Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  And enfolded in events, are we simply awaiting our interpretation? To Randi it is looking less and less like an ordinary American afternoon, with wind bending the tops of the pines along the ridge and gently rustling the birches closer to the house. Now it is the doomscape of history. She drove to Pennsylvania today, but Guy obviously has been making a journey into history with a capital H. She stretches and then slowly, almost hesitantly, lays her head on Guy’s shoulder. He switches his beer to his left hand and then, carefully, as if he’s worried he’ll scare her away, shifts so that his right arm is around her. They sit and wait for the revolutionary castaways.

  The others arrive near dusk. They have been “on maneuvers” in the woods and fields. Teko is bursting with a steroidal energy, at the border of a jolly hostility familiar to Guy from the halftime locker room, an inflammatory and self-renewing aggressive confidence. He moves around the kitchen while dinner is prepared, joyous, plates and glasses clanking angrily together in his hands. Yolanda talks blandly with Randi about the kitchen garden, which is overgrown and neglected but still producing “fantastic” tomatoes, according to Yolanda. Joan has disappeared into the parlor. Guy listens to Teko recount the day’s martial triumphs while keeping an eye on Tania, who sits silently at the kitchen table, her shadowed face further darkened by a large eggplant-colored bruise blooming on her left cheekbone.

  Teko is feeling so damned good that Guy knows he’ll have a tricky time selling the idea of moving to him and Yolanda. He’s not shying away from a confrontation, exactly; this is the kind of conversation he’s handled before, expertly. Usually the key, when delivering bad news is to appeal to their pride in their own self-possession. To say, you have to either bargain for this stuff, take it with equanimity, or you might as well go in for managing the produce department at the Alpha Beta. Hey, yeah—day in and day out with the vegetables; stacking them in neat pyramids, checking for rot, setting the misty spray mechanism to go off at designated intervals; remembering names, prices, varieties, growing seasons. Sell organics even; go to work at Rainbow or the Berkeley Bowl and turn the whole dreary enterprise into the politics of self-congratulatory smiles. Why not? Everybody loves a greengrocer. None of the stain, the flesh stink, of a butcher in his bloody white coat, and the hard hat to remind you that meat is a heavy industry manufacturing its product from the inert flanks of huge corpses. Now there’s a challenge, to work amid the fury, the chain saw din, of the meatpackers! So usually that’s the key. That’s what the key is, to these type conversations. Guy indulges in his reverie as Teko paces and talks. He’ll wind down, Guy thinks, and then I’ll tell him. But Guy has the impression that Teko has been overcranked for a few days now.

  “Joan’s a natural,” Teko is saying, flinging his arms out before him. “We’re dealing with a question of motivation.”

  “Motivation,” repeats Guy.

  “She doesn’t want to lead. I say, what about your responsibility to minorities? The SLA was conceived and recruited with minority leadership in mind. I want to assure you that my position as General Field Marshal is strictly an interim thing. I don’t deserve to lead the revolution against white fascist corporate Amerikkka. Maybe if I was a homosexual. I only deserve whatever small role I’m assigned.”

  “They have these bugs,” Yolanda tells Randi.

  “She could take over right now if she showed only the slightest iota of interest. But as it is, she’s a barely functioning guerrilla.”

  “I think she thinks her time with you is an interim kind of thing too,” says Guy.

  “Well, I wish you’d talk to her about getting with the program … I think if she just gave it a real try … She could be dynamite.” Guy notices a shit-eating grin creep onto Teko’s face.

