by Nick Mamatas
3.
A tree fell through Bernstein’s house when the remnant of Hugo hit Long Island. I had imagined having a few days or even a week of surreptitiously collecting the mail in the hope of finding a clue before the neighbors figured out something was up and called the pigs. Instead, the front page of Newsday told the story to everyone on Long Island. Jerome Bernstein, “former” sixties radical and “New Age” believer—two errors in just three words!—was found dead when a LILCO linesman checking out nearby power lines noticed the small cottage under a large tree and decided to investigate. Bernstein had committed suicide via self-inflicted gunshot wound, and “a note may have been found.” The tree and the wind must have cast some of Bernstein’s letters onto the lawn and all throughout the nearby wood.
I made toast and eggs for my grandmother and read the paper at our tiny Formica table. Everything smelled like grease and smoke, and made me sick to my stomach. Once upon a time I was a vegetarian, which drove Grandma crazy. Bernstein used to smirk at me and call me a “Pop-Tarts and french fry vegetarian,” which was true enough. Then I gave it up.
“I know that man,” Grandma said. She rarely spoke anymore. I lived with her for one reason—her Social Security checks kept the lights on, and Section 8 paid the rent. She lived with me for lots of reasons, even though half the time she looked at me like I was some kind of monster born of senile dementia—I did the laundry, cooked a little, let her watch TV till her hair fell out from the radiation. She pointed to the front page of the newspaper. “Christmas Jerome.”
“Christmas Jerome . . . ? His last name was Bernstein,” I said.
“Billy brought him to the house one Christmas,” Grandma said. “Because the poor boy had nowhere else to go. They were in college together, at Stony Brook.” She’d been taking to calling my father, William, “Billy” again for the past few months. “He was a nice young fellow. He brought us a present he made. A strange painting of a tower. I couldn’t display it, of course, but you know what they say: it’s the thought that counts.” She looked back down at her eggs, cooked over hard the only way I could be bothered to do them, and sliced into one with the edge of her fork. Then she glanced back up at the paper. “I know that man,” she said. “Christmas Jerome . . . ” I let her cycle through the story one more time, but folded the paper so she wouldn’t see the picture again and perseverate even more. The story was virtually the same the second time, except that she said, “It’s around here somewhere.” Not likely true—half the time Grandma thought she was still living in the split-level ranch she had before the bank foreclosed on it. “Billy” had smoked his way through four months of mortgage payments. Once I found her peering into the hall closet, looking for the second story of a home she no longer had.
Dad was easy to find. There’s a lot of money in Suffolk, and on the North Shore especially. There are pockets of poverty, but only one real crack house in Port Jeff. I took the car, which I always hated. Driving was just so visible; I always imagined windshields as huge magnifying glasses that inflated my head to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon proportions. The car is supposed to be a symbol of American freedom, but it’s just another way for the cops to track you. You’re caged already. But Long Island barely has any public transportation thanks to that old cryptofascist Robert Moses, and the crack house was down a back road, so I had no real choice. It wasn’t far from the old manor houses that lined the hill over the harbor, houses with backyards large enough to stable a horse. After that, a few smaller homes in disrepair, their inhabitants long since driven out by high property taxes, then the crack house squat.
Nothing stirred when I pulled up in Grandma’s old Volkswagen Rabbit, though the diesel engine made it sound like there were hundreds of marbles rolling around under the hood. Branches and wet leaves littered the lawn and porch. The door was locked, but it was easy enough to open with my driver’s license. Dad was on a couch that had been salvaged from . . . somewhere. Dredged out of the Long Island Sound, it looked like, and smelled like. There was no TV, no lamps, and the room was dark thanks to some towels tacked up over the windows. Someone else was in the corner, stretched out on a stained twin mattress. Dad had his feet up on a coffee table made of plywood and a few milk crates, just the way he did back when he lived at home.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. It took a long moment for his head to turn my way. “What’s the matter—did you switch over to smack from crack?”
“Dawn . . .” he said. “What the fuck do you want?” He looked me over and sneered at me. “You’re tracking mud into the house. Into my home!” Dad tried to shout like he used to, but he was desiccated in his little wifebeater T-shirt and khaki shorts, so his words just came out as a grating groan. He mumbled, “I don’t have any fuckin’ money for you, okay.”
“I have some for you,” I said. I did. Ten dollars.
Dad perked up a bit. “What do you want?” The woman on the mattress stirred as well. She smiled at me—her front teeth were missing—and stood up and lurched toward the little kitchen beyond the room in which I stood. There was an upstairs too, and I strained my ears in case more crackheads were up there. I wasn’t worried. All I had to do was take a giant step backward, get into my car, and go. If that was my Will, it would be done.
“Remember your friend from high school, or something? Jerome Bernstein?”
“What about him? You want to suck his dick or something?” The girl was back from the kitchen with two plastic cups of water. She made to offer me one, from across the room, but was giggling too much at Dad’s little joke to make her way over to me.
“Oh, I have sucked his dick. And it was fucking good, Daddy,” I said. “I like Jew cock. Nice and clean, no dick cheese.” The crackhead girl really lost it then. She spilled both cups and fell to her knees, her shoulders bobbing, her hand over her mouth as she snorted.
