“Have fun,” says Yolanda.
Tonight she goes with Joan and Susan to the 49er Drive–In. There are a few station wagons holding families, a couple of pickups, their beds crammed with noisy, dateless teenage boys. No throngs this Thursday night, just lots of empty space and the meditative evensong of crickets at the weedy fringes and in the dark trees beyond. Susan steers the car across the cracked pitch to a remote spot and parks. The two fugitives send her to the snack bar to buy food.
Awaiting the movie, Tania is eager to see what signs and omens will paint the night, forty feet high on a rust-stained screen.
When she’d first started coming, with Roger, she sat smack up against him on the front seat. Not snuggling, exactly. More like huddling. She’d fidget with him—with the rivets on his jeans, his watchband, examining him with her fingers, reaching up occasionally to touch the stone ape hanging from its moldy cord around her neck. She hadn’t been to a drive-in since that terrible night in May. Roger lightly rested his arm on her, petted her hair, while eating french fries from a cardboard tray. He never pushed her away or said he was uncomfortable. If he knew what she was thinking about, he never said a word. After a while she’d settle down and watch.
The movies tell us we can communicate with the dead; the movies are the dead communicating with us, shining out of the darkness with the smiles and intimacies of all our beloved. She can still feel the hole, the absence where Willie had been in her life. Anytime she wants. In one hour of one afternoon of one day it had all gone away.
One of the teenagers throws a beer can at the screen.
But once she began watching the movies, she noticed a curious thing: They all seemed to be about her. Not in their particulars, but in their design, their narrative pattern—it was too eccentric and too consistent to be a fluke. At first, it had driven her to burrow more deeply into Roger. She studied him, while he watched the screen blandly, sipping from a Coke. Could he not see it?
Eventually she had to learn to relax. Identifying and tracking themes: It’s straight out of Sister Marie Dominic’s ninth-grade English curriculum. Sister Motif, they called her. So she’ll say to herself, There’s something in the air. Or: It’s not exactly a coincidence, but these are the sort of things people are thinking about. Her own name is tossed out as a sort of laugh line during one movie (a reporter, on the trail of a big story, is dressed down by his editor, who reminds him that he had once claimed to know her whereabouts. A light ripple of mirth passes through the audience: Oh, yes, her), and she realizes exactly how notorious she has become, a cultural touchstone, a catchphrase whose meaning hasn’t yet been worn down through repetitive use.
She sees Thieves Like Us (three bank robbers gradually feel themselves seduced by the newspaper coverage of their exploits).
She sees Big Bad Mama (Angie Dickinson plays a bad-ass bankrobbing mother).
She sees The Wind and the Lion (kidnapped woman falls for her captor and the nobility of his cause).
She sees Sleeper (bored, shallow member of the ruling class first is kidnapped by and then joins the rebel army fighting the police state that holds power).
She sees Dog Day Afternoon (hostages begin to identify with their captors as the incident in which they’re all ensnared becomes the cynosure of the media’s attention).
She sees Going Places (outlaw drifters abduct a girl and work to bring around a sexual response on her part).
She sees The Sugarland Express (fugitive outlaw steals a car and kidnaps its owner to further a quixotic, doomed mission, attracting the relentless interest of a bored, story-hungry media).
“We want the movie, we want the movie,” chant the teenagers.
The drive-in is showing a double feature tonight, Night Moves (missing girl is traced at the request of the mother who hates and envies her) and something called Savaged.
“What’s playing first?” asks Susan.
“The stiff,” says Joan. “Elsewise everybody splits after the first picture and they don’t sell the popcorn.”
“Which one’s that?”
“The one they show first.” Joan bites into an onion ring.
The movie starts. The print is in such bad shape it seems as if it must have been touring these second-run theaters for years, but the copyright says MCMLXXIV SAVAGED, the screen says.
