Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

And where do we go from here?

Which is the way that’s clear?

The redhead grips the pole. It’s an interesting gesture because Guy sees all the fingers working, each seeking purchase on the sweaty shaft of metal, gripping and regripping like the fingers of someone operating a sewing machine, or throwing a pot, this is really work , Guy thinks, his fourth beer half empty before him, she grips and bends low and in one of the lulls in David Essex’s spare piece of pop poetry he hears her grunt, an earthy sound, allied with exertion and weariness and digestion and excretion and other functions that would seem to have absolutely nothing to do with this tits ‘n’ ass phantasm set down in the middle of this derelict land, and as she sways to the left her hand gently sweeps across the top of his head, knocking his cap off, and as she sways to the right her fingers softly caress his scalp and the high border of his dwindling hair, and his own hand rises with a five-dollar bill in it. Why not? This is work . Nothing else could possibly look like work next to this. She takes the bill, folds it in half lengthwise, and strokes her labia with it, then tucks it in the teeny-weeny waistband of her G-string. Then she strides off; her work here is done. It’s enough to make him want to cry. He wants to be up there. He wants to feel it all for himself. He actually does begin to tear up. In the end that’s the only thing they could really accuse him of, the only thing they could ever really find him guilty of. He just wants to know for himself what it all feels like.

Randi has two large red American Tourister suitcases that she would never have dreamed of bringing to San Diego if she’d had the slightest notion that she would be staying for only three days. Her whole life these days seems to consist of dealing with the consequences of errors in judgment. So, having finally checked these millstones, she’s trying to live it up a little, drinking a martini out of a plastic cup in the departure lounge and flirting with the tall graying business type who “lent” her a cigarette. They sit and smoke, gazing at the huge machines rolling down the taxiways, aware of having little to say to each other and equally aware that each is trying to keep up the conversation. Sexy, in an awkward way. She has no idea why she is attracted to this very straight-looking fellow. He’s not exactly Republican straight, more like former Young Democrat straight, which, to her mind, is better. Room for hope. Though Guy would certainly, and loudly, disagree (her lip curls into a slight sneer at the thought of Guy). Would it be a terrible thing if she and this gentleman were to find a quiet corner of the terminal in which to fuck? It’s the fantasy lingering here and in every such place on earth. The regional planners put their sagacious heads together, they obtain the zoning, they condemn the land, they build the airport, they install the Gay Nineties saloons, the gift shops and newsstands, they bring in the fleets of shiny jets — in short, they alter the landscape, the cadence of an entire region, life itself, and all around are these boxes in which you can deposit, for a dollar and a half, a completed, preapproved application for life insurance. Everything made clean and shipshape and trimmed with smiles and bright lights, fixed, and still, they have these depositories to remind you of the statistical presence of death. The payoff, if your flight explodes in midair or corkscrews into some subdivision, is scads of dough. Not for you, though. And what if she were to write across the face of the insurance policy, “Inform my husband that three hours before my fiery death I gave a hand job to a very nice man in a Hathaway shirt and a rep tie in return for a Vantage. See if he doesn’t take the money. Tell him that I whacked off a hundred men, all of whom had questionable class sympathies, in a dozen airports; tell him that I never cared, never shared his obsessions, so my death isn’t a loss, it’s nothing he’ll suffer — and just see if he doesn’t take the god damn money and never thinks twice about me again.”

The Young Democrat has never, ever, ever forgotten his wife’s birthday.

Never cut her vacation short.

Never made her spend a single moment, much less weeks at a time, in a VW Bug.

Never sat across from her and discussed his digestion, his bowel movements, his reflux, his prostate, his hematospermia, his unjustly weak orgasms, his desire to wear women’s undergarments, his bunions, his ingrown toenails, or his personal sense of what Hegel would have had to say about the day’s headlines.

Never gotten drunk around the kitchen table with stupid undergrads or even more stupid ex-football players and erected tall towers of empty beer cans.

Never had an affair with a hypochondriacal little twat like Erica Dyson.

A flight is announced over the PA, and the Young Democrat picks up his briefcase and raincoat and rises. He tells Randi to enjoy her flight and then he’s gone, heading toward the cluster of people forming near one of the gates. Randi opens her pocketbook and checks her wallet to make sure (again) that she has enough money to buy a ticket aboard the flight. Sixty-four dollars and she is only now vaguely realizing that she could have driven. She could have rented some nice roomy American car that doesn’t sound like a heart attack heading down the road and just driven up to L.A. without hassling with taxis and skycaps and Hare Krishnas and Young Democrats before climbing aboard some skinny tube that’s likely enough to plummet to the earth that they think it’s levelheaded to install special boxes where you can lay a bet in favor of your own death. As long as we’re throwing away money anyway. As long as sixty-four dollars here, there, and everywhere doesn’t mean diddly-squat compared with the thrill of being a fugitive from the law.

Her plane is a tiny prop with two rows, each ten seats deep, extending to the rear of the plane. A curtain separates the cockpit from the passenger cabin. A uniformed man wearing a change apron comes aboard just before the pilot seals the hatch to collect fares from passengers buying tickets. Randi gives her name as Eileen Rimer. A cousin. The plane takes off and an hour later it’s Welcome to Los Angeles County International Airport. Two seconds in the terminal and she’s already seen three women, hair out to here, wearing these Suzy Creamcheese outfits that are designed not so much to make the women wearing them look terrific as to make women like herself feel dowdy. Works like a charm. And here’s Guy, walking through the place looking like the sixth Marx Brother. Oglo. Staro. Gawpo. He spots her and heads over.

“For God’s sake,” he says, “it took you long enough.”

She just sat in the damn thing and they pulled the throttle back, or something, and it went. What does he want from her?

“Don’t be so sensitive. This is no time for you to be sensitive. They’re looking for us right now.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? The federales. Bearing grand jury subpoenas. They already served Dad.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they can compel testimony.”

“In connection with what?”

“A certain house in Pennsylvania, for one thing.”

“We never tried to hide the fact that we rented it.”

“It’s who was there.”

“We went over the place. What could they have?”

“Who the hell knows what they have?”

“They shouldn’t have anything.”

“Well, apparently they do.”

“Who would have told them?”

“Ernest, apparently.”

“Ernest? How could Ernest possibly know anything?”

“I didn’t mention this in Portland?”

Randi stops dead as they are approaching the baggage claim area.