Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  “Tania’s out. She goes over to the trees. Try to be alone out there.”

  “And she’s doing how?”

  “Don’t blame me responsible.”

  “I’m not holding you responsible. Though you are a responsible person. The only one around including me I might add.”

  “Oh, shut up. I cheer her up. There’s a real person inside there someplace. But, you know, the thing, though, is, like, I’m thinking it probably isn’t the person who it was before.”

  “Before Cujo died?”

  “Before she got snatched.”

  “No shit.” Guy says this sincerely. He trolls his eyes like a pair of searchlights over the small, pretty woman in the doorway.

  “She’s figuring it out. Who she’s got to be. When she isn’t sure, she just switches off. Drives them”—she nods at the pile of Teko and Yolanda’s papers, their metonymic essence—“nutter—butters. They make her do things. Run! Carry! Jump! Then she’s turned back on, starts up talking—they get even madder. Smack her in the face, which I tell her she hasn’t got to take.”

  “They don’t hit you, do they?”

  “I told that little shrimp you ever touch me I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

  Guy returns to Tania. “So, figuring it out, hmm.”

  “Not everybody gets to grow this big strong tree of a personality like you, Guy. Some people are always having a new one they work on.”

  “You a tree? Or a whadayacall, a sapling?”

  Joan has correctly intuited that Guy has never, for a moment, doubted who he is. A touch of fatalism in that. Why, ultimately, his career as an athlete topped off at the level it did. He could never articulate the physical striver’s questioning of his own identity, his measurement of his own worth on a scale of millimeters, or hundredths of a second; he’d never needed to see if the difference between winning and losing would embody itself in him, make him, by the breadth of a hair, a new man nothing like the one who’d touched his feet to the floorboards that morning. He hadn’t been interested, an attitude that could piss coaches off in record time. Now here you have a Joan. Life is a whole bunch of forks in a whole bunch of roads for her. Who to be next? How strong? How brave? In the younger woman she would have to have seen something of her own self, in the constant adaptation, the knack for living.

  The rattle of the Bug comes to them from the road below and grows louder as the little car turns into the driveway and climbs the rise toward the house. Soon they’ll find out what they’re about. Soon they’ll be safe.

  SARA JANE MOORE IS seated in the Learning Center at the Palo Alto headquarters of the California Society of Certified Public Accountants, where she is enrolled in a CPE course in estate taxation. Other accountants surround her in the fluorescent gloom of the windowless basement room. There is something wrong with the air conditioning down here in the Pit, as she has heard its subterranean denizens, the mailboys and shipping clerks and pressmen, refer to it, and the door is propped open to allow air to circulate. A mail clerk, a tall, good-looking boy wearing a T-shirt that says CAMP TALCOTT, has brought in a standing fan and set it up in a corner where it blows stale air across the room, ruffling the edges of their papers as it oscillates, describing a forty-five-degree arc. The boy’s colleague calls out to him down the corridor, and his response is clear but incomprehensible: “Sir Jade, Sir Jade.”

  The issues concerning the field of estate planning and taxation that the sole practitioner faces today are. Who gives a shit. She hears the sharp crack-crack-crack-crack of the equipment through the wall as it cuts freshly printed brochures and stacks them. There is a smell of ink and oiled machinery. She just wants to get this crap over with, get her four hours in so that she can maintain her certification. Already the State Board of Accountancy has sent her a semithreatening piece of official correspondence, claiming that she has not kept up with her Continuing Professional Education requirements. And of course it’s the CPA society that offers the courses. All in cahoots. You can bet that if she were with Touche Ross or Coopers & Lybrand she would not be sitting in some stifling basement room with a bunch of nosepicking dimwits. And she has a busy day. After she signs out, she has to head up to the city to meet with Popeye Jackson about People in Need, ask him a few disingenuous questions about the location of certain fugitives from justice, call the Examiner to leave a message for Hank Galton, and then drop by the FBI office to be debriefed by Tommy Polhaus. And then there’s the dry cleaning.