Savaged opens in an apartment furnished with plaid couches and Naugahyde beanbag chairs, a shag carpet on the floor, and Day-Glo posters hung beside an incongruous framed diploma on the wall. A young man wearing long hair, eyeglasses, a paisley shirt, and an ascot sits reading a book whose cover reveals its title as Eastern Philosophy. A young woman in skintight hot pants and a tube top enters the frame, holding a textbook.
“Hey, babe,” he says, “dig some grass?”
“You know I have a big exam tomorrow,” she says, flipping her feathered blond hair.
“Well,” he says, undaunted, “as an assistant professor of philosophy [note BOOK and DIPLOMA] at this institution of higher learning, I hereby authorize you to expand your mind.” He raises and lowers his eyebrows as he withdraws from his shirt pocket and flour–ishes a joint roughly the size of a small cigar.
“Oh all right.” She gives in.
Now there is some crosscutting between the two, hysterical giggling in SSTTEERREEOO RREEWEERRBB [note JOINT, which billows smoke like a room fumigator], meaningless reaction shots.
Here’s an abrupt cut. The couple are suddenly a foot or two closer to each other. The stock is grainier.
“It’s the next day,” says Tania.
“It’s the next movie,” says Joan.
The boom drops into the frame.
“Testing, one two three,” says Susan.
The couple is embracing and muttering sweet endearments at each other. In a burst of wit the man tells the girl to address him as Professor, then abruptly reaches to pull off the girl’s tube top. He has some trouble extricating her from it. There’s another stutter cut. The Professor’s shirt is now unbuttoned partway as the couple continues to clinch. Suddenly, there is the sound off camera of glass breaking.
“Must be another grade grubber,” says Susan.
The Professor tells her to Wait Here, but before he gets very far, he is confronted by two Black Men with Guns, both wearing combat fatigues.
“What is it you want?” whines the effete intellectual.
“Sitchassdown,” says the Black with the Authoritative Baritone, “muhfucka.”
The second Black mugs and speaks with a high-pitched, crazy voice. Soon the obliging Professor provides the two Black Men with a pretext to pistol-whip him, which the Crazy Black accomplishes with a maniacal grin on his face. An uncomfortably edited montage: the girl’s expression of horror, the grinning face of the Crazy Black, the implacable face of the Authoritative Black, the Professor, his eyeglasses slipping from his bloody face, and the book of Eastern Philosophy, lying open and abandoned on the floor.
“Now hep me wit de bitch,” says the Authoritative Black. The Crazy Black puts his Black Hands all over the White Girl’s White Torso as he helps the Authoritative Black restrain her so that she can be carried out the door, whitely Half Naked.
Tania gasps, folds her arms across her chest. “I can’t believe this.”
“What?”
“That. Up there.” She points. “Can’t you see? That’s not what happened!” Tania’s indignant. She’s never before mentioned to anyone the confluence of her peculiar life and the cinema’s honed insight about what might be possible, or timely, or desired, or just, or true. So far the point of juncture has been achieved through synchronicity or—OK—coincidence. But this is so clearly her, up there. “Jesus.”
“What, you’re saying that’s suppose to be you?” Joan looks at her.
“Totally obviously.”
“It’s a movie, honey.”
“Shitty movie,” adds Susan.
“That totally happened to me. That’s exactly what happened.”
“You jus
t said it wasn’t what happened.”
“But that’s not what I meant. I meant, it is what happened, but they got it wrong.”
On the screen the two Black Men toss the girl into the trunk of their car.
“Help me,” she screams. “Help me, somebody, please!”
Down goes the lid.
“That happened,” Tania says.
“Well, where else are you going to put somebody?”
“I’ve done it before,” says Tania. “You don’t have to throw someone in the trunk. It’s really mean.”
“I’m sorry,” says Joan. “I think maybe we’re talking about two different things.”
“I don’t think you’re sorry at all.”
“We’re talking about the movie or what happened to you?”
“They’re stealing my life, is all.”
“No,” says Joan, with infuriating calm, “the people who threw you in the trunk stole your life. Get that right.”
