Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

The alley curves in a series of stair steps around the rear of the center, with its back entrances and loading docks. Yellowjackets hover irritably near sealed Dumpsters. A chain-link fence runs along the other side of the alley, beyond which she can see glimpses of houses between closely spaced trees and thick undergrowth.

The back door of the bank is marked with the number, 4375, and the bank’s name. She stands before the back door, noting the terrain. Exiting, you’d bear left down the alley and then take the sharp right onto the walkway. She walks the route. The bank’s neighbor, the Arden Plaza Dry Cleaners, has its back door propped open with a cinder block, and she catches a whiff of the heavy fumes. The man inside, busy before a pile of clothes, ignores her.

About fifteen seconds, she figures, from the bank to the walkway, which is itself shielded from view by high stockade fencing on either side. She pays careful attention to these details, mindful of Marighella’s reflections on the prepared urban guerrilla: “Because he knows the terrain the guerrilla can go through it on foot, on bicycle, in automobile, jeep, truck, and never be trapped. Acting in small groups with only a few people, the guerrillas can reunite at an hour and place determined beforehand, following up the attack with new guerrilla operations, or evading the police circle and disorientating the enemy with their unprecedented audacity.” That’s the idea. Plus they’re low on cash right now.

She moves along the walkway toward its outlet at the intersection of Vulcan and Venus. The sun is just beginning to burn through the morning overcast. An old blue Chevy is parked at the curb nearby, and a young man sitting on its hood looks up from the newspaper he is reading.

“You know, you look just like her,” he says, holding out the paper and slapping it with the back of his hand.

“Oh, shut up,” she says, pulling open the passenger door.

“Cuter, though.”

He comes down off the hood and climbs into the car on the driver’s side, tossing the paper into the backseat.

“So how’s it look?”

“Yolanda wasn’t bullshitting. Far as I can see, it looks pretty easy.” She removes her eyeglasses, folds them, and places them in her purse.

He bends to her then, catching her slightly off guard. He can hear her feet shifting on the rubber mat. With impatience? He lifts out of the kiss, hoisting himself up with one hand on the steering wheel and feeling, as ever, importunate. As usual there is something she will not yield, some kernel of herself that remains inviolate, despite the complex emotional message he means for his kisses to impart, the response he intends for them to elicit. Fresh taste of her, like sweet corn on the cob, her lips satiny where he’d had his mouth, relaxed and leaning back into the seat, breathing evenly — but still absent, her eyes elsewhere. He gently puts his hand on her thigh, and she turns it over, examining the yellow knobs of callus that ridge the fold of his palm. She spreads the fingers apart, palpates each, slides a loose-fitting ring halfway up his index finger and then down again. His hand remains still, relaxed, throughout her inspection. Then she pats it: all done now.

“Anyway, like I say. Pretty easy.” She rattles off some of her observations, counting them on her fingers, while he starts the car and puts it in gear.

“Easy for you, maybe,” he says. “You’re not on the assault team.”

“I god damn well should be. I’m the only one who’s ever robbed a fucking bank around here.”

Those ghost images from inside the Hibernia Bank, Mack Sennett armed figures running, jumping, standing still.

“So the appropriate term for what this is is robbery, or expropriation?”

“This,” she says, “is a stickup.” She forms a gun with her thumb and forefinger and places it to Roger’s head. “Drive.”

“Where are you taking me?” he gasps in mock fright.

“Do as I say and you won’t get hurt.” She giggles.

A tidy city, Sacramento, laid out in its alphanumeric grid in that same year, 1848, when greed seized and validated the newly American territory. That tidy plan, delineating the extent of the upheaval, the overthrow of the old alcaldes; a tidy plan refuting that chaotic, revolutionary greed while facilitating its very ends: California’s First City Welcomes You. But Roger Rorvik thinks very little about the history of a place. He likes the tidiness. He approves. It’s a fairly easy drive from the East Bay. He finds his way around. It seems manageable and sensible. Manageable, sensible: not words he’d use, but they tag the comforting sense this burg gives him.

Plus it’s here that he first fell under her spell, making the place itself somehow magical, absolving it of its shortcomings, as such coincidences will. She’d arrived in California first, before Teko and Yolanda had returned from their travels with their flinty yen to whip everybody into shape and their nostalgic urgency to pick up the revolution where they’d left off. General Field Marshal Teko’s sweet autocratic logic had dictated that they situate the recrudescent cell in Sacramento, and obediently Roger’s cousin Susan had rented the apartment at 1721 W Street. It had been agreed that the new members of the group, who so far included only Susan and Jeff Wolfritz, would try to maintain their aboveground lives and contacts for as long as possible, but making that round-trip commute two, three, four times a week was just wearing them thin, so Roger had been tapped to help babysit their famous comrade.

He was game. All he’d had going was a semiregular housepainting gig with Jeff. It was a living, though the job had triggered a program of regular calls and letters from his aunt, all centering on the theme of What was he going to do with his life . This was a question she’d taken an interest in ever since Roger’s mother had died and he’d come to live with his aunt, uncle, and cousin twelve years ago. Now she’d lost a daughter, a nephew, and a potential son-in-law to the sinister magnetism of the Bay Area and was in dire need of some reassurance. Roger could see her standing at the kitchen extension back in Palmdale, with stupid fuzzy slippers on her feet and a cigarette burning in her hand, that look of wounded incomprehension crossing her face as they spoke. It was all distance between them, razz and buzz. Berkeley! Three years you’ve been there, and you’re painting houses. This is a summer job for a teenager, not an occupation for a grown man. And now. Now your cousin. Now your cousin Susan goes on television blithering all about those crazy radicals. Berkeley! Berkeley! His aunt uttered the name in a clipped, parrotlike intonation, and Roger pictured the prissy, contemptuous face she formed in order to enunciate it. “She didn’t ‘go on TV,’ Aunt Rose. The stations covered it, like news , you know?” As if this were the sort of news a mother dreamed of her daughter’s making. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. That the “children” had drifted there separately, in a phased process, freaked her out, as if that were proof enough that the whole thing of Berkeley was a depraved program, instead of being whatever it was, which anyway he wasn’t so sure about, so he never did feel as if he could effectively defend the place to her.

So it was good to be able to report that he had a job waiting in Sacramento (“Property management,” he’d announced), as clean and nice a town as there was to be found, home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for Christ’s sake; secure from the hippies and the Hare Krishnas and the malevolent leftist influence of the East Bay. And frankly, it was good to get out for a number of other reasons. For numerous reasons. A plethora of them. He’d been getting forgetful, a sign of creeping boredom he knew all too well. Losing words, trains of thought vanishing. The monotony of the long summer and the several dozen student apartments he painted. Lay the dropcloth over the cheap shag and slap it on, one shabby and fucked-up room at a time. Hot-boxing it in his car at lunchtime, a thin David Dubinsky rolled of Humboldt County’s finest, insulting his short-term memory. Found himself before the kitchen sink, holding a glass in one hand with the other frozen above the tap. Righty-tighty. Lefty-loosey.