  At lunch Sara Jane first follows some of her colleagues, who wander down the corridor to the break room. She catches a glimpse of the inside of the shipping room, where the walls are festooned with cutout pictures from Playboy, Oui, Penthouse, you name it. One of the moron clerks inside, operating a curious device that shoots out measured lengths of prewetted packing tape at the touch of a button, gazes at her without interest. She opens the door to enter the break room but finds nothing there but her awkward-looking classmates and two vending machines.

  Instead she goes upstairs to have a smoke in the fresh air. The building is on Welch Road, right across from Stanford University Hospital, and on the second floor several doctors have their offices, according to the directory mounted on the lobby wall. A woman, her head and face swathed in bandages, with glossy dark contusions under both eyes, is helped out of the elevator by a woman in scrubs and guided toward a waiting car. Curious. As she smokes, Sara Jane watches a Cadillac pull into the lot and park, and a middle-aged man steps from it to help another woman, similarly bandaged and bruised, out of the passenger seat. She emerges gingerly, grabbing hold of the man’s proffered arm with two hands, and together the two of them walk slowly from the large gleaming auto toward the entrance of the building. As they pass her, the man gives Sara Jane a slightly suspicious once-over. These dames are in serious discomfort with their busted-up faces. All at once Sara Jane remembers some Reader’s Digest article she once read describing the aftermath of certain types of plastic surgery. Blackened eyes from shattered noses. Stitched-up faces, the raw flesh employed as a sling against gravity. How foolish and pathetic. Going to a doctor to let him break your nose with a mallet. How very Palo Alto.

  She tries to sign out forty minutes early, during the open book test, and the instructor nails her. Total cahoots; no doubt he gets a piece of the action too, of course. The discussion gets a little heated, and he asks her out into the hallway. What is the difference? She has finished her test and is a grown person with responsibilities. She could tick them off, just to see his eyes go wide, this dumb bunny from Bakersfield. Estate planning, how presumptuous, blechh.

  Sara Jane double-parks her car on Twenty-fourth Street and charges into the dry cleaner’s, her ticket held at the ready. The pinheaded man behind the counter looks up without even a vestige of a smile on his sour puss. Only something like $250 a year she spends here. She decides to check carefully for stains because she knows she pointed them all out.

  Oh here’s one.

  She leaves a muumuu behind because sometimes you have to make the point that you won’t just take it from them all the time. There are other dry cleaners in this city. There are synthetic fabrics that require only a brush or a sponging down and need never be ironed and so the dry cleaner man needs to get it into his head that he should be thankful for her repeat business and for an old-fashioned girl’s taste in old-fashioned textiles. He takes the garment back from her and hangs it up and then patiently copies her driver’s license number onto her check. What is that going to tell you? How does a driver’s license number protect you from a bum check? It is all part of control. The numbers are gathered here at the very bottom of things and circulate upward to the heights of power. Driver’s license information. Social Security numbers. Telephone exchanges. She signs the check “Alice Galton.” Just to see if he notices.

  “Sally, you are overwrought.”

  “I go into the dry cleaner’s for two minutes. One, there’s a stain on an item. Two, he requests my personal driver’s license
information. Height and weight and date of birth? What does this have to do with accepting personal checks?”

  “Sally.”

  “Three. I come out with my bundle and there is a man in a little pizza delivery cart putting a ticket on my windshield. I think you could say I am on police business.”

  “I don’t know if I could agree with that.”

  “You could agree with it but you won’t. I do not see why you can’t secure me with a placard or a sign. They give these to teachers. They give these to handicapped persons in wheelchairs. They give these to roving reporters.”

  “That would be the police. The FBI has to go to the local police to get their parking permits as well.”

  “What are they called? Those pizza carts?”

  “It’s called a Cushman.”

  “If I go to the man in the Cushman and tell him I am on FBI business, will I get a placard?”

  “I sincerely doubt it and I hope you’ll consider how inadvisable it would be for you to do such a thing.”

  “I think I’m entitled to some recompense.”

