Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Outside the study, the house had opened itself up to life; through the windows the gray sky spilled a brightened shade of itself. Through a door he saw a maid running a vacuum cleaner, its distant roar rising and falling in ostinato as her hips and shoulders swayed, working the device back and forth over the rug beneath her feet. The bags the driver had carried in were gone from the entryway. Hank thought of all this as a kind of progress, a continuation, a retrieval of life. But when he climbed the stairs, the shadows descended over his body as he rose toward the darkened landing, where the only light came from the windows at each end of the long hall. The damp lived here. All the doors were closed except for that of a bathroom, in which something rhythmically dripped. He approached his wife’s bedroom and knocked at the door, his head inclined to listen for a response. When it came he opened the door carefully, and the light from the room escaped to lie across the dim hall.

Inside Lydia was half reclined on the bed, her head and torso propped up with pillows. She held a paperback in her hand that Hank dimly recognized from the airplane, her index finger holding the pages apart at her place. The room’s light came from a roseshaded lamp that sat on the bedside table adjacent to an open box of chocolates, which gleamed dully in the pink glow.

She looked across the room at him from behind the hard surface of her eyes, hooded and cold below the lacquered ornament of her hair.

“What is it, Hank.”

“I just wanted. The news, alone, it’s.”

“What news? We have no news that I’m aware of.”

“Lydia. We’ve had the best news.”

“What we have means only that nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed at all.”

“But she’s alive, Lydia.”

Lydia began to make strange jerking motions with her head and neck, her lips moving, some sort of prearticulation that anticipated her toxic disdain. It came.

“Alive? Alive in that filth, again?”

Hank was unsure what she meant by “again.”

“With those cuckoos, driving around, with guns? Shooting at people, kidnapping them.”

Hank began to wring his hands.

“It almost,” said Lydia, looking through the window into the distance, as if deriving her opinion from the churning sky. “It almost would be better,” she said, “better if—”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Hank.

“Don’t interrupt me. Yes, better.”

“No.”

“Yes, yes.”

“No, it wouldn’t be better. Do you think the other parents feel better? The other parents would give—”

“Who cares about them and their low-class hoodlum children?” Her hand came up and then the book left it to fly across the room. It landed on a wing chair and bounced softly to the floor.

“You lost your place,” said Hank.

Lydia was crying and Hank walked over and sat at the foot of the bed, not exactly beside her. He reached out and put his hand on one stockinged foot. It felt strange, sharp and armored, through the gauzy fabric of her panty hose.

“Well, the important thing,” he said, “the important thing.” He patted the thorny foot.

“What about our family?” she said, furious. “What about our honor?”

Hank stared at her foot. Some people’s feet had personalities all their own.

“What about me ? I don’t understand how it is I’m supposed to get through all this. What am I to tell people?”

Alice had a room here. Things hung in the closet still, ready for her to return home any time she wanted. A tennis shoe peeked out from under the dust ruffle that skirted the box spring. This was normal, wasn’t it? People behaved as if he’d received lessons of some sort on how to live, as if he didn’t put old letters in a shoebox like all the rest of them. His daughter’s clothes still hung in the closet; her dusty photos, framed moments that were famous to her, sat silent on the shelf. All ready, anytime she wanted. All his life Hank had been confident of an answering echo, the sonar of conviviality. To speak was to receive a reply. And suddenly this. They knew she was alive only because they’d sifted through bone and ash. There was no reassuring phone call from her, only photographs of her jaws and teeth flown specially to Los Angeles.

THREE NIGHTS AT THE Cosmic Age. Every minute, all thirty-seven hundred of them, meaningless, each a sort of obstacle to be overcome by the habit of being. First you put one foot down. Then you put the other in front of it. Repeat. It gets Tania to the bathroom, back to the bed. Her job is to stay in the room. Just another face in an upstairs window, she parts the drapes to survey the parking lot, the cars rolling in and out. Vacationers, deliberately insulated from the news, arrive wide-eyed, like refugees from the road, the desert’s affectless severity. The only news that matters is Here We Are. The plates say America’s Dairyland and First in Flight and Garden State and Great Lakes and Keystone State and Land of Enchantment and Live Free or Die and Show-Me State and Sportsman’s Paradise. It infuriates her. She wants them hiding, with her. She wants them to fear the state’s unchecked power. She wants them as angry and terrified as she is. But they aren’t even conscious.

Teko comes into the room and tosses on the bed a newspaper that has been clearly marked in the upper right corner “204.” Their room is 226. Tania says nothing about his inability to resist petty thievery even under these circumstances, even given what happened the — but never mind. There is a story about her parents on the front page. They have returned home. They are relieved but concerned. Grim work continues for the coroner.

“It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Teko says. “It’s not that they’re dead; it’s that you’re not dead.”

“Sorry,” she says.

The good news is that she’s now third-in-command.

And after Disneyland, what? Yolanda went out and got new disguises, and now they crowd into the bathroom to make themselves over quickly. Teko goes to settle the bill, and she and Yolanda exit through the rear. In a little while someone else’s family will shape itself to the rhythms of room 226. Maybe the one in that car with the license plate that says Je Me Souviens. They cross the broiling lot to where the Corvair sits neatly parked between painted lines. Yolanda wears a gray wig and hangs on to Tania, as if for support. They walk slowly.

The road swallows them, Monday morning’s lackadaisical rush pulls the Corvair forward in fits and starts. A shadow fills the car, and from her vantage — lying on the floor, in back — Tania sees the cab of an enormous truck that’s drawn abreast of them, a plump tanned forearm resting on the door frame. Yolanda turns to look down at her, speaks abnormally loudly in her old lady voice.

“Did you find it, dear?” Then she growls: “Get up! Damn it, get up!”

Tania sits up and pretends to hand something to her. There is no need any longer even to figure out these deceptions. Passing on the right, the truck cuts them off.

The bad news is that Cujo is dead and nothing matters.

Teko finds the Golden State Freeway, but it soon becomes apparent that they’re heading in the wrong direction, south.

“Orange County,” he says, grimly.

“Teko, Anaheim is Orange County,” says Yolanda.

“I mean, like, the real Orange County.” He sings, “ Folk down there, really don’t care, really don’t care, don’t care, really don’t.”

Tania is impressed.

Over the hills, where the spirits fly, is Costa Mesa, which seems like a perfectly good reason to leave the freeway. They roll down a straight road with the green Pacific at its end and the Catalina Islands on horizon’s edge. Finding a motel is not a problem; there are plenty of them, their signs looming over the road, practically extending into the lanes, competing to offer amenities. Teko picks one that promises LO WKLY RATES and KCHTTES. Tania lies down on the floor of the Corvair under a Cosmic Age bath towel.