Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  It’s all for her. The revelation comes gradually; she knows that she’s become famous, but this? The car begins slowly to move forward, gently prodding the coruscating figures who gradually open up a narrow lane leading to the mouth of a dark tunnel that will take her to the future, and the parking garage. All for her—her own monumental meaning, whatever it is, shining brighter than the moon and stars. And so she smiles, receiving her public, instinctively fulfilling them, and as the famous face widens, opening to their scrutiny, there is hungry stirring outside, as though the true extent of the yearning for this particular smile, these particular teeth, had only now become clear, and when she raises her shackled hands, her right formed unmistakably into a fist, she is bathed in light again, waves of it that rise and fall, drenching the sedan and causing it to halt once more, polishing her bright with her own blank renown.

  Distilled to their essence, revolutions are acts of supreme creativity.

  —“THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

  AND CONFLICT SHORT OF WAR,”

  BY STEVEN METZ AND JAMES KIEVIT

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO

  Sound on Sound

  CODA

  Let My Gun Sing for the People

  SARA JA+NE MOORE HOLDS the telephone receiver absently, cocked over her right shoulder, as if she were about to throw it. So Thomas Polhaus won’t take her phone calls any longer. Mr. Big Shot.

  She can tell when she is beginning to be considered a burden. This is the hard-won intuition of five deceased marriages. Here you are, trying your best, and sooner or later someone gets around to telling you that you won’t do. Then all you can do is point an angry finger. At his full to bursting refrigerator that contained exactly one stick of margarine, a pound of spoiled bacon, and half a bottle of apple juice the first time you opened it. At the shiny floor and glistening toilet. At the savings passbook with its regular deposits earning 5 percent. Each a noticeable improvement but looks like someone got bored.

  He doesn’t take her calls and the Gal Friday type who answers is the kind who puts you on hold without asking. So you wait fruitlessly on the other end of a rude gesture. What it all adds up to is a bad taste in her mouth.

  Some people change when they get their names in the paper.

  Meanwhile over on Telegraph Avenue the other day she receives the total deep freeze from any acquaintance she happens to encounter. This is an exceptional first-time thing. She made it plain to Thomas Polhaus that their conversations, which as an informant she is perfectly entitled to, are confidential between the two of them alone. And Thomas Polhaus seems to agree; he nods or gestures in the commonly accepted affirmative manner, because what good is she to them if her credibility is damaged? No good at all. Naturally this comes before she is cut loose by the FBI. What they did was pump her, then cut her loose, then set her up. Sara Jane realizes that it serves their purposes to have her killed or silenced.

  Wherever she goes they can find her. They set it up way back, collecting the information. Telephone number. Social Security number. Mother’s maiden name. She sees at the bank the other day, that adorable little Filipina teller goes, “Now you can have your personal driver’s license number printed directly on your checks.” She laughed all the way out onto the street.

  Good thing she has a gun.

  Speaking of guns, she is flipping through some magazines today and there on the cover of Newsweek is a story about Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a devotee of Charles Manson’s, who in Sacramento had wandered into the crowd engulfing President Ford with a high-caliber handgun and murderous intent and advised onlookers that “the country is in a mess. This man is not your president,” before taking aim at the chief executive. The attempt was thwarted by a Secret Service man who astutely inserted the webbing between his thumb and forefinger in front of the hammer of the pistol as it fell, preventing the gun from firing. That must have smarted. Fromme later explained that she had “wanted to get some attention for Charlie and the girls.”

  Besides, here is an ad, for this package of frozen waffles, across which a banner runs, pledging “Improved Waffle Taste!” This is the sort of embedded, subliminal stupidity that colors everyone’s book of days. You don’t need to go any further if you’re looking for a reason to overthrow the established order. Here it is. Waffles with improved waffle taste. Do they even hear what they’re saying.

  The Newsweek article is written by someone named Dan Russell. This is a name that rings a bell from the case of the Famous Fugitive. How could it, how can it be? She checks the date on the magazine: September 15. This is a clear message, planted in the magazine three days before the capture. It is for her, tentacular, linking the two cases, directing her.

  What tends to happen when you no longer see people you’ve gotten used to seeing is you miss them. This is a fact of physical and cultural anthropology both.

  She’s talked to exactly one agent exactly one time since she’s been trying to get ahold of Thomas Polhaus. An impatient type named Von Isenbarger. She has it written in a notebook. Whether this is a first and last name both, or just some lengthy last name, she isn’t sure.

  Funny she should have picked this particular magazine up today. The president is swinging through San Francisco tomorrow. She believes presidential assassination is a federal crime and the FBI would have jurisdiction.

  She will see Thomas.

  She will restore her reputation amid her friends and comrades.

  She will draw a line, unmistakable, connecting the case, demarcating the old from the new. Fromme being the former and herself being the latter.

