Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Move the gun to your head, not the other way around. And stop breathing.”

Teko has come up behind her and stands, leaning against a tree. He is wearing shorts and a T-shirt that is dark with his sweat. Around his ankles are weights he had Yolanda make, sand sewn into heavy cotton socks.

“How’d you manage to let me sneak up on you anyway? Crashing through these woods, you should have had the drop on me. Lost in the stars, rich girl.”

Suddenly he draws the toy revolver from his waistband. Tania flinches.

“Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. See, you’re dead. I killed you. You fail the test.”

A ridiculous moment, the two of them in the trees, playing with toys. Tania abruptly remembers firing the submachine gun at Mel’s, people flattening themselves against the asphalt, the gun bucking, fighting her as it emptied itself. Teko, meanwhile, had allowed himself to be disarmed. Teko had blown everything. RIP Cin, Zoya, Gabi, Fahizah, Gelina, and Cujo, Cujo, Cujo. Who’d “failed” when it mattered?

“Are those the socks you took from Mel’s?” she asks.

“There are going to be some changes,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Big changes around here. No more sitting around watching fucking brainrot TV No more fucking takeout. No more fucking girl talk and giggles like a fucking slumber fucking party.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“You watch that attitude, bitch. I got my eye on you.”

Tania looks up from a paperback copy of The Exorcist to watch from the screened porch Yolanda and Joan walking together in the tall grass behind the barn. They walk slowly, contemplatively. Joan has her hands behind her back, the fingers of one gripping the opposite wrist. Yolanda gestures deliberately, sculpting a sort of compact box in the air, illustrating the solidity and unassailability of her thoughts, gestures that say, Let’s Be Reasonable. Tania wonders idly what Yolanda is trying to con Joan into doing. A brief wind thrills the surface of the grass, momentarily drowning out the insect drone. Bugs all around here: grasshoppers and praying mantises and endless flies plus cicadas in the trees shrieking out the swan song of their long lives. Why they screened the porch in, probably. Nice in here, cool and with that summer-place smell of dust and must.

Off in the distance she sees Yolanda stoop and pick up a weatherfaded tennis ball. Awkwardly she pitches it into the sea of waving grass, where it disappears. Then she and Joan continue their slow walk. Tania returns to her book, not looking up again until she hears someone climbing the porch steps. Joan opens the screen door and sits on a chaise, sinking slowly into its cushion, which audibly exhales.

“You wouldn’t believe this,” she says. “But what they want me to is dress up like a white. For to go to town.”

Guy Mock’s big idea was that Joan would be available to run errands and such this summer, keeping the lid on the red-hot fugitives. This was a way for her to return the favor he and Randi had done her by smuggling her out of California in 1972, when she herself had been red hot. Randi helped wipe down her apartment, and then Guy drove her to L.A., where together they boarded a New York flight, Joan carrying a huge stuffed rabbit and an Easter basket by way of disguise. Joan sometimes feels as if she’s been continuously returning this favor for two years.

Here it’s been tough duty. An Oriental girl sashaying into the general store, yeah sure, to buy Oscar Mayer baloney and Wonder bread. “Who you think you’re fooling with that stuff, chink?” the clerk had finally asked her. One day she’d gone into the Goodwill just for a look at the paperbacks when she’d sensed another presence in the quiet nook where the books and old National Geographics were piled, and she’d looked up to meet the disapproving gaze of the clerk, who’d come out from behind the counter to follow her.

She said, “We’re closed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Leaving, Joan thought, stupidly, “That’s funny, the sign says open till four, the lights are on, no one else seems to be leaving.” The dawning that the woman had sought to protect her foxed old copies of national best sellers from Joan’s gook depredations came upon her slowly and humiliatingly.

“She says, like, I’m just a little obvious.”

“Duh,” says Tania. “Why don’t they just go themselves?”

“And blow the covers.”

“Their famous cover. Research assistants don’t buy groceries too? And what are you supposed to be, the Oriental houseboy?”

Joan snickers.

