Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

There are five fortune cookies for the six of them. Don’t ask how it happened but Joan and Tania, dawdling over their lo mein, are the ones who get stuck. Tania saw Guy’s open hand shoot out to enclose one of them even before he was done eating. Guy’s eyes take in the weight and measure of everything, calculating his best potential share. But the other one just disappeared. Joan doesn’t care much, but the others insist they go halvesies. They insist! Come on! Laughter and camaraderie. Tania cracks open the brittle shell and grabs the end of the paper strip. It’s a feeling so familiar it seems as if it dated back to the ocean’s saline womb, as if mankind were created to tug paper slips from sugar wafers baked in a shaped crumple. She pulls and the paper is freed.

“Tear it in two,” orders Yolanda.

“Now, how does that work?”

“Tear it and like see what it says.”

Tania tears the strip down the middle and hands one half to Joan. “This is silly.”

Joan glances at hers and shrugs. “It says, ‘ning for Success.’”

Tania looks down and gasps. On the torn slip, plain as day, it reads, “You have a Year.”

Laugh that one off.

A big hale fire department lieutenant named Lafferty drops by the apartment to deliver the summer lease to his Pennsylvania farmhouse and get the rent check, and beforehand there is this unbelievable scene, with Teko lofting himself into orbit because they’re renting the place from a “pig.”

Guy has become thoroughly weary of this word. Joan, wide-eyed after one single day with Teko ‘n’ Yolanda, confides: “These are some fucked-up son of a bitches.”

Guy had harbored hopes that he’d be able to swing a meeting or two with publishers during his New York stay, but it’s becoming pretty clear that he’ll be lucky just to ferry Joan and the SLA three to their remote hideaway before they kill one another in his apartment.

Two grand, incidentally, for this summer rental — as Randi would doubtless point out, two more grand — and still not so much as a thank-you. A simple thank-you, as his mother might say. And Guy does feel a little like his mother, killing you with chips, crudités, pigs in blankets, drinks, ice, clean ashtrays, coffee, fresh baked cookies, German chocolate cakes, whatever hospitality program fitted onto the spindle of her faithful and discontented brain, waiting uselessly all the while for a sign of gratitude from the louts in her life.

Guy likes the ring of the phrase, isolated farmhouse . Rather than connote the In Cold Blood quality of total menace Guy would ordinarily associate with the countryside (with the horizontal threat of the Midwest still fresh in his mind), it sounds, at this hectic juncture, charmingly withdrawn from the hurlyburly of everyday life. The cover story the others will use, if asked, is that they’re research assistants working for a New York writer — nominally him. And he can see himself in the midday quiet of the place, working away in a back bedroom overlooking a lawn screened by gnarled old shade trees.

For Guy, the bitch of life is that clear view the brain permits of inaccessible alternatives.

The day’s work done, you remove the sheet from the typewriter platen and then go off to the swimming hole, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do in rural Pennsylvania. But now he just wants to drop his argumentative little payload and head back to the Bay Area.

It’s too bad, he was ready to meet anyone, anytime, anywhere. Carries his copy of The Athletic Revolution to say, I am real. My reputation precedes me. On the back cover his eyes glare out from under the dome of his skull. On the front, a big caramel-colored fist makes the black power salute.

(He holds the paperback up to the bathroom mirror. Joking/not joking: My most recent book. Free Press. Division of Macmillan? Seated at a plush red banquette.)

He leafs through the book, stopping here and there to read passages of varying length. Transformed — by politics, by violence, by notoriety — the sports issues he engages in the book continue to resonate. If, as they so love to claim, sport is a mirror of real life, then revolt in sport is a mirror of revolt in real life, gaining in popularity and meeting heavy resistance from those who have every reason to resist change. What he’s really done is toss the phony paradigm back into their faces. In dealing with revolution explicitly, the SLA book project just extends these ideas. That’s what makes the project so attractive. That plus the Tania factor makes for what Guy feels is instantly accessible material.

Still, the tautological justifications offered up by the SLA for the Foster murder, the shootings, the kidnappings continue to piss Guy off because he is, at root, an academic who prides himself on his critical thinking. Not an easy hop from plain Guy to Dr. Guy V Mock. Heavy-duty, baby. Adorno. Barzun. Frankl. Spend enough time with those dudes, and you begin to develop a sensitivity to the slightest whiff of bullshit. And for all the captive hours he’d spent with Teko and Tania, the suggestible front seat intimacy of engine drone and wind murmur as they pushed on toward the horizon, there wasn’t a single moment when either of them truly let their hair down, when he didn’t feel as if he were dealing with the surviving tape loop of SLA dogma, a disembodied part that whirred and buzzed indiscriminately now. He does not want to become the SLA minister of propaganda. And as the events since he arrived in New York have amply demonstrated, these are some difficult people, emotionally speaking. As human beings they are selfish, prideful, envious, lazy, nearly all the seven deadlies. Fucked-up sons of bitches, indeed.

HERE’S HOW IT BEGAN with the psychics. Imagine a middle-aged man you’ve just met standing in your living room, removing his clothing avidly, though without any sexual heat — the way, say, an insurance salesman might unpack his briefcase at your kitchen table, moving the cup of coffee you’ve offered to one side to lay out brochures and folders. Hank had an inkling something like this might happen. Lydia’s face was frozen as the man stripped down to his Fruit of the Looms, until finally, faced with the greater part of his pale, flabby body, she covered her eyes with one hand and then slid quietly from her sitting position on the sofa to hide her face in a throw pillow. Hank gathered her up, buried his arms nearly up to the elbow in her armpits and raised her to her feet, then guided her through the doorway and to the foot of the stairs. He stood watching as she started up. Then he went back into the living room.

“So,” he said, putting his hands together.

A minute later Hank was calling Hernando in from the garage. He introduced him to the man in his underpants.

“Would you please lift this gentleman and carry him to the car outside,” Hank began.

Hernando listened and then hefted the man and carried him out to a car waiting in the driveway.

“Call me ‘bitch,’” said the man.

Hernando threw him into the open trunk and slammed the lid down. The car then sped off, and Hank thanked Hernando.

Later the phone rang. “If you’re willing,” the middle-aged man said, “I’d like to recommend that we try again. I really didn’t obtain a clear picture.”

One man fondled her shoes. One pored over her photographs. One lay in her bed, pulling the pastel duvet up to his chin.

“But she hasn’t slept here in years,” Hank said. He switched on the light beside the door.

The man sat up, blinking irritably. He was a dour little man, with dark crescents under his eyes and finely etched lines framing his mouth. He spoke quietly, in a distinct midwestern accent, from amid the rumpled bedclothes.