Tania’s face is burning. For a moment she wants to hit Joan. She considers demanding to be taken home. But she watches the screen in deep-breathing silence. Shortly, the movie’s plot sharply diverges from her own; it was just another abduction-by-the-light-of-a-big-white-bra after all. She feels acute embarrassment for having said anything at all—for allowing her comrades, her friends, to see that she associated herself with some shrieking celluloid nitwit, for having allowed Joan the chance to cast doubt on her life, to remind her that they scared the shit out of her, beat her, fucked her, called her names; that she sat blindfolded in a cramped closet for weeks. What had she later called it for Adam K. Trout? “An environment of love,” in which she learned how to live. Fuck that shit.
The atmosphere is uncomfortable inside the car, and Joan suggests leaving after the first feature. On the way home, Susan says, “Maybe they did borrow from it a little.”
“What,” says Tania.
“I mean, it was familiar from the news. The basic facts. Eww, was that supposed to be Eric Stump?”
“They got him right.”
“But not you, is that it?” Joan turns to look at her.
“No, that wasn’t me at all. I was scared.”
“I bet, honey.”
“No but wait. I was ready. Just like you. I was ready to join. I didn’t know it then but I was.”
“If mama won’t come to the mountain,” says Joan.
“Take the mountain to you,” says Susan.
“Take the mountain to me.”
“Hallelujah,” says Joan. “But next time maybe they should ask.”
PACIFIC HEIGHTS. THIS PART of town strikes Guy as being just a lit–tle freaky. Quiet houses, too big, too wealthy, with a sort of haughty though listless grandeur that somehow always reminds Guy of how foreign he still feels in California, even after all these years. These houses spot strangeness in the cut of a jacket, the lay of a haircut, the burnish of a shoeshine. Uneasy fools like him wander in and immediately start seeking an exit as they might from the scariest slum.
Five blocks and he’s encountered exactly one other human pedestrian, a stocky man in livery with a face, as his mother might say, stamped with the map of Ireland. The man paused on the steps of a large Queen Anne house and brazenly followed Guy with his eyes until he was certain Guy was continuing on his way. Ex-cop? Who knows. Much of the capital flowing through the state bottlenecks here in these icily pleasant streets with nary a sign of the gated doorways and barred windows just down the hill in the Fillmore. It isn’t class intimidation that keeps all these rich folks safe at home in their beds.
Then again, how safe are they? He’s heading to his lawyer’s house to meet with the father of a girl who’d relied one day too many on the assumptions of a privileged life. If she’d simply said, “Who is it?” when destiny had banged on her door that evening, who could say that she wouldn’t have gone to bed and awoken the next morning with nothing more to concern her than the dirty dishes she’d left soaking in the sink the night before? He’s always wanted to ask her just why she’d opened up her house to her abductors. Had she thought she was charmed? Though Stump of course had done the actual opening. But same difference. The press acts as if Stump had blown into the Galtons’ orbit like a stink from the other side of the tracks, but come on: Palo Alto upbringing, Princeton man. He was a variation on a theme. So was Willie Wolfe, a doctor’s son, the nth-generation Eli. The Galtons didn’t really know from the wrong side of the tracks until they heard catty rumors that their daughter had been knocked up by Cinque.
Funny, but this is the first subject Hank Galton wants to broach when they finally get around to talking turkey.
Well but first they had cocktails, and then claret with dinner, and port with dessert, and now they settle in the parlor with the vodka again, whereupon Frank Cahalan discreetly withdraws and Guy realizes that he’s drunk. He’s pretty certain Hank is shitfaced too; he keeps adding little half–ounce tipples to his own glass, topping it with soda from a chrome siphon. When the glass gets down to a certain level, Hank fills it up again. They talk sports. Can the A’s do it again? Guy thinks not. Catfish Hunter has become the Three Million Dollar Man and is pitching in a Yankees uniform. No doubt the rest of the team will soon follow him into the lucrative new territory of free agency. Hank notes that Guy sounds almost as if he disapproved. Surely a man like Guy would favor free agency. Guy favors it for the sake of the players but is unsure whether he wants to pay five bucks to sit in the bleachers. They clink glasses. There’s a certain self-congratulatory air to Galton’s bonhomie that his agreement with Guy on this throwaway point underscores. Probably Hank sat in the bleachers once. Probably thought it was the best time he ever had. Probably can’t even remember who was playing.
