Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“All right, comrades,” he said. “Let’s get on out of here.” Fahizah spoke, her voice coming from near the kitchen. “We have just enough time to get to the rendezvous, I think.”

“Rendezvous?” said Cinque.

“We were supposed to meet up at the last show at the Century Drive-In.” She added: “Um. You picked it.”

“Well, why the hell didn’t you mention it before now?”

“Well, I. I thought, it seemed like you, like you wanted, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” demanded the Field Marshal.

“Like you wanted us to be quiet, like you needed to think things over.”

Because of a painful corn that had formed on the ball of his left foot, what Cinque had thought over was this: Reverend Borrows liked to treat the smallest cuts with iodine that hurt so bad it felt like you were trying to scare the dirt out. It was a pleasure to him to treat wounds, to sit with his teenage boarder with surgical tape and a blue box of cotton and little brown bottles of stinging ointment between them, disinfecting and bandaging up his cuts and scrapes. Cinque had let him do it too.

It was information of a kind, neither more nor less important than anything else he might think about. Always expecting him to have like these great thoughts , damn.

Reverend Borrows’s daughter was Harriet. If Borrows had let him marry her when he got out of Elmira, everything would be different now. OK, she was only fourteen. But with the reverend’s permission he would have waited around, learned a steady trade, gotten work. Instead he floated to Newark, swum into the waiting maw of Gloria Thomas, twenty-three, drop-dead gorgeous, mother of three.

“Too dangerous. We’ll check out the drops tomorrow. What we need tonight is to get out of here and find a place to stay.”

Was there a hint of discontent in the ranks as they filed out the door in quiet pairs, himself and Gelina, Cujo and Fahizah, Gabi and Zoya? Well?

Once a senior class treasurer … She divided and redivided the money, enjoyed seeing it split into equal parts. No “more or less.” Her best work was done at a desk, in bright light. She liked thinking and plotting. She liked the look of an idea as it took shape on paper. She liked the look of a number in a box or a circle. She wished she had a typewriter. She enjoyed working with reams of paper, generating drifts of ideas from out of nothing. The sheer accumulation, as the stack of papers mounted, as collections of receipts grew fat in a stained number ten envelope imprinted with the address of the Berkeley Public Library. Where she worked for a while and helped organize fellow workers in a labor dispute. This was something she would put on a resume one day, after the revolution, at the very bottom so that people could see what a long way she’d come.

At the library it had been thought that she had difficulty communicating with older workers. She categorically disagreed.

The dispute had ended up with the library’s remaining a nonunion shop. Still, she reminded herself, significant advances had been made.

Leaving stuff like that behind — the receipts, the notes, the drafts, the lists, the correspondence— killed her, not just because the others pointed out that their movements could be tracked exactly if such a rich trove of evidence were to fall into the wrong hands (she had to admit that she didn’t care, instinctively disliked the idea of vanishing off the face of the earth) but because it was a comfort and a relief to watch evidence of herself add up on the record. White drifts of her self, piling up on a tabletop on either side of the blue Smith-Corona portable. She wished for personalized checks, for a business card she could give out. Checks were better; they came back. She wrote graffiti on the walls of the safe houses instead.

And now maybe this was not what she wanted. She had grown used to things not being precisely as she wanted them; that was no longer her life’s objective, so it wasn’t where the problem was located. The problem was not quite knowing what the objective was. Zoya knew armed struggle was not about to happen down here. These people were in love with their Chevrolets and Smoky Joes: so what? They would come around. That wasn’t the problem. Inevitably her mind returned to Gabi. She couldn’t help thinking that Gabi had manipulated her into a situation where the ultimate point was for her to be with Gabi. This was unacceptable, and the word she used to describe it in her thoughts was travesty , a travesty of her beliefs. At the same time, she just had to look at Gabi — shlumpy in her fatigues, apart from the others — to feel an unwelcome wave of guilty feelings wash over her. It was like trying to abandon a kitten and hearing it calling for you from the back alley. Gabi cried from the physical effort of her training. She lumbered through drills, bulky and awkward, and Zoya wished she would just stop. Gabi stubbornly made it plain that her ideological commitment was less than 100 percent, and the fact of her actually having lived among the third world poor to whom her father ministered made everyone suspicious, including, Zoya realized, herself. Gabi had settled in as the butt of the cadre’s jokes. Cin gave her a horrible time. She’d seen her unmet sexual needs become the topic of an evening’s discussion more than once, and Zoya resented the implication that she was the one obliged to satisfy them. The whole focus of Zoya’s involvement in the group now was to keep Gabi from having a negative net effect on operations. Hand-holder. Babysitter. She jollied her and walked with her. Explained why they weren’t on the same team.

Today they’d sat on the lawn, and Gabi had cried while she accused Zoya of not thinking to suggest to Cinque that the two of them carry out the errands Teko, Yolanda, and Tania had been sent to complete. Of just plain not thinking . Gabi shook her head, burdened with the inexpressible complexity of her emotions. But they knew each other so well now that Zoya no longer wished to see to a deeper level of Gabi’s character: Gabi was now as much an agglomeration of annoying habits as any stranger, except that she was stupefyingly predictable to boot. When Gabi cried, Zoya always had to fight the impulse to laugh. It was the cruelest thing she’d ever recognized in herself. It was like watching a clown weeping clown tears in clown clothes. Gabi blubbered and snuffled on that retarded Compton lawn and Zoya wanted alternately to laugh out loud and to crush her ex-lover’s skull.

Now she started heading off to her own van, with her own team of Cujo and Fahizah. Gabi reached out and held her by her sleeve.

“Mizmoon,” she said, “happy birthday.” She held up her wristwatch to show that it was past midnight. May 17: Zoya was twenty-four.

“Damn, don’t call me that.”

“That’s your name . You chose it.”

“I choose Zoya.”

“We need to talk.”

You need, thought Zoya, but she looked directly into Gabi’s eyes and raised her chin to indicate that she was listening.

“There’s something wrong here.”

“What do you mean, something wrong?”

“The way we sat. For hours, Trish.”

Zoya cringed. Especially don’t call her Trish. She would choose her names from now on, as often as necessary, swapping whenever one became freighted with outcast meaning.

“So?”

“The police are supposedly coming, and we sit for hours without a word of protest.”

“Protesting what?”

“The just sitting there.”

“Cinque had to work it out.”

“And no one’s allowed to talk while he does it? That’s bullshit, Trish.”