Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  It’s too bad, he was ready to meet anyone, anytime, anywhere. Carries his copy of The Athletic Revolution to say, I am real. My reputation precedes me. On the back cover his eyes glare out from under the dome of his skull. On the front, a big caramel-colored fist makes the black power salute.

  (He holds the paperback up to the bathroom mirror. Joking/not joking: My most recent book. Free Press. Division of Macmillan? Seated at a plush red banquette.)

  He leafs through the book, stopping here and there to read passages of varying length. Transformed—by politics, by violence, by notoriety—the sports issues he engages in the book continue to resonate. If, as they so love to claim, sport is a mirror of real life, then revolt in sport is a mirror of revolt in real life, gaining in popularity and meeting heavy resistance from those who have every reason to resist change. What he’s really done is toss the phony paradigm back into their faces. In dealing with revolution explicitly, the SLA book project just extends these ideas. That’s what makes the project so attractive. That plus the Tania factor makes for what Guy feels is instantly accessible material.

  Still, the tautological justifications offered up by the SLA for the Foster murder, the shootings, the kidnappings continue to piss Guy off because he is, at root, an academic who prides himself on his critical thinking. Not an easy hop from plain Guy to Dr. Guy V Mock. Heavy-duty, baby. Adorno. Barzun. Frankl. Spend enough time with those dudes, and you begin to develop a sensitivity to the slightest whiff of bullshit. And for all the captive hours he’d spent with Teko and Tania, the suggestible front seat intimacy of engine drone and wind murmur as they pushed on toward the horizon, there wasn’t a single moment when either of them truly let their hair down, when he didn’t feel as if he were dealing with the surviving tape loop of SLA dogma, a disembodied part that whirred and buzzed indiscriminately now. He does not want to become the SLA minister of propaganda. And as the events since he arrived in New York have amply demonstrated, these are some difficult people, emotionally speaking. As human beings they are selfish, prideful, envious, lazy, nearly all the seven deadlies. Fucked-up sons of bitches, indeed.

  HERE’S HOW IT BEGAN with the psychics. Imagine a middle-aged man you’ve just met standing in your living room, removing his clothing avidly, though without any sexual heat—the way, say, an insurance salesman might unpack his briefcase at your kitchen table, moving the cup of coffee you’ve offered to one side to lay out brochures and folders. Hank had an inkling something like this might happen. Lydia’s face was frozen as the man stripped down to his Fruit of the Looms, until finally, faced with the greater part of his pale, flabby body, she covered her eyes with one hand and then slid quietly from her sitting position on the sofa to hide her face in a throw pillow. Hank gathered her up, buried his arms nearly up to the elbow in her armpits and raised her to her feet, then guided her through the doorway and to the foot of the stairs. He stood watching as she started up. Then he went back into the living room.

  “So,” he said, putting his hands together.

  A minute later Hank was calling Hernando in from the garage. He introduced him to the man in his underpants.

  “Would you please lift this gentleman and carry him to the car outside,” Hank began.

  Hernando listened and then hefted the man and carried him out to a car waiting in the driveway.

  “Call me ‘bitch,’” said the man.

  Hernando threw him into the open trunk and slammed the lid down. The car then sped off, and Hank thanked Hernando.

  Later the phone rang. “If you’re willing,” the middle-aged man said, “I’d like to recommend that we try again. I really didn’t obtain a clear picture.”

  One man fondled her shoes. One pored over her photographs. One lay in her bed, pulling the pastel duvet up to his chin.

  “But she hasn’t slept here in years,” Hank said. He switched on the light beside the door.

  The man sat up, blinking irritably. He was a dour little man, with dark crescents under his eyes and finely etched lines framing his mouth. He spoke quietly, in a distinct midwestern accent, from amid the rumpled bedclothes.

  “Alpha waves leave some of the most lingering impressions,” he said. “I’m definitely getting something. If you’ll excuse me.” Hank left the room. Returning a few minutes later, he found the man snoring quietly.

  A woman laid out a seven-card Solomon’s seal and offered obscure answers to Lydia’s anxious questions. Hank looked at the lurid and disturbing pictures illustrating the Rider Waite tarot deck as the woman’s soft voice murmured on.

  What hadn’t he done right the day that she was taken? What ritual had he overlooked? He got in the car, he drove the car. To work. Downtown. Dinner, at the homes of friends, his wife silent at his side. There’s something he was supposed to have done, to have been doing, something that had worked quietly day after day, all the years of his daughter’s life, and one day it hadn’t happened, had gone haywire like some humble cell inside the body that sets you up for disaster. Whatever the hell it was it had nothing to do with writing checks to favorite charities or bundling up old suits and putting them in the tall, heavy Goodwill bag. It was deeper and more integral, something beneath the surface of goodnight kisses and checking to see that the door was locked, something along the lines of an unspoken prayer or petition he hadn’t even been aware of making. Something as real as the first bite of a juicy pear that you’d never remember again.

