Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“What does he want to do then?”

“I sometimes think the only thing he really believes in is the revolution.”

Oh, Jesus, please. Teko? Revolution? Come on. Had he sent Guy to Havana? Hanoi? The jungles of Central America? Is that where he’d wanted to make contact, establish relations? No, Guy had been dispatched to Rockefeller Center. Teko wanted what every kid snug under the blankets with his secret wishes wanted, the cover of Rolling Stone. If Guy lifted up that serving wench skirt, would he find Susan’s head stuck up her ass? He actually reached for it, grabbed the material between thumb and forefinger. She snatched it away angrily.

He underhanded the hollow crust of bread down the embankment. It bounced and rolled. For whatever reason, he’d gotten hooked on the SLA: couldn’t stop helping them, flaunting them, bragging about them, denying them, scolding them; trying to manipulate them, reform them, fold them into his peculiar reality. They’d seen it; they’d conned him, gotten more and more and just a little bit more out of him.

Susan kept the meeting short and sweet, wouldn’t explain a thing. She said goodbye on the Marina Green, surrounded by people with Frisbees, dogs, and wicker picnic baskets. Overhead, a seaplane climbed, ungainly on its fat pontoons, astonishing as always.

Drove them himself. Laid out all that dough. Smashed up his own car with a sledgehammer to get Allstate to pay for their trip home. Now they were jerking the last post out. He felt the vertigo of his sudden plunge.

Now he waits. While he does, he drinks two frozen margaritas. Actually, what he orders each time is a margarita and a shot of Cuervo, taking a head-throbbing slug from the frozen drink and then dumping the shot in to strengthen it. Well, so, this is how he’s been feeling lately. A person is entitled. He has a drumming headache, he’s extremely photosensitive these days, one of his kidneys is making him feel as if someone’s hit him in the side with a baseball bat, his anterior cruciate ligament is on the cusp of saying “¡adios!” and his nose seems to be rotting from the inside out. In addition to which he’s noticed that the angle at which his erection hangs from his naked body has increased markedly, from a taut twenty-five degrees to a droopy forty-five degrees.

In other words, Guy is exhausted. Again. Knowing what he knew, no sensible person would have touched the SLA again with a ten-foot pole, but Guy just couldn’t lay off. Saw himself signing his name to a contract, saw fame, saw respect, saw another popeyed portrait leering out from the dust jacket of a book. Saw commercial potential harmoniously wedded to radical credibility. Saw six (!) figures ( !! ) — winged, already aloft, and heading out the window in the manner familiar to all readers of the funnies, though how the hell could he have known that? He himself flew hither, he flew yon, and when all was said and done, the undertaking was worthwhile even if it had come to naught. Because what is life if not an adventure? What is achieved if nothing is risked? Huh? Now all he has to do is convince himself of that, but first and foremost he is exhausted.

He sees them moving toward him through the dark and he rises, slightly unsteady on his feet. All he’s had to eat are a couple of bowls of tortilla chips. Not a problem. The menu at Senor Pico’s is so heavy with cheese, beans, and ground beef he’ll have sopped up all the booze by the time they take the troughs away. This is his first eyeful of Lydia, and he sizes her up as she walks over. Sees the mom who’d give you a pretzel stick and a glass of tap water when you came over after school. The lady who knows the levels of all the bottles in the liquor cabinet, who knows offhand exactly how many crescent rolls are in the bread basket, who’s been keeping an eye on things no less vigilantly than any old Amsterdam Avenue housewife leaning on a dirty pillow set up on a front room windowsill.

“Hello!” He waves.

Hank comes across as the same old hail-fellow-well-met type, but Lydia fixes Guy with her eyes and extends a hand in his direction as if there were a loaded.45 in it. So naturally he grabs it and gives it an eager yank like the slick little bastard she already thinks he is. (Of course, he and Tania had some pretty good chats about old Mom. Tania had used adjectives like suspicious, bigoted, selfish, rude, intolerant, self-righteous, narrow-minded, rigid, hidebound, authoritarian, punitive, and unforgiving. Sounded to Guy like a malignant version of the Scout Law.)

“Well, I have some good news,” Guy begins. What’s the good news? The usual hearsay, secondhand rumors, and idle gossip, combined with raw conjecture on his part. From what he has managed to learn, he infers that their daughter is feeling homesick and nostalgic. That the group is fragmenting. That its personal conflicts have started to become overwhelming. That ideologically the group makes less sense than ever. That a philosophical split has devolved into a dualism as simple as NO GURLS ALLOWED / BOYS KEEP OUT, so he’s pretty certain that he’ll be able to restore to the Galtons a young lady who is a feminist but not a Maoist.

Even to someone like Lydia, this has got to be a big distinction. Take your choice: You want a daughter who sticks a gun in a utility executive’s face, or her pussy? “Eat me now, bourgeois man-pig!” It has a nice ring to it, no? Better than “Death to the Fascist Insect.” You recuperate from cunnilingus. You definitely pull through. Though Guy has a feeling Lydia may disagree with him on this. But this is really all good news. She wants to see them. She misses them. OK, she hates everything they stand for, but as sentiments go, this is pretty standard issue nowadays. They can probably work around it.

But Guy doesn’t articulate a word of this. His sense is that were he to utter a word such as pussy within the hearing of Lydia Galton, he would instantly transform into a wizened piece of rock, some pre-Cambrian formation, ancient and eternally silent. Plus, in the instant that he takes to gather his thoughts before plunging into his spiel, Lydia leans forward and addresses him.

“I want you to know that my husband places a great deal of faith in you. He is a very gullible man. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that his faith is justified other than your assurances that you’re in touch with our daughter and that she’s all right. That would be the sum of it.”

“I haven’t got any reason to lie, Mrs. Galton.”

“Oh, yes, you have. That’s why I’ve come along to this event. Hank never will out and ask what it is that you want. But I won’t hesitate. I’ve had a bellyful of you people over the last year and a half. You’ve each wanted something. You lecture us about how corrupt we are, and then you hold out your palm for our money. Now we haven’t heard from you in three months, and suddenly you’re in touch. Clearly you have something in mind.”

“I just. More information has come to light.”

“And what would you like in exchange for this information?”

“Lydia. Guy freely offered information to us last time.”

“Isn’t that how pushers work? The first time’s always free?”

“Apparently you know more about that than I.”

Guy gazes wistfully at the icy dregs in the bottom of his glass.

Lydia says, “Oh, don’t pretend to be embarrassed. You don’t have to put on a phony display of discomfiture.”

“If he’s embarrassed, it’s because you’ve done your best to embarrass him.”

“I think he’s shameless.”

“You’ve made that very clear. Why have you come?”

“Because you have always been the type to pick up strays, Hank. It’s not enough that you give them a job or money, whatever it is they want. You have to offer them a share of our lives. That girl. Alice’s friend from Crystal Springs.”