Love Is the Law

by Nick Mamatas

  Greg didn’t look too bad, even with the stitches in his lips and on his cheek. I could see the outline of my mouth, just like after the first bite of a sandwich, but to his school friends it probably looked totally badass. He had brought me the painting.

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “Small town,” he said. “Your grandma is in the book, and everyone knows about your father.” His voice was muffled a bit by the fact that his lip was stapled together. I smiled and let him in.

  “It’s totally cool that you’re here. Do you want to meet my grandmother? She loves company. I can just wake her from her nap.” I said that just to get him to leave. Then Grandma appeared in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. There were toast crumbs all over her chin and housedress. She smiled, unashamed.

  “Hello,” she said to Greg. She glanced down at the painting. “That’s a painting of fire. Fire so hot buildings wilt. Did you paint it?” Then she added, “What happened to your face, young man? Was it a terrible wolf in the woods?”

  “He painted it for me!” I said. I took a hold of Greg’s elbow and started tugging him toward my room. “Grandma, General Hospital is on. Do you need help with the TV?”

  “Naw,” she said. “I got it.” She always knew exactly where the remote control was.

  “Room’s a mess, sorry,” I told Greg. The usual sort of thing—clothes on the floor, books open and spine up like banana peels thrown over someone’s shoulder, a desk crowded with Bernstein’s papers and some of my own doodles and work. No place to sit but the bed and the desk chair. Greg chose the bed immediately. I took the chair and sat in it backwards, legs spread on either side of its back, like a boy.

  “Tough guy, eh?” I said. Then in an impression of his voice, half my mouth stuck together, “I know where you live.”

  “You think you can fuck me up like you did and get away with it?” Greg said.

  “Yes, yes I do.” He didn’t say anything to that and made no move, so I explained the whole thing to him. “I’ve already gotten away with it. You kick my ass, kill my grandmother, rape me, burn this whole apartment complex down, I’ll have already gotten away with it. Whatever little consequences you think you can introduce into my life are irrelevant. I’m not into revenge. I’m not into ju—” I stopped myself, but it was the thought that counted, so I snatched a pen from my desk, lifted my shirt, grabbed a bit of flab with my free hand and jabbed it in, hard as I could. “Fuck!”

  Greg was taken aback. “Holy shit. Look at your fucking stomach.”

  “That’s some real magick,” I told him. “But I’m still trying to get it right.” He put his hand to his face. Grandma cracked the door open then and asked what was wrong. Not because she’d heard my cry or was concerned, or even remembered that I was in my room with a strange and wounded boy, but because there was a commercial on the television and she came to check me out five times an hour on schedule. Greg was startled. I took the opportunity to slide off the chair and slip into his blind spot. Grandma wandered off, as she does, and I sniffed Greg’s hair. He jumped back and threw a wild arm at me but I ducked.

  “Okay . . . Jesus, fuck,” he said. “That was impressive and weird. How did you get so close to me without me even knowing? Did you plan that with your grandmother?”

  I held up the bloody pen. “Want to learn how? This time, you’ll have to make your own wound.”

  “Can I have a different pen? You know, AIDS. I mean not that you have AIDS.”

  “There’s a razor in the bathroom. With a pink handle,” I said.

  Greg, his left palm wrapped in a rag made from one of my father’s old T-shirts, had some good ideas, and made a list of them. Suspects. Means, motive, and opportunity. Ratiocination. But not individuals—we had no way of collecting clues from the scene, no neighborhood to canvas, and when magick was involved, means could mean anything. He had boiled it down to some groups: rival occultists, or a possible other “acolyte” who had been jealous of me. Rival Communists—Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, or even anarcho-terrorist. The ruling class. The middle class. Organized crime. Or some combination thereof. Sounded like a long list, but except for the middle class, there were very few folks fitting the bill on Long Island, and of the remainder very few who knew who Bernstein was. Virtually all his acquaintances and correspondents might have had a reason to kill him, occult or otherwise.

  “Why wouldn’t a magician just kill him with magic?” Greg said. He took up a pencil and made to temporarily scratch out “rival occultists” from his list, which was blue streaked with red thanks to my bloody pen.

