Love Is the Law

by Nick Mamatas

  “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.

  14.

  I made it back to the apartment, and picked up what needed picking up. It wasn’t that messy after all. We didn’t have much, and my father had taken all he could carry. He probably had had that woman with him, or perhaps even a third person, and a car. One big trip and he took half our belongings. He left the TV, but the remote was missing. I imagined Grandma grabbing it in her claw-like hand and refusing to leave without it. My own overnight bag I’d left in the trunk of Mike’s car, so
I was down to a Hefty bag and an oversized purse for packing purposes. I found a jar of peanut butter, unopened, and a tablespoon and packed that as well. Then it was out to the Volkswagen. I smeared some mud over the license plates, then drove through the giant puddles in the Meat Farms parking lot to splash more dirty water along my wheels and the sides of the car. It was all busywork to keep from thinking about what I should have been thinking about—did Bernstein really kill himself? Did he “create” Chelsea on some level, transforming her into someone rather like me . . . or like he had wanted me to be? How long would it take for Dad to get sick of Grandma—I was fucking sick of her—and leave her in an ER somewhere, or even just on the side of the road? I’d been tempted to, but I needed her Social Security check to pay rent.

  I am not a very nice person sometimes. I guess I do take after my dad.

  I drove to the deli, bought a pack of cigarettes—Pall Mall Gold, like Grandma used to smoke before her dementia made that an arson risk—and dialed the hardcore show hotline from the pay phone outside. Another Abyssal Eyeballs show, but in two nights. I’d have to check that out. Then I drove into Joshua’s development, parked about a block from his house, and walked the rest of the way. I waited for him on his stoop, smoking cigarettes and occasionally repositioning the painting on the step for it to be nonchalantly discovered next to my knees. I should have worn a skirt, but Joshua already had a masturbation problem and I needed his help.

  The sun was down, and I had smoked four cigarettes, by the time he pulled up in his driveway. He had a bag of Chinese food with him—enough for three people from the look of it. “Hey,” I said to him, “is it D&D night?”

  “What do you want?” he asked, all surly. He stayed by the car, keys in hand. I waved my hand in the air to signal the motion detector porch light, then nodded toward the painting. “I brought something for you to look at.”

  Now Joshua was interested. “Where did you get that?”

  “Oh, this ol’ thing,” I said. “A few places, actually.”

  “The Tower,” Joshua said. He trotted up to the stoop. My stomach growled loudly. I was half-ready to trade the painting for his egg rolls.

  “I was wondering if you could help me sell it,” I said. “You must get a lot of freaks—uh, I mean, aficionados—in the store.”

  “What’s its provenance?” He put his sack down, extracted from it a little white cardboard box and a plastic fork. No chopsticks for this guy. He ate his chow mein noisily.

  “A semifamous occultist painted it.”

  “Some longhair’s been looking for you,” Joshua said. “Metalhead kid.”

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “Nope,” Joshua said. “Do you think I’m crazy? Why would I bother trying to sell some painting for you?”

  “Can you afford a home in Port Jefferson on a comic book store clerk’s salary?” I said. “No. You have sidelines. Selling stuff, probably. Porno Japanimation, other things, under the table. To weirdoes.”

  “Maybe I inherited this house.”

  “You didn’t inherit shit.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Yeah—if you had, you would have sold it and moved away. That’s what everyone your age, without kids, does. You know that Long Island is a little turd hanging off the east end of America.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You stay here. Give me the painting.”

  “I’ll stay here with the painting.”

  Joshua dug his keys out of his pocket, which required some juggling of the chow mein and his bag of food—he held the latter between his fat knees—and muttered, “Excuse me,” like he didn’t hate me and I wasn’t practically trespassing, and headed inside. If he called the cops, I’d jam. If he called anyone else, I’d be eager to see what they had to say for themselves.

  I was surprised when, a few minutes later, a dumpy-looking station wagon pulled up behind Joshua’s car. The door behind me swung open and Joshua stepped out. He smelled like food, and the sort of sour sweat typical of him. I was dazzled for a moment when the driver of the station wagon hit her high beams, and then when the lights went out like extinguished matches, out came Aram and Karen both. Karen smiled when she saw me. Aram had a camera with an unwieldy looking flash attachment.

  “Well, hello!” he said. “We meet again. Are you the artist?” Without waiting for an answer he lifted the camera. I lifted the painting and interposed it between the lens and my face, and tried to tuck my knees up behind the canvas as well.

  “I’ll hold it,” Karen volunteered. She stepped forward and plucked the painting from my hands without any other comment. She was tiny enough to hide behind the canvas for real, and she expertly kept her fingers off the painted surface. Aram grinned and took three photos. The flash filled the front yard of Joshua’s house like a nightclub strobe light.

  “Are you interested in buying this or no? It’s not a tourist attraction.”

  “They represent . . .” Joshua said slowly, “a certain interested party.”

  “Aram’s a Maugham scholar,” Karen said from behind the paper. I did not know that.

  “I’m mostly interested in Maugham’s views of the Brontës, but I have a secondary interest in the Gothic, of course,” Aram said. Of course, like I was another graduate student and not a punk kid, genius notwithstanding, who hung around Stony Brook mostly because they had shows there, and a cool radio station, a few real leftists—a short list from which I could now scratch the Red Submarine crew—and some people around my age I didn’t want to brain with a hammer. But I knew enough to ask:

  “Ah, so like The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham’s book about Crowley.” I instantly hated myself for adding W. Somerset to Maugham’s name. It made me sound like I’d just read the name on the cover of the book and knew nothing else about him. Which was true, but to tantalize these people I had to come off as something other than a student. “Have you read much Crowley, actually?” I asked.

