Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“OK. But this is not what I asked.”

“Because that is the absolute worst. You know? The absolute worst. Here is a beautiful strong young brother doing the dirty work of the Man.”

“Mm-hm. But, so tell me.”

“This brother from a heritage of chains, three hundred mother-fucking years of the Man dangling chains off him, and he tries to chain me up like a — like a—” He raises and shakes his wrist, the cuffs there dancing.

“Like a three-speed, Drew.”

There is a silence. Without looking, she knows Yolanda sits with her arms folded.

After a moment Teko says, “Where the fuck am I going anyway?”

“Well, you sure got me there. Let me have a little look.”

“Well you sure don’t sound, geez! What. You on the rag? Or what?”

“Ruthellen.” Yolanda twists her neck to read a street sign as they pass. “No, I’m not on the rag, Drew. The hell happened back there?”

“Ruth … Ellen.” He pronounces the name as if he could do something with this.

“What happened?”

“You know, what we need is we need to get rid of this fucking van.”

Then Teko brakes abruptly as he encounters a line of waiting traffic at the top of a rise.

“Shit,” and he’s turned around to see about backing up.

“Well, you want to get rid of this van how about this red car parking right here?”

“Right now?”

“When’s better?”

But Teko’s shifted into reverse and has begun moving when he notices a car approaching from the bottom of the hill.

“There’s that little fucking junior pig again!”

“You’re kidding me. Well, maybe you had better waste him.” Yolanda looks at him out of the corner of her eye. There is more than a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

“Ah, as leader of this fire team I personally oversee expropriation and commandeering of goods and matériel.” Teko wags a finger at the red car, a Pontiac LeMans.

“Uh-huh,” says Yolanda.

Ignoring Yolanda, Teko addresses her for the first time since the ride began. He says, “Take the carbine,” and points to the other car, the one that climbs toward them.

There’s a High Noon aspect to this that doesn’t escape her. She’s holding the rifle before her—“at port arms,” it’ll later be described — as she approaches the car below. She’s made strangely happy by the mere sensation of walking downhill; it’s an old elation, unquestioned, its source a mystery. She feels tall; maybe that’s it. The distant car is her strange, thrumming opponent; she doesn’t look at the man inside, but at the face of the car: the headlight eyes and radiator grille grimace. As she advances, she thinks she will aim dead center of the windshield and wonders how many rounds are left in the banana clip. Behind her, she hears Teko’s goofy greeting: “Hi! We’ll be needing your car right now if you don’t mind. I don’t want to have to kill you!” She takes another step and then another. She slips her finger inside the trigger guard and raises the gun to sight down its length. Within the car there’s an abrupt flurry of motion as the occupant throws his arm over the seat back, looking to the rear as he rolls back and out of sight. She returns to the van, but Yolanda calls her to the Pontiac.

“This is Arthur, and, Ruby? Ruby. Arthur and Ruby are letting us have their car for now.” She indicates the LeMans. “Would you please tell them who you are?”

She smiles, broadly, as she’s been told, and removes the eyeglasses. Neither crude disguise nor subsistence rations nor the rigors of combat training have altered a face everyone has come to know.

Speaking slowly and clearly, she says, “I’m Tania Galton.”

As they begin to drive and she feels her heart slow she indulges the old luxury of feeling annoyed with her comrades.

“So anyway. What happened, General Teko?” asks Yolanda.

“Nothing. Well. I saw something, a bandolier. I thought we could maybe use it.”

“Jesus Christ, that was stupid.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“What did it cost, two big bucks?”

“Jeez, will you just. Come on, Diane.” He pounds the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

“Yo-lahn-dah.”

They go on, a soft-shoe demonstration of marital antagonism. Tania wonders if this kind of life intensifies conjugal discord or just frees it to seek its regular expression. She wonders if there was ever a little off-campus apartment for Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Shepard of Bloomington, IN, with jug wine on the counter, Ritz crackers and a hunk of Kraft on the cutting board, and a Mr. Coffee hissing and spitting brown liquid into a steamy carafe, a place where they lived politely, planning their evenings around the listings in the TV Guide, while Teko earned his master’s in urban education. She sees the clean shower stall, the carpeted staircase, the burnt-orange Creuset saucepan simmering with Campbell’s soup atop the range centered in the island overlooking the living room. A little off-campus nest full of the twigs and string of stifling ambitions. All that clutter coming between the hairy little grad student and his tall wife with the bland athletic good looks and the slightly off-center face, between their hostility. Now it flows like lava, burning clean.

Under her annoyance, Tania admires them. She thinks of Eric Stump, her lover since she was sixteen, her fiancé for some months, and now the deserted cuckold. He was like a radio receiver eternally on and tuned to receive garbled flashes of superior intelligence from distant reaches of the galaxy. Her job had been to monitor the airwaves for sudden bursts of communication that would inevitably be followed by cryptic silences. She imagines the Shepards into a past that resembles her own because it’s easier that way to imagine their path out of the familiar. Though little could compare with the sudden violent rupture that had removed her from Eric. Still, she can see the need for its having happened now. She might never have gotten around to it otherwise, because what’s there to hassle about when you can watch The Magician at eight o’clock? How can you admit you hate being with someone when you’ve gone and bought an ADT system to remain locked safely alone with him? When you’ve had your formal engagement photograph taken, standing posed beneath a portrait of your long-suffering grandmother Millicent?

Once the clutter started rolling in, it was almost impossible to stop it: silver and china and crystal, all at her disposal for a light supper on the TV trays, eaten in silence while Bill Bixby sped around in his Corvette, pulling knotted scarves out of his sleeve.

And even as she picked out her formal Royal Green Darby Panel, Hutschenreuther cobalt blue, and Herend VBOH china patterns, her Towle Old Master silver, her thumbcut Powerscourt crystal by Waterford, she was beginning to think of those things as objects to be set between her and Eric.

She fingers the ugly stone monkey that hangs from her neck. Cujo gave it to her and as far as she’s concerned it’s the only gift she need ever receive again.

Her parents have released photos of her receiving her first Holy Communion. A photo of her and Eric, taken to commemorate the announcement of their engagement, in which their faces are imprinted with their forced enthusiasm. A pensive 16 magazine shot showing her with knees drawn up to her chest, hands folded across her knees, cheek resting on her hands, eyes staring off to one side — just an ordinary girl with her head full of confusing fun choices.

Her mother had gone to town, to the press actually, describing the pearl-handled fruit knives and forks she’d given her as an engagement present.

They would offer this, the weight of a life of well-intentioned privilege, in evidence against the bewigged specter in the bank captured on dozens of pictures shot by two Mosler Photoguard cameras firing away at four frames per second; against the guerrilla girl, legs astride, hugging the M-1 to her hip before the seven-headed Naga symbol (Xeroxed flyers made from this Polaroid have shown up all over Sproul Plaza, declaring WE LOVE YOU TANIA); against the voice referring to her parents as “pigs”; against all the overwhelming documentation that Tania had devoured Alice, that the girl had simply become divorced from her own self.