Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  “Right after Vatican Two my father started making hamburgers on Friday,” Langmo says. “Every Friday it was burgers: with cheese, with bacon, with Lipton onion soup mix mixed in, whatever, as long as they were dripping blood. Threw them on the grill. Liked to eat them on a kaiser roll. Enough of this fish shit, he said.”

  “Hated fish.”

  “He hated fish. Loved the Latin mass, but he hated fish.”

  “I’m kind of attached to the old ways, myself.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t kill myself or anything, you understand.”

  The young man drives off as Mystery Man carries his fish and yesterday’s news up the steps.

  At ten to one the door opens again and the Mystery Couple comes out. They’re dressed for a jog, in shorts and T-shirts.

  Bockenkamp radios. “Anyplace they could hide a weapon under there?”

  “Search me,” says Nietfeldt.

  “Ho-ho. I mean, this is it. Now’s when we take them.”

  Langmo’s bouncing in the passenger seat.

  “Let them do their jogging. Wear them out a little. I’m sure as fucking hell not chasing them up and down these hills,” says Nietfeldt.

  The couple starts trotting in the direction of the park.

  Subjects rounding Alabama. South on Alabam. You copy?

  Ten-four Car one, you got a print kit ready? ID this guy right away. Nip it in the bud if we’re wrong.

  Progress, car two?

  Still on Alabama. They usually, the routine is, down Alabama to Ripley.

  Copy that, two.

  Um, stand by. Stand by.

  What’s up, two?

  Subject male is stopping. Stone in his shoe or something, looks like. Subject female is continuing.

  Shit. They’re not together, you mean?

  Negative. You copy?

  Car one, Base. Take up position on Folsom. They don’t join up we’ll take her fast so he doesn’t see.

  copy.

  Here he comes. Shit, he’s going flat out. Gonna have a heart attack.

  Stay in position, one.

  Ten-four

  Two here. Subjects together.

  He caught up.

  Subjects turning north onto Folsom. You copy?

  Ten-four, two.

  One here. Visual contact.

  Base here. Move in, three. Take up position at Two Eight Eight.

  Approaching 288, the couple, sheened with perspiration, slows to a walk. McQuirter, Stepnowski, and Holderness emerge from their sedan to surround them.

  “FBI,” says McQuirter.

  Mystery Man looks blankly at the three agents, but his companion screams: “You sons of bitches!” Then she turns to run. And there’s Nietfeldt, hustling up from the corner, covering her with a shotgun. Covering all five of them, actually, at this distance—but who has time to consider the petty details? She freezes, and Holderness grabs her, and then Langmo is rushing past Nietfeldt to assist Holderness, and Nietfeldt can put up the gun.

  “Get the fuck off me, you motherfuckers! Let me go!” She thrashes, kicks, and spits.

  “Get her in the fucking car and get her out of here,” says Nietfeldt. “We don’t want Herself hearing the ruckus.”

  “Where’s that kit?” says McQuirter. Mystery Man is still standing quietly beside him, Stepnowski’s .38 aimed at his head, holding his uncuffed hands away from his body slightly, fingers spread, as if he were air-drying freshly painted nails.

  “Like we need it,” says Nietfeldt. But he takes a stamp pad and a five-by-eight out of his jacket pocket. He’ll feel a lot better when all the guns are put away.

  Polhaus walks through the apartment: cluttered, but not quite like the packrat middens they’d discovered in Clayton and Daly City and on Golden Gate. The usual guns and bombs (including, Polhaus notices, a Red Ryder BB gun), dozens of linear feet of papers, but all neatly stored in one of the two bedrooms. The rest of the place looks as ordinary as can be.

  Polhaus contemplates the middle-class comforts the apartment encloses and perceives the terminus of the adventure. The apartment foretells this afternoon, his own presence here, more acutely than anything else could. Running exhausts people. Hiding bores them silly The last fantasy of the SLA, even more implausible than that of leading a revolution, was that they could revert to this. Neighbors say that they were a nice couple. Even had a few of them up for tea. Coffee and cake. Plants on the windowsills. Scented candles in the bath. Even upon them, Polhaus thinks, the normal exerted its pull. At the furthest point of their renegade orbit it may have looked as if they’d broken free, soared, but to the end they remained natural satellites of the culture; it hauled them back every time; and whenever it did, they were complicit.

