Love Is the Law

by Nick Mamatas

  “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.

  19.

  Roderick was pissing against the side of a tree in a yard by the house. It was to be another basement show. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, n
ice cock.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I inherited it from my father. But if you want more than what you see, you’ll need to pay me a quarter.” He tucked it back into his pants and zipped. “I won’t offer to shake hands with you.”

  “I appreciate that, thank you,” I said. “So, getting a good crowd for the show?”

  He nodded. “Yup. Should be a good one. Promises have been made.”

  “Do you know the Abyssal Eyeballs well?”

  “Eh, not really,” he said with a shrug. “But they weren’t the ones to make the promise, you know?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t?”

  I rolled my eyes. You’d think I’d be used to the utter absence of straight answers in my life by this point, but no, not really. “Is Greg here?”

  “Yeah, he said he’d be here. Didn’t he talk to you?”

  I shrugged. “He left me a note. I’ve been busy.”

  “What have you been up to?” Roderick asked.

  “I beat the shit out of some crackhead bitch,” I said. “A girlfriend of my father’s.”

  “A girlfriend? Does he have more than one?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. He’s a very attractive crack-addicted crazy person and incompetent fuckface who let my mother die because he couldn’t even keep a job building nuclear bombs for Ronald fucking Reagan.” Roderick sucked on his teeth, unsure. “You know, Reagan had a large appetite for nuclear holocaust. It should have been like selling shoes to socialites.”

  “Well, okay,” he said. “Your father . . . Well, he sounds like a real piece of work. Anyway, let’s go in. It’s cold out here.”

  There was a cellar door, the good kind, the kind worth sliding down, and it was open. Some didgeridoo music floated out from its maw. We stepped into the basement and both of us giggled. The place had a nautical theme—very Long Island. Stuffed swordfish on the wall right over the slapped-together plywood and 2 x 4 stage, a pair of white lifesavers on the far wall, netting strewn with fake plastic starfish. The staircase leading upstairs into the home proper was decorated too, with fishing oars and boxes of tackle put on display under glass, like mutant butterflies. There was a boom box in the corner, and not too far from it stood Karen, leaning against a pillar. Even the pillar was decorated with some nautical knot work. She was the only one here, and so small none of us saw her until she waved.

  “Hey,” she said when she saw me. Her smile seemed authentic. “Did you bring the painting?”

  “Why would I bring the painting to a house show?” I asked. It was in the car, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “Painting?” Roderick asked.

  “Well . . .” Karen started. “I thought maybe you would. I mean, what else would you do with it? Where would you keep it now?”

  “Now,” I repeated. She had nothing to say to that.

  So, “Hello, my name is Karen!” she said instead, turning toward Roderick, her tiny hand out. He shook it, confused. “Didn’t you host the last show?”

  Roderick nodded. “Yeah, I did. Kinda. I don’t know the band at all, really, but I got an offer you couldn’t refuse, let’s say.”

  “Ah,” Karen said. “Friends in high places?” She was suddenly suspicious. Then we all had an awkward moment.

  Roderick said, “More like low places.” He tapped the floor with his foot and winked at me.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and decided to go for it. “What do you mean by that? What are you talking about, Roderick? What’s your connection to the Abyssal Eyeballs, to this house, to the people who are coming tonight? Do you know that girl with the Chelsea haircut?” He stared at me, and so did Karen. “She’s fucking my father.”

  “She looks like you,” Karen said.

  “I know. That’s purposeful,” I said. “But Roderick, I was talking to you, about you.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got some cousins who work in construction and home improvement, so we know all the good basements—”

  “And these events?”

  Roderick snorted. “If I could explain these events . . .” He trailed off, waved his arms, then started again. “Well, you were at the last one.” We were all agreed, at least if awkward silence equals vague consent.

  “Look, there’s a fake plastic seagull hanging from two wires in that other corner,” I said, finally.

  “I feel like I should have a kid’s menu and a paper placemat with word puzzles and a labyrinth,” Roderick said. “I want fish and chips.”

  “Where’s Aram?” I asked Karen. Then I wanted to chew my tongue to pieces and spit it out. Asking about a man, again. The old patriarchal script.

  “He’ll be here soon,” Karen said. And with that, our conversation was truly over. Neither of us had anything to say. We both turned to Roderick, but he was out of ideas as well. The door at the top of the steps squeaked open, then someone flicked the lights on and off. “Hello?” Karen called out, but nobody answered. The lights went out completely. The door shut. In a corner, the building’s furnace roared to life, a little peephole of fire sending our shadows strobing against the walls.