  “It’s not that easy to do something with just magick,” I said.

  “Do you know where to begin looking for other magicians?”

  “No,” I had to admit. And the idea of Bernstein maybe having another initiate out there, one who took him out, was especially upsetting. I pushed it out of my mind. “So, political rivals? That should be easy. Nobody mainstream gives a shit about Marxism anymore, not even as an enemy, what with glasnost and all the shit happening in East Germany these days.”

  “So, Nazis and commies,” Greg said. There was one place to look. I snatched a flier from my desk and told Greg to wait in the bedroom. In the kitchen, I picked up the phone and called the hardcore show hotline. It was an answering machine tape recorded by some guy out from Queens, or at least someone from Queens. His accent, all lispy and nasal as though mixing Brooklyn, Long Island, and the sounds of mental retardation, gave it away. He never gave a name, and was entirely nonpartisan. Far-right bullshit punk shows held in some asshole’s basement or a Polish American hall—Nazis liked playing in the clubs of their former victims, of course disguising their intentions to gain power—were listed alongside real house shows, club gigs, and college events. There was something going on virtually every night, and all of it invisible to anyone not already in the know. Hardcore was a lot like magick: ritual, rage, and rebellion. Something that most people knew nothing about or were terrified by. Some marginal few discovered, embraced, and were consumed by it. A few brave folks even made it out alive at the other end.

  There was a show tonight, in a basement on Woodhull Avenue. A few years ago, that was just a road through a wood connecting a development to Nesconset Highway, but now it had about a dozen identical houses and even a shitty little strip mall with a deli and a locksmiths’ anchoring it. Not a good place for a show, but the band had an intriguing name: Abyssal Eyeballs. A reference to Nietzsche’s old saw about staring into the abyss until the abyss stares back, probably. But that could be a Nazi group, or an anti-Nazi group. Or some art fags who liked silly names and found abyssal eyeballs euphonious and obnoxious in equal proportions, as I did. At any rate, it was a show and five bucks, nobody turned away.

  Greg had to call his mom to get permission to go. “This is your fault,” he hissed at me, pointing at his injury. “I used to be able to go wherever the fuck I wanted.”

  “Pfft, you don’t even have a car.”

  Anyway, permission was granted thanks to his mother’s answering the phone through a haze of Valium and we had some time to kill, so I made him, and Grandma, some grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I giggled at myself the entire time. Greg even struck up a conversation with Grandma about life on Long Island. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a German immigrant to Brooklyn who wanted a life for his family away from the grime and crime of the big city, so he looked in the newspaper and found a cheap house in Port Washington. But he got his presidents wrong and got on the LIRR to Port Jefferson. Great-Grandpa was very confused when he got here and asked the ticket agent for help. “Well, you can go all the way back to Jamaica, and then get on the train to Port Washington,” the ticket agent had said. “Or I can show you my house. I happen to be selling it.” And that was the great two-family Victorian that went to my father after Great-Grandpa died and that we all lived in until my father discovered crack and sold all the furniture and then let the bank foreclose on it. Gran
dma didn’t mention that part. Grandma and Greg even watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune together, while I flipped through some of the materials we had salvaged from Bernstein’s files. Every so often she’d turn to him and ask, “Oh Lord, what happened to your face!” He’d say, “A dog bit me,” and she’d mention her friend from grade school whose leg was nearly torn off by a wild dog back in Brooklyn.

  “Greg and I are going out, Grandma,” I told her finally, and her face lit up.

  “Oh, wonderful!” she said. “Well, do have a good time.”

  “Uh, bye, Mrs. . . .” Greg said. Grandma didn’t offer up her surname, perhaps having forgotten it, so I said, “Seliger,” and Greg repeated it and Grandma told him to call her Helen.

  “You should,” I said when we were out the door. “Helen is her name.” But he didn’t laugh.

  It wasn’t a long walk, but it was getting dark earlier now that the fall had come. A few plastic jack-o’-lanterns in the windows and on the porches of the homes on either side of the street leered at us. I was glad to have grabbed the big cop flashlight from atop Grandma’s fridge to light our way.

