by Nick Mamatas
This afternoon was colder than chilly. An autumnal near frost, the wind fueled by the Long Island Sound. It hurt my bones, the wind did, and I decided to walk into it. When I was a kid my father took me to the docks at the edge of Port Jefferson and explained to me that my second grade teacher was wrong—Christopher Columbus didn’t discover that the world was round. The ancients knew it, from peering out at the horizon and watching ships come in over the curve of the Earth. And we waited for a ship to come in, but the sandbars and the fact that the Sound was only about twenty miles wide ruined our chance.
I walked up into Belle Terre to check on the Riley family of cardboard-pizza eaters. I was curious whether they’d be home—were they Wall Street types who commuted three hours each way to enjoy their stainless steel freezer full of frozen foods, or were they Old Money who just happened to “have” their riches in the same way the rest of us have a pair of ears? It was midafternoon by the time I got to their house, and the low sun painted the stonework in yellows, oranges, and reds. I expected that either the house would be dark and empty, except perhaps for an overweight Latina with a push broom, or that the couple would be home, enjoying doughnuts and cider in their J. Crew sweaters. Reality without Will often conforms to cliché, after all.
The cleaning lady wasn’t Latina, but she was otherwise what one might expect from Belle Terre—it was the old Greek lady who had the fifteen cats at her own house about a mile away, with her usual shuffling gait and an old black dress and cardigan. She was in the kitchen, mostly keeping herself busy. Her car wasn’t in the driveway; perhaps Belle Terre had local rules to keep aged automobiles out of the development, and she had had to walk up the long and winding path to get here.
And the man was home in the enormous living room. Disappointingly, he wasn’t in drag, or nude and swinging from a noose, or fucking a ten-year-old boy. He was watching television. CNN. Protesters in the GDR again. What a huge television it was, practically the size of one of the walls of my bedroom at Grandma’s apartment. He had something in his lap: a white bread sandwich. And he lifted half of it—did the maid cut it diagonally for him on request or out of long-standing habit?—to his rich face and bit into it like an animal, his cheeks stuffed. Did watching history end before his very eyes give him an erection? The inevitable triumph of capitalism must have made his Wonder Bread taste extra special, I’m sure.
Suddenly, I was sick. My stomach turned inside out and started crawling up my throat. This was something other than Will; it was pure autonomic response. My arms moved, herky-jerky, and picked up one of the bleached white rocks at my feet. The shrubbery was lined with them. I threw it at a window and it bounced off. Then I screamed, picked it and a few more up, and flung them at the window with both hands. A clatter, then a scatter. Not even a scratch. High-tech, high-security stuff designed to look just like every other early twentieth-century mansion in Belle Terre. He didn’t even hear it.
I avoided the comic shop and the rest of downtown Port Jefferson, though I hadn’t eaten and was getting very hungry. I even stayed off Main Street, in case someone recognized me from my morning antics at the LIRR. I thought to try to find Roderick, but given how my last stunt with finding someone had gone, I thought the better of it. Greg, I could talk to, if only to warn him away from Chelsea.
How strange my libido was. It was an animal of its own, a lioness in the cage of my skull. I was in mourning for an older man, on a mission of j______. No, a mission of revenge. I had spent the last couple of years purposefully alienating myself from the local boys, with Twinkies and Manic Panic and a cultivated surliness. And now I was jealous of another girl, and desirous of cock my own age. Hell, had Riley turned around after I’d thrown that rock I probably would have offered to suck his dick too. Learn a little capitalist magick for once, maybe.
I was surprised to find Greg and Roderick together, in Greg’s front yard. Greg was raking the leaves, or pantomiming the same, working over the same mud-brown pile. Roderick stood on the curb, smoking a cigarette. I saw them before they saw me and got a chance to listen in for a few seconds.
“—all fucked up,” Greg said.
“The whole world is, it’s true,” Roderick said. “Ever see that movie, Something Wicked This Way Comes? It’s like that—a storm is coming.”
“The seller of lightning rods arrived before the storm,” I said as I walked up to them.
