Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Oh,” says Dan.

“And plus it was getting pretty obvious that the FBI and police are going to be gunning for me, what with all the statements flying around the press where they’re just assuming that I haven’t been even really kidnapped , even, like it’s just this ruse , and the pigs are grilling Eric — you know who that is?”

“Your fiancé?”

“ Ex . Who had totally nothing to do with it, which I didn’t either I might add. Anyways, and then my mom accepts her being reappointed by Reagan to the UC Regents, which is this totally bogus inflammatory thing and in such bad faith under the circumstances I just basically thank the reasonableness and patience of the SLA for not killing me right on the spot.”

Dan nods judiciously.

Outside, Teko and Yolanda have walked a little ways, hand in hand, and appear to be talking calmly. Tania sighs. Then she pats the blanket, which asks anyway why are the three of them on the run. And she sighs again and tells about Mel’s, and about how she fired on the store, and about all this driving around, and car switching, and how it was they decided on Dan’s van, and then about Mel’s again: the shots, the gun jumping away, how it was the first time she’d fired using live ammunition, and Dan asks her how it felt.

“It was a good feeling,” says Tania emphatically. “It was a good feeling to see my comrades come running across the street.”

He just meant the actual what do you call physical act of the shooting. How did it feel to shoot the gun?

The doors open, and Teko and Yolanda get in.

“We’re going to drive by Eighty-fourth,” says Teko. “Everybody stay down back there.”

The house on Eighty-fourth appears, sitting dark as they approach it. Not that there was any electricity to begin with. But the other cars have gone from the driveway and are not parked anywhere on the street, and the heavy surveillance drapes have been removed from the front windows. Teko sits behind the wheel staring rigidly ahead, proceeding at a steady 25 mph, while Yolanda and Tania both study the empty house as openly as they dare when they pass. Teko rounds the next corner with deliberate care, signaling ahead of time and decelerating into the turn. Then he gives the van gas, gradually bringing its speed up, heading for the anonymous arteries.

What could be a more trusted component of American sensory experience than the feel of getting into a car for a long trip, the familiar abbreviation of the body as it settles into its seat? Gabi could have closed her eyes and imagined that she was heading just about anyplace as they set out into the ghetto night of Los Angeles. A little more than a year before she’d driven west from her parents’ in Illinois to reunite and reconcile with Mizmoon, who’d flown to Denver to meet her. Life aboveground was so near at hand. Even today she could feel the familiarity of the enveloping seat during that trip, her car clean from its months inside her parents’ garage, and well tuned, and an air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangling from the rearview — her father’s idea — emitting its overpowering aroma. Taking turns at the wheel, driving back to the Coast, they read aloud to each other from magazines with campy quizzes and grave stories about failed marriages. They stopped, got out, stretched, and walked around. Fill ’er up, ladies? Her plain round face behind its eyeglasses was anonymity itself. Her most political act was the writing of faintly erotic lesbian poems. And Mizmoon, flying into Stapleton, opening little cellophane packages of peanuts and counting out money to buy headphones from a smiling woman in a pillbox hat, she herself must have looked more like a stewardess than a radical.

And now this. She shook her head (Cin’s eyes darting toward the rearview, to glare at her reflection, alert as ever for any sign of insubordination). One day Mizmoon had been talking about composting, the next about armed revolution. Was it that facile a set of alternatives? Had there been no sense of a complete overturning of one’s life, much less of a wholesale exchange of personalities, when she’d taken up arms? And Gabi just felt dumb, reciting for Mizmoon (“Zoya, damn it!”): I will cradle youlln my woman hips/Kiss you/With my woman lips . “Stupid little boudoir poems,” was what Mizmoon called them now. OK. All right. Gabi would follow her in good faith. She accepted that this was the love she just had to follow, wherever it led, even as it forsook her, turned on her, spit on her.

Oh, what was she doing here?

“What you having a conversation with your own self back there about, Comrade Gabi?” Cinque sounded mellow enough. He tilted back a pint bottle of blackberry brandy as he drove, his left hand laid atop the steering wheel.

She responded forthrightly. “I was just thinking it was funny, how we’ve come so far together in such a short time. This is never what I’d have imagined for myself just a year ago, but here we are.”

“Funny?”

Cinque still sounded even-toned, but in Gelina’s quick response Gabi read that she’d provoked him somehow:

“I think she means it like we came together so well that it’s hard to believe it’s only been, what, eight months?”

“Well, that’s not ‘funny.’ That’s a vision. On behalf the People.”

“I don’t mean ha-ha funny—”

“Watch you say, bitch . Enough trouble without you calling the SLA funny. You be the only thing funny here. Not funny we separated from our comrades, who may’ve fallen into enemy hands. Not funny we out in the open right now. Damn.”

“I don’t think she meant it that way, Cin.” But Cinque shook Gelina’s hand off his right arm, raising the pint bottle to his mouth.

“Then she ought to watch she says.”

Gabi sighed; she was done talking. She was very tired anyway. Leaning her head against the cold window, she looked out at the dark houses they passed. Inside each was a blossom of life as complex as a flower, beautiful and strange and triumphant for as long as it continued. Her father had taught her that anyone else’s life was unimaginable, that you needed patience, that it was the utmost arrogance to draw assumptions from the disheveled flesh that encased the spirit. Flowers she had taught herself about, drawing and painting them in compulsive detail from a bee’s-eye view, in order to learn something about beauty’s working parts. She looked at Cin, recalling “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another,” the divine injunction that had brought her family first to Africa, and then to South America. What she’d seen there had roused the gentleness in her. She was the most surprised of anyone to find herself holding a gun in her hands. She imagined herself explaining her life to her father, sitting opposite him before a fireplace, describing how similar her work was to his. They each had mugs full of some hot comfort, and her father nodded, nodded, though his eyes displayed the faltering of his understanding. Gabi slept.

Make memory into a postcard and mail it off and it doesn’t come back to get you.

Postcard one shows a high ranch house in North Haledon, NJ. A picture window to one side of the front door looks out on the house’s twin, opposite. A pair of knotted-together sneakers swings from the power line overhead: the modern-day equivalent of heads on pikes, a form of expression imported from the nightmare crater of Paterson, scant blocks distant. But it loses something in translation. Here it signals boyish exuberance, the Norman Rockwell touch.