Trance

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Trance Page 39

by Christopher Sorrentino


  She moves along the walkway toward its outlet at the intersection of Vulcan and Venus. The sun is just beginning to burn through the morning overcast. An old blue Chevy is parked at the curb nearby, and a young man sitting on its hood looks up from the newspaper he is reading.

  “You know, you look just like her,” he says, holding out the paper and slapping it with the back of his hand.

  “Oh, shut up,” she says, pulling open the passenger door.

  “Cuter, though.”

  He comes down off the hood and climbs into the car on the driver’s side, tossing the paper into the backseat.

  “So how’s it look?”

  “Yolanda wasn’t bullshitting. Far as I can see, it looks pretty easy.” She removes her eyeglasses, folds them, and places them in her purse.

  He bends to her then, catching her slightly off guard. He can hear her feet shifting on the rubber mat. With impatience? He lifts out of the kiss, hoisting himself up with one hand on the steering wheel and feeling, as ever, importunate. As usual there is something she will not yield, some kernel of herself that remains inviolate, despite the complex emotional message he means for his kisses to impart, the response he intends for them to elicit. Fresh taste of her, like sweet corn on the cob, her lips satiny where he’d had his mouth, relaxed and leaning back into the seat, breathing evenly—but still absent, her eyes elsewhere. He gently puts his hand on her thigh, and she turns it over, examining the yellow knobs of callus that ridge the fold of his palm. She spreads the fingers apart, palpates each, slides a loose-fitting ring halfway up his index finger and then down again. His hand remains still, relaxed, throughout her inspection. Then she pats it: all done now.

  “Anyway, like I say. Pretty easy.” She rattles off some of her observations, counting them on her fingers, while he starts the car and puts it in gear.

  “Easy for you, maybe,” he says. “You’re not on the assault team.”

  “I god damn well should be. I’m the only one who’s ever robbed a fucking bank around here.”

  Those ghost images from inside the Hibernia Bank, Mack Sennett armed figures running, jumping, standing still.

  “So the appropriate term for what this is is robbery, or expropriation?”

  “This,” she says, “is a stickup.” She forms a gun with her thumb and forefinger and places it to Roger’s head. “Drive.”

  “Where are you taking me?” he gasps in mock fright.

  “Do as I say and you won’t get hurt.” She giggles.

  A tidy city, Sacramento, laid out in its alphanumeric grid in that same year, 1848, when greed seized and validated the newly American territory. That tidy plan, delineating the extent of the upheaval, the overthrow of the old alcaldes; a tidy plan refuting that chaotic, revolutionary greed while facilitating its very ends: California’s First City Welcomes You. But Roger Rorvik thinks very little about the history of a place. He likes the tidiness. He approves. It’s a fairly easy drive from the East Bay. He finds his way around. It seems manageable and sensible. Manageable, sensible: not words he’d use, but they tag the comforting sense this burg gives him.

  Plus it’s here that he first fell under her spell, making the place itself somehow magical, absolving it of its shortcomings, as such coincidences will. She’d arrived in California first, before Teko and Yolanda had returned from their travels with their flinty yen to whip everybody into shape and their nostalgic urgency to pick up the revolution where they’d left off. General Field Marshal Teko’s sweet autocratic logic had dictated that they situate the recrudescent cell in Sacramento, and obediently Roger’s cousin Susan had rented the apartment at 1721 W Street. It had been agreed that the new members of the group, who so far included only Susan and Jeff Wolfritz, would try to maintain their aboveground lives and contacts for as long as possible, but making that round-trip commute two, three, four times a week was just wearing them thin, so Roger had been tapped to help babysit their famous comrade.

