Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“CLEARraaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaaNOW aaaaaaCLEARaaaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaa NOWaaaaaa.”

Others at the edges now saw the swelling, and the confrontation waiting for it where it would break, and turned to run, pushing into the milling group that was on Telegraph and forcing it into two sections, angry where they had divided and coming together again, like reverse mitosis. Behind her Joan heard the sound of glass breaking and turned her head to see a heavy bearded man rolling through the jagged center of a broken plate glass storefront, just rolling slowly and as easy as you please. As she was pushed back, she felt with her heel for the curb, fearful that she would fall beneath all those feet, and she stumbled up onto the sidewalk just as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. More people were coming onto Telegraph from Haste now, the bullhorn had quit, and she heard the sounds of combat, those intent on fighting sandwiched between police and national guardsmen, and the rest in flight. She saw a wispy trailing plume climb away from the police line, describe an arc, then vanish into the crowd nearby, where a pale haze gathered and expanded in the humid air, repelling people.

“Gas!” someone shouted. “The fucking pigs are gassing us!”

A man made for the canister. “I wouldn’t grab that,” another man said. With lucid calm Joan studied his T-shirt, which depicted a friendly-looking young man evolving in several stages into a ferocious pig clad in army fatigues and bearing a rifle, over the legend DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. “It’s fucking hot,” he added.

The first man removed his hat and, using that, gingerly picked up the canister. Again the plume rose, tracing its path back in the direction it had come, as he returned the canister to the police. Joan caught some of the fumes and instinctively brought her hands to her face, astonished by the speed with which the reaction arrived, bringing convulsive retching and elastic strings of saliva that swung from her mouth. She tried to keep her eyes open, but they fluttered spasmodically. Tears and snot rolled down her face. She lurched for the building behind her, figuring to grope and fight her way out of there. Her outstretched fingers jammed against something both hard and soft, and something seized her by the wrist and swung her back into the crowd.

“Watch where you’re going, you dumb bitch,” a voice said, aggrieved.

She tried again, but now her disorientation was complete. Light appeared between her eyelids, which thankfully had stopped flapping, but now they just sagged, sleepily half shut, so that she really couldn’t see. She placed her hands in front of her face, palms out, and pushed forward. She decided not to panic. She felt panic approaching because she was caught in the crowd and she was feeling sick to her stomach and her eyes and her nose and her lips were burning and she was having tremendous trouble catching her breath and she couldn’t see a damn thing. Panic was hanging back, but just waiting to sprint in and unhinge her completely. So she deliberately considered her case. OK, Joan, she said to herself, you’re going to just walk until you run into something solid. Then you’re going to hang on to it. This rule outs people, who move and fall. This rule outs cars, that someone can move or that can turn over. This rule outs the sidewalk, for there’s nothing to hang on to, plus you might get walked all over. Her manner with herself kept her calm enough that she was able to keep going through the crowd, which, fortunately for her, had not yet discovered its direction. She was almost amused, and she kept it up. Well, Joan. You have really gotten into a good mess here. What in the earth were you thinking about? Joan, you are just not a crowd person. Then her palms were up against something flat and smooth. It was not a wall, and it was not a door, nor was it a truck or a bus, and panic finally turned up when she realized that she had worked herself face up to a big plate glass window like the one she had just seen the fat man fall through. The crowd heaved slightly behind her, pushing her a little, and involuntarily she let escape a cry. The moderating, mildly reproving voice inside had abandoned her, and she was left with a growing conviction that she would be pushed through the glass and cut to pieces. Then she felt a hand on her.

“You got gassed?” a voice asked.

She nodded.

“Can you breathe? Take deep, slow breaths. Don’t take panic breaths. You’re OK. You got bronchitis? Asthma? Tuberculosis? Lung cancer? No? You’re probably OK. You might react, bronchospasms or something, but you haven’t so far, so again, you’re probably OK. Hold on and come with me.”

