Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Basically we’re all set,” she says.

“I knew you’d be.”

“Will you look at all this shit?”

“How come you’re so tidy?”

“You haven’t heard? I’m a bourgeois.”

“Oh, yeah,” Guy says vaguely. He sits down on the edge of the rumpled bed, starts, reaches under the blanket, and pulls out a dirty athletic supporter.

“For what ?” asks Joan.

Guy drops the jockstrap. “Where’s your protégée?”

“Tania’s out. She goes over to the trees. Try to be alone out there.”

“And she’s doing how?”

“Don’t blame me responsible.”

“I’m not holding you responsible. Though you are a responsible person. The only one around including me I might add.”

“Oh, shut up. I cheer her up. There’s a real person inside there someplace. But, you know, the thing, though, is, like, I’m thinking it probably isn’t the person who it was before.”

“Before Cujo died?”

“Before she got snatched.”

“No shit.” Guy says this sincerely. He trolls his eyes like a pair of searchlights over the small, pretty woman in the doorway.

“She’s figuring it out. Who she’s got to be. When she isn’t sure, she just switches off. Drives them”—she nods at the pile of Teko and Yolanda’s papers, their metonymic essence—“nutter — butters. They make her do things. Run! Carry! Jump! Then she’s turned back on, starts up talking — they get even madder. Smack her in the face, which I tell her she hasn’t got to take.”

“They don’t hit you, do they?”

“I told that little shrimp you ever touch me I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

Guy returns to Tania. “So, figuring it out, hmm.”

“Not everybody gets to grow this big strong tree of a personality like you, Guy. Some people are always having a new one they work on.”

“You a tree? Or a whadayacall, a sapling?”

Joan has correctly intuited that Guy has never, for a moment, doubted who he is. A touch of fatalism in that. Why, ultimately, his career as an athlete topped off at the level it did. He could never articulate the physical striver’s questioning of his own identity, his measurement of his own worth on a scale of millimeters, or hundredths of a second; he’d never needed to see if the difference between winning and losing would embody itself in him, make him, by the breadth of a hair, a new man nothing like the one who’d touched his feet to the floorboards that morning. He hadn’t been interested, an attitude that could piss coaches off in record time. Now here you have a Joan. Life is a whole bunch of forks in a whole bunch of roads for her. Who to be next? How strong? How brave? In the younger woman she would have to have seen something of her own self, in the constant adaptation, the knack for living.

The rattle of the Bug comes to them from the road below and grows louder as the little car turns into the driveway and climbs the rise toward the house. Soon they’ll find out what they’re about. Soon they’ll be safe.

SARA JANE MOORE IS seated in the Learning Center at the Palo Alto headquarters of the California Society of Certified Public Accountants, where she is enrolled in a CPE course in estate taxation. Other accountants surround her in the fluorescent gloom of the windowless basement room. There is something wrong with the air conditioning down here in the Pit, as she has heard its subterranean denizens, the mailboys and shipping clerks and pressmen, refer to it, and the door is propped open to allow air to circulate. A mail clerk, a tall, good-looking boy wearing a T-shirt that says CAMP TALCOTT, has brought in a standing fan and set it up in a corner where it blows stale air across the room, ruffling the edges of their papers as it oscillates, describing a forty-five-degree arc. The boy’s colleague calls out to him down the corridor, and his response is clear but incomprehensible: “Sir Jade, Sir Jade.”

The issues concerning the field of estate planning and taxation that the sole practitioner faces today are. Who gives a shit. She hears the sharp crack-crack-crack-crack of the equipment through the wall as it cuts freshly printed brochures and stacks them. There is a smell of ink and oiled machinery. She just wants to get this crap over with, get her four hours in so that she can maintain her certification. Already the State Board of Accountancy has sent her a semithreatening piece of official correspondence, claiming that she has not kept up with her Continuing Professional Education requirements. And of course it’s the CPA society that offers the courses. All in cahoots. You can bet that if she were with Touche Ross or Coopers & Lybrand she would not be sitting in some stifling basement room with a bunch of nosepicking dimwits. And she has a busy day. After she signs out, she has to head up to the city to meet with Popeye Jackson about People in Need, ask him a few disingenuous questions about the location of certain fugitives from justice, call the Examiner to leave a message for Hank Galton, and then drop by the FBI office to be debriefed by Tommy Polhaus. And then there’s the dry cleaning.

At lunch Sara Jane first follows some of her colleagues, who wander down the corridor to the break room. She catches a glimpse of the inside of the shipping room, where the walls are festooned with cutout pictures from Playboy, Oui, Penthouse, you name it. One of the moron clerks inside, operating a curious device that shoots out measured lengths of prewetted packing tape at the touch of a button, gazes at her without interest. She opens the door to enter the break room but finds nothing there but her awkward-looking classmates and two vending machines.

Instead she goes upstairs to have a smoke in the fresh air. The building is on Welch Road, right across from Stanford University Hospital, and on the second floor several doctors have their offices, according to the directory mounted on the lobby wall. A woman, her head and face swathed in bandages, with glossy dark contusions under both eyes, is helped out of the elevator by a woman in scrubs and guided toward a waiting car. Curious. As she smokes, Sara Jane watches a Cadillac pull into the lot and park, and a middle-aged man steps from it to help another woman, similarly bandaged and bruised, out of the passenger seat. She emerges gingerly, grabbing hold of the man’s proffered arm with two hands, and together the two of them walk slowly from the large gleaming auto toward the entrance of the building. As they pass her, the man gives Sara Jane a slightly suspicious once-over. These dames are in serious discomfort with their busted-up faces. All at once Sara Jane remembers some Reader ’ s Digest article she once read describing the aftermath of certain types of plastic surgery. Blackened eyes from shattered noses. Stitched-up faces, the raw flesh employed as a sling against gravity. How foolish and pathetic. Going to a doctor to let him break your nose with a mallet. How very Palo Alto.

She tries to sign out forty minutes early, during the open book test, and the instructor nails her. Total cahoots; no doubt he gets a piece of the action too, of course. The discussion gets a little heated, and he asks her out into the hallway. What is the difference? She has finished her test and is a grown person with responsibilities. She could tick them off, just to see his eyes go wide, this dumb bunny from Bakersfield. Estate planning, how presumptuous, blechh.

Sara Jane double-parks her car on Twenty-fourth Street and charges into the dry cleaner’s, her ticket held at the ready. The pinheaded man behind the counter looks up without even a vestige of a smile on his sour puss. Only something like $250 a year she spends here. She decides to check carefully for stains because she knows she pointed them all out.