Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

This, just generally, is not the life she was raised to live. Here is a seizure of a kind of exquisite loneliness, a sudden shuddering. She wants to pick up the phone. She wants to go out for drinks. She wants the free fresh wind in her hair. She has always thought of herself as a simple person, but as her life has repeatedly cycled into the simplest of patterns — waiting, in an unadorned space — she has found that she is much more complex than she’d thought, both stronger and weaker, smarter and dumber, surprisingly void of sentimentality, abruptly affectless in grief after two days of crying herself blind.

She also holds dueling loyalties in her mind. Lately she’s been thinking a lot about her old friend Trish Tobin. Trish’s parents happened to own the Hibernia Bank, whose Sunset branch the SLA robbed in April, both to “expropriate” the very money that was paying for this motel room and to provide an appropriately public venue for Tania’s own coming out. She and Trish had a lot of fun together and she wanted to send her a postcard after the robbery, just to let her know it was nothing personal.

But no postcards. No phone calls. No nothing. And without Cujo she suddenly is a very lonely guerrilla. She misses Gelina and Fahizah. Gabi too, kind of. But Zoya and especially Cinque she’s pretty glad are dead. What she admits to herself once in a while is that if she were given a choice, she would add Teko, Yolanda, and herself to that pile of smoking corpses, in that order.

Tania blinks in the scrubbed light. The sun tingles on her bare arms. It is the morning of May 27, Memorial Day, and she is standing outdoors for the first time since the previous Monday.

During their week inside Yolanda grew embarrassed enough to start carrying their empty gallon jugs of wine — they finished five — out to the Dumpster herself, so that the maid wouldn’t see (Teko ridiculed her bourgeois propriety). But what else was there to do in there?

Well, Teko, at least, had been planning, setting down on paper tentative plans for a more or less triumphant (as he saw it) return to the Bay Area. He worked with road maps and local traffic reports and his own rash ignorance. First he wanted to drive straight up the coast on Highway 1; next was a plan to head out past Palm Springs for a few days’ bivouac in Joshua Tree, and then up, through the Mojave, through anciently dry lakes, through the country of dead roads and ghost towns, right under the very nose of the enemy (Marine Corps Base, Twentynine Palms; Fort Irwin; Edwards Air Force Base; Naval Weapons Center, China Lake), the sound of whose exploding ordnance crackled through the calm arid sky beyond razor-topped fences.

“Drive that lemon into the desert?” asks Yolanda. “Are you nuts?”

“You picked it.”

“I wasn’t planning on joining the Donner Party.”

Finally Teko reluctantly suggested “the obvious one”: straight up via the seam of the state, Interstate 5. But they would have to wait until the holiday itself, when the roads would be jammed and the three travelers would be able to slip through checkpoints and roadblocks relatively inconspicuously.

In the parking lot, Tania hefts a duffel bag containing the submachine gun, the carbine, the shotgun, the ammo belts, the sheathed knives, and some loose ammunition and puts it in the Corvair’s tiny trunk. Teko’s hand is in his jeans as he adjusts himself, preparatory to settling behind the wheel. Yolanda places a bag of snacks on the floor of the car, then pulls her dark dress away from where it is stickily clinging to her chest.

“God damn it,” she says, “it’s too hot to wear synthetics. They don’t breathe.”

“So go change,” says Teko. “Anyway, you don’t even look like you’re on vacation.”

Memorial Day, to remember the fallen. For their purposes, though, it is Day Eleven, Year One.

“Crunch! Crunch!” goes a Granny Goose Sour Cream ‘n’ Onion Potato Chip, crisply delivering its valedictory inside Teko’s mouth. Tania briefly wonders who will fry the potato chips when the revolution comes. Potato chips were invented by a black man, Cujo had once told her.

“But do you think he got the credit?”

A question to ponder in the closeted dark.

RISING OUT OF THE basin, the outlying beach the dun edge of ocean’s glimmering, the end of America, the memory of a dream; dropping again into fertile bleakness, flat and fruitful and rolling toward the horizon through the Central Valley, miles of cultivated moonscape punctuated by giant elevated signs to announce flamboyantly fulfillment of the more subdued blue pledges of FOOD PHONE GAS LODGING, markers proclaiming the famous names that outshine the little towns that host them, farm towns whose fortunes are entwined with the road’s, the land that was their reason all but irrelevant now, a mere furrowed moment in the dust and glare and insect spatter of freeway mph, hypnotic and droning; on the radio here shitkicker music, or religious zealots barking sulfurous and contagious fear out over these unspoiled plains of almonds, cauliflower, grapes, lettuce, onions, peaches, soybeans, watermelon; with miles of freight lined on the distant rails, hauling cargo from one end of human endeavor to the other; BRIDGE, and you look to see what torrent rushes by beneath as you pass, and it’s just a dry gulch, a wash, an arroyo, such words occurring lightly to the native-born Californian, painting ideas you hold close about the land (and here you’re with these outlanders, tourists really, guns and ambition notwithstanding); lemonade springs and rock candy mountains: the car burns at its steady fifty-five, which saves gas and lives in that order, every now and then a policeman in his black-and-white drawing parallel to peer in from behind the tinted aviators and from under the hat that conceals the Human Face of the Law. Stop. Gas. Snacks. You’d like a movie magazine or a National Enquirer. You just want to know what’s up with Jackie O, you little twat , is the unvarnished opinion ventured from the driver’s seat, and you know you could shove another brick of envious rage up his ass by mentioning that you’ve met the bitch, yes actually personally MET the FUCKING BITCH. Pacheco Pass and onto 152, sunlight spread across the windshield, imbuing the crushed insects with a delicate glow plus dangerously obscuring the view; you pass through Gilroy where there’s a kinda cute ‘n’ kitschy little restaurant/hotel/gift shop, Casa de Fruta: Everything is “Casa de” something — Casa de Coffee , Casa de Gifts, Casa de Wine, Casa de Sweets , get it? — mercifully zipping straight through to hook up with 101.

Here, as you approach San Jose, where the old orchards have been turned under the earth, new housing rises, and the places in which its residents will labor appear, equally new, monuments to the city’s ambition to sow itself beyond its boundaries, the orphan seeds of such civic aspiration sprouting right up to the very edge of the road, lighted and empty, solitary cars in the enormous lots, lining the freeway for miles, all the way north this replication of an epic and futile vanity, in a night that smells like rain. Home again.

HOUSEWIVES SENT THINGS OVER, casseroles and vats of chili. Succor all with food. It was an expression of sympathy that had more force than words. Send enough food to construct a golem, another Alice; enough food to represent every single meal she’d eaten. Hank was touched, though Lydia found it mildly distasteful that fried chicken, urns of coffee, and macaroni salads were turning up, unbidden, on her doorstep, left like floral offerings (“In the middle of the night!”). She said, finally, that she thought it was funereal. The alien food would have to remain outside the house, like some kind of stray dog. She had a folding buffet table brought up from the cellar and placed on the lawn and directed that the spread be laid out daily for the reporters and for anybody else who wanted it. FBI men in shirtsleeves and TV reporters with their microphones stuffed in the pockets of their blazers lingered together in the sun over paper plates of chow. Pour out a half-drunk cup of coffee on the lawn at your peril, gentlemen. Genuine Zoysia grass. The lady of the house is ever vigilant.