  From whose life could trouble have been more distant? Well, he accepted the presence of the psychics because he accepted now that there were forces in the universe with which, unbeknownst to him, he always has been at odds, and he wanted to become acquainted with their ways and means.

  She laid out the cards, and he heard their slap over the soft murmur of her words, Lydia leaning forward, looking drawn, for a change.

  AFFIXED TO THE HANDRAIL on the second-story balcony above the screened porch, wrought-iron letters spell out PAIX. The house is on a slight rise, set fifty yards from a red barn, with a garage and two other small outbuildings in between at the head of the wide dirt driveway, halfheartedly scattered with gravel, that climbs from the road below. The barn and other outbuildings a deep red against the blue of the sky and the green of the tall grasses swaying in fields long relinquished to nature.

  “You’ll see the falling stars here at night, I bet,” says Guy. He has on his face the look of a man who is backing away, figuratively. He and Randi will be spending the night, and then they’re off. A mission to torrid Cuba, so Guy says. Guy pronounces it “coobah.”

  Inside is an American farmhouse. Tania is charmed. She has never seen the like. A mudroom filled with Wellingtons, faded buffalo check mackinaws, raincoats, flashlights, and the disused vacation things of the Laffertys: Louisville Sluggers and volleyballs and cross-country skis and a deflated float in the blue-gray shape of Disney’s Eeyore. An enormous kitchen, with attached pantry, overlooking the kitchen garden and the barn beyond. Tiny bedrooms upstairs, three of them, each like van Gogh’s room at Aries. Half a mile away a tiny town center forms at a crossroads. There’s a country store. Tania is charmed, just charmed.

  They explore the barn. Damp-smelling, loft still full of moldering hay. On its walls hang a bridle of rotten leather, which causes Tania to note the empty stalls, and rusty objects of faint menace, sickles, saws, and a pitchfork. Teko finds three abandoned toy guns, which he expropriates for training purposes. One is a revolver in filigreed Wild West style, with white plastic handgrips, and this he adopts as his own. He extends its barrel at the horizon. “Pow,” he says.

  Behind the house hills rise and fall softly, alive with the same swaying grass that covers the fields. A quarter mile away survives a stand of pines some pioneering farmer planted across the ridge of the tallest hill as a windbreak. Here in the faint daylight that penetrates these trees Tania picks her way over gray trunks felled by age and lightning. She carries the little plastic pistol she is supposed to be sharing with Joan, though Joan
has told her that as far as she is concerned this whole pistol routine is a fucking joke. Teko has said that because they have gone so long without their weapons they need to refamiliarize themselves. So Tania is tramping through the woods, her finger resting on the trigger guard of this goofy toy gat, which is stamped “Tracer Gun” and which fires little colored perforated plastic disks, if she remembers correctly.

  It’s very nice to be walking alone in the woods. The millions of brown needles yield softly beneath her feet. Technically she is supposed to be familiarizing herself with the terrain, like a good freedom fighter. “The urban guerrilla never goes anywhere absentmindedly and without revolutionary precaution, always on the lookout lest something occur. Eyes and ears open, senses alert, his memory engraved with everything necessary, now or in the future, to the uninterrupted activity of the fighter.”

  She does remember correctly because good old Ainley Hembrough III, her first love, had a pistol exactly like this. You pulled the trigger and this disk flitted out, wobbling klutzily in the air and invariably going off line well before reaching the target.

  Ainley was a doofus, pimples and comic books. On Friday nights he always cut their assignations short, so that he could get back by ten to watch Star Trek. She’d chosen him simply because of proximity. She’d been going to Santa Catalina in Monterey, and he’d been at Robert Louis Stevenson in Pebble Beach, and she could look out and say, Round this craggy promontory dwells my True Love. She would send him notes to that effect, cutting the ironic melodrama of her faintly Victorian yearning with ridicule, so he wouldn’t think she was taking it all that seriously. Though he actually was the sort of boy she liked: tall, wiry, quiet.

  The pines there came right down to the white sand, a dark fringe. Sitting in the moonlight on the luminous, fine sand, you could look up at that lighted ball with its ancient scuffs and wounds, shining down on the world with all the mysteries of the night, and you could imagine that you actually were up there. Ainley said if he had a good enough telescope he bet he could probably see the lunar module.

