Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Then Teko begins. “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.” Guy hates to admit it, but he is growing drowsy as General Field Marshal Teko rails on, sending greetings to obscure or fictitious groups, to “the Anti-Aircraft Forces of the SLA,” to fellow travelers wherever (and whenever) they may find themselves, asserting, curiously, that the SLA fled San Francisco because it is “surrounded by water,” complaining about having been accused of stealing a “forty-nine cents pair of socks” at Mel’s Sporting Goods. “The People found this very difficult to believe when it was pointed out that we had already purchased over thirty dollars’ worth of heavy wool socks and other items.” Listening to Teko argue these points to death, Guy anticipates the long cross-country drive in his company with dismay.

Guy sits up straight, wide awake, when Teko makes the cogent point, the only point requiring relevance, really, that in their annihilating overreaction to the SLA, the “authorities” (a concept that seems to manage better in the abstract) had bared a fundamental contempt for the “People” (ditto). But Guy slumps again when Teko phases into the cant of affected mistrust, to rant about “white, sickeningly liberal, paranoid conspiracy freaks and spaced-out counterculture dope fiends,” zooming in on the prospect of his own paranoia as he disavows wacky rumors about Cinque’s “having been programmed and electrodes implanted in his brain” (this, Guy knows, is in reaction to the published opinion of local conspiracy oracle Mae Brussell, who is never happier than when she can declare that someone has been brainwashed), followed by Teko’s familiar gleeful repudiation of the idea of white cunts “enslaved by gigantic black penises.” (Guy idly wonders how big Teko’s dick is.) Teko finishes up on a triumphally bum note with a little name-dropping. “As our dear comrade Ho Chi Minh once wrote from an imperialist prison, ‘Today the locust fights the elephant, but tomorrow the elephant will be disemboweled.’”

By contrast, Yolanda’s segment is short and sweet. There is the usual agitprop stuff, as she talks about “fifty or one hundred or five hundred irate niggers”—leaving her mouth, the word sounds as stiff and uncomfortable as a new and ill-fitting garment—“firing from their houses, alleyways, treetops and walls, with a straight and fearless shot, to bring down the helicopter, the SWAT squad, the LAPD, the FBI.” As with Teko, though, even her rhetorical incapacity fails to diminish what Guy sees as the pointed truth in this haystack of mumbo jumbo. “There’s been a lot of talk about wasted lives, referring to the six dead bodies of our comrades and to Tania, Teko, and myself. There are no editorials written for the wasted lives of our brothers and sisters gunned down in the streets and prisons.”

So far the eulogy’s been short on tribute and long on exhortation. A belief system, not a group of dead comrades, is being memorialized. But now the moment Guy has been waiting for.

Hers is a small voice, precise though somewhat enervated, a voice that has been so carefully cultivated to enclose a sense of prerogative that even now, more than four months after having been excised from an orderly life, it still conveys her unreserved faith that her expectations will in the end be met. But shortly Guy can hear in the voice the sort of anguish that wracks and diminishes the speaker. Just as he is flashing She loved one of them , Tania says, “Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

How could he not have known? Susan had mentioned something about being sad about Willie, but at that point Guy still needed a scorecard to keep track of the names of the players. He supposes that he figured that the black guy was the one named Willie, don’t ask why. Guy considers this a serious lapse on his part. The voice has the quality of an open sore. While her elegy draws upon the same jargon used by Teko and Yolanda, Tania circles again and again to Cujo. The things lovers tend to do.

Guy suddenly remembers a longish letter he wrote to his big brother, Ernest, making plain his love for a young woman whose name he claims, falsely, he can’t even remember now. What was he, eighteen? It was a letter he’d wanted to write because he felt that the force of his love demanded not merely its revelation at every opportunity but an accompanying detailed validation as well. He had labored — a letter filled to the margins with encomia and which went so far as to attribute to this girl opinions she had never held and sagacious quotations she had never uttered. That girl was alive, though. He had been writing of someone who eventually just walked out of his life, leaving him spangled in the sun of a morning long dead, chopped to half of what he’d been.

Come and get these memories, Guy snickers.

All wrapped up in Teko’s world-in-flames rhetoric, Tania’s naked mourning somehow seems even more poignant than it might have otherwise, as if she were struggling to express herself through tone of voice, through emphasis and cadence, alone. Now slow. Now monotone. Now barely audible. Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. It’s very difficult to listen to this oration and not be convinced that Tania means what she’s saying. Even if the cause was something she embraced halfheartedly, the love of Cujo justified any level of involvement. Cujo’s own involvement was total, ultimately a self-disappearing act. Guy wonders: Did Cujo imagine his death? But of course: all SLA rhetoric is steeped in the language of suicidal devotion to the ideals and goals of the SLA. Those ideals and goals are less precisely stated than the penalties for having trespassed against them. The goal is to defeat the pig, to kill the fascist insect. Guy sits listening to the tape broadcast over foundation-supported noncommercial radio, turning over in his mind the ways he can apply it to the authorized story he’ll try to peddle to Macmillan or Viking or Doubleday, and he knows that Teko, and certainly Yolanda, are aware that the fascist insect will never die, but that they already have attained something even better: They’re handling the biggest star in America. FROM HEIRESS TO TERRORIST. It almost rhymes.

The way she keeps coming back to the subject that haunts her. It just wipes him out.

Cujo was the gentlest.

Cujo taught the truth.

I loved Cujo.

Cujo was beautiful.

Cujo’s name meant something beautiful.

Cujo’s life meant something beautiful.

I never loved anyone like I loved Cujo.

Cujo never loved anyone like he loved me.

When they took Cujo from me, they ripped me off.

Cujo and I were always talking of important things.

I hate my parents, and love Cujo, by the way.

Cujo gave me something to share — and I keep it.

Her boilerplate devotions to the other members of the dead army sound earnest enough, as if she were trying to shut them inside a group of little boxes that have been neatly hammered together by Teko and Yolanda. When she talks about Cujo, Guy gets the feeling that she is trying to praise him back to life. Guy thinks, Love without a soul to receive it is like a ghost. It’s an odd thought for him, but there is such a haunting, searching quality to her voice. It is the inconsolable living who haunt the memory of the dead. Though that first blush, the idyllic inseparability, has long ago faded from his affair with Randi, Guy still tries to imagine what it would be like to know that she had died, to watch it from a distance as smoke signals hoisting the whole weight of their lives together into the air. The desolation.

Suddenly Guy is eighteen and on that dappled plaza, watching a girl walk into the morning fresh.