  The cellar door opened again, and down walked Greg on mantis legs. It took me a moment to see that there were other people with him; he was so tall compared to everyone else. With one step he broke from the pack and stood before me, expectant. Was he expecting a hug and a kiss? He said, “Hey, you’re out. Was it that guy you made me call?” He put out his arms and really did hug me. I kept my hands at my sides. “I’m surprised. He didn’t sound rich,” he continued in a whisper, arms tight around me.

  “Hi,” Karen said. “You were at the last Abyssal Eyeballs show?” Roderick looked at Greg but didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, he’s outside,” Greg said to me, in my ear. “He has a flier about you, but he wouldn’t give me one. I think he recognized my voice.” The basement was filling up now. It was larger than the last basement venue, and the Abyssal Eyeballs fan base had seemingly expanded over the last week to match it. Perversely, I wondered if Riley would host a house show of his own in that gorgeous basement of his, then I remembered that I might have to kill him somehow tonight.

  The band had come in with the bulk of the crowd, sight unseen by most, but I spotted them. I pushed through the crowd toward the heavy woman, the beatboxer, but was intercepted by Chelsea. Another person I felt like killing.

  “Guess what?” she said. “Daddy’s mad at you.” She laughed, a quick piping haha! and smirked at me.

  “Why? Because I won’t fuck him, so he has to depend on a skank like you? Should I let you know when I change haircuts so you can rush out and get one just like it?” I said.

  “You know why,” she said.

  “Let him call the pigs,” I said. “Hello, police? I’m a crack addict and I’d like to report a crime against my favorite crack whore. She’s a little wary of coming down to the station to file a report for some reason, so could you send a couple of officers down to my crack-house squat?”

  Chelsea cracked a smile at that, and snorted. “Cute. You don’t even know what the hell’s going on, do you?”

  Something came up from under my feet. It was that black thing from the core of the Earth, more huge than ever before. An ocean-sized wave, filling me up, every cell. The band started with a deep bass roar that made my sternum vibrate. Everyone felt it, and shut the hell up. The Abyssal Eyeballs were all pro. No tuning, no fucking around with the monitors, no clumsy banter with the crowd or grumbling amongst themselves; they were on stage and making a joyful noise with a single depressed key on an electronic keyboard. Chelsea and I both turned to the band, though the only light was from the furnace, which was still grinding away in counterpoint to the deep note from the Abyss.

  Chelsea leaned in and whispered in my ear. “You’re gonna fucking die,” then put herself back upright.

  So I leaned in and said, in her ear, “No, you are.”

  It was a weird crowd, I realized as my eyes adjusted. Chelsea and
I must have looked like foreign exchange students from another planet. And there was Greg, and Roderick, who was at least a kid, but everyone else was dressed like the bush-league bourgeoisie. Button-down shirts with pinstripes, Dockers, pencil skirts and blouses with the giant shoulder pads for the women, of which there were a few. Karen, who hadn’t drifted from her corner—I realized now that she was in charge of the boom box and had turned it off at some point to wait for her next cue—looked practically homeless next to the women here.

  So she was with the band. And had a contact with the would-be buyer of my Tower painting. Who was certainly Riley. Who knew Bernstein, and who bought the house out from under us. Who knew my father. My father, who was in the room. I didn’t recognize him at first because he was in drag as a member of the middle class. I remembered that suit jacket, that tie. I’d bought it for him for Father’s Day, with the few dollars I’d made from babysitting, back when people would actually let me near their kids. What little Daddy’s crack habit didn’t kill, my punk rock habit had. The band shifted toward a song of some sort—there was beatboxing, drumming, odd groans and noises, all on the lower registers. I was in the belly of a whale, a great leviathan. My father seemed caught up in the noise just as much as everyone else. Aram, a hulk next to Karen, was entranced. Greg peered up at some special part of the ceiling. And the people I didn’t know, or barely did, from the bus or the mall or who were neighbors of my junior high school friends, were all one with the sound.

  I felt it too, but I also experienced something deeper, more familiar. That great and dark sea under the sands of Long Island. It was both ocean and creature, a thing so huge it swam in itself. As the Abyssal Eyeballs played, a pair of eyes appeared before me. The Leviathan. None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? Leviathan is older than all the old things. He is the one who cut this long island free from the earth; he is the glacier and we are just the moraine. The debris left in his wake.

  And Leviathan looked at me, and Leviathan loved me. I spent an eternity staring into his eyes, and he stared back into mine. This was the great Bernsteinian secret. The Leviathan, the great watery creature, he was the mystic incarnation of the mass struggle. The class, or nation, or race. Like the sea itself, Leviathan carved out the borders of the lands of earth, and we little monkeys could not help but fill the niches Leviathan left in his wake. Leviathan, all consuming, that was the god I would be.