Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Is that Guy Mock, then?”

“Yes.”

“Difficult one to pin down, aren’t you? I’m going round, all thorough like, but it seems you’ve left each of your last-known addresses unattended. I says to meself, he’s a crafty, peripatetic sort, this Mock is. Leaves with a secret face and a quiet mouth. Stops the papers and the mail. The milkman’s wholesome shadow does not darken his doorstep. Long holiday? I think not.”

“Who is this?”

“Me name’s Roy Hume. I represent the National Eye and Ear.”

Guy hears “iron ear,” pictures some nightmare prosthesis.

“It’s a journalistic enterprise of exceedingly poor reputation, it is. I shall save you the bother of asking and, standing in your own inquisitive place, rhetorically put the question of ‘How come?’ In keeping with newspaper tradition I shall now provide me own answer. There are three elegantly simple reasons. Number one is that as a national publication we feel no bleeding obligation to cover the news from a local angle. Sod that. A local angle would bore our readers silly, it would. We’ve discovered via scientific inquiry that our sort of reader doesn’t seem to come from anyplace at all, actually. He simply appears in the foul hollows of the country, equipped with a modicum of literacy and an insatiable gullibility. This journalistic approach is in fact an innovation originating in the mother country, which for the sake of convenience we shall identify as Britain, although morally and ancestrally speaking, I consider meself a Scot. The second reason is that we have the sensibility of a bricoleur, as the poofs like to say. We have a few stock bits we keep round that time and still another scientific inquiry have amply demonstrated are evergreens of reportage, stimulating constant reader interest. Contrary to popular opinion, the average end user of news and information tends to rally round the familiar bits of disaster, plague, and salacious ruin. Contrary to popular opinion, novelty’s not what he’s after. Not a bit of it. He wants the familiar bits. They provide comfort, they do, in all the vague specificity of their permutations. He wants the water levels to rise and submerge Manhattan. He wants mass murders in the remotest points of South America. He wants a joint Soviet-American project to develop an invisibility spray in an aerosol can. He wants the devil to rule the earth from 1975 to 1978. He wants the seat of world government to be switched to caverns under Wichita.”

“So,” says Guy, holding the sponge aloft and examining it, “what can I do for you?”

“Don’t forget there’s a third reason, mate.”

“OK.”

“The third reason is that our undisguised motivation is profit. We actually make money on the bleeding newsstands. No Pulitzers for us. We have the space aliens and we have Satan. For all their glistening Pulitzers, has the bloody New York Times ever had space aliens and Satan? I think not.”

Guy hangs up the phone.

After waiting in a glum chamber filled with books from the prestigious house’s current list and decorated with a bronze wall relief depicting the publisher’s famed Irish setter mascot, Red, Guy is ushered into a meeting at Stumpf requested by Borden Cratty, a managing editor still riding high from his stewardship onto the national bestseller lists of Party Games* (*for adults only) , a book that, according to insider gossip, single-handedly rescued the marshmallow and whipped topping sectors of the processed food market from unprofitability in the third and fourth quarters of 1972. Cratty, an apparent dwarf, wears hand-painted ties and smokes cheroots and grabs Guy’s hand in both of his, drawing him into his office and seating him across from a man he introduces as Standolph “Libby” Tinsby. “Libby” is Stumpf’s “longsuffrin corprate counsel,” and he’s “got a lil ol Q ‘n’ A for yall.” Guy settles into his chair.

“In light of the recent Clifford Irving hoax that turned out so unfortunately for our colleagues at McGraw-Hill, we would like to make absolutely certain that you are indeed in authorized possession of, or, alternatively, soon to be in authorized possession of, a legitimate manuscript written or cowritten in substantial measure by ac— tual representatives of the apparent breakaway state of Symbionia.”

“I actually don’t believe it’s a nationalistic-type sobriquet—”

“Well praps they alld like that.”

“Accordingly, we have taken the liberty of drafting a set of affidavits, a representative sample of which I hold in my right hand, that in pertinent part affirm that each individual signing thereto is a citizen or denizen of Symbionia maintaining an active role in the events described in the proposed Narrative.”

“Aint this just the silliest damn thang but you know we gotta cross the tees and dot th ahs—”

“In addition, there is one supplementary affidavit, to be executed by the individual presently d/b/a Tania, affirming that indeed she is, or at any rate was, Miss Alice Daniels Galton.”

“Yall can understan that. I know it.”

“Incidentally, these affidavits and any other legally binding documents that set forth terms or an understanding of any nature between Stumpf and the Symbionese are understood to be governed by the laws of the United States of America. That is, such documents do not recognize Symbionese authority, such as it is. Ha-ha.”

“Oh, Libby. Haw.”

“Naturally, the signatures that the Symbionese attach to these af — fidavits will need to be witnessed by a notary public certified by the state or commonwealth in which each Symbionese currently maintains his or her principal domicile.”

“Jest a precautionry measure. A mere formaldehyde, as they say befoe any undahtakin.”

“Then and only then can Edgar E. Stumpf & Co., in consultation with its parent company, Gulf & Western, take under consideration the possibility of contracting to put into published form the proposed Narrative authored by Guy Mock, Junior, and the Symbionese.”

Guy simply rises and walks out of this one, bringing Cratty scurrying at his heels.

“Guy! What can I say? They are havin evry one of us fo breakfiss since Irvin fucked it up for evrybody with that fuck-ass Howd Hughes book. Fake it! I don care. You are goin to have a Irish settah rampant across your spine! The spine of your book, that is! I swear it!”

“We seem to be experiencing a bugger of a connectivity problem,” says Hume. “Occurs each and every time I ring you up, it does.”

“Maybe you should talk to the transatlantic operator.”

“Ho!” says Hume, delighted. “I’m in South Florida, I am. Let me relate a thing or two about me life in this earthly paradise. At this very moment I’m watching a bloke wrestling this absolutely smashing marlin onto the dock of the marina whilst seated in a plastic chaise longue. He’s seated, that is. I’m on me feet, riveted, steaming up one of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows here in me bleeding breakfast nook, a glass of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice from concentrate in me hand. The brute must weigh twenty stone. He’s a real brute, he is. Soon I’ll step out onto the deck to rub coconut oil on me pale British flesh, submit it to the blandishments of the tropical sun. This is far in excess of what I dared imagine for meself, for me future, as a small lad growing up in a gloomy scheme, it is. Far, far indeed.”

“Try the operator,” says Guy. He hangs up.

Small & Grey asks for the book. But there is no book. “I have got to have something to give to sales,” says the editorial director, Jane Pancake. “If I don’t have something to give to sales, they’ll laugh me out of their tiny, windowless offices. Loud eruptions of braying laughter accompanied by derogatory comments about the way my legs look in sheer hose, which really is nothing I can control. When I was at Wellesley, we weren’t even allowed to say ‘hose’ except during Punt Hill Week. There’s nothing to be done about these men. So, no, gaga as I may be over the concept, I simply can’t go to the salespeople on this one empty-handed. Though I think it’s got all the makings of a sure winner.”