Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“We’re not saying this is a choice-type scenario. This is you’re being hunted down by a fascist death squad.”

“I’m not. It wouldn’t happen. And I’d totally leave the pack.”

“Not everything’s a damn choice you get to make,” says Teko.

“This is a dangerous mode of thinking, Tania. It’s almost counterrevolutionary. I have to wonder where these ideas of yours are coming from.”

“Oh, we all know where they’re from. We don’t even have to mention where they’re from. If you want to be like Joan, just lying around with the fucking Sunday funnies, waiting for the pigs to burst in on you, then be my guest. Just don’t waste me and Yolanda’s time. You want to be like her , go ahead. But you saw — you saw what the pigs will do to you. You saw it in L.A.”

“How about we just pretend I’m carrying the pack?”

“Not listening!” says Teko, and shoves her in. She splashes forward a few steps, arms flailing, then pitches forward, landing on her knees in about two feet of water. The bottom of the pond is putrescent mud, totally gross. Plus, in falling, one of the rocks, slung forward within the pack by inertia, has smacked her in the occiput. Dazed, angry, she remains motionless in the water.

“Now get on your feet and wade in. Do you think in ’Nam we didn’t carry full packs into the paddies?”

Tania knows, from remarks Yolanda has made during her arguments with him, that Teko spent six months in the rear echelons in Vietnam, then was stationed for the remainder of his East Asian tour on Okinawa, manning an officers’ club. Probably this is something it would be wiser not to bring up just now. She gets to her feet and begins to wade.

“You need to remember your duty. You need to remember this isn’t any damned vacation. I know that god damned bitch has filled your head up with ideas. We lost six comrades, Tania! The pigs smoked them like they were nothing. They smoked Cujo!”

The mention of Cujo’s name has the desired effect. She doesn’t cry, but she feels an intense physical thrill that begins somewhere behind her breastbone and surges into her lower abdomen, where it blossoms with a kind of viral sapience. She lumbers forward in the murky water, her body’s knowledge undeniable. It knows, for example, that at this moment she is possessed by the spirit of Cujo (a kindergarten daydream, like the one she sometimes has of Cujo gazing down on her from a cotton ball heaven, standing at the side of Jesus, Ché, Lou Gehrig, Anne Frank, George Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Pope John, and a benevolent white-bearded God); it knows again the days and nights of their short time together. How could Joan understand? Joan thinks that she is helping, but she couldn’t possibly grasp how close, how very much her family Teko and Yolanda are. She marches out into the middle of the pond, the water rising above her hips, her waist, the good soldier; praying to live, praying to die.

Drown.

Drown.

Live.

Drown.

Live, drown.

Drown.

Live, live!

When Tania enters the house in her sodden, mud-caked clothes, followed by an unusually buoyant Teko, Joan says nothing, just studies her for a moment and then drops her head, bending to the tablet on which she daily writes letters to Willie or diaristic notes. Cold, hungry, and by now thoroughly abandoned by the spirit of Cujo, Tania thinks that what Joan is writing has to be some contemptuous observation about her, and for a moment she flashes with the anger that Teko and Yolanda exhibit at the sight of Joan writing away. She climbs the stairs to her tiny bedroom and strips off her clothes, tossing them to the floor. She actually liked those clothes, too, is the thing. The mud, pervasive, streaks the folds and interstices of her body, the spaces between her toes and the flesh beneath the slight droop of her breasts.

The clock on the wall has stopped at three minutes past nine. Tell the truth, they could throw all the clocks into the pond for all it mattered. Time enough to bathe later. Time enough for everything. She looks at herself in the mirror atop the bureau, at the stone monkey on the lanyard knotted around her neck.

“Bastard,” she says. It is unclear whom she is addressing. She pulls on some slacks and a T-shirt and goes back downstairs, heading into the sunny parlor, where Joan sits between two windows in a Morris chair, her leg tucked underneath her.

“I was just writing Willie about you,” says Joan. Joan’s letters, which contain coded names, places, and events, are forwarded and retranscribed by a series of intermediaries before ending up in Willie Clay’s lonesome hands in Soledad. Her admission comes as a surprise to Tania.

Joan says, “I tell Willie you’re getting stronger all the time. Every day there’s a little bit more of you. Amazing.” She points at the tablet with her pen. “But I was just saying that you know who and you know who must have put serious pressure today. It’s a long time between a day like this.”

Tania feels the muscles in her mouth jerk downward, as if pulling the tears from the ducts in her eyes.

“I thought to be honest you’re like a fruit or a vegetable when I first met you. Then a little better, back on Ninetieth Street. Then he ”—she jerks a thumb Teko-wise—“shows up, and it’s bad all over, worse than before. Sheesh, I say, this girl’s fucked up. Nothing really happening up there.” She taps her forehead. “Don’t cry, honey,” she adds, closing the tablet to indicate that it’s time to concentrate on making Tania stop crying.

“It was really terrible today,” she says.

“People can really screw around with you. Some people, it’s like their job. ”

Tania nods, sniffling.

“But you know, I know you’ve been through lots; every time you turn around it looks like you’re starting all over someplace; you are kidnapped, your boyfriend is killed, you’re here, you’re there, wow. So I am bare in mind from the minute I meet you that you’re together at all, like shampooing hair and eating. I know just from watching that there’s hope. And”—a brief pause; Joan flings open her hands, fingers spread wide, to indicate the radiance of what she’s saying—“there is.”

“Your boyfriend and mine have the same name,” says Tania.

“I know, honey,” says Joan.

“Isn’t that like the funniest coincidence?”

“It’s funny. And either of us don’t see them anymore. But it gets better. I’m telling you you’re here to get better and you are.”

LYDIA STOOD IN HALF-LIGHT. She was in the doorway leading to the lighted hallway, and he was standing on the other side of the doorway in the living room, a newspaper in one hand, just about to turn on a lamp, in fact. Her face was in shadow.

“You’re going to meet with him, then?” she said. This is a conversation that they’d been having off and on. “No matter what I think of it.”

“I think it’s important to keep the lines of communication open.”

“This is not the sort of person from whom I would have thought.” She didn’t finish. Then she said, “Lines of communication?”

Hank was going to meet with Popeye Jackson, paroled leader of a group called the United Prisoners Union. Jackson had earlier been named by the SLA as one of the people they wanted to oversee the food distribution program, and he gave off the impression of having multiple contacts and connections in the underground. When his parole was nearly revoked after a tainted bust for possession, Hank had printed an editorial supporting him.

Talk to the man. Find out what he has to say. Lydia’s problem was that she was still awaiting a white knight who would ride to the rescue of an untainted daughter. Untainted being a crucial conceit. Hank had the impression when he spoke to his wife that she would prefer a dead child to the return of a living one who would shame her. White being a crucial conceit as well. The interpolation of a man like Jackson as a kind of medium suggested that the gap between the Galtons and their child was greater than that between the Galtons and Jackson, not to mention between Jackson and their child. Well, what an idea; Hank didn’t find it any more palatable than Lydia did. But there she was. To a willfully ignorant observer, like Lydia, it appeared that Alice had simply vanished into a rabbit hole, equidistant, in the mystery of that other dimension, from every normal thing on the planet. But it was becoming clearer to Hank, from conversations with his reporters, with Stump, from the necessity of conversations with people like Jackson, that she was close, close enough for a Jackson to say credibly that he could find a way to get in touch. Seams of mistrust divided them, and at every level Hank would have to overcome these, mining further into the black earth of her disappearance.