  He was game. All he’d had going was a semiregular housepainting gig with Jeff. It was a living, though the job had triggered a program of regular calls and letters from his aunt, all centering on the theme of What was he going to do with his life. This was a question she’d taken an interest in ever since Roger’s mother had died and he’d come to live with his aunt, uncle, and cousin twelve years ago. Now she’d lost a daughter, a nephew, and a potential son-in-law to the sinister magnetism of the Bay Area and was in dire need of some reassurance. Roger could see her standing at the kitchen extension back in Palmdale, with stupid fuzzy slippers on her feet and a cigarette burning in her hand, that look of wounded incomprehension crossing her face as they spoke. It was all distance between them, razz and buzz. Berkeley! Three years you’ve been there, and you’re painting houses. This is a summer job for a teenager, not an occupation for a grown man. And now. Now your cousin. Now your cousin Susan goes on television blithering all about those crazy radicals. Berkeley! Berkeley! His aunt uttered the name in a clipped, parrotlike intonation, and Roger pictured the prissy, contemptuous face she formed in order to enunciate it. “She didn’t ‘go on TV,’ Aunt Rose. The stations covered it, like news, you know?” As if this were the sort of news a mother dreamed of her daughter’s making. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. That the “children” had drifted there separately, in a phased process, freaked her out, as if that were proof enough that the whole thing of Berkeley was a depraved program, instead of being whatever it was, which anyway he wasn’t so sure about, so he never did feel as if he could effectively defend the place to her.

  So it was good to be able to report that he had a job waiting in Sacramento (“Property management,” he’d announced), as clean and nice a town as there was to be found, home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for Christ’s sake; secure from the hippies and the Hare Krishnas and the malevolent leftist influence of the East Bay. And frankly, it was good to get out for a number of other reasons. For numerous reasons. A plethora of them. He’d been getting forgetful, a sign of creeping boredom he knew all too well. Losing words, trains of thought vanishing. The monotony of the long summer and the several dozen student apartments he painted. Lay the dropcloth over the cheap shag and slap it on, one shabby and fucked-up room at a time. Hot-boxing it in his car at lunchtime, a thin David Dubinsky rolled of Humboldt County’s finest, insulting his short-term memory. Found himself before the kitchen sink, holding a glass in one hand with the other frozen above the tap. Righty-tighty. Lefty-loosey.

  He brakes, descending to the surface road and turning onto W Street. Roger always experiences a vague sadness driving up these mopey blocks, every single time; dispiriting is the word for the place. The duplex is strictly a dump, a sagging box in the middle of the block, three nothing rooms a stone’s throw from the overpass, with freeway thrum twenty-four hours a day. The bungalows they pass have settled into their decrepitude, plywood weathered under the torn tar paper, crumbled cinder blocks holding up the porches. A hand-lettered sign leaning in one front window promises BEAUTY—NAILS. A tarp draped over an old sedan flaps stiffly in a sudden gust of wind. He pulls up before the duplex.

  “Better kiss me now,” she says, grabbing a handful of his hair. “You won’t get another chance until later.”

  He’d met her before, following the Los Angeles massacre. His impression then had been of a small person, underfed rather than delicate, seething and wordless, mostly wordless. He’d shied away from any encounter beyond a simple hello; he’d gotten something about the dead boyfriend and was intimidated by the idea of confronting naked and angry grief. In fact he’d stayed in the background, literally; leaned up against the wall of the little apartment on Euclid Avenue with his arms folded while Susan worked out some arrangements with Teko and Yolanda concerning the trip East. Not that he didn’t study her, seeking to reconcile this slight figure, her hair slashed and badly dyed, her little feet crossed primly at the ankles, with the divergent published likenesses of the chilly deb and the sexy, gunslinging insurgent. It wa
s a third person who was present, neither a combination of the other two nor entirely distinct from them.

  And mostly wordless. That much she shared with her photographs. Ah, well, what else could she be? The terrible fire drawn up into the sky, the wind its bellows and chimney; the armed, uniformed men; the businesslike wrath of authority: It was a spectacle belonging to television, familiar to all of them, but its meaning, you dodged its true meaning, recognized maybe the half of it, until the day you were able to say, had to say, having seen it, “all gone,” and then maybe you just didn’t speak again, for a while.

  He hadn’t talked to her. Zero chemistry. Then the SLA three were gone, and he’d put them out of his mind. The long summer stretched ahead. Lay the dropcloth and slap it on, over thumbtack holes and the dark stains left by oily heads. The little car filling with the sweet and pungent smoke. His head emptying. To tell the truth, his aunt had a point.

