Love Is the Law (10 page)

“You sure say ‘anyway’ frequently,” I said.

“Anyway,” he said. Then he laughed at himself. “By any Way necessary,” and yes, I heard the capital
W
in the way Mike said
Way
. “Though there is only one way.”

“The way that ends with me coming home with you.”

“You can stay here if you like,” Mike said. I didn’t like. “ ‘Here’ meaning both in the care of the Suffolk County Department of Corrections, and in the prison of individuality and individualism,” he added.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Bernstein always prided himself on being what Eugene V. Debs had called a contradiction in terms: an unorganized socialist. He’d done his time selling papers on the street corners and attending protests; he had even headed down to West Virginia to work among the coal miners. For the experience. What he’d found is a bunch of college kids from Brown, with trust funds, playing Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky, so he had retreated into his books.
Like Lenin, who in the wake of the collapse of the 1905 revolution, retreated into Hegel in order to better understand the dynamics of history
, Bernstein had told me. Mike Schmidt, on the other hand, had no such pride. He just couldn’t help himself. He had to be the center of the revolution, and every act was revolutionary. Bailing me out was a fatal blow against police repression, his broad hints about me staying with him for a while was an attempt to smash bourgeois notions of romantic love and commodified sexual relations both. When he ran a red light, that was the revolution. When he stopped for the next one, that was also the revolution. When we made it back to the apartment, Mike parked in a tow-away zone and insisted on coming upstairs. “I want to meet your grandmother, perhaps help calm her. She’s probably highly agitated. All those strangers yelling at her.”

“And you won’t yell at her, not like those other strangers,” I said.

“Not unless she requires it.”

Mike was a lot like Bernstein, but stupid and needy. And Grandma was gone. The place was messed up. “Tossed,” Mike said, though I was sure that all the cops had left with me when I was arrested, and not
everything
was tossed. My room was in its usual semichaotic state, but the drawers hadn’t been overturned, and my overnight bag was in the closet, packed. I grabbed it and went through the rest of the apartment. Some silver candlesticks were gone, as were a bunch of Grandma’s clothes, and a few pictures. Some of the forks, and the KFC bucket in the fridge, had also vanished. So had the painting of the Tower.

“You can’t call the police,” Mike said. “You can’t call 911. They’ll just arrest you again. You’re a person of interest, and this can be seen as probable cause. Lots of criminals have the bright idea to whack a family member, then call 911.”

“Whack,” I said. “You watch a lot of television for a revolutionary Communist.”

“The ruling class presents its ideology in a very straightforward way; I’d be stupid not to watch several hours of television every day. But what I am saying is true.”

“I don’t call 911. I think Grandma either ran off by herself, or my father caught wind of all this and came to get her, and some stuff to sell for crack money,” I said. Mike looked at me, surprised. “My father loves crack,” I explained. “He was squatting downtown. We can—” I stopped. I couldn’t exactly consort with a known drug user either, and Mike had turned pale.

“If he’s in some kind of crack frenzy”—Mike
did
watch too much television—“he might come back, thinking that there were some valuables left to steal. You should come home with me tonight.” Now I knew where the blood that had been in his face and limbs had gone. Disgusting, but were my sentiments regarding my grandmother any different? I loved an illusion. Materially, the contents of the bag of chemical reactions that made all that I had loved as a child was degrading, like batteries left so long in a Walkman that they leak, corrode, and ruin everything. Grandma was a weakness for me, but the painting was still a clue. My father had them both, probably.

“All right, I will,” I said. I wondered if he’d like my leopard-print bra, or my scars. Would he dare to touch them?