  Thomas Polhaus reaches behind him to take his suit jacket off the back of his chair and gets his billfold from the inside pocket. The ticket Sara Jane Moore has thrown onto the surface of the desk before him is for ten dollars, and he removes a five and five singles from the billfold.

  “I would think the FBI would have a more formal way of disbursing petty cash.”

  “We probably do. Would you like to wait the usual two to four weeks?”

  “I have just had a bad day. You don’t have to make fun of me.”

  Polhaus says, “I’m not making fun of you. I’m trying to get you to relax and see things in perspective. Everybody gets a ticket now and then. No one’s ever happy about it. And while I’m always delighted to see you, you know that the reason for your coming here today wasn’t to appeal your parking citations or to air your grievances concerning the shoddy practices of Noe Valley dry cleaning establishments. Come on, Sally. I’m counting on you.”

  “It is a lot of pressure on me. And then there are these aggravations, which I just want you to know about because it goes right to the matter of difficulty.” She looks as if she might be about to cry. That wouldn’t be unusual.

  “Nobody ever said that doing the right thing is easy.”

  “But does the State Board of Accountancy have to weigh in with its two cents right at this juncture?”

  “Sally, what are we talking about?”

  “I am taking supposedly required courses at this advanced age of my career in a Palo Alto basement where they perform disfiguring surgeries. That’s what. What kind of a day is that?”

  “Maybe this can be the best part of the day.”

  And it can. Polhaus knows he can lay a hand on her wobbly instability, restore purpose, direction, and meaning to a sorry and disconnected existence. It’s a bad moment when an ordinary person suddenly has to confront the way that the everyday evades significance. How unaccompanied, how unheralded, an ordinary life can be. Sometimes all that a person deciding whether to become an informant needs to push her over the line is the belief that life won’t always be able to disregard everything she says or does. Life doesn’t always have to be so infuriating; one doesn’t have to suffer unaccompanied. There is actually a written record, kept in a big building, guarded by men with guns. To these armed men, this record is important, and that is the ultimate rebuttal to habit and its dissatisfactions. Half the “informants” he deals with are lonely zanies, dialing from remote phone booths out on the Great Highway or the basements of faded hotels on Bush Street—grandmothers and secretaries, he imagines them, dockworkers and retired animal control officers, old men from the Avenues who see menace in the odd parcel someone sets out on the sidewalk with the trash. They call the Bureau to let them know. They report seditious conversations they overhear in Justin Herman Plaza or Union Square. If it’s mysterious and baffling and doesn’t quite seem to fit the definition of a crime as set forth by that Webster’s of the everyday, prime-time TV, call the FBI. Call early, call often, and don’t forget to ask for your case number. We like making them up on the spot.

  But Sally Moore is exceptional. The nutburger who through a serendipitous series of accidents manages to find herself in precisely the right place to serve the Bureau’s purposes. There were plenty of middle-aged folks whose heads had been screwed up by the last ten years. Drugs. Politics. Vietnam. Civil rights. Long hair. You name it, there were a thousand causes, ideas, and substances into which an American human could disappear. But when, as inevitably happened, they finally became angry with their exciting new lives and, eager to turn in some coconspirator in their frustration, picked up the phone, the Bureau usually found itself with a misdemeanor drug case on its hands, which it routinely referred to local authorities. But now Sally is interesting. She has all the screwy hallmarks of the sort of person who’ll call up to report a few pot plants in the next backyard, or even an imaginary nuke in a suitcase, but instead of bailing out of the Telegraph Avenue scene and heading for a commune in Mendocino or a master’s program back East, this oddball manages to get herself a job keeping the books for the People in Need program and, moreover, manages to ingratiate herself not only with both Henry Galton and Lud Kramer, the program’s administrator, but with Popeye Jackson and other radicals, jailbirds, and bad hats the SLA had stipulated to oversee the distribution. All this Thomas Polhaus learned in the course of the routine sub rosa check he’d ordered on the PIN operation and its key workers and volunteers. It piqued his interest, but then what really got him was when he learned that Hank Galton quietly had sought out Sally Moore on his own, to serve as a liaison between himself and Jackson. Hank old pal, Polhaus had thought, how could you? Thought we were going to share and share alike. Of course the Bureau’s (subordinate, minor, marginal) role in the L.A. firefight had somewhat dulled the Galton family’s keenness to cooperate with it and then there had been Saxbe’s asinine comment about Alice’s being a common criminal.

