Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

It was murder being between jobs.

Suddenly he was in his car, his lights carving a tunnel into the darkness surrounding him. The impulse to leave, to stop waiting had come so abruptly that he’d nearly lost his balance lurching downstairs. His knee hurt from banging it on the door frame on the way out, and he squeezed it with his aching knuckles. Eventually everything starts to hurt. But the thing was that in the course of his solitary meditation on loneliness and rejection at the top of the stairwell, back when only his knuckles had been killing him, he’d suddenly drawn up an archetypal memory: of himself, at ten, sitting alone, forgotten, in the backseat of the car, driving home from some excursion, while Guy snuggled between his parents in front. As they entered the outskirts of Scranton, his mother had had the nerve, the horse-faced old bitch, to turn around and compliment him on his behavior during the ride, praise with which his pussy-whipped father murmured his agreement. And then Baby Guy had raised his head to gaze back at him, a look of arrogant self-satisfaction on his tiny buglike face. Ernest acted swiftly and decisively. Before him there’d been a jumbo ashtray, filled to the brim with butts and ashes. He pulled it out of its housing and shook it, emptying its contents, over the occupants in front. In the slipstream of air coursing through the car from the cracked wing window, the ashes scattered and flew, a blizzard of rank gray fallout that made his father swerve and nearly lose control of the car and his mother sputter with rage and confusion. And Guy? He’d cried and cried, his precious little eyes full of the gritty stuff. Ha-ha — bug-faced son of a bitch! His mother had waited patiently until they arrived home, then had removed Ernest from the car and taken him by the hand, leading him upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, where she laid him across the flowered spread and hammered his bare ass, beating him hard and with single-minded dedication, while he inhaled all the perfumy smells of her side of the bed. It was like fucking her.

Now, as periodically came to pass, it was time for Guy to get his. It seemed to Ernest that whenever he bothered to look up, not that he did all that often anymore, there was Guy, still nestled between their parents, still drawing far more than his due. Little bastard! Dragging them into this stupid plot of his, exposing them. And they ate it up, as usual. Whatever little Guy-Guy wanted. Well, enough of that. He happened to know a captain on the Scranton PD, Earl Fry. Always meant to look him up when he was in town, and what better time than this, when the security of the nation was at stake.

Police HQ was a forbidding old building, part citadel, part prison, part bankrupt public institution. Ernest responded to its looming presence uneasily, on some hindbrain level. A ramp led down from a gated archway beyond which the motor pool lay, but public parking was found in the court out front, deserted now except for a sheriff’s vehicle, probably there to transfer a prisoner to the county jail. He pulled up behind the sheriff’s car and got out, looked the place over. He felt good about the idea. It felt right. Bring the whole thing home where it belonged. Earl Fry. Old high school pal. Knew Ernest, and he knew Guy too. Ernest could imagine Fry rising from his desk to greet him, What a surprise, and then his jaw dropping as Ernest dumped the gift-wrapped news in his lap.

All there was, though, was a cop, with corporal’s stripes, behind a desk, leaning toward a sheet of paper half rolled out of the typewriter in front of him and daubing at it with Liquid Paper. The cop did a really professional job of ignoring Ernest until he’d finished his daubing, blown on the page to dry it, and then rolled it back into the platen.

“Help you?”

“Let me speak to Captain Fry. Please.”

“Off duty.”

“Who’s on duty?”

“There’s me. There’s Sergeant Durkin. There’s Lieutenant Bricca.” He did not say this in a friendly way, but as if he were reviewing an obvious set of data for the benefit of an idiot.

“Let me talk to Bricca.”

“He’s Code Seven.”

“What’s that? On the shitter?”

The cop studied him for a moment. “Dinner,” he said, finally.

“When’s he back?”

“What do you have?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Suit yourself,” said the cop, indicating a bench.

“When did you say he was back?”

“I didn’t,” said the cop. “He’s the lieutenant. You know?”

Ernest sat. He watched the cop type and file some papers for a while. Two patrolmen came in with a drunk who smelled like puke and led him around the front desk and down a corridor for processing, quickstepping him, as if they were tired of dealing with him. Back where the holding cells must have been someone started singing:

Hoya polski naga polka

Meenzata lavuso

Hoya polska gnocchi polka

Mordenchoo leverno

Polka chevy qualum cherchez

Lavooie hardehar

Return to me and always be

My melody of love!

It echoed down the corridor and into the lobby, and the cop on duty rose and slammed a door, cutting off the sound.

“I’m Polish, you know,” he said. “I hate that fucking Bobby Vinton.”

Ernest bestirred himself. “Shoot the bastard.”

“Shit no. Slow death. Death of a thousand cuts. Chinese water torture.”

“You want to shoot him in the throat. Never sing another note.” Ernest spoke authoritatively.

“That’d be nice. I hear the motherfucker’s getting a show on CBS next fall. Just what I need. The fuck.” He gestured, as if the man in the cell were Vinton himself.

A man in plainclothes came in holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Anything up, Casimir?”

“Yeah, no, Lieutenant. This man’s waiting for you.”

“Yeah?”

“He wanted Captain Fry.”

“Fry works human being hours.”

“So I told him.”

“He misses all the good stuff.”

“That’s what we all say.”

“Goes home and has his supper at six and watches prime-time TV like a regular taxpayer.”

“We were just talking about TV”

“It’s no good for you. This is what’s good for you.”

“Sure it is.”

“Work work work for the dawn is coming.”

Bricca turned toward Ernest and lifted his cup to his lips, blowing on the coffee as he gave Ernest the once-over. Ernest bared his teeth in a smile.

“What in Captain Fry’s absence can I do for you?”

“You’re Lieutenant Bricca.”

“Twenty-four hours a day.”

“Just about, huh?” Ernest looked around him, as if the late hour resided in the corners of the room.

“You want to see me about what?”

“You have someplace we can talk?”

“People talk in my office sometimes.”

They sat on opposite sides of Bricca’s desk.

“I have to admit that I’m sitting here with you because I’m a wee bit intrigued that a man claiming to be a friend of St. Earl’s wanders in here at fucking whatever it is in the a.m. looking like a boozer at the tail end of a long unhappy binge. You’re a personal friend, are you?” The lieutenant’s face and voice were full of unveiled hope.

Ernest sort of sized up the way things stood between Fry and Bricca.

“What’s the problem, Bricca? His office prettier than yours?”

Actually, Bricca’s office was pleasant, looking more like a college professor’s than a cop’s with its embrasured windows set in the thick stone walls and the row of bookcases and the framed diploma identifying Bricca as the possessor of a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Shippensburg University. The room was softly lit by a green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk.