Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Amy Ralston is the name.

Joan writes long letters. She writes of the “fucked-up interpersonal dynamics” within the cadre. She writes, “We, those of us who decided to go our own way, discussed the matter and it became obvious to us what the problems were. On the surface it seems as though we all agree and believe in the same thing, but after working with them, we’ve come to the realization that we do in fact disagree politically very drastically.” She writes, “And to add to this is the personal aspect of these people. They are two individuals with weak egos lacking very much in sense of themselves.” She writes, “They are doctrinaire Marighelaists. These people are totally unable to check out the objective situation and deal with it. They simply do not know how to take a theory and apply it to the reality that exists.”

Tania thinks, Is this the sort of letter an imprisoned man awaits in his lonely cell? But she reads on, though the coffee goes right through her and she has to pee. She stands. Too bad. She never gets to read Joan’s penultimate paragraph:

I wish that I could talk to you and tell you in every detail about everything. Some day I will. I tell you this is an experience I’ll never forget! It was horrendous but at the same time I’ve learned a hell of a lot. Now I understand more clearly my political views and, oh, the sense of myself I’ve gotten out of this ordeal — I wouldn’t exchange it for anything! I think most of us came out of this ahead. I hope you’ll have the chance to meet A.G. She is incredible! She amazes me! I swear only the toughest could have come out of it as she did. What an ordeal she went through!! What an ordeal all of us went through!! I can write a book about it.

No, there’s a man in the apartment with a gun and he says FBI and this is it. All along, the one indelible gift the SLA had imparted to her was a belief that the authorities were coming to kill her. This, the cornerstone of the mysterious “conversion” that perplexed the world, seemed unshakable. Everything Cinque said had come true: When they couldn’t rescue her, they relabeled her. Made her a common criminal. Such was the phrase used by the attorney general of the USA. Simple as switching a tag. Named her a criminal and then came gunning for her, burned her lover and her friends. All it took was the potency of a new classification.

Isn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes or something?

Amy Ralston.

The guns are in the bedroom and she takes mincing backward steps, heading for her trusty carbine.

“Freeze or I’ll blow her head off,” says the man. Joan is pressed up against the kitchen counter, and she swivels her head, reflexively avoiding the gun, her eyes finding Tania’s, and it seems that Joan’s face suddenly bears the weight of every single day of her thirty-odd years, as if all the petty retributions the world demanded of her throughout her effortful life had suddenly come due all at once.

Now here’s another man. Another man, another gun. That appears to be the scheme of things. He calls out her name and involuntarily she moves forward. So much for Amy Ralston.

The second man spins her around and handcuffs her. Asks her where the guns are. Already she feels the lure of another master viewpoint, the influence of another eager and unrelenting authority, the inauguration of another phase during which she will have to earn and defend everything she has, everything she does, everything she says. The closet, again. Can all of life, at its essence, finally be reduced to the span of the chain that joins the cuffs? One freedom left. She was going to pee, and so she does, right in her pants; it keeps coming and coming, fear, doubt, nervous blood, coffee, whatever, all exit. It’s a decision she makes, no more and no less. God knows when she’ll see a toilet bowl.

WHEN IT BECAME OBVIOUS that Herself was not hiding among the knickknacks, papers, and sawed-off shotguns at Precita, Polhaus took steps to secure the apartment and preserve the scene. Neighbors milled about. SFPD started arriving. The local parochial school would let out soon. If a fire truck turned onto the street, he wouldn’t have been surprised. It was like the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera.

Polhaus had a few addresses left to check. Nietfeldt could split hairs on whether he should have had them covered to begin with, but now wasn’t the time. The adrenaline was still coursing through him; his body still thrummed and tingled as if with fever; his arms felt the phantom weight of the fearsome shotgun he’d aimed at that angry, crazed woman. Months of mocking her, and he had to admit that coming face-to-face with her scared the hell out of him. Polhaus told him and Langmo to check the Morse Street address, and Nietfeldt was eager to head down there. It was the next best thing to a stiff drink.

On their way to the sedan he spotted two San Francisco cops, Fleischer and Sparks, who’d worked the Hibernia Bank case. Want to come along? They led the way, taking obscure byways that steered clear of both traffic and well-paved roads.

A man works in the garage beneath the parlor floor apartment at 625, spray painting kitchen cabinets that sit on sheets of newspaper. He’s inspecting the job, absently shaking the spray can he holds in his hand, when he notices the four men standing in the open doorway of the garage. He reaches for a rag, to wipe his hands with.

Now Nietfeldt creeps up the back stairs, followed by Fleischer. Man in the garage saw nothing, knew nothing, recognized no one, but he did say that “the two girls” were in the upstairs apartment now. Then asked them not to mess the place up.

Nietfeldt feels improbably serene, given his agitation earlier. His heart thuds in his chest at its normal rate. He holds his.38 in steady hands. The sound of his feet on the steps, the feel of the wood’s slight give beneath them, reminds him faintly of summer, the beach, of steps climbing toward a boardwalk. At the landing between floors he pauses to look and listen. There’s the sound of water running through pipes. He continues upward. As he approaches the back door of the apartment, it occurs to him, gazing at it from the extremely foreshortened perspective his position affords him, that there is something peculiar about the way the window in the door emits light. That is, it seems as if the door actually were made of light. These thoughts do not occur to him in words, and by the time he is ready to articulate them to himself, before he has a chance to dismiss them as mild hallucinations arising from lack of sleep, he has reached the upstairs landing and rapidly is assimilating the fact that the door is made of light. That is, the door is open. That is, he is staring directly into the eyes of a pretty Oriental woman who stands before a kitchen table. There’s a writing tablet and a teacup on the table, and there’s a lumpy purse there too. Who knows what could be in that. Nietfeldt brings the gun up. “Freeze!” he says. “FBI!” He moves into the apartment — and there she is, rising from the table, falling away, falling into the dark hallway, leaving him behind, leaving all of them behind again, and Nietfeldt feels a destitution, watching her disappear, like that of the world’s most bereft lover. Suddenly he’s filled with sadness, and a tremendous fatigue. His arms, holding out the pistol before him, feel as if they weighed a hundred pounds apiece.

“Freeze,” he says. The word comes out like a dreamword. Icicles have formed on the letters of the word freeze.

Can he really be falling into the abyss of sleep, standing right here?

“Freeze,” he says again, finding himself, “or I’ll blow her fucking head off.” He sights on the Oriental girl, who flinches, turning her eyes from him. Never shot anybody. Never liked guns. But the threat brings her back into view. Now Nietfeldt feels Fleischer moving behind him, past him, shouldering his way into the hall where she is. Does he hear her giggle? Then he hears the cuffs. The Oriental girl is still as a statue.