Love Is the Law (13 page)

When the going gets tough, the tough go punk. The Abyssal Eyeballs were playing that night. A part of me realized that it would be just too neat if Chelsea appeared at the show, perhaps with my father or Greg in tow. Or if Aram and Karen showed up again, with a name and phone number for the person who wanted the Tower painting. At the same time, what else could possibly happen?

The day was long. Grandma was covered in bruises and whimpering in pain like a dying puppy. I had to carry her to the bathroom and then back to bed. She wouldn’t sleep, or eat, robbing me of my occasional standby of slipping her an over-the-counter antihistamine crushed up in a jelly sandwich. She didn’t eat peanut butter anymore—dentures, you know.

“What happened? What happened?” Grandma kept saying. “Where’s Billy? I lost Billy in the woods.” She asked me, “But you were there. You must know where Billy got off to. Why don’t you tell me?” She cried till her tear ducts dried out, and gulped water like a child.

“Chelsea . . .” She called me Chelsea. I almost slapped her right in the mouth. “You have to understand something about Billy. He doesn’t always think clearly. Sometimes he says things that, at the time, he thinks he will do, but then doesn’t do it.”

“I know, Grandma,” I said.

“I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know what I did wrong. He was a nice boy, a good boy. Always very attentive. It was when he got married and had that baby that something turned in him. It was like he expected to be a teenager forever, Chelsea. No wonder he likes you so much.”

I doubted that there was any percentage in pretending to be Chelsea, but there’s even less in arguing with dementia. “Does he ever talk about me?” I tried.

“Oh yes, all the time,” Grandma said. I knew that was a delusion. Grandma hadn’t said more than a hundred words to my father in months. Grandma continued,. “He says you’re very smart and do well in school, and that he met you at Good Read Book Stop, and that’s how he knew how smart you were.”

I supposed it was possible that the bookstore could be a lead. What else did I know about Chelsea? She was fucking my father. She owned, or had access to, a Volvo. I hadn’t known her in school, or even seen her around, so she was probably from the Village, not Port Jefferson Station—different school districts. Probably some rich bitch out for a few thrills. Maybe she’d been to the bookstore.

Grandma was telling me a story about how smart I was. How an essay I wrote was published in the elementary school newsletter back when I was in second grade. No wonder my father made his teenage girlfriend shave her head so he could fuck a girl who looked just like me. He surely missed me very much. Grandma’s story ended, “And then Dawn brought home the newsletter and said that she had her essay in it. And that’s how I knew she was so smart. One time in second grade . . .” She looped through the story again in its entirety.

“We’re going downtown,” I announced suddenly. Grandma was startled. Her lip started trembling. “No arguments. Billy lives downtown, don't you know?” I couldn’t leave Grandma alone; who knows whom she’d let into the house while I was out. She fussed, but was interested. I got her into her housecoat and packed a bag. I told her it was in case we got lost, which she was addled enough to believe. I locked up the apartment as securely as I could and drove right to St. Charles Hospital. I walked her into the ER, and she followed silently until she saw the check-in window.

“What are we doing here?” she whispered to me.

“You’re covered in bruises, Grandma,” I said. “Look at your arms!” They were well marked from last night’s exertions and a couple of days of rough living in squats and who knew where else. Then I whispered, “I think Billy knows who did it. I’ll find him and bring him here. You just stay here, and let the doctors take care of you.” For a second I thought she might begin screaming, and bring the orderlies down on us. Then I’d have to fill out forms, answer questions about her physical condition, perhaps submit to a police interrogation. But she was tired, and had burnt herself out this morning. I sat her down, handed her her bag, and said I was going to get a doctor. Instead, I left. On the way out I passed an orderly and asked for the chapel, telling him that I wanted to light a candle for my grandmother, at whom I pointed. Grandma even waved to me. Of course, I looked just like the bride of Satan, so the kid mostly just stammered and blinked before waving his arm in the direction of the chapel. I asked him to keep an eye on her, and he shrugged and said he would. I whispered that I thought she had tried to commit suicide—instant bump-up on triage that way—and split.

