Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Joan’s a natural,” Teko is saying, flinging his arms out before him. “We’re dealing with a question of motivation.”

“Motivation,” repeats Guy.

“She doesn’t want to lead. I say, what about your responsibility to minorities? The SLA was conceived and recruited with minority leadership in mind. I want to assure you that my position as General Field Marshal is strictly an interim thing. I don’t deserve to lead the revolution against white fascist corporate Amerikkka. Maybe if I was a homosexual. I only deserve whatever small role I’m assigned.”

“They have these bugs,” Yolanda tells Randi.

“She could take over right now if she showed only the slightest iota of interest. But as it is, she’s a barely functioning guerrilla.”

“I think she thinks her time with you is an interim kind of thing too,” says Guy.

“Well, I wish you’d talk to her about getting with the program … I think if she just gave it a real try … She could be dynamite.” Guy notices a shit-eating grin creep onto Teko’s face.

“Everybody loves Joan,” says Guy. This is true. Joan exercises a gravitational pull, the tasty mystery of good-looking people with dark secrets they hold close. Nobody is quite sure of Joan’s history, including Guy. He knows about Manzanar, sat up straight at the mere mention of the magical name Hiroshima. OK, the chronology is a little screwed up, might be something as trivial and vain as Joan’s lying about her age. The Big Three-Oh, or something. But this is something he believes she’s entitled to, as a person displaced by events, a displaced person. He thinks of Negro cemeteries he’s been to, the cockeyed stones lacking birthdates, lacking surnames, free of all the administrative litter that joined a life to its lineage. And now Teko’s developed a little sheepish crush on her. Odd too, considering that from everything Guy’s seen, and everything Joan has reported, Teko seems to resent everything about her. Well, maybe not so odd. If Guy’s ever met a man with an angry little hard-on quivering at the center of his antagonism, General Teko is it. Well, he certainly wouldn’t “talk to her.” It’s difficult enough to keep Joan functioning in this limited capacity without Guy’s pushing her over the edge by blatantly pimping on behalf of the SLA and the concupiscent longing of its interim chief. He changes the subject.

“How about Tania?” He looks directly at her, to will her into the conversation. She doesn’t return his gaze, continues to look so intently into the kitchen depths that Guy half turns his head in the direction of her stare, sees only the hutch with its smudged glass doors.

“Hopeless,” sneers Teko. “Never going to be a guerrilla. Nev-ver.”

“Well, you know, she might have value in another role.” Guy says this offhandedly, without a trace of sarcasm, though the minute the words are out he’s wondering if Teko really sees Tania’s fulfilling no greater function than that of a foot soldier, if he’s so intent on replenishing the ranks of his depleted army that he’ll put Tania on the front lines, wherever they are. Guy never had a chance to meet Field Marshal Cinque, and in fact he’s always taken a slightly patronizing view of the man, but it abruptly strikes him that whatever else you might say about the guy, the SLA’s dead founder possessed a markedly more subtle sense of the uses to which the Missing Heiress could be put than Teko does. The famous photo of Tania hefting the carbine from her hip and training it on whatever her vacant stare encountered beyond the edge of the frame was infinitely more useful, more suggestive, more pregnant with violent potential than actually having her splatter a fucking sporting goods store with.30-caliber slugs in the middle of some petty shoplifting incident. For, what, sweat socks?

“What kind of role?” Teko is all suspicion now.

“The public face,” Guy says, “of the SLA.”

Teko drops his chin, shaking his head as if he were embarrassed, holding a closed-mouth smile. Then his hand comes up, a single argumentative finger raised and waggling, as he takes two strides toward Guy, to whom this collection of movements seems familiar, but unplaceable. Suddenly he flashes: Ralph Kramden.

O, the Great One: admonishing, reproving, cautioning, scolding, clarifying, elaborating, expanding upon; the farcical delusions of grandeur; the ideas and schemes, the preposterous crescendoing plotting, all from out of the Spartan home he returned to each day from the bus comp’ny, that room as bare as Beckett, that perfection of obscurity, with the wife who never, never once, let him forget that he was all impotence and frustrated ambition. Teko as Gleason! Guy would surely laugh out loud if he dared. How sweet it is!

Teko is saying, “See, I think what you’re thinking is this is about her. When actually what it is, is it’s about the revolution.”

Guy edges away from where Teko has cornered him, pinned him with his back to the counter, advancing with those two bullish strides. “See, Norton, what it is,” says Ralph Kramden, “is it’s about the revolution.” Caramba! He joins Randi and Yolanda by the sink. Randi slices tomatoes, their skins creviced and blackened where rot has gotten to them but still shining and beaded with water droplets.

“Well, it’s funny but that’s what, well, I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“Yeah?”

“We need to get working on this book.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And frankly I think we all know that, unfair as it may seem, the focus isn’t exclusively going to be from the Symbionese perspective. I mean, ‘Let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.’ It’s a good point. In fact, an excellent point. There’s your political program in a nutshell and you articulate it in the amount of time it takes a bullet to reach its mark. ‘Say it with guns.’ Madison Avenue would give its eyeteeth to come up with that one. But.”

“But what? So what’s your idea?”

“Well, first, everybody’s heard that. And second, book-wise, you’re going to have to lead with your strength. In a book people are actually going to want to pick up and read, the emphasis falls naturally on her.”

He gestures at Tania. Teko is silent.

“I told you it was fucking bullshit, Teko,” says Yolanda. “He’s just trying to exploit us. To get to her.” She’s been standing beside Randi, maintaining a posture of such chummy intimacy that Guy has been wondering whether she was even listening. She was. She strikes. Snakelike person. Yolanda has to crane her neck, looking beyond Randi and Guy, to address this to Teko, enhancing Guy’s impression of a cobra, rearing.

“I’m not trying to exploit you. I’m trying to encourage you to develop and fully utilize your notoriety. And she’s your best argument on your own behalf. She’s living testimony to the power, the persuasiveness of the SLA viewpoint!”

The public face of the SLA massages her left wrist, her face expressionless.

“It’s always about her, ” says Teko, bitterly. “She’s just accidental.” He shakes his head adamantly.

“Six figures is what they tell me. Knowledgeable people. Six figures for a story that accentuates the Tania. Not an exclusive focus, mind you, a highlighting. Six figures. And this is before serial rights, paperback rights, foreign rights, movie rights, the whole schmear.”

“Don’t believe it, Teko,” says Yolanda. “They don’t want to pay us. They want to kill us. They don’t pay revolutionaries for their stories in this country. They silence them. Look at what happened in L.A.”

“That was L.A.,” says Guy. “They don’t know from publishing there. They move in with their newsreel cameras, get their shaky blurry footage, and, you know, that’s good enough for them. But in New York they know a story isn’t really whole, isn’t done justice, until a topnotch writer publishes a twenty-thousand-word think piece and later expands it into a book.”