Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

It’s thirty dollars a week for a single and another ten for each additional adult. As she sneaks her into the room, Yolanda tells Tania that her presence has to remain a secret because Teko thinks that a man and two women traveling together will arouse too much suspicion, but Tania knows it’s the ten dollars.

She has to hide in the closet for the duration of each of Teko and Yolanda’s frequent outings.

She has to hide in the closet when the clerk comes to explain the two-burner range.

She has to hide in the closet when the maid comes to clean up.

She has to hide in the closet when the manager drops by to ask a question.

She has to hide in the closet when there are footsteps on the walkway.

“You are a fucking ungrateful bitch. Think about what our comrades went through and you’re complaining about being crammed into, quote unquote, the closet. Don’t you think Cujo would give anything to be ‘crammed into’ a closet right now?”

“Yeah, you think Cujo would be complaining? Huh?”

This is enough to bring forth instant capitulation. Tania sighs heavily and turns toward the closet, or places her hand on the knob, or squats to insert herself, or whatever action’s most appropriate depending on her proximity to the fucking closet.

“The pigs killed Cujo like an animal.”

“An animal.”

“But I bet he didn’t complain.”

“He was a devoted soldier.”

“I recognized the sound of his rifle firing to the last.”

“I bet Cujo’d be real disappointed in you. ”

She’s inside, closing herself into the muffled darkness.

She sits in the dark of the closet on the plywood floor, crying silently, the hems of Yolanda’s dresses draped over her shoulders, feeling the tears running down her cheeks, first the hot rolling droplets and then the cold tracks, to pool at her jawline and fall. It feels sometimes as if she’s spent her life crying without making a sound, has acquired a dubious expertise.

Teko returns one afternoon with a gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. He fills the ice bucket from the machine and, with two hands holding the jug, pours drinks over ice for all three of them. Three rounds later, it is apparent that this libation flagrantly violates the letter of the SLA Code of War that stipulates, “ONCE TRUE REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE SERIOUSLY UNDERTAKEN REVOLUTIONARY ARMS STRUGGLE, MARIJUANA AND ALCOHOL ARE NOT USED FOR RECREATIONAL PURPOSES OR TO DILUTE OR BLUR THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF REALITY, BUT VERY SMALL AMOUNTS FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES TO CALM NERVES UNDER TIMES OF TENSION, NOT TO DISTORT REALITY.”

A glass of iced burgundy on the bedside table. Tania watches the Watergate impeachment hearings. By Thursday she is pretty much ignoring her standing orders to conceal herself in the closet when she is alone. Sometimes when the others enter the room, they find her leaning in the closet door, eyes on the TV, a cigarette burning across the room in the ashtray near the bed — not even trying, really, to fool them.

“What are you doing?”

“Watching this.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean then?”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Watching this.”

“Is that what you’re supposed to be doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you supposed to be doing?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting where?”

She giggles.

“You think it’s funny, hah? Maybe you’ll think this is funny too.”

Teko crosses the room, rapidly closing the space between them. Tania is caught between panic and apathy. So she tosses her wine at him. He freezes. There is the sound of the ice cubes hitting the carpeted floor. The expression on his face indicates his attempt to scale new heights of rage. Without a word she disappears into the closet and closes the door behind her. She stays there for the remainder of the night.

It’s Nixon’s viscid gift that his presence haunts these hearings, clammily, despite his physical absence, his attempts to appear above the fray. Even Yolanda is made uneasy by the transcripts the White House has newly released in an effort “to put Watergate behind us,” the ones in which their profane, bigoted, scheming president vents his paranoia. Despite her generally inflationary use of terms like pig and fascist , the revelation of Nixon’s true character surprises her.

“You met him?” she asks Tania.

“I don’t know.”

“How could you not know?” asks Teko, fixing an iced burgundy in the kitchenette.

“I just don’t know.”

“Oh, I can believe it,” says Yolanda. They’re both on one of the beds, leaning up against the headboard, watching television. Yolanda reaches out with her leg and seizes Tania’s foot between two long prehensile toes, giving it a little shake of solidarity. “They’re all alike. How could you tell the difference?”

“Quit it.” Tania giggles.

“Screw this,” says Teko vaguely. He drops into a chair, placing the wine before him.

“But what was he like?” asks Yolanda.

“I don’t remember.”

“First you don’t know. Now you don’t remember.” Teko is pointing at her.

“I don’t,” says Tania. It dawns on her, too late, that she’s been drawn into a trap.

But tonight for once Yolanda doesn’t feel like joining Teko in batting her around. “I don’t see what difference it could possibly make,” she says to Teko as she hoists herself up and then weaves her way to the kitchenette to refill her glass.

“It makes a big fucking difference,” says Teko. “As if her family and Nixon aren’t asshole buddies.”

“Like, what, Teko?” Yolanda drops ice into her glass, “Like she infiltrated the group? Come on. We kidnapped her, remember? Anybody home?” She pauses beside Teko and pantomimes tapping on his head with her knuckles. He recoils angrily, but does nothing more.

“Who’dja think you were kidnapping, chrissake? Angela Davis?”

“We had nothing to do with that operation,” says Teko.

“Pick, pick, pick,” says Yolanda.

“We had nothing to do with it, Tania.” Teko rises, gesturing earnestly.

“Are you apologizing to me?” Tania asks in wonderment.

“Sounds like he’s copping a plea to me,” says Yolanda.

“That’s enough out of you,” says Teko. Without warning he swats Yolanda’s drink out of her hand and then slaps her across the face. She stares, for a moment, at her hand, dripping with wine, and at the spreading stain on the carpet, and worries about inconsequential things, permanent marks and stains, the feelings that suddenly lance her from out of the midwestern early sixties. Sometimes she can smell the ammonia and Pine-Sol, see the gleam of the dark wood. This, dripping from her hand, is an insult to order. Such decadent worries, how dare she? She lunges for Teko, her indignation suddenly having taken shape, trying to stick her thumb into his eye. She misses, jamming it against the bridge of his nose, and each seizes up, Teko with his hands to his face and Yolanda with her wrist cradled against her chest.

Tania notices, not for the first time, how absurd ice cubes look lying against the beige carpet.

“I think, actually,” she says, “that I met President Eisenhower.”

Tania has lived in three closets since February. This is the worst yet, because she shares it with the clothes. In other words, she doesn’t feel as if it’s hers. She considers telling this to Teko and Yolanda, suggesting that maybe they could fold their clothes, or some of their clothes, and keep them in the bureau drawers, and then the closet could be hers alone, and she wouldn’t say a thing about spending all the time in it they wanted her to. She is vaguely jealous of the clothes, she realizes, realizing also how strange this all is. She has become an expert at living in closets, has developed unambiguous preferences (e.g., length is infinitely more desirable than width), has slept in them and eaten in them and read books in them and been raped in them and recorded messages to the People in them.