Mike’s apartment was close to Stony Brook—a few more minutes across Loooong Island—and looked like typical shared graduate student digs, but Mike lived alone. The bookshelves were all cinder blocks and 4 x 4s, and they were jammed with Marxist texts, religious nonsense in English and a few Asian languages, science fiction paperbacks, and the Beats and existentialists. The furniture was scarred and sagging; there were three couches in the living room, and through the open door to Mike’s room I saw the bed topped with two mounds of dirty jeans—one for black, and one for blue—and the whole place smelled like patchouli and burned rice. A cat, no, three cats, scattered when we entered, though Mike
tssk-tssk-tssked
for them. The television was on, running TV-55, our thrilling local channel. Mike muttered
Jaws II
to himself, but thankfully didn’t expect me to sit down and watch it with him. He turned the set off as he passed by it.

I pushed a box of leaflets and Red Submarine zines off the cushion of one of the couches, grabbed the nearest book—which was, and there are no coincidences, Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
—and read while Mike putzed around, pretending to arrange his apartment for some purpose other than him fucking me, when all he really wanted to do is fuck me. Or fuck anyone, I suppose. I read aloud as he rushed back from the bedroom with a plastic laundry hamper full of foul clothing, and then to the kitchen to put on some tea and to find a bottle of wine that hadn’t gone bad in the fridge. “The concrete content, which sensuous certainty furnishes, makes this
prima facie
appear to be the richest kind of knowledge, to be even a knowledge of endless wealth—a wealth to which we can as little find any limit when we traverse its extent in space and time, where that content is presented before us, as when we take a fragment out of the abundance it offers us and by dividing and dividing seek to penetrate its intent.” Mike halted, for a moment, both in the way in to the room when I hit the word
sensuous
and on the way back, with the wine, when I hit the word
penetrate
.

“We can fuck if you want,” I told him. “I don’t come, though. I don’t care if you do. It’ll be pretty awful, as the first time with someone new generally is, especially when they don’t like each other so much—”

“I like you, Dawn—” he started.

“It’s not mutual. I appreciate that you sprung me, and gave me a ride back, but it sounded like I was going to be let out sooner rather than later anyway. I don’t owe you a fuck, but fucking isn’t any worse, or better, than shaking someone’s hand. I know you seem very excited about it, and I am willing since it seems to be an acceptable way to end the evening, and I’ll have to ask you another favor soon enough, but it isn’t going to be fun,” I said. “What I mean to say is, don’t worry about your dirty sheets, or the sock smell, or whether you’ll fumble with the condom for a minute and then go soft and have to jerk yourself off to get hard again. I won’t reach down to put you in me, Mr. Red Submarine; you’ll have to squirm around to find the slot yourself like an idiot. So don’t drink too much.”

“Well, I find it easier with doggy style anyway,” Mike said. He drank from the bottle, smiled, and handed it to me. Not a bad comeback, all things considered. “So, have you read much Hegel?”

“Just those sentences. I can see why you like them.” I took a drink. “It’s gibberish. Stuff is all over the place. Look at it, but don’t
take a look at it
. Not to start anyway. Gotcha.”

“So you think it’s nonsense, but you’re a Marxist yourself,” he said, and he sat down next to me. We were going to fuck after all. Oh, well.

“Nonsense, but nonsense in the way that’s close to the truth,” I said. Then I dropped my voice an octave and said, “We are to conquer the Illusion, to drive it out. The slaves that perish are better dead.”

“Did I sense a capital
I
in the word
illusion
,” Mike asked, “or was that itself an illusion? Where’s the quote from? Nietzsche?”

“Crowley,” I said.

“Oh, brother,” he said. Then he leaned in and started kissing my neck. “Talk about the prison of individuality,” he said. His hand was on my belly. I was still wearing my orange county-issue top. The scars across my stomach would not stop Mike. “I’ve already shattered the Illusion, Dawn,” he said. “That’s how I was able to act so quickly, to take a call from a stranger to go help another stranger. We’re all connected.”

“We’re going to be anyway,” I said. Now he had a titful with one hand and with the other he snaked between my back and the couch to turn me to him for a kiss. I gave him one, closed lipped. “I need to find my grandmother tomorrow. And something else too. Do you know how to look up deeds? I want to know who owns the house my grandmother used to own.”