Tentatively, the subject is raised at last. Guy is careful to limit what he says to avoid self-incrimination.
There’s a certain individual. An individual I believe we have in common.
We’re talking about the same person I think I think I can find ways to get in touch if if
With this person. If the person you’re talking about is the person I’m talking about well I’m very interested Guy, in making contact.
Well through an intermediary, mind you Hank I’m I think this can be arranged and but with other parties who’d have to approve.
Of course I would accept any restrictions these parties decided to impose, Guy. I always have.
Yeah but basically I’m just saying this individual probably would not it would not be possible to make personal contact, Hank.
Well I mainly want to know
Hank?
I want to know about her health.
You mean is the person in good health?
The person I’m talking about is perfectly healthy, Hank.
And the last time that you saw the person, Guy, was … ?
Some yuh a few months ago.
I wonder what you might know about the current state of the person’s health?
The person’s in good health as far as I know. I mean I I would have heard any news to the contrary.
I guess I don’t mean health per se.
I’m I’m not getting you.
“Was she pregnant? Was she pregnant by Cinque?”
“Oh,” says Guy, surprised, and then he understands. “Ah, no. She had a pregnant belly they made. She wore it as a disguise sometimes.”
“Oh, thank God,” says Hank. “It would have been. I just can’t imagine how much harder it all would be if she’d had a child. Especially his child.”
“They’re actually pretty careful about that stuff.” Guy’s guessing, but he figures he’s got to be right. The Manson Family screwed their brains out too, but those women were dropping kids left and right.
They’re silent for a minute, Hank perhaps taking solace of a kind in the thought that his daughter has been diligently practicing family planning.
He asks, “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.”
“Is she happy?”<
br />
“Well, you know. I don’t know what it was like before L.A. From what I’ve heard it sounds like it was weirder, more violent, more squalid, more doctrinaire, and more, I don’t know, incestuous if you get my drift. But since then they’ve found some different ways of looking at things, met up with some new people.”
“Like yourself, for example.”
“I suppose. We weren’t really day to day with them, Randi and me. Just kind of checking in. But the point is I don’t think we would even have been allowed to help them back in the Age of Cinque. That guy really had them marooned on that psycho island of his. The world was exactly what he said it was. I think Drew Shepard still has a little of that in him. But it’s a matter of time. Let me just say that I doubt they believe they’re going to overthrow the system anymore. Maybe Drew and Diane do. Probably definitely Drew Shepard. He’s sort of a hopeless case.”
“A romantic,” says Hank dryly.
“What I think is she’s surrounded now by a bunch of more or less ordinary people who have the sort of ideas about things that even a man like yourself, no offense, is bound to have encountered over the past few years without once giving them a second thought. Believe me, these people don’t want to shoot the president. They want to do yoga. Basically they’re back to where they started out from, more or less, you know? They’re people you might actually like. Is she happy? Who can say. It’s OK. I think she has a pretty regular life. It’s acceptable to her. You’ll think this is nuts, but.”
“What?”
“A mutual friend put me in touch with them after L.A. And you want to know the truth, I had serious reservations about helping them out at all. It wasn’t just the Marc Foster murder, though that whole thing was so stupid it made me want to cry. It wasn’t the total dumbness factor, the idiot hyperbole, all that fascist insect crap, which everybody on the Left just loved to point to, but I was always like, hey—glass houses, OK? It was the kidnapping. I just hated it. It was like something out of some shit-ass midnight movie that gives you the willies. Maybe if it was you they’d kidnapped I’d say all right. But even then. But this is the crazy part. This is the part where you’ll think I’m crazy.”
Trance Page 46
