Love Is the Law (14 page)

“Riley!” someone else called out. It wasn’t me; it was another woman, one with a familiar voice. I turned to see—it was Dad’s crackhead girlfriend, tumbling down the block behind me, hissing and growling. She walked by me, calling for Riley, ignoring me utterly.

I wanted her attention. “Hey, bitch; get any dick from my father lately?”

“No,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

“What do you want with that guy?”

“Maybe I want to suck his dick because your father turned out to be a faggot.”

I shrugged, and tried not to laugh. “I guess that’s a strong possibility.”

“What's your problem, bitch?” she wanted to know. All curious, almost like a normal person. “I need money, and he has it. He owes your father money, which means he owes me money. You too, you fat fucking bitch, but I know you don't have shit.”

“How does he owe my father money? That guy’s rich.” It was probably a mistake, listening to this woman’s hysterical babbling.

“From high school. They went to McDonald’s every day and ate Big Macs. In college, your father was a real fucking sport and bought all the beer for their little faggot parties. That’s how! Two hundred dollars,” she said, her voice a shriek now. “With interest! Compound fucking interest.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

“I was there with Billy. I saw it all,” she said. “You think I’ve always been like this? You think I like living in a fucking abandoned house and shitting in the backyard? I went to school, you know, and I have a degree, so I’m fucking better than you. And I’ve got your father back, too. He came crawling to me when that whore he married finally fucking died.” She stared at me hard for a long moment. I guess she could have head butted me if she wanted to, if she had the balance to pull it off. Then her rictus broke, and she was afraid.

“What’s so funny?” she asked me. She was quieter now. “What’s so goddamned funny?” She wouldn’t even say “fucking” to my face anymore. I hadn’t even realized it, but I was smiling at her.

Lots of things were funny. My mouth was open, ready to announce the punch line, and even explain the joke. Whatever I said was going to be true. I had thought that I was a member in good standing of the Imaginary Party. Chairman Bernstein, Comrade Dawn. But something wicked this way had come, and neither of us had suspected at all. It was as though everyone in this stupid town was involved in a conspiracy except for us. Riley had Bernstein’s books; my father knew Bernstein too. And Riley bragged about buying up real estate—he was obviously the third friend my grandmother had mentioned, the one who bought the house out from under us. And now, here was Dad’s crackhead high school girlfriend, looking for Riley. I couldn’t ask any more questions of anyone. That would simply summon more doubt into my reality, bind my seekings with confusion. But I had no conclusions either, so I could say nothing. But I could still make a definitive statement.

I glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, then punched her in the face with every ounce of strength I had. It was a very good punch. I turned my ankle, loaded up my thigh, kept my arm all loose to get the kinetic link to my leg muscles going, focused on the first two knuckles, the whole Mike Tyson bit. I felt like there was another me, my own executive function or Holy Guardian Angel, observing from several feet away, critiquing my form. And my form was good. For me, the punch was a moment that stretched; for her it was a flash of flesh and pain, as it should be. Her nose vanished under my fist and her eyes glazed over. When I pulled my fist back—I was ready to unload a second time—she stood in front of me for a long moment. Then someone pulled the spine from her body and she crumpled to the ground, nice and easy. It was a mercy, really. Now she wasn’t all frantic about getting her hands on crack. With that nose, she wouldn’t be sucking dick behind the bait shop for five dollars a go for a few days anyway. I was practically a social worker. And I wasn’t even wearing my spiked ring.

By the time I made it to Belle Terre, it was getting dark. I was mostly keeping an eye on the sun, as it was a long walk back to where I’d hidden the car after leaving the hospital. Grandma was probably being treated very nicely at the hospital. She liked pudding. The lights were on in Riley’s home, and his wife was in the living room reading a magazine on the couch, but Riley wasn’t anywhere to be seen at first. Then I noticed a light in the basement window well.

I had to scuttle up to the well on my belly to see into the depths of the basement. It was huge—a single room the size of the manse—and finished. And Riley stood before a lectern. He wore a gaudy robe, black with pentagrams stitched in sequins, over his street clothes. Riley looked ridiculous, like the milquetoast boys Molly Ringwald woos in the movies with her eccentricities and spastic dancing, ten years later. Like a second-string Nazi. He hadn’t even taken off his sweater for the ritual. His pits must have been hot and stinking.

I presumed that the robe was his latest Good Read purchase. There was a book on the stand—it was an old book, definitely. Not even early twentieth century, nothing mass produced. The walls seemed to be lined with similar spines. Nothing I recognized from Bernstein’s, except as a matter of type. One corner was stocked with different books, thick and shiny volumes of your everyday law library. So Riley
was
an occultist—and even worse he was an attorney—and his sanctum was a furnished, carpeted basement with a relatively high ceiling and an old wet bar in the corner.

