Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Fresh drink in Uncle Jerry’s hand.

“Have to admit, when you were growing up I never pegged you as the type who’d go in for radicalism. But then, I bet you never thought your filthy rich uncle in Shallow Alto would turn out to be an old lefty. Thing is, usually what you figure you know about someone is what the person decides you ought to know. But you’d be familiar with that.”

“Me?”

“Not you personally, necessarily. Your generation. The ones who distill entire schools of philosophy into what you can fit on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. I see them whizzing around here. Sloganeering. One flat smart-ass sentence fragment, then another, and another, and another.”

Here we go. Not only does he want to put on his old Mao jacket and get into the act, but the real problem is with her generation.

“No depth, no meaning. A pretty kind of symmetry. Nincompoop aphorisms, zipping past on the bumper of an old beater, telling me everything they figure I need to know about them and about everything else for all time. Or until they junk the car.”

“Well hey. Dad there is wearing a WIN button.” She gestures behind her.

“He is?” Uncle Jerry rears back and laughs. “My God. Well, your father has always wanted to do his part, God love him. I’m fairly certain Howard wouldn’t try to foist an unwelcome point of view on anybody. Of course all that damned button is going to get him is a hole in his lapel.”

What it must have been like growing up with this sententious prick. Her father’s told her tales of an awkward and myopic boy, not nearly as popular as the athletic younger brother who served good-naturedly as a friend pimp, lay analyst, and punching bag.

“Because the WIN button has a purely talismanic function. It’s a direct conduit to, communion with, the wishful thinking, the cerebral processes of, the power elite. That’s why there’s only one damned word on it, Christ’s sake. They’d like for us to know that they too want inflation to disappear. A bolt from Olympus. After ten years of Vietnam, at last here’s an enemy we all can root against.”

“I don’t actually think about it all that much.”

“Personally I’d be disappointed if you did. Pocketbook issues are for people like your father and me, who supposedly remember when everything was hunky-dory. Yes, when we were growing up, all the mothers would wheel us around in our carriages, going from the butcher to the baker and so on and exclaiming to one another the whole time, ‘My goodness! Everything costs exactly the right amount!’”

At this Susan laughs, and Jerry takes a slug of his drink and then rattles the ice cubes in his glass.

“Besides,” he continues, “you have a different enemy to root against.”

“Who?”

“People like your dad and me. Look at this place. What do I represent, strictly objectively? Funny thing, you think you know all about the sort of man who owns a place like this. If you really knew about it, you’d blow the whole town up tomorrow.”

One day, after Angela had disappeared, an FBI agent came to Susan’s apartment to talk to her. She spoke to him long enough to let him know what she thought of him and then shut the door, vaguely aware that in her attempt to sound confident she had come off sounding more like a bratty kid. She stood by the door for ten minutes, convinced the knock would come again. But when she worked up the courage to open the door, no one waited on the threshold.

In February she and Jeff were watching Newsroom one evening when Angela was identified as a member of the group that had taken an heiress from her off-campus apartment, the SLA. Susan was a little surprised to hear it. She hated those bastards, not just for the stupidity of the Foster murder, but because they’d allowed millions to put a finger, once again, on what it was that bugged them, really pissed them off, about Berkeley. Why, it was a drug-saturated cesspool of free love and women’s lib and black militancy and miscegenation and homosexuality and Communist thought, that’s what. Commentators thundered away. It was the Day of the Commentator. Oh, they loved to thunder, Old Testament voices booming from under shaped haircuts and poly-blend suits. Every opportunity was taken to use the past as a bludgeon, as an indictment against the present. And tourists had started coming over, coming down from the hills, from Piedmont, Walnut Creek, Orinda, straights milling around like drunks in North Beach, boorish and judgmental, snapping photographs of houses and storefronts and making everybody uptight.

Then one night Susan arrived home at about five-thirty. Jeff was working that day, housepainting, and wouldn’t be home until later. She dropped her keys in the wooden bowl by the front door, got herself something cold to drink, and turned on the old Philco console set she and Jeff had found on the street and humped three blocks to the apartment. The picture was banded top and bottom by thick horizontal stripes of black that seemed to grow wider by the day, distorting the picture with a flattening, fun house mirror effect. Everyone was short. Everyone was stocky. When you were high it was very amusing. When you weren’t high it was like watching TV with a persistently lousy picture. The jingle for a furniture store sang, “Dublin, Berkeley, San Lorenzo, Cupertino, San Jose,” enumerating the store’s outlets. She moved around the apartment, puttering, gathering up the mail, her unbalanced checkbook. She had nothing planned that night.

The room didn’t feel quite right, the bright paced cadence of sound and controlled shifting of light that she expected from TV wasn’t happening. This awareness came to her on a hypothalamic level, unease seeping into consciousness as a kind of itch. She shifted in her chair, looked out the window. She confirmed that her checkbook made no sense to her. She turned to the TV and was profoundly disturbed by what she saw.

The picture was grainy and slipped in and out of focus. It was so unsteady that Susan felt the presence of the cameraman. What the camera showed also told the story of his limitations, his human inability to do everything right.

Stories of the boundaries of craft are necessarily ruinous and unsettling.

The camera showed a frame bungalow — a poor house, ordinary in its poverty — as purple, deep-shadowed twilight began to fall. Something so homemade to it; formally it reminded her of a pornographic film. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

A voice through a bullhorn: “Ocupiss uh fourtee sixeesix ee fifty fourstree: this izza luzangeles plice, ” is what she heard. The cameraman, her unseen protagonist, abruptly thumbed the zoom, and the frame now embraced a much larger area, an area occupied by squad cars and uniformed cops and soulless, armored creatures, carrying automatic rifles, who surrounded the bungalow. The same purple, deep-shadowed uneventfulness. In her limited experience with pornography, Susan had been impressed by its insistence upon the staging of a scene. Deliberate, leisurely, eschewing montage to allow tension to flirt with tedium. Still purple twilight with shadows and people. The picture bobbled a little, as if the cameraman were impatient with the pace of the story. She reached out and flipped the channel to KRON, KPIX, KGO. It was everywhere. Another bullhorned announcement, the deep basso thrum of a helicopter passing over the scene. Pornography, with its endlessly flimsy pretexts.

“Cupply emerdiately add you woonahbe hahmed.”

The pretexts under which the “true” action commences. Now, what was this that she was watching?

Abruptly, a mediating voice broke in. “For those of you who are just joining us,” it explained.

It was the worst news: Angela had been trapped. Caught shoplifting in L.A., members of the SLA had abandoned their car, leaving behind a parking ticket that had helped the police trace their whereabouts. “And now, death rains down on them from all sides, over a pair of stolen sweat socks!”