  “Oh,” says Yolanda, “I practically almost think of that as your real name.”

  “That’s because you don’t know me,” says Joan. “At all.”

  Randi comes into the tiny kitchen. All four of them share the space with the appliances and the sound of a siren coming through the airshaft. The wall is of exposed brick and there is a little gap in the wall over the stove where a box of kitchen matches stays.

  “I had a call from Guy today,” says Randi. “He says he should be here tomorrow.”

  “Check,” says Yolanda. “With the package.”

  “You mean that package with the wittle tiny wegs,” says Joan, an innocent expression on her face. She knows Teko only through the descriptions she’s heard, mainly from Tania.

  “And the fuzzy wuzzy wustache,” adds Tania. She and Joan begin to giggle.

  “De wittle wevowutionary weader.”

  “De wascawy wabbit.” Tania sags, putting her hands on her knees. She gasps for breath. She is laughing so hard that she hopes that she and Joan stay together forever. Randi hefts one of the bags of pot. “Have you two been into this stuff already?” Yolanda has a face of stone.

  Tania hates the new names. They have no proud provenance, unlike their guerrilla names. They’re just these ugly old names. She is Pearl, Teko is Frank, and Yolanda is Eva. And anyways they always forget to use them.

  They can smoke pot in the apartment, but Randi puts her foot down about cigarettes. Verboten, nyet, no good. So Tania steps outside into a night street, heavy still air and the hum of air conditioners all around. She carries a pack of Tareytons and a disposable Cricket lighter. A very exciting invention. She lights it repeatedly, studying the adjustable flame, imagining what if she were from Vietnam or Russia or someplace and were handed this single object from which to make sense of America.

  There are plenty of people on the street, despite the town’s fearful reputation. Talking, always talking, and with an abandon to the talk, a rude candor that indiscriminately lashes all within earshot. Underlying it all, this supreme self-absorption. They either don’t care that you’re not interested or they assume that you have to be interested. And she does want to join in.

  She considers it kind of funny that when they arrived in New York, practically at the instant they’d crossed the George Washington Bridge, any residual sense she had that maybe she ought to keep herself out of sight, to hide in the closet, vanished. There was no question of it, in spite of Yolanda’s persistent bossiness. You’ve come a long way, baby. And you don’t travel this far to crouch in fear. She allows herself some absurdly impossible ideas: She’d love to find an apartment like Guy and Randi’s. The rents up here seem reasonable. She and Joan could fill it with Salvation Army furniture. She has to admit that she’s basically a homebody. Fantastically, she sees herself working, getting a job at an ad agency or a publishing house (maybe Guy could help with that), keeping the SLA business confined to the weekend. The revolution appears far enough removed from New York to allow ROTC-type training. Anyway, here it seems as if the People already have the upper hand, or maybe it’s that their poverty is so much more up front and aggressive that it itself is the establishment here.

  A succinct breeze, more like the push of a ghostly hand, brings with it the explicit stink of rotting garbage and then disappears. Tania lights another Tareyton. She feels more stupid and noticeable standing outside for the purpose of smoking a cigarette than she does for being on the FBI’s most wanted list. A man clad only in a hospital gown approaches her. The gown’s got a dense small-figured paisley print, Tania can see, with the name of the hospital stenciled near the bottom. Pedestrian traffic subtly alters course, pointedly avoiding the unlikely pair while equally pointedly pretending to take absolutely no notice of her or of the half-naked man. She looks directly into his eyes. It seems like a smarter thing to do than to avoid his gaze. And ignoring him is out of the question; he’s basically right on top of her.

  “You have one of those?”

  She hands him a cigarette. She asks, “Do you want a light?” He considers this for a moment and then tucks the cigarette behind his ear.

  “You have another?” She gives him a second cigarette, and this one he puts between his lips, and Tania is glad to have the opportunity to use the magical Cricket once again. They silently stand and smoke for a minute or more, altogether too close to each other for Tania’s taste, while he watches the people who pretend not to see him. He puts a hand to his throat, touches it softly, Tania notices. It seems like a pose.

  “Can I come in for some water?”

  “No, sorry,” says Tania.

  “No water?” asks the man.

  Tania looks around, and her gaze lights on a bodega on the corner. “You could get some there,” she tells him. He turns to look, then faces her again.

  “For free?” One eyebrow raised.

  “No, probably not.”

  He discharges something, less than an obscenity, more like the wordless expectoration of disenchantment: She has totally let him down. He steps back and wheels on one calloused heel, then step
s carefully with his naked feet, continuing on his bare-assed way down the street. With his departure the spell is broken, and not only do the other pedestrians resume noticing her, but one addresses her as well.