  She arrived in Sacramento about three months later on the overnight Greyhound from Vegas. Susan sent Roger to the depot to meet the bus, and he felt an unexpected anticipation. The pneumatic door hissed open to release the Americruiser’s consignment of hardup traveling souls, and she walked into his life, accompanied by Jeff Wolfritz, revolutionary chaperon. They both looked like total shit. Still, there was, for Roger, the sense of an auspicious beginning.

  That fall, the getting-to-know-you period, they’d spent a lot of time driving around. Just lazy cruising. He’d taken her down 80 to where there was a stretch of cropland, bearded a deep green late in the season, over which you could sometimes see a cropduster, drifting, turning sharply at the end of the furrowed rows, dipping low and then soaring away, leaving behind cloudy trails of the poison it dumped, a kind of improvisational aviation that tightened his throat and nearly made him want to cry. Though he knew that he also was waiting for the pilot to misjudge the angle of his cavalier descent, to nip a telephone line, to stall too near the ground to drop the nose and recover; waiting to see the thing crash, explode, and burn. And had he taken her there, pulled over onto the dirt shoulder as traffic zinged by, so that she could see that too?

  All those apple-picking colors burning through late autumn and on into winter. There might actually even have been apples in the backseat once or twice, a paper bag of fruit, ripe and lustrous, from the U-Pick. Who knows? They say there’s two trees in Sacramento for each man, woman, and child.

  WITHOUT KNOWING QUITE why, Teko reaches above his head to where items, suspended from hooks, dangle brightly over the bins of merchandise at waist level. Just needs to touch. The gleam attracts him, and to feel these things—the HOLES studding the circumference of the COLANDER, the bat-eared PROTRUSIONS on a STRAINER, the artichokelike LEAVES of the STEAMER BASKET, the barbed HELIX of a CORKSCREW—is both exquisite and exquisitely unsatisfying. Yet his awareness of this, too, is strangely occulted, concealed from himself behind the jangling static at the forefront of his mind, which seeks to work the word panther into the sentence of a budding communique:

  • the beating heart of a (black?) panther

  • all the grace and power of a (black?) panther

  • as the (black?) panther does not suffer those who would deny its freedom

  • our beautiful brother of the wild, the (black?) panther

  Teko sees this as a rhetorical step forward. First, in the purely literary sense. As he’d noted in his Revolutionary Diary, “Metaphor=OK?” Second, he thinks of it as appealingly inclusive. Plenty of animal lovers out there who may be ready to take up arms against the government at any moment. Third is the subtle homage to the Black Panthers. Because you never know.

  Overhead he spots a paring knife, secured to its cardboard backing by two thick staples, a two-inch blade sprouting from a handle of drab green plastic. Sixty-nine cents. He removes it quietly from the backing, popping the staples to free it, and then slips the knife into his jacket pocket. He looks up to meet the gaze of an older woman, who promptly averts her eyes.

  “Shhhhh,” he advises, mildly, bending to lift the basket. He strolls toward the front of the store, just another householder, for the items in his basket are truly quotidian: ball of twine, roll of tape, 7¾″ x 5″ notebook, pack of Bic pens, Prell shampoo for dyed hair, box of Tide, package of sixty-watt lightbulbs, and three cans of cat food for the ungrateful strays that make the backyard stink of piss and that Yolanda has unaccountably taken to feeding. They ought to keep a tighter grip on their money or soon they’ll be eating the shit themselves. Not that it’s an issue today: Susan had come through again, delivering, via Roger, four freshly purloined MasterCharge cards. The one he offers to the cashier is imprinted with the name Harland Funderbunk, no doubt some hapless sojourner at the Sir Francis Drake, and he watches edgily as she fingers the thick monthly circular, its every page covered with fine-print columns listing stolen credit card numbers, sitting near the credit card blanks. But she is only moving it out of the way.

