Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

First, though, he has some principled questions.

What about the assassination of Marcus Foster, the Oakland superintendent of schools, who was universally perceived as a progressive influence and whose killing was angrily denounced by the black community and the Left alike?

“Neither of us was in the SLA then.”

“We read about it in the newspapers.”

“I was just an average Berkeley housewife then.”

But did you agree with the Foster killing?

Here Teko lays out a sinuously convoluted rationale, in which he seems to have complete faith, concerning (1) the fascist Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, (2) the imminent implementation of a program in which “bio-dossiers” would have been maintained on all students attending the Oakland public schools, (3) fascist police agents patrolling the halls with shotguns and attack dogs, (4) fascist concentration camps for so-called troublemakers, and (5) Foster’s complicity in all of the above. Plus the program was to be implemented under the direction of a “former police sergeant.”

Guy thinks it’s funny; an entirely new subset of clichés was coming of age. He hadn’t realized that the SLA took its rhetoric literally .

Anyway, after the assassination, Teko and Yolanda bought up all the copies of the Oakland Tribune they could find: to send to friends.

“But then the community reaction was so overwhelmingly negative,” complains Yolanda bitterly.

“Not that the People really liked Foster,” says Teko.

“He was just a fucking fascist,” says Tania.

“They made believe they liked him because they knew the pigs would come down on them if they talked about him the way they really felt.”

It might have been a better idea, the harijan army agrees, to start slow, with confrontational graffiti and broken windows, before moving up to shotgunning Foster and his fascist lieutenant, Blackburn.

Guy thinks, fascist fascist fascist fascist fascist.

OK, then, what about the Hibernia Bank robbery? What was the necessity of shooting two bystanders? Hadn’t you already obtained your objective of “expropriating” funds?

“It became imperative to obtain resources by any means necessary,” says Yolanda.

“It was totally compulsory. We were forced into it since being underground had totally depleted our funds.”

“We like couldn’t work,” explains Tania.

But what about the shootings?

“Oh, everybody was real shaken up by that,” says Teko.

“It was an overreaction. I don’t see that ever happening again.”

“In combat you have to make these decisions on a split-second basis.”

“They were told , the two men, they were told to lie on the floor like everybody else. They ran instead. And were fired upon.”

That was their split-second decision.

“Exactly.”

“We should have put something out explaining the mistake and saying we were sorry. It’s important for revolutionaries to do that.”

“A serious blemish on an operation that was otherwise extremely well done,” says Teko.

Guy had expected something more from these bright people — the pep chairman and straight A student, the social chair of Chi Omega, and the art history major whose society wedding had been scheduled to take place this very month — more than for the three of them to sit here answering his questions with all the earnest insincerity of entry-level job applicants. They so wanted to provide the “right” answers. They were so convinced that there were right answers, and that he was looking for them. Now the big one:

How about the kidnapping?

“Which one?” More laughter.

“Well, that’s just it. You’re laughing. But there’s something,” Guy says, “about taking people by force, making them come with you under duress.”

Teko and Yolanda look back at him brightly, attentively, though there’s something about them that gives the impression that they’re bracing for a body blow. Guy turns his eyes on Tania. She recedes into the couch, as if she were embroidered on its surface, an anchored superficiality. Her own eyes are steady, and looking at nothing.

“It’s just, it’s everything freedom isn’t, whatever the ‘reason’ may happen to be. I guess you could argue for the political necessity of Foster’s assassination; you could even make a case for shooting those people at the bank, if you really really had to. But there’s something about taking over a person’s life and making it something other than their own.”

“Oh, Dan Russell loved every minute he was with us,” says Yolanda. “I could tell.”

Guy says, “I’m not talking about god damn Dan Russell, and you know it.” He surprises himself with his sudden change of tone.

“What are you talking about?” Yolanda’s face is rigid, lean with anger, and she sits straight up. Mean, Guy thinks. Mean woman.

In the end, Guy leaves, exhausted, without having made a single commitment to these people. Susan walks him to the door, holding his forearm, gripping it as they step out onto the walkway, gripping the arm as they move down the stairs and into the courtyard. She is leaning in, pitching for his aid. She is saying Angela: Angela this, Angela that, invoking — not entirely fairly, Guy thinks — the name of her dead friend. Ultimately, hers is not an appeal to his politics. Guy tries to imagine what it must feel like: to catch fire, and burn. He finally takes hold of the hand hanging on to him, holds it gently in his as a prelude to dropping it and walking away.

He is excited and troubled. The SLA sat there stripped naked — figuratively, anyway — bereft of comrades, friends, lovers, an operative sense of purpose, and all because they didn’t show up. What’s more, they lost the revolution. We can’t forget that they lost the war, even if not many people happened to notice it, that’s what it was to them — the Naga banner their battle flag, “Death to the Fascist Insect” their rebel yell — and in the end they were massacred by the state for having waged it, massacred in an act of lawlessness under color of authority. As General Teko carefully pointed out, most of the people in that house had not been charged with any crime before being surrounded; they were as innocent as the day they were born, were, in effect, martyrs to the cause, although they were at war with fascist Amerikkka (which word Guy noticed Teko had found a distinct way to pronounce), and Guy stayed with Teko despite this minor sophistry, thought he was right on , but then Teko had gone into some strange obsessive rap about Gigantic Black Penises and White Cunts and Bourgeois Fear while Yolanda and Tania accompanied him with this fake black churchy thing (“Tell it!” “Uhnhhuhnh!”), so Guy had carefully sorted through his memories until he located one of a breathtakingly cold swim he’d taken in Lake Tahoe one morning in early summer, of devouring the contents of a picnic basket after having emerged shivering from the jeweled water, one of many pointless reminiscences that spangle his consciousness, and it tided him over until Teko quit with all the dick talk.

So. They are these defeated people, crumpled up like old Dixie cups someone pissed in before deciding to toss them, fucked up with grief and regret. Right? No, they are giving him shit: “What kind of car is it you drive?” “Who’d you say it was that published your book?” “How big of an advance would a book like this be likely to get?” “Where will we be staying?” These American revolutionaries are interested in the amenities.

The afternoon has had an unusual effect on him. In having sat in a shabby North Berkeley apartment across from the fugitive heiress, the girl whose absence has been the strange floating turd in the punchbowl of jeunesse dorée, Guy feels that he has experienced the sense of wonder you might undergo in opening up an oyster and finding a pearl. So Guy decides he is going to be expansive about it. So they’ve fucked everything up, and they’re mostly wrong, and every exchange they shared with him wobbled at the edge of argument. So the Shepards take a scattershot approach to assigning blame, at times conveniently impugning the dead. So there is not even a single focused reason that will serve to clarify his own motives. He sees a group of people. He sees a narrative. He sees himself having lunch with an editor.