by Nick Mamatas
Bernstein rarely drank anything but water and Coca-Cola, and he finished a half-full two-liter bottle in an extended guzzle. Some trickled down his chest and belly. It had been a hot night, that one, and we were both sweating out our lusts for one another, in bed, me between his thighs as he declaimed. His balls tasted like sugar. Then he said, “Plus that fucker Moses chased the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. I’ll never forgive him for that shit.”
The Dodgers reminded me of an old 1010 WINS radio commercial. “Are the Dodgers coming back to Brooklyn?” the excited voice-over artist would shout, and the camera itself would zoom toward a clock radio. And WINS, a news station, reminded me of the newspaper, and that Dad used to buy Newsday for me to flip through when we went to the diner, even though we already had home delivery. There was a diner out in Hauppauge, open twenty-four hours a day. The Pioneer. I headed west, pleased to stop short of the city. Wir bleiben hier.
I got a booth in the back—the hostess was happy to oblige, given my looks—and bought a coffee. Bernstein had trained me to sit with my back to the wall whenever in a restaurant and to keep an eye on the entrance and windows. On the rare occasions when we went out to eat together, we’d share the same side of the booth. Waitresses often assumed that we were just high, or retarded. Once, I complained to Bernstein and he said, “Well, if that’s what they think, they’re half right.”
I ordered a plate of fries, and read yesterday’s paper, which someone had left behind in the booth some hours earlier. More enthusiasm for the crumbling of the Eastern bloc. Honecker was cornered by his party’s own youth brigades, who chanted, “Gorby, help us! Gorby, save us!” What a pair of slogans—as if Gorby would do anything for those kids but hand them over to the West Germans so they could compete against Turkish immigrants for the lowest-paid work. We can only ever save ourselves, either as a class or as individuals.
The diner was mostly empty, but amazingly I saw someone I knew from Port Jefferson. It was the old Greek lady, with the cats. She was sitting at the counter, her legs not even touching the floor, and chatting amiably, in Greek, with the counterman. I had a reason to drive twelve miles, and past two or three other diners that actually close at one in the morning, but what would she be doing here? I studied her closely. She wasn’t smiling. Both she and the counterman were Greek, but outside of a passing physical resemblance there was no sign that they were related. She was easily thirty years older than he, and wearing widow’s black, so I wasn’t witnessing a flirtation despite the occasional shoulder squeeze and loud laugh. She was old enough to be free of the tyranny of men. When was the last time I talked to a man who didn’t want to fuck me, and the last time I talked to a woman about a subject other than men? Years, probably.
I inhaled deeply and concentrated. I raised my own feet from the floor, crossed my legs, shifted my weight onto my left side like the old woman did. I held my mouth like she did, drank the bitter remains of my coffee to match the tiny cup of the Turkish stuff she had before her. It was both sympathetic magic and basic materialism—by somatically emulating the woman I could gain entrée to her thought processes. I’d be her doppelgänger.
She was lonely. She was attempting to be an enthusiast to keep the man’s attention. She knew that a tangle of ethnic, generational, and gendered obligations would keep him rooted on the spot, here and now without the excuse of other customers, chatting with her. That’s why she drove twelve miles for a cup of midnight coffee. The alternative was home, and the cats, and a television full of people rapidly communicating in a language she still wasn’t comfortable with. She liked feeling intelligent and rarely had the opportunity anymore. Once or twice in just a few minutes she corrected the pronunciation of something the counterman said—his Greek wasn’t native; the accent didn’t sing. The counterman would have greatly preferred to speak in English, and she knew it, so exercised her power over him by sticking to Greek.
And I became her. I was lonely too. There was no place for me to go; I had no connections with anyone anymore, other than those I made by force. I felt like a tiny brain floating within a disobedient blob of a body, my protoplasm smeared against a corner of the Earth’s rocky crust. But don’t two smears grow closer and closer under the light of the sun, and finally become one? It was night out, but the moon was full and something quaked in my body and I decided to go for it. She would have something to teach me, this woman.
Finally, the counterman made his excuses and left his position. She held her posture and watched him slip into the kitchen, then immediately deflated. I took my coffee and walked up to her and said hello. I did it in that nonthreatening way people around here often do: “Hullo.”
“Hello,” she said. “Are you a clown?” There was no venom in her voice. She even smiled. She had a gold incisor. Total rock star. But she thought I might work at the circus, which might be in town, and after a long night of spritzing myself with seltzer I came to the diner for a late-night meal.
“No, I just like this look,” I said.
She glanced up at the sides of my head. “Don’t you get cold? Winter is coming?”
“I have a hat,” and I produced my longshoreman’s cap from the pocket of my jacket.