She reached out, and her hand partly encircled a forearm — not a particularly hairy one, she noticed right off. They walked this way for a bit, forearm to forearm, and soon had turned off Telegraph and onto a quieter side street.

“Good thing it’s raining,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice. “Tilt your head up. Did you rub your eyes?”

“A little,” said Joan.

“That makes it worse. Here, now let the rain wash some out. I have a canteen here too. I always carry one to these demos. You never know when the pigs are going to start firing that stuff. You’re not wearing contact lenses, are you?”

No, Joan shook her head.

“Good. Boy, they’re murder. People wear them, though. Ego. Got to look your best. I guess you never know when you’re going to meet that special someone. But listen, now I’m going to pour some water out of the canteen directly into your eyes. Just blink it out. How’s your breathing?”

“Good. Better.”

“Blink. Blink. Here, hold out your hands. You rubbed your eyes, you got it on your hands. How’s your eyes?”

“Good.”

“Can you see?”

What she could see was Willie Clay, nice-looking guy, trim, good face, a little short. Younger than she was, it looked like. What she said was, “A little better.”

“What you really need to do is take a shower. You live nearby?”

Joan shook her head no. He blushed. Definitely younger.

“Do you think you might want,” he suggested, his eyes widening as if he were astonishing himself, “to come back to my place?”

If Joan didn’t want to deal with the crowds, she’d met up with Willie Clay at just about the right time, because to his way of thinking the demos were now entropically inclined. It was as if a buzzer had gone off and suddenly the idea was done. First off, people had started to show up looking for the hippies: the dancing naked girls with henna tattoos, the burnout freaks with flowers in their hair. This was bad . This made Willie feel useless, impotent, helpless, feeble, and shabby. But then the dancing naked girls had started showing up too, and this Willie could not abide. Also to his way of thinking, even the most serious-minded group of demonstrators tended to find itself at loggerheads over the single central issue of intent. To wit: in the case of, say, an antiwar demonstration, most of the people who showed up, well, they just wanted the war to stop. OK, Willie would say to them, so we stop the war. Then what? Then we go back to drinking jug wine and eating table grapes? because so what about the farm workers? Then we go back to living in communities where the basic job of the pigs is to keep the blacks confined in their ghettos? Then we go back to our credo that every American has the God-given right to walk around his house in a T-shirt in the middle of winter and drive his Cadillac two and a half blocks to the grocery store? Then we go back to smoking dope with towels stuffed under the doors because they’ll bust your ass and lock it up for years? Then we just go back to Nixon? Richard M. Nixon? Excuse me, but you mean we just go back to waiting patiently while Nixon serves out, presides for , eight years? Huh? And so they would look at you like, What the fuck is up your ass, man? We just want the damn war to stop. Or they’d go, It’s the first domino, with the self-satisfied affect that only complete mastery of evocative but basically empty jargon brings. Domino! Willie repeated, fairly heaving with disgust. This is the image McNamara and Co. (he pronounced it, and Joan envisioned, “coe”) came up with to sell the war here at home. To his way of thinking, these people, the purist war enders, would eventually form a new class: financially comfortable, tasteful, smugly proud of its impeccable progressive credentials, entrepreneurial, and totally, emetically bourgeois. Raising false consciousness to unheardof levels of falsity. Just stand by until around 1984, and you’d see. To his way of thinking, when the government finally got around to ending the war — which wasn’t likely to happen real soon if the opposition principally spent its time marching around on college campuses, which had about as much to do with the daily life of the average American as bathing rituals along the Ubangi — these poseurs would probably take the credit for it. Shameless! Here was Willie’s opinion: To his way of thinking, you wanted to end the war by bringing the society that waged it, that developed and continually refined its rationale, to an end. You wanted total revolution. Of course, if you had that, you couldn’t open a food co-op somewhere or buy yourself a nice piece of land in Bolinas. You’d have to commit ; you’d have to fight and struggle . His right fist hitting his left palm for emphasis.