Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Guy nearly overshoots the driveway, and in jerking the wheel to avoid missing it, he sends the old Bug’s suspension into a sort of tailpipe-banging seizure. After this grand entrance, Randi notices that the place seems quiet. They enter the house and discover it in a state of fetid disarray: days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink and on the counters, garbage overflowing, dirt and mud all over the floors.

So much for the deposit.

“Well, they’ve been eating at least,” Guy says. He holds up a chicken bone between thumb and forefinger.

“Thanks to Uncle Guy and Aunt Randi,” says Randi.

Guy removes his cap and runs his hand through the hair thinning at the crest of his scalp. “Let us not measure the extent of our commitment,” he says, affecting a round, oratorical tone. “Let us only measure its depth.”

Yeah, yeah.

Guy roots around in the refrigerator, which, owing to a strange habit of Yolanda’s, is full of uncovered plates containing halffinished meals. He pulls out a couple of bottles of Schmidt’s. He opens the squat brown bottles and carries them out to the porch, where together they sit on a faded love seat to wait for the others. Side by side, again, though without all the business of shifting and signaling and checking mirrors. Randi remembers that when she and Guy were first together, he always joined her on the same side of a restaurant booth. Waitresses frequently acted put out by this, as if to serve them in this manner would fall foul of an honored eatery tradition. Not that new lovers, their whole world shrunk to two hearts’ desire, concern themselves with mere mortals and their sense of trespass. And now here they were, still together, but long ago having entered the time and motion world in which those waitresses subsisted, everything a matter of mechanics.

“Where could they be? Aren’t they supposed to be, you know?”

“Laying low? To say the least. Especially given the panic over the propane guy and the blueberry kid. You’d think they’d be under the beds or something.”

“Oh, come on. They’re not that paranoid, are they?”

Guy shrugs. “Maybe they are. We didn’t look. Hey, if it were me, and I were here, I might have just killed us, waltzing in like this.”

“Aren’t they expecting us, Guy?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say not expecting.”

“But you think they might have killed us.” Randi is not shocked, not ever, but what is the word, nonplussed.

“No, I think I might have killed us. What I think is it’s a good thing I wasn’t here to get the drop on us.” Guy laughs.

“The drop on us. You’re not the killer type.”

“History’s populated with the nonkiller types who kill in the clutch.”

“Name me one.”

“Ah, Alan Ladd in The Deep Six .”

“Name another.”

“Anthony Perkins in The Tin Star.”

“One more.”

“James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

“Nice try, but that was really John Wayne if I recall.”

“Secret sharer.”

Movie characters as history, certainly the memory of lanky Jimmy Stewart and little Alan Ladd coheres into something realer, more authoritative, far more satisfying than the frail group that Randi and Guy have arrived in Pennsylvania to gather up and replant. Except of course that one of their number is a star. Again Randi wonders what exactly it is that they have here in this particular revolution. Whenever she tries to envision what the future holds, it’s never anything she can imagine having had its origin inside Teko’s skull. You know? Guy advised her to forget about idealism.

“‘History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.’ Speaking of Mr. Conrad. He daid.”

Yeah, and does Guy think the SLA is going to make history?

“They already made it. It’s made. I know, they’re a highly suspect organization, politically speaking. Nonsensical. But the politics have to take a backseat to the show. Maybe they say they want to overthrow the government. Maybe they even believe it. But if anything, these guys’ relationship to power is parasitic. Symbiotic, if you will, heh. What they really excel at is preempting the regularly scheduled programming. These guys are running with an idea that’s been sort of sitting there unexplored at the margins of every single thing going on since the Free Speech Movement. How do these nice kids from these nice families turn out this way? Before, it was always somebody else’s kid, and the press is dutifully pasting together this blurry picture of bearded, long-haired filthoids who you could never in a million years imagine they belonged to Four-H or toasted s’mores over a campfire or had a catch with Dad, and the SLA zeroes in on the story of one particularly nice girl and how she becomes a little fanatic waving a gun around. It’s the fucking movie of the week.”

But it isn’t a story, Guy. It’s her real life.

“You should’ve seen her in that car riding across country, Randi. Anytime we saw a highway worker, a tollbooth clerk, she’d want to blast him for being a pig. She’d sit and X out the faces of executives in the financial pages of the paper. This nice kid sitting there with her Brearley accent rattling on about rich fascists. It could happen to her, it could happen to anybody’s kid, is what the SLA is saying. And you bet it’s history. Posterity’s going to look back, and it’ll be one thing if she dies out there in the wilderness, the terrorist princess. But it’ll be a whole ’nother thing if she cops a plea, says “just kidding” and turns state’s evidence and then after a couple of years in minimum goes back to the name and the millions and the uptight boyfriend with the mustache. If she’s some Hillsborough matron in twenty-five years, remembering on Dick Cavett her crazy days as a revolutionary, then that’ll be the story of the sixties, so called. That’ll be the whole and only story.”

And enfolded in events, are we simply awaiting our interpretation? To Randi it is looking less and less like an ordinary American afternoon, with wind bending the tops of the pines along the ridge and gently rustling the birches closer to the house. Now it is the doomscape of history. She drove to Pennsylvania today, but Guy obviously has been making a journey into history with a capital H. She stretches and then slowly, almost hesitantly, lays her head on Guy’s shoulder. He switches his beer to his left hand and then, carefully, as if he’s worried he’ll scare her away, shifts so that his right arm is around her. They sit and wait for the revolutionary castaways.

The others arrive near dusk. They have been “on maneuvers” in the woods and fields. Teko is bursting with a steroidal energy, at the border of a jolly hostility familiar to Guy from the halftime locker room, an inflammatory and self-renewing aggressive confidence. He moves around the kitchen while dinner is prepared, joyous, plates and glasses clanking angrily together in his hands. Yolanda talks blandly with Randi about the kitchen garden, which is overgrown and neglected but still producing “fantastic” tomatoes, according to Yolanda. Joan has disappeared into the parlor. Guy listens to Teko recount the day’s martial triumphs while keeping an eye on Tania, who sits silently at the kitchen table, her shadowed face further darkened by a large eggplant-colored bruise blooming on her left cheekbone.

Teko is feeling so damned good that Guy knows he’ll have a tricky time selling the idea of moving to him and Yolanda. He’s not shying away from a confrontation, exactly; this is the kind of conversation he’s handled before, expertly. Usually the key, when delivering bad news is to appeal to their pride in their own self-possession. To say, you have to either bargain for this stuff, take it with equanimity, or you might as well go in for managing the produce department at the Alpha Beta. Hey, yeah — day in and day out with the vegetables; stacking them in neat pyramids, checking for rot, setting the misty spray mechanism to go off at designated intervals; remembering names, prices, varieties, growing seasons. Sell organics even; go to work at Rainbow or the Berkeley Bowl and turn the whole dreary enterprise into the politics of self-congratulatory smiles. Why not? Everybody loves a greengrocer. None of the stain, the flesh stink, of a butcher in his bloody white coat, and the hard hat to remind you that meat is a heavy industry manufacturing its product from the inert flanks of huge corpses. Now there’s a challenge, to work amid the fury, the chain saw din, of the meatpackers! So usually that’s the key. That’s what the key is, to these type conversations. Guy indulges in his reverie as Teko paces and talks. He’ll wind down, Guy thinks, and then I’ll tell him. But Guy has the impression that Teko has been overcranked for a few days now.