Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Stop. Stop. Stop. Slow down,” says Yolanda.

“Well, which one? I mean. Man.”

“Slow down. We need to find another car.”

“Already? Like, two blocks, this car.”

“Yes, already.”

“Try and, you know. Where I’m coming from, here.”

“Over there.”

Two men are unloading a lawn mower from a blue Nova wagon when Teko pulls the LeMans up and jumps out, carrying the submachine gun.

“We’re the SLA. We need your car right now. This is not an expropriation; we’re just borrowing it. I mean, you’ll get it back, man.”

“Just put our stuff in the car, Teko,” says Yolanda. “Stop talking now.”

“Sure,” says one of the men. “Long as you need it.”

“You can, ah,” says Teko, “keep the lawn mower.” And the men move it off the back of the wagon, double time.

She’s about to get in when Yolanda reminds her, nodding in the direction of the two men. “Tania?”

“Oh. Yeah.” After straightening her wig, she removes her eyeglasses and smiles at the men. The younger one smiles back.

It’s now 4:33 p.m. Yolanda turns the dashboard radio dial searching for news reports, while Teko drives. At this hour, helicopters hover in position over the freeways that enlace the city, delivering traffic reports to the drivers anchored below. The unfamiliar road names, and the conditions on each, are enumerated over the radio. There’s no word yet of a manhunt, or the incident at Mel’s.

They stop at a shopping center called Town & Country Village. Tania enjoys these oases, the hand-painted signs in the supermarket windows, the faded placard outside the restaurant and cocktail lounge listing the specials. This one has a slightly rough-hewn theme, the storefronts framed in wood stained a dark brown. A boy in a blue apron retrieves the shopping carts scattered throughout the parking lot. He links them in a long unwieldy train and pushes them toward the entrance of the supermarket. A lot of crashing noise accompanies the task. It looks like not such a bad job. Tania’s only job, ever, was working at Capwell’s, in Oakland, clerking in the stationery department for two and a quarter an hour.

But her scalp is starting to itch like hell, and she is nearly overcome with anxiety when she realizes that Teko and Yolanda are discussing switching cars once again. Teko parks and they all get out of the Nova, Teko carrying the submachine gun concealed in a plastic shopping bag from Mel’s, which says brightly in red script Thank You For Your Patronage! with some sort of exploding curlicues or whatever all around the words. A festive-looking bag. They stroll around the shopping center periphery, listening to the thin strains of the Muzak, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which Tania has heard so often in such places she believes it must act as a subliminal inducement to shop. As this gives way to “Moon River,” an old pickup with a camper top pulls into a spot, and a man, youngish, in faded denim, with long hair, gets out and walks around to open the passenger door for a little boy. The boy wears a sateen windbreaker with applique patches shaped like baseballs. She thinks it’s called a varsity jacket. She’s fascinated with the little boy’s jacket. It’s new and clean and looks like the largesse of Grandma or Grandpa, or so she guesses.

Teko asks Yolanda, “How about that hippie’s camper?”

“How ’bout it?”

“Fill the bill?”

“Go for it, Teko.”

“You think?”

“Go go go go go .”

“I’ll talk to him, see what he says.”

The man has squatted to tie his son’s sneakers. Tania hears the boy’s high little voice carrying across the lot — it demands: “Tight! Tight!”—while the man squats, pulling the laces tighter, unaware of the presence of danger and revolution as Teko comes near, swinging the bag with the submachine gun nestled in it beside thermal underwear and socks and a flannel shirt. It unfolds like a two-reel silent: Teko hails the man, and they talk, friendly enough; Teko, speaking, gestures toward the camper, and the man startles, a little flurry of the arms and upper body; Teko lifts the muzzle of the gun out of the bag; the man leaps to his feet and grabs his son and dashes around the camper; Teko shuffles back and forth near the front fender, trying to keep the man in sight. When the man breaks away, Teko tears the submachine gun out of the bag and rushes after him.

“Oh, shit,” says Yolanda. Teko screams, gesturing with the gun, at the man, who is crumpled against the hood of a car, his arms draped over his head, moaning. Teko turns to Yolanda and hefts the gun, as if he were testing its weight.

“Should I off him?”

“Don’t, Teko.”

The man moans, “No, no.”

“Shut up! Should I just fucking off him right now?”

“Teko, you’ll bring the pigs down on us!” says Tania.

“No, no.”

“Shut! up! Who asked you?”

“Teko, she’s right, we better go now!”

“OK. OK. OK. Listen, you hippie dipshit. You listening? Listen! You tell anyone about this and we will be on you like white on fucking rice! We will cut off your balls! You hear? We will tear out your fingernails! You hear? We will take that kid of yours and roast him on a fucking spit! You hear?”

“No, no.”

“Do you hear me?” Teko holds the gun close to the man’s ear and fires into the air. He backs away. Yolanda and Tania are already running for the Nova; the gunfire releases them to their fear. “Close to You” is playing on the Muzak. The ice-cream families of America keep coming out of the shoppes, unawares, poised and carefree.

“I can’t necessarily agree with these tactics, Teko.”

“That’s why you’re not a general.”

“Don’t even start.”

“You might not want to admit it, but: it’s true.”

Yolanda is driving now. Tania is beginning to get hungry. It’s six, and the top-of-the-hour newscasts are reporting the incident at Mel’s and the Southern California manhunt for “suspected SLA members, possibly including kidnapped heiress Alice Galton.” Who is being sought for questioning in connection with the San Francisco bank robbery last month in which she was an apparently willing participant, in which innocent family men were gunned down; who has turned her back on her loving family and devoted fiancé; who has adopted the name Tania. Is she, as U.S. Attorney General William Saxbe claims, “nothing more than a common criminal”? Is she the mindless, programmed victim of brainwashing? Or is it more likely that she may have been coerced and is just waiting for the opportunity to send us all a message of reassurance?

There’s a hearty laugh in the Nova.

In any case, it is a mystery for the public and law enforcement officials alike. In any case, it is clear she is not what she once was.

The mood in the car turns sour again when the announcer reports that Teko had been caught stealing a pair of sweat socks.

“It wasn’t sweat socks. And I didn’t steal it.”

The exact meaning of those sprawling urban stucco barrens evaded him. Not that he’d been looking for it. But what did it all mean, the ugliness they’d wrapped themselves in, the beaten cars and shabby houses and dingy streets? He saw boys on the corner carrying golf clubs, black boys, a little younger than he was, never been near a golf course in their lives. He saw two men drive up to a house and furtively unload unopened cases of Viva paper towels and bring them inside, then come out on the tiny porch laughing when the chore was done. He saw two used condoms in the gutter and a third that had been inflated and a stylized girl’s face drawn on it with lipstick. It was like observing something a million miles or years distant.