“So, he’s dead.”
“AIDS? He die of AIDS?” Dad asked. “Did that fucking kike faggot give my daughter fucking AIDS?” He slumped back onto the couch.
“Someone shot him in the head. Any idea who it might be?” I pulled the ten-dollar bill from my pocket, crumpled it up, and threw it at him. He snapped to for a moment, snatched it off his lap, and squeezed it tightly in his palm.
“Shot him, eh?” he said. To the girl, he said, “Someone shot my second-best buddy Jerome from high school. Can you imagine that? Shot him right in the fucking head.”
“Second best?” For all I wanted to just strangle him right now, this was the deepest and most intimate conversation I’d had with my father in years. So fuck him. “You talk like a girl,” I told him.
“There’s a hierarchy in all things,” Dad said, the druggie quiver leaving his voice for a moment. Then it was back. “That’s why Communism ain’t ever gonna work, bitch.” It was his last dinner at the apartment all over again.
“So there was a painting of a tower—know anything about that?”
Dad looked at me, his eyes bright and cracked red. “That fucking thing. God, that fucking painting. It went with the house. Yeah, go look in the house.” The house that the bank took, the contents that Dad couldn’t sell to the thrift store having been dragged out to the curb and left. Then he murmured something more about his best friend.
“When did you last see Bernstein anyway?”
“A long time ago, hon. Long ago. Like two weeks ago.”
“Where?” I couldn’t imagine Bernstein having much patience for my father’s bullshit. “Here?”
“Naw, naw,” he said. Then he pointed to his forehead and tapped his temple twice. “I saw him up in here. In heeere.” The girl cackled. Dad focused on me again. “Why ain't you in school? Is it fuckin’ Halloween? I don’t have any candy for you.”
“I graduated last summer, Dad.”
He snorted. “Why ain’t you in college then, eh? You're so fucking smart with your SATs and shit. College girl. You can suck a lot of Jew dick in college.” He put his hands together and rolled the ten bucks i
nto an even tighter ball. “College fucking bitch. I went to college too, you know. And look at me now!” He laughed and laughed and spread his arms wide. “Soon, all this too will be yours.”
I took a giant step backward out of the house, and got into my car and drove. At a red light, I opened the glove compartment, took out a razor, found a tear in my stocking, and left a cut on a patch of new flesh.
4.
The few friends I had in high school—punks like me, and the one kid who loved Lovecraft and didn’t try to hit on me—were all off to their little petit-bourgeois college experiences in Massachusetts or California. That’s how the system parcels out culture, and cultural capital, to reproduce the class system. And my only two living relatives were both out of their minds. But both Grandma and Dad had said some interesting things, and if Bernstein had taught me anything it is that there are no coincidences. The tower painting, and Grandma’s inexplicable recall of it, meant something. Dad’s dream about Bernstein, whether he actually had one or was just trying to fuck with me somehow, meant something too. I went home and checked my copy of 777. There was a chart detailing the proper titles and looks of tarot trumps. Of course, the Tower is bad news. War unto ruin, truths revealed as lies. The revelation that blinds. But the title Crowley suggested—The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty—well, that was interesting. The capitalist class; it could mean nothing else.
Capitalism is an occult formulation. Look at the back of a dollar bill, and it’s all there. That’s what makes the exoteric esoteric; put that shit right on display and that’s how a symbol gains power. The Federal Reserve makes money out of nothing but Will every day—it’s a friggin’ wizards’ guild. Where the pyramid meets the eye is where Bernstein was in life, and where I was now that he was dead. I’d be next with a bullet in the brain, with a gun placed in the wrong hand as a knowing joke.
When the bleeding stopped, I went on my rounds. Afternoons often meant a lot of empty houses, but nothing is more real than someone home alone, away from work or school. The best homes were the predevelopment ones, where the unemployed and underemployed stayed all day, often without air conditioning. They left the blinds up and the windows open. First, I checked in on a grotesquely ugly-cum-beautiful grad student. He was a favorite of mine. A huge Indian fellow, wild sideburns, dressed in suit jackets he couldn’t button around his pendulous belly, constantly chewing on his fingernails. He was grading papers at his kitchen table. A slim Asian girl, Korean American was my guess, brought in some tea. He kissed her hand by way of thanks. I decided to come back some night to see how they fucked. I imagined she’d have to bend over the side of the bed or something. At least he’d kneel before her and put her legs up on her shoulders or something. Maybe they didn’t have a sexual relationship, but just read one another poetry or something. I liked this guy a lot—when I first found him I’d made the racist error of deciding that he was in the sciences, but he was actually part of the English Department over at Stony Brook. Studying the Brontës, even. He took the bus to campus most days, filling two seats in its last row. He even smiled as he graded the papers. Probably because he wouldn’t be living in Port Jefferson forever.
