Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Socks?

She watched with a sense of inevitability. The moment at which the camera lens had changed its focal length to alter the banal street scene, to take in the spectacle of the potential siege that beset it, Susan knew how it was going to end. TV and Vietnam had taught her that much.

She learned a thing or two about “false consciousness” that evening. Her horror at the televised firefights from Vietnam had been contrived and casual, her disgust less debilitating than a stubbed toe. But the sense of dread that filled her watching the black smoke pour out of the blazing house once the cops were done with it; the lifelessness, or, rather, the sense of the recent elimination of life, that emanated from the place as, crackling, its ceiling collapsed and its walls crumpled; the open glee of the reporters; the knowledge that Angela was gone, leaving a charred log they could pin their judgmental misconceptions on: It all had her shivering as if with fever and retching.

What impressed her, later, was the clarity with which she received the message, for the first time in her life, that when terrible events occur unexpectedly, even a forcefully lucid awareness of the chain of their causation does not rob those events of the power to astonish. The guns, the armored men, the breathless reporters, the scene’s redolence of inevitability: Even in their contribution to the swelling anticipation, none of those things matched the flight of the first bullet, its seeming spontaneity despite all the evidence that the machine of the state had ordained its firing.

Now Angela’s in the ground and Susan has been dreaming every night of pets in danger; of children she knows with certainty are her own slipping out of her grasp and falling; of her father alone, his heart failing, his delicate aging body breaking — dreams of perfect anxiety that fill her nights. She would have thought she’d thrash in the bed under the influence of such dreams, but she lies still, feels in her tight chest and beating heart and irregular breaths as she comes awake in the predawn a sense of surfacing from beneath the weight of dark water. She lies beside Jeff, knowing that sleep is finished for the night, that the day begins now, begins here. Now, what do you do? Proximity alone doesn’t place you at the epicenter of “struggle.”

On May 31 the Weather Underground bombed the attorney general’s office in L.A., for “our brothers and sisters” of the SLA. The unacceptable group had finally gained some limited entree among the Left. Encouraged, Susan threw herself into organizing a memorial rally for the group, to be held at Ho Chi Minh Park on June 2.

“I think that would be kind of an extreme reaction, Jerry.”

“Well, as I said, you don’t spend much time in Palo Alto.”

“Even if I did.”

“Oh, really?” Jerry smiles, rattles his cubes. “Well, all right, Miss Principled Assistance.” He smiles, frowns. “Look, the people to whom you’re providing this principled assistance are responsible for some spectacularly stupid rhetoric. And you weren’t far behind them the other day, I have to say.”

“Oh, really?”

“This is not a strictly literary assessment. I mean their behavior, I mean their ideology and politics, I mean the whole chimichanga.”

“Well, what about the behavior of the pigs?” spits Susan.

“Pigs?” Jerry rattles the cubes. “Go on.”

“I’m waiting tables,” Susan says, finally. “That’s the day job. Just, you know, taking people’s orders, making sure the kitchen gets it right.”

“You’re going to tell me you’re a waitress.” Uncle Jerry’s tone is nasty all of a sudden.

“The tips are great,” says Susan, and turns away.

Her father is laughing with someone, trying to remember the words to the Fargo Central High School anthem. As she comes near, he reaches out, without looking at her, taking her gently by the arm, drawing her into the conversation. When he has her close, he turns to her.

“The football team was called the Midgets, Susan. The Midgets!”

His face is happy, as if he were sharing a joyous surprise. Who wouldn’t be happy about this? Rooted for a team called the Midgets. She’s heard it all before, eaten it up. Summers at Camp Cormorant. Headed downtown to N.P. Avenue on Friday nights and tried to talk to girls. Joined the navy and flew gull-winged Corsairs in the PTO. Nobody complained about those flight paths. Hadn’t everything been hunky-dory? Come back home, move to the Golden State, raise a family, teach high school English, coach sports. It’s not like Uncle Jerry: the dilapidated leftism, the showy contempt for the trappings of his military contract millions, even the bookish allusions. It’s clear to Susan that Jerry is not what he wants to be, that he feels trapped in his own life, that he is not “advising” her so much as urging her to take notice of him.

Yet from the curdled political outlook that led her father to vote — enthusiastically, and twice — for Nixon, to mutate from a New Deal Democrat into the sort of man who casts a ballot in the spirit of retribution, from the disconnected fear and anxiety that have netted her mother a set of annoying habits, a penchant for imagining the worst, and an open prescription for Miltown, from all these things she can see that somewhere down the line everything went to shit for them too. They were still the same people, fair and loving, nothing had changed to turn them into monsters, but they radiated disappointment, this sense that somehow American life was basically just a bust. It makes her sad for her father, all of a sudden. Sad for him that he knows something, has intuitively fathomed it even from way out in that scrubbed high desert country, knows the same thing that she knows and can’t quite figure out what to do about it. Votes for Nixon and buys a porch light that responds to shadowy movement, out there in the dark, snapping on abruptly.

And she’s figured out what to do about it?

They’re not a kissy-kissy family. They do not effusively express their affection for one another. Deep Scandinavian reserve, tempered on the bitter plains of America’s hinterlands. But Susan seizes her father now, throws her arms around him, kisses him again and again.

Someone cornily applauds. Someone cornily says, “Hear, hear!”

“I love you, Dad,” she says.

“Well,” he says, his face lit with a kind of bashful pleasure, “that’s just fine.”

Ho Chi Minh Park, June 2, 1974:

“Keep fighting! I’m with you! We’re with you!”

Susan saw flashbulbs popping, the Mickey Mouse — eared profile of spring-loaded Bolexes fitted with four-hundred-foot magazines and the bosomy swelling of Canon Scoopic 16s, cameras panning across the hirsute crowd, the short-sleeved, short-haired men who operated these devices looking as incongruous as nature photographers amid a flock of agitated exotic birds.

She felt the thrill of fame.

Roger shakes her awake; they’re parked outside her apartment building. She thanks her cousin and turns away to climb the outside staircase to her apartment, groping in her handbag for her keys. She sees the package leaning against her door. It’s a book in a brown paper bag, The Art of the Stage . She’s pleased with its familiarity, and then she opens it and sees Angela’s equally familiar writing, the name Angel DeAngelis (a little halo over the first g) and a Bloomington, Indiana, address. A slip of paper falls from between the book’s pages.

Are you with us?

Meet me in the park tomorrow.

“Oh, yes,” says Susan.

GUY MOCK HAS A way of bouncing into a room like Tigger. That’s whom Randi thought of once, trying to compare the man’s energy to someone or something, an effortless flash of similitude that her brain awarded her, another small fraction of the distance toward understanding this person she’d been dealing with since, oh, 1963. It was, yes, Kennedy was president.