Love Is the Law Read online

  1.

  I am a fucking genius. The only one on Long Island, guaranteed. Yes, there are scientists at Brookhaven, and at Stony Brook, charming quarks. Clever, and mathematically minded, but not geniuses. All sorts of millionaires roar across the island on the Cannonball for Friday happy hour in Amagansett in the summertime, but they were slaves to an abstraction smaller than themselves, and thus disqualified. There probably might have been a lone kook or two living in some moldy clapboard house on the shore who might almost qualify as genius. I knew I was the only genius because I was still fucking alive. Bernstein, who was a scientist, and a millionaire, and more recently a lone kook, wasn’t. He was stretched across the seventies shag rug, bright orange except where his blood had pooled, in his living room. I made a note of it. The lights were on, and so was the little black-and-white television he kept balanced atop a milk crate, tuned to TV-55. Bernstein didn’t have cable. On the screen, it was the usual news—East Germans gathered up by der Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, chanting, “Wir bleiben hier.” The gun was near Bernstein’s right hand, and chunks of his skull, and hair, and brains, did splay off to the left. Whoever killed him probably thought that the cops would be too stupid, and too relieved, to examine the scene closely. But Bernstein was left handed, and anyone who took the time to open his journals and read his many writings on Marxism and the occult, a few of which he once shared with me, would have spotted that right away. On the other hand, on the sinister hand, if you get me, nobody ever lost money betting against the cops. Local fruitcake who writes letters to the community newspaper demanding that the North Shore proletariat rise up to defend the gains of October sees the Eastern bloc crumble on TV, takes off his pants, and shoots himself in the head. Case closed: happens all the time.

  Bernstein lived in a little two-room shed right on the southern part of Mount Sinai Harbor. He could have sold it and been rich, but he didn’t care about such things. He liked the swamp, the hills, the fingery tree branches in the late autumn. Bernstein had once read a poem, an original composition, to that effect at the Good Read Book Stop. That was in May, when I decided to put him on my route. It was an extremely mediocre poem, but I liked Bernstein anyway.

  I thought about jimmying the lock and helping myself to some of Bernstein’s rarer books and papers—he had a photocopy of the original handwritten Liber AL vel Legis he’d gotten from a friend in Berkeley—but for a moment my Will left me and I ran, scared, back home, the muck of the swampy backyard slurping against my Docs as if to keep me there.

  What is there to say about Bernstein? He was brilliant. A polyglot, an economist, a talented magician, a prolific correspondent. Instead of a refrigerator and oven, he had three huge file cabinets in his kitchen, filled with carbons of the letters he sent to statesmen, wizards, revolutionaries, and artists. And he was perceptive enough to sense me watching him. Nobody had ever caught me before, but he immediately knew I was outside watching him. The second night I visited him, he marched over to the window. I ducked. He drew the shade and then turned on a bright light. On the grass before me I read the words no key needed. I turned around and saw the letters, backwards and made of black tape, on the shade. I made to run, but he slammed his fist against the wall and opened the shade. So I walked around to the front and entered the unlocked door. My look was so distinctive that running was useless anyway.

  “What are you called?” he asked me.

  “Aimee,” I said. It was the first name that came to mind.

  He scowled and said, “Amaranth it is.”

  “Huh?”

  “Bloom, O ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,” he said. “For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!” He raised a finger and said, “Coleridge!” Then he told me to sit down. My boots had steel toes. I had a ring with a spike on it in my pocket, and put my hand in my pocket just in case, but I sat down.

  Bernstein had a film projector—that was the light he had used—and whipped the sheet from his couch and showed me a Super 8 print of an old weird black-and-white film called Meshes of the Afternoon. It was strange and short, like an MTV video, except silent and about . . . I still don’t know. It was like a dream, I guess. Not like a dream sequence in an ordinary Hollywood movie, but like an actual dream. Maya Deren, the director and “star,” was a commie gone occultist too. She was beautiful, with a haystack of black curls. Why wouldn’t the lwa want to ride her, kiss her till her lips were chapped and bleeding? Bernstein had a nice cock and paid me to suck it. I was not a whore, though. I just needed the money, and was patient with him, not like a whore would be. It always took him hours to get off. He hummed to himself, patted the bald side of my head, murmured the magic words, then let his ov into my mouth. Bernstein would have given me anything I wanted for nothing in return, but then I would have really been his whore, his slave, dependent on him the way a sheep is on its shepherd. He was a good yogi, but couldn’t stretch far enough to suck his own dick. So it was commerce without capital for him, magick without tears for me. He never tried to touch me, or make me get naked. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, or mentor and protégé. Maybe I was his Scarlet Woman; perhaps he was my Holy Guardian Angel, but in the final analysis, we were comrades, a cadre in an Imaginary Party.

