Love Is the Law (17 page)

Call it a bourgeois-sentimentalist flinch. Call it yet another failure of my Will to embrace my destiny as an Autarch of the self. Raymundo was ready for anything—we could drive to the airport
now
and get me on the redeye to Miami, and from there on a boat to Puerto Rico. He had cousins everywhere; he knew people. He and Roderick were cousins, and they had cousins of cousins, a matrix of cousins draped over the continent. Nobody would ever find me. Bank robbers from the independence movement would protect me on his say-so. But after just fifteen minutes of fruitless driving around, some frantic comparing of notes, and a quick examination of my neck, I had Raymundo drop me off at St. Charles, back in Port Jeff. I wanted to see my grandmother, the stupid old bitch. Visiting hours were long over, but I’m practiced enough in the art of invisibility to walk past a bored receptionist who can’t even be bothered to look up from her Rosemary Rogers novel.

Grandma was unconscious, in a state deeper than sleep. Her bruises had ripened into strange purple fruit. I realized why my father had taken her. He knew I’d try to follow.
Oh, you got a better plan for money than her?
he’d shouted—that could have been about me, not Grandma’s Social Security check. He had wanted to kill me at Bernstein’s house, with Chelsea watching or assisting. The Abyssal Eyeballs show had had an ad hoc quality that stank of Plan B. Chelsea saw me at the first show, figured I’d come to the second, and whistled for Dad and his coterie. Aram and Karen probably tipped off Riley that I’d be there. And it wasn’t as though I had any place else to go other than the show.

Except for where I was right then. And that’s how the cops found me.

There was a trial, and it was a short one as I had no lawyer. I hardly made the papers, which was shocking given the sensationalism of it all. A punk-rock Satanist kills her father, his lover, and a former lover of her own in a kinky bondage performance art piece with twenty-five witnesses. Oh, and guest-starring a teenage dirtbag and a real-live Puerto Rican gangbanger type who killed a promising graduate student. But the newspapers didn’t bite—certainly not
Newsday
, and not even the
National Enquirer
.

Geraldo Rivera, I would have even granted an interview to.
Call me, Geraldo!

The dark hand of Riley was behind the media blackout, behind the utter absence of witnesses. I know because I was found guilty of three counts of second-degree manslaughter. The jury deliberated for just under two hours. My public defender was good for a few things. He got the judge to agree to allow me to wear a wig so that my Mohawk wouldn’t prejudice the jury. And I got to stay on Long Island, in the county lockup, despite three three-year sentences to be served consecutively.
Wir bleiben hier
.

We are staying here? We have stayed here. Here I am, now.

Now, I am the only surviving relative of my grandmother, who is basically a vegetable with a beating heart, and whose nurse wheels her in to see me once a month. It would have been cruel, to her, to ship me upstate. Not that she remembers me at all. Every time she is placed across from me, she asks who I am, and what I’m doing in prison. Every time, I tell her. Sometimes I start by saying, “I killed my father.” Sometimes I start by saying, “I killed your son.” Either way, she cries throughout the telling of my story, and doesn’t recognize herself in it, even when I tell of her scrabbling around in the dark while her son fucked a girl who looked just like me.

I get to wear my wig during visiting hours too. I think it helps Grandma deal with what I’m telling.

I never made
Newsday
, but Riley did. The Berlin Wall crumbled, as he predicted it would, just as I was put behind a thick set of walls here in the county lockup. I’m still far freer than the East Germans. I don't have to work and scrabble for my three hots and a cot—the Germans will, and they’ll suffer for it. Riley made sure of that. He was all over the Eastern bloc, working with the leaders of the fledgling states to integrate property rights into the new laws and constitutions of their governments. If you tilt your head toward the east, and listen closely, and believe with all your heart in an unseen hand, you can hear the sound of poker chips being scooped up and moved from there to here.

Riley’s personality profile appeared in the paper’s Sunday magazine. He wasn’t the cover story, but he got a color spread and four thousand words on what a genius he was. His right arm was a little chicken wing tucked up against his rib cage thanks to his accident, and the hole in his neck was obvious. Not as obvious as the permanent crease in my own, but I was pleased to have left my mark on his fucking throat. There was no mention of the occult, or even his college career save for his peculiar support of Barry Goldwater back in ’68.