  But what the nuns did when they caught you out! Tania scrubbed more than her share of toilets. It ended up she liked the job, liked keeping things shining and clean, the porcelain white and antiseptic and the brightwork gleaming. It was their own dirty sensibilities that bestowed an axiomatic unpleasantness upon the chore. But she enjoyed seeing those big tiled rooms come clean to her own satisfaction.

  Ainley smoked pot and then lied about it to her. It took her a while to figure out how she felt about it, exactly, but when she finally did, that was the end. She received, from here and there, sad little reports about this waning boy, pining away for her. She imagined him standing beneath her window, like poor dead Michael Furey. By then, though, she’d successfully petitioned her parents to get her away from those crazy Dominicans, and on her first day at Crystal Springs School for Girls, she had gotten her maiden eyeful of Eric Stump.

  Nice to be alone in the woods. Tania hasn’t had any time to herself in ages. The birdsong here is intermittent and plaintive. Now she touches the Olmec monkey on its thong around her neck.

  He gave me the little stone face one night.

  She slips her finger inside the trigger guard and takes aim at a bough high overhead. On second thought, might as well do it right. She mimes: Rack the slide, watch the round coming up the ramp and into the chamber. Feet apart, relaxed, raise the gun to find the target with your dominant eye. That tweety little bird, all innocence, chirping away up there. Align the sights (actually, only one on this toy) and squeeze the trigger.

  “Move the gun to your head, not the other way around. And stop breathing.”

  Teko has come up behind her and stands, leaning against a tree. He is wearing shorts and a T-shirt that is dark with his sweat. Around his ankles are weights he had Yolanda make, sand sewn into heavy cotton socks.

  “How’d you manage to let me sneak up on you anyway? Crashing through these woods, you should have had the drop on me. Lost in the stars, rich girl.”

  Suddenly he draws the toy revolver from his waistband. Tania flinches.

  “Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. See, you’re dead. I killed you. You fail the test.”

  A ridiculous moment, the two of them in the trees, playing with toys. Tania abruptly remembers firing the submachine gun at Mel’s, people flattening themselves against the asphalt, the gun bucking, fighting her as it emptied itself. Teko, meanwhile, had allowed himself to be disarmed. Teko had blown everything. RIP Cin, Zoya, Gabi, Fahizah, Gelina, and Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. Who’d “failed” when it mattered?

  “Are those the socks you took from Mel’s?” she asks.

  “There are going to be some changes,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Big changes around here. No more sitting around watching fucking brainrot TV No more fucking takeout. No more fucking girl talk and giggles like a fucking slumber fucking party.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “You watch that attitude, bitch. I got my eye on you.”

  Tania looks up from a paperback copy of The Exorcist to watch from the screened porch Yolanda and Joan walking together in the tall grass behind the barn. They walk slowly, contemplatively. Joan has her hands behind her back, the fingers of one gripping the opposite wrist. Yolanda gestures deliberately, sculpting a sort of compact box in the air, illustrating the solidity and unassailability of her thoughts, gestures that say, Let’s Be Reasonable. Tania wonders idly what Yolanda is trying to con Joan into doing. A brief wind thrills the surface of the grass, momentarily drowning out the insect drone. Bugs all around here: grasshoppers and praying mantises and endless flies plus cicadas in the trees shrieking out the swan song of their long lives. Why they screened the porch in, probably. Nice in here, cool and with that summer-place smell of dust and must.

  Off in the distance she sees Yolanda stoop and pick up a weatherfaded tennis ball. Awkwardly she pitches it into the sea of waving grass, where it disappears. Then she and Joan continue their slow walk. Tania returns to her book, not looking up again until she hears someone climbing the porch steps. Joan opens the screen door and sits on a chaise, sinking slowly into its cushion, which audibly exhales.

  “You wouldn’t believe this,” she says. “But what they want me to is dress up like a white. For to go to town.”

  Guy Mock’s big idea was that Joan would be available to run errands and such this summer, keeping the lid on the red-hot fugitives. This was a way for her to return the favor he and Randi had done her by smuggling her out of California in 1972, when she herself had been red hot. Randi helped wipe down her apartment, and then Guy drove her to L.A., where together they boarded a New York flight, Joan carrying a huge stuffed rabbit and an Easter basket by way of disguise. Joan sometimes feels as if she’s been continuously returning this favor for two years.

  Here it’s been tough duty. An Oriental girl sashaying into the general store, yeah sure, to buy Oscar Mayer baloney and Wonder bread. “Who you think you’re fooling with that stuff, chink?” the clerk had finally asked her. One day she’d gone into the Goodwill just for a look at the paperbacks when she’d sensed another presence in the quiet nook where the books and old National Geographics were piled, and she’d looked up to meet the disapproving gaze of the clerk, who’d come out from behind the counter to follow her.

