Then one night Susan arrived home at about five-thirty. Jeff was working that day, housepainting, and wouldn’t be home until later. She dropped her keys in the wooden bowl by the front door, got herself something cold to drink, and turned on the old Philco console set she and Jeff had found on the street and humped three blocks to the apartment. The picture was banded top and bottom by thick horizontal stripes of black that seemed to grow wider by the day, distorting the picture with a flattening, fun house mirror effect. Everyone was short. Everyone was stocky. When you were high it was very amusing. When you weren’t high it was like watching TV with a persistently lousy picture. The jingle for a furniture store sang, “Dublin, Berkeley, San Lorenzo, Cupertino, San Jose,” enumerating the store’s outlets. She moved around the apartment, puttering, gathering up the mail, her unbalanced checkbook. She had nothing planned that night.
The room didn’t feel quite right, the bright paced cadence of sound and controlled shifting of light that she expected from TV wasn’t happening. This awareness came to her on a hypothalamic level, unease seeping into consciousness as a kind of itch. She shifted in her chair, looked out the window. She confirmed that her checkbook made no sense to her. She turned to the TV and was profoundly disturbed by what she saw.
The picture was grainy and slipped in and out of focus. It was so unsteady that Susan felt the presence of the cameraman. What the camera showed also told the story of his limitations, his human inability to do everything right.
Stories of the boundaries of craft are necessarily ruinous and unsettling.
The camera showed a frame bungalow — a poor house, ordinary in its poverty — as purple, deep-shadowed twilight began to fall. Something so homemade to it; formally it reminded her of a pornographic film. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.
A voice through a bullhorn: “Ocupiss uh fourtee sixeesix ee fifty fourstree: this izza luzangeles plice,” is what she heard. The cameraman, her unseen protagonist, abruptly thumbed the zoom, and the frame now embraced a much larger area, an area occupied by squad cars and uniformed cops and soulless, armored creatures, carrying automatic rifles, who surrounded the bungalow. The same purple, deep-shadowed uneventfulness. In her limited experience with pornography, Susan had been impressed by its insistence upon the staging of a scene. Deliberate, leisurely, eschewing montage to allow tension to flirt with tedium. Still purple twilight with shadows and people. The picture bobbled a little, as if the cameraman were impatient with the pace of the story. She reached out and flipped the channel to KRON, KPIX, KGO. It was everywhere. Another bullhorned announcement, the deep basso thrum of a helicopter passing over the scene. Pornography, with its endlessly flimsy pretexts.
“Cupply emerdiately add you woonahbe hahmed.”
The pretexts under which the “true” action commences. Now, what was this that she was watching?
Abruptly, a mediating voice broke in. “For those of you who are just joining us,” it explained.
It was the worst news: Angela had been trapped. Caught shoplifting in L.A., members of the SLA had abandoned their car, leaving behind a parking ticket that had helped the police trace their whereabouts. “And now, death rains down on them from all sides, over a pair of stolen sweat socks!”
Socks?
She watched with a sense of inevitability. The moment at which the camera lens had changed its focal length to alter the banal street scene, to take in the spectacle of the potential siege that beset it, Susan knew how it was going to end. TV and Vietnam had taught her that much.
She learned a thing or two about “false consciousness” that evening. Her horror at the televised firefights from Vietnam had been contrived and casual, her disgust less debilitating than a stubbed toe. But the sense of dread that filled her watching the black smoke pour out of the blazing house once the cops were done with it; the lifelessness, or, rather, the sense of the recent elimination of life, that emanated from the place as, crackling, its ceiling collapsed and its walls crumpled; the open glee of the reporters; the knowledge that Angela was gone, leaving a charred log they could pin their judgmental misconceptions on: It all had her shivering as if with fever and retching.
What impressed her, later, was the clarity with which she received the message, for the first time in her life, that when terrible events occur unexpectedly, even a forcefully lucid awareness of the chain of their causation does not rob those events of the power to astonish. The guns, the armored men, the breathless reporters, the scene’s redolence of inevitability: Even in their contribution to the swelling anticipation, none of those things matched the flight of the first bullet, its seeming spontaneity despite all the evidence that the machine of the state had ordained its firing.
Now Angela’s in the ground and Susan has been dreaming every night of pets in danger; of children she knows with certainty are her own slipping out of her grasp and falling; of her father alone, his heart failing, his delicate aging body breaking — dreams of perfect anxiety that fill her nights. She would have thought she’d thrash in the bed under the influence of such dreams, but she lies still, feels in her tight chest and beating heart and irregular breaths as she comes awake in the predawn a sense of surfacing from beneath the weight of dark water. She lies beside Jeff, knowing that sleep is finished for the night, that the day begins now, begins here. Now, what do you do? Proximity alone doesn’t place you at the epicenter of “struggle.”
On May 31 the Weather Underground bombed the attorney general’s office in L.A., for “our brothers and sisters” of the SLA. The unacceptable group had finally gained some limited entree among the Left. Encouraged, Susan threw herself into organizing a memorial rally for the group, to be held at Ho Chi Minh Park on June 2.
“I think that would be kind of an extreme reaction, Jerry.”
“Well, as I said, you don’t spend much time in Palo Alto.”
“Even if I did.”
“Oh, really?” Jerry smiles, rattles his cubes. “Well, all right, Miss Principled Assistance.” He smiles, frowns. “Look, the people to whom you’re providing this principled assistance are responsible for some spectacularly stupid rhetoric. And you weren’t far behind them the other day, I have to say.”
“Oh, really?”
“This is not a strictly literary assessment. I mean their behavior, I mean their ideology and politics, I mean the whole chimichanga.”
“Well, what about the behavior of the pigs?” spits Susan.
“Pigs?” Jerry rattles the cubes. “Go on.”
“I’m waiting tables,” Susan says, finally. “That’s the day job. Just, you know, taking people’s orders, making sure the kitchen gets it right.”
“You’re going to tell me you’re a waitress.” Uncle Jerry’s tone is nasty all of a sudden.
“The tips are great,” says Susan, and turns away.
Her father is laughing with someone, trying to remember the words to the Fargo Central High School anthem. As she comes near, he reaches out, without looking at her, taking her gently by the arm, drawing her into the conversation. When he has her close, he turns to her.
“The football team was called the Midgets, Susan. The Midgets!”
His face is happy, as if he were sharing a joyous surprise. Who wouldn’t be happy about this? Rooted for a team called the Midgets. She’s heard it all before, eaten it up. Summers at Camp Cormorant. Headed downtown to N.P. Avenue on Friday nights and tried to talk to girls. Joined the navy and flew gull-winged Corsairs in the PTO. Nobody complained about those flight paths. Hadn’t everything been hunky-dory? Come back home, move to the Golden State, raise a family, teach high school English, coach sports. It’s not like Uncle Jerry: the dilapidated leftism, the showy contempt for the trappings of his military contract millions, even the bookish allusions. It’s clear to Susan that Jerry is not what he wants to be, that he feels trapped in his own life, that he is not “advising” her so much as urging her to take notice of him.