Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

They were whispering in the din of the complaining engines.

“What’s your point? My team’s leaving.”

“Team. You know what this is turning into?”

“What is this turning into?”

“This is turning into like one of those whatchamacallits I read about in Time last year. Cults.”

“Like people in hoods and altars? Drinking blood? You insult me. You insult our hard work, our comrades.” Then, bitterly: “ Time .”

“No,” said Gabi, falteringly. “Like the Hare Krishnas. The Moonies.”

Utopian hucksters, dealing in a new variant on the familiar people’s opiate, with daily sales quotas. Their kind would be put against the wall. A look of disgust crossed Zoya’s face: a slight curl of the lip, the subtlest suggestion of a rolled eyeball. She sensed the presence of the expression and exaggerated it in case Gabi had missed it.

“‘Any comrade may leave the guerrilla forces if she or he feels that they no longer feel the courage or faith in the People and the struggle that we wage.’” Zoya quoted from memory.

Gabi walked off.

It was snug in the little apartment on Parker Street where Zoya wrote the Codes of War with Cinque the previous March. It was a rainy spring, and they worked in the kitchen, with the oven door open to warm the room. In the persistent damp, paperback book covers curled back upon themselves and photographs she’d pinned to the walls rolled up tight as scrolls. They had a series of running jokes about the oven, the oven door. Very funny at the time. Delirious. Everything had a heightened sense of meaning in that brief interlude of revolutionary domesticity. Cin was handy. The circular fluorescent buzzed annoyingly; he went to the hardware store and brought back mysteriously useful items in a brown paper bag, replaced the fixture with an incandescent. Soon they sat in the white silence of a GE Soft White bulb, hunting and pecking, holding the world at arm’s length while it waited for their embrace.

TANIA CAN’T STAND BEING with these people, she realizes. While Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they ought to leave now or remain through the second feature just in case, she stretches out in the back next to the blanket. The van smells like warm ketchup. The blanket seems to shiver or tremble from time to time. She pats the blanket on the head. “It’s OK,” she says. “You’ll be OK.”

Despite the engaging subject matter of the film, Teko is in favor of leaving. Yolanda is opposed. The details of the argument are sheer static, a kind of buzzing in the front, and Tania ignores them, patting the blanket with Dan Russell under it at regular intervals, as if she were stirring a pot. At one o’clock the movie ends, and dozens of cars start up and switch on their headlights. Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they should leave right away or wait until the numbers of cars jockeying to join the long line have thinned. Teko wants to get started right away; Yolanda wants to wait awhile. The van sits motionless as they gesticulate and whisper fiercely in the front, occasionally bathed in the headlights of the cars outside that slowly turn, gravel crunching beneath their tires. Moths spin in the dusty shafts of moving light.

At last they join the queue and after a while merge with the traffic on the road.

“We need to get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow,” says Teko.

“Can we just kind of scoot by the house? I mean, just to see.”

“See what? They’ve gone. Gotta be.”

“Well they didn’t — when they never showed up at the drive-in I was thinking maybe somehow they haven’t heard about the whole thing, our problem today.”

(Another fight brewing, Tania thinks.)

“That’s absurd. And you have any idea what the risk is?”

“This is the guy who fires off three rounds in a shopping mall talking to me about risk.”

“It’s against all the rules of urban guerrilla warfare.”

“This is the guy who shoplifts a pair of socks talking to me about rules.”

“ GOD damn it, it was NOT a pair of socks it was a FUCKING bandolier, do you have it FUCKING straight?” The heel of his hand smacking the dashboard on each emphasized word. Yolanda, who has been driving very slowly in the right lane, pulls over to the side of the road and begins to cry, enormous choking sobs.

“Well can you just get a grip. I mean, until we’re somewhere else? Ow, I hurt my hand.”

“Where else? Where ? Bandolier, socks — who cares? You did it, you stupid bastard. You had to go and take it, and now we’re here, going in stupid circles nowhere. I feel lost, I feel totally lost and alone and stupid, stupid, stupid ! for listening to anything you ever say.”

“Let me tell you something.”

“Don’t tell me anything.”

“Let me just tell you this, OK?”

“Don’t! Don’t tell me anything!” Yolanda opens her door and is out of the van.

“Oh shit. This isn’t good. OK. We’ll be back. Sit tight.” And Teko leaves.

Tania and Dan Russell are alone in the van. Outside, the scanty traffic speeds down the road, each car making its own clean, distinct noise as it passes, the sound of things going smoothly for someone else.

“You OK?” Tania asks the blanket.

“I’m OK,” says the voice of Dan Russell.

“Don’t be scared,” suggests Tania. “You’ll be OK.”

“I’m not scared,” answers Dan.

“I was scared,” says Tania. “I was really fucking freaked out. Man. They came through the door and they knocked me down and tied my arms and carried me out kicking and screaming. They hit me in the face and threw me into the trunk of a car. I thought I was gonna die.”

“Well. You’ve all been pretty nice to me.”

“We don’t want. See, look: they had to scare me. I mean, my head was so screwed up before you wouldn’t believe it. Plus, you know, they were planning for me to be with them, to learn with them, for a while. While with you we just need to have you with us for a little bit because of the van and all.”

“Would you be being mean to me if I were going to be staying for a while?”

Tania smiles through the dark at the blanket. “No,” she says.

They are quiet for maybe thirty seconds, and Tania watches Teko and Yolanda standing outside on the shoulder of the road. They’re not arguing now; they’re talking, working it out, and she suddenly feels both tremendous loneliness without the others, without Cujo particularly, and unexpected warmth for the two of them.

Dan Russell asks, “When did you decide to go with, join their army deal? Was there a plan with a deadline or something, or did it just like happen?”

Tania shrugs. “I just started listening and learning from like the day I was taken away, and I started changing my views about things. It was a real process , the way I see it, though I guess it seems like a real sudden change. But first it seemed like my dad wasn’t trying real hard to get me back, so I start wondering why isn’t he interested in complying with the spirit of the ransom demands, blah blah blah. I mean, he’s cheaping out in this kind of totally obvious way when, you know, my family’s got more money than God: let’s face it. So they helped me, my comrades, they helped me see that these are all signs of like a hidden agenda, that there’s serious pressure coming from somewhere to keep me from coming home because they don’t want to be seen as giving in to the SLA demands.”

“They who?”

“The pigs,” answers Tania.

“Oh,” says Dan.

“Because they’re really, you know, the People’ s demands. And so they gave me all sorts of shit to read and talk about. We do a lot of studying you know. This was like George Jackson and Malcolm and Soul on Ice . Blew me away.”