  “How are you going to explain the gash on your hand to your mom?”

  “I’m not,” Greg said. “Don’t need to. She won’t notice. My face was hard to hide, the palm easy to hide.”

  “Ah, hiding in plain sight. Very occult!”

  Greg changed the subject. “What kind of show is this? Punk?”

  “Probably.”

  “Fucking punk—so ridiculous.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “There’s no virtuosity,” Greg said. “Punk is just picking up an instrument and slamming against it like an idiot. Can any of the bands on your jacket play a real lick? Read music? Do they even fucking practice?”

  “That’s the point, though. It’s something anyone can do—” I started to say.

  “I get the point. The point is bullshit. People lump in punk and metal just because they’re both loud and use power chords, but metal has more in common with Vivaldi. It’s real music. I listen to anything, so long as there’s some excellent musicianship, and I’m treated like I eat shit for breakfast every morning. Have you ever even heard of Jaco Pastorius?” He pantomimed a bass and did that doob-de-doob-moob thing with his mouth that bassists do when trying to impress women.

  “Can’t say that I have. Maybe you’ll play him for me sometime.”

  He muttered something about yeah, maybe, and we were there. The site of the show was a nondescript house. Actually, the house was so nondescript that I instantly thought it was some sort of trap. It looked like the sort of thing a little kid might draw if you handed her some crayons and said, “Draw a house.” A door with a single step before it, one window on either side, perfectly clean siding and brown shingles. Even a chimney, but one coming out of the room rather than built alongside an exterior wall.

  “You knock,” I said.

  “You knock,” Greg said. “My hand hurts.”

  So I knocked, and a young Hispanic man answered. Nobody I’d seen around before, though I go to house shows all the time. He didn’t seem shocked to see a girl with a bright orange Mohawk and a big spiked leather jacket at his door so I asked if there was a show.

  “In the basement, yeah. Go around back. There’s a cellar door. I was about to put up a sign.” He held up a sign with a big red arrow on it, smacked it onto the door, then closed it on us.

  “That must be an example of the friendly punk rock community, eh?” Greg said. “And that arrow will really be helpful. People won’t just walk down the block, even if they knew what to make of it.”

  “You can go home if you want,” I said, but he was right. There was something queer going on, but it’s not as though I had any other leads. And there was something about an imminent experience, the unknown about to become known, that twisted my stomach into delicious knots. It’s why I did anything I did, really, from taking a set of clippers to my hair to climbing a tree and looking into a bedroom window, half hoping I’d be caught. I had to see who, and what, was in the basement. My Will was strong, Greg’s not so much, so he followed. There was a cellar door, it was open, and from it spilled the low murmurs of conversation.

  The basement was spotless. Not even spotless in the lived-in rumpus room way. Like the house above, everything looked brand new—the clean boiler, the blank gray walls, the freshly poured cement floor, the unfinished wooden staircase in the corner leading back upstairs to, I presumed, the empty living room and static-charged wall-to-wall carpet. The basement was so pristine that it looked empty even though about a dozen people were already present, clumped in twos and threes. Nobody turned to greet us, or even look at us. And I recognized nobody. This wasn’t the usual crowd. One girl had a Chelsea haircut with a pretty pronounced curl, looking more like a mostly bald Bob’s Big Boy than was good for her, but most of the others weren’t even punks. The great big graduate student from my route, and his tiny girlfriend, were in one corner. I wanted to rush up to him and say, “Aram, hello!” but of course he’d have no idea who I was. But then I realized—that’s exactly what I should do, especially as Greg was getting antsy and twitchy standing next to me and waiting for something to happen.

  “Aram, hello!” I said as I walked on up to him, my hand out like a used car salesman. “And Karen.”

  Aram smiled and shook my hand. “Hello, how are you?” he said, his face exploding with a real, authentic smile. Karen looked confused and wilted. Clearly, she should be paired off with Greg, and I should have had Aram. We both decided to play friends.

  “So, Abyssal Eyeballs!” I said. “Haven’t seen them before!”

  “Me neither. It should be . . .” Aram said, glancing around the room. His hair nearly scraped against the low ceiling. “An interesting show.”