  “Everybody loves Joan,” says Guy. This is true. Joan exercises a gravitational pull, the tasty mystery of good-looking people with dark secrets they hold close. Nobody is quite sure of Joan’s history, including Guy. He knows about Manzanar, sat up straight at the mere mention of the magical name Hiroshima. OK, the chronology is a little screwed up, might be something as trivial and vain as Joan’s lying about her age. The Big Three-Oh, or something. But this is something he believes she’s entitled to, as a person displaced by events, a displaced person. He thinks of Negro cemeteries he’s been to, the cockeyed stones lacking birthdates, lacking surnames, free of all the administrative litter that joined a life to its lineage. And now Teko’s developed a little sheepish crush on her. Odd too, considering that from everything Guy’s seen, and everything Joan has reported, Teko seems to resent everything about her. Well, maybe not so odd. If Guy’s ever met a man with an angry little hard-on quivering at the center of his antagonism, General Teko is it. Well, he certainly wouldn’t “talk to her.” It’s difficult enough to keep Joan functioning in this limited capacity without Guy’s pushing her over the edge by blatantly pimping on behalf of the SLA and the concupiscent longing of its interim chief. He changes the subject.

  “How about Tania?” He looks directly at her, to will her into the conversation. She doesn’t return his gaze, continues to look so intently into the kitchen depths that Guy half turns his head in the direction of her stare, sees only the hutch with its smudged glass doors.

  “Hopeless,” sneers Teko. “Never going to be a guerrilla. Nev-ver.”

  “Well, you know, she might have value in another role.” Guy says this offhandedly, without a trace of sarcasm, though the minute the words are out he’s wondering if Teko really sees Tania’s fulfilling no greater function than that of a foot soldier, if he’s so intent on replenishing the ranks of his depleted army that he’ll put Tania on the front lines, wherever they are. Guy never had a chance to meet Field Marshal Cinque, and in fact he’s always taken a slightly patronizing view of the man, but it abruptly strikes him that whatever else you might say about the guy, the SLA’s dead founder possessed a markedly more subtle sense of the uses to which the Missing Heiress could be put than Teko does. The famous photo of Tania hefting the carbine from her hip and training it on whatever her vacant stare encountered beyond the edge of the frame was infinitely more useful, more suggestive, more pregnant with violent potential than actually having her splatter a fucking sporting goods store with .30-caliber slugs in the middle of some petty shoplifting incident. For, what, sweat socks?

  “What kind of role?” Teko is all suspicion now.

  “The public face,” Guy says, “of the SLA.”

  Teko drops his chin, shaking his head as if he were embarrassed, holding a closed-mouth smile. Then his hand comes up, a single argumentative finger raised and waggling, as he takes two strides toward Guy, to whom this collection of movements seems familiar, but unplaceable. Suddenly he flashes: Ralph Kramden.

  O, the Great One: admonishing, reproving, cautioning, scolding, clarifying, elaborating, expanding upon; the farcical delusions of grandeur; the ideas and schemes, the preposterous crescendoing plotting, all from out of the Spartan home he returned to each day from the bus comp’ny, that room as bare as Beckett, that perfection of obscurity, with the wife who never, never once, let him forget that he was all impotence and frustrated ambition. Teko as Gleason! Guy would surely laugh out loud if he dared. How sweet it is!

  Teko is saying, “See, I think what you’re thinking is this is about her. When actually what it is, is it’s about the revolution.”

  Guy edges away from where Teko has cornered him, pinned him with his back to the counter, advancing with those two bullish strides. “See, Norton, what it is,” says Ralph Kramden, “is it’s about the revolution.” Caramba! He joins Randi and Yolanda by the sink. Randi slices tomatoes, their skins creviced and blackened where rot has gotten to them but still shining and beaded with water droplets.

  “Well, it’s funny but that’s what, well, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to get working on this book.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “And frankly I think we all kno
w that, unfair as it may seem, the focus isn’t exclusively going to be from the Symbionese perspective. I mean, ‘Let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.’ It’s a good point. In fact, an excellent point. There’s your political program in a nutshell and you articulate it in the amount of time it takes a bullet to reach its mark. ‘Say it with guns.’ Madison Avenue would give its eyeteeth to come up with that one. But.”

  “But what? So what’s your idea?”

  “Well, first, everybody’s heard that. And second, book-wise, you’re going to have to lead with your strength. In a book people are actually going to want to pick up and read, the emphasis falls naturally on her.”

