Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  So it was just big talk. Not that Joan didn’t love to hear Willie talk. To have him sitting there, all five feet seven of him, taking up revolution’s case in his polished and unconscious American idiom, was like listening to a Little Leaguer talk dirty to you. Innocent, exciting, and erotically charged. Willie was unconscious of it, and there was nothing he could have done about it had he tried; he couldn’t halt his big American self-confidence even in his stylized oppression, couldn’t stop it any more than he could stop himself from rooting for the Cubs or preferring the micronite filter of Kent cigarettes. Willie was politically very aware, but he was also a bright, interesting, sexy fantasist, and Joan fell in love with him.

  Then he asked her to rent the bomb factory.

  It was a vacant, detached garage in Berkeley that was renting for twenty-eight dollars a month. Joan called the number Willie had copied from the hand-lettered sign taped to the roll-down door and, identifying herself as “Anne Wong,” agreed to meet the landlord to inspect the place. She showed up at the designated time, did whatever she thought would indicate her sincere interest in a sheltered, secure parking space for her car—pulled down the door a couple of times, tried the switch that turned on the overhead light—and then rented it on the spot, sealing the deal with a month’s security and the first month’s rent in advance. The way Willie had said “bomb factory,” eyes alight and with a goofy smile, aided Joan in her belief that he didn’t actually mean it, that he had been interested in renting the garage for some other purpose, though what that purpose might be Joan couldn’t guess. Willie’s friends didn’t exactly seem poised to begin blowing things up, no matter what they might say around the kitchen table. But then Willie began to produce certain items, some of them from hiding places within the apartment—where, it became clear to her, Joan had been living in a state of willed benightedness—produced them and started to move them, in stages, to the garage, from placid objects, like notes and communiques attributed to “The Revolutionary Army” to such terrifying materials as ammonium nitrate, ammunition, blasting caps, fuses, gunpowder, guns, and pipe bombs.

  From the first, through self-interest alone, Joan found secrecy an easy burden. Then, gradually, trust eliminated the weight entirely. Born a suspect, she was happy to become a coconspirator with whoever would bank on her. Sometimes the Revolutionary Army was Willie alone. Sometimes members of Venceremos joined in. Occasionally the odd Weatherman or two. Always Joan’s participation was unquestioned; her race, prized.

  Willie’s original objective was armed propaganda. After-hours bomb blasts would be visited upon banks, brokerage houses, and other temples of capital in deserted financial district streets and suburban office parks. Small blows, systematically delivered, would damage the system while sparing the comparatively innocent, was the idea. This rule did not apply on the day in 1971 when Joan drove with Willie to O’Connor’s, a cop bar across the street from the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. It was about 4:30 when they pulled up, just around the time when cops, bailiffs, marshals, and deputies began filling the saloon. Willie sat in the passenger seat with a Styrofoam cooler on his lap. In it was a six-pack of Olympia beer, only five of whose cans contained the brew. The sixth held gunpowder, nails, and carpet tacks. For this Willie had devised a fuse by scraping the substance from Fourth of July sparklers and crushing it, mixing the resulting powder with water, and then dipping string into the mixture. Once fuses of varying lengths had dried Joan had tested several, timing each as it sparkled and popped itself into a length of gray ash. She had done it in the alley outside the garage, squatting on the cracked slab of concrete angling into the space, whose door she had discreetly lowered. Two boys zipping up the alley on banana bikes had come to a stop so that they could watch. Eventually, after a period of reverential silence, one had been moved to ask, “What’re those for?”

  Joan had given him a tight smile. “Chinese New Year,” she said.

  Ten seconds was what she had figured. Enough time for Willie to light it, toss it in, get back to the car, and get away. She had cut several fuses to the proper length and placed them in a plastic bag that previously had held sticks of incense. Now, as Willie took the bomb from the cooler, she reached for the bag of fuses. In her nervousness she dropped one as she withdrew it from the bag.

  “Come on, c’mon,” said Willie.