  Their final alias was Carswell, Christopher and Nanette. It’s there on the mailing label for the TV Guide.

  THEY GET UP LATE on Morse. The fugitive’s privilege. No work, no worries, and Teko and Yolanda all the way up in Bernal Heights. They have a routine of making coffee and then sitting around drinking it and talking and smoking until it’s time to make tea. Ridiculous. Drifts of dirty laundry covering the floor, dirty dishes hidden under the beds. Roger does most of the cleaning up.

  Another lazy day. They move around one another in the kitchen, each familiar with the other’s way of doing things, her sense of space. Joan pours hot water into the mugs to allow them to warm before she serves the coffee. This is an elegant and fine-featured act, a small marvel each morning. Never would have occurred to Tania. Once again Tania is stumped to characterize it without recourse to the Exotic East.

  One waits to occupy the other’s space. Tania pauses, holding a container of orange juice, waiting for Joan to vacate the patch of countertop next to the refrigerator, where she pokes a fork into the side of her English muffin, separating the two halves. Crumbs and smears of jam on the tile surface of the counter. They step around each other, pause and wait their turn, like the oldest of old couples. The hot water is emptied from the warmed cups and the coffee is poured at last.

  This is almost what Tania wants. Endless days, without ever exhausting the subject, whatever it happens to be. It’s all ahead of them. They’re all set to go to Boston.

  She has a new name all picked out. Amy Ralston. She’ll never have to deal with a dumb nickname. Goes with the tony accent Teko was never able to get her to shake. She has the birth certificate: died in infancy.

  She hears a lot of good things about Boston.

  Today Joan has a letter to share, and Tania sits with one leg tucked under the other, waiting patiently while Joan introduces the letter: She sat up last night and wrote to her Willie, a long postmortem on the dissolution of the Symbionese army, nation, and people.

  “I had to get this off my chest,” says Joan, shaking the pages before she hands them over. Soon she’ll entrust the letter to the system of retranscription and coded paraphrase that has allowed her to correspond with her lover for three years. Joan is silent about the mechanism of this system. Always that reticence to her, a holding back, the promise of a subjacent stage richer than one might imagine. The mysterious Orient.

  “The group,” Tania reads, “has ceased to be a group.”

  A week ago Roger met Teko at a Mission bar to kiss off the SLA for good. Only two other men drank in the afternoon quiet, letter carriers from the post office around the corner, their satchel carts brazenly parked outside. Teko had been expecting Tania and was disappointed when Roger walked in alone. He wanted the opportunity to say goodbye to his protégée. They’d been through so much struggling together. So Roger had quoted him. Bullshit. The final argument, a few days prior, had been a deafening marathon. She and Joan had toted over to Precita a lengthy letter they’d written criticizing SLA leadership past and present, grounding the appraisal in the feminist arguments that had been useful enough to boost them out of backwater Sacramento. Dug out the opus, “Women in the Vanguard: Toward a Revolutionary Theory,” and worked those old changes one more
time.

  They handed him the “divorce letter,” so called, and he stood in the parlor at Precita, reading, tossing the pages on the floor as he was done with them. Yolanda bent to pick up the discarded sheets as they fell, and they stood beside each other, heads bent, reading the familiarly phrased counterclaims.

  “This isn’t political criticism,” said Yolanda. “This is a personal attack.” Well, whatever she was, she wasn’t dumb. Nor was she, of all people, blind to the private uses to which “politics” could be put. Compared with what it already had been used to justify, this was nothing. To liberate yourself from Petaluma or Goleta, assassinate a school official. To shake off the fetters of dusty afternoons in Clarendon Hills, kidnap an heiress. To turn your back on the stifling hush of Hillsborough, tape a harangue, type up a screed, author “Articles of War,” swear out a death warrant against your favorite corporate criminal, blow up a power station. Cut down a churchgoing homemaker in pursuit of cold cash.

  They argued until two in the morning, until all four of them noticed that the rhythmic pounding they’d felt was actually the neighbor, hammering on the wall. Some people have to get up for work in the morning. She and Joan caught a bus on Mission, and that was the last she saw of her field marshal.

