Love Is the Law (7 page)

There are almost no girls or women in my life. I had wanted to make friends with that Chelsea girl before she started making out with Greg. After that, I just wanted to talk to her. Bernstein always said that he had almost no other men in his life—in his real life, that is, outside of his busy days writing and responding to letters. We
’
d found one another thanks to a complex of sociosexual reasons, the demand for yin by yang, and “vice-a-voisa” he had said to me once. Bernstein had a bit of a Queens accent, and years of isolation on Long Island did only a little to dampen it. Only when he was performing a ritual or speaking with his true Will behind him did his voice change, growing deeper, almost senatorial, and the nasal buzz of his voice vanished.

I called WUSB and asked if they had anything by the Abyssal Eyeballs, which was sort of a fool
’
s errand, since their library was so huge. Then I called the concert line, but it was still the same tape from the day before. There were never too many shows on a Tuesday night.

And then I was at loose ends. For years, I
’
d been wandering from encounter to encounter, from weirdo to weirdo, hunting for other members of the Imaginary Party, my haircut a freak flag which people could salute. I found one in Bernstein, then he was taken from me. I decided to give Grandma another whirl and planted the painting of Crowley
’
s Tower card in front of the television. The apartment was only a one-bedroom, so she slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. When she awoke, it was slow and awkward, as if each new day was truly a disappointing surprise.

Grandma
’
s eyes focused on the painting, as if it were part of the set of
Good Morning America
. Then she said, “Is it Christmas? Is Jerome coming again?”

“Did he only come on Christmas?” I asked.

“Well, he always came on Christmas,” Grandma said. “His parents were Orthodox Jews. He liked the idea of Christmas, I guess, since it was forbidden fruit for him.” It had never even occurred to me to think of Bernstein as a human being with parents, possibly siblings, with connections to the world other than the ones he had revealed to me.

“When did you last see him?”

“Oh, oh . . . years ago,” she said. “Just before we lost the house.”

“Really?” I wanted to reach out and shake her, to crack open her head like an egg and paw through the stupid goop of her brains for the information. “He was at the house?”

“He bought the house . . .” she said. “He was going to let us stay.” She sucked on her lip for a moment. “But then he didn’t.”

“This is Christmas Jerome you’re talking about. Jerome Bernstein bought our house when the bank foreclosed?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s fucked.” So fucked it was hard to believe. Memories drift like ice floes in the dark sea of Grandma’s mind. Sometimes two different ones collide and combine into a new memory of something that never even happened. When Grandma was in her right mind, she hated cursing. Even “shut up” was too much for her. She’d tell me, “Say ‘be quiet’ if you must say anything, because the word ‘quiet’ ends with a smile. ‘Shut up’ ends with a frown.” When I turned thirteen I started saying “lighten up” to her in response, but she never did point out that I was still frowning. She would just frown and wander away.

Now her antipathy toward cursing was gone. “Oh yes, very fucked indeed,” Grandma said. “That’s what put Billy over the edge, I’m sure.”

“Well, why did he?”

“Why did who do what, dear?”

“Why did Jerome buy the house?”

“Oh, Jerome didn
’
t buy our house!” she said.

“Who did?”

“Billy
’
s other friend from school.”

“Okay,” I said. “Was the name of Billy
’
s other friend from school . . . Jerome?” Grandma just looked at me. Sometimes a little presto-changeo like that could help her brain reset, but not this time.

“No, no,” she said. “Jerome is a Jew. This was the other fellow. Billy
’
s friend from school.”

“The non-Jew,” I said. “Okay, why did the friend who wasn
’
t Jewish buy the house?” There had to be an easy way to find out who owned the house now. The county clerk
’
s office or something.

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
.