  The musky incense smell filled the car. Hare Krishna, thought Joan, Krishna Hare. She didn’t know why. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

  “This is the exact frame of mind I had hoped you would avoid like the plague,” said Willie. “You either think this is funny or you’re panicking and in either case you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  Joan snorted. She couldn’t stop; she definitely had the giggles. Willie took the bag of fuses from her, pulled one out, and fitted it to the beer can grenade.

  “Now. I’m going to go. I’m going to do it. Be ready to get out of here.” He threw open the door and was out of the car. Joan bit the insides of her cheeks and prepared to drive off. Then Willie was back. The beer can still in his hand.

  “A light?” he asked, gesturing with his free hand at the bomb.

  Joan scanned the car. She reached out and pushed in the dashboard cigarette lighter.

  “That’s it? That’s the light we brought?”

  Joan started giggling again.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He waited, jiggling his leg, the beer can held gingerly by his fingertips, until the lighter popped out, and then grabbed it.

  “Better hurry up,” said Joan. “It colds down real fast.”

  He dashed to the entrance, sheltering the glowing end of the lighter, the bomb cradled against his chest. Joan ticked off: Light fuse, open door, toss in grenade, dash back to car.

  “Go, go, go go go!” he said, though Joan had the car moving before he had closed his door. “That ought to get them. That ought to take care of them.”

  “Did you mail the communiqué?” asked Joan.

  “I figured I’d wait until the action was over.”

  “It won’t get picked up until tomorrow, you know. Unless we take it right to the post office.”

  “It’ll keep,” he said. “What do you say we go to Flint’s? We can eat in the car and listen to the news.”

  But there wasn’t any news. Whether the grenade had been stomped out by a vigilant off-duty cop or had simply been a dud, the thing didn’t go off, and there was only a small item in the local section of the Chronicle the next morning. No radio or TV coverage at all. Disappointed, Willie began to plot out more ambitious actions. His visits to the garage became lengthier and more frequent.

  On March 30, 1972, two policemen on patrol were hailed by a Berkeley housewife who told them that she was smelling gas “out back.” After advising dispatch to notify PG&E, the cops went into the alley that ran behind the street, where they made a cursory examination of the area, just sticking around until the utility guys arrived. The alley was lined with freestanding garages on one side, with the backs of bungalows and apartment houses on the other. Coming from one of the garages was a keen, chemical odor that aroused the curiosity of the cops, not the odor of gas, but it was a faintly familiar smell, and it was a slow morning, and they had a valid pretext, so what the hell. The cops picked the garage door lock easily and rolled it up, extending daylight into the small space. There they discovered the appurtenances and raw materials that constituted what the newspapers, with typical color, soon described as a “massive” bomb factory. Although, coming almost exactly two years after members of the Weather Underground had blown up a Greenwich Village town house by accidentally touching off thirty sticks of dynamite, such hyperbole was perhaps understandable.

  Joan typically woke to a clock radio, a device that enchanted her and drove Willie nuts. She woke up to the news, to even-toned voices telling of faraway things! It was a lovely idea, to lie there in her bed, next to Willie, allowing her consciousness to absorb the world events of the last twen
ty-four hours. On the morning of Good Friday 1972, the top news was local: Three men had been arrested and charged with operating a “massive bomb factory,” right there in Berkeley. This had Joan sitting bolt upright. The men apparently had been on their way to bomb the UC Naval Architecture Building when the police had taken them into custody.

  Joan had only just typed out the communique: “Any stage in the production of the Empire’s death machines is a legitimate target of revolutionary war, including the training school for the technicians of Death.”

  Also discovered in the suspects’ possession were notes plotting the kidnap of Robert S. McNamara and a detailed plan for the bombing of the UC Berkeley space sciences laboratory. Two of the suspects were identified as Paul Rubenstein, twenty-two, and Michael Bortin, twenty-three, both of Berkeley. A third man remained unidentified. That was Willie! Holy shits! No wonder the pigs weren’t knocking down her door! He’d given her a chance to get out of there. But to go where?