  He gestures at Tania. Teko is silent.

  “I told you it was fucking bullshit, Teko,” says Yolanda. “He’s just trying to exploit us. To get to her.” She’s been standing beside Randi, maintaining a posture of such chummy intimacy that Guy has been wondering whether she was even listening. She was. She strikes. Snakelike person. Yolanda has to crane her neck, looking beyond Randi and Guy, to address this to Teko, enhancing Guy’s impression of a cobra, rearing.

  “I’m not trying to exploit you. I’m trying to encourage you to develop and fully utilize your notoriety. And she’s your best argument on your own behalf. She’s living testimony to the power, the persuasiveness of the SLA viewpoint!”

  The public face of the SLA massages her left wrist, her face expressionless.

  “It’s always about her,” says Teko, bitterly. “She’s just accidental.” He shakes his head adamantly.

  “Six figures is what they tell me. Knowledgeable people. Six figures for a story that accentuates the Tania. Not an exclusive focus, mind you, a highlighting. Six figures. And this is before serial rights, paperback rights, foreign rights, movie rights, the whole schmear.”

  “Don’t believe it, Teko,” says Yolanda. “They don’t want to pay us. They want to kill us. They don’t pay revolutionaries for their stories in this country. They silence them. Look at what happened in L.A.”

  “That was L.A.,” says Guy. “They don’t know from publishing there. They move in with their newsreel cameras, get their shaky blurry footage, and, you know, that’s good enough for them. But in New York they know a story isn’t really whole, isn’t done justice, until a topnotch writer publishes a twenty-thousand-word think piece and later expands it into a book.”

  He decides to push it a little.

  “What if I were to tell you that I heard Norman Mailer was on his way to JFK to grab the first flight to the Coast the minute he heard about the shoot-out? Tom Wolfe was desperate for a piece of it. Hunter Thompson expressed a strong interest. John Lennon wanted to hang out with you guys. These are top-quality writers and in Lennon’s case I guess a top-quality cultural raconteur-type star person.”

  “John Lennon!” Teko seems impressed.

  “I mean, there is a definite clamor for this. The story is wanted. People definitely want it. But people also have certain understandable priorities. To a firm doing business in a high-rise building on the island of Manhattan you have to grant the right to determine its own priorities based on a mixture of experience and common sense and an altogether acceptable amount of mercantile trepidation. They want to be able to position a book so it can compete to its best advantage against what are frankly some really schlocky titles that have come out, paperbacky supermarket rack kind of junk.”

  “And just where does that leave you?” asks Yolanda, a shrewdness flickering across her features. “Where does that leave you if Mailer or whoever does the book?”

  Guy draws himself up, swelling with an approximation of dignity. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done with your best interests in mind. I have an interest in the book, yeah, but that’s not a secret thing. We discussed it day one, back in Berkeley. If Mailer’s the guy you feel you want to go with, then I’m Mailer’s lackey. If you and Lennon decide to go ahead with the revolutionary opera that Johnny”—Johnny!—“seems so fired up about, I’ll tune his guitar if that’s where there’s a place for me. Or I can pull out right now. I’m a role player.”

  There is silence for a moment as Teko considers this information.

  “What I propose,” says Guy, “is that we withdraw to another location and get down to work.”

  “Another location?” says Yolanda. “Where?”

  “In my opinion, the less you know, the better.” Here Guy shifts ever so slightly so that he can peer out the window over the sink, as if scanning the kitchen garden for intruders.

  “Why?”

  “Well,” says Guy, “those security breaches, for one thing.”

  “Security breaches?”

  “The propane guy, the blueberry kid.”

  “Do you think it’s that serious?”

  Guy pauses, for effect, privately savoring the puzzle piece, its thorny shape, he is about to drop just so into its place.

  “There are other concerns.”

  “Like what?”

