Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Hello, Ernest.”

“I like the look. You look real natural, Guy-Guy. Like a guy who crashes the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic for the atmosphere.”

“Does he get a hello? He walks in, he’s driving since the crack of dawn, and the long-lost brother is all over him.”

“I greeted you when you came in. Guess you want me to try again. Hi, there, little brother. And now we resume our broadcast day.”

Ernest paused to drink. Ice chimed.

“That is some mop. It looks like dune grass on that bald head of yours. C’mere, Guy-Guy. I want to pull your hair, see if it’s real. Like Santa’s beard.”

“Still hung up on Santa, Ernest? Explains the back-to-school clothes. Did you get some galoshes too? A nice pencil case?”

Mrs. Mock explained. “We took Ernest to the shopping center this morning. Because there was a sale.”

“My desert ensemble.”

“You look more like a Wilkes-Barre golf pro.”

“Ah, ha. Ha.”

“He needed some clothes. You boys need clothes.”

Ernest sipped his drink. “I’m sure Mom can drive you over to the Goodwill after lunch.”

“Oh, lunch,” said Mrs. Mock.

“Lunch sounds good,” said Guy.

“I don’t see any sign of your father. And where is your lady friend, Guy?”

“ Randi? Randi, you mean?”

“Of course that’s who I mean. Why, Guy, you didn’t bring that other young lady friend of yours back here, did you?”

“‘Other young lady friend’?” Ernest smiled at him over the drink.

“What sort of friend?” Guy felt sudden, atrocious pain in the vicinity of several small, little-known organs.

He smiled back. “I have lots of friends. Friends are good, Ernest. Friends are our friends. Only you would consider the having of a friend to be an inherently suspicious thing.”

“I don’t think we can count on your father right now. He said something about cleaning out the rain gutters,” said Mrs. Mock.

“My guess is he’s a no-show,” ventured Ernest.

“They have rain gutters in Las Vegas?”

“Form’s sake,” said Ernest.

“What gets in them that you have to clean them?”

“Fallout?”

“ Is she coming? Should we hold lunch for her?”

“Who? Randi? Randi is not here.”

“Who really is?” Ernest emptied the glass and rose from his chair. Guy watched. He seemed steady on his feet. He figured he could chalk the belligerence up to his unexpected arrival. Was it belligerence even? Guy had discovered that as often as not, a provocation from Ernest was intended as an invitation to a special, dangerous genre of fellowship. Ernest conversed best, most fluently and easily, with strangers seated twenty feet down the bar, via digs he delivered in the direction of the mirror directly opposite, while occasionally reading in the eyes of a wary bartender the telemetry gauging the reaction to his comments. Declining an invitation to share in the interests of a man who enjoyed being punched in the face required a certain amount of tact and discretion, neither of which was Guy’s strong suit.

Surprisingly, maybe, lunch was uneventful. Mrs. Mock devoted herself to preparing and serving the meal, Ernest read the newspaper, explosively clearing his throat from time to time, and Guy stared through the sliding glass doors at the blanching sun that threw itself over the shadowless day. Afterward Guy put on his trunks and went out to the pool, where he swam laps. He paused in the middle of the pool after a while and, treading water, spotted his father behind the cabins. Mr. Mock moved forward, but erratically, pausing every couple of steps to do something that looked as if he were trying to get dog shit off his shoe. As he approached, Guy realized that he was smoothing with his foot the gravel that lined the walkway on one side. He was wearing a faded dress shirt and a pair of jeans that he had cut the legs off unevenly. Guy waved, but the old man took no notice of him.

“We’re in Libya,” Ernest said later, sitting with Guy at the bar of the Golden Charm Casino, which consisted of the bar and four slot machines. “A ‘hot spot,’ as they say.”

“Who’s in Libya?” said Guy. It was around one in the morning and they were very drunk. Guy felt himself leaning forward with the eagerness of a child, listening to Ernest. He sipped his beer and stuffed a handful of dry roasted peanuts into his mouth.

