Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Roger isn’t quite sure yet how he feels about the whole thing of the bakery. The necessity of the second safe house is tautologically self-justifying, apparently: an additional safe house is required because one isn’t sufficient. This doesn’t strike Roger as a particularly revolutionary reason, really. Though so far the revolution hasn’t threatened to interrupt his idyll here; it’s been kept at a distance, postponed by cash infusions and stolen credit cards regularly provided by Susan, still toiling away at the Plate of Brasse. But a second safe house is beyond the means of a waitress pulling shitty shifts and her housepainter boyfriend.

Maybe they’re not telling him everything. But he doesn’t want to be, has never wanted to be, a wet blanket. Always a good egg. Always game. He allows himself to entertain only slight misgivings about what he’s committing himself to. Frankly, he’s more concerned about whether Susan will be displeased with the smallishness of her assignment, which is to involve sitting in the coffee shop adjacent to the bank and timing the sheriff’s department’s response. He’s hoping she won’t be. It’s right up her alley, really, an incognito moment, a camouflaging of purpose. Lingering over toast and coffee and feigning curiosity when the pigs tear into the lot, one eye on the sweepsecond hand of her watch.

“Who wants a caveman around today? Along with houses, tables, knives, and forks, we have developed standards of friendship and courtesy that make life a lot more enjoyable.”

Susan sits at her kitchen table, wearing an old terry cloth bathrobe of her father’s, all dangling threads, a comfortable ruin stolen from the back of his clothes closet on her last trip home. She looks at her cousin, sitting opposite her.

“Teko called me a semiretard,” Roger complains. He holds a cup of tea in both hands, his fingers interlaced. To Susan he looks amused rather than insulted.

“Nothing semi about it,” she says. “Reminds me. I made your excuses for you to Mom, as usual. But I think she still expects a call now and again.”

“I’m in no mood.”

“And I come off shift just raring to hear the latest dispatch from the lonely desert outpost of Palmdale.”

He laughs through his nose, an exhalation coupled with a short hum, as if he were clearing his sinuses.

“I’m serious, Roger, somebody needs to help me out with this woman.”

“She should take a class. Adult ed.”

“Perish the thought.”

“A creative writing workshop.”

“That I should suggest to Mom, with her clippings and her used paperback books of famous psychology cases and the history of England that she brings home in a shopping bag.”

“Art appreciation.”

“I’m going to suggest to her that she is an uneducated person.”

He shrugs, smiling: You win.

“Well, so what’s the latest dispatch?”

“They had a streaker last week outside the Civic Center.”

“There’s a Civic Center?” Roger raises his eyebrows in mock surprise.

Susan glances at the electric clock hanging over the stove. Greasy yellowish dust on its face. Two in the a.m. Tomorrow — today — she has lunch and the first dinner service at the Plate of Brasse.

The businessmen work you, but it’s the tourists who run you off your feet and then stiff you. Party of six on Tuesday ran up a check of more than a hundred bucks and then left her a deuce . After she did everything but compliment their ugly sweatshirts.

“And so what did you tell her for me?”

“I said a girl,” says Susan, “what else?”

Her cousin smiles secretly. “Next time, actually, you could tell her a brain tumor.”

“Oh, you are nuts.”

“I’m sort of serious.”

“I’m sure you can imagine for yourself, the blizzard. The blizzard of clippings. If you were even to hint.”

“Just a feeling I have. I’m making a mental picture of something growing on my brain. It looks like a walnut.”

“Your brain? The size is right.”

“Please.”

“You know she’s equal to the job. Maybe she still calls it the Big C, but she can handle the research. Remember Grandma?”

“Oh, God.”

“Mom could only whisper the word, leukemia . But she found out everything.”

She had too. Doled out what her daughter and nephew had dubbed the “Platelet Report” every morning. Returned home from the ReSale Oasis with shopping bags full of books about the disease. Living with it. Dying from it. Cures derived from apricot pits. Meditation therapy. Recipe books for chemo patients. A book about a young man with leukemia who fell in love with his young nurse.

“And then she just went, Grandma. Went downhill real fast.”

“But Mom didn’t,” whispers Susan. “It was more words to whisper. Multiple myeloma . You want her whispering at you?”

“No,” he whispers back.

Americans talk about getting sick the way she imagines Europeans talk about sex or food: with real gusto and a connoisseur’s recognition of the quality, value, rarity, significance, and magnitude of a given malady. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us. And a cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo.

Sick or healthy, they hit the hay. Susan wants some shuteye. But she finds herself crawling out of bed early, to sit at the table in the sunlit kitchen, the schematic of a felony flickering in her brain.

She shakes a cigarette out of the pack before her, places it in her mouth, and lights it. The smoke curls in the sunlight, winds toward the ceiling in ghostly bluish plaits, though of enough substance to cast a shadow.

The thing will happen. They will storm onto private property and forcibly take money. It will be planned to the last detail and timed to the last second, an operation of military precision. And soon. Turns out she does like her part, imagines herself dressing for it. Imagines herself picking something good and American off the diner menu, something above suspicion. Crucial role. Timekeeper. Observer. How many cops? Lights and sirens or silent approach? Guns drawn or holstered? Will the media appear? The intelligence she gathers will be used to refine their technique for the next action.

Politically the value of the action is questionable, since they don’t intend to exploit the propaganda opportunity presented by the assault. What they do intend is to melt into the earth, carrying undisclosed amounts of cash, traveler’s checks, and money orders. She means, in other words it might be interpreted, not altogether incorrectly, as just another bank holdup.

She appreciates the idea of the second safe house. And the idea of a women’s collective is near and dear to her. What bothers her, though, is her skulking impression that as a justification for armed robbery it is pure needy childishness, driven by a kind of bored nihilism. But she’s not about to examine things too closely. Oh, how she’s been waiting for this. They came to her — to her! And then like an idiot, she handed them off to Guy Mock. She should have learned her lesson about him during those early days in Oakland.

They came to her , and there was room for nothing but compassion, what with all the SLA dead, and the empathy aroused by the idea of their being survivors on the run, an overflowing of good and generous and openhanded spirits, and Berkeley felt righter and better than it had in years, with expressions of condolence and solidarity from the Movement, with memorial graffiti on the walls that made them all cry; and they fed them cookies and soup, and brought them changes of clothes, and saved the newspapers for them to read, and delivered their revolutionary communiques, and then she gave them away to Guy fucking Mock.

Stupid idiot! Once the prick saw that he’d cornered the SLA market, he cut her off. All summer she felt sick at heart, frustrated, unfulfilled, empty. They disappeared into their adventure, distant and mysterious, while she spent her days fetching extra dressing and replacing unsatisfactory flatware and sending perfectly good food back to the kitchen because it wasn’t cooked silly. She and Jeff argued over whether her support and concern for the SLA were counterrevolutionary, since (in Jeff’s opinion) it stemmed from her “personal feeling” (he made it sound obscene) for Angela, which (according to him) had the “unmistakable aroma” of “the personality cult.” Susan fumed. Jeff was still annoyed, Susan knew, by the notoriety she achieved addressing the crowd at Ho Chi Minh Park; he had work that day. Now he was giving her shit, telling her how “concerned” he was about her “preoccupation,” which he “felt morally obliged to say” he thought was “not politically based.” She told him to just stick to painting apartments.