  “Better for you not to know. But the choice is yours. You have this place through October first. Or you can come to the new location. In either case, your whereabouts are safe with us, but with us having rented the place under our own name and all, sooner or later things will be traced back to us. But don’t dwell on it. Talk it over. Make up your minds. And for courage, think about the book. Picture it between covers, full buckram, with a dust jacket, with blurbs on the back. That’s what always does it for me.”

  “It would be like Prairie Fire,” says Teko.

  “Yeah, but with a little extra oomph,” says Guy.

  On a saucer before her, Tania is absently arranging sardines she takes from an open tin. The oily fish ring the dish along its rim, and in the center she has arranged a column of three, their heads facing in alternating directions.

  “Farrar, Straus and Giroux,” says Guy. “Good. You’re thinking ahead.”

  With that, Guy walks out of the kitchen, assuming a stately gait and maintaining the upright posture that together help subordinate his anxiety, his lack of will, his basic pointlessness to levels of near imperceptibility. What is perceptible—what is in fact plain as fucking day—is that he is a person of substance whose pronouncements carry some gravity, and he notes with satisfaction that as a measure of that substance and gravity, dinner seems all but forgotten about. Behind him the kitchen already sounds—how should he put it?—emotionally evacuated. No prep sounds, no water running, no eating sounds, no chairs scraping across the floor, no conversation. A lunatic thrill accompanies the exercise of this sort of power, as insignificant as it may be. He’s a ballsy guy who takes his recklessness to the brink and teeters …

  On some level, Guy has been dishonest—good, frank word—with Randi about the reasons for the move’s necessity. With Guy Mock there is always an additional level.

  Randi, though, has long ago realized that she is accustomed to Guy’s tendency toward vagueness. It’s almost as if she would rather not know. What had her awareness of Erica Dyson netted her? Shit, what had it done for Guy, other than to provide him with a pirate’s scar slanting rakishly over one eye? At this point all she wants is to sleep in the same bed for one month straight. If they’re not going to be able to pull that off, then she doesn’t necessarily need to know the true and correct reasons why. Perhaps, in the fullness of time—a phrase that delights Guy because it makes delay and procrastination sound so right, so just, so principled—he will come clean with her. Perhaps on his deathbed, Randi thinks.

  The reason that Guy has to send Randi out to rent another house in the middle of the season is an inapt admission Guy made to his older brother, Ernest, in Las Vegas, Nevada, earlier in the summer.

  Happily subsidizing the excesses of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Guy had zipped cross-country yet again, this time to visit his parents, to reassure himself of their silent complicity in his activities and incidentally to have a dip in their pool and slip into their Jacuzzi to submit his genitals
to the constant warm caress of its jets. There he’d come face-to-face with Ernest.

  “Oh, it’s you,” his mother said. She was dressed, just a little before noon, like a woman who intended to forcefully communicate her eternally thwarted desire to eat lunch at a nice restaurant. Guy leaned to kiss her but before the lying gesture had a chance to fully take shape she turned from him at the threshold and walked into the unit. He followed her, swinging the olive drab canvas poke that held his clothes and toiletries.

  “Oho! The prodigal returns.” There Ernest sat in the living room, nice and settled, looking very Vegasy in crisp new khakis, loafers, and a sport shirt. At his feet were shopping bags from Penney’s and a couple of other stores, filled with shirt cardboard and tissue paper and other packaging. Ensconced, is how he looked. The shopping trip had probably happened in the morning. That was Ernest’s great time, a smile for everybody and a slap on the back. Their parents fried his eggs and poured his coffee for him, that son of a fucking bitch. It was appalling. The guy was a bullshitter who honed his bullshit to its brightest burnish in the a.m., and Guy sometimes felt that of all the effortful attempts he’d made to get his parents to recognize one kind of truth or another, the most effortful of these attempts occurred whenever he was trying to convince them of the mendacious dissemblance that charged the nucleus of Ernest’s character. The Breakfastime Ernest remained embedded in their consciousness as a sort of Norman Rockwell son, paper opened to the sports page and propped up against the sugar bowl.