  Of all Willie’s friends, the one who in his raffish self-confidence had most appealed was Guy Mock, whose every word seemed to insinuate a supreme ability to compartmentalize, a detachment from the moment at hand, that just as one project was beginning to cool off another was simmering and about to bubble; that no matter where he was or what he was doing there was always a different place where he would soon need to go or to be. If connections were the most important thing, whether in business, bureaucracy, or revolution, Guy stressed his connections everywhere, dropping names into conversations like depth charges. If anyone could help her out in a quick jiffy it would be Guy. And Guy loved to acquire people; she’d felt it herself from time to time when he’d cozy up to her, weird big eyes glowing, with this sort of Hey Sexy Exotic Little Jap Bomber Girl Pound for Pound You are a Pearl of Great Price, covetous but not in a strictly sexual way. She knew he would kill to have her owe him a favor.

  She took a pair of clean panties and her toothbrush and put them into her purse. She left the apartment then, heading for Guy and Randi Mock’s place on Fifty-eighth Street. As she had guessed, Guy was delighted to help. Two days later she was flying out of LAX, seated in first class, with Guy beside her and an enormous stuffed bunny on her lap.

  The questions of who is to run into town to perform errands, and in what guise, remain unanswered, forgotten, and gradually it becomes plain to Tania that what Teko and Yolanda put forward to Joan as issues concerning the well-being of the entire group, matters of crucial importance, are actually excuses to manipulate her, to boss her around. Joan remains stubbornly resistant to this sort of handling. She bluntly declares that the SLA’s concerns and her concerns are two different things. She will not take part in the drills—in the biceps curls, shoulder shrugs, paratroop push-ups, sit-ups, knee bends, leg lifts, and jumping jacks that Teko, Yolanda, and Tania practice every day, though she enjoys the regular morning and afternoon runs. She will not participate in the study sessions, which bore her, or the political discussions, which she refers to derisively as “fantasyland.” She declines to be comradely with either Teko or Yolanda. She reads the Sunday newspaper, works the crossword. She carries a lipstick and occasionally applies it. What’s especially infuriating, from Teko and Yolanda’s perspective, is that Joan’s insubordination is accomplished with that unruffled equanimity that comes as naturally to her as breathing. She is not rude or unpleasant about it, simply dismissive in a very forthright way, in the manner of a gracious child rejecting what is offered. What remains is the assurance of a young woman whom it is impossible to intimidate or coerce.

  Later, at trial, this same resistance to intimidation will bag her five contempt of court citations.

  Tania is duly impressed. Nor is this impression lost on either Teko or Yolanda. So the summer’s design works out to something like: Take a crack at Joan every day, see what the yield is (Teko persuades Joan to pour him a glass of orange juice when she pours one for herself = major victory); take turns trying to destroy her growing influence on Tania.

  Early one morning Teko gathers rocks, about thirty-five pounds of them, and loads them into an old canvas knapsack. Hoisting it, he guides Tania’s arms through the straps.

  “Now run,” he says, pointing at Yolanda, who waits before a group of birch trees by one of the property’s three ponds, a hundred yards distant. She waves back at the two of them, less a friendly gesture than as if she were trying to hail a cab in the rain. “Run!”

  Tania begins to trot. The pack weighs more than a third of what she does, the stones dig into her spine and rib cage like a dozen elbows. Teko jogs beside her. “Run all out, or I’ll be right behind you, kicking your ass.” To illustrate, he drops back and dispenses a kick to her left buttock. Tania gasps.

  “Come on, Tania!” Yolanda hollers, waving with both arms now. Mist hangs low, in gnarled puffs, over the pond.

  “You want another one?”

  “No!” pants Tania. “Please!”

  He kicks her anyway.

  “Get down there! Move! Christ!”

  “Come on, Tania!”

  She plods along toward Yolanda, the pack chafing her shoulders, the rocks jabbing her, the sound of Teko’s breathing behind her. Finally, she reaches Yolanda. She halts and bends at the waist, getting the weight of the knapsack off her shoulders while she catches her breath.

  “Well, what are you stopping for?”

  “You heard her, keep going!”

  Tania looks blankly ahead of her. They stand at the edge of the pond, which drops away from the shore to a total depth of around eight feet.

