Authors: Nick Mamatas
“Names are important things. Your surname, Seliger, means
blessed man
.”
“And
Bernstein
?” I asked, because I knew that
’
s what he wanted me to ask. His voice was an octave lower than usual, after all.
“The stone that burns. Amber was thought to be created by burning, but—”
“Sulfur, eh?” I said. Bernstein smiled at me, his little cocksucking genius. “All fiery and brimstoney. And can the Old Man of Mount Sinai be . . . Saaaatan?” Bernstein normally didn
’
t like my Church Lady impression, but he nodded this time. It was a rare moment of frivolity, and Bernstein
’
s smile was even rarer. I was sufficiently immersed in the memory of it that I barely felt the car move until it stopped in a driveway in Setauket. I scrambled to my feet and before the comic book guy could leave the car I had my shoelace around his neck.
“Surprise!” He was shocked, his eyes wide. I had all the leverage, and his throat, and my Will. I could have killed him then and there, just to show him that I could. To show myself that I could. “Don
’
t piss yourself, please.”
He didn
’
t. He glared at me with infinite hate in his rear-view mirror. Who knows how many daydreams of vigilante heroics he had, or fantasies of being tied up by a wanton she-devil of a girl and utterly ravaged? Well, they both had gone right to shit. I tugged a little tighter on the shoelace. “We
’
re going to go inside and have a nice chat.”
“I
’
ll . . . fuckin
’
. . . kill,” he said as best he could. True, there was no real way I could get him to let me into his house and chat, but I just wanted him to realize that. I smiled at him and leaned back, planting my knees against the back of his seat. He couldn
’
t get his fat fingers between flesh and rope. He kept eye contact with me, which was good for him, so I could see his eyelids flitter and face go purple. When he was just about to lose consciousness, he suddenly shuddered terribly, and I let him go. My plan had been to leave him in the car, alive, while I checked out his apartment, but I hadn
’
t realized that one of his daydreams was still active. He
’
d been touching himself through his jeans with his other hand, and had orgasmed. The smell filled the car.
“Holy fuck,” I said, and I laughed aloud. “You
’
re totally fucking insane.” As I released his throat he started coughing and sputtering. I grabbed the keys from the ignition and left him in the car. My Will guided my fingers around the correct key for the front door on the first try, and I was inside and had the door locked behind me before he even tumbled out of the car and onto the lawn.
I suppose the apartment was typical. Lots of board games and books, a small pond of dirty shirts, VHS tapes with handscrawled labels. And a computer, with a printer! A Macintosh with a case half-brown from cigarette smoke, and gosh, fliers for last night
’
s Abyssal Eyeballs show were still in the printer tray. I had the computer on and was clicking on the folders when he finally came in.
“I had a spare key,” he said, triumphantly. “What the hell?” I turned and made a point of staring at his crotch.
“You have complaints?” I said.
“What the hell!” he repeated, his voice still mostly trapped in his throat.
“I knew you were hiding something,” I said. “Because I am a fucking genius.” I held up the flier. “Didn
’
t know anything about it?”
“I was told you might be coming. Are you someone
’
s sister?”
I snatched a VHS tape at random and waved it around. “Is this child porn?” He sat down, defeated. “What is
Urotsukidoji
?” I said, reading from the label.
“Well, not really child porn. It
’
s an
anime
,” he said. “You know, Japanimation?”
“I
’
m not anyone
’
s sister. Did the older man with the Chelsea girl—”
“Chelsea girl?”
I put a hand to my head and made the shape of bangs with my fingers. “Did he say I was someone
’
s sister? The Chelsea girl
’
s sister.”
“He said it was a surprise party for you,” the man said. “Uhm . . .”
“What
’
s your name?”
“Joshua. And you
’
re Dawn.”
“You have access to the pull lists at the comic store,” I said. “It
’
s not hard to guess I was the ‘Dawn
’
—how many other girls are regulars, or buy anything good? I
’
ll perform the Holmesian displays around here.”
“How did you know I printed out the fliers?”
“Oh, that I didn’t,” I admitted. “I just knew you were hiding something, because you made no effort to pretend that you weren’t. But now that you mention it, they do kind of look like the fliers the store makes for itself.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police right now,” Joshua said. “You could have killed me.”