“We will, I do. According to my ability and according to your needs,” he said. “Do you want to go into the bedroom?” I said sure, and we did, and he was rather expert with the condom after all and his bed squeaked like an old shoe. On my hands and knees, he couldn’t see much of my front, which was fine with me.

At 3 a.m. he woke me up and asked what I thought of the situation in the Eastern bloc. Before I could answer, he told me that it was very exciting, that he saw the possibility of the deformed workers’ states solving their own bureaucratic excesses via working-class self-activity, and thus leading to a true socialist second world that we could both inhabit. He literally used the word “inhabit.” I told him that he was fucking dreaming, but he thought I meant to say that he was talking in his sleep.

Mike Schmidt knew a lot of social workers, and true to his word he started making calls at two minutes after nine. He didn’t make breakfast, or even offer to go out and get Dunkin’ Donuts. I drank water from the tap—I had to wash a glass myself, and even the sink was dirty—and waited at the kitchen table, flipping through some RS pamphlets, which were mostly about campus issues and reminiscences of the 1960s, when he was an undergrad. The phone was in the living room. Red Submarine, so far as I could tell, seemed to be composed of Schmidt, whoever he was fucking at the time, a random and ever-changing assortment of sophomores who are purged when they declare an unacceptable major, and a few perennial graduate students. And Bernstein.
Comrade J
anyway, according to the caption under the photo in the zine I was reading. There was no real discussion of what Comrade J was doing, or even why his picture was in the pamphlet. Bernstein was filler. His sideburns were so thick they looked like a pair of bushy wings. I guessed 1974 or so. Even the sign he was holding appeared to be blank, though much of it was cropped out of the frame.

“Hey,” I called out, “Do you have a job? I mean, do I need to leave soon?”

Mike swung his head into the doorway. “I don’t. Back in 1979 Public Safety beat me during a demo and broke my leg in three places. I sued SUNY and got a huge settlement. It’s what inspired me to read the law too.” Then the phone rang, and he ducked back into the living room. After some murmuring he returned and said, “Well, the good news is that your grandmother wasn’t taken in anywhere. Nor has she been found by the cops, and she’s not in any public hospitals anywhere in Suffolk County. So she’s not in the clutches of the state. And no, you can’t leave. You’ve been released into my custody, remember?”

I just stared at him. Grandma wasn’t home when we had swung by the apartment the previous night. She had no friends, nobody to turn to, and no kindly stranger was going to be able to put up with her for long. “So, she’s not in the clutches of the state. But I am, and you are. After all, if I leave that means you have to follow me. Aren’t we both trapped, after a fashion?”

“Oh, you can leave. I was just teasing. Anyway, I just have to make sure you don’t leave the county, basically, and if the cops want to talk to you, that you’ll be available . . .” Mike trailed off. He was trapped, he realized finally.

“Let’s go find my grandmother,” I said. She had to be with my father, unless he just took the stuff and left the door open behind him, for her to wander through, lost and confused and cold in her house dress and slippers.

“Thanks for last night,” he said in the car. He listened to WBAB. Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and such. I told him that I couldn’t believe he listened to this shit, and he launched into a monologue about rock and the 1960s and the nature of power in culture and I didn’t have to talk about our sex thanks to his narcissism, so I was quite pleased with myself.

Then I asked about Bernstein. “Comrade J, eh?” Mike said. “Yeah, he was a character, but aren’t we all?”

“You often confuse being abstruse with being enigmatic, and being enigmatic with being intelligent, you know?” I asked.

“Hey, I like that. Mind if I borrow it? We’ll have to write it down later.” Mike wasn’t being sarcastic.

“Anyway,” I said.