“I didn’t even read it. I think I saw the movie once,” Greg said. “Oh, hi, Dawn.”
“You guys know each other?”
“Who do you think the lightning rod seller is?” Roderick asked me.
“Maybe a better question is who the lightning rod is, Rod.”
“I’ve known Roderick for a long time. Forever even.” Greg leaned on the rake as if his labors of several minutes had exhausted him. “We took tae kwon do together when we were seven.”
“I went to Catholic school. My mother used to drive me all the way out to Huntington and back every day,” Roderick said.
“Is that what you two were doing? Reminiscing about karate class?”
“Tae kwon do,” Greg said.
“We were talking about all the weird shit going on lately,” Roderick said.
“You told him about Bernstein,” I said to Greg, who just shrugged. “What other weird shit is going on lately?” I asked Roderick.
It was his turn to shrug, but he answered, “Well, there was the Abyssal Eyeballs.”
“Which you were a part of.”
“Like I said, I just had a feeling,” Roderick said.
“Is that what they taught you in Catholic school—to get in touch with your feelings?” I wanted to smile at him, at both of them, really. But I couldn’t.
“I’ve been doing house shows for a while—”
“Out in Huntington?” Greg said.
“Yeah. Catholic-school girls like anything transgressive,” Roderick said. He shot me a look out of the corner of his eye.
“Ha, I noticed,” Greg said.
“Is this how guys talk when there are no girls around, boys?” That shut them up. “Good boys. You should stop smoking, Rod. And Greg, don’t you own any non—Iron Maiden T-shirts? There’s no reason to play Casanova Badass with me.”
“What do you want?” Greg said, petulant.
“Remember that girl at the show? The one whose esophagus you cleaned out with your tongue? She’s a bad penny, that one. If there’s weird shit going down, I guarantee you that she’s involved in it.”
“And you’re not?” Greg said.
“Yeah, maybe you’re the lighting rod seller,” Rod said.
“I’m the lightning rod,” I told them. “And I’m not a commodity, not a capital good. I am the thing in itself, a use value.”
“Okay, I’m confused,” Greg said.
“Good,” I said, and I turned on my heel and walked off, waiting just a moment too long before appending bye to the word good. Roderick launched into an explanation of Marxism for Greg as I turned the corner. He must have been educated by Jesuits.
It was twilight by the time I picked my way through the side streets and back to the apartment, and when I walked in the police were there in the kitchen, waiting for me, and Grandma was sitting at the table, sobbing like a toddler.
“Look at you,” one of the cops said. There were five of them—there had never been so many people in the apartment, not even when Grandma had fallen last year and the EMTs had come—and they all were smirking. “Halloween isn’t for another three weeks, fuckin’ freak.”
“Murder . . .” Grandma whispered.
12.
I’m not a huge fan of the show I Love Lucy, but of course I’ve seen every episode. Despite my interests in magick, overthrowing capitalism, and punk rock, I’m still living in the suburbs of the United States, and my grandmother owns a television. Of course I watched it as a kid, and like most people I have a favorite scene. A kabbalist might call my reminiscence about Lucy an example of Qliphoth—an impure “hus
k” left behind after the moment of Divine Emanation.
Anyway, my favorite scene isn’t the one on the chocolate factory assembly line—though is there a better example of speed-up and increased exploitation in popular culture?—or Lucy’s drunken attempt to sell Vitameatavegamin, a classic critique of consumerism and bourgeois medical “science.” My favorite scene is from the episode when Tennessee Ernie Ford plays Lucy’s hick “Cousin Ernie” from Tennessee. He got lost on the way to the Ricardos’ fancy Manhattan apartment, and walked across Long Island to find it.
“You walked all the way from Long Island?” Lucy asks, incredulous.
“Yup. Ding-donged if it ain’t,” Ernie answers.
“What?”
“A loooooong island,” Ernie says.
