Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

He knocks, employing the ridiculously lively shave-and-a-haircut theme. After a silent interval he adds the two bits. More silence. He turns and, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, looks down upon the courtyard. A Ford Pinto pulls into one of the carports, and a middle-aged woman emerges in a pants suit an acute shade of green, keys dangling from her hand, and stares curiously up at Guy.

“He’s away,” she calls, shielding her eyes with the hand holding the keys.

“Pardon me?” answers Guy, raising a cupped hand to his ear.

“I say, he must have gone away.” The woman has begun to mount the stairs. “His car’s been gone for the past few days anyways.” She points at one of the empty carports.

“I’m. Oh. Well.” Guy has no idea what to say. He feels out of his depth, a vertiginous sensation that precedes what he knows will be an inept improvisation. He reaches for his shoulder bag. “Maybe I’ll just leave him a note.” He nods, smiling with tight lips at the woman. Who snorts.

“ If he knows how to read.” With that, she fits the key into the lock and lets herself into her apartment.

Guy removes the yellow pad and a pen from the shoulder bag. He gently lays the zucchini bread at his feet. What’s he supposed to write? Yabba-dabba-doo? Death to the Fascist Insect? Well, you know, we all want to change the world? He looks up and, unsurprisingly, sees the curtain move at the window beside Miss High-Wattage Green’s door. A good bet that his note will be inspected. He writes: “Was here Sun AM. Will try again. G.” He tucks it under the door, leaving half an inch or so exposed so that the woman doesn’t kill herself clawing it out from under there.

Back in the Bug he begins rhythmically contracting his sphincter, trying to stave off the inevitable. Plus give himself more sexual stamina and longer and more satisfying orgasms, to look at it in the long term. Primarily, though, he’s trying to keep the shit up the chute. Usually he can manage to make himself forget about it, but he can tell that today he is on the verge of a rude and unpleasant experience, and he is about to turn the key in the ignition and head back to Oakland when he sees the distinctive tail of the Pinto, like the thalidomide nightmare of European design sensibility, emerge from the driveway as the green woman turns sharply and takes off up the hill. He’s out of the car for one more try.

His note appears to be missing. He knocks. He knocks again, louder. He places his hand on the doorknob. He is feeling nakedly conspicuous and out of place here in this quiet apartment complex. He may as well act as if he belonged here, what the fuck. Besides, he has to get to a toilet right away.

The door opens when he turns the knob. Inside, a smell like that of a pet shop, vaguely aquatic. He spies the enormous aquarium that sits in a corner of the living room. The fish rise, fall, and dart in its soft glow, and he is drawn to them, comes near and watches the neon tetras and the angelfish and whatever else there are in there moving in loose and graceful formation inside the box of lighted water. He spots a toggle on the light ballast that fits over the aquarium’s top, and when he switches it, the aquarium becomes, under the scrutiny of a black light, a lunar landscape, the neon tetras a liquid metal as if forged from the sultry waters of their origin, luminous and mercurial, dancing above the brilliant and depthless gravel in the ultraviolet cartoon of his gaze.

Then he feels it, a hollow clunk accompanying the metallic shock of the thing’s making contact with the back of his skull, and a strange sensation of being probed, as if he were first to be examined by the instrument of his destruction, and also there is the oddly light grip on his shoulder as he is guided, backward, out of the living room and into the kitchen. He moves stiffly and takes tiny steps, feeling the terrain change from shag carpeting to linoleum. He is placed standing amid the cupboards before a small, round dinette table set in front of a sliding glass door, crudely curtained with floral bed sheets, that leads to a tiny balcony. On the dinette table is an army surplus gas mask bag, open, from which the butt end of a revolver and a pack of Tareytons protrude. A spiral-bound notebook lies open next to the bag, a capped Bic inserted in the twisted wire spine.

The butt end of a revolver, protruding, nearby.

A male voice, several feet away: “Well, did you check his bag?”

A woman, closer: “No.” Guy notices that the object against his head moves ever so slightly when she speaks.

“Well, you know. I think I’ve mentioned before. Real, real important.”

“I’m sorry.” The voice is tiny.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”

Butt end, just a quick grab away.

But there is the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and footsteps, and Guy’s shoulder bag is roughly taken from him, and the bag of zucchini bread too.

If there is a gun in the gas mask bag, then this thing against his head definitely is a gun. Because otherwise they’d use the one in the bag. Right?

The man asks, “What’s this?” A small hairy hand holds the bread up in front of his face.

Guy responds: “Zucchini bread.”

“You a fucking baker, man?”

“I thought you might want something homemade.”

“I might?”

“All of you.”

“All of us. Shit.” The man chuckles.

“Who do you think ‘us’ is?” The woman presses the gun into his occiput. Guy thinks he is going to shit in his pants.

“I’m Guy Mock. Check the shoulder bag.”

“Did I ask who you were?”

“Well. But I think you’re expecting me.”

From outside there comes the hollow sound, surprisingly loud, of people ascending the staircase. Quick steps, which seem to jar the flimsy building to its very core, move down the walkway and pause outside the door. In the silence it’s as if the room itself had been drawn in with their held breaths, all the isolating span removed from the space the three of them and the gun and Guy’s tortured gut share. The only sound is the aquarium’s humming filter. Then the sound of a key being shaken loose from the others on a ring and then inserted in the lock. The door opens, and Susan Rorvik enters, followed by an older woman, with graying hair and eyeglasses. For an instant Guy wonders why Susan has brought her mother here with her, and how nice, how weird, up from Twentynine Palms, or what is it, Palmdale? some desert spot, an oasis of aluminum siding and thirsty imported turf, military bases of unknown purpose — covert training of desert assassins, testing of nerve gases that curdle the minutest aspects of human anatomy, dissection of alien visitors — hello, good to see you, glad to know you, ha-ha-ho. Then, as Susan gasps, “Guy!” the other woman removes the wig and the glasses, and Guy stares into the face of Diane Shepard, who is looking past his shoulder.

“God fucking damn it, Teko, that’s Guy Mock. You want her to blow his head off?”

For the first time in about, oh, six lifetimes, a few shrill eternities in the lake of fire, an extended cosmic interval in which that famous solitary ant has carted off the greater part of the Gobi, the Sahara, the Gibbon, one grain at a time, the gun moves off his skull, and Guy turns, pivots carefully with no unnecessary movement of his extremities, to face Tania.

“I’m, like, really sorry,” she says. She blushes.

They sit in the living room, Guy cross-legged on the floor between Susan and Jeff Wolfritz, who has joined them in the apartment sometime during the bathroom interval that restores tranquil immaculacy to Guy’s GI system, with the SLA three lining the couch in the deadeye sepia pose of a nineteenth-century family group. The fish in the tank dive, dart, and coast. For his pitch, Guy settles into the lotus position. An affectation, to be sure, intended to imbue his physical aspect with the wisdom that his staring eyes and receding hairline combine to deny. And that he does, after all, possess to a measurable degree. Plus it stretches out the ligaments in his hips, allowing for deeper and more thrillingly pleasurable penetration during intercourse.