  “Bet someone’s looking for him,” says the woman, who walks a German shepherd.

  “Bet you’re right,” says Tania, gazing at the police dog.

  Inside, the living room is now dark, and as Tania tiptoes to the kitchen, where Joan and Randi still sit at the table, Yolanda raises her head from where she lies on the sofa.

  “Quiet,” she says, irritably.

  “Sorry,” says Tania.

  Joan and Randi are laughing at something.

  “Lately,” says Joan, “I been having troubles with my vocabulary.”

  “It’s OK.” Randi laughs.

  “It’s like, the word’s under here someplace but when I go to go after it, it’s gone already.”

  “You do so well, considering.” says Randi. “I mean, no offense. Anyway, you draw from inward for meaning. It’s a matter of self-actualization. If you know what you mean to say, other people will too. It’s a natural process.”

  “Yeah,” says Joan. “But mostly people like to know the names of things. Heliotrope. Jack-o’-lantern. Deadly nightshade.”

  Teko comes in, dressed like Al Green and clean-shaven under butterscotch-tinted aviators and hair that has been bleached blond. You walk into a room looking like that you take a second to let everybody get used to the glare. But Teko goes straight into his inspector general routine, like you’re waiting for him to put on the white glove and swipe a finger across the lintel in a quest for fugitive dust. The point is, why bother even hoping for a change? Tania sits quietly on the wicker Queen Anne sofa, her hair damp from the shower and spilling over the white terry cloth robe she wears, she guesses it’s Guy’s, watching as Teko takes in the apartment. His canvas knapsack dangles from his hand. There are knickknacks and other useless creature comforts that Tania suddenly is seeing through Teko’s eyes. She feels embarrassed by her own ease.

  “Quite a bed of roses,” says Teko. Teko wears that strange and insincere smile he has. It displays the peculiar concave camber of his upper teeth. Actually, it’s quite an ordinary apartment. Aside from the wicker sofa, there are in this room two undistinguished armchairs, a footlocker pressed into service as a coffee table, a low bookshelf of unfinished pine, and in an alcove the “offices” of the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society: two file cabinets, a desk made from a hollow-core door, and a set of shelves extending from the wall on brackets.

  “And here’s the new recruit,” he says to Joan.

  “No,” answers Joan.

  “No? I thought you were joining us,” says Teko. His voice is mild and laden with malice.

  “Just a fellow traveler,” says Joan.

  “Well I don’t understand the point of that.”

  “The point of I’m not joining you?”

  “I mean what are you doing here then?”

  “Joan and you all have a lot in common,” says Guy. “We’ve been through all this.”

  “A babysitter’s what you’re saying.”

  “This isn’t the term I personally would use.”

  “But you’re saying if the shoe fits.”

  “I’m saying Joan’s been living underground for more than two years.”

  “We have some potato salad and cold cuts,” says Randi.

  “Why would we start, I wonder,” wonders Guy, “arguing about this the minute we come through the door? You knew what was on the other side of that door. We had three thousand miles to talk about what and I might add who was on the other side of that door.”

  “Cheese, orange kind and white kind, and coleslaw,” says Randi.

  “It’s not, believe me,” Guy says to the others, displaying his open palms, “it’s not like we had this fun see-the-USA-in-your-Chevrolet trip, forget all our troubles, sit back and relax.” He addresses Teko. “You were bugged about everything, the whole way. The waitress at the Big Boy is looking at you. The clerk at the store puts his hand on your brand of cigarettes before you tell him what you want. Your eye’s glued to the speedometer in the desolate nether stretches of no place, where two deputies patrol a million square miles. You’re unscrewing the mouthpiece on the motel telephones to check for listening devices. And all that time you knew who and what was waiting on the other side of that door in this apartment in this city, and you didn’t say thing one.”

  “Ever wonder who came up with three-bean salad? I sure do.”

  “So tell me why now we’re instigating some sort of dialogue about the basically settled issue of Joan.”

  “I just wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” says Teko. He slurs it enough to make it sound like whore’s. An additional tension takes hold of the room. The gratuitous insult has a presence, a weight, that is unignorable.

  Tania thinks that there’s something very Hollywood about borrowing and wearing a man’s bathrobe in his apartment. Hollywood and sexily Goldilocks-ish.

  “So now you heard it,” says Joan, ignoring the insult. “I don’t know who do you think you’re giving orders to, but it’s not me. I don’t know who it’s going to be.” She looks at Yolanda, but Yolanda’s eyes are downcast.

