Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“I really don’t see why. It’s counterproductive. Guy will be very unhappy when he finds out.”

“Oh, fuck Guy!” Yolanda’s voice lilts pleasantly, as though she were talking to a child. And Trout is aware that his own voice sounds small, boyish, petulant, overcome. One fissure, and he has revealed everything.

“You almost,” she continues, “have me believing he’s fooled you too.”

“Fooled?”

“Please.”

Teko comes in. He still carries the BB gun.

“Beautiful morning,” he says. “Beautiful, beautiful morning.” Thrusting his hand into an open box of cereal on the kitchen table, he draws up a handful and proceeds to eat it. Mouth full, he says, “Hemingway figure it out yet?”

“He’s getting there.”

“I’m sorry,” Trout says, “I’m very confused right now. I’ve spent a week of my time out here, and I really don’t understand this at all.”

“Like you need an explanation,” says Teko.

“Please do explain,” Trout says.

“Lays it on thick, doesn’t he?”

“All I can say is, we are so disappointed,” says Yolanda.

“Disappointed?” says Teko. “Does Guy Mock think we’re an idiot? We’ve got Tania! Right here in her own words! Tania! Tania!”

“I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Guy’s loyal to you. He’s dedicated to this book.”

“Oh, yeah?” says Yolanda. “Then how come you’re not Norman Mailer?”

Trout is rendered speechless. After all, there are so many reasons.

Now here’s an unexpected development. Trout appears indirectly to have become the casualty of Guy’s self-assured persuasiveness. What Trout does know is that the editors Guy has approached have expressed an enthusiastic, though guarded, shall we say, attitude toward an SLA book. Certain conditions apply. The tenor of their stipulations being along the lines of: Bring us a lock of Tania’s hair, a fresh fingerprint, a Polaroid featuring the renegade heiress posed with the headlines of the day. And signed releases, too, would be a big plus. “Shit,” Guy had said. “You think an agent would help?”

Still, Trout is hesitant to reveal this intelligence. First of all, he doesn’t think that he can make as strong a case for the truth as Guy can for pie in the sky. Second, he knows the money situation here is dire, too dire, really, to abruptly withdraw the promise of “six figures” that’s infected everyone’s imaginations, induced a type of febrile, depraved expectancy that seems tremendously unrevolutionary, to say the least. And third, there’s the air rifle, which Teko cocks, slipping his finger inside the trigger guard.

“Are you going to shoot me with that BB gun?”

Teko must interpret this comment as an insult, an attack on the dignity of his weapon. Smiling his strange smile, he raises the gun to his shoulder and takes aim at Trout. Plainly, Trout reflects, he has in this case erroneously deployed a modifier.

“Teko!” Yolanda’s shout makes both Trout and Teko jump, and the gun discharges, shooting Trout in the hand. He and Teko both look slightly confounded by the blood trickling down his wrist, the back of his hand, between his fingers, by the meaty reality of the wound.

“Don’t get excited,” Yolanda says to Trout. “We’ll have a full discussion. What time’s Guy coming?”

The familiar clatter of the Bug. And warm greetings for good old Guy from Teko and Yolanda. Guy, wired and loopy and irritable, unfolding from behind the wheel of the VW for like the 863rd time in the last eight weeks, extending himself into country sunlight and a veritable chorus of hail-fellow-well-met salutations and good cheer. Guy, Guy, here’s Guy! What happened to Eat Shit? he wonders numbly. Oh, he’s tired of these people. He folds the front seat forward so he can remove the paper bag containing the spread he’s brought, a celebration lunch of cold cuts, cheese, bread, potato salad, slaw, and cold beer. Not every day you finish the first preliminary stage of a potential project that may eventually turn into the draft manuscript of a book somebody somewhere might want to buy sometime! It’s about as lame as that sounds, but Guy wants his revolutionaries optimistic and upbeat. The better to evict them from his life.

We’re so glad to see you! Where’s Randi?

Randi coming?

Where is she, Guy?

All this concern over Randi. So odd, so new. Refreshing, even. They’d always treated her before as a sort of appendage. Guy lifts the bag out of the backseat and turns, notices for the first time Trout’s ashen face, the bandage around his hand.

“What happened to you?”

“Just an accident,” says Yolanda. “Will Randi be coming later?”

“No,” Guy says. “Randi took a pass today, I’m afraid. She’s feeling sort of traveled out. Frayed was one word she used. It’s known to happen; take a nice young person and run them ragged and there you go, a disinclination to take trips of this sort. And then there’s always the problem of the not-so-spacious backseat and who has to sit in it on the way back. Should I just go ahead and say, she has a hemorrhoid?”

“But she knows you’re out here?” Teko asks.

“Of course she knows,” Guy says, suddenly alert to the ulterior. There’s a kind of calm — physical, impenetrable, and stifling — that lies over things the way a woolen blanket covers up a bloody sheet. “Of course. What kind of accident?”

“Well,” says Teko, “I shot him. Can you believe it?”

Trout remains silent. He has a sullen, dazed look on his face.

“A mistake, Guy,” says Teko.

“Of course it was,” says Guy. He shifts the paper bag from one hand to the other. Teko and especially Yolanda stare at him fixedly. “And where are the others?” Guy asks.

“Tania and Joan? We sent them into town to run a couple errands.”

“I could’ve—” Guy begins to speak but stops. “Well. Done is done. Hope I don’t miss them. A nice lunch, and then your intrepid reporters are off.” And running. Guy has a very, very bad feeling.

On the kitchen table is wound litter: a bottle of antiseptic, some scraps of cotton and tape. The air rifle lies on the floor. The house smells of sweat and stale smoke. Guy sets the bag on the counter and rapidly begins to unpack the food, laying it out. Buffet style, as his mother would say. Eat it and beat it. They’ll take the tapes back to Ninetieth Street and see what’s there. Through all of it, all the difficulties — the thousands of miles, the thousands of dollars, the occasional sardonic report from Joan, the near-tears phone calls from Trout, the bulging suspicion that this was not, after all, going to be the book the educated middle class would turn to at bedtime to knock itself out — the project has persisted in Guy’s brain, burning there, just out of reach in his cranium, the apparition of its own perfect embodiment. Eventually he’ll grab hold of it, with or without the help of the SLA.

He’s appeared alone here today because of Randi’s refusal this morning, flat out, to get out of bed if the purpose of her rising was to travel to Jeffersonville. Just overflowing with hostility these days. Hot to get back to those brown California foothills, the tinderbox calm of late summer. There’s been scene upon scene over the last week or so. Tiresome and, irritatingly enough, ultimately persuasive. Randi began by pulling out the last few months’ bank statements, charting for him the oceans of cash that had flowed out of their hands. This never bothered Guy, but he understood that for Randi money was always a suitable way to frame an issue that had moral dimensions. He was like, OK, develop your thesis. Moving right along, Randi pointed out that if anything, he had less sympathy for the SLA’s tactics and objectives today than he’d had when he first heard of the group. That Teko, Yolanda, and Tania did not hesitate to demand money, food, shelter, transportation, supplies, and weapons but viciously rebuked the Mocks for their politics, values, and way of life. That Joan, too, now not only seemed to take their largesse as her due but appeared also almost to resent their ability to provide it. She suggested to him that it was only a matter of time before the feds linked the personal check Guy had written to Fire Lieutenant Lafferty to the place in South Canaan and were all over it and them.