  They’ll go to Boston, work as community activists. She’ll garden in a backyard plot, assemble a collection of recipes on three-by-five cards, walk the dog, eventually have a child. All the old imaginings cohere around the new authenticity she’s made.

  Amy Ralston is the name.

  Joan writes long letters. She writes of the “fucked-up interpersonal dynamics” within the cadre. She writes, “We, those of us who decided to go our own way, discussed the matter and it became obvious to us what the problems were. On the surface it seems as though we all agree and believe in the same thing, but after working with them, we’ve come to the realization that we do in fact disagree politically very drastically.” She writes, “And to add to this is the personal aspect of these people. They are two individuals with weak egos lacking very much in sense of themselves.” She writes, “They are doctrinaire Marighelaists. These people are totally unable to check out the objective situation and deal with it. They simply do not know how to take a theory and apply it to the reality that exists.”

  Tania thinks, Is this the sort of letter an imprisoned man awaits in his lonely cell? But she reads on, though the coffee goes right through her and she has to pee. She stands. Too bad. She never gets to read Joan’s penultimate paragraph:

  I wish that I could talk to you and tell you in every detail about everything. Some day I will. I tell you this is an experience I’ll never forget! It was horrendous but at the same time I’ve learned a hell of a lot. Now I understand more clearly my political views and, oh, the sense of myself I’ve gotten out of this ordeal—I wouldn’t exchange it for anything! I think most of us came out of this ahead. I hope you’ll have the chance to meet A.G. She is incredible! She amazes me! I swear only the toughest could have come out of it as she did. What an ordeal she went through!! What an ordeal all of us went through!! I can write a book about it.

  No, there’s a man in the apartment with a gun and he says FBI and this is it. All along, the one indelible gift the SLA had imparted to her was a belief that the authorities were coming to kill her. This, the cornerstone of the mysterious “conversion” that perplexed the world, seemed unshakable. Everything Cinque said had come true: When they couldn’t rescue her, they relabeled her. Made her a common criminal. Such was the phrase used by the attorney general of the USA. Simple as switching a tag. Named her a criminal and then came gunning for her, burned her lover and her friends. All it took was the potency of a new classification.

  Isn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes or something?

  Amy Ralston.

  The guns are in the bedroom and she takes mincing backward steps, heading for her trusty carbine.

  “Freeze or I’ll blow her head off,” says the man. Joan is pressed up against the kitchen counter, and she swivels her head, reflexively avoiding the gun, her eyes finding Tania’s, and it seems that Joan’s face suddenly bears the weight of every single day of her thirty-odd years, as if all the petty retributions the world demanded of her throughout her effortful life had suddenly come due all at once.

  Now here’s another man. Another man, another gun. That appears to be the scheme of things. He calls out her name and involuntarily she moves forward. So much for Amy Ralston.

  The second man spins her around and handcuffs her. Asks her where the guns are. Already she feels the lure of another master viewpoint, the influence of another eager and unrelenting authority, the inauguration of another phase during which she will have to earn and defend everything she has, everything she does, everything she says. The closet, again. Can all of life, at its essence, finally be reduced to the span of the chain that joins the cuffs? One freedom left. She was going to pee, and so she does, right in her pants; it keeps coming and coming, fear, doubt, nervous blood, coffee, whatever, all exit. It’s a decision she makes, no more and no less. God knows when she’ll see a toilet bowl.

  WHEN IT BECAME OBVIOUS that Herself was not hiding among the knickknacks, papers, and sawed-off shotguns at Precita, Polhaus took steps to secure the apartment and preserve the scene. Neighbors milled about. SFPD started arriving. The local parochial school would let out soon. If a fire truck turned onto the street, he wouldn’t have been surprised. It was like the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera.

  Polhaus had a few addresses left to check. Nietfeldt could split hairs on whether he should have had them covered to begin with, but now wasn’t the time. The adrenaline was still coursing through him; his body still thrummed and tingled as if with fever; his arms felt the phantom weight of the fearsome shotgun he’d aimed at that angry, crazed woman. Months of mocking her, and he had to admit that coming face-to-face with her scared the hell out of him. Polhaus told him and Langmo to check the Morse Street address, and Nietfeldt was eager to head down there. It was the next best thing to a stiff drink.