“When everyone else was into free love, I was into loving freedom.” That’s an actual quote from the piece. How could anyone not want to force open his adorable little mouth, and vomit down his throat?

Riley’s hired wife was given a name in a caption: Dawn. They posed together, arm in arm, in their living room. On the far wall behind them hung Bernstein’s Tower painting. I am a fucking genius. The only one on Long Island, guaranteed. I always knew there was no such thing as j______. But here’s an inevitable happenstance I look forward to: Riley’s been able to move about the world unseen, thanks to his magick robe that makes him invisible to state operatives. Well, he’s working hard to eliminate the state and supplant it with a global marketplace. Soon, there will be no such thing as privacy, or subtlety. We’ll all be tawdry celebrities on perennial benders, and releasing Rob Lowe–style sex tapes purposefully, to publicize our careers. One day, someone will find out about Riley, and expose him, and by extension me, to the world.
Occult
means
hidden
, but in the New Aeon of the all-encompassing market, there will be no hiding.

On the tier I make myself useful. I can read and write, and have become a scribe of sorts to some of the other girls. I keep my head down, and as this is county, most girls come and go pretty quickly, while I’ve become an institution. I’m a loner in a web of gang and extended family associations, but it’s not so bad. If you keep your head down, and occasionally lick a little pussy, it’s not so bad at all. Since women in prison are the lowliest, and sexiest, of class strata, every Maoist and anarchist group tries to recruit us. I get to read a lot of revolutionary newspapers—none of them have any idea why the Berlin Wall fell, and all of them seem happy to blame one another’s lack of faith—and occasionally even receive a missive from Red Submarine. The endless repetition of the Mike Schmidt byline has been replaced by . . . nothing at all. Every article is anonymous. Now that’s Taoist Marxism: the role of the party chairman is taken up by a blank space whose purpose it is to fill the role of the party chairman and keep everyone else out.

I still listen to Outrage every Wednesday night, on a little transistor radio I hide under my pillow. Nobody dares try to take it from me.

Roderick visited me once. He told me he was going to move to California, and that he doesn’t dream of a great big snake anymore.

“What do you dream about?” I asked him.

He stared past me for a moment, as if looking over my shoulder and all away around the curve of the Earth to see into the back of his head. “Little snakes. Millions of them, necks tied to tails, like a net covering the whole world.”

“What are you going to do in California?”

He shrugged. “Something with computers maybe?”

“Make a little money, that sort of thing?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.” And that was that. My not cursing him out was all the thanks he was going to get, and he was grateful for it. He blew me a kiss on the way out.

Greg, never heard from him again. Eh, who could blame the kid, really?

My official prison job is highway cleanup. I can no longer Will myself to invisibility. The COs with their shotguns, the girls in our bright orange Oompa-Loompa jumpsuits, we’re the only entertainment for the great and endless steel snake of Long Island Expressway traffic lines. Well, except for throwing shit out the windows. After my own failed experiment with it, I came to the conclusion that vegetarianism was a bourgeois affectation, something for people who benefit from current structures of oppression to agitate for. But now, after picking up my ten thousandth McDonald’s wrapper—and after eating as many veiny prison-grade hamburger patties that make McDonald’s taste like a Peter Luger steak—I was ready to eat the weeds.

And, as it turns out, I could. I was tearing up weeds on a traffic strip one day when I noticed a few different-looking greens.

“Hey, Michelle,” I said, holding up a fistful. “Ever see anything like this before?” Michelle’s an older woman, African American, a southerner. She got nailed selling her prescription medication to junkies at a five hundred percent markup. Because she was unincorporated and hadn’t made a public offering of stock in herself, they threw her in prison with me. At home, she loved to garden and to cook for her hundred screaming nephews and nieces.

Michelle never had any little ones of her own, but only because she’s an enormous dyke. I liked her.

“Bring it here, hold it out in front of you. Let me take a look,” Michelle said. Michelle always shouted like a third-grader at the school play when among the COs, so they wouldn’t beat her up. She was very worried about her teeth. Prison dentures rarely fit well. She peered at the leaves. I let them go and the wind from a passing tractor-trailer took them to her; they fell like feathers at her feet.