  She said, “We’re closed.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Leaving, Joan thought, stupidly, “That’s funny, the sign says open till four, the lights are on, no one else seems to be leaving.” The dawning that the woman had sought to protect her foxed old copies of national best sellers from Joan’s gook depredations came upon her slowly and humiliatingly.

  “She says, like, I’m just a little obvious.”

  “Duh,” says Tania. “Why don’t they just go themselves?”

  “And blow the covers.”

  “Their famous cover. Research assistants don’t buy groceries too? And what are you supposed to be, the Oriental hou
seboy?”

  Joan snickers.

  “Shit, I’ll go down there myself.”

  “Someone is feeling frisky.”

  “Just bored around here all the time.”

  “Well, whatever else, they heard of you, star chick. Your face is the famous face.”

  Tania laughs, softly, and throws down the book, which she finds pretty boring, actually. Girl locked in a room with a bunch of authority figures trying to change her personality? That’s entertainment? Plus every time Father Karras lights up a smoke, she wants one, and she’s trying to cut down.

  Tania never smoked at all before she was taken. Now she just can’t stop. At the apartment on Golden Gate, where she first came out of the closet to join the others at their eating, training, schmoozing, fucking, standing guard, and all the other pursuits the nine of them had crammed into those two rooms, she took up the habit in earnest. Everybody smoking away in two sealed rooms with the heavy surveillance drapes over the locked windows. Actually, she began in the closet, accepting cigarettes just to be polite. She remembers Cinque advising her that smoking was like killing pigs. “Baby,” he said, “once you start you just want to do it all the time.” She tilted her head back as subtly as she could manage, trying to peer at her captor from beneath the blindfold she wore.

  The depths of arcane knowledge she explored in that closet. The subject of blindfolds, for example. She came to know more about blindfolds than any human not similarly situated might ever have suspected there was to know. The different materials they were made from, the different methods of fastening them, their different purposes: concealment of the world or inducement to terror. Blindfolds made of bed sheets were most comfortable, but their tendency to loosen and slip down filled her with panic. Panic in the dark was not good. It was as limitless as the blackness and totally irresistible. When she could discern that the blindfold was no longer functioning, she would attempt to position herself in a way that she thought would indicate total noncomplicity in its failure. There she would cower. Blame was always a matter of who happened to discover her in there, concealing her wily capacity to examine the timeless dark. Cin would curse her, Zoya would roughly retie the blindfold, sometimes making it impossible to breathe through her nose, Teko would hit her, Cujo would rarely notice, and Gelina would cluck sympathetically. They put a pillowcase over her head and wound cord or twine around her neck to hold it on, but for some reason that didn’t last. Someone came up with the idea of taping cotton to her eyes, wads of surgical cotton pulled from a blue box with a big red cross on it and then taped to her face. When she wept, the cotton efficiently absorbed the tears, holding them there, a soggy memento to her despair. Plus she got a kind of diaper rash on her face. Any decent blindfold design needs to take tears into account. People who are left tied up and blindfolded in little closets tend to cry, frequently. They talked about pinning newborn-size Pampers to her face, but the Pampers were too expensive. They tried sanitary napkins instead, but they just fell off, leaving her blinking in the dark, wondering whether she was going to get killed, socked in the face, hauled over the coals, or commiserated with. Finally they just fastened sponges to her eyes with thick elastic bands. That worked all right. Everybody achieved a satisfactory middle ground with that one. It seemed to fulfill the requisite need for grotesquerie; it blinded her; it was uncomfortable but not distractingly so. Thus successfully disabled, she continued to wait. She kept expecting to cross the threshold beyond which she would take a stand, of some kind, but she surprised herself, with her ability to go farther and farther, without protest, eating when she was told, waking up when she was told, bathing when she was told, having sex when she was told, speaking the words she was told to speak. It did not strike her as weakness, not in the least. Strength, rather. Strength that she could eat such food, in the dark. Strength that she could pull herself fully awake at a moment’s notice, ready to agree with Cinque, to denounce the world. Strength that she could plod blindfolded and naked through the crowded apartment and then sink her bones into the grimy tub. Strength that she could endure the unwanted groping and gasping on the floor of her closet. Strength that she could learn to be another person, that she could empty the reliquary of herself, part with so much secret knowledge without once asking, “Is this really me? Then where do I think I’m going?” without even a moment’s nostalgia. If it was nostalgia she was after then it was a nostalgic attachment to the functions of her medulla oblongata that she developed; to her old pals respiration, circulation, and kinesthesia; to the feel of the beaten-down carpet under her skinny butt.