  “Get in there!”

  Tania begins to slip out of the pack.

  “With the pack, come on!”

  “With this pack?” says Tania. “I’ll drown. It’s too heavy.”

  “What if,” poses Yolanda, “you were being pursued by the enemy and you were carrying essential supplies? Would you just stop at the edge of the water? Or would you go on, like a true guerrilla?”

  “You’d get in there,” says Teko.

  “No, but I’d leave the pack behind,” says Tania. “No way I’d get in there with it.” To her this is still a situation to which she can apply reason. In spite of everything that has happened to her, she believes this.

  “We’re not saying this is a choice-type scenario. This is you’re being hunted down by a fascist death squad.”

  “I’m not. It wouldn’t happen. And I’d totally leave the pack.”

  “Not everything’s a damn choice you get to make,” says Teko.

  “This is a dangerous mode of thinking, Tania. It’s almost counterrevolutionary. I have to wonder where these ideas of yours are coming from.”

  “Oh, we all know where they’re from. We don’t even have to mention where they’re from. If you want to be like Joan, just lying around with the fucking Sunday funnies, waiting for the pigs to burst in on you, then be my guest. Just don’t waste me and Yolanda’s time. You want to be like her, go ahead. But you saw—you saw what the pigs will do to you. You saw it in L.A.”

  “How about we just pretend I’m carrying the pack?”

  “Not listening!” says Teko, and shoves her in. She splashes forward a few steps, arms flailing, then pitches forward, landing on her knees in about two feet of water. The bottom of the pond is putrescent mud, totally gross. Plus, in falling, one of the rocks, slung forward within the pack by inertia, has smacked her in the occiput. Dazed, angry, she remains motionless in the water.

  “Now get on your feet and wade in. Do you think in ’Nam we didn’t carry full packs into the paddies?”

  Tania knows, from remarks Yolanda has made during her arguments with him, that Teko spent six months in the rear echelons in Vietnam, then was stationed for the remainder of his East Asian tour on Okinawa, manning an officers’ club. Probably this is something it would be wiser not to bring up just now. She gets to her feet and begins to wade.

  “You need to remember your duty. You need to remember this isn’t any damned vacation. I know
that god damned bitch has filled your head up with ideas. We lost six comrades, Tania! The pigs smoked them like they were nothing. They smoked Cujo!”

  The mention of Cujo’s name has the desired effect. She doesn’t cry, but she feels an intense physical thrill that begins somewhere behind her breastbone and surges into her lower abdomen, where it blossoms with a kind of viral sapience. She lumbers forward in the murky water, her body’s knowledge undeniable. It knows, for example, that at this moment she is possessed by the spirit of Cujo (a kindergarten daydream, like the one she sometimes has of Cujo gazing down on her from a cotton ball heaven, standing at the side of Jesus, Ché, Lou Gehrig, Anne Frank, George Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Pope John, and a benevolent white-bearded God); it knows again the days and nights of their short time together. How could Joan understand? Joan thinks that she is helping, but she couldn’t possibly grasp how close, how very much her family Teko and Yolanda are. She marches out into the middle of the pond, the water rising above her hips, her waist, the good soldier; praying to live, praying to die.

  Drown.

  Drown.

  Live.

  Drown.

  Live, drown.

  Drown.

  Live, live!

  When Tania enters the house in her sodden, mud-caked clothes, followed by an unusually buoyant Teko, Joan says nothing, just studies her for a moment and then drops her head, bending to the tablet on which she daily writes letters to Willie or diaristic notes. Cold, hungry, and by now thoroughly abandoned by the spirit of Cujo, Tania thinks that what Joan is writing has to be some contemptuous observation about her, and for a moment she flashes with the anger that Teko and Yolanda exhibit at the sight of Joan writing away. She climbs the stairs to her tiny bedroom and strips off her clothes, tossing them to the floor. She actually liked those clothes, too, is the thing. The mud, pervasive, streaks the folds and interstices of her body, the spaces between her toes and the flesh beneath the slight droop of her breasts.