“Good, good,” she said. “If your head is cold, everything is cold!” Then she said something in Greek. It sounded like cot-zseh. Then she said, “Sit, sit,” and patted the stool next to hers. So I sat, and made a promise to myself not to speak of men. Of course, as the only thing I could think to ask about was the counterman who had just left, I had efficiently rendered myself a mute. The scars on my stomach tingled. There was no need to worry, however. The woman was full of conversation. She didn’t even ask me my name, but offered hers. She was Chrysoula. She said it meant “golden treasure” and even tapped a fingernail against her tooth. Chrysoula had a younger sister whose name I’ve forgotten, but it meant “silver,” and the economics of it all really tickled Chrysoula. She said that she had seen me around Port Jefferson, and was surprised to see me all the way out here, but she didn’t ask me what brought me to this diner, and didn’t offer a reason for her own patronage, except that the Lite-Haus Diner, in Port Jeff, was disgusting and full of roaches. I mentioned that my grandmother had once said the same thing, having seen a roach there twenty-five years ago, before I was even born. Then she launched into a long history of that diner and its various owners, and their battles with both rats and health inspectors. They had not acquitted themselves well against either foe.
Here is the important thing that she said: “Watch out for your family.”
“My family?” I hadn’t realized we had been talking about family.
“The family is the problem,” she said. “They’re always close. Too close.” The counterman came back with a small plate of greens, and two slices of lemon. Chrysoula dug in without a word to him or me. “I am old, so nobody young pays attention to me. A woman, so no man pays me attention neither. Not American, so the Americans don’t see me. But I see all of them, you see?”
“I do see,” I said. “So, you’ve seen me around? My family?”
“I see everything,” she said. “I know your father. He walks around the town on drugs.” I instantly wanted to vomit. I was tempted to ask if she had seen a lady even older than her wandering the streets of downtown Port Jeff in a pink housecoat, but thought the better of it. I liked this woman. She reminded me of me. “You come all the way here from Port Jefferson like me. You want to hide, but you are too crazy looking. Who are you hiding from? Where is your family, that you come to the diner so late at night and don’t eat nothing?”
“So,” I said, remembering my vow and nodding toward the little plate before her. “What you got there?” Talking about family would mean talking about men, necessarily.
Her mouth half-full, Chrysoula bared her teeth and said, “Vleeta.”
The counterman said, “It’s amaranth. Greeks eat it. Sometimes hippie weirdoes do too.” He shrugged. “It’s just a normal green. Has sort of a sharp flavor.�
�� Bernstein used to call me Amaranth. There are no coincidences. I realized where my grandmother might be.
It wasn’t a long drive back to Mount Sinai, but it felt like I was crawling along the asphalt instead of riding in my car. Every traffic light was against me, and I was at war with myself, as usual. Not just between the poles of attraction of Marxism and magick, but between my affection for my grandmother, my hatred of my father, and the fact that the old Greek lady was absolutely right. For all my posing, I was still a slave to my family and their demands. Bernstein was a respite from all that, or so I’d thought, but he was somehow attached to my father. My grandmother even had a nickname for him, one that she remembered. The fucking bat had been slipping up and calling me by my mother’s name occasionally for the last six months. We had never looked alike, my mother and I, even before the Mohawk and the nose ring. But Bernstein she remembered.
I cut the lights and drove the car onto the side street and then onto the grass by the edge of the woods. I was pleased to have a tiny Rabbit, and found some shrubs behind which to park it. Please please please, I said to myself, my brain a big empty echo chamber. If there was no God, and there is no God, who was I saying please to? Molecules in motion, who had no interest in me. My Holy Guardian Angel, whom I’d never really heard from. To myself, hoping that I’d be wrong.
I grabbed my flashlight from the glove box and set off toward the ruins of Bernstein’s house. It was getting cold these nights, and I couldn’t imagine Dad really taking care of Grandma effectively. He might have just dumped the body there—please please please I said again, and then comforted myself by saying that I only didn’t want to have to encounter a corpse and get mixed up with the police again—or left her there shivering and pissing in a corner. I left my flashlight off; I wanted the advantage of surprise. Please please please I wanted to be wrong about the whole thing.
There aren’t many animals left on Long Island. The occasional deer, rabbits, sometimes a skunk or a raccoon, and those last always seemed surprisingly huge. Bernstein told me once that he had encountered a fox. There were certainly no predators worth worrying about, but when I heard a rustling amidst the trees, I flipped my flashlight on and gave it an arc-like swing. My father, a cop, the satyr even.
It was huge and white and reached out for me and screamed, limbs thrashing and blind. The air smelled like shit and rotten teeth and then it was on top of me, twigs gnarled up in its hair.
“Grandma!” I said. She slapped at my face, jammed a finger up my nose somehow. “Enough!” I managed to get my arms around her and then we both tumbled to the ground. I rolled over to pin her, and she cried and wailed. I grabbed a handful of leaves and shoved them in her mouth to keep her quiet. She tried to bite me, but her dentures were gone, so it was just a gross gumming. I balled up a fist and raised it high, but realized that I was thinking like a movie. Knocking someone out is never so clean in the real world. Nobody else seemed to be coming from the trees, and after a moment Grandma quieted down. I petted her cheek and even put my thumb back into her mouth to dig out the leaves. Her breathing was shallow, but steady.