  I lived with my grandmother and given my haircut and sartorial choices—punk as fuck, studs and ripped everything, a bright orange Mohawk and I didn’t give a fuck about my “figure” either—I wasn’t going to get a job at the Smith Haven Mall, or even Farpoint Comics. My mother was dead, my father’s new wife was a crack pipe and he was better at sucking that than I was at sucking cock. When Maya walked into a room to see herself sleeping on a recliner, I felt something important. When I saw her fling herself against first one wall, then another, as she tried to climb up a flight of crooked, swaying steps, I knew what it was. For so long my other world, my alternative existence, was in Manhattan. Whenever I could, I’d get out to the city on the LIRR. Two hours on the train and then a quick stride into the Village, to Bleecker Bob’s Records, St. Mark’s Bookshop, a vegetarian bakery, shawarma, the dirty and foul Mars Bar where I learned to drink. But all I was doing was buying, then leaving. I was the worst sort of commodity fetishist; in trying to consume the life I wanted, all I was eating was my own slow death. With Bernstein, I realized that I could make my life my own, on Long Island or anywhere else. Wir bleiben hier. We are staying here.

  But someone killed my Bernstein, and ruined absolutely everything. But I am a fucking genius, and I was determined to find out who killed Bernstein and bring them to . . .

  No, not to justice. To something else.

  2.

  I have mastered only one feat of magick, specifically the art of invisibility. Bernstein saw right through it, of course, but otherwise it worked pretty well. It’s easy enough to be invisible on Long Island—be a pedestrian. Sidewalks here are few and far between, so every walk is a nature walk. Usually dead nature. A dead bird is an awful thing to stumble across, as they always seem to die with their eyes open and staring. At me. It’s startling to see one at your feet, and even worse to hear the crunch of thin bones underfoot, but the worst is the walk back. The shock of the unexpected decays into a dread of seeing the body again. Is this where that thing was? No, it must have been further along the road. Then the ground gives way by just an inch. I look down at my shoes. No, I was right.

  Roadkill on the street proper or in the sandy strip on the shoulders of most roads is nearly as bad. Dead mammals make a larger splash—imagine wrapping a paint can full of sausage casings in a mink stole, and smashing it to the ground. I remember one dead raccoon whose glassy-eyed stare seemed almost wise. It was finals week, and I had been run ragged, having signed up for nineteen credits. I walked by the carcass every day, wis
hing I could feel as serene as it looked, even with its viscera splayed around the body like torn wrapping paper. Serenity is the key to this ritual.

  At first, there wasn’t a single day when I wasn’t harassed or accosted by drivers and passengers in passing cars. Some just scream. Others shout, “Ha, you’re poor!” or “Get a car!” or “Fucking freak!” or, after the song became popular, “Punk rock girl!” I got quite a few comments about my sexual preferences, with a level of detail that wouldn’t be more exacting had I been pushing a naked lover in front of me in a wheelbarrow. One guy even shouted, “Hey, nipple clips!” at me. After a heavy rain, or during a light one, some drivers liked to veer toward the side of the road and kick up a wall of gutter water.

  The answer was to walk more, and to walk calmly. No more shouting back, no more shaking my fist or even grabbing a stone and flinging it at the rear windshield, then running off across the railroad tracks or into a yard when the brake lights flared angry red and the car stopped. I’d just take it, and prowl the nights. I walked a mile and a half to school, tromping through snowdrifts or marching under the blazing sun with nothing but an outstretched arm and a palm toward heaven to shade me. I was everywhere, all the time. Did people see me on the shoulder of the highway today or yesterday? Had I been striding across their lawn last week or last summer, walking on the Port Jeff pier with an ice cream cone on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day? Had I been spotted heading off the train at Huntington and taking the long stroll to the Angle, or Cinema Arts Centre when they were on the way to the movies, or when they’d been coming back from the movies? I dyed my hair the Little Orphan Annie orange and got a boy’s leather jacket, just to be more distinctive. Even the hardcore bands on LI—all boys, of course—dressed in backwards baseball caps and Gap jeans, so I was That Ugly Fucking Girl. Because I was everywhere, I eventually was nowhere. Part of the scenery, just another tree or strip mall.

