by Nick Mamatas
Grandma shrugged. “It was going cheap, wasn’t it? We’d been foreclosed on. Billy forgot to pay the mortgage, you see . . .” Then she forgot what she was going to say. “Let’s have toast with peanut butter this morning,” she said, remembering what she had every morning but not that she had it every morning.
I didn’t have much to actually do, except make Grandma her breakfast and then do a little laundry. I had no job and no real desire to get one. If I needed money, I’d think of something, but my thoughts were scattered and I had nobody to talk to again. The social world of Long Island is built around institutions—schools and workplaces. Without membership in either, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, except maybe mill around a shopping mall or go downtown.
Downtown had the advantage of being where most of the Hispanics in town lived. Old Raymundo was an exception, probably because he had a high-paying defense job. Maybe I’d run into the Hispanic kid from last night, if my luck held out, and if he even lived in Port Jefferson. He may well have been an invader from Coram.
Port Jefferson’s downtown is a “nice place,” with the usual mix of dumb little shops: T-shirts, crystals, restaurants that claim that their seafood comes right out of the titular port though it rarely ever does, ice cream and fudge, a mediocre record store and a decent comic book shop, and the excellent Good Read Book Stop off on a side road, away from the day-trippers from Connecticut and the city. The Long Island Rail Road tracks run right through the town, splitting it into the tony Village with its colonial bullshit and its fancy high school, and the tedious Station where I lived and went to school with the heavy-metal dirtbags and unsubtle date rapists. The small Hispanic community tended to be bunched up around the tracks, sprinkled across either side. Of course, he could have been anywhere.
The walk was pleasant except for the usual catcalls and bullshit. I didn’t dare wear my headphones. There were too many coincidences swirling about, too many encounters. My Will was diffuse, useless, and I found myself on automatic pilot, heading to the places I usually went to on a stroll. First a peek inside Infant Jesus, where the ex-hippie priest let drug addicts sweep the floors and such for obscure therapeutic reasons. The church and community center were both empty, and the van was gone. Errands, or stolen by a delinquent again? Then I took a left and checked out Barnum Street, which is chock full of nineteenth-century mansions, except for one hideous box with vinyl siding that I absolutely loved because the old Greek widow—her black wardrobe was the tell—with gold teeth kept fifteen cats on the porch and in the weed-choked driveway. Her car wasn’t in the drive, and the cats swarmed up to greet me, all tick bitten and one eyeless. I never could hide myself from animals and as Grandma and my father were both allergic to cats, I didn’t want to anyway.
Then I cut up through the parking lot and past Rocket Park, which was empty except for a few toddlers and their mothers. Long Island at midday always felt like a neutron bomb hit the place. Most people are gone, but the buildings remain. Rocket Park was so named because of a retrofuturistic and rusted slide shaped like a 1950s missile. The Big One had landed.
I popped into Farpoint Comics, and smiled when all the boys inside gasped. It was an undersmile, really—my lips stayed tight and closed. It was as though my teeth and tongue did the grinning. The “girl in the comic shop” was a role I was long used to, but it never stopped being funny. Nerds were too cowardly to try to pick me up, and almost nobody read Love and Rockets. Friggin’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a cartoon now, and everyone knew about indie comics, but the store was still wallpapered with Batman posters and graphic novels of all sorts, and one color—bluish-black—thanks to the movie. Girls were rare as comets around here and twice as hard to communicate with, so nobody bothered to try.
I poked around for a bit, just enjoying the smell of the ink and the way conversations would end as I drifted past, when I saw the flier for yesterday’s “event via the Abyssal Eyeballs.” That’s what the text read, in part.
BEHOLD!
A happening
and event
via
The Abyssal Eyeballs
9pm
9/18/89
(718) 555-6666
Obviously not the typical punk flier. No stencils, no logos, no hand-scrawled instructions or commentary, and no shadows left behind by photocopying cut-out letters or words. It was laid out on a computer, by a word processing program, and just printed out. And there was a tiny unicursal hexagram, and that was some sort of clip art, not hand drawn or cut out either. The number for the venue was the usual concert phone number. But the flier did narrow things down quite a bit—someone with a computer, and probably some money. Not the usual punk rock kid, but I knew that already. More importantly, someone with almost no idea what a proper concert flier should look like. And someone had been here to drop them off.
I took a flier up to the cashier, who was yet another tall fellow in glasses, with bushy hair. “Do you remember this flier?”
“Uhm . . .” he said. He was reading about the friggin’ Hulk of all things, but he put down the comic. “I do. There’s a whole bunch over there already.”
“Yes, I know. Do you remember who dropped these off, or when?”
He smiled. “I thought you had dropped them off, with that guy?” Then he pointed a finger at the top of my head and drew a circle around my hairdo. “But I guess it was someone else.”
The Chelsea girl. There are innumerable subtle differences between a Chelsea and a proper Mohawk, but most of them would be invisible to the sort of poor pathetic bastard who’d end up working in a comic book shop in his midthirties. He wasn’t even my usual cashier, but I normally came in on Wednesdays anyway.