“Why don’t you come with me?” I said, softly. I had no idea where we would go. Back to the diner, maybe, to get her washed up, or maybe we could risk the apartment if I stayed up all night and sat with my back against the front door. She shook her head and, eyes wide and white, turned her head to look over to the ridge. Beyond that was Bernstein’s cabin. Grandma’s fingernails were all blackened, and chewed up. The crazy old bitch had probably scaled the ridge. She found the dirt and sank her fingers into it, clutching the earth.
“Fine,” I said. “Stay here.” She’d either follow me, in which case I’d head toward the car, or stay where she was, which was fine with me, or run off screaming again and I was pretty sure I could find her now that I knew that she was still alive. I figured that my father was down in Bernstein’s cabin, hiding out from random imaginary enemies and going through the wreckage to see if there was anything salable.
I put my cap on my head and slowly eased down the embankment, then circled around to the side of the house that was still staved in from the tree. There was someone inside, but no flashlights, no loud noises. Just black-on-black shadows and familiar-sounding murmur. I knew it. Agios, agios, agios. Then a screech from inside nearly had my skeleton tearing itself out of my flesh.
“This isn’t working!” It was Chelsea, hissing in a rage. Then I heard my father’s voice saying, “Shut the fuck up!” between clenched teeth. I’d heard that before. I still couldn’t see a thing, but I knew what they were doing. A Gnostic Mass, or parts of one anyway—it’s not like a crackhead has the mental discipline for one, and there were only two of them poking around in the dark. Chelsea was naked, and shivering. I could hear her squirming on the filthy floor, her teeth chattering like die being cast from a cup. I was gladder than ever for my longshoreman’s cap.
A moonbeam showed me a flash of thigh. She was crawling out from under Dad; he was all ribs and broomstick limbs. “You promised!” she said, and she squirmed out of his grip, and her robe, and smacked him across the face. “You said you had money, that you had power. That you could do things!”
Chelsea was my doppelgänger, as though cloned from my blood and soul. For a moment, I wanted to cry. I remembered the moment my father had finally betrayed me with his incompetence so well. And it had nothing to do with Mom’s death, or crack, or anything so melodramatic. It was a slow grind through childhood. A layoff from Grumman here, an obviously ripe piece of bullshit spilling from his mouth there, telling all of his friends that of course he was voting Reagan in ’84, but confiding in Mom that he was going to secretly pull the lever for Mondale—all that stuff. Then he kicked himself off the cliff one steaming July day back when I was a knock-kneed kid who liked Duran Duran and pink bubblegum. I’d been out riding bikes with neighbor kids or something asinine like that, and when I got home I found him on the couch, alone, eating an entire pizza, from local favorite Carnival Pizza. Dad was in his underwear, and his belly was slick with pizza grease. It was too hot to eat, really, and Dad was making eating pizza look like something dirty and weird, but I loved Carnival and I wanted some. So I said, “Oh boy, pizza! Can I have a slice?”
With his mouth full, Dad said, “Fuck you.” He swallowed and added, “Get your own.” Then he practically shoved an entire slice into his mouth, puffing out his cheeks like a fat child in a bad movie. I almost vomited right there. Ours was a household where it was a big deal when Mom said “damn,” and Grandma used to stretch out the word suuuuugar to keep herself from saying “shit” in front of me.
Finally, I said, “I’m gonna tell—”
“Shut the fuck up,” my father said. I ran outside, tears everywhere, and got back on my bike and rode around the block two dozen times till my calves screamed. I was wishing that a car would come out of nowhere and hit me, then I’d have to go to the hospital and I’d be in traction, wrapped in mummy bandages. Dad would be sorry and Mom would make him buy me a whole pizza, and he’d have to feed it to me.
Nothing happened. I eventually went back home and never mentioned the pizza, or Dad’s outburst. The next day, he brought me home a model ICBM from work. It was a fun toy. Dad had worked on the guidance system, so I enjoyed playing Ronald Reagan. I’d press the imaginary Red Button and hoist the missile into the air, announce that its gyroscopes were going crazy and sending the warheads right into the White House, leading to a planet-incinerating chain reaction. Pcchrrruu! Kra-kraaaa-throoooom!
I always was a bit of a tomboy. When Dad started telling me to study hard at math so I could go to work for a defense contractor too, I decided to focus on my diary and bullshit teenage poetry instead.
And now, years later, a girl just like me, but skinny and thus better, crawled out from under my father, and she was crying just the way my father used to make me cry, too. She wasn't Bernstein’s. She was never Bernstein’s. She was always my father’s. I burned with jealousy and r
age. That great dark thing was rising again up from the center of the Earth, but I didn’t feel it pushing up through my spine. It was without, away from me. The night went dark again as a cloud ate the moon, and Chelsea said, “O Lion and O Serpent that destroy the destroyer, be mighty among us!” There was a rush of movement, thrashing about. I so wanted to turn on my flashlight, but there were two of them, and something else huge and coiling about the little building.