“And with both hands, you could have freed yourself, but you were too busy jerking off,” I said. “How does it feel, the shoe being on the other foot? You were asking for it, just like a girl in a short skirt.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just kill you and rape you for real,” he said then, his voice a cold dead thing. I showed him my Swiss Army knife, and opened the blade.
“That all you got? You can
’
t kill me with that.”
“I can ruin your day with it.” I showed him my spiked ring too. “And this. And more. And after we had such an intimate moment in your car, too.”
Joshua put a hand up to his neck. He’d have a story for work. “Do you always run around striking up conversations and then attacking people?”
“I have been making a habit of it this week,” I said. “Listen, the older guy you met, with the girl? He’s dead. Shot in the head. I’m trying to figure out who did it, and why.”
He laughed. “Maybe he blew his own head off. Ever think of that?”
“That’s what the cops think, but I know better.”
“Well, I can’t help you,” he said. “I met the guy once. He bought a shitload of comics—
Watchmen
and
Dark Knight Returns
and all the other stuff we can’t keep on the shelves because of all the news and hype. The usual middle-aged guy, except that the girl he was with was actually cute, and not his daughter.”
“And how about her? Did you see her again?”
“I did, actually,” Joshua said. “She gave me a disk with the little symbol in it.” I quickly looked around the table, then realized that he meant the symbol was
in
the disk as a file, not on the disk as a symbol. “She wanted that added to the fliers.”
As leads go, it was a thin one, but even if the Chelsea girl wasn’t the killer she knew Bernstein and that alone made her worth talking to. Apparently, Bernstein had a type anyway. For a second I imagined her on the other side of the house, peeking in through the other window, seeing Bernstein’s body from another angle and coming to the same conclusions I did. And then maybe she attached herself to Greg to get closer to me, almost like I’d forced myself on Joshua.
“Do we look that much alike?” I asked. “Could we really be sisters?” I left myself open, and he took the bait.
“You could be the fat sister,” he said, the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger still massaging the streak of red across his neck. “Hell, you could be the guy’s daughter. You’ve got a big nose, like he does. The other girl’s older than you. Looks young, but maybe midtwenties, and fucking smoking. She wore this slick silk number that hugged her curves. She looked a little like Dagger from
Cloak and Dagger
—”
“Do you want to be alone with your rape videos and stained pants again?”
“Why don’t you get out of here before I change my mind about calling the police.”
“I will,” I said. I grabbed a crumpled napkin and used it to pluck another videotape, this one unlabeled but clearly used, from a coffee table. “Should I keep this to show them when they come to my house?”
“It’s blank,” Joshua said blankly.
“Then you won’t mind.”
“I certainly don’t mind at all.”
“I’ll be on my way then. Do you remember the number for 911?”
“I believe it’s 911. You go home and wait for them and show them that blank tape right before they arrest you for attempted murder.”
“I’ll do that. I’m sure they have a copy of their own in the special jerk-off room right by the coffeemakers and doughnuts display case.”
“That’s where I’d set up a jerk-off room for blank tapes, indeed.”
“I’ll be seeing you then, Joshua.”
“You will be.”
I sauntered outside. He foolishly didn’t open the blinds to watch me leave. I slashed two of his tires so he couldn’t follow me, or mow me down, then broke into a mad run. It was a fairly long walk back home, and the sun was dipping low and red. Once again I’d encountered someone who was linked to Bernstein’s machinations. I had thought he and I were alone against the world, but I was beginning to realize that we were all somehow connected. A web radiating forth from Bernstein, with only a few strands leading directly to me. But I had names and the beginning of a timeline. I just needed to find my skinny little doppelgänger, the Chelsea girl. Or let her find me.
And then someone else found me. Roderick. He was on a ten-speed and roared past me as I was walking down the synchronistically named Cherub Lane. He waved to me, and I was so shocked that he saw me that I waved back and smiled. My face felt goofy, like a pumpkin with a crooked smile.
He stopped with the soles of his feet right in front of me and smiled back. “Hey,” he said. “What brings you out here?”
“Hey, that’s an odd thing to ask a single woman, alone and on her own,” I said. “Are you a stalker? Are you stalking me?” I took a step forward and licked my lips.
