Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

But not today. Today’s news is more bullshit from Popeye pertaining to some issues clinging to his messy parole situation. He seems to have mistaken Hank Galton for his parole officer. Well, Hank asked for that particular headache.

“I am really not feeling so well,” says Sally. “Do you mind if I just sit for a few minutes?”

“No, Sally. Can I get you some more water? Some coffee?”

“Can’t you open that window?”

“No.”

“I don’t see the point.”

“Me neither,” says Polhaus cheerfully. “Sure is a pretty evening, though.” He lifts the telephone receiver, puts it down.

“I don’t know what to do with myself right now,” she says.

“Go home. Make a drink. Watch the news. Have a bite.”

“Is that what your evenings are like?”

“Just a suggestion.”

“Not a very exciting one.”

Is she flirting with him? Polhaus is pretty sure she’s giving some to Popeye; does she want to compare equipment?

“I’m afraid I don’t have much excitement on my mind. I have to prepare for a court appearance tomorrow. In Sacramento.”

That ought to keep her out of the office.

“Oh,” she says, “well.” She closes her pocketbook. Then she stands. “Have a good day in court tomorrow. Do you have to testify? Or are you just going to lend moral support?”

Thomas Polhaus has to smile. It’s one of the funniest things he’s heard lately.

TANIA AND JOAN CREEP through the woods, dense mixed stands of birch and willow on the flats, pine on the slopes. They are on point/ slack maneuvers, searching for the “enemy” team of Teko and Yolanda. Though today Teko has designated Tania and Joan as the pursuers in his new game, he and Yolanda are naturally disinclined to behave like prey for long. From far ahead they usually lay an ambush for the other two.

Joan takes a dim view of all this. She’s really just keeping Tania company. Tania is particularly terrified of Teko and Yolanda’s surprise attacks, Teko crashing out of the trees, screaming, tackling her and pretending to draw a knife across her throat or cutting her and Joan down with simulated gunfire. Frequently, when these assaults occur, she wets her pants.

“He always goes for me, ” she says.

“He knows what I’d do if he laid his hand on me.”

“He’s worse here.”

“Honey, he’s worse everywhere.”

“Here” is Jeffersonville, New York, where Randi has found them a place, another nowhere, except this time more so. Up a private drive hewn out of the pinewoods that line the road, their house sits adjacent to an old forsaken creamery, surrounded by acres of wooded land. If their isolation from the outside world seems more complete than before, inside the house there’s a near-total lack of privacy; it’s one big room, with a sleeping loft. It’s a dusty place, void of character and charm, nothing like the Lafferty place. Tania finds dead spiders in the corners. She finds old newspapers on a shelf. She watches moths batter the overhead light. That’s the local color.

And it’s true that here Teko apparently has found much to nourish his authoritarian spirit. These military exercises he undertakes with great seriousness of purpose. Compulsory political study group every evening. The usual running, weight lifting, and calisthenics. He calls Guy repeatedly from town, urging him to supply the SLA with weapons for training, until Guy, ragged with worry about the steady stream of calls to his number from the remote upstate hamlet of Jeffersonville (as he pictures it being phrased in the papers), capitulates, bringing with him on his next visit two old Daisy Red Ryder air rifles, which Teko holds in his hands as if they had been sculpted from shit. Still, he sets up one end of the creamery for use as a rifle range. Guess who gets to pick up the BBs for reuse when practice is over. He plots and schemes toward the day when the group returns to California, the day the Revolution begins, anew.

A breathless day, overcast with occasional zags of lightning crossing the sky followed by the low rolling rumble of thunder, but no rain to relieve things, just the fraught light that passes through the storm suspended above them.

The two pupils sit side by side on upturned milk crates in the old creamery. Teko faces them, arms folded across his chest, Yolanda at his side. It’s the People’s elocution class.

Teko says, “You had this bunch of rules impounded into you. They told you what to do and when to do it. And of course you didn’t notice, but they even told you how to speak. You”—Teko here indicates Tania—“so that you could take your place among the ruling elite. And you”—Teko thrusts a forefinger in Joan’s direction—“because you were at their mercy. A member of a defeated people, you had to learn the language of the imperial oppressor.”

There are plenty of rules here too. According to Teko and Yolanda, the People’s vernacular is the same as Amos ‘n’ Andy’s. Nonrhotic. Dropping of the final g in the present participle and gerundial forms. Lack of definition of final sound in word-ending consonantal clusters. Multiple negation. Omission of word final s and ed. Substitution of word final f for th. Substitution of word initial d for th. Substitution of auxiliary be for first-, second-, and third-person singular and plural present and past indicatives of that verb. Not in so many words.

It is much too uncomfortable to call it a lazy day. Tania moves constantly, freeing herself of her clothes where they adhere to her. She crosses one leg over the other, sits for a moment, and then switches. Though the creamery’s huge door has been left open to allow air to circulate, it does no good. The sounds from outside are muzzy, without definition, except for the thunder, which rolls, enveloping them but bringing no rain.

As usual, Joan is giving Teko and Yolanda shit. Tania wishes that just this once she would go along with these two maniacs. It is so hot. They sit side by side on the upturned crates. If they touch accidentally, the impulse to move is both simultaneous and immediate, and as they peel apart, Tania feels their two skins, every centimeter of the way.

“You’re laughing, Joan, but take the accent, for example. They trained you to retain it, to mark you as an outsider.”

Joan giggles.

“Well, they did!” Yolanda is adamant.

“A lack of consciousness of the purpose of these differences is built into their design,” confirms Teko, somewhat obscurely.

Tania watches Teko prepare for his afternoon jog. Every afternoon the same thing: the same purposeful stretching, the eyeglasses left at the same spot on the porch rail, the same huffing breaths as he strides to the point at which he begins, every day, to run at the same leisurely pace. She checks the kitchen clock: 5:03 today. Teko and Yolanda are creatures of habit, rapidly falling into a pattern anywhere they find themselves, any situation. Naturally, Tania is obliged to share these shifts in behavior.

Ordinarily Tania is a person who takes comfort in the familiarity of habits and routines. Forms them quickly, adapts to those of others. Those of her parents. Those of the church. Those of her schools. Even those, God knows, of Eric Stump. She’d felt, with him, in that apartment on Bienvenue, as if the steadiness of their lives together would either stave off the death of love or slow its approach. Their habits hardened them into their apartness from each other, though the change was barely perceptible, evolutionary and profound, so that eventually they became two different creatures, divergent but both superbly adapted to the conditions of their common environment, who might chance to look up and gaze at each other with passing interest. All she’d wanted to do was to sit opposite the man: two laps, two books open in them, two glasses of wine on the coffee table. She might have made a life out of that. She could have. Even in its most difficult aspects it would have been the easiest thing to do.