“Shit, I’ll go down there myself.”

“Someone is feeling frisky.”

“Just bored around here all the time.”

“Well, whatever else, they heard of you, star chick. Your face is the famous face.”

Tania laughs, softly, and throws down the book, which she finds pretty boring, actually. Girl locked in a room with a bunch of authority figures trying to change her personality? That’s entertainment? Plus every time Father Karras lights up a smoke, she wants one, and she’s trying to cut down.

Tania never smoked at all before she was taken. Now she just can’t stop. At the apartment on Golden Gate, where she first came out of the closet to join the others at their eating, training, schmoozing, fucking, standing guard, and all the other pursuits the nine of them had crammed into those two rooms, she took up the habit in earnest. Everybody smoking away in two sealed rooms with the heavy surveillance drapes over the locked windows. Actually, she began in the closet, accepting cigarettes just to be polite. She remembers Cinque advising her that smoking was like killing pigs. “Baby,” he said, “once you start you just want to do it all the time.” She tilted her head back as subtly as she could manage, trying to peer at her captor from beneath the blindfold she wore.

The depths of arcane knowledge she explored in that closet. The subject of blindfolds, for example. She came to know more about blindfolds than any human not similarly situated might ever have suspected there was to know. The different materials they were made from, the different methods of fastening them, their different purposes: concealment of the world or inducement to terror. Blindfolds made of bed sheets were most comfortable, but their tendency to loosen and slip down filled her with panic. Panic in the dark was not good. It was as limitless as the blackness and totally irresistible. When she could discern that the blindfold was no longer functioning, she would attempt to position herself in a way that she thought would indicate total noncomplicity in its failure. There she would cower. Blame was always a matter of who happened to discover her in there, concealing her wily capacity to examine the timeless dark. Cin would curse her, Zoya would roughly retie the blindfold, sometimes making it impossible to breathe through her nose, Teko would hit her, Cujo would rarely notice, and Gelina would cluck sympathetically. They put a pillowcase over her head and wound cord or twine around her neck to hold it on, but for some reason that didn’t last. Someone came up with the idea of taping cotton to her eyes, wads of surgical cotton pulled from a blue box with a big red cross on it and then taped to her face. When she wept, the cotton efficiently absorbed the tears, holding them there, a soggy memento to her despair. Plus she got a kind of diaper rash on her face. Any decent blindfold design needs to take tears into account. People who are left tied up and blindfolded in little closets tend to cry, frequently. They talked about pinning newborn-size Pampers to her face, but the Pampers were too expensive. They tried sanitary napkins instead, but they just fell off, leaving her blinking in the dark, wondering whether she was going to get killed, socked in the face, hauled over the coals, or commiserated with. Finally they just fastened sponges to her eyes with thick elastic bands. That worked all right. Everybody achieved a satisfactory middle ground with that one. It seemed to fulfill the requisite need for grotesquerie; it blinded her; it was uncomfortable but not distractingly so. Thus successfully disabled, she continued to wait. She kept expecting to cross the threshold beyond which she would take a stand, of some kind, but she surprised herself, with her ability to go farther and farther, without protest, eating when she was told, waking up when she was told, bathing when she was told, having sex when she was told, speaking the words she was told to speak. It did not strike her as weakness, not in the least. Strength, rather. Strength that she could eat such food, in the dark. Strength that she could pull herself fully awake at a moment’s notice, ready to agree with Cinque, to denounce the world. Strength that she could plod blindfolded and naked through the crowded apartment and then sink her bones into the grimy tub. Strength that she could endure the unwanted groping and gasping on the floor of her closet. Strength that she could learn to be another person, that she could empty the reliquary of herself, part with so much secret knowledge without once asking, “Is this really me? Then where do I think I’m going?” without even a moment’s nostalgia. If it was nostalgia she was after then it was a nostalgic attachment to the functions of her medulla oblongata that she developed; to her old pals respiration, circulation, and kinesthesia; to the feel of the beaten-down carpet under her skinny butt.