After dinner Ernest had grabbed Guy by the hair, rapped hard on his forehead with a pair of knuckles, and invited him out for a drink. Here they were. Ernest was feeling chatty.

“A CQA op, it was. I’d been doing blunt and edge work, very comfortable with it, but I wanted to branch out. They had a triple S op — safe, simple, and secret — and I wanted to give it a shot.”

“Who had?”

“They said, can you do falls?”

“Who said?”

“I said, you give me a clear seventy-five feet of vertical passage and a hard surface and I’m your man.”

“Whose man?”

“I arrange with the subject to meet. It’s different. Blunt and edge, you have either a simple or a chase situation. Blunt, usually simple. The guy turns his back, you clock him in the temple with a hammer. Edge, you are frequently teaching a lesson.”

“Teaching who a lesson?”

“Edge, there’s severing involved, and mess. Gory stuff. Subtlety is not an issue. As a technique, it’s inherently terroristic. So you are in a chase or guarded situation. An unhappy, resistant subject, running, begging, bleeding. You get used to it, and you don’t — this was always a big plus for me — you don’t have to hone your interpersonal skills. But in this case, like I say, it’s simple and secret. And I am not used to setting up meetings. So I am, you know, a little tentative.”

Here Ernest called the bartender over. Like all bartenders seemed to for Ernest, this guy immediately dropped everything — in this instance a lengthy and highly vivid, yet still suspiciously adumbrated description of his personal collection of intaglio prints, delivered to an off-duty chorine, half in the bag and so statuesque Guy would have sworn she was a transvestite — to rush right over and take Ernest’s order. Guy couldn’t figure it. Ernest wasn’t an overgenerous tipper. In his new J. C. Penney clothes, he was dressed about as well as he ever was. He did not feign camaraderie with bartenders or sympathy for their ontological condition. Something about Ernest made bartenders come running, though.

“Wild Turkey 101 on the rocks,” he said, “and another Shirley Temple for the kid. They said, Ernest, the subject drinks. This is a perfect cover: case your height, get him loaded, take him up there, and drop him. Sounds easy, right? But you know how hard it is to get a drunk drunk in Libya? Hard is how hard.”

“ Who said?”

“But I figure I’ll manage. They fly me in on Shitheel Air, sitting with the goats and the chickens, just like everybody else. I got a seersucker suit and a Canadian passport and I’m carrying an old Pentax for a prop. I got an envelope full of cash. Bad news is, every place you go, you’re hemorrhaging dinars. To get an entry visa. To get a cab. To get a table. To get a menu. To get a room. Good news is, with enough dinars you can get anybody to get anything for you. Get it? Makes that envelope skinny as a mermaid’s pussy, but in the end I get my booze. See?”

Guy raised his glass of beer and moved it from side to side, a gesture meant to indicate comprehension, a concentration of attention, an eagerness to hear the story unfold.

“Now, my powers of persuasion are, OK, they leave a little to be desired under the very best of circumstances, but it is not real difficult to finesse a drunk into ascending to a great height with you. I told him I had a business proposition to discuss. I’m a Western stranger in a seersucker suit and a fedora, a universally familiar type, and it sort of follows that I would have a business proposition to discuss. Now, my great height. For my great height I had picked out an old converted villa with thick walls and a marble staircase and an old-fashioned elevator in a cage that we could ride in the pretty predictable event of drunken fatigue.” He built the place with his hands as he spoke. “Among other things the place housed the Tripoli bureau of the Associated Press, for a steady and inconspicuous influx of pushy Westerners like myself, and an outfit called Mustafa Importing, which supposedly is the firm I’m supposedly doing business through and which I happen to know is closed on that day. Oh, what a shame. They appear to have stepped out. Would you care to come up to the roof with me, have a cigarette? I believe there is an excellent harbor view. Whatever bullshit. The building rises six fucking stories above a street made of opportunely solid cobblestones. It has a parapet about yea high.”