It was a hostile place into which he’d been born, in whose light he now floated between the darkness at either end. He knew the darkness into which he’d exit differed from where he’d come in because it would be corrupted by his regret. The idea was to regret nothing: neither Gloria nor her children he’d accepted as his own nor the one or two he’d actually fathered with her.
There’d been a sense of receding since Tania’s annunciation; it was a tough act to follow. As he’d worked his way through his own early enthusiasm, that of his followers, and come to recognize that his army was already with him in its entirety; that he’d come up empty foraging for members even amid the Berkeley Left; that he hadn’t convinced political recruits so much as entranced true believers; that he’d done less to shape his enlistees into an army than they’d done to elevate him to its leadership, as he had come to see these things clearly, he’d also seen that his most incandescent vision had been realized as political theater rather than as a terrorist act. Its rulingclass victim had renounced her victimhood, disavowing the very self that had been victimized and thereby annulling the crime that millions had been convinced took place. Thus the SLA’s greatest success — the abduction and conversion of Alice Daniels Galton — a success that had brought it fame and notoriety and the power to make extortionate demands also clearly marked its limitations as well, for if Alice Daniels Galton was human enough to disappear into a new identity as one of the People, what did that say about the “fascist insect”? If the victim’s declaration that her ravishers were in fact heroes led to the People’s repudiation of her, what did that say about the People?
That it was the wrong time, place, ideology, and army everybody already knew. He’d sensed it since he saw a hundred doors in precarious dingbat apartment buildings and crappy bungalows close again and again on his primitive importuning, the gestures and cadence he’d learned in Buffalo from Reverend Borrows twinned with retread political oratory. The fearless Left covered its soft white ass, oh so politely. But while before there was always some residual feeling of hope, now, on at least one level, Cin knew he was totally fucked. Send the man out to procure field supplies using the local currency, easiest fucking thing in the world — oh what the fuck say he got sent to go shopping—and he tries to take some motherfucking socks off them. He walked back to the shack through the subtle unfamiliarity of the world, thinking about how losers seemed always to be packing up, how he’d been packing his bag up since the day he left Cleveland.
“I don’t like him,” said Zoya as soon as he came through the door. Out with the opinion, right up in his face, like she’d been doing from Day One. “I get a bad feeling.”
He ignored her. Whatever the others might have had to say to her about this they’d probably already said, because they stayed quiet.
“Uh-uh,” she repeated, “don’t like him.”
“Well,” said Cinque, finally, “you won’t have to see him no more. We’re booking on out of here.”
The shape the predictable protest took was: What about Teko, Yolanda, and Tania? but Cin could tell it was inertia speaking, the tedium of unscattering everything that lay strewn around the house, stuffing it into duffel bags and grocery sacks; of bugging out of another safe house without even leaving behind one of the successively less grandiose valedictory gestures — e.g., the incendiary bomb at Sutherland Court (to “melt away any fingerprints,” Fahizah had said), the cache of papers they’d placed in the tub and then pissed on at Golden Gate Avenue — that had accompanied each previous evacuation, and his five troops had begun complying with the general order even before their objections ceased, as he fell into a meditative mood and fetched his bottle of plum wine to sit leaning against the wall, drinking and smoking.
Even as the chrysalis had cracked and Tania had entered dripping into their presence — taping her declaration of herself while posing for the photograph that seconded that declaration more persuasively than any words she’d spoken, the picture depicting her before the Naga banner, armed and ready for just about anything — Cin had felt the end drawing near. He painstakingly crafted what amounted to goodbyes to them all — to Victor, Damon, Sherry, Sherlyne, Dawn, DeDe, and, by implication, Gloria — to be tacked onto the end of that tape (after Fahizah’s curiously cultish anointment of him as a revolutionary messiah, which had swiftly and decisively destroyed any remaining credibility the SLA had with the Left), along with a couple of death warrants that he’d issued more in the spirit of rhetorical What the Hell than in true seriousness. There was just this strange foreboding that he would not be allowed to live through this. He saw himself dying in fire and smoke.
They packed up and then Fahizah and Cujo went to warm up the vehicles and for an instant, before he heard the engines turning over, he sensed, from some strange deep part of himself that was in touch with the darkness of childhood nightmare, hopeless encirclement, that waiting for him were highly efficient shock troops with rifles and tear gas and Nixon’s the One bumper stickers and flagstone backyard patios and weekend ticket plans at Dodger Stadium and color TV and a thousand other things that made him wince, waiting and snacking and sipping and chatting in their idleness and not even taking the whole thing seriously.
He wanted to go.
He wanted to wait.
He wanted someone to tell him what to do.
He wanted someone to come up and say, It’s OK.
Instead his sullenness generated a zone around him into which no one crossed. The evening brought a darkness to the two rooms that had the glow of his cigarettes at its center. He lit them, each one from the last, then absently field-stripped the butts. Fahizah and Cujo went and shut off the motor again after a while. Inside, it was implicit that silence was part of the bargain. Outside, the voices of young men, a shouting-out into the spring evening. It was like that feeling after a bad argument with Gloria, when he was crushed and empty, sitting there as depleted as after sex, while the world kept moving right outside the windows and you just couldn’t believe it was still going on, that anything still bothered.
“ORDERS, EVERYONE?)”
Yolanda and Teko are smiling! And before Tania has a chance to really think about it, she realizes that they’re happy simply to be here at the Century Drive-In! Workers of the world, unite-and let’s go to the movies! Though that would not, strictly speaking, constitute a Maoist aphorism. And of course she is not a member of the proletariat. And while the folks all around them enjoying The New Centurions from the comfy depths of their bucket seats may be the lumpen of the westward dream, they are also the bourgeois, putatively enfranchised, silent majority, and they surely are getting a different charge from this cops ‘n’ robbers melodrama than the SLA Three, who, though the major reason they’re here is to rendezvous with the others, are enjoying the rare opportunity to study enemy propaganda that their being here allows.
“Shoot ’em, kill the pigs!” urges Teko.
Forget she said anything.
Teko: Cheeseburger, Fries, Coke
Yolanda: Chicken ‘n’ a Basket, Fries, Tab