Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Police believe newspaper heiress Alice Galton is in the house with her former captors, the people she’s come to identify as her comrades

she now wishes to be known by the name of Tania

will the strange saga of heiress Alice Galton come to an end here in the Los Angeles ghetto?

They think she’s in there. And they don’t care. Never did. Cinque was right all along: She is a sacrifice, she is a traitor to her class, she is a common criminal. Whatever justifies the rabid fury of this assault is what she is. Alice Daniels Galton, her old name rides on waves of ions and electrons, bouncing off lofty satellites and trundling under the sea in stout cables, carried the world over, flying across the oceans and vaulting distant mountains, uttered with alien accent and inflection. Is she dead? Is she dead at last? Is the ungrateful bitch dead?

Some might say that she’s getting what she’s got coming.

THIS IS SWAT TEAM TWO, REPEAT TEAM TWO. REQUEST PERMISSION DEPLOY FIVE FIVE FIVE INTO LOCATION REAR, REPEAT, REQUEST PERMISSION TO DEPLOY FEDERAL FIVE FIVE FIVE GAS INTO LOCATION REAR, OVER.

Smoke. Fire. Fire. She sees fire. She looks quickly at Teko and Yolanda to see if they see what she sees. Sheets of flame rising from the windows and up to the roof. Teko is shaking. Fire is terror.

“They’ve fired incendiaries! Those fucking—” and he loses language suddenly, a regression to animal wrath, guttural horror.

COME ON OUT. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.

But the guns are still firing from within the house. Yolanda cheers, a sort of throttled scream. She hugs a pillow to herself. Teko pounds on the bed with both his fists, his glasses falling off.

“I wish I were there with them,” he says. “I wish I were there with them. I wish I were there with them.”

Tania stares at the black smoke and fire. The rear of the house is a wall of searing, kinetic color.

Suddenly a woman comes out of the house and is dragged on her belly and handcuffed after a brief struggle.

What’s this! A Negro just came out of the house! A Negro woman has just emerged from the burning house! It’s not we don’t She may have been one of the Negro hostages. The police are taking her to safety now.

The police report later describes how an officer places “his foot firmly but lightly on her back to stop her voluntary and involuntary movement.”

The militant radical SLA members, who seek to violently overthrow the government of the United States, are still firing upon the police. The gunfire is coming at a less constant rate now.

this onetime law-abiding girl who now calls her parents … PIGS!

COME OUT, YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. IT’S ALL OVER. THROW YOUR GUNS OUT THE WINDOW YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.

All are probably dead or dying in there. Hard to believe that anyone could survive such a fiery inferno. Only time will tell if missing heiress Alice Galton is among the dead.

Yolanda rationalizes, “It would serve no purpose to go there … we’d only be killed.” But Tania knows that they all are equally immobilized by nauseating fear as they look at the blaze and the greasy smoke.

The police are working against a background of bordello colors: twilit lavender with the peach and melon tones of the fading May sun and the uncanny flux of light and shade from the fire and smoke.

Getting ready for the final assault. Cops moving ‘em back hard. Can’t say but maybe. Maybe an explosion in the offing. Gas mains and whatnot. Moving back. The bravely professional members of the LAPD doing one hell of a job here today!

Children pressed tight against the walls of the surrounding houses, sightseeing in their own neighborhood. Overhead a helicopter drones. The children stare, openmouthed; the camera zooms in on their faces briefly.

Snipers ready ready on the roofs in case some of the SLA try to make an escape.

Every vision of hell from her Janson’s is conjured up. Tania wishes she could tell Cujo. She wishes she’d paid more attention when she stood jadedly before the Breughels and Goyas of Europe.

The sound of windows bursting, exploding from the heat. It is a molten thing in the shape of a house that glows there on the TV screen.

What was a house just a few minutes ago is now a funeral pyre for the Symbionese Liberation Army and their twisted beliefs.

proving that those who live by the sword

Whatever else happens the police and FBI have established an unbreakable cordon surrounding this area no one will get in or out!

Tania fingers the stone monkey around her neck. Everything, ending. Everything over.

KEEP BACK FOR THE FIRE DEPARTMENT, THEY WANT TO MOVE THAT APPARATUS IN. THEY HAVE SOME THEY HAVE SOME.

Fire trucks moving in, containing the fire damage before it spreads to other houses

SOME RESCUE EQUIPMENT SMOKE INHALATION AND THAT SORT.

They killed them. They killed him. They killed her. She crawls on hands and knees to the bathroom, closes the door with her shoulder, and then wedges her upper body in the space between the tub and the toilet, feeling the cool of the porcelain and tile against her skin and through her thin shirt. She reaches up to reassure herself: The monkey is still there. She will never see Cujo again. They’ve taken him. She will not know this grief again until she repudiates him in open court. But that is twenty-one months away. What’s in her mind now is what’s always in the mind of the shattered to identify what provides solace but there’s none here. There’s nothing. He’s gone, all gone. Her world is rising black into a darkening sky thirty miles to the northwest. She reaches for the monkey and fingers it. Hope and love leave the earth and rise in rolling dark clouds. Oh God please let his monkey burn with him don’t let them have it.

Yolanda starts banging on the door.

“Come out here, Tania!” she says peevishly. “You’re not being very respectful of our fallen comrades!”

Tania rises and opens the bathroom door and then strides through the room, opens the door, and steps outside, ignoring Teko’s stern admonition. They will cast this in revolutionary terms. Let them cast it in revolutionary terms, this is her loss not the People’s, This is my loss I will not share it . I hold on to it. I’m holding on.

Outside in the parking lot she sees that the walls of the Cosmic Age glow an eerie blue against the twilight: both she and Cujo are in glowing houses, and she has to smile. The solitary trace of their bond, of this catastrophe, that the gathering darkness accommodates is in the coincidence, and, sensing that the charity of signs and omens will be scarce in the days to come, she clings to it tightly.

INTERLUDE 1

Threnody

Threnody (I)

SING OF GRIEF. GRAB the collar of the old shirt you loved and pull until it tears. You didn’t know your own strength. This is the outward part, the rending of garments as they say. Sit in your chair holding that strip of shirt in your hand, one end still attached to an actual article of clothing you actually wear. Your hand ringing, with a sensation between discomfort and pain, from the effort. That you barely notice. That’s shock.

Then to focus on the smallest of your chores, break it down to atomized movement, elemental gestures as ritualized as ballet. To scrub, to sweep, to put away. It’s a good thing that things go askew by themselves, or rather, that it seems to happen pretty regularly in the course of events; at any rate, that things make themselves available to be straightened by you. Otherwise your fingers would dart out at nothing at all. To file things away, to stack papers evenly, to search for the wrong amount in the checkbook register, tapping the point of your pencil on your scratch pad: you hate being off by any amount. And: mystery novels. And: loaves of banana bread, the sink filled each day with soiled mixing bowls and rubber spatulas. And: God knows what else. You fill time.