It’s important, when encountering young men of fuckable dimensions, to act a little strange at first. It’s not quite playing “hard to get,” which is just Victorian morality and market-based sexual political economy, but something more. You can take a measure of a man, find out how interesting he is, by challenging him. Would Roderick play the brute to cover up his offense? Would he stammer like a schoolboy? And that’s leaving aside the fact that there is no such thing as a coincidence. Whether one believes that we all exist on the currents of aether and spend our lives pushed and nudged about by the Wills of Secret Masters, or if we are just all simply molecules in motion, one thing is true: there are no coincidences.
“I am stalking you,” Roderick said. “I was on my way to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I am also stalking you. It was a perfect coincidence.”
“I see, and why might you be stalking me?”
Roderick blinked. “You mean . . . you don’t know? Don’t you realize what’s going on here? Between us? In the world around us?” Now he was fucking with me. Flirting under conditions of universal alienation from our species-being made it impossible for him to just be honest with me—that’s the fate of sex under capitalism. There was something clever on the tip of my tongue, something clever and long enough to reach all the way down to the pit of my stomach, but I stopped. Bernstein was dead. By no means was our relationship a traditional one, not even on the level of mentor and protégé, or mage and Scarlet Woman, but still, he was a dead old loser with a bullet in his head, and only two people in this world cared about that: me, and the person who had killed him. What was I supposed to do? Spread for some kid who either had a condom in his wallet for just such an occasion, or well-rehearsed justification for not ever using one? Fuck that.
“Kid, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told him. “I’m tired.” And by saying so, I became tired. “I’ve got to get home. I’ll see you around. It’s a small town.”
“There’s another Abyssal Eyeballs show,” Roderick called out after me. “A couple of nights from now! There are things you need to know!”
“I know everything I need to know,” I said without turning back, without even glancing over my shoulder. “I am a fucking genius!”
When I got home, Grandma was reading the
TV Guide
slowly, to herself, cheering each jeer and jeering each cheer, and the painting of the Tower was still in front of the television screen.
I was up all night. One thing my mother said that always worked for me is this:
When you’re anxious or upset at night, go to bed anyway. Even if your mind is racing, your body will get some rest.
There’s an interesting little division between mind and body. The Marxists wouldn’t have it, but there is something to be gained from seeing oneself as one’s own homunculus pulling the levers and turning the cranks of the body. Even if it’s not true, it’s often best to behave as though it is true. And that’s magick. I’d programmed the body well; I was going crazy, getting close to killing someone, finding my limbs doing things that years of school and church and parents should have hardwired them against ever doing. All in the cause of j______. I was worried that I might soon murder someone. It’s not a moral issue, but a practical one. I’d never find Bernstein's killer in prison. The ethics of sacrificing someone . . . Well, there’s a long history of bloodletting unto death for ritual or social purposes. “The ethics of the thing appear to have concerned no one; nor, to tell the truth, need they do so,” Crowley once wrote. Of course, that particular essay ended with the sentence, “You are also likely to get into trouble over this chapter unless you truly comprehend its meaning.”
But I was not truly comprehending anything. What had Bernstein been up to? He knew my father, perhaps even knew me from afar before I met him, owned the home in which I grew up, and even somehow planned the Abyssal Eyeballs show for me. Then there was that Chelsea girl—another me. Maybe even a better me. Was the Hispanic kid also one of Bernstein’s? Greg? Bernstein could have planted the painting with him, or simply whipped up another one. Bernstein had seen me coming, after all.
How many points does a unicursal hexagram have? That’s a simple question with a simple and inaccurate answer—six. But the line, drawn properly, forms four triangles and a pair of rhomboids and a quartet of quadrilaterals, so there’s another twenty-eight, on the inside. The hexagram is all about movement, a dialectic between Abyss and Divinity, and movements always get more complex the more you focus on them. I thought of myself as the center of Bernstein’s symbolic life, the five-petaled flower Crowley dropped in the middle of the shape to symbolize heaven, but maybe I was just marooned on some distant tip, and seeing everything from the wrong vantage point.
I couldn’t go searching for the Chelsea girl, I decided. Partially because I was annoyed with Greg, and partially because two people on the move would hardly ever find one another. In the morning, I would strike. She would find me. People have a habit of finding me, just as I have a knack for finding them. It’s a small town, just like I’d told Roderick.