“And was the guy Spanish?” He just looked at me. “You know, Hispanic? About my age and yay tall. Name of Roderick?” I held a hand over my head. He actually reached out to touch me, and moved my palm about seven inches higher. If he noticed the look on my face—if I could kill someone with my mind, I would have—he didn’t register it on his own ugly puss. Then he said, “Nah, an older guy. Big nose. You know . . .” Then sotto voce, “Jewish looking.”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, a few weeks ago,” the cashier said. “It was so memorable. To be honest, we don’t get a lot of female customers, and they certainly don’t come in with older gentlemen. I was sure something kinky was going on.”
“I’ll be back here soon,” I said. “With a picture. Will you be here to identify him as the person you saw?”
“You a cop?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “I mean, you don’t look like a cop.” Then he laughed. “What is this, like, Baker Street or something?” He meant the comic about a punk Sherlock Holmes that sounded much better than it actually was. His behavior was strange. Never before had a clerk at Farpoint, or any comics shop, not simply fallen all over himself to answer any question I might have.
“Listen, dude, whatever,” I told him, and left. I got some ice cream and headed back out to the parking lot. That guy was too husky to walk to work—it was just a matter of figuring out which car was his, and there were few enough in the lot. It was a demographic inevitability that his car would be a piece of shit, and thus I didn’t even need to see the not all who wander are lost bumper sticker on the off-white 1983 Chevy Chevette to know it belonged to him. And Arby’s wrappers littering the well of the front seats; excellent. But most important was the manual lock. So I undid the lace on one of my boots and made a little noose-like loop of it. With the trusty screwdriver on my trusty Swiss Army knife, I pried open the passenger side door the slightest, and then I slid the lace in, snagged the lock, yanked, and popped the door open. Then I moved inside, closed the door, locked it, and ducked under the back seat and waited. The Chevette was a three-door, but I was sure he’d not see me even if he threw a backpack or something in the back before taking off.
This was going to be so much cooler than going to the county clerk’s office to find out who owned my old house.
I was tired of being pushed around, of being messed with by virtually everyone I met. Even Greg, even with scars I left decorating his fool mouth, found a way to treat me like shit. I needed to assert my Will once again. The well of the back seat lent itself to yoga and the clearing of the mind, but my thoughts couldn’t help but drift toward Bernstein again. Was the Chelsea girl sucking his cock too, and if so, did that make her the killer? My heart rate roared, so I pushed back, toward another memory.
Bernstein once told me what brought him to Mount Sinai. The answer was magick. “This town was once called Old Mans,” he said.
“With an apostrophe?” I asked. “Like, belonging to an old man? Or was it some Dutch thing?”
“Depends on the document. It was the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after all. Maps were more creative, and perhaps even more accurate for it, back then. When it came time to change the name of the town, the postmaster performed a work of bibliomancy. With a knitting needle in hand, he opened the Bible and felt the hand of God, so he said, draw the point of the needle to the words Mount Sinai.
“Names are important things. Your surname, Seliger, means blessed man.”
“And Bernstein?” I asked, because I knew that’s what he wanted me to ask. His voice was an octave lower than usual, after all.
“The stone that burns. Amber was thought to be created by burning, but—”
“Sulfur, eh?” I said. Bernstein smiled at me, his little cocksucking genius. “All fiery and brimstoney. And can the Old Man of Mount Sinai be . . . Saaaatan?” Bernstein normally didn’t like my Church Lady impression, but he nodded this time. It was a rare moment of frivolity, and Bernstein’s smile was even rarer. I was sufficiently immersed in the memory of it that I barely felt the car move until it stopped in a driveway in Setauket. I scrambled to my feet and before the comic book guy could leave the car I had my shoelace around his neck.
“Surprise!” He was shocked, his eyes wide. I had all the leverage, and his throat, and my Will. I could have killed him then and there, just to show him that I could. To show myself that I could. “Don’t piss yourself, please.”
He didn’t. He glared at me with infinite hate in his rear-view mirror. Who knows how many daydreams of vigilante heroics he had, or fantasies of being tied up by a wanton she-devil of a girl and utterly ravaged? Well, they both had gone right to shit. I tugged a little tighter on the shoelace. “We’re going to go inside and have a nice chat.”
“I’ll . . . fuckin’ . . . kill,” he said as best he could. True, there was no real way I could get him to let me into his house and chat, but I just wanted him to realize that. I smiled at him and leaned back, planting my knees against the back of his seat. He couldn’t get his fat fingers between flesh and rope. He kept eye contact with me, which was good for him, so I could see his eyelids flitter and face go purple. When he was just about to lose consciousness, he suddenly shuddered terribly, and I let him go. My plan had been to leave him in the car, alive, while I checked out his apartment, but I hadn’t realized that one of his daydreams was still active. He’d been touching himself through his jeans with his other hand, and had orgasmed. The smell filled the car.
“Holy fuck,” I said, and I laughed aloud. “You’re totally fucking insane.” As I released his throat he started coughing and sputtering. I grabbed the keys from the ignition and left him in the car. My Will guided my fingers around the correct key for the front door on the first try, and I was inside and had the door locked behind me before he even tumbled out of the car and onto the lawn.