  But Polhaus thinks that he’s noticed something changing in Hank, something he might have missed if it hadn’t been for the tensions now evident between the Galtons. Lydia is one tough cookie. He’d become aware of that when she accepted another term as a UC regent in contravention of an SLA directive. If the kid ever comes home, Lydia is ready and willing, even eager, to do what she can to send her to jail. Polhaus thinks that he detects in Lydia a certain dislike for her missing daughter. It’s almost as if the distaste she evinced at the idea of Alice’s having joined the SLA were a masquerade emotion, designed to throw pursuers of her inner life off the trail. Lydia feigns—Polhaus’s pretty sure—angry confusion over Alice’s statements and actions, but the true and palpable sentiment is the fuming self-satisfaction you feel when someone fulfills the low expectations you had for them. Hank, on the other hand, seems truly lost and upset. He seems more the jilted and deserted lover than Stump (to Polhaus’s eye, Stump generates as much amorous heat as a night-light). In fact, Thomas Polhaus thinks that Hank will do anything to restore contact with his daughter, even aiding and abetting her fugitive life. And so he was pleased with his intuition when he learned that Hank was making overtures to Popeye Jackson and doubly pleased when he discovered that their go-between was Sara Jane Moore, who would become as tractable and willing an informant as one could wish for. All Sally has to do is tell him where the girl is first, before she takes it to Hank, and Operation GALTNAP is all sewed up, right here at home where it belongs.

  But not today. Today’s news is more bullshit from Popeye pertaining to some issues clinging to his messy parole situation. He seems to have mistaken Hank Galton for his parole officer. Well, Hank asked for that particular headache.

  “I am really not feeling so well,” says Sally. “Do you mind if I just sit for a few minutes?”

  “No, Sally. Can I get you some more water? Some coffee?”

  “Can’t you open that window?”

  “No.”
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br />   “I don’t see the point.”

  “Me neither,” says Polhaus cheerfully. “Sure is a pretty evening, though.” He lifts the telephone receiver, puts it down.

  “I don’t know what to do with myself right now,” she says.

  “Go home. Make a drink. Watch the news. Have a bite.”

  “Is that what your evenings are like?”

  “Just a suggestion.”

  “Not a very exciting one.”

  Is she flirting with him? Polhaus is pretty sure she’s giving some to Popeye; does she want to compare equipment?

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much excitement on my mind. I have to prepare for a court appearance tomorrow. In Sacramento.”

  That ought to keep her out of the office.

  “Oh,” she says, “well.” She closes her pocketbook. Then she stands. “Have a good day in court tomorrow. Do you have to testify? Or are you just going to lend moral support?”

  Thomas Polhaus has to smile. It’s one of the funniest things he’s heard lately.

  TANIA AND JOAN CREEP through the woods, dense mixed stands of birch and willow on the flats, pine on the slopes. They are on point/ slack maneuvers, searching for the “enemy” team of Teko and Yolanda. Though today Teko has designated Tania and Joan as the pursuers in his new game, he and Yolanda are naturally disinclined to behave like prey for long. From far ahead they usually lay an ambush for the other two.

  Joan takes a dim view of all this. She’s really just keeping Tania company. Tania is particularly terrified of Teko and Yolanda’s surprise attacks, Teko crashing out of the trees, screaming, tackling her and pretending to draw a knife across her throat or cutting her and Joan down with simulated gunfire. Frequently, when these assaults occur, she wets her pants.

  “He always goes for me,” she says.

  “He knows what I’d do if he laid his hand on me.”

  “He’s worse here.”