Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“You know what you’re doing. You’re running around changing the bed sheets in that motel. Get that guy across the street to look after it for you. Taranutz.”

“Ha. I am not the one convinced of the infallibility of Dick Taranutz.”

“Still. I would suggest this trip. Whatever your final decision is, and I will respect that decision, I ask that you consider the benefits of a little change of pace, plus also these life and death aspects I mentioned. Not to put pressure, but because it really is a matter of life and death.”

“Whose?”

“Pardon?”

“Whose life and whose death?”

“Well that, that I don’t really feel comfortable discussing over the phone. Which I hope you understand. But I can tell you that Randi and I need your help driving a very important person from here, the Bay Area, to the East Coast.”

“Randi’s coming?” Mr. Mock’s face lit up. He liked Randi. In the designer living room, at the sound of the inappropriately mannish, she thought, name, Mrs. Mock wrinkled her nose.

GUY IS A DERVISH today. The phone, the car, the knocking on doors, the typewriter, the tape recorder: All this industry should have him flat on his back moaning for ice and Darvon and a deep-tissue massage of the variety that tends, in his experience, to lead to intercourse and the sort of acute, spirit-wringing orgasm he would feel compelled to note in a journal, if only he kept a journal. Instead, manic, he smokes a joint, feeling the air around him in the kitchen. It presses in on him, weighty. Vibes in here. There’d been an argument, of course. Here I am just getting it together here and you want me to head back to New York indefinitely? And so on. Randi is usually pretty pliant but he senses that in this case he’s run up against the limits of her patience.

It still isn’t exactly a question of will-she-or-won’t-she, but he’ll have to find a way to “make it up to” her. As he’s promised so many times.

In the meantime, though, he is on this energy jag that he finds just exhilarating. Just to have been able to put an end to the “discussion” with Randi — she remained unsatisfied, he could tell, as he backed out of the room, hands raised in the air as if she were an armed bandit — just to have managed that was a minor accomplishment of a kind.

Oh, the methodically thrown plates that had zipped across the room the day that shouted name, Erica Dyson, had hovered, charging the air between them, becoming taboo evermore. Shards of china progressively filled the checkerboard spaces of the kitchen linoleum, skidding across them, coming to rest in the corners. When finally one had ricocheted, breaking the rhythm, to strike him just above the left eye, there had been instead of pain the feeling of awakening from a dream.

In and out, in and out, all day long. Armful of maps from AAA. Granola and some twiggy stuff for trail mix. Wigs from Wig City over in Oak Town.

The telephone’s on his desk in the spare room. His squat little buddy, the phone. Calls like potato chips, just one and you’re committed to a spate of them, helpless. Guy likes the phone. Invasive, irresistible, anonymous, it amplifies his core personality in all sorts of interesting ways. As a teenager he’d pick out girls he liked from his high school class and telephone their homes, basically tripping on the fact that he was making a disruptive noise right where they lived , causing all the wholesome activities there to stop, their dads rumbling up out of their easy chairs, grunting with the effort, to pick up the phone as their pretty blossoming daughters waited to see what news or worshiper’s adoration the call might yield. Guy would hang up. He wasn’t a heavy breather. It had nothing to do with sex at all. Sex was another thing; the fine art of masturbation he had honed to perfection was another story. Offered up lessons in technique in the school cafeteria before a captive audience of late bloomers and textbook cases of latency, pimpled pusses registering both faint disgust and budding interest. But the calls had been about sheer manipulation.

The plan has come to him in bits and pieces. His friend Gary Kearse will be arriving soon to take Yolanda first. Guy doesn’t describe it this way, but it will be a dry run to see how things go before Tania goes across. When that happens he personally intends to escort her, posing as her husband; along with his real parents, posing as his fake parents (an interesting concept). Why not just send her with his parents? He can’t fully justify his desire to accompany her. Definitely the sheer star appeal of Tania is a factor. Also the fact that conceivably he can swing the credit for recovering her if she takes it into her head to walk into a state police barracks somewhere and turn herself in. Also he figures that once he’s in New York maybe he can reach for a few strings, sit down with his connections at some of the hipper publishing houses to discuss the Book Project. Also there’s the sense that he’s serving something bigger and more important than himself, though to be honest he is not exactly persuaded of the merit of the SLA’s politics. That doesn’t particularly matter to him, though. Fame, money, and high principles definitely figured into the scheme in that precise order. Also sex, in there somewhere. Sprinkled over everything else, say. He admits (to himself) that he has toyed with the idea of seducing Tania on the road, a visualization of himself as Humbert Humbert. There is a strange reckless something about the girl that tells him she’s game for just about anything and that this sort of willing enthusiasm is still exhilaratingly fresh for her. Anyway, it’ll be him, Tania, and his parents, the very image of propriety barreling down the highway in a twoton boat. Dad of course will be let down when Randi doesn’t turn up for the trip (if all goes according to plan, after Randi’s done boiling over and Guy has a chance to sit down with her and discuss details, she will be leaving in the Bug ahead of time to open the apartment and find a suitably remote hideaway for the summer), but Guy hopes that Tania will prove a sufficient surrogate. So to speak.

Teko, Guy’s decided, is going to have to stay here in the Bay Area and wait for Guy to return for him, a little payback for the gun-to-the-head incident that otherwise he’s completely forgotten about.

Now Guy is in a chair, listening to KPFA. Susan has called to say that through friends (friends or “friends”? Guy wondered. The occulted language sometimes got confusing), she arranged for the delivery of a tape to KPFK, KPFA’s sister station in L.A. The tape contains a lengthy eulogy to the SLA dead recorded by the three survivors. KPFK broadcast the tape immediately after having been tipped off to its presence under a bunch of crap in an alley behind the station.

Guy loves the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

Commercial radio is already broadcasting parts of the tape, but left-leaning Pacifica stations like KPFA and KPFK will air the thing in its entirety.

Guy is aware that Susan is still trying to sell him on the SLA. He admits to himself that despite all his activity and plans, the way that he responds to the tape is going to make a difference, if only in terms of his personal feelings. Things will continue to happen anyway, since he’s already set them in motion, a certain precipitousness for which he is renowned. Repent at leisure, ha-ha. Anyway, he wants to believe, at least, that Tania means what she says. Why will a scripted tape convince him? He doesn’t know. In a way, it’s pretty pathetic. He managed to sit and look into the girl’s eyes, and he had his doubts, but a radio broadcast will tip the balance in one direction or another.

He leans back in his chair. It’s a thrift shop find, a high-backed dark Naugahyde executive swivel chair that looks as if it would be at home in the corner office of a Hayward law firm. The announcer comes on and does some horsing around. KPFA can get a little smart-alecky, Guy thinks. It often sounds to him like a group of students who have taken over the high school PA. But that’s the Movement for you. Willie Wolfe had probably segued directly from toilet-papering houses on Halloween to pointing guns at savings bank depositors, and Angela Atwood, Pat Soltysik, and Nancy Ling Perry must have been more familiar with their driver’s ed manual than with the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla . Is he being glib? Yes, he is being glib.