  And I sang to myself. Subvocalizations that set my sinuses ringing. I loved Token Entry and SFA and Ludichrist, who actually knew how to play their instruments. They were local, and the tapes were cheap, and I played them till they snapped or demagnetized. I knew better than to wear headphones in traffic, so I was my own grumbling, scatting Walkman. The music kept my heart rate accelerated, but even. I felt like I could do anything, and I started doing just that. I liked to keep a hand on my little spiked ring, though it wasn’t even all that good for stabbing people. But it helped me feel prepared, ready for anything. Never listened to anything mainstream except for that one Public Enemy song that everyone loved that summer. Nineteen eighty-niiiiiiiiine!

  Once I achieved invisibility, it was easy to indulge in my hobby. I liked to walk up to the big bay windows that so many of the more obnoxious houses around here had and peer in. I had my favorites. The Dominican family living on Route 25A was one. The father’s name was Raymundo. Ray plus mundo—I daydreamed that his name meant “light of the world” because I found portent and sign in everything I observed. Raymundo loved to chase his kids around, yelping and laughing and pretending to be a werewolf. His wife was a dried-up little woman who shrieked and complained and didn’t speak any English. The kids, three boys and a girl, were all chubby and snotty. Raymundo worked at Fairchild building Warthogs and other imperialist death weapons, until there wasn’t a Fairchild anymore, and then he wasn’t happy anymore. Bernstein would have somehow blamed Gorbachev for such a thing, were he around to do so. Raymundo stayed home and fumed at his big television set, and got fat and stupid; then one day they were all gone and the walls were bare except for the square stains where the kids’ school pictures had been.

  I had a few people up in Belle Terre, a tiny village of mansions built around a country club. They weren’t as exciting as I’d hoped. No long cocktail parties or feather boas or insane ranting over a ticker tape à la Gomez Addams. One couple about the age of my parents ate the same shitty Pathmark frozen pizza that I did, except that they had a huge kitchen with a great slate island on which to put their paper plates and greasy napkins. No kids; presumably they couldn’t birth any that would match their furniture, so decided against. According to their mail, the family name was Riley. The wife never seemed to receive any correspondence, but the dude was Robert. Robert Riley—he could have been a comic book superhero with that name.

  And then there was one old woman in Belle Terre who did nothing all night but watch the BBC feed sucked down from space via an enormous satellite dish behind her cabana and weep into a handkerchief. She kept strange hours to keep up with the television, taking tea at 11 p.m. She slept on the couch in the afternoons. A black maid cleaned around her twice a week, clearing the piles of saucers and other service items.

  High school dirtbags were endlessly fascinating as well. Port Jefferson is a mix of suburban developments and older cottages and saltboxes. Dirtbags and longhairs lived with a parent or two in the latter. Only the most pathetic and poor, like me and my grandmother, lived in actual apartments. Dirtbags loved their stereos, and really could stare at an Iron Maiden album cover for an hour as the album played, as the aluminum siding against which I huddled as I peered through the window buzzed along with the rhythm section. Sometimes, a few of them got together and played a half-hearted game of Dungeons & Dragons. They loved the occult shit, these kids, but not one of them had the discipline necessary for real magick. In school, we never spoke. There was a bright red line between punk and metal, just as there was between dirtbag and Guido, Guido and preppy. Every year we marched out to the football field and took a class picture, all bunched together in our groups, with the few Asian or Hispanic kids around even further out on the periphery. I took a lipstick to the picture and drew the borders between us all, tracing out a perfect unicursal hexagram, as though right from the pen of Aleister Crowley. Picture a diamond with a bow tie, or something like two of the little spaceships from Asteroids laid atop one another—one pointing toward the Divine, the other toward the Abyss. Just like high school. I was glad to be invisible, happy that the relationships with my classmates were utterly imaginary. I’d even ditched school the day of the picture, and wasn’t in it.

