Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Should we be holding that much?” asks Tania, anxiously.

“Give me a break,” says Joan, like that’s the least of their worries. Two fat alligator Baggies appear on their side of the window. “Thank you,” says Joan. She puts the Baggies in her purse.

Outside she says, “That place gets on my nerve.”

They walk and talk, taking the same meandering route back to Guy and Randi’s apartment. Since Guy returned to the Bay Area to get Teko, it’s just the girls, and it’s been fun. Tania hasn’t spent this much time hanging out with women since she was about sixteen, just before Eric Stump entered her life and she set up housekeeping with him like an imitation adult.

Despite the agreeable atmosphere, Tania understands that she’s learning to live as a fugitive. So far it’s a curiously unstructured life, with the four of them — Randi, Yolanda, Joan, and herself — awaken — ing late and lingering over coffee, the TV blaring.

Tania personally can’t get enough TV The repeats on the local stations, punctuated by endless commercials for technical training schools, seem more in sync with the life of the great waning city outside the windows than what she sees on the news. They track the tale of being at home during the workday, which is a secret sort of life, scandalous in a pint-size way to remain at the edges while everybody else makes for the bustling center. Ricky tells Lucy he’s heading to the club, and the next thing you know a frizzy-headed Puerto Rican — looking guy is turning from an oscilloscope to ask, in an accented English that both recalls and skewers Ricky Ricardo’s, “How did I get this great career?” Technical Career Institute, is the answer. Offering certificate and degree programs in the rapidly expanding fields of Electronics; Computer Technology; Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration; Building Maintenance; Computerized Accounting Systems; and Office Technology. Free set of tools when you graduate. Then Lucy’s back, getting Mrs. Trumbull to watch Little Ricky while she tries to work her way into the act, again. Waaaahh. That sexy single strand of pearls around her neck. They sit and talk, drag slices of toast through slicks of yolk remaining on their breakfast plates, as the credits crawl over the gray iridescent swollen heart that floats in the middle of the screen, suspended there by love supreme and the blasts of hot air rising from the rhumba beat of the theme song.

Back at the apartment, Joan lays the bags of pot on the kitchen table.

“Any trouble?” asks Yolanda.

“No trouble,” says Joan.

“Pearl?” Yolanda uses Tania’s new code name.

“No,” says Tania.

“Are you sure no one saw you?”

“We said no.”

“I just need to know, Joan. While we’re waiting for Teko, I’m ranking officer.”

“So next time you should go yourself.”

“As the one in command it would be irresponsible of me to expose myself that way.”

Joan repeats, “Expose yourself?” Tania snorts.

“Oh, very mature. But that’s not even the point. The point is I don’t think a debriefing is uncalled for after an operation.”

Joan rolls her eyes. “Operation. We’re buying some grass, for Christ sake.”

“I really don’t see why you have to like challenge my authority,” complains Yolanda.

With a slight shift of her body, Joan shuts her out.

Yolanda says, “Pearl.”

Yolanda says, “Pearl,” considering the name.

“That name,” says Yolanda thoughtfully, “doesn’t suit you.”

“Well, leave it to Teko to pick out a bunch of crappy names,” says Yolanda.

She turns to study Joan.

“I think it would go much better with your personality, Joan. It’s a very Oriental-sounding sort of name anyway.”

“Joan goes OK by me with my personality,” says Joan.

“Oh,” says Yolanda, “I practically almost think of that as your real name.”

“That’s because you don’t know me,” says Joan. “At all.”

Randi comes into the tiny kitchen. All four of them share the space with the appliances and the sound of a siren coming through the airshaft. The wall is of exposed brick and there is a little gap in the wall over the stove where a box of kitchen matches stays.

“I had a call from Guy today,” says Randi. “He says he should be here tomorrow.”

“Check,” says Yolanda. “With the package .”

“You mean that package with the wittle tiny wegs,” says Joan, an innocent expression on her face. She knows Teko only through the descriptions she’s heard, mainly from Tania.

“And the fuzzy wuzzy wustache,” adds Tania. She and Joan begin to giggle.

“De wittle wevowutionary weader.”

“De wascawy wabbit.” Tania sags, putting her hands on her knees. She gasps for breath. She is laughing so hard that she hopes that she and Joan stay together forever. Randi hefts one of the bags of pot. “Have you two been into this stuff already ?” Yolanda has a face of stone.

Tania hates the new names. They have no proud provenance, unlike their guerrilla names. They’re just these ugly old names . She is Pearl, Teko is Frank, and Yolanda is Eva. And anyways they always forget to use them.

They can smoke pot in the apartment, but Randi puts her foot down about cigarettes. Verboten, nyet, no good. So Tania steps outside into a night street, heavy still air and the hum of air conditioners all around. She carries a pack of Tareytons and a disposable Cricket lighter. A very exciting invention. She lights it repeatedly, studying the adjustable flame, imagining what if she were from Vietnam or Russia or someplace and were handed this single object from which to make sense of America.

There are plenty of people on the street, despite the town’s fearful reputation. Talking, always talking, and with an abandon to the talk, a rude candor that indiscriminately lashes all within earshot. Underlying it all, this supreme self-absorption. They either don’t care that you’re not interested or they assume that you have to be interested. And she does want to join in.

She considers it kind of funny that when they arrived in New York, practically at the instant they’d crossed the George Washington Bridge, any residual sense she had that maybe she ought to keep herself out of sight, to hide in the closet, vanished. There was no question of it, in spite of Yolanda’s persistent bossiness. You’ve come a long way, baby. And you don’t travel this far to crouch in fear. She allows herself some absurdly impossible ideas: She’d love to find an apartment like Guy and Randi’s. The rents up here seem reasonable. She and Joan could fill it with Salvation Army furniture. She has to admit that she’s basically a homebody. Fantastically, she sees herself working, getting a job at an ad agency or a publishing house (maybe Guy could help with that), keeping the SLA business confined to the weekend. The revolution appears far enough removed from New York to allow ROTC-type training. Anyway, here it seems as if the People already have the upper hand, or maybe it’s that their poverty is so much more up front and aggressive that it itself is the establishment here.

A succinct breeze, more like the push of a ghostly hand, brings with it the explicit stink of rotting garbage and then disappears. Tania lights another Tareyton. She feels more stupid and noticeable standing outside for the purpose of smoking a cigarette than she does for being on the FBI’s most wanted list. A man clad only in a hospital gown approaches her. The gown’s got a dense small-figured paisley print, Tania can see, with the name of the hospital stenciled near the bottom. Pedestrian traffic subtly alters course, pointedly avoiding the unlikely pair while equally pointedly pretending to take absolutely no notice of her or of the half-naked man. She looks directly into his eyes. It seems like a smarter thing to do than to avoid his gaze. And ignoring him is out of the question; he’s basically right on top of her.