“That’s amaranth, Dawnie,” she said. “The leaves. It’ll flower soon.”

“Amaranth grows wild on Long Island?” I was surprised.

Michelle shrugged. “You’re from here, girl. Don’t you know?”

“I couldn’t even identify the stuff with a bunch of it in my hands, Michelle.”

She chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s weeds mostly, but some people eat it.”

“I know.”

The next day, I looked it up in the prison library. It’s mostly law books and romance novels, but they do have some newspapers. Amaranth grows just fine on Long Island; there just isn’t any. Or wasn’t any, according to
Newsday
, until Hurricane Hugo shanghaied some seeds from the south and dumped them on our shores. Amaranth means “never fading.” It was Bernstein’s name for me. Hurricane Hugo destroyed his home, and sent so much of his occult knowledge to the four winds. There are no coincidences, I know that. In times past, I would have retreated to my room to contemplate the plant and its connections to my life, to the spinning of the world, to the class struggle, but these days it’s hard to give a fuck about anything. I almost miss wiping Grandma’s ass sometimes, miss driving the Rabbit, and definitely miss peering through windows made of something other than crisscrossed wires. I destroyed myself, and for what? The man who killed Bernstein is striding across the planet like a colossus, remaking it in his own image, and harnessing Bernstein’s power to do it.

Another storm is coming. There’s no highway duty today, because of Hurricane Bob. It—no, he—has already chewed through the Carolinas, Maryland, and Jersey, and left a billion dollars of damage in his wake. Destruction, but not creative destruction, not capitalist destruction, and now Bob is bearing down on Long Island. I cannot help but picture him as Killer BOB from
Twin Peaks
, entire towns grinding between his big tombstone teeth.
Twin Peaks
was a favorite on the tier last year. We have a TV, HBO even, but it’s not like we each get a tube in our cell. There’s the tier proper, and its row of cells, a slim walkway surrounding it that we all have access to when the doors open in the morning, and another, larger, cage around all of us. On the other side of
that
cage, bolted to the far wall, is the TV. Good luck trying to get the remote control from whatever badass has claimed it for the day. When the batteries die from the incessant clicking around, we have to wait a day or three for one of the COs to replace them. One time the TV was stuck on TV-55 for a week. I was surprised there were no suicides.

Our hosts in county government have no idea what to do about Bob. He’s roaring toward us like he’s looking to break me out of here. Are we prisoners to be evacuated, or will only the good citizens of Riverhead and the coastal areas of Long Island be shepherded to safety? I hope the hurricane grinds the island down to a sandbar. I hope motherfuckers drown in their cars on the highway as they try to escape to Manhattan. O Leviathan, crash against the shore and send waves to bury us all.

“He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment!” I shout, from my cell, to the group that is always gathered closest to the tier’s TV. “Leviathan!” This is one way I’m able to keep my roommate from spending too much time in our cell.

And another storm is coming, one that even interrupts TV coverage of Bob, my new friend and, I hope, lover. It’s a storm of steel riding through clouds of diesel. The girls on the tier are frantic over it. The two TVs on the tier are calling it the August Coup. Soviet hard-liners have called in the tanks, to save socialist society from glasnost, from perestroika. “Oh Lord, oh Lord!” one of the girls cries. “It’s the end of the world! The storm, the tanks—Satan is walking the Earth!” She’s right, and I want to tell her so, but her conception is so oversimplified as to be inaccurate. She has no idea what will happen next, but I’m pretty sure I do. I write it down with my little golf pencil and give it a day to see if my prediction comes true.

Boris Yeltsin, a capitalist alcoholic, climbs one of the tanks and gives a stirring speech. Like magick, the troops change sides. The girls go wild, hooting and pumping their fists. They’re in fucking prison in capitalist America, and they still believe every stupid lie about freedom the television tells them. I give myself a gold star for my accurate forecast. Maybe later, when the CO turns the TV off for the night, they’ll go back to their gang formations and to their grand hobby of broom handle sex to pass the time. That night, to the echo of someone’s orgasmic screaming, I look up in the ceiling and think about how useless it is to be correct sometimes. It’s so difficult to do the right thing, even when you can sense the spirit of the age, even when you believe you know where the waters of history will flow.