Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Well,” he says, undaunted, “as an assistant professor of philosophy [ note BOOK and DIPLOMA] at this institution of higher learning, I hereby authorize you to expand your mind.” He raises and lowers his eyebrows as he withdraws from his shirt pocket and flour — ishes a joint roughly the size of a small cigar.

“Oh all right.” She gives in.

Now there is some crosscutting between the two, hysterical giggling in SSTTEERREEOO RREEWEERRBB [note JOINT, which billows smoke like a room fumigator], meaningless reaction shots.

Here’s an abrupt cut. The couple are suddenly a foot or two closer to each other. The stock is grainier.

“It’s the next day,” says Tania.

“It’s the next movie,” says Joan.

The boom drops into the frame.

“Testing, one two three,” says Susan.

The couple is embracing and muttering sweet endearments at each other. In a burst of wit the man tells the girl to address him as Professor, then abruptly reaches to pull off the girl’s tube top. He has some trouble extricating her from it. There’s another stutter cut. The Professor’s shirt is now unbuttoned partway as the couple continues to clinch. Suddenly, there is the sound off camera of glass breaking.

“Must be another grade grubber,” says Susan.

The Professor tells her to Wait Here, but before he gets very far, he is confronted by two Black Men with Guns, both wearing combat fatigues.

“What is it you want?” whines the effete intellectual.

“Sitchassdown,” says the Black with the Authoritative Baritone, “muhfucka.”

The second Black mugs and speaks with a high-pitched, crazy voice. Soon the obliging Professor provides the two Black Men with a pretext to pistol-whip him, which the Crazy Black accomplishes with a maniacal grin on his face. An uncomfortably edited montage: the girl’s expression of horror, the grinning face of the Crazy Black, the implacable face of the Authoritative Black, the Professor, his eyeglasses slipping from his bloody face, and the book of Eastern Philosophy , lying open and abandoned on the floor.

“Now hep me wit de bitch,” says the Authoritative Black. The Crazy Black puts his Black Hands all over the White Girl’s White Torso as he helps the Authoritative Black restrain her so that she can be carried out the door, whitely Half Naked.

Tania gasps, folds her arms across her chest. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“That. Up there.” She points. “Can’t you see? That’s not what happened!” Tania’s indignant. She’s never before mentioned to anyone the confluence of her peculiar life and the cinema’s honed insight about what might be possible, or timely, or desired, or just, or true. So far the point of juncture has been achieved through synchronicity or — OK — coincidence. But this is so clearly her, up there. “Jesus.”

“What, you’re saying that’s suppose to be you?” Joan looks at her.

“Totally obviously.”

“It’s a movie, honey.”

“Shitty movie,” adds Susan.

“That totally happened to me. That’s exactly what happened.”

“You just said it wasn’t what happened.”

“But that’s not what I meant. I meant, it is what happened, but they got it wrong.”

On the screen the two Black Men toss the girl into the trunk of their car.

“Help me,” she screams. “Help me, somebody, please!”

Down goes the lid.

“That happened,” Tania says.

“Well, where else are you going to put somebody?”

“I’ve done it before,” says Tania. “You don’t have to throw someone in the trunk. It’s really mean.”

“I’m sorry,” says Joan. “I think maybe we’re talking about two different things.”

“I don’t think you’re sorry at all.”

“We’re talking about the movie or what happened to you?”

“They’re stealing my life, is all.”

“No,” says Joan, with infuriating calm, “the people who threw you in the trunk stole your life. Get that right.”

Tania’s face is burning. For a moment she wants to hit Joan. She considers demanding to be taken home. But she watches the screen in deep-breathing silence. Shortly, the movie’s plot sharply diverges from her own; it was just another abduction-by-the-light-of-a-big-white-bra after all. She feels acute embarrassment for having said anything at all — for allowing her comrades, her friends, to see that she associated herself with some shrieking celluloid nitwit, for having allowed Joan the chance to cast doubt on her life, to remind her that they scared the shit out of her, beat her, fucked her, called her names; that she sat blindfolded in a cramped closet for weeks. What had she later called it for Adam K. Trout? “An environment of love,” in which she learned how to live. Fuck that shit.

The atmosphere is uncomfortable inside the car, and Joan suggests leaving after the first feature. On the way home, Susan says, “Maybe they did borrow from it a little.”

“What,” says Tania.

“I mean, it was familiar from the news. The basic facts. Eww, was that supposed to be Eric Stump?”

“They got him right.”

“But not you, is that it?” Joan turns to look at her.

“No, that wasn’t me at all. I was scared.”

“I bet, honey.”

“No but wait. I was ready. Just like you. I was ready to join. I didn’t know it then but I was.”

“If mama won’t come to the mountain,” says Joan.

“Take the mountain to you,” says Susan.

“Take the mountain to me.”

“Hallelujah,” says Joan. “But next time maybe they should ask.”

PACIFIC HEIGHTS. THIS PART of town strikes Guy as being just a lit — tle freaky. Quiet houses, too big, too wealthy, with a sort of haughty though listless grandeur that somehow always reminds Guy of how foreign he still feels in California, even after all these years. These houses spot strangeness in the cut of a jacket, the lay of a haircut, the burnish of a shoeshine. Uneasy fools like him wander in and immediately start seeking an exit as they might from the scariest slum.

Five blocks and he’s encountered exactly one other human pedestrian, a stocky man in livery with a face, as his mother might say, stamped with the map of Ireland. The man paused on the steps of a large Queen Anne house and brazenly followed Guy with his eyes until he was certain Guy was continuing on his way. Ex-cop? Who knows. Much of the capital flowing through the state bottlenecks here in these icily pleasant streets with nary a sign of the gated doorways and barred windows just down the hill in the Fillmore. It isn’t class intimidation that keeps all these rich folks safe at home in their beds.

Then again, how safe are they? He’s heading to his lawyer’s house to meet with the father of a girl who’d relied one day too many on the assumptions of a privileged life. If she’d simply said, “Who is it?” when destiny had banged on her door that evening, who could say that she wouldn’t have gone to bed and awoken the next morning with nothing more to concern her than the dirty dishes she’d left soaking in the sink the night before? He’s always wanted to ask her just why she’d opened up her house to her abductors. Had she thought she was charmed? Though Stump of course had done the actual opening. But same difference. The press acts as if Stump had blown into the Galtons’ orbit like a stink from the other side of the tracks, but come on: Palo Alto upbringing, Princeton man. He was a variation on a theme. So was Willie Wolfe, a doctor’s son, the nth-generation Eli. The Galtons didn’t really know from the wrong side of the tracks until they heard catty rumors that their daughter had been knocked up by Cinque.