“Yeah, Jay. Nice guy, I guess. Into some heavy stuff. A real ultraleft. Any nationalistic dictator who waved a red flag, he’d support. A genius, a very clever guy. He read maybe eight or nine languages. If not for his politics, he could have worked for the United Nations pretty easily, but he spent a lot of his time corresponding with radicals all over the world. I was never quite sure what he was getting at, though. He expected the revolution to happen without putting in the hard work a revolutionary needs to put in.”

“What work would that be?” I asked.

“I stopped trying to figure that out long ago. That’s why I’m a Marxist of the Tao,” he said. And we were there.

The squat seemed unoccupied. When I kicked open the door, Mike said, “Wow.” He added, looking around, “What a mess.”

“Really? It’s less cluttered than your digs,” I said. And it was less cluttered than it had been. A lot of dust and broken glass had been swept into a corner with a piece of cardboard. A fresh-looking towel hung over one of the windows. In the kitchen, a new space heater was plugged into an extension cord which traveled out the window and into the weed-filled backyard. From there I presumed it met another cord, and eventually plugged into someone else’s outlet one or two doors down.

“They were definitely here, and definitely had some money they didn’t spend on crack.”

“What’s upstairs?” Mike asked. Two bedrooms, as it turned out. One had a bed of sorts, made out of clothes and blankets and two couch cushions piled artlessly against the far wall. Across the narrow hallway, the other bedroom was almost entirely empty. In it, leaning up against a wall, was Bernstein’s Tower painting. “They’re probably out shopping for a frame,” Mike said.

“Asshole,” I said.

“So, we can’t stay. You’re—”

“A person of interest in a murder case, yes, I know. That’s why I let you drive me out here instead of just dropping me off at my place, so I could get my own car.” But staying would have made sense. Mike would get bored and wander off, I’d have the place to myself, and I’d wait for Dad to come back with Grandma, grab her, and go. Unless Dad was armed, or his girl was, or he whored Grandma out, or killed her, or left her at a hospital after getting her to sign some papers. My mind spun with the possibilities, and all I could see before me was the Tower falling, and me buried under a thousand tons of steaming rubble.

Mike snapped his fingers in my face. I grabbed his wrist and locked it hard. Dad had showed me that one, in the old days. Mike’s foot left the floor as he staggered in my grip. “Who the fuck do you think I am?” My voice was fried, a thrash growl. “Don’t you fucking snap your fingers at me. I’ll make sure you can’t call the cops.” Then Mike shoved me, but I held on. He regained his footing and rushed me against the wall. I got a knee up and he winced, but didn’t drop. Wasn’t this just like the left? Always at each other’s throats? Mike grabbed my wrists now and tried to pin them against the wall, but I squirmed out and got a thumb at his Adam’s apple, then hit his balls with my knee again, and shoved him away.

“Fuckin’ crazy bitch,” he said, best he could between coughs and spasms.

“Petit-bourgeois dilettante,” I said, and that really hurt him. I marched past him, took the painting, and headed back downstairs. He called after me, “You’re in my custody!” He even dug his car keys out of his pocket and jingled them. “I have the car!”

There is a feeling I’ve experienced only once or twice on my many strolls.
Waldeinsamkeit
is the feeling of being alone in the woods. When I was a kid, the whole area was wooded, except for Nesconset Highway, Route 25A, and Main Street. It seemed wooded anyway. My mother used to take me on strolls through the woods along the edges of the highway. Everything was amazing. The leaves under leaves, moldering and turning brown. The tall trees, and the ones that grew in large Ys or that shot out of the ground, practically horizontal. The malevolent-seeming poisons ivy and oak that she was so good at spotting and that I never even found until my ankles and shins burned. We never encountered another person on our walks, but I did encounter plenty of their spoor: beer bottles, condoms, once much of a car’s shiny chrome bumper. I’d wanted to take it home; like a lot of kids I was obsessed with finding things, and selling them for big money. Even base metal could be transmuted into gold. US Steel was the biggest and most important company in the world, or at least it was on the television news every night.