  Aram smiled. He had so many teeth, it was almost inhuman, and they all appeared to be shaped exactly alike. “Oh no. I flipped through some of it; seemed like the rantings of a madman, which I’m sure Crowley in a lucid moment might admit that they were.”

  “Well, that’s part of the charm. So, who are these photos going to?”

  “Someone Aram’s working with for his dissertation,” Karen said.

  “He might wish to buy the painting. How much are you asking?”

  My mind buzzed. What’s a deposit and a month’s rent on a studio apartment around here? How would I even find a studio apartment around here, in prefab town? The East Village, maybe—no, that was a total fantasy. “That’s negotiable,” I said after too long a silence. “I’d have to meet any potential buyer. It’s an occult thing; you wouldn’t understand.”

  Aram chuckled and shrugged, like a cartoon bear. “I’m just a humble go-between,” he said. Karen stiffened up though. I stood up and took the painting back. “But perhaps he would like to meet you. He’s the sort of person who likes to . . . ”

  “Collect people,” Karen said. She smiled again, this one forced, like a puppet built with posable lips. “In a good way. He’s very wealthy, and occasionally even generous. He likes to have bohemian friends; he probably thinks it puts him in touch with a more authentic self.”

  “Something like that, yes. We’ll get him these photos,” Aram said. To Joshua: “We can contact you, yes?”

  “I’m brokering any sale, yes,” Joshua said. I put a dumb look on my face. I nodded at Joshua, and even beamed. Yep, just a girl with a ridiculous haircut, needing the comic book store manager’s help to do anything more complicated than tie her shoes or suck a dick. “Bring the painting inside, Dawn,” Joshua said, all nonchalant.

  “I need to get it back home,” I said. “I’ll see you later, Josh.” And with that I trotted away from the stoop.

  Aram called out, “Can we give you a ride anywhere,” and Karen giggled as I held the painting over my head and squeezed through
some shrubbery to cut across a neighbor’s backyard. Joshua just said Shit! and loudly.

  I got to the car, started it, and was shaking almost too much to drive. There are no coincidences. There are no coincidences. And what did Joshua want with me, inside? Had he called the pigs after all, and let one in through the back door? Was he just going to cold conk me, tie me up, rape me? He’d probably jerk off to that little fantasy once he got over his disappointment, and his inability to chase after me. All men are pigs. I felt like a pig just for imagining Joshua’s fantasies and so transparently getting them right.

  I cut through the side streets and found the highway. It occurred to me that I had nowhere to go.

  15.

  In the city, homeless kids group together and live in squats, or in the park, or wander the seemingly endless labyrinth of the subway system. In the city, there are public bathrooms everywhere if you know which restaurants and bars to patronize, and there are tons of free food for the salvaging if you don’t mind stale bagels and the occasional tussle with a rat. In the city, people don’t lock their doors and call the cops when they see someone they don’t like walk down their block. The entire system of telephony would collapse into a flaming wreck, sparks raining from every transformer on every telephone pole in the five boroughs.

  But Long Island was not the city. It was where people went to escape the city, to free themselves from their kin and fellow ethnics, to play lord of the manor over their quarter-acre backyards. When Robert Moses had the Northern and Southern State Parkways built—the so-called “Master Builder” did not “build” them as historians and journalists would have it;workers build things, labor does—he kept the overpasses low to keep city buses, and blacks and Latinos, out of his island and off his precious Jones Beach.

  Bernstein had had a great rant about Robert Moses, and made me read The Power Broker. “Unelected power, entirely occulted, and I mean that in both senses of the word, Amaranth!” he said as he handed it to me. He’d still occasionally call me Amaranth when excited, though by then he knew my name was Dawn. His other nickname for me was Golden Dawn, which amused us both, but him much more. Robert Moses, despite his Jewish background, was a Freemason and had an abject fascination with the Aryan race. With Long Island as a mystic laboratory, Bernstein said, Moses wanted to bring a new people to a new promised land—WASPs. And he wanted to seal them off from the rest of the state of New York, in the hope that the lily-white Methodists and Presbyterians would, like millions of churning spermatozoa, alchemically and spontaneously generate a “social homunculus” that would have all the attributes of Adolf Hitler, save one: a human body. The body was the role of the mother, and in Moses’s formulation, the phallic island had no yonic counterpart. And it happened too! Despite Nassau County having plenty of Jews, and Suffolk a huge Italian American population, the social homunculus was alive and helping drag the state of New York, and by extension all of America, to the right. “By the dawn of the new millennium,” Bernstein told me, “fucking Ayn Rand will be considered a serious philosopher. Democrats will be pulling off shit that Ronny Ray-gun wets the bed dreaming of—slave labor for welfare mothers, permanent military bases all over the Middle East, torture chambers deep underground, bugs in every phone and office fax machine, computer chips in everything else, and robotic stealth bombers doing all the dirty work. And that will be the liberalism of the epoch. What Robert Moses summoned cannot ever be banished, not now that the Eastern bloc is in disarray, with the blood sacrifices in Tiananmen Square. There’s some Taoist alchemy for you.”