  Soon he’s headed out to the car, stopping to examine the newspaper headlines. Hey, hey, SLA, made page one again today. The anniversary of the kidnapping, and the general drift of the coverage appears to be that the pigs have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re doing. Not that Operation GALTNAP, as the FBI has dubbed it, has anything to do anymore with solving a kidnapping or rescuing a hostage. “Miss Galton will face a number of state and federal charges, including attempted murder, bank robbery, and kidnapping.”

  Yeah, right. Teko accepts it as an article of faith that the pigs will simply blow them all away. Originally the marked-for-death belief had seemed a suitably fiery fantasy of Cin’s, the idea that they were the meanest, the baddest, the most extreme revolutionary army of them all, killing Uncle Toms with phony liberal agendas and their CIA handlers, firing on elderly bank depositors whose creaky joints couldn’t deliver them to the prone position quickly enough to suit, swooping down like angels of death upon the children of the ruling elite, so bad and so mean, so camped out on the raggedy edges of the lunatic fringe that the only choice the fascist insect would have would be to annihilate them.

  Then, of course, the pigs had annihilated them, and what Teko had noted well was his own sense that some safety circuit that should have tripped before things had gone too far had malfunctioned or been entirely absent to begin with. What he couldn’t shake was what no one else could shake either, in the aftermath: the index of juvenile achievements attributed to his dead comrades, the glowing faces and carefully styled hairdos of their yearbook photos, the fact that it wasn’t their commitment to revolution or justice or even their having had their hearts in the correct place that he, personally, would have submitted as corroboration of their right to continue living, but the penumbra of utter conventional ordinariness that fell upon them to veil and contradict all that they insisted they were. All he insisted he was. It was the good people, from the comfortable houses and safe neighborhoods, turning out to bring those tortured bodies home and pass through those same leafy streets, a sad suburban cortege, to bury them in mahogany coffins with polished brass handles. It agitated him to realize that he had thought this marked them as different, exempt, that because their bail would have been made, because they had college degrees, because albums were filled with faded snaps of their birthday parties they would, at the critical moment, be allowed to avail themselves of privileges never before denied them. It agitated him to realize that despite all that had drawn him to Cin, filled him with near veneration, he had accepted Cin’s subfusc forecast as tongue-in-cheek rhetoric.

  His belief in Cin’s prescience now is in fact the most prominent of the differences marking Teko from the new group of Susan, Roger, and Jeff Wolfritz. Overall, a bookish and chatty bunch, which is one reason why he’s chosen to involve them all in the Bakery Operation, so called. Get them out there, pointing guns at people and making elemental demands. Give me, give me, I want. The pure playground logic of it, get the superego the hell out of the picture for a change. It might even help if they actually were to shoot s
omeone, to scorch the cost of commitment in their minds. Simple as yes/no, on/off, with us/against us, alive/dead; strictly zero sum, the reality from which they hide behind books and talk. That was the mistake he made last summer, allowing Guy Mock to talk him into disarming and laying low and then allowing the bitch, Shimada, to set a lackadaisical and insubordinate tone. If he’d been smart, they would have shaken up one of those hick towns, but good. It would have bound them together, made them stronger, announced to the world that the revolution had arrived on the East Coast. Instead they whiled the time away, drinking draft beer and playing shuffleboard in local taverns, loading change into the jukebox.

  Another reason, then, to involve the others in the Bakery Op is to make them criminally complicit in the revolutionary activities of the SLA and end any conflict between their divided, their treasonously bifurcated loyalties. Which of course gives rise to a third reason (which he admits to himself only cautiously): He has to get these people serious because their casual attitude presents an obvious and attractive alternative to his own martial approach.

  The wind stirs briefly, ruffling his collar and kicking up trash that has gathered at the curb. The barest threat of sun at the corner of the somber sky. Winter in Sacramento. He gets into the car beside his wife, putting the bag of supplies between his feet.

  “Why didn’t you just buy it?”

  “Buy what?” His hand moves to the pocket where he has concealed the knife.

  “The paper.”

  “Oh, God. And deal with the bitch preening all day? The star?”

 

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