I wondered whether it was selling his soul to the most foul and darkest power that made his fortune, or if he used magick.
Now, now, now / money, money, money!
Riley didn’t seem engaged in a ritual. He was just skimming the book, turning a page every few seconds with gloved hands. Then I heard a dial tone, and static, and some buzzing. He had a PC with a modem in his sanctum too, and it was probably in one of the corners by the well, so I hadn’t spotted it. Riley pulled his gloves off as he marched toward the computer, toward
me
—I rolled out of his line of sight, then rolled back after a moment—and began typing in a noisy clatter. I couldn’t see him anymore though, as he was tucked away somewhere against the wall. But many things were explained. At least one thing was. Surely, Riley was the collector looking to buy the Tower painting. He seemed like that kind of idiot, trying to buy magick instead of earning it.

And he was rich. And he was an occultist. Bernstein’s rival, revealed at last.

So, did Riley kill Bernstein? On one level, it hardly mattered. His neck was made for the lamppost. That he was a practitioner made him fit my mental profile of who might have killed Bernstein, but the world couldn’t wait for him to hang even were he innocent. Nobody gets as wealthy as Riley without exploiting the working class. That said, I was no anarchist. Killing an individual capitalist brings us no closer to revolution, and only leads to state repression. What did Trotsky say?
If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party?

But the great dark thing welled up in me again, filling the empty space behind my eyes. It was a roar in me, and I nearly threw myself in through the window, head first, to scuttle along the floor and kill Riley with my teeth. Then I realized something: I’d only ever attacked people weaker than I. That poor woman, damaged and enslaved by society and patriarchy. Joshua, a declassed, fat loser. Even idiot Greg. I’ve never taken on anyone who I thought, even for a moment, that I couldn’t beat. The black receded into the bowels of the Earth, and I had nothing left to do but run.

I was only halfway across the huge yard when a flashlight beam cut across the night before me. Chrysoula, in her widow’s black, held the torch and ran the light over me.

“Ah, you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I know Riley. My father does, I mean.” Of course, that was true. In their youth. Occult shenanigans. Something.

“Your family,” she said, her accent thick on her tongue. “Your father. Yes, I know him. He walks around town, your father.”

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I’m looking for a cat,” she said. I found myself wondering if she was looking for a missing cat, or if she was just looking for a brand-new cat to bring home for her collection.

“Well, I should leave you to it,” I said.

“Why? Where are you going now?” She stepped up to me, aimed the flashlight at my face.

“I put my grandmother in the hospital today. I have to go visit her. Some bad things happened to her—there are people in this town interested in beating up older ladies, so watch out.”

Chrysoula shifted the flashlight in her hand, holding it like a club. “I’ll beat them down.”

“Well, okay!” I went to move, and Chrysoula went to step in front of me. Then light flooded the lawn. Riley’s Mercedes roared past us. I thought I saw that he was still wearing his robe. “Did you see that?” I asked. “Do you know about your boss?”

“He’s not my boss. I’m my own boss.”

“Do you know what he does in that big basement of his?”

“I don’t clean basements, or bay windows.” She was about to say something else, when a cat emerged from the shrubs, ran over to her, and began rubbing its flanks against her ankles.

“Well, so glad I could be here for you,” I said. “Goodbye!” And I ran as best I could in my big boots.

Everything was coming together and falling apart at once. Revelations led only to further mysteries. Was there anyone in town not connected to Bernstein somehow, not part of his life? I thought he belonged to me—after all, I belonged to him, and wasn’t it mutual, contractual? But everyone had a piece of him, it seemed. My father, Mike Schmidt, Riley, Grandma. Everyone in town was part of the Octopus of the occult, cadre of the Imaginary Party, and I was the outsider.

I was used to being an outsider.

There’s a trick to it. To be an outsider means to be connected to the inside somehow. It’s a dialectic, or
taijitu
—the symbol beloved by kung-fu weirdoes and van art aficionados, with the white spot in the black fish, and vice versa. An outsider is more than a stranger, less than a friend. We cannot help but be inside everywhere. And I was headed in deeper than I’d ever been.

The night was a cold one. There was even a layer of frost on the Rabbit’s windshield when I got to it. I spared a thought for my grandmother, then realized that I’d probably never see her again. I sure as hell wasn’t going back for her. She’d never find me. I couldn’t imagine her getting down to Riverhead, or wherever I was going to end up after the quick if sensational trial, to visit me on the other side of the reinforced glass. Tonight, I had nothing to gain but my chains.

On the drive, I briefly considered saying
fuck it
and pointing the little car toward Manhattan. A kernel of a plan came to mind—go hang out at CBGB’s or ABC No Rio. Find some dude. Fuck him for a place to sleep and some cigarettes. Get a job at a restaurant, maybe off the books or with lots of tips, and then just live. Forget Bernstein; he sure as hell wouldn’t be searching for my killer. Forget the remnants of family; they were eager to forget me, either through drugs or dementia. I had nothing else out here. Long Island isn’t built for anyone over the age of seventeen and under the age of thirty-seven. Even the college kids at Stony Brook are mostly commuters, filling the LIRR with dirty laundry and Brooklyn accents to head back home to the city every Friday.