When I was a kid, family legend had it that I would only eat when I Love Lucy was on TV. Luckily for my mother, and for me, Channel 5 aired it three times a day, and around breakfast time, lunch, and dinner. I don’t even remember the first time I saw my favorite scene, but of course I remember the first time I remember—I was six, and it was five o’clock, and the Long Island scene came on and I squealed with excitement. “Lucy knows about Long Island! She made a joke about Long Island!”
“You say that every time,” my mother had said, but I hadn’t remembered anything that had ever been so thrilling. The pretty woman who called herself a redhead even though she was clearly in black and white had somehow acknowledged my existence, just as I worshiped her thrice daily. I’ve been looking for that moment again ever since. Bernstein told me that one could dig enlightenment from Qliphoth, and there we go—I just did.
I had thought of my favorite scene from I Love Lucy for a fairly banal reason: Long Island is very long. The pigs arrested me for Bernstein’s murder, cuffed me, took me downstairs and around the back where their three black-and-whites were hiding, near the apartment complex’s garbage bin. They shoved me in the back seat of one of the cars, hit their sirens and lights, and we sped down to Riverhead. It was a long trip. This is a loooong island. The sun was down when we got to the county lockup.
My look did not go over well in the holding cell. There were three other women, all black, older than me, and members of the lumpenproletariat, in holding. We all wore our civilian clothes—the presumption of innocence, you see, despite the bars and the desk pig’s rape threats, though they did take away my boots—and they wore cheap T-shirts despite the autumnal chill. One was still in sandals. There were about as many teeth in my head as there were in between them. I had a racist thought when they turned to look at me as one, when their chatter ceased—Do these girls know each other? Are they a gang? Are they gonna jump me? No, they were strangers to one another.
“Who the fuck are you?” said one woman, who looked like a collection of five broomsticks. “A punk rocker?”
One of the others, who, I realized as she spoke, was actually sitting on the cell’s toilet and taking a shit, said, “That’s pretty obvious.”
The third just stared. I wanted to stare back. I could have won any staring contest, easily, but there were three of them to keep track of. Of them. That old racist flinch. Isn’t every man and woman a star? “I won’t be here for long,” I said. “You can get on with your evening in a bit.”
“What you don here for?” the toilet woman asked.
I wasn’t sure if don was “done” or “down” but I told her half a lie. “They say I killed my boyfriend, but it wasn’t me.” The girl who was staring at me kept staring, but now she was smiling.
“It wasn’t none of us,” said the toilet woman.
“Who was it?” said the first woman, then she laughed. “Who killed your man?” They all laughed at that, then started speaking amongst themselves, about me, as though I wasn’t there. I was the dumb white bitch who certainly didn’t have a boyfriend because I looked like the devil, and I probably was a chickenhead, and I was an ugly cunt as well. The staring woman had joined in on the conversation too, but without taking her eyes from me.
Obviously, Chelsea was the lightning rod seller, and she had sold me out to the pigs. Maybe the trip out to Bernstein’s was just to give the cops time to show up at the apartment and terrify my grandmother. My grandmother, who could already have tried to make herself dinner, like she used to, but one lapse in her attention and the kitchen would go up in flames. It was extremely important that I not care about this at all, to match my doppelgänger emotion for emotion, thought for thought. And then, find a way to take one step beyond where she was, to get the better of her.
I had the feeling that the cops didn’t take the murder charge all that seriously. Nobody did. There had been no news van outside, no more than the usual sneers any punk on Long Island gets from the pigs, no interrogation or even casually incriminating conversation on the long drive over. The pigs who had arrested me didn’t even glance at me in the rearview mirror. There was a force at work beyond the state, that dark thing that lived under the sands of the island, that lived out in the Sound. It had no more of an interest in j______ than I did, but it was moving with a Will of its own to run interference for me, I could feel it.
The starer decided that she wanted my shirt, which was a man’s Hanes pocket T-shirt I’d decorated with a Sharpie. Admittedly, it was still in better shape than hers. “Take it off,” she told me. The air in the cell changed.
“Fuck off,” I said. “Dyke.” I added that last bit to make her angry, but she just kept simmering.
“I don’t care about your titties, white girl. I just want that shirt.”
