Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Stay in position, one.

Ten-four

Two here. Subjects together.

He caught up.

Subjects turning north onto Folsom. You copy?

Ten-four, two.

One here. Visual contact.

Base here. Move in, three. Take up position at Two Eight Eight.

Approaching 288, the couple, sheened with perspiration, slows to a walk. McQuirter, Stepnowski, and Holderness emerge from their sedan to surround them.

“FBI,” says McQuirter.

Mystery Man looks blankly at the three agents, but his companion screams: “You sons of bitches!” Then she turns to run. And there’s Nietfeldt, hustling up from the corner, covering her with a shotgun. Covering all five of them, actually, at this distance — but who has time to consider the petty details? She freezes, and Holderness grabs her, and then Langmo is rushing past Nietfeldt to assist Holderness, and Nietfeldt can put up the gun.

“Get the fuck off me, you motherfuckers! Let me go!” She thrashes, kicks, and spits.

“Get her in the fucking car and get her out of here,” says Nietfeldt. “We don’t want Herself hearing the ruckus.”

“Where’s that kit?” says McQuirter. Mystery Man is still standing quietly beside him, Stepnowski’s.38 aimed at his head, holding his uncuffed hands away from his body slightly, fingers spread, as if he were air-drying freshly painted nails.

“Like we need it,” says Nietfeldt. But he takes a stamp pad and a five-by-eight out of his jacket pocket. He’ll feel a lot better when all the guns are put away.

Polhaus walks through the apartment: cluttered, but not quite like the packrat middens they’d discovered in Clayton and Daly City and on Golden Gate. The usual guns and bombs (including, Polhaus notices, a Red Ryder BB gun), dozens of linear feet of papers, but all neatly stored in one of the two bedrooms. The rest of the place looks as ordinary as can be.

Polhaus contemplates the middle-class comforts the apartment encloses and perceives the terminus of the adventure. The apartment foretells this afternoon, his own presence here, more acutely than anything else could. Running exhausts people. Hiding bores them silly The last fantasy of the SLA, even more implausible than that of leading a revolution, was that they could revert to this. Neighbors say that they were a nice couple. Even had a few of them up for tea. Coffee and cake. Plants on the windowsills. Scented candles in the bath. Even upon them, Polhaus thinks, the normal exerted its pull. At the furthest point of their renegade orbit it may have looked as if they’d broken free, soared, but to the end they remained natural satellites of the culture; it hauled them back every time; and whenever it did, they were complicit.

Their final alias was Carswell, Christopher and Nanette. It’s there on the mailing label for the TV Guide.

THEY GET UP LATE on Morse. The fugitive’s privilege. No work, no worries, and Teko and Yolanda all the way up in Bernal Heights. They have a routine of making coffee and then sitting around drinking it and talking and smoking until it’s time to make tea. Ridiculous. Drifts of dirty laundry covering the floor, dirty dishes hidden under the beds. Roger does most of the cleaning up.

Another lazy day. They move around one another in the kitchen, each familiar with the other’s way of doing things, her sense of space. Joan pours hot water into the mugs to allow them to warm before she serves the coffee. This is an elegant and fine-featured act, a small marvel each morning. Never would have occurred to Tania. Once again Tania is stumped to characterize it without recourse to the Exotic East.

One waits to occupy the other’s space. Tania pauses, holding a container of orange juice, waiting for Joan to vacate the patch of countertop next to the refrigerator, where she pokes a fork into the side of her English muffin, separating the two halves. Crumbs and smears of jam on the tile surface of the counter. They step around each other, pause and wait their turn, like the oldest of old couples. The hot water is emptied from the warmed cups and the coffee is poured at last.

This is almost what Tania wants. Endless days, without ever exhausting the subject, whatever it happens to be. It’s all ahead of them. They’re all set to go to Boston.

She has a new name all picked out. Amy Ralston. She’ll never have to deal with a dumb nickname. Goes with the tony accent Teko was never able to get her to shake. She has the birth certificate: died in infancy.

She hears a lot of good things about Boston.

Today Joan has a letter to share, and Tania sits with one leg tucked under the other, waiting patiently while Joan introduces the letter: She sat up last night and wrote to her Willie, a long postmortem on the dissolution of the Symbionese army, nation, and people.

“I had to get this off my chest,” says Joan, shaking the pages before she hands them over. Soon she’ll entrust the letter to the system of retranscription and coded paraphrase that has allowed her to correspond with her lover for three years. Joan is silent about the mechanism of this system. Always that reticence to her, a holding back, the promise of a subjacent stage richer than one might imagine. The mysterious Orient.

“The group,” Tania reads, “has ceased to be a group.”

A week ago Roger met Teko at a Mission bar to kiss off the SLA for good. Only two other men drank in the afternoon quiet, letter carriers from the post office around the corner, their satchel carts brazenly parked outside. Teko had been expecting Tania and was disappointed when Roger walked in alone. He wanted the opportunity to say goodbye to his protégée. They’d been through so much struggling together. So Roger had quoted him. Bullshit. The final argument, a few days prior, had been a deafening marathon. She and Joan had toted over to Precita a lengthy letter they’d written criticizing SLA leadership past and present, grounding the appraisal in the feminist arguments that had been useful enough to boost them out of backwater Sacramento. Dug out the opus, “Women in the Vanguard: Toward a Revolutionary Theory,” and worked those old changes one more time.

They handed him the “divorce letter,” so called, and he stood in the parlor at Precita, reading, tossing the pages on the floor as he was done with them. Yolanda bent to pick up the discarded sheets as they fell, and they stood beside each other, heads bent, reading the familiarly phrased counterclaims.

“This isn’t political criticism,” said Yolanda. “This is a personal attack.” Well, whatever she was, she wasn’t dumb. Nor was she, of all people, blind to the private uses to which “politics” could be put. Compared with what it already had been used to justify, this was nothing. To liberate yourself from Petaluma or Goleta, assassinate a school official. To shake off the fetters of dusty afternoons in Clarendon Hills, kidnap an heiress. To turn your back on the stifling hush of Hillsborough, tape a harangue, type up a screed, author “Articles of War,” swear out a death warrant against your favorite corporate criminal, blow up a power station. Cut down a churchgoing homemaker in pursuit of cold cash.

They argued until two in the morning, until all four of them noticed that the rhythmic pounding they’d felt was actually the neighbor, hammering on the wall. Some people have to get up for work in the morning. She and Joan caught a bus on Mission, and that was the last she saw of her field marshal.

They’ll go to Boston, work as community activists. She’ll garden in a backyard plot, assemble a collection of recipes on three-by-five cards, walk the dog, eventually have a child. All the old imaginings cohere around the new authenticity she’s made.