Once we saw a turtle and she stood with me for ten minutes to watch it cross the little path we were walking down. Another time we saw a skunk and Mom made a game of walking slowly backwards, with exaggerated “ballerina steps” to keep us from getting sprayed. When we came across a recently dug hole, she told me that a leprechaun had dug it and that if we came back at the right time, the leprechaun would be there and give us ice cream. It took me weeks of begging and sniffling to get another trip to the woods, but by the time I found what I thought had been the clearing with the hole in it, the hole had either collapsed or been filled in.

Then came the bulldozers, and the strip malls, and the McMansions, and cancer, and almost all of the woods around Port Jefferson was gone. There was just enough for a few warrens of brown rabbits, and just enough for a girl to get lost in. That was me. I’d never experienced
Waldeinsamkeit
with Mom—by definition since I wasn’t alone in the woods, and had never been as a child. And years later, when I began my strolls to just get out of the house, or to practice smoking, she was still with me, in my head, a Holy Guardian Angel of sorts warning me away from the poison ivy.

The only other time I’d experienced the strange wonder of being alone in the woods, of being alone in a world the edges of which only birds could perceive, was sometime prior to my first encounter with Bernstein. It was a night walk, in summer, and I’d taken a small bag of oranges with me to eat. The citrus was supposed to keep the mosquitoes away, and it almost did. It was a sticky night, but cooler outside than in the house. My parents never liked air conditioning; my mother used to say using it when the temperature was only in the eighties was “putting on airs.” Then she’d giggle at her own pun. Also, my father was such a fuckup with money that we could have AC one week, and no power at all the next.

I made a few turns through the trees and almost sprained my ankle when I tripped over a root. Then I found it—the spot in the woods where there was no light pollution from the highway or the King Kullen supermarket, where the distant roar of the traffic was swallowed by the chirping of the crickets. And there were fireflies, and a dark and musky smell, like that of an animal that had never been bathed by human hands.

I started crying on the spot; it was so beautiful. I had the world all to myself, like I’d always wanted.

Now, I had Bernstein’s painting. I followed the extension cord from the kitchen into the yard, and laughed when I saw that it wasn’t connected to anywhere. Dad must have given up when the task of stealing electricity for Grandma turned out to be marginally harder than it seemed. The usual. Then I went into the woods. It was a bright day, and chilly, and soon my breath was steaming in front of me as I picked my way over the cracked and fallen trees left in the wake of the hurricane. There was plenty of noise from “Western Civilization”—what was Gandhi’s line about thinking it would be a good idea to try it one day?—the blast of the ferry horn out on the Sound, a motorcycle roaring by, even a loud soap opera as I passed by one of the better houses. I was careful to make sure the painting wasn’t scratched by the twigs I was brushing past, but I still felt it. I looked up at the sun and the blue-white sky and realized the awesomeness of the world.
Awesome
is a word that is tragically misused, especially on Long Island. It basically means “Oh boy!” among my age cohort and anyone younger. The notion of
awe
has been shorn from it. That’s late capitalism for you—taking the sacred and transforming it into the profane for the sake of profit. There is nothing we’re supposed to be in awe of, except for the
Batman
movie. But I was in awe of the wood through which I was traveling, which I was occupying like a tiny army. Small as it was, constrained as it was by highways and vinyl siding, these woods were something different, something real. And Bernstein would never see this again. I couldn’t bring him out here and try to explain what I’d felt, even though I knew he’d just chuckle and then tell me of some greater experience he once had, likely involving the Great God Pan or a protest against clear-cutting. Or my grandmother could have been wandering through here a little while ago, finding a thin line of trees and following them to a greater wood in which to really get lost, confused and lonely and never to experience even a moment of
Waldeinsamkeit
. Someone was going to pay.

There was no satyr in these woods, and a moment later I heard some yelling in the distance. Just the sort of casual autumnal shrieking of a child on his bicycle. The feeling was gone. Some of the blue paint on the corner of the frame had flaked off onto my palm.