Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Alpha waves leave some of the most lingering impressions,” he said. “I’m definitely getting something. If you’ll excuse me.” Hank left the room. Returning a few minutes later, he found the man snoring quietly.

A woman laid out a seven-card Solomon’s seal and offered obscure answers to Lydia’s anxious questions. Hank looked at the lurid and disturbing pictures illustrating the Rider Waite tarot deck as the woman’s soft voice murmured on.

What hadn’t he done right the day that she was taken? What ritual had he overlooked? He got in the car, he drove the car. To work. Downtown. Dinner, at the homes of friends, his wife silent at his side. There’s something he was supposed to have done, to have been doing, something that had worked quietly day after day, all the years of his daughter’s life, and one day it hadn’t happened, had gone haywire like some humble cell inside the body that sets you up for disaster. Whatever the hell it was it had nothing to do with writing checks to favorite charities or bundling up old suits and putting them in the tall, heavy Goodwill bag. It was deeper and more integral, something beneath the surface of goodnight kisses and checking to see that the door was locked, something along the lines of an unspoken prayer or petition he hadn’t even been aware of making. Something as real as the first bite of a juicy pear that you’d never remember again.

From whose life could trouble have been more distant? Well, he accepted the presence of the psychics because he accepted now that there were forces in the universe with which, unbeknownst to him, he always has been at odds, and he wanted to become acquainted with their ways and means.

She laid out the cards, and he heard their slap over the soft murmur of her words, Lydia leaning forward, looking drawn, for a change.

AFFIXED TO THE HANDRAIL on the second-story balcony above the screened porch, wrought-iron letters spell out PAIX. The house is on a slight rise, set fifty yards from a red barn, with a garage and two other small outbuildings in between at the head of the wide dirt driveway, halfheartedly scattered with gravel, that climbs from the road below. The barn and other outbuildings a deep red against the blue of the sky and the green of the tall grasses swaying in fields long relinquished to nature.

“You’ll see the falling stars here at night, I bet,” says Guy. He has on his face the look of a man who is backing away, figuratively. He and Randi will be spending the night, and then they’re off. A mission to torrid Cuba, so Guy says. Guy pronounces it “coobah.”

Inside is an American farmhouse. Tania is charmed. She has never seen the like. A mudroom filled with Wellingtons, faded buffalo check mackinaws, raincoats, flashlights, and the disused vacation things of the Laffertys: Louisville Sluggers and volleyballs and cross-country skis and a deflated float in the blue-gray shape of Disney’s Eeyore. An enormous kitchen, with attached pantry, overlooking the kitchen garden and the barn beyond. Tiny bedrooms upstairs, three of them, each like van Gogh’s room at Aries. Half a mile away a tiny town center forms at a crossroads. There’s a country store. Tania is charmed, just charmed.

They explore the barn. Damp-smelling, loft still full of moldering hay. On its walls hang a bridle of rotten leather, which causes Tania to note the empty stalls, and rusty objects of faint menace, sickles, saws, and a pitchfork. Teko finds three abandoned toy guns, which he expropriates for training purposes. One is a revolver in filigreed Wild West style, with white plastic handgrips, and this he adopts as his own. He extends its barrel at the horizon. “Pow,” he says.

Behind the house hills rise and fall softly, alive with the same swaying grass that covers the fields. A quarter mile away survives a stand of pines some pioneering farmer planted across the ridge of the tallest hill as a windbreak. Here in the faint daylight that penetrates these trees Tania picks her way over gray trunks felled by age and lightning. She carries the little plastic pistol she is supposed to be sharing with Joan, though Joan has told her that as far as she is concerned this whole pistol routine is a fucking joke. Teko has said that because they have gone so long without their weapons they need to refamiliarize themselves. So Tania is tramping through the woods, her finger resting on the trigger guard of this goofy toy gat, which is stamped “Tracer Gun” and which fires little colored perforated plastic disks, if she remembers correctly.

It’s very nice to be walking alone in the woods. The millions of brown needles yield softly beneath her feet. Technically she is supposed to be familiarizing herself with the terrain, like a good freedom fighter. “The urban guerrilla never goes anywhere absentmindedly and without revolutionary precaution, always on the lookout lest something occur. Eyes and ears open, senses alert, his memory engraved with everything necessary, now or in the future, to the uninterrupted activity of the fighter.”

She does remember correctly because good old Ainley Hembrough III, her first love, had a pistol exactly like this. You pulled the trigger and this disk flitted out, wobbling klutzily in the air and invariably going off line well before reaching the target.

Ainley was a doofus, pimples and comic books. On Friday nights he always cut their assignations short, so that he could get back by ten to watch Star Trek . She’d chosen him simply because of proximity. She’d been going to Santa Catalina in Monterey, and he’d been at Robert Louis Stevenson in Pebble Beach, and she could look out and say, Round this craggy promontory dwells my True Love. She would send him notes to that effect, cutting the ironic melodrama of her faintly Victorian yearning with ridicule, so he wouldn’t think she was taking it all that seriously. Though he actually was the sort of boy she liked: tall, wiry, quiet.

The pines there came right down to the white sand, a dark fringe. Sitting in the moonlight on the luminous, fine sand, you could look up at that lighted ball with its ancient scuffs and wounds, shining down on the world with all the mysteries of the night, and you could imagine that you actually were up there. Ainley said if he had a good enough telescope he bet he could probably see the lunar module.

But what the nuns did when they caught you out! Tania scrubbed more than her share of toilets. It ended up she liked the job, liked keeping things shining and clean, the porcelain white and antiseptic and the brightwork gleaming. It was their own dirty sensibilities that bestowed an axiomatic unpleasantness upon the chore. But she enjoyed seeing those big tiled rooms come clean to her own satisfaction.

Ainley smoked pot and then lied about it to her. It took her a while to figure out how she felt about it, exactly, but when she finally did, that was the end. She received, from here and there, sad little reports about this waning boy, pining away for her. She imagined him standing beneath her window, like poor dead Michael Furey. By then, though, she’d successfully petitioned her parents to get her away from those crazy Dominicans, and on her first day at Crystal Springs School for Girls, she had gotten her maiden eyeful of Eric Stump.

Nice to be alone in the woods. Tania hasn’t had any time to herself in ages. The birdsong here is intermittent and plaintive. Now she touches the Olmec monkey on its thong around her neck.

He gave me the little stone face one night.

She slips her finger inside the trigger guard and takes aim at a bough high overhead. On second thought, might as well do it right. She mimes: Rack the slide, watch the round coming up the ramp and into the chamber. Feet apart, relaxed, raise the gun to find the target with your dominant eye. That tweety little bird, all innocence, chirping away up there. Align the sights (actually, only one on this toy) and squeeze the trigger.