The butt end of a revolver, protruding, nearby.
A male voice, several feet away: “Well, did you check his bag?”
A woman, closer: “No.” Guy notices that the object against his head moves ever so slightly when she speaks.
“Well, you know. I think I’ve mentioned before. Real, real important.”
“I’m sorry.” The voice is tiny.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.”
Butt end, just a quick grab away.
But there is the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and footsteps, and Guy’s shoulder bag is roughly taken from him, and the bag of zucchini bread too.
If there is a gun in the gas mask bag, then this thing against his head definitely is a gun. Because otherwise they’d use the one in the bag. Right?
The man asks, “What’s this?” A small hairy hand holds the bread up in front of his face.
Guy responds: “Zucchini bread.”
“You a fucking baker, man?”
“I thought you might want something homemade.”
“I might?”
“All of you.”
“All of us. Shit.” The man chuckles.
“Who do you think ‘us’ is?” The woman presses the gun into his occiput. Guy thinks he is going to shit in his pants.
“I’m Guy Mock. Check the shoulder bag.”
“Did I ask who you were?”
“Well. But I think you’re expecting me.”
From outside there comes the hollow sound, surprisingly loud, of people ascending the staircase. Quick steps, which seem to jar the flimsy building to its very core, move down the walkway and pause outside the door. In the silence it’s as if the room itself had been drawn in with their held breaths, all the isolating span removed from the space the three of them and the gun and Guy’s tortured gut share. The only sound is the aquarium’s humming filter. Then the sound of a key being shaken loose from the others on a ring and then inserted in the lock. The door opens, and Susan Rorvik enters, followed by an older woman, with graying hair and eyeglasses. For an instant Guy wonders why Susan has brought her mother here with her, and how nice, how weird, up from Twentynine Palms, or what is it, Palmdale? some desert spot, an oasis of aluminum siding and thirsty imported turf, military bases of unknown purpose — covert training of desert assassins, testing of nerve gases that curdle the minutest aspects of human anatomy, dissection of alien visitors — hello, good to see you, glad to know you, ha-ha-ho. Then, as Susan gasps, “Guy!” the other woman removes the wig and the glasses, and Guy stares into the face of Diane Shepard, who is looking past his shoulder.
“God fucking damn it, Teko, that’s Guy Mock. You want her to blow his head off?”
For the first time in about, oh, six lifetimes, a few shrill eternities in the lake of fire, an extended cosmic interval in which that famous solitary ant has carted off the greater part of the Gobi, the Sahara, the Gibbon, one grain at a time, the gun moves off his skull, and Guy turns, pivots carefully with no unnecessary movement of his extremities, to face Tania.
“I’m, like, really sorry,” she says. She blushes.
They sit in the living room, Guy cross-legged on the floor between Susan and Jeff Wolfritz, who has joined them in the apartment sometime during the bathroom interval that restores tranquil immaculacy to Guy’s GI system, with the SLA three lining the couch in the deadeye sepia pose of a nineteenth-century family group. The fish in the tank dive, dart, and coast. For his pitch, Guy settles into the lotus position. An affectation, to be sure, intended to imbue his physical aspect with the wisdom that his staring eyes and receding hairline combine to deny. And that he does, after all, possess to a measurable degree. Plus it stretches out the ligaments in his hips, allowing for deeper and more thrillingly pleasurable penetration during intercourse.
First, though, he has some principled questions.
What about the assassination of Marcus Foster, the Oakland superintendent of schools, who was universally perceived as a progressive influence and whose killing was angrily denounced by the black community and the Left alike?
“Neither of us was in the SLA then.”
“We read about it in the newspapers.”
“I was just an average Berkeley housewife then.”
But did you agree with the Foster killing?
Here Teko lays out a sinuously convoluted rationale, in which he seems to have complete faith, concerning (1) the fascist Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, (2) the imminent implementation of a program in which “bio-dossiers” would have been maintained on all students attending the Oakland public schools, (3) fascist police agents patrolling the halls with shotguns and attack dogs, (4) fascist concentration camps for so-called troublemakers, and (5) Foster’s complicity in all of the above. Plus the program was to be implemented under the direction of a “former police sergeant.”
Guy thinks it’s funny; an entirely new subset of clichés was coming of age. He hadn’t realized that the SLA took its rhetoric literally.
Anyway, after the assassination, Teko and Yolanda bought up all the copies of the Oakland Tribune they could find: to send to friends.
“But then the community reaction was so overwhelmingly negative,” complains Yolanda bitterly.
“Not that the People really liked Foster,” says Teko.
“He was just a fucking fascist,” says Tania.
“They made believe they liked him because they knew the pigs would come down on them if they talked about him the way they really felt.”
It might have been a better idea, the harijan army agrees, to start slow, with confrontational graffiti and broken windows, before moving up to shotgunning Foster and his fascist lieutenant, Blackburn.
Guy thinks, fascist fascist fascist fascist fascist.
OK, then, what about the Hibernia Bank robbery? What was the necessity of shooting two bystanders? Hadn’t you already obtained your objective of “expropriating” funds?
“It became imperative to obtain resources by any means necessary,” says Yolanda.
“It was totally compulsory. We were forced into it since being underground had totally depleted our funds.”
“We like couldn’t work,” explains Tania.
But what about the shootings?
“Oh, everybody was real shaken up by that,” says Teko.
“It was an overreaction. I don’t see that ever happening again.”
“In combat you have to make these decisions on a split-second basis.”
“They were told, the two men, they were told to lie on the floor like everybody else. They ran instead. And were fired upon.”
That was their split-second decision.
“Exactly.”
“We should have put something out explaining the mistake and saying we were sorry. It’s important for revolutionaries to do that.”