Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Oh, God,” says Tania.

“Oh, Gary,” says Joan, coming around and throwing herself on the fragrant grass, arching her back, moaning. “You make my labia tremble!” She and Tania burst out giggling. Then the front door opens, and Teko emerges in his jogging clothes. Tania turns her wrist to glance down at a watch that hasn’t been there since February. But she knows without checking that it’s nowhere near five o’clock.

“They’re right,” he says, “it’s a great day for a walk in the woods.”

It’s a lousy day, overcast again and humid.

“We’re OK here,” says Joan.

The usual stretching. Eyeglasses in their usual spot on the porch rail.

“Well, I’m off for a jog,” he says. He takes the usual brisk steps, huffing and puffing, and then launches into his usual canter. His feet pound in their usual way against the ground as he runs up the path he has worn into the grass and then turns into the woods. Everything as usual, except that it is too early and the day feels too different, as if they had somehow misused it. Though Tania and Joan hug their knees and laugh, sitting like any two girls on a square of lawn anywhere in America, the tone is dark with premonitory shadows. Though Tania knows that Teko would probably behave exactly the same if Yolanda were planning to cuckold him with a genuine urban guerrilla — especially if the act were to leave him with nothing more than a bum finger to keep him company — she feels that Kearse is an intruder, a tourist lazily dipping into their revolutionary ways and conventions. Why’d he have to show up?

They talk and read and doze as the misshapen afternoon crawls by. Once an enormous burst of lightning lashes across the sky, bridging the clouds, yielding an enormous and instantaneous crack of thunder, and as the still air begins to move, cool now and reeking of ozone, they gaze upward, seeking the rain that seems sure to come. Tania sees Teko’s figure come out of the woods and make for the creamery.

“I’m head inside now,” says Joan. “I’m like a cat about getting soaked in your clothes.”

“OK.” Tania lifts a hand in a lazy farewell, her eyes on Teko’s back as he muscles the creamery door, sliding it open a few feet on its stubborn track and then vanishing inside.

She studies for a moment the dark gash the open door forms in the face of the creamery. After getting to her feet, she begins walking that way, not quite sure why. The first drops of rain splat on her back, and she feels them, warm through her T-shirt. She thinks of the circles of Teko’s blood on the countertop. The rain comes down steadily. She can hear it now, falling softly through the trees and, as she approaches, hammering on the corrugated tin roof of the creamery. Hiding behind the broad door, she creeps along the apron of concrete laid outside the creamery entrance and peeks into the opening. Teko has drawn a tall silhouette on the wall, comical, unmistakably Kearse’s, and he is firing at this target with one of the air rifles. She steps inside.

It’s deafening in the creamery, a steady pounding on the tin roof that echoes throughout the unfilled spaces of the building. Shafts of gray light fall through the noise from window slits overhead. Teko stands in the shadows, engrossed in his shooting, firing, cocking the rifle, and firing again. The sounds of the gun and of the pellets striking the wall are lost in the battering noise of the rain. Tania reaches up to smooth her hair, gathering the wet locks at the back of her head and squeezing them, wringing out the rainwater onto the soaked fabric of her shirt. She shivers now. She’s cold. It was funny, and now it’s not so funny. She has never really thought of him as a man before and now she’s struck by her curiously mingled feelings of empathy and schadenfreude. When Teko turns and looks at her, he seems unsurprised at her presence.

She asks, “Did you catch up with them?” She has to shout.

“I caught up,” he shouts back.

“How far did they get?”

Teko inclines his head vaguely.

“Oh.”

Teko turns, raises the gun to his shoulder, and fires again.

“New target?”

“Yup.”

“Tall.”

“It is that.”

“So. Are they heading back to the house?”

He asks, “Who?” Then: “Oh.”

He says, “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

He says, “I don’t know what they’re doing right now.” He turns, raises the gun to his shoulder, and fires again.

“They’ll get pretty soaked.”

“Pour cold water on them. That’s what they do, right?” He laughs curtly, but to Tania it’s just a smile and a shake of the head, silent in the drumming noise. She looks at the silhouette, gangly and absurd, its head perforated with tiny punctures, its torso. Tania notices the crudely drawn sneakers on the silhouette’s feet, with three diagonal stripes running down the sides.

“Go ahead and keep shooting,” she shouts. “Don’t let me bother you.”

“I don’t want to. These guns stink.” He throws the rifle. It lands without a sound in the clattering din. They stare at the spot where it lies for a moment. Teko asks, “You want to know where I found them?”

“OK?”

Teko advances on her, two big steps toward the little girl shivering in her wet T-shirt. “I found them in the woods. Under a tree. Fucking. Like a pair of animals. Like hippies.”

Tania says, softly, “I’m sorry, Teko.”

“What?”

“I said I’m sorry!”

“Sorry about what?”

“I just am.”

“Don’t be sorry!” And then he turns his head, the voice is lost again, there is only an outraged animation amid the noise. Tania can’t quite believe it, but what she thinks she hears, the voice moving in and out of intelligibility, of audibility itself, are the words security breach . Teko shrugs and pulls at himself, his mouth moving.

Security breach.

Security breach?

“—security breach—”

“OK,” says Tania.

“‘OK.’ Don’t patronize me.”

“OK.”

“You think you’re clever. You think you know something. You don’t know shit. I’ve been telling you that all along.”

“OK. I don’t know anything.”

“ You don’t know shit! ”

“ I don’t know shit! ” They are screaming at each other through the racket of the buffeting rain.

“I’m sick of this,” Teko says. He reaches out and grabs her by the upper arms with freezing hands.

“You try to work democratically and all you get is disrespect.

… a total lack of discipline.

… you all act like you’re at sleepaway camp.

… from now on I just take what I want. No more asking.

… or something.”

He seems to be airing a couple or more different grievances. Tania feels dizzy. His icy fingers still clutching her right arm, he reaches down and unsnaps her jeans, poking her in the crotch as he gropes for the zipper.

“Come on,” he says.

The wind rattles the big door in its frame and the hammering intensifies, panning now across the roof in slow strafing surges. Cataracts of water fall inside through the window slits and into the darkness below. Teko unzips her jeans and tries to yank them down, “Come on now,” he says, “help me.” The breath he chants into her face is sweet, putrid, cigarettey.

“No, Teko, I don’t want this.”

“It’s going to happen.”

“No, Teko.”

“Help me now,” he insists, pulling, his fingernails raking her.

“No, Teko.”

“You have to.”

He has her hand now and is jabbing at himself with it; she keeps it as dumb and stiff as a mannequin’s but can’t mistake the hot, jouncing erection for anything other than what it is. The sheer intimacy of this assault is all needful rage; the thing Teko is trying to wrap her hand around demands a satisfactory answer; that other, usual, anger of Teko’s — the comic, blustering ire — is nothing compared with this thrusting, jockeying, earnest vehemence. In the days of the closet, when Cinque, Teko, and, god damn it, yes, Cujo had taken turns with her, it was all compounded talk and cajolery and appeals to what was portrayed as her born culpability that led to her humiliated surrender. But this is spiked with a greater violence, plain and awful.