  “My name is Karen,” Karen finally said.

  “Dawn, and this is Greg.”

  Greg mumbled a hello. Then he said, “Where’s the instruments?”

  “It’s not a musical,” Karen said. “It’s a straight play.”

  “More performance art, actually,” Aram said. “I’m pretty sure there will be instruments.”

  “See, performance art,” I said to Greg, nudging him with my elbow. “With instruments.”

  “What happened to your face?” Karen asked him.

  “Pit bull with AIDS,” Greg said with a laugh. Wrong crowd for bumper sticker humor. Nobody found his joke funny, but everyone in the basement quieted down and turned to look at him. Or past him, as the lights overhead dimmed and the door to the upstairs opened, yellow and orange light, and fog-

  machine fog spilling out onto the staircase. The cellar door through which we had entered slammed shut behind us.

  Karen was wrong—there were instruments. Two surpetis sounded from somewhere in the room, droning on at tones so slightly different as to almost create a third, weird buzz. A strobe started. Someone had a violin. Most of the people around us weren’t waiting for a band; they were part of a show. Aram and Karen, and the Chelsea girl, appeared to be spectators, but that was it. One man had glow-in-the-dark face paint. Then things got a little weird.

  “If I do not throw a physical bomb, it is only because there is none big enough . . . There can be no peace between Socrates and Athens, between Jesus and Jerusalem. We must then first throw moral bombs!” someone bellowed. It was a line from Crowley’s The World’s Tragedy. A guitar started grinding away, more black metal than hardcore. The surpetis droned endlessly. Other members of the band—the cast?—started taking off their clothes. Greg was making out with the Chelsea girl, or seemed to be as best I could determine in the momentary flashes of light. We’d gone looking for politics, but found some sort of vaguely occult performance. I suppose that was to be expected.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said another voice. It was the Latin kid, but far away and tinny. It took me a second to figure out that he was still upstairs and speaking into some kind of vent or pipe that led i
nto the basement. “The Abyssal Eyeballs.” The strobe slowed down. Three people descended from the steps leading to the upstairs. One of them was under a sheet with three circles over the head, like a cartoon ghost. The other two were a slightly overweight woman in sweatpants and facial mud, the other a man dressed as though he should have been much older—high pants, a straw hat, black socks, and sandals. As if we already didn’t know that suburbia was a soul-raping nightmare. If the ghost was supposed to be the soul of either an abortion or some kid who committed suicide, I was going to leave. But it wasn’t. The guitar changed up a bit, the woman started doing some human beatboxing, and the ghost raised its arms under the sheet and twirled like a dervish. It was a woman too, a real dancer. The man began to sing. I heard Aram say aloud to Karen, “This is supposed to be a straight play?” but then I wondered if they too weren’t actually part of the show rather than just spectators. Much of the song made no sense to me, as most of the lyrics weren’t in English. Each line seemed to be in a different language. Only the old saw from Nietzsche, “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil,” was in English. I’d taken French in school, but the vocabulary of the lyric in that language was beyond me. Someone handed the ghost woman a guitar. She draped the sheet over her arms to play. The Chelsea girl shouldered past me, tugging Greg behind her. They started pogoing in front of the band. The woman in the mud mask had a bongo drum. The Abyssal Eyeballs got some pretty solid riffing going. I took a deep breath, found a shadow, and got up the steps unmissed.

  The kitchen was bare. I noticed that the fridge wasn’t humming, and opened it. No light, no power. And the food was all props, like they have in Sears. A big plastic turkey with little plastic trimmings. Empty no-brand juices and sodas. Even fake bread, actually sliced. A pair of plastic fried eggs, with big yellow staring yolks. The living room had no furniture either except for a tall lamp in the corner. Of course, no vent. There were two doors—one was likely a closet, the other perhaps a bedroom. I inhaled, didn’t think, grabbed a doorknob, and opened it. A bedroom, yes, with a cot and the Latin kid on it, a small desk lamp on the floor, and some random junk—an easel, paint tubes, a pile of towels, a bass drum and a floor tom, some cardboard boxes likely filled with stuff.