Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

He brakes, descending to the surface road and turning onto W Street. Roger always experiences a vague sadness driving up these mopey blocks, every single time; dispiriting is the word for the place. The duplex is strictly a dump, a sagging box in the middle of the block, three nothing rooms a stone’s throw from the overpass, with freeway thrum twenty-four hours a day. The bungalows they pass have settled into their decrepitude, plywood weathered under the torn tar paper, crumbled cinder blocks holding up the porches. A hand-lettered sign leaning in one front window promises BEAUTY — NAILS. A tarp draped over an old sedan flaps stiffly in a sudden gust of wind. He pulls up before the duplex.

“Better kiss me now,” she says, grabbing a handful of his hair. “You won’t get another chance until later.”

He’d met her before, following the Los Angeles massacre. His impression then had been of a small person, underfed rather than delicate, seething and wordless, mostly wordless. He’d shied away from any encounter beyond a simple hello; he’d gotten something about the dead boyfriend and was intimidated by the idea of confronting naked and angry grief. In fact he’d stayed in the background, literally; leaned up against the wall of the little apartment on Euclid Avenue with his arms folded while Susan worked out some arrangements with Teko and Yolanda concerning the trip East. Not that he didn’t study her, seeking to reconcile this slight figure, her hair slashed and badly dyed, her little feet crossed primly at the ankles, with the divergent published likenesses of the chilly deb and the sexy, gunslinging insurgent. It was a third person who was present, neither a combination of the other two nor entirely distinct from them.

And mostly wordless. That much she shared with her photographs. Ah, well, what else could she be? The terrible fire drawn up into the sky, the wind its bellows and chimney; the armed, uniformed men; the businesslike wrath of authority: It was a spectacle belonging to television, familiar to all of them, but its meaning, you dodged its true meaning, recognized maybe the half of it, until the day you were able to say, had to say, having seen it, “all gone,” and then maybe you just didn’t speak again, for a while.

He hadn’t talked to her. Zero chemistry. Then the SLA three were gone, and he’d put them out of his mind. The long summer stretched ahead. Lay the dropcloth and slap it on, over thumbtack holes and the dark stains left by oily heads. The little car filling with the sweet and pungent smoke. His head emptying. To tell the truth, his aunt had a point.

She arrived in Sacramento about three months later on the overnight Greyhound from Vegas. Susan sent Roger to the depot to meet the bus, and he felt an unexpected anticipation. The pneumatic door hissed open to release the Americruiser’s consignment of hardup traveling souls, and she walked into his life, accompanied by Jeff Wolfritz, revolutionary chaperon. They both looked like total shit. Still, there was, for Roger, the sense of an auspicious beginning.

That fall, the getting-to-know-you period, they’d spent a lot of time driving around. Just lazy cruising. He’d taken her down 80 to where there was a stretch of cropland, bearded a deep green late in the season, over which you could sometimes see a cropduster, drifting, turning sharply at the end of the furrowed rows, dipping low and then soaring away, leaving behind cloudy trails of the poison it dumped, a kind of improvisational aviation that tightened his throat and nearly made him want to cry. Though he knew that he also was waiting for the pilot to misjudge the angle of his cavalier descent, to nip a telephone line, to stall too near the ground to drop the nose and recover; waiting to see the thing crash, explode, and burn. And had he taken her there, pulled over onto the dirt shoulder as traffic zinged by, so that she could see that too?

All those apple-picking colors burning through late autumn and on into winter. There might actually even have been apples in the backseat once or twice, a paper bag of fruit, ripe and lustrous, from the U-Pick. Who knows? They say there’s two trees in Sacramento for each man, woman, and child.

WITHOUT KNOWING QUITE why, Teko reaches above his head to where items, suspended from hooks, dangle brightly over the bins of merchandise at waist level. Just needs to touch. The gleam attracts him, and to feel these things — the HOLES studding the circumference of the COLANDER, the bat-eared PROTRUSIONS on a STRAINER, the artichokelike LEAVES of the STEAMER BASKET, the barbed HELIX of a CORKSCREW — is both exquisite and exquisitely unsatisfying. Yet his awareness of this, too, is strangely occulted, concealed from himself behind the jangling static at the forefront of his mind, which seeks to work the word panther into the sentence of a budding communique:

• the beating heart of a (black?) panther

• all the grace and power of a (black?) panther

• as the (black?) panther does not suffer those who would deny its freedom

• our beautiful brother of the wild, the (black?) panther

Teko sees this as a rhetorical step forward. First, in the purely literary sense. As he’d noted in his Revolutionary Diary, “Metaphor=OK?” Second, he thinks of it as appealingly inclusive. Plenty of animal lovers out there who may be ready to take up arms against the government at any moment. Third is the subtle homage to the Black Panthers. Because you never know.

Overhead he spots a paring knife, secured to its cardboard backing by two thick staples, a two-inch blade sprouting from a handle of drab green plastic. Sixty-nine cents. He removes it quietly from the backing, popping the staples to free it, and then slips the knife into his jacket pocket. He looks up to meet the gaze of an older woman, who promptly averts her eyes.

“Shhhhh,” he advises, mildly, bending to lift the basket. He strolls toward the front of the store, just another householder, for the items in his basket are truly quotidian: ball of twine, roll of tape, 7¾″ x 5″ notebook, pack of Bic pens, Prell shampoo for dyed hair, box of Tide, package of sixty-watt lightbulbs, and three cans of cat food for the ungrateful strays that make the backyard stink of piss and that Yolanda has unaccountably taken to feeding. They ought to keep a tighter grip on their money or soon they’ll be eating the shit themselves. Not that it’s an issue today: Susan had come through again, delivering, via Roger, four freshly purloined MasterCharge cards. The one he offers to the cashier is imprinted with the name Harland Funderbunk, no doubt some hapless sojourner at the Sir Francis Drake, and he watches edgily as she fingers the thick monthly circular, its every page covered with fine-print columns listing stolen credit card numbers, sitting near the credit card blanks. But she is only moving it out of the way.

Soon he’s headed out to the car, stopping to examine the newspaper headlines. Hey, hey, SLA, made page one again today . The anniversary of the kidnapping, and the general drift of the coverage appears to be that the pigs have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re doing. Not that Operation GALTNAP, as the FBI has dubbed it, has anything to do anymore with solving a kidnapping or rescuing a hostage. “Miss Galton will face a number of state and federal charges, including attempted murder, bank robbery, and kidnapping.”

Yeah, right. Teko accepts it as an article of faith that the pigs will simply blow them all away. Originally the marked-for-death belief had seemed a suitably fiery fantasy of Cin’s, the idea that they were the meanest , the baddest, the most extreme revolutionary army of them all, killing Uncle Toms with phony liberal agendas and their CIA handlers, firing on elderly bank depositors whose creaky joints couldn’t deliver them to the prone position quickly enough to suit, swooping down like angels of death upon the children of the ruling elite, so bad and so mean, so camped out on the raggedy edges of the lunatic fringe that the only choice the fascist insect would have would be to annihilate them.