I didn’t know what I expected to find at Good Read, but I had little to do before the Abyssal Eyeballs show, which was being held in a secret location. Sounded promising. Before Bernstein, Good Read was my education in both magick and Marxism. It’s a used and antiquarian bookstore, the sort of place where one could buy a sack of paperback horror novels for a dollar, or spend five thousand bucks on a signed first edition Nabokov. Cool stuff, and a great way to peer into the collective psyche of the older generation and the way they used to live, and think, before they all sold out and went to work for Grumman or the state.

The section on Marxism and anarchism was a mishmash of old party pamphlets—Maoists of various stripes, mostly, as the specter of a black boyfriend was most offensive to parents back in the sixties—anti-Communist exposés from the fifties, a lot of stuff on economic calculation and planning, anarchist classics, and some scholarly material. But it was enough for me. The occult section was similarly a dog’s breakfast: UFO abduction stories, Seth books, Edgar Cayce, some pagan junk, and some actually cool stuff. Maybe Satanic boyfriends were even more fearsome a generation ago. My first ever occult book was the hysterical
The Magick of Chant-O-Matics
by Raymond Buckland. One of the chants literally went, in part, “Now, now, now / money, money, money!” Funny, my father used to mutter exactly that, all the time, under his breath.

And as though the thought made him materialize, the chimes rang as he pushed the door open with his shoulder. It was Riley, the man from Belle Terre. He had a big cardboard box in his arms, and struggled with its weight. I slid behind a shelf and thought of nothingness—much easier than trying to think of nothing. The clerk didn’t smile at him, but his eyebrows went up as he got to the counter with a single lurch and plopped the box on the table.

“Well, this should do it,” Riley said. I’d never heard his voice before. I had no idea what I expected him to sound like, but whatever it was, I was wrong. His voice was deep and soft at the same time, like a crooner from a black-and-white movie. “A free trade between fair traders.” I wanted to strangle him. Bernstein was always of the mind that the
capitalists knew the score, that Communism was inevitable, but Riley spoke like a bourgeois economics textbook.

“Okay, we’ll take a look,” the clerk said. “Take a
look
.” The air turned dark and cold, like a meat freezer’s. He reached in and pulled out a few slim, but wide, volumes, bound in leather like new library books. The spines were unremarkable, but familiar all the same. There’s no reason to print a hundred-page poster-sized book unless there are lots of images, diagrams. Art books, technical manuals, heavy math shit, and occult texts. That’s where I’d seen them. Bernstein’s house.

“Those are mine,” I said as I stepped out from behind the shelf. “You stole them from my friend.” Riley smiled at me, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t look surprised to see me, or upset. That was the archconfidence of the ruling class. Reagan and Bush smiling at the television while the Eastern bloc imploded.

The clerk shrugged. “I’m not interested in buying stolen merchandise,” he said to Riley. And then he turned to me. “Do you have any proof that this is your, uh, collection?”

“You should ask him for proof that they belong to him,” I said. “Those are valuable books. You could probably buy a house from the proceeds. If I pointed to an empty house and said, ‘Hey, it’s mine. Wanna buy it?’ would you without seeing a deed?”

“What do you know about these books?” the clerk said.

“What do you know about deeds?” Riley asked.

“Magick,” I said. “Sacred geometry, summoning spirits, enlightenment. Not the junk you can find at B. Dalton either. The real shit.”

“You’re right,” Riley said. “These are occult books. But you’re also wrong.” The clerk put the books back into the box, planted the frayed elbows of his sweater onto the countertop, and rested his chin atop his knuckles. He rarely got a show like this.

“Here’s how you’re wrong, miss,” Riley said. “I can point to a house and say, ‘Hey, it’s mine. Wanna buy it?’ as you put it, because I own a significant amount of real estate in the Village, and in Port Jefferson Station as well. Point in any random direction, and you’ll likely be pointing at one of my properties. There have been a fair number of short sales lately, foreclosures. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Which suggests to me that these very expensive books do belong to him,” the clerk said. “He can afford them, and we’ve been arranging this barter for months. This man knows their contents. Do you?”

“I know many things,” I said. I pointed at Riley. “Have we met before?”

“Of course not,” he said. “We clearly don’t traffic in the same circles,” he added, as an aside to the clerk.

“Clearly,” the clerk agreed.

“Then how do I know that your name is Riley?”

Riley jerked back, surprised, but the clerk shrugged and said, “Maybe you do read the papers. What are they calling you these days, Mr. Riley?”