  I used my power to get my hands on occult books. The public library only had the usual Wiccan shit from Raymond Buckland and born-again Christian scare books that were totally hysterical in both senses of the word. And there was Good Read Book Stop, but more about that later. SUNY Stony Brook’s college library—just fifteen minutes away—had a few good volumes, and I was able to walk right in to the stacks despite not having a student ID card. I’d just wait for a student who looked like she might have been a friend, and walk in behind them. A lot of the books had already been stolen—anything by Crowley goes quick, as does anything that has pentagrams and other magical circles printed on the pages, or anything that looked old. But I found a few good ones, and took them. Crowley’s 777: vel prolegomena symbolica ad systemam sceptico-mysticae viae explicandae, fundamentum hieroglyphicum sanctissimorum scientiae summae is a favorite. It took me a week to memorize the title, and I didn’t even allow myself to open the book until I did. And on the first page I read, “Am I no better than a staphylococcus because my ideas still crowd in chains? But we digress.” And I howled with glee, my first real laugh since moving in with Grandma. As far as the rest of it, I had no idea what the fuck he was on about. 777 is sort of a farmer’s almanac without any explanations. I saw Chinese trigrams, and a chart that tied human hips and thighs to centaurs—I presumed because that’s where man meets horse in a centaur body, but it was just confusing. It was a great edition though, published in London in a limited edition of five hundred copies in 1909, the year my grandmother was born in Brooklyn. When it came to comprehension though, I was no better than a staphylococcus.

  Bernstein was such a godsend—and even now I struggle not to think in terms like godsend. I’d gone to the bookstore not to hear Valium-addled housewives read their poems, but to find some beginner Crowley titles and boost them. Instead I found Bernstein. His poems
were just as bad as anyone else’s, but he knew it. He was a prankster, mocking the other readers. I didn’t dare laugh and give it all away. Though he was a wiry little man with gray hair shooting out from the top of his head like a dandelion, I sat there with my legs together and got wet for him. He knew me inside out. He let me be “Aimee” for a week or two before he casually admitted that he knew my name was Dawn. That I’d graduated from high school and had no particular plans. That he knew my father once, when they were younger.

  So, who killed Bernstein? Who could? Of course he had enemies. Intelligent people always have enemies. He certainly didn’t have any friends, save me and his far-flung correspondents. He was up to his eyebrows in politics too. That summer, a lot of his time had been spent on the phone to Yugoslavia, shouting in three languages, and to Western Union, sending money over to middlemen in France. My eyes would roll to the back of my head during one of his spontaneous lectures on the number of dishwashing machines in Moscow, and how the bureaucratic caste dominating the deformed workers’ states were ready to be destroyed by the real proletarian revolution. Maybe it was a good thing he’s dead.

  I couldn’t call the police. I couldn’t bear the thought of the fucking pigs going through Bernstein’s papers and library. And I’d have to explain what I’d been doing outside, peering in through the window—one of our many little games. Plus, the cops are generally under the thumb of either the bosses or some occult group. I could pick up the phone, dial 911, and report the crime to the murderer, or one of his mind slaves. And then there’s the gibberish ideology of the bourgeois legal system in the first place. How would a Christian choose to punish the Roman soldier with the hammer and three nails, if he could?

  There’s a ritual I know—Liber III vel Jugorum. It’s freedom through bondage. Set a rule: don’t use a word like the, or but. Or don’t use the letter m. And when you do, take a razor to your flesh. Soon enough you’ll stop doing what you’ve decided not to do. So what I barred myself from even thinking was the word, the concept of justice. Nothing’s fair. Nobody is owed jack shit. Every dumb failure, from premenstrual cramps to hearing only the outro of that one song on WLIR that I so wanted to tape, is exactly what I had coming. And the same with television. Hurricane Hugo tore through North Carolina and every weepy redneck hick appealed to God, and it was hilarious. I did slip up a few times. Every chubby girl on Long Island cuts herself when she’s feeling angsty—vomiting is for mere cheerleaders—but I worked with a deeper purpose, running a razor across my stomach, playing with fingertips full of blood. It hurt all the time, but that’s the point. After a week, I was free of notions of bourgeois j______. I couldn’t even imagine anything but a dark and swirling hole, a mouth of a great wyrm yawning wide to consume us all, whenever I even tried to think of that unthinkable thing. A second feat of magick, accomplished.