Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Hands behind your head,” says Nietfeldt, reaching for his own cuffs.

In the lumpy purse there’s a loaded Colt Python. A Detective Special is in a pocketbook hanging from the back of a chair. The women lead them to more guns concealed throughout the apartment. When Nietfeldt and Fleischer begin to escort the two women down the stairs, she turns around and looks him in the eye.

“Could I please change my clothes, please?” she asks. “I wet in my pants when you guys came in.”

THE SEDAN ARRIVES AT the Federal Building, slowing to a crawl as it proceeds into the delirium of light and noise that awaits it, then stopping. The expectant crowd turns at its appearance, and the sky is lit a thousand times, the sedan and its occupants baked flat in the cold light, the contours of things at the margins leaping in shadow; everything beyond the ardent focus of the uproar languishing in the negated colors of natural light and everyday darkness. At first Tania is frightened by the photographers, and Joan reaches for her with her manacled hands, soothing. The crowd engulfs the sedan, reporters hammering on its roof and fenders, hollering through the windows, and the photographers press up close, capturing the brilliant shadowless figures in the backseat, making fast those dazed faces that will exhibit the confirmation of any sin or virtue the picture editor chooses to assign to them, vivid and so beautifully there, aloof no longer.

It’s all for her. The revelation comes gradually; she knows that she’s become famous, but this? The car begins slowly to move forward, gently prodding the coruscating figures who gradually open up a narrow lane leading to the mouth of a dark tunnel that will take her to the future, and the parking garage. All for her — her own monumental meaning, whatever it is, shining brighter than the moon and stars. And so she smiles, receiving her public, instinctively fulfilling them, and as the famous face widens, opening to their scrutiny, there is hungry stirring outside, as though the true extent of the yearning for this particular smile, these particular teeth, had only now become clear, and when she raises her shackled hands, her right formed unmistakably into a fist, she is bathed in light again, waves of it that rise and fall, drenching the sedan and causing it to halt once more, polishing her bright with her own blank renown.

Distilled to their essence, revolutions are acts of supreme creativity.

—“THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

AND CONFLICT SHORT OF WAR,”

BY STEVEN METZ AND JAMES KIEVIT

SARA JA+NE MOORE HOLDS the telephone receiver absently, cocked over her right shoulder, as if she were about to throw it. So Thomas Polhaus won’t take her phone calls any longer. Mr. Big Shot.

She can tell when she is beginning to be considered a burden. This is the hard-won intuition of five deceased marriages. Here you are, trying your best, and sooner or later someone gets around to telling you that you won’t do. Then all you can do is point an angry finger. At his full to bursting refrigerator that contained exactly one stick of margarine, a pound of spoiled bacon, and half a bottle of apple juice the first time you opened it. At the shiny floor and glistening toilet. At the savings passbook with its regular deposits earning 5 percent. Each a noticeable improvement but looks like someone got bored.

He doesn’t take her calls and the Gal Friday type who answers is the kind who puts you on hold without asking. So you wait fruitlessly on the other end of a rude gesture. What it all adds up to is a bad taste in her mouth.

Some people change when they get their names in the paper.

Meanwhile over on Telegraph Avenue the other day she receives the total deep freeze from any acquaintance she happens to encounter. This is an exceptional first-time thing. She made it plain to Thomas Polhaus that their conversations, which as an informant she is perfectly entitled to, are confidential between the two of them alone. And Thomas Polhaus seems to agree; he nods or gestures in the commonly accepted affirmative manner, because what good is she to them if her credibility is damaged? No good at all. Naturally this comes before she is cut loose by the FBI. What they did was pump her, then cut her loose, then set her up. Sara Jane realizes that it serves their purposes to have her killed or silenced.

Wherever she goes they can find her. They set it up way back, collecting the information. Telephone number. Social Security number. Mother’s maiden name. She sees at the bank the other day, that adorable little Filipina teller goes, “Now you can have your personal driver’s license number printed directly on your checks.” She laughed all the way out onto the street.

Good thing she has a gun.

Speaking of guns, she is flipping through some magazines today and there on the cover of Newsweek is a story about Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a devotee of Charles Manson’s, who in Sacramento had wandered into the crowd engulfing President Ford with a high-caliber handgun and murderous intent and advised onlookers that “the country is in a mess. This man is not your president,” before taking aim at the chief executive. The attempt was thwarted by a Secret Service man who astutely inserted the webbing between his thumb and forefinger in front of the hammer of the pistol as it fell, preventing the gun from firing. That must have smarted. Fromme later explained that she had “wanted to get some attention for Charlie and the girls.”

Besides, here is an ad, for this package of frozen waffles, across which a banner runs, pledging “Improved Waffle Taste!” This is the sort of embedded, subliminal stupidity that colors everyone’s book of days. You don’t need to go any further if you’re looking for a reason to overthrow the established order. Here it is. Waffles with improved waffle taste. Do they even hear what they’re saying.

The Newsweek article is written by someone named Dan Russell. This is a name that rings a bell from the case of the Famous Fugitive. How could it, how can it be? She checks the date on the magazine: September 15. This is a clear message, planted in the magazine three days before the capture. It is for her, tentacular, linking the two cases, directing her.

What tends to happen when you no longer see people you’ve gotten used to seeing is you miss them. This is a fact of physical and cultural anthropology both.

She’s talked to exactly one agent exactly one time since she’s been trying to get ahold of Thomas Polhaus. An impatient type named Von Isenbarger. She has it written in a notebook. Whether this is a first and last name both, or just some lengthy last name, she isn’t sure.

Funny she should have picked this particular magazine up today. The president is swinging through San Francisco tomorrow. She believes presidential assassination is a federal crime and the FBI would have jurisdiction.

She will see Thomas.

She will restore her reputation amid her friends and comrades.

She will draw a line, unmistakable, connecting the case, demarcating the old from the new. Fromme being the former and herself being the latter.

She will kill that bastard Ford.

Or maybe it’s the Secret Service whose jurisdiction it is?

Sara Jane writes a poem to celebrate the event before it even happens. It just comes out of her, this must be what they mean by inspiration. Besides, somehow she doesn’t think she’ll have much time afterward.

Hold-Hold, still my hand.

Steady my eye, chill my heart, And let my gun sing for the people.

Scream their anger, cleanse with their hate, And kill this monster.