I suppose the apartment was typical. Lots of board games and books, a small pond of dirty shirts, VHS tapes with handscrawled labels. And a computer, with a printer! A Macintosh with a case half-brown from cigarette smoke, and gosh, fliers for last night’s Abyssal Eyeballs show were still in the printer tray. I had the computer on and was clicking on the folders when he finally came in.
“I had a spare key,” he said, triumphantly. “What the hell?” I turned and made a point of staring at his crotch.
“You have complaints?” I said.
“What the hell!” he repeated, his voice still mostly trapped in his throat.
“I knew you were hiding something,” I said. “Because I am a fucking genius.” I held up the flier. “Didn’t know anything about it?”
“I was told you might be coming. Are you someone’s sister?”
I snatched a VHS tape at random and waved it around. “Is this child porn?” He sat down, defeated. “What is Urotsukidoji?” I said, reading from the label.
“Well, not really child porn. It’s an anime,” he said. “You know, Japanimation?”
“I’m not anyone’s sister. Did the older man with the Chelsea girl—”
“Chelsea girl?”
I put a hand to my head and made the shape of bangs with my fingers. “Did he say I was someone’s sister? The Chelsea girl’s sister.”
“He said it was a surprise party for you,” the man said. “Uhm . . .”
“What’s your name?”
“Joshua. And you’re Dawn.”
“You have access to the pull lists at the comic store,” I said. “It’s not hard to guess I was the ‘Dawn’—how many other girls are regulars, or buy anything good? I’ll perform the Holmesian displays around here.”
“How did you know I printed out the fliers?”
“Oh, that I didn’t,” I admitted. “I just knew you were hiding something, because you made no effort to pretend that you weren’t. But now that you mention it, they do kind of look like the fliers the store makes for itself.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police right now,” Joshua said. “You could have killed me.”
“And with both hands, you could have freed yourself, but you were too busy jerking off,” I said. “How does it feel, the shoe being on the other foot? You were asking for it, just like a girl in a short skirt.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just kill you and rape you for real,” he said then, his voice a cold dead thing. I showed him my Swiss Army knife, and opened the blade.
“That all you got? You can’t kill me with that.”
“I can ruin your day with it.” I showed him my spiked ring too. “And this. And more. And after we had such an intimate moment in your car, too.”
Joshua put a hand up to his neck. He’d have a story for work. “Do you always run around striking up conversations and then attacking people?”
“I have been making a habit of it this week,” I said. “Listen, the older guy you met, with the girl? He’s dead. Shot in the head. I’m trying to figure out who did it, and why.”
He laughed. “Maybe he blew his own head off. Ever think of that?”
“That’s what the cops think, but I know better.”
“Well, I can’t help you,” he said. “I met the guy once. He bought a shitload of comics—Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns and all the other stuff we can’t keep on the shelves because of all the news and hype. The usual middle-aged guy, except that the girl he was with was actually cute, and not his daughter.”
“And how about her? Did you see her again?”
“I did, actually,” Joshua said. “She gave me a disk with the little symbol in it.” I quickly looked around the table, then realized that he meant the symbol was in the disk as a file, not on the disk as a symbol. “She wanted that added to the fliers.”
As leads go, it was a thin one, but even if the Chelsea girl wasn’t the killer she knew Bernstein and that alone made her worth talking to. Apparently, Bernstein had a type anyway. For a second I imagined her on the other side of the house, peeking in through the other window, seeing Bernstein’s body from another angle and coming to the same conclusions I did. And then maybe she attached herself to Greg to get closer to me, almost like I’d forced myself on Joshua.
“Do we look that much alike?” I asked. “Could we really be sisters?” I left myself open, and he took the bait.
“Do you want to be alone with your rape videos and stained pants again?”
“Why don’t you get out of here before I change my mind about calling the police.”
“I will,” I said. I grabbed a crumpled napkin and used it to pluck another videotape, this one unlabeled but clearly used, from a coffee table. “Should I keep this to show them when they come to my house?”
“It’s blank,” Joshua said blankly.
“Then you won’t mind.”
“I certainly don’t mind at all.”
“I’ll be on my way then. Do you remember the number for 911?”
“I believe it’s 911. You go home and wait for them and show them that blank tape right before they arrest you for attempted murder.”
“I’ll do that. I’m sure they have a copy of their own in the special jerk-off room right by the coffeemakers and doughnuts display case.”
“That’s where I’d set up a jerk-off room for blank tapes, indeed.”
“I’ll be seeing you then, Joshua.”
“You will be.”
I sauntered outside. He foolishly didn’t open the blinds to watch me leave. I slashed two of his tires so he couldn’t follow me, or mow me down, then broke into a mad run. It was a fairly long walk back home, and the sun was dipping low and red. Once again I’d encountered someone who was linked to Bernstein’s machinations. I had thought he and I were alone against the world, but I was beginning to realize that we were all somehow connected. A web radiating forth from Bernstein, with only a few strands leading directly to me. But I had names and the beginning of a timeline. I just needed to find my skinny little doppelgänger, the Chelsea girl. Or let her find me.
