Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

She’d told him this and he said that the man who did Tigger’s voice was a fascist.

He said, “You have to watch out for that voice because it’s all over the place in disguise.”

Randi thought about that one, about watching out for a disguised voice.

“Would you need special equipment, Guy, or what?”

A dismissive wave. “It’s Cap’n Crunch, it’s Toucan Sam, it’s the Pillsbury Doughboy, and for all I know it could be the little guy in the rowboat stranded in the middle of the toilet bowl, or Armstrong on the moon with his giant step and his baby step unless you actually believe they managed to shoot something with that kind of a payload into space, which is a physical impossibility. But he is a total fascist, and a stool pigeon to boot. An undercover informer.”

Randi wondered if there was any other kind of informer.

“He lulls people into this total lack of suspicion, granting command performances. Doing the nostalgic breakfast voices of these sugary cereals that set off some pinball array of lights in your brain.”

The voices of cereals? And what about the man in the toilet? thought Randi. But she hadn’t said anything.

Now he bounces into a room, specifically a kitchen, filled with cardboard boxes, each bearing a label of woolly specificity, “KITCHEN STUFF.” Three of them are open on the floor, islanded away from the greater stack amid snarls of paper tape and crumpled pages from The New York Times. These were where the skillet and spatula and silverware and plates and cups and coffeepot and salt and pepper shakers came from.

Guy and Randi have just moved back from New York, where they went to live after Guy had gotten shit-canned by Oberlin. For a while Oberlin could quasi-deal with a so-called radical director of athletics, but when Guy opened that big mouth of his to attack Bear Bryant, the shit really hit the fan.

Picture, like, a million angry alumni chanting imprecations from a hilltop.

It took a while, but the new president and the trustees finally sidled up to Guy with an offer to buy out the two years remaining on his contract. Second time that had happened. The first had been up at the University of Washington, where they paid him off without his having worked a single day. So they moved to New York. A little apartment on West Ninetieth with exposed brick walls and upstairs neighbors who had a washing machine that made the windows rattle in their frames when it hit the spin cycle. You could hear the machine moving across the floor overhead until it reached some apparently impassable groove in the wide pine boards and then the windows started moving, shuddering with a vehemence that made Randi think of earthquakes, of seismograph needles going berserk, every time. And they washed a lot of clothes upstairs.

But let’s face it, you can blame the shaky windows and the flaky brick walls all you want, plus the parking problems because like a pair of dopes they brought the car with them to the city and then like a singular dope Guy refused to get rid of it — but let’s face it, Randi is not a New York person. Nothing against the place at all. It is unique and vital and stylish and blabitty blah blah blah. Whatever it’s necessary to say to keep hysterical N.Y.C. partisans from flying at her face like birds with talons or whatever. They can get pretty weird with the whole Manhattan fetish thing. Even here you run into ex — New Yorkers of fierce loyalty who always refer to themselves as expatriates for some dimly romantic reason. And all you have to do is mention California, and they’re on you; it’s like you issued an invitation to your own autopsy. Your life is stupid, your motives are stupid, and the very thing that maybe ought to redeem you, the moving to New York, is the stupidest thing of all plus makes you totally unwelcome. She couldn’t figure it out. Say you’re from Detroit and they love you to death, pat you on the head, and give you ice cream.

“So say you’re from Detroit,” said Guy.

“What’s for breakfast?” says Guy.

“I had some eggs.”

Guy’s eyes are roving, looking around for an alternative. They come to rest on a box of All-Bran atop the fridge. Direct connection between Guy and this dowdy box of fiber. It was amazing to watch, a joy for Randi to behold. Whatever else he is, the man is in touch with himself and his needs; he is a conduit to some future time when hypochondria is bred into the genome. Imagine living with an evolutionary link. Better start having some kids.

When they left New York, they kept the apartment because they were so flush with the spoils of controversy that Randi didn’t feel like arguing with Guy over the crummy $250 a month, though she definitely could have seen it going toward something more substantial. But Guy started in, pulling dubiously accented French phrases like pied-à-terre on her like concealed weapons, and she just tuned out: like, OK, zzzzzzz — nap time! When Guy went to work on you, it was like Last Year at Marienbad forever. And if he wanted it, so what? He was the one who’d gone to all the trouble of getting fired. He’d even gotten Spiro Agnew pissed off at him. (“Yeah, look what that got him,” said Guy.) They piled their effects into boxes and labeled the boxes and piled the boxes into a U-Haul trailer and attached the trailer to their car and got some maps from AAA and some film for the camera and headed cross-country in a variation on a hardy American theme, hoping against hope that in years to come, as nostalgia became their dominant style of utterance, they would have completely forgotten that they spent a big chunk of the time creeping down the highway, bickering, afflicted with indigestion.

They came back to the East Bay. No place like it in the world. Randi loves the endless spring you earned after the months of rain, the soft summer nights when the other side of the bay is covered with fog and yecch. She likes the street people and the campus nearby. And they have friends here, which had been hard to swing elsewhere.

But Guy is already getting restless. He was definitely a person who needed something to do. Her, you give her some potting soil and the new Ross MacDonald, and she could disappear for about maybe three days. Some fresh lemons to squeeze into lemonade, a jug to fill with teabags and water and stick in the sun for a day. Give her a broom and a porch covered with sand and dried mud. She can pass months like this, marking time by the diurnal succession of events, flowerings, ripenings, gatherings, emptyings, endings.

Guy takes one look at the boxes on the floor, rinses out a water glass in the sink, and fills that with the All-Bran. He eats standing over the sink. He, what is the right way, he bolts his food. Not every time but when it’s useful to him. She knows he has some big plans because he doesn’t want to sit down with her and hold forth for an hour.

“What are you doing today?” she ventures.

“Susan and Jeff’s.”

“The barbecue!” says Randi, as if it were the solution to an enduring mystery, Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. Susan Rorvik and Jeff Wolfritz had taken custody of their big barbecue grill when they’d left for Ohio, and they never had replaced it.

“Something’s on the fire, all right.” Spooning bran into his mouth, Guy hunches and unhunches his shoulders a few times, which Randi takes to be a form of laughter. Whatever. She is into her day now. She will begin penciling out a list soon. Tops on it is getting the KITCHEN STUFF unpacked and into cupboards and drawers because when your personal things are inaccessible it means you are dwelling in a state that is akin to death. It’s a long June day and she wants its Alpha and its Omega down on a piece of scrap paper where she can keep an eye on them. She sees herself in the backyard as evening falls, drinking something cold at the round table, amid the petitioning of the crickets, the bougainvillea darkening in the failing light. California.