But no.
Wir bleiben hier
. We are staying here. Manhattan wasn’t a Big Rock Candy Mountain with nothing to do all day but hang out in Washington Square Park and wait for Joey Ramone to show up with a free pizza. It was Wall Street. It was Central Park West. The Twin Towers. The very center of world capitalism. With the implosion of East Germany, it was only a matter of time. The little nooks and crannies in which people like me dwelled, in shitty roach-strewn tenements with bathtubs in the kitchen, were about to be gentrified, or torn down completely and utterly replaced by condos for the children of the bourgeoisie. There was no place for me in the city.

Long Island, thanks to the summoning spell of Robert Moses, was static. It would always be like this, half-formed and stupid. Like me. I turned the wheel and headed back to the apartment, to pee, to eat something.
I’m a person of interest
, I thought to myself. Beyond a mere murder investigation, I was a person of interest to the entire town. There was something in the air, a charge. I was the lightning rod.

When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me. It hadn’t been mailed. There was no stamp, and no address. Just my name in someone’s idiot scrawl on a small envelope, embossed with a rose. A mother’s stationery set. I opened it and read a very brief note, from Greg:

Dawn.

Rodrick told me not to leave a massage on the phone answering machine so I am writng this. Your friend “Mike” “the Communist Layer” called me when he could not call you to tell me to tell you that your grandma’s old house is now owned by Galt Omni Limited Holding Company. Rodrick and I will be at Obissul Eyeballs and will see you there.

PS: You were right about Chelsea. She’s a skank.

I’d figured the Riley connection already, and was only mildly surprised to see that Greg couldn’t spell “abyssal.” Or “Roderick.” Or simpler words. He was a little shaky on what quotation marks meant too. Chelsea had probably dropped Greg when she realized that he wouldn’t be a good way to get to me, but that was the least of my concerns now.

There’s an occult joke in the phrase name Galt Omni Limited. Obviously Galt was a reference to Ayn Rand and her noxious fictions. “Omni Limited” is too dumb on its face to be anything but secretly clever. Riley had all but admitted that he owned half the town, so it was probably him. What made Rand’s imagination “omnilimited” was her vulgar materialism. “Metaphysics: Objective Reality.” That was Marx’s error too, of course. He missed that the little bags of chemical reactions we all carry around in our skulls have perceptual abilities we haven’t tapped yet. We could perceive abstractions—such as freedom, such as Satan—so thoroughly that we could bring them into existence. The lie that becomes the truth. If you're not willing to speak falsehood and lie in the same utterance, no,
as
the same utterance, your bold and totalizing truths will only ever be lies.

That’s why Bernstein wasn’t interested in money. He had plenty, somewhere. But he didn’t play the game. He was afraid of it, though of course he never put it that way.

“There are many gods one can summon, Amaranth,” he told me once. It was an unusual night. We actually went out for a walk through the woods rather than just spending the whole evening on his couch. “As many as you can fathom, and gods unnamed in deeper fathoms still. But don’t waste what I’m giving you by summoning Mammon.”

Inspired by another Deren film,
The Very Eye of Night
, we had walked out among the trees with no flashlights, under the dark of the new moon. The only illumination came from the far-off highway, and from fireflies. We wanted to walk among a field of stars, nothing but inky black and bright pinpoints. But it still smelled rich, fecund, and my lips were salty from the trek.

Bernstein’s voice was disembodied; he was a black blob picking his way through other black blobs. “Ever read the New Testament? When I was young, I found it exotic, a treat. Finally, the protagonist of the Bible revealed!”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’ve only ever read kiddie versions, or saw boring religious cartoons, or heard references or aphorisms, or memorized a verse or two for a lollipop. The wages of sin are death, and the wages of knowing that the wages of sin are death is a Tootsie Roll Pop.”

Bernstein chuckled in the dark. I rarely got him to laugh, so I was secretly thrilled. “You might have heard this then: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.
Ye cannot serve God and Mammon
.” He affected a Thurston Howellesque accent for the last sentence, and we both had a laugh.

“It’s true, you see. Mammon is the magick that is the end of magick. You cannot serve any god and Mammon. You cannot
be
any god and Mammon.” He smacked a bush and sent a swarm of fireflies into the air. “Every man and woman is a star,” he said, mostly to himself.

“So, Bernstein, you agree with Judeo-Christian slave ideology. Ooh, the poor are special, the rich are evil.”

“Judeo-Christian slave ideology is half-right,” he said. Another truth—I’d been poor for a while. So had my dad, my grandmother, that crack whore I cracked open. There was nothing special about them, or me. I checked the fridge, but no food had magically appeared, nor another beer. All the Will in the world won’t fill an empty stomach. I was just another welfare moocher, not special at all, except for what Bernstein had taught me. I could be any god I wanted to be. I would be the god of the abyss tonight.

I didn’t bother hiding the car a few blocks from the venue, or applying new mud to the license plates. Let the pigs tow the Volkswagen away; it meant nothing to me. I was staying here. Let them try to interrogate my grandmother again. Maybe her senile storytelling would work in my favor this time.