Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“I’ll go ahead and get in line,” says Myrna. She takes a step forward.

“All right, everybody put your noses to the carpet!”

She turns around, and there are the hunters, and strangely enough they’ve brought their guns into the bank with them. There is a moment, a clear moment devoid of anything for Myrna but innocent curiosity, when she wonders if people really hunt with.45 automatics. She remembers her father’s telling her that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with one of those, and she imagines it must make it tough to shoot game. Then she realizes what’s going on.

“Get down!” says one of the hunters. “Get the fuck down!”

Myrna winces at the language. She does not understand why, she has never seen the sense of using such language to make a point. She is scared now, abruptly. Such language scares her, but mainly it’s the guns, here in this bright light. She has the general impression that people are carefully beginning to kneel all around her.

She turns to put the adding machine on the counter. There is a flash of light, and she is lifted.

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“For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

“Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun … Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Enter the long sleep of the soul, and rest thee, Myrna.

THE RADIO PLAYS ON Capitol Avenue, noise and life, excited voices cast across the territory, calling out the tragic news between Top 40 triumphs. A woman, a mother of four, has been struck down this day. And now, “Philadelphia Freedom.” Where the hits never stop coming.

They sit quietly in the kitchen. They haven’t counted the money, just shoved it in the closet. Doesn’t matter. The news tells them that they got away with fifteen grand. The news also tells them that numerous people took note of Teko’s stolen car’s stolen license plate: 916 LBJ. 916 being the local area code. LBJ being the memorable monogram of the late president. The car was ditched in Fair Oaks, though, so perhaps this is academic.

So what happened? You can always count on a few hairy moments, a few deviations from plan, a few chance encounters. These are normal operational risks. Try to minimize them, but there’s never an occasion you can call textbook. In this case everything went as planned except that Yolanda’s shotgun “just went off,” as anyone might have predicted.

Yolanda is pale and shaking. She appears to have been crying. But she manages to repeat, “She was just a bourgeois pig.”

“Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind.”

Tania smokes and smokes, lighting one from another, smoking right down to the filter. She thinks she feels awful about the woman. Definitely she feels fearful, and not of abstract retribution; for the first time she recognizes her likely punishment will be years in a cell. And for what? This is stage one of abandoning the revolutionary project. Tania is certain of this, at least. Nobody here knows what to think about it yet, but there’s a sack of cash in the hall closet: the primary objective of, the principle underlying, their action, and its useful consequence as well. The other consequence is lying on a slab. A woman is dead. A mother, if you want to privilege her that way, though why bother? What’s the difference? We freed no one today. Fed no one. We damaged no fascist enterprises, stopped nothing, disrupted nothing. What we did, we killed someone for a little chump change and then ran like thieves.

Teko takes a split and blistered shotgun shell hull from his pants pocket and holds it in the palm of his hand.

“The murder round,” he says. Only he seems to be in good spirits.

“Put it away, please,” says Susan.

“I’m going to put it where no one can find it,” he says, putting on his jacket. When no one presses him for details, he adds, “I’m going to bury it beneath a tree in McKinley Park.”

After he leaves, Susan says, “For God’s sake. There’s a Dumpster right out back. Collection day is tomorrow unless I’m sadly mistaken.”

“Maybe he wants to grow a shotgun tree,” says Joan.

Yolanda sobs without warning, with the rasping sound of a chair scraping across the floor.

“Are you OK?”

“She was just a bourgeois pig, a bourgeois pig!”

“Till the whip-poor-will of freedom zapped me right between the eyes.”

A little later Teko returns. “All done,” he announces. He hangs his jacket up, whistling.

Yolanda looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “I want to get out of this town,” she says. “I want to go back to the Bay Area. I’m going to really start the women’s collective down there.”

“Oh ho, not that again.”

“I’m taking my share of the money and moving back down there.”

“What brings this on? Just because you killed some bitch today?”

Yolanda doesn’t answer.

“Well, like let’s put it to a vote,” Teko says. “I think we’ve been doing real well here, considering.”

“You stay,” she says. “I’m getting out of here.” She gets up from where she’s sitting on the floor as if she were going to leave immediately.

“I’m certainly not to blame for what went on today.” Teko jabs himself in the chest with his thumb, lets his arm flop down at his side. He stands awkwardly for a moment. “Where’ll we live?”

“I don’t know where you’re going to live,” says Yolanda. “Look in the paper. That’s what I’m going to do.”

They all wanted to move down there anyway. The whole point is now’s their chance. The whole point is now there’s money available, to leave with. Fifteen grand in that sack in the closet, according to the Action News team. A daring early-morning bank robbery that’s left one woman dead and a grieving family asking why.

INTERLUDE 4

Adventures in Wonderland

TWO DAYS AFTER GUY arrives in New York, he stands at the counter eating strawberries from a lattice basket of green plastic. A sunny morning, the bright time in his kitchen. With a paring knife, he cuts soft spots out of the berries before popping them into his mouth. He grabs a sponge and is about to work a pink spot out of the Formica when the phone rings.