  On their way to the sedan he spotted two San Francisco cops, Fleischer and Sparks, who’d worked the Hibernia Bank case. Want to come along? They led the way, taking obscure byways that steered clear of both traffic and well-paved roads.

  A man works in the garage beneath the parlor floor apartment at 625, spray painting kitchen cabinets that sit on sheets of newspaper. He’s inspecting the job, absently shaking the spray can he holds in his hand, when he notices the four men standing in the open doorway of the garage. He reaches for a rag, to wipe his hands with.

  Now Nietfeldt creeps up the back stairs, followed by Fleischer. Man in the garage saw nothing, knew nothing, recognized no one, but he did say that “the two girls” were in the upstairs apartment now. Then asked them not to mess the place up.

  Nietfeldt feels improbably serene, given his agitation earlier. His heart thuds in his chest at its normal rate. He holds his .38 in steady hands. The sound of his feet on the steps, the feel of the wood’s slight give beneath them, reminds him faintly of summer, the beach, of steps climbing toward a boardwalk. At the landing between floors he pauses to look and listen. There’s the sound of water running through pipes. He continues upward. As he approaches the back door of the apartment, it occurs to him, gazing at it from the extremely foreshortened perspective his position affords him, that there is something peculiar about the way the window in the door emits light. That is, it seems as if the door actually were made of light. These thoughts do not occur to him in words, and by the time he is ready to articulate them to himself, before he has a chance to dismiss them as mild hallucinations arising from lack of sleep, he has reached the upstairs landing and rapidly is assimilating the fact that the door is made of light. That is, the door is open. That is, he is staring directly into the eyes of a pretty Oriental woman who stands before a kitchen table. There’s a writing tablet and a teacup on the table, and there’s a lumpy purse there too. Who knows w
hat could be in that. Nietfeldt brings the gun up. “Freeze!” he says. “FBI!” He moves into the apartment—and there she is, rising from the table, falling away, falling into the dark hallway, leaving him behind, leaving all of them behind again, and Nietfeldt feels a destitution, watching her disappear, like that of the world’s most bereft lover. Suddenly he’s filled with sadness, and a tremendous fatigue. His arms, holding out the pistol before him, feel as if they weighed a hundred pounds apiece.

  “Freeze,” he says. The word comes out like a dreamword. Icicles have formed on the letters of the word freeze.

  Can he really be falling into the abyss of sleep, standing right here?

  “Freeze,” he says again, finding himself, “or I’ll blow her fucking head off.” He sights on the Oriental girl, who flinches, turning her eyes from him. Never shot anybody. Never liked guns. But the threat brings her back into view. Now Nietfeldt feels Fleischer moving behind him, past him, shouldering his way into the hall where she is. Does he hear her giggle? Then he hears the cuffs. The Oriental girl is still as a statue.

  “Hands behind your head,” says Nietfeldt, reaching for his own cuffs.

  In the lumpy purse there’s a loaded Colt Python. A Detective Special is in a pocketbook hanging from the back of a chair. The women lead them to more guns concealed throughout the apartment. When Nietfeldt and Fleischer begin to escort the two women down the stairs, she turns around and looks him in the eye.

  “Could I please change my clothes, please?” she asks. “I wet in my pants when you guys came in.”

  THE SEDAN ARRIVES AT the Federal Building, slowing to a crawl as it proceeds into the delirium of light and noise that awaits it, then stopping. The expectant crowd turns at its appearance, and the sky is lit a thousand times, the sedan and its occupants baked flat in the cold light, the contours of things at the margins leaping in shadow; everything beyond the ardent focus of the uproar languishing in the negated colors of natural light and everyday darkness. At first Tania is frightened by the photographers, and Joan reaches for her with her manacled hands, soothing. The crowd engulfs the sedan, reporters hammering on its roof and fenders, hollering through the windows, and the photographers press up close, capturing the brilliant shadowless figures in the backseat, making fast those dazed faces that will exhibit the confirmation of any sin or virtue the picture editor chooses to assign to them, vivid and so beautifully there, aloof no longer.