  She will kill that bastard Ford.

  Or maybe it’s the Secret Service whose jurisdiction it is?

  Sara Jane writes a poem to celebrate the event before it even happens. It just comes out of her, this must be what they mean by inspiration. Besides, somehow she doesn’t think she’ll have much time afterward.

  Hold-Hold, still my hand.

  Steady my eye, chill my heart, And let my gun sing for the people.

  Scream their anger, cleanse with their hate, And kill this monster.

  Sounds like the beginning of something.

  Why don’t you go to the prison beauty shop?

  —CATHERINE HEARST TO HER DAUGHTER PATRICIA,

  AFTER THE LATTER’S ARREST,

  CONCERNING THE CONDITION OF HER HAIR

  My greatest trouble is the present and the past, and I guess the future too.

  —PATRICIA HEARST,

  RESPONDING TO A SENTENCE COMPLETION TEST,

  CA. THE SAME PERIOD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Fiction based on real events always risks appearing to be coy about its proximity to the actual, whether or not its author hews closely to the facts. Still, I thought in this case it might be of use to affirm that while many of the situations this novel depicts, and the people it portrays, are drawn from a well-documented episode in recent American history, I have disregarded the record whenever it’s served my purpose to do so. Among many adulterations, I have, strictly according to my own lights, emphasized, diminished, conflated, and omitted incidents and individuals; I have frequently invented characters and incidents altogether; and I have occasionally changed the chronology of events and consciously indulged in anachronisms. I have freely included invented documents, newspaper articles, and the like alongside genuine ones. I have, through my characters and narrators, offered opinions or hypotheses that are entirely spurious when placed outside the invented context of the novel. In short, I exercised the novelist’s right to avoid those things that did not interest me and to take imaginative liberties with those that did.

  Accordingly, readers should note that while many of the characters in this book have counterparts in real life, their actions, thoughts, beliefs, personalities, and, certainly, legal and moral culpability as depicted here are, finally, the product of an author’s imagination.

  A note on sources: Many, if not most, of the sources dealing directly with
the SLA that I reviewed were written while the case was ongoing in one sense or another and attempt to present factual accounts from a journalistic perspective. While these accounts provided a vivid glimpse of the mid-1970s to aid my own shaky memory, they’ve suffered from the passage of time in all the usual ways. Facts have been superseded by newer and more influential facts. The authors frequently bring to their material oddly insistent personal agendas, at once both tangential to and entangled with the larger subject, that persuasively demonstrated to me the narcotic allure of the SLA/Tania story and the ways in which people relate certain public events to their private lives. Finally, it should perhaps go without saying that both the relevancy of such matters and our way of thinking about them have drastically changed since I started writing in the fall of 2000.

  One book that I found indispensable was Vin McLellan and Paul Avery’s The Voices of Guns (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). Equally valuable were the lengthy articles by David Kohn and Howard Weir that appeared in Rolling Stone in 1975-76. Shana Alexander’s Anyone’s Daughter (New York: Viking, 1979), though it often careens into the personal in the manner described above, provides a thoughtful and candidly bemused look at the “establishment” take on home-grown radicalism and its consequences. Robert Brainard Pearsall’s annotated compilation The Symbionese Liberation Army: Documents and Communications (Amsterdam: Rodolpi N.V, 1974) both collects those things and places them in welcome context. Patricia Campbell Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), and the LAPD’s official report “The Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles,” while both somewhat self-serving, offer information unavailable elsewhere. Another book that was of particular help was Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), an impressionistic look at the Japanese-American experience during and after World War II. Still other sources are acknowledged in passing within the novel.

  As is my habit as a fiction writer, I conducted no fieldwork, archival research, or interviews toward the completion of this book. Seekers of documentary truth are gently encouraged to look elsewhere.

  Among those on whose help, encouragement, advice, and support I relied I must acknowledge Ira Silverberg, Lorin Stein, Cary Goldstein, Bradford Morrow, Leon Friedman, Richard Wong, Gilbert Sorrentino, Sam Lipsyte, and especially my old friend and tutelary saint, Jonathan Lethem.

  Of course many others provided aid and comfort to me during the writing of this book, and I hope I’ve managed to reciprocate when I could.

  Notes

  1 Ultimately the man’s dissertation is published under the title Revolutionary Minstrels: White Appropriation of Black Oratory in Postwar American Radical Rhetoric.

  Copyright © 2005 by Christopher Sorrentino

  All rights reserved

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429932721

  First eBook Edition : May 2011

  First edition, 2005

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sorrentino, Christopher, 1963–

  Trance / Christopher Sorrentino.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-27864-9

  ISBN-10: 0-374-27864-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Hearst, Patricia, 1954-Fiction. 2. Symbionese Liberation Army—Fiction. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 5. Guerrillas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.0697T73 2005

  813’.54—dc22

  2004058333