Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Hank took the towel he’d draped over one arm of the easy chair and lifted his feet one at a time from the tub and dried them.

“And why are you soaking your feet, you old woman? It makes me sick. You’ve become like an invalid. You’re ridiculous, driving around in a station wagon and soaking your feet like a bartender or a policeman. What happened to the man I married? He lets himself be taken in by little nobodies, and then he comes home and soaks his feet. What’s next, Hank? Dry toast for dinner? You used to be a steak man. I married a steak man, god damn it.”

“I had Chinese food for supper,” said Hank, extending his hands, palms up.

“Well, that, that is not food, Hank. That is exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stood, put on his slippers, and then bent to lift the plastic tub to carry it out to the kitchen.

“This is what I’m talking about,” said Lydia, suddenly animated, her limbs unspooling from the taut center of her body. “This. What are you doing carrying this? Who do you think we are?” Her arm shot out, and she slapped the tub out of Hank’s hands. A cataract of blue liquid arced from the falling vessel, splashing the carpet, the easy chair, and a coffee table covered with books and magazines.

“Bull’s-eye,” he said mildly.

Lydia sank to the floor and began to sob.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I said those things.”

Hank had been reaching for the empty tub but he stopped and reached for the crying woman instead. He got down on his aching knees (though his feet felt terrific) and put his hands on her shoulders and when she didn’t snap and growl he put his arms around her.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“I really don’t know. I really don’t know why I said those things. I’m so upset all the time. I just want these people out of our lives and I feel like you’re always bringing more of them in.”

“I probably am.”

“I don’t mean it. I never mean it.”

“It’s all right. I understand. I know this isn’t you talking.”

“You shouldn’t have to understand.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“It’s not.” She pulled back from him. “For God’s sake, Hank. Do you have to be such a weakling?”

TANIA GOES TO THE movies, leaving Yolanda like any coupon-clipping suburban parent, sitting at the kitchen table on Capitol Avenue and searching through Standard & Poor’s Register and the Bee’s financial pages, researching potential terror targets.

“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.