Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“OK. OK. I’m ready to move on to plan B.” Teko is holding a revolver and gesturing with his head toward the huddled prisoner in the back. He nervously cocks and uncocks the weapon’s hammer, the barrel aimed carelessly at his own femoral artery.

“Are you sure you want to do it in the car? Pretty messy.”

“Well, I guess not. But where’m I supposed to?”

“I don’t know. It’s your plan.”

“Well, I can’t just shoot him in plain sight.”

“Well, we can’t just go driving around with a bloody body in the back.” Tania slackens her face to demonstrate the stupidity of this prospect.

“You’re shouting again.”

“I’m not. I’m not shouting. This is talking.”

“Well, whisper.”

“I’m so sick of whispering. I don’t have a whispering voice. Some people were born to go mousing around whispering their whole lives and I’m not one of them. I’m so sick of whispering I could scream.”

“Don’t scream.”

“I’m not screaming. I’m not shouting. I’m just sitting here talking. You’re the one who puts us in these situations where we have to be going around talking in these little like whispery voices. Talk about something else and we don’t have to whisper. Just, like, change the subject.”

“You’re crazy. You’ll never be an urban guerrilla. You just don’t understand that this sort of work calls for instantaneous reactions to rapidly unfolding developments.”

“OK. Sure. I don’t understand. Let’s just shoot the guy. Mr. Fraley, will you please sit up?”

“Stop! Shouting!” screams Teko. “Fraley, you just lie there, man! Don’t listen to her! She is fucking around with us.”

The blanket is trembling. Nearly twenty-four hours of trembling blankets. Something about this upholstered fear that makes it more palpable, more pitiable; something about it that marks the total destitution of these seized and interrupted lives. She is moved beyond words by these frightened people hidden away under blankets; she is furious that Teko sees them merely as markers at arc’s end of a gesture he is determined to complete.

Teko is red-faced, and he is shaking with anger. He raises the gun and presses it to her collarbone.

“You”—he taps the gun against her—“fucking”—tap—“watch it”—tap.

Then there is motion in blue heading up the road and through the parking lot. It’s the Corvair, with a harried-looking Yolanda behind the wheel. She pulls up beside the Lincoln, yanks the emergency brake.

“Sorry I’m so late,” she says.

1466 East Fifty-fourth Street

Everybody began falling by to see the SLA. Cinque sent Crystal out to get some Boone’s Farm, and Sheila watched uneasily as he slugged that down while describing the SLA’s goals, showing off his quick-draw technique with his Chief’s Special, and occasionally seeming to drop off to sleep in mid-sentence. The white man kept watch out the front windows. Charles Gates went up to Cinque and whispered something in his ear. Sheila rolled her eyes. Mr. Big Secret. Man so full of it he can’t see straight. Cinque nodded, and Charles Gates left.

Charles Gates was booking on out of there with that easy five hundred. Never to return, baby.

Sheila went to stand behind Willie and look out her own front window, thank you. This was a day of wonders for sure: another white man, wearing a coat and tie, was outside talking to Charles Gates, pointing and gesturing at her house. He looked familiar, and then his friend or what you call colleague with the little camera comes up, and she sees the camera has on it “KNXT MiniCam Unit.”

She heard Cinque ask, “Where’s the station wagon?”

“I don’t know. When did you send that kid?” asked the hard-looking one.

“While ago, now.”

“With the money.”

“What you want me to do?”

“Bye-bye.”

“Well, what you want?”

Sheila was tireder than she could ever remember. Up all night and then this whole day being what her grandma would have called a tribulation. Cartons and boxes seemed to be piled in every corner of her home now, and she picked her way past, heading for her bedroom, where she found that white boy stretched out on her own bed. She put her hands on her hips. Not a word. Just one look was all it took. He leaped up as if she’d stuck him with a hatpin and was gone. She closed the door behind him.

When Timmy got home from school he didn’t see his mother but he did see all those white people and their guns were still there. The man told him to Sit Down and Shut Up and he went out the back. Mr. Reddy was out there and he told him to go to his grandma. “Go get your grandma,” said Mr. Reddy.

EVEN AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK, the main parking lot is jammed and a long line forms outside the gates of the happiest place on earth, Disneyland. Curled in exhaustion on the backseat of the Corvair, Tania senses a distant agitation, in the noise and aromas, in the quality of the light that falls upon this former citrus orchard. It is a place as peculiarly essential as can be. For millions it is an introduction to crowds and their logic. It is rules and order in carefree guise. It is a walk inside a giant rendering of the sugar coating that swathes American life, an exhibit like the Smithsonian’s enormous and anatomically precise organs. But who sees it that way? A million kids with stomachaches? Parents in ridiculous tourist garb, popping off flashcubes like confections of frosted light, the fathers encumbered with Nikons and Pentaxes, the mothers easily swinging Instamatics from their wrist straps? These people waiting to buy sugar water, spun sugar, sugar baked in the familiar forms of nutritious items? Those who stand in line to sit in moving chairs? It is the greatest fun of all, to ennoble all of a culture’s half-forsaken myths and shibboleths by reducing them to cliché and sanitizing them. Yet even among clichés there are those that aren’t permitted here, they’re so ambiguously evocative or of such unpalatably grizzled mien. Everything here looks as clean and disposable as a Dixie cup.

E.g., the motels across Katella Avenue. This is the epicenter of a kind of beauty, the wild optimism of transience. These postatomic permacrete structures stand in mute astonishment at their survival into the 1970s. There are the Little Boy Blue Motel, the Magic Carpet Motel, the Magic Lamp Motel, the Samoa Motel, the Space Age Inn, and a dozen others, each asserting itself through its towering sign, its brummagem modernism, its paradoxical insistence on the eternal half-life of fads.

Yolanda worked here, at Disneyland, one summer, having traveled to the Coast from Indiana. Tania tries to picture the grim revolutionary as a rube fresh from the Midwest, an eight-hour smile on her face throughout her shift, her uniform soiled and smelling of grease.

Teko pulls into the broad driveway of the Cosmic Age Lodge, which sits unobtrusively enough in the harsh light of late afternoon. Driving the Corvair slowly through the half-empty lot, he circles the structure, choosing a spot in the rear with plenty of vacant spaces on either side of it. As Yolanda and Teko instruct her to remain hidden in the backseat while they register, Tania worries for a moment that the little blue wreck will be mistaken for abandoned in its purposeful isolation. Set apart from the sturdy late-model Buicks and Mercurys that muscle up to the building, their car has that telltale bent and faded look of automotive worthlessness.

And it doesn’t escape her that now she’s the one stowed away under that blanket.

Meanwhile …

The law couldn’t believe its good fortune. Los Angeles ASAC Haff had been informed not only that the SLA vans had been located, but that someone had phoned to report that she had seen the SLA and to provide their address, while another caller had reported “white girls” sneaking around backyards — and all in the same immediate vicinity.