Riley regained his composure. “Mr. Peace Dividend.” He smiled at me, the way a dentist does to a nervous kid. The worst possible smile. “I made a fair amount of money betting on war, in the markets.”

“How many millions of dollars’ worth of Grumman stock did you own?” the clerk asked him, fawning.

“More than enough. Too much, truly,” Riley said. “I liquidated it, decided to get into real estate. Then the East Germans developed a taste for freedom. I got out of the stock market just in time.”

“And you also dabble in the occult?” I asked.

“I ‘dabble’ in commodities. I can’t make heads or tails of this stuff, and that’s because there’s no heads or tails to be made of it. Occult books, fine art, palladium futures; it’s all the same to me. That’s my business. Now why don’t you mind your own business and let us carry on.”

Then I performed a bit of magick I’d never been able to. I started crying, at Will. Real tears. The tension fell from my face, my skin heated up, my voice changed to the sort of girlish coo I didn’t know I was capable of. “You don’t understand,” I said. “My life is really falling apart right now. I lost my boyfriend—these are his books, or he left them with me. And now he ran off with some high school girl. LILCO is going to cut the lights.” I blinked away the tears. “I don’t even know why you’re picking on me! What have I ever done to you?”

It was good. Almost all of it was true. Riley was impressed, but all my body did was stiffen a bit, against his own Will. But he wasn’t the target; the clerk was. If he shipped them out of town, I’d never see them again.

“Mr. Riley, do you know what this woman is talking about?” the clerk asked. He seemed dubious about the whole thing. The store was still cold, but now the frost seemed to be coming from his icy exhalations.

Riley made an uncomfortable little noise. “I’m afraid I do. If you’re concerned, just hold the books for now.”

“Oh, I’m not concerned,” the clerk said. He ducked under the counter and brought up a large, soft-looking package in a plain brown wrapper. It wasn’t a book, whatever it was. “Here you are, Mr. Riley.” Riley hugged the package to his chest, squeezing it almost comically, and without another word left the store.

I turned off the tears. “What was in that package?” I asked the clerk.

“Are you a police officer?” he asked. “Or are you just insane?”

“No. Would you tell me if I were?”

“Insane?”

“No, a police officer.”

“No, I would not tell you either way,” the clerk said.

“It was in a plain brown wrapper. Was it porn? Kiddie porn?” He opened his mouth to say something but I interrupted him, because men hate when women interrupt them. “No, it wasn’t even a book. It was a blow-up doll, wasn’t it? Maybe a kiddie-shaped blow-up doll.” I was close to shouting, “Pedophilia!”
Pedophilia!
was a powerful magical word, the
abrahadabra
of the late twentieth century. It shattered lives and tore up schoolyards in the search for secret sex tunnels, it pit neighbor against neighbor and legalized murder.
Pedophilia!
was a summoning word, a whistle for Satan and his army of prick-dicked imps. It could set a suburb to boil. Even I was a little wary of saying it too seriously, though if I could have done it, I would have won far more easily.
Pedophilia!
and the cops tear Riley’s mansion apart.
Pedophilia!
and Joshua gets dragged away, blubbering that he will tell who wanted Bernstein’s painting, and that sexy Japanese cartoons are too a legitimate art form.
Pedophilia!
and Dad goes away for a long long time. Maybe forever. But I couldn’t say it; I wasn’t even as good a witch as the girls from Salem. A failure of my Will, a reminder of my father and his living voodoo doll of me, Chelsea.

“Why don’t you go ask him,” the clerk said. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know what’s in that package. I just midwived the exchange.”

“Didn’t you care at all?”

The clerk looked at me, his eyes wide and hollow. He clearly didn't care about anything. That’s why he chose to work in a used bookstore in a town where people rarely read anything more challenging than Danielle Steele. “Fine, then,” I said, and I left.

“Hello! Riley?” I called out, on the street. He was only half a block away, headed down the picturesque little hill that made the block so attractive to day-trippers, and already had his car keys out. His
Mercedes
keys. I clomped after him, and he was being all cool. He didn’t turn around when I called his name a second time. He was so good at ignoring people. I let him get into his car and drive off. He made a left at the end of the block, suggesting that he was headed home. I could head over there myself pretty easily. Maybe I’d even see Chrysoula sweeping up after him, or cutting the crusts off his bread.