Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Of course she will be joining the women’s collective, won’t she? Yolanda, in an attempt to establish “sisterhood” with Tania, daily conducts her beloved criticism/self — criticism sessions — just the two of them, one on one. Do we feel as if our commitment to the doctrine of direct revolutionary action has come at the expense of our work toward a new feminism? Check.

Teko has stopped bathing, Tania notices. This seems to be his way of rebuking Yolanda.

They pack up. Papers, guns, and clothing go into cardboard boxes Tania scrounges from the Lucky supermarket. Flat old pillows and threadbare blankets that regular people would put out on the sidewalk for the garbageman. While the others box these sorry possessions, Teko lectures on the Vietcong; how a guerrilla would head into the jungle for months at a time carrying only ammunition, a sack of rice, and minimal personal belongings in his pack. A quart bottle of Colt.45, Teko’s latest affectation, sits empty on the kitchen counter.

One night there is an argument in the bedroom, fierce and whispered. Tania and Roger lie in the darkness, frozen with embarrassment.

Teko throws things, picks them up over his head and hurls them, into the boxes. He yells. But Yolanda will not be drawn in. The mailbox outside has a label that reads “Mr. and Mrs. Carroll Simmons,” the name Susan selected when she found and leased the dump. It’s an alias never referred to, as if Teko’s shame at having to accept the gift of this neutered name had rendered it taboo. Now Tania sees that the “& Mrs.” has been crossed out. She is unsure who is rebuking whom.

Yolanda feeds the strays in the backyard. She stands amid the debris back there, holding an open can of cat food in one hand and a soup spoon in the other, calling to the animals in an unnatural high-pitched voice.

Roger tells it again, to Susan, to Jeff, to Tania, who was right there beside him: He woke up, and there was Teko, cradling the submachine gun.

Before dawn one morning, just before the move, the three are awakened by flashing lights shining through the windows and the sounds of the police, surrounding them. They immediately take up their positions in the house, prepared to shoot it out. Squatting by the window, Tania crams shells into the loading port of a shotgun. But the police activity ebbs. Two of three patrol cars drive off, leaving a pair of cops to offer vague and blase answers to the queries of sleepy residents dressed in robes and pajamas. One citizen carries an alarm clock in his hand, as if to prove that the hour is inappropriate for such goings-on. An ambulance rolls up, slowly, without lights or siren, and the cops stand by as the attendants remove equipment and a gurney from it. By first light the street is quiet again. Then around midmorning a young policeman appears at their door to question them about what they may have seen or heard. He wears a department-issue windbreaker that is stiff with newness and a hat that is too small. Turns out a man was robbed and beaten to death next door, in the overgrown lot separating the duplex from the neighboring bungalow. Yolanda clucks her tongue and gasps at the policeman’s narrative, standing at the partly open door and blocking the cop’s view into the apartment. He touches two fingers to the brim of his little hat as he turns to leave.

The smell of something dead pervades the Capitol Avenue apartment. It begins with a faint smell in the kitchen, the slightest whiff of something putrid, and Yolanda and Susan pace across the linoleum, sniffing, talking lightly of it, their voices echoing throughout the empty rooms. But soon the stench has taken over the apartment. Tania walks in one afternoon to find Yolanda seated on two cardboard cartons, holding a paper napkin to her nose. A little exploration reveals that a mouse has died within the wall just behind an electrical outlet, and after removing the fuse and unscrewing the faceplate, Tania squats, a bandanna covering her nose and mouth, working at the stupid rodent with a tweezers, trying to remove it from the tangle of cable and wire where it managed to lodge itself before it died. Breathing through her gritted teeth behind the bandanna, Tania grabs hold of the mouse by the ear, birthing it slowly out of the hole in the wall, the stink really blossoming now, and the mouse keeps coming, it is the longest mouse in recorded history, until finally she has the enormous reeking corpse.

JOAN ISN’T HAPPY THAT she’s walking out on her life again carrying a toothbrush in her purse and that’s it. When the pigs find her, they find her, but what she truly hates is the idea of all those guys going through her underpants.

This is not a way of life she would recommend to everyone. Though things have been going OK up into now. She left the East Coast separate from the others. She met up with a restless friend in New Jersey, Meg Speice, and they drove to San Francisco together. No way was she going to Sacramento. She’d had it with these hick towns, she never wanted to lay eyes on Teko or Yolanda again, and she considered her so-called debt to Guy Mock paid in full. She and Meg moved into a flat on Clayton. She kept tabs on Tania through Susan Rorvik, who also got Meg a job at the hotel restaurant where she worked.

So for the past few months she has been indistinguishable from a hundred thousand other girls: young, single, maybe with a problem relationship or two under their belt, living in a roommate situation at the edge of a total shit neighborhood, trying to apply all the fucked-up shit they’d learned to the world around them.

Then one morning she walks out the door and guess who’s on page one of the Chronicle. People live for this? She ducks back inside and makes Meg go buy her the papers.

“What happened?” Meg asks, dropping the Chron on the table. The two of them stand over it, hands on their hips.

“I don’t know how they could have found the farm if Guy didn’t tell them, but I can’t believe he would. My guess is he opened his big mouth up in the neighborhood of the wrong ears.”

Meg puts her index finger on one of the columns of type, taps it, and then moves it in a circle around a group of words. “They found your fingerprint.”

“What the fuck? We went over that place with a fine tooth combed.”

The dummy rented the place in his own name. Guy has an ego he can’t help but see his own name printed on all the blank spaces of the world.

Roger picks her up before noon, and they drive north.

“We have a lot of space now,” he says.

Joan doesn’t respond.

“It’s kind of nice up there,” he offers.

“You’re the one getting laid.”

His right ear, the one facing her, colors. The back of his neck. She folds her arms and stares straight ahead through the windshield.

MAN SOUGHT IN SLA CASE SURFACES, DENIES RUMORS

by N. Palmer Hockley

SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, April 9. A man sought by Federal authorities for questioning in connection with the militant Symbionese Liberation Army emerged from the shadowy world of the radical underground less than twenty-four hours af — ter televised news reports that he and his wife had left the country. Accompanied by their attorney, Guy Mock, 32, and his wife, Randy, held a press conference this morning here to “offer living proof” that they had not fled to North Africa and to issue a statement concerning their activities over the past year.

The F.B.I. has sought the Mocks since February in connection with their suspected activities on behalf of the S.L.A., whose surviving elements went into hiding following a deadly confrontation with police and federal agents in Los Angeles last May that left six members of the radical left-wing group dead. According to a source close to the investigation, the Mocks are suspected of having aided fugitive members of the group, possibly including Alice Galton, by maintaining a “safe house” in rural Pennsylvania for their use last summer. The Mocks dropped out of sight after a federal grand jury subpoena was issued in February.