  “I don’t ‘give orders,’” says Teko. He picks up a highball glass that sits on the footlocker and sniffs it.

  “On the other hand,” says Randi, “we could always do Jade Mountain.”

  “Just No-Cal,” says Tania. Her hair whispers against the terry cloth as she turns her head toward him.

  “Frankly, I could kill for some Chinese after a thousand hamburgers,” says Guy. “Has Randi taken you girls to Jade Mountain yet? It’s the best.”

  “Oh, have we been out on the town?” Teko shakes his head in disgust.

  Guy says to Yolanda, “He’s all yours.”

  “Guy, I just, shit,” says Teko. “We’re traveling undercover, and they’re sampling the local cuisine.”

  “They’re undercover too. But they’ve got to eat. An army travels on its stomach, says Mao.”

  In a concession to Teko’s security concerns, Guy and Randi go to Jade Mountain to bring back takeout. They push the footlocker to the side, making room to form a circle on the living room floor, the white takeout containers clustered at its center. They eat hungrily, without talking. Guy eats scrupulously with chopsticks. Joan does not. The meal seems to mellow Teko out somewhat, and Tania watches him eat, fascinated: He reaches with his fork for the food on his plate and then hovers with it at chest level, waiting while his jaw works metrically at the previous forkload, revealing none of the epicure’s contentedness or satisfaction, his eyes uninhabited behind the candy-colored sunglasses, a device, refueling, on standby.

  There are five fortune cookies for the six of them. Don’t ask how it happened but Joan and Tania, dawdling over their lo mein, are the ones who get stuck. Tania saw Guy’s open hand shoot out to enclose one of them even before he was done eating. Guy’s eyes take in the weight and measure of everything, calculating his best potential share. But the other one just disappeared. Joan doesn’t care much, but the others insist they go halvesies. They insist! Come on! Laughter and camaraderie. Tania cracks open the brittle shell and grabs the end of the paper strip. It’s a feeling so familiar it seems as if it dated back to the ocean’s saline womb, as if mankind were created to tug paper slips from sugar wafers baked in a shaped crumple. She pulls and the paper is freed.

  “Tear it in two,” orders Yolanda.

  “Now, how does that work?”

  “Tear it and like see what it says.”

  Tania tears the strip down the middle and hands one half to Joan. “This is silly.”

  Joan glances at hers and shrugs. “It says, ‘ning for Success.’”

  Tania looks down and gasps. On the torn slip, plain as day, it reads, “You have a Year.”

  Laugh that one off.

  A big hale fire department lieutena
nt named Lafferty drops by the apartment to deliver the summer lease to his Pennsylvania farmhouse and get the rent check, and beforehand there is this unbelievable scene, with Teko lofting himself into orbit because they’re renting the place from a “pig.”

  Guy has become thoroughly weary of this word. Joan, wide-eyed after one single day with Teko ‘n’ Yolanda, confides: “These are some fucked-up son of a bitches.”

  Guy had harbored hopes that he’d be able to swing a meeting or two with publishers during his New York stay, but it’s becoming pretty clear that he’ll be lucky just to ferry Joan and the SLA three to their remote hideaway before they kill one another in his apartment.

  Two grand, incidentally, for this summer rental—as Randi would doubtless point out, two more grand—and still not so much as a thank-you. A simple thank-you, as his mother might say. And Guy does feel a little like his mother, killing you with chips, crudités, pigs in blankets, drinks, ice, clean ashtrays, coffee, fresh baked cookies, German chocolate cakes, whatever hospitality program fitted onto the spindle of her faithful and discontented brain, waiting uselessly all the while for a sign of gratitude from the louts in her life.

  Guy likes the ring of the phrase, isolated farmhouse. Rather than connote the In Cold Blood quality of total menace Guy would ordinarily associate with the countryside (with the horizontal threat of the Midwest still fresh in his mind), it sounds, at this hectic juncture, charmingly withdrawn from the hurlyburly of everyday life. The cover story the others will use, if asked, is that they’re research assistants working for a New York writer—nominally him. And he can see himself in the midday quiet of the place, working away in a back bedroom overlooking a lawn screened by gnarled old shade trees.

  For Guy, the bitch of life is that clear view the brain permits of inaccessible alternatives.

  The day’s work done, you remove the sheet from the typewriter platen and then go off to the swimming hole, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do in rural Pennsylvania. But now he just wants to drop his argumentative little payload and head back to the Bay Area.