Next was an older woman. My grandmother didn’t know her, so she must have come out here from the city fairly recently. Her lawn was unkempt, so no children to push the mower for her, and no money to hire a landscaper. She had a bay window in the front of her clapboard house and some overgrown hedges hugging the exterior wall, so I was able to squeeze in and get very close. Then my favorite thing happened. This one didn’t like looking out the window. She had the couch right under the window and her television against the opposite wall. And on the show she was watching, one of the characters sat down on his couch, the camera over his shoulder, and turned on his own television. And the show the character was watching was also about someone watching television. I had to stifle a barbaric yawp of glee. The old lady was half-deaf—the TV was blaring, and the TV on the TV was also friggin’ loud—so she didn’t hear my snorting. It couldn’t get any better than that, so I had to move on.
The school bus rolled down Route 25A and let some kids out. Mostly high school freshmen and sophomores, of course, as around here virtually every kid gets a car for his or her sixteenth birthday, but there was one dirtbag senior stuck taking the bus. Did Daddy take the T-bird away, or was he really a sad welfare case of some sort? I knew the kid—his name was Greg, and he had been a year behind me in school. Skinny, blond, acne scars on his cheeks visible from across the street, denim everywhere, Megadeth T-shirt rather than Metallica—clearly an intellectual among metalheads. Well over six foot as well. I had never followed him before, so it was time.
His house was too cute, and neatly kept. Two stories, but there was a tin shed in the backyard to climb on, so I’d be able to get a look even if Greg’s room was upstairs. As a dirtbag, him heading right to his bedroom to put on headphones to either listen to music or practice his guitar playing was a demographic inevitability. The backyard also had a bunch of kiddie toys—a bright plastic Big Wheel, a wading pool, a dangerous-looking swing set piebald with rust stains—so perhaps I’d luck out. Families who shit out a lot of children like to keep the little kids upstairs, and will give the older child a first-floor or basement room. I hovered on the corner for a long moment, then made my move.
Greg had a basement all to himself. A little television, a pretty gigantic stereo, and vinyl and tape everywhere. His CDs were neatly filed on a bookshelf. And he was a bassist, or an aspirant anyway. Permissive parents, or he just didn’t give a shit, as he ran through a lengthy tuning process on a basic Peavey practice amp. I slid down to a squat, then sat on my ass and watched Greg sidelong, so my body wouldn’t drape a shadow over his room and give me away. Sweet Satan, he was practicing standing up, in front of a dusty full-length mirror. There would be no homecoming dance for this boy next week. Or maybe there would. Right atop the mirror, on a high shelf, was a small oil painting in reds and yellows—a great eye, a tower melting under the blazing flames of wisdom, dragon ascendant, shadowy figures hurtling themselves from the walls, like a figure in a faster, hellish Nu descendant un escalier n° 2. The Tower painting.
I slipped my spike ring on and rapped on the basement window till Greg heard me and looked up.
5.
Greg had cigarettes, but didn’t dare smoke them in his bedroom, so we went down by the train crossing to smoke them. Cloves, which he kept hidden from his school friends because cloves are obviously for faggots. He was happy to tell me that he bought the painting at the thrift store run by the local Greek Orthodox church—“for a dollar, because they just wanted it out of there”—but was much more reticent when discussing the why of it all.
“Crowley Tarot,” Greg said between puffs. “Wow.”
“Yeah, wow,” I said. “So, you didn’t know? What were you even doing poking around a Christian thrift store anyway?”
Greg shrugged. “I just went.”
“Ever go before?”
“No.”
“Since?”
“No . . .” He looked at me. The first time he’d made extended eye contact. It was like a flagpole had turned to stare at me. Probably wasn’t used to talking to girls. I made a note not to touch him in any way, as he might misinterpret it as some kind of sex signal. “Why, do you think it’s cursed?”
I laughed and laughed. “No, no, it’s not cursed. And even if it was cursed, here’s how to neutralize the effects of the curse—stop believing in the curse.”
“You don’t believe in curses? Aren’t you a Wiccan or something?”
“Of course not,” I told him. “I’m a Marxist. A Communist.”
“Well, why do you care so much about the fucking painting, if there’s nothing special about it?”
So I told him almost everything. About “Christmas Jerome,” the gun in the wrong hand, my father the crackhead, what I was hoping to do. I kept the details of Liber III vel Jugorum to myself. Greg agreed that it was some
heavy shit. But there was something Greg wasn’t telling me. He looked away again; he lacked the childlike excitement a moron like him should be experiencing when the talk of an afternoon turns to dead bodies and magickal secrets. He hadn’t even asked what I was doing crouched outside his window.
“Want to go to Mount Sinai and see if any of Bernstein’s papers got blown into the woods?” Boy howdy, did Greg want to do that. But he wasn’t interested in walking, though he had no car of his own. I walked off without him. He followed eventually, hair flopping against his shoulders, face flushed.
“Tada!” Greg said as we crossed the yellow lines on Crystal Brook Hollow Road, and passed into Mount Sinai. I swallowed a smile. I used to do that as well.
“Why are you a commie?” Greg asked suddenly. “And into Crowley! Aren’t they, like, opposites?”
“Yes, they are opposites,” I said. “But they have a lot in common. It’s all about changing consciousness, and creating a kind of personal discipline that can change the world.” We were cutting across a lawn, breaking every rule of suburbia, just like every kid ever did all the time.