She didn’t want the shirt. She wanted to humiliate me, and to bond with the others in the cell. The others who belonged here, and knew it, and resented me for not belonging. And they were right; something was very wrong with my presence here, and I wouldn’t be staying long. But there was no way I was going to lose this little game either, and no way I was going to let her beat me up, so I played the card I was dealt.
“In that case,” I said, “here you go.” And I reached down and pulled the shirt over my head, folded it sloppily, and handed it to her. My bra was black and leopard print, and got an appreciative snicker from the woman on the toilet, who I then realized had stopped shitting. She was playing a game of her own. Would we have to beg for our chance to use the commode, and thank her for warming it for us, later?
“That’s right, here I go, you fucking fat white bitch,” the starer said. I stared back at her this time. The locus of power had shifted sufficiently. This must be what Scarlet Women feel like, I found myself thinking. Omnipotent, not vulnerable, in their nakedness.
“Your stomach,” the starer said, blinking. My stomach had a little bit of a gut, and it was crisscrossed with gashes from those moments when I slipped and dared think about j______. “Your man do that to you?”
I looked down, frowned, then shrugged. “No, it was me.”
“Why do you do that for?”
“To remind myself that nobody ever gets, or deserves, an even break,” I said.
The first woman laughed. “I could have told you that already, child.” And with that the mood lifted. It was chilly in the cell, and the women made no room for me either on the benches or on the floor near the vent, so I stood all night, hands in front of my belly in a zhan zhuang pose, just breathing in and out, trying to empty my mind and fill it with my body.
Breakfast was McDonald’s—Egg McMuffin, no hash browns, no coffee because coffee could be a weapon. The three women drank water, I took nothing, but the smell of industrial grease agitated my stomach and drove me wild. My mouth was full of saliva when I was finally led to the phone to make my phone call. A guard gave me an orange top, which was flimsier than a hospital gown, to wear for my walk down the hall. Someone had written presumed innocent on the back with a smelly Magic Marker so that I would not be confused with actual convicted criminals. That was one of the few rituals of legality, for the law is a magick all its own that exists as pure Logos with hardly any intersection with the world of
material creation, given to me. Still no interrogation, no hint of a public defender, not even a mention of a murder charge. At the phone, which was an old pay phone rigged with steel bars for some reason, I realized that I had nobody to call. I wracked my brains for a moment, then asked for the White Pages. My first instinct was to open to a random page and stab at it with my finger, then call that person, but then I realized that Greg was in the book. Not that he had any money. But he did answer the phone. It was a Saturday morning.
“Greg, it’s Dawn. I’m in Riverhead, at the jail.”
“Holy shit.”
“Listen, I need you to do something for me . . .” I said. Then I explained that I wanted him to go over to Stony Brook—“Take the bus; it’s only a dollar and it arrives at Meat Farms every hour on the hour, Jesus Christ!” I had to tell him—and to find some Red Submarine flier or leaflet or pamphlet. The campus was littered with them. Then call that number, and ask for Mike, and arrange for him to come down to the jail, maybe with an attorney, to find out what was going on with charges or bond or an arraignment on my behalf.
“Uh, why would he even do any of that?” Greg asked.
“Because he’s a Marxist. And he has money.”
“How do you know he has money?”
“Because he’s a Marxist! Poor people on Long Island don’t care about Marxism. It’s a rich person’s hobby, like collecting vintage decoy ducks.” The guard stiffened. “I have to go, just do it! Blowjobs for everyone, after the revolution!”
I had no idea if Greg would go to Stony Brook, or manage to find Mike’s number, or if he could even be bothered to call Mike. I would have asked Roderick, but I didn’t have his number, and he was a bit too independently minded. Maybe I should have just sent Greg to find out what happened to Grandma. Did the state get its paws on her? Maybe that would be for the best. Worse—they could have somehow got in contact with Dad, who might even now be in the apartment, shoving jewels and tchotchkes into a pillowcase, or maybe even liberating the television. Or perhaps he was done with his new exotic lifestyle of squatting in abandoned buildings with crack whores, and decided to just move himself in and “take care” of Grandma.