Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

ONE LAST THING:

Canary pads. A child’s delight. Her father brought them home for her and her sisters in his briefcase, along with ballpoint pens, paper clips, typewriter erasers, reams of twenty-pound bond. The agreeable fact that they came from Daddy’s office, not from a store. Though that would have been all right too. Tania feels that if history has tossed her and this yellow pad together in this place at this moment, it is her own history. It’s an oddly comfy feeling, if false, the one this urban guerrilla has in the rear kitchen, piebald with sun and shadow, of the apartment on Euclid Avenue.

She works diligently, in shifting natural light. Though the others are waiting, she loses track of the time it takes. It seems a long time since she’s worked on a composition. From the other room comes Teko’s murmuring voice. There is an oddly familiar quality to the murmuring. Tania realizes, with only the mildest surprise, that Teko is imitating the tone and cadence of Cinque’s voice. He is recording his part of their collective eulogy to their fallen comrades, her own contribution to which she is now composing. She hears Yolanda loudly and contemptuously correct his pronunciation of W.E.B. DuBois’s surname. “Shit!” says Teko.

She bends to the work, her hand pleasantly cramped. Occasionally she massages it in the softening light. She reflects that sometimes dusk can seem later and more urgent than any part of the night, courting as each day does the petty grief over its own loss on the blushed horizon. It is too late. Tania feels that the last fading plumes of her trust in the world evaporated in the sky above Los Angeles, along with her old measure of herself. The true self is here at this table, transformed and annealed, and she takes care to make plain that her tribute is intended not merely to lay the dead to rest but as an annunciation.

“Greetings to the People. This is Tania. Now that the fascists have assassinated our six brothers and sisters the pig media waddles up to the trough to feast upon their brutalized remains. The lies and falsehoods they are spreading about our comrades are beyond even what we had thought them capable of. Cujo was the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known. In the short amount of time we had together he sought only to teach me the truth that had been kept from me throughout my life among the pigs. In the end he gave his own life for the People willingly and without hesitation. Some pig probably got a medal for shooting him down, but beware, pig: the name Cujo means ‘unconquerable.’ You may have destroyed his body but his spirit lives in the hearts and minds of the People. I never loved another individual the way I loved Cujo. I don’t mean the bourgeois love that seeks houses and fancy cars. I mean a mutual love based on the struggle for the People. They can’t take that from me. When the pigs stole Cujo from me I understood at last how it felt for thousands of beautiful sisters and brothers in Amerikkka when they were ripped off by the pigs of their loved ones. We mourn together! Let our guns sing our grief!

“Gelina said it all with her beautiful words but she was burning inside with a fire to destroy the fascist insect. She came a long way to become the guerrilla warrior who died fighting the pigs. She taught me how to forget the past, to wash the blood off my hands, and make a fresh start as a revolutionary. How we laughed together, cried together, loved together, hated together. She loved the People as much as any of us.

“Gabi embraced all, she will be remembered as one of the true mothers of the Revolution. She was patient and gentle — but also a merciless killer whose shotgun barked pure death from its maw. She was murdered trying to wring justice from the fascists using the only method pigs can understand.

“Zoya died on her birthday. It is the sort of death that gives a fierce and passionate life like hers meaning. She was pure death, icy and meticulous, unflinchingly delivering vengeance upon those who would deny the People their freedom. She taught me how to kill — now she’s taught me how to die.

“Fahizah understood the importance of her own righteous example. She understood the timidity of the middle-class, cringing, hamburger-eating pig and how that fear could paralyze. Her solution was to refuse to hesitate: shoot to kill, and ask questions later. She loved the People, and freedom, and she always will be loved.

“Cinque saw the future as a beacon up ahead and he steered us there tirelessly, his strong Black hand upon the tiller of freedom. He gave us the gift of himself, when he could have been with his beautiful sisters and brothers. He taught everyone that Black people and whites could be comrades, that the fight for freedom is color-blind. He was hard on us, a strict teacher and a stern leader, but he always let us see that it was his love for the People that drove him. He always told us that it wasn’t how long you live that matters: it’s how you live. When he was assassinated by the cowardly pigs he proved that in dying for the People’s freedom his life had the highest meaning imaginable. On February 4, Cinque Mtume saved my life.

“The SLA goes on under the leadership of General Field Marshal Teko. As a fully functioning cell of the Malcolm X Combat unit of the SLA we are prepared to function autonomously. The pigs articulate no more than their own fear and alarm when they report that we are leaderless and broken.

“In the end, a small fire team of committed urban guerrillas faced down an army of cowering pigs, who could find only one way to defeat them: by setting fire to them with incendiary grenades. Perhaps in underestimating the commitment and bravery of the fallen SLA soldiers they had only their own cowardice to guide them. Now they call them suicidal: what a joke. Only the corrupt fascist insect would mistake courage for suicide. There was no surrender then, nor will there be now. Be forewarned, pig!

“Gabi’s father understands and it gives us solace. To hear him speak so plainly and understandingly of our purpose even through his personal grief, you can see where she got her courage and strength. Likewise General Teko’s mother. Cujo’s father. What a difference between them all and the pig Galtons! One day, just before … uh … Cujo was talking to me about how my parents fucked me over. I was jealous, but happy for him, when he told me that his parents were still his parents because they’d never betray him or try to make him into who he wasn’t. He said that my parents were really Malcolm X and Assata Shakur: my true parents will never betray me either.

“The pigs probably have the little Olmec monkey that Cujo wore around his neck. He gave me the little stone face one night.

“So, pigs. You’ve killed another brave Black leader. But in tearing that one hair out of your pig head another thousand will bloom in its place! Cinque lives! The People will unite and when they do the pigs will never be able to burn them out the way they could a handful of revolutionaries.

“I died in that fire on Fifty-fourth Street, but out of the ashes, I was reborn. Our comrades did not die in vain. They did not die in vain. I turned my back on the pig I was when Cin and Cujo gave me the name Tania. I have no death wish, but I do not fear death either. I would rather die than spend my life surrounded by pigs like the uber-Pig Galtons.

“Patria o muerte, venceremos! Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”

INTERLUDE 2

Lionel Congreaves Explains the Current Situation

“ HELLO, THIS IS Lionel Congreaves speaking. I am not dead yet, but I still remain high on the SLA hit list. If the caller is a terrorist, please include your affiliation, so the credit for my demise can be properly awarded.”