That morning, I put myself in the center of town. Or rather, right on the border between two villages—Port Jefferson Station and Port Jefferson Village are bisected by the Long Island Rail Road tracks. We have separate zip codes, different post offices, everything. In the dreams of some suburban planner, the Village was for the wealthy and the Station is where the wealthy would keep their maids, and plumbers, and pizza parlors, but the border was a porous one. My father’s squat was technically in the Village, and all sorts of rich assholes lived in Port Jefferson Station. I toed the line between the two, literally, by standing on the railroad tracks, right on Main Street. It was just after the morning rush had ended, so there were fewer trains to concern myself with, and more vehicle traffic. The time was right, the conditions were right—I would summon her.
I walked across the tracks to the middle of Main Street and began my reverse breathing—pulling in the belly on the inhales, pushing out the belly on the exhales. A diesel engine idled by the railroad station. I stood between lanes like a traffic cop in an old movie, cars brushing right by me. I could have reached out and adjusted the rearview mirrors as they passed, had I wished to. Time passed quickly. It was so difficult not to think of Chelsea Girl, not to think of a white horse galloping around a church. There was a shudder under my feet, but it was not the big black thing from the Earth’s core. Some lever had been thrown on the locomotive engine. I dared not glance at my watch, or that would break the spell. Port Jefferson Station is the terminus of the line, and by definition also the origin, so the trains leaving the station tended to leave on time. But what time was it? Had it been forty-five minutes already?
Here’s the thing about using one’s Will to go unnoticed. One really has to be nonchalant about it. It’s not true invisibility at all—there’s no atom-sized black hole conveniently sucking the light in all directions. You’re there. You’re visible. You just must act
above
notice, and not beneath notice. Humans are predators; we seek out the weak, we crave them. The sniveling coward can never hide. Curling up into a ball practically sends out a cloud of fuck-kill-eat pheromones that attracts sharks in the form of men. But it’s hard to be nonchalant when a locomotive is rumbling a few yards away. I finally glanced over. The conductor was still on the platform, his uniform just archaic enough to be comforting. That hat, the blue blazer. From my perspective, on the tracks, waiting to shrug my shoulders and hold a little sit-in of one, I realized for the first time how insanely LIRR personnel dressed. What were the semiotics of those little round caps, the large bills, the metal plate?
The red lights flared and the railroad crossings jerked to life and began to lower. For a moment my Will deserted me and I glanced about nervously. There she was, in a weird white boat of a Volvo, laughing at me, both middle fingers way up. Then she sneered and honked the horn, cranking down her window. “Hey, you stupid bitch!” she shouted. “Get off the tracks!” I bolted, ducked the railroad crossing, and tried her door, but she managed to slam the lock shot with her palm first. The Volvo was an older model, but a big station wagon type; Chelsea Girl had already reached over and locked the passenger side door too before I’d even rounded the corner. I tried the back hatch, but it was also locked. No plates. The train began to pull out of the station. Traffic had backed up, but Chelsea Girl threw the car in reverse and tried to edge me out. I grabbed the roof rack and pulled myself up onto the car’s ridiculously huge rubber bumper. She stopped just before backing her rear, and my own, into the car immediately behind us. Now everyone started yelling, hooting, honking their car horns. The train roared past and I howled, joyously. At least something was leaving Long Island for fabled Mannahatta.
Lo! Upsprang the aboriginal name!
Chelsea Girl wasn’t going to speed off; traffic was always a crawl down Main Street, and a cop car was generally idling nearby in case someone decided to cause some trouble for the railroad. Main Street also had a semisecret identity as Route 25A, a state road. And state roads meant state troopers. A very visible me hanging from the rear of her car—one sans license plates—limited her choices even more severely than they limited mine. When the rail crossings rose, she drove immediately into the train station parking lot. I ran around to the passenger side, hoping she didn’t store a revolver in the glove compartment. The air didn’t smell like death just then, but I hadn’t quite determined whether Chelsea Girl was an intelligent person or just some arbitrary bitch as of yet. She reached over and unlocked the door. I got in, locked it again, planted a boot against the glove box, and told her to get a move on, but she was smart enough to do that. The parking lot had another exit, so we took that one and drove out onto Railroad Avenue, which was sooty and underdeveloped, like a patch of acne on a cute face. Like Chelsea Girl’s face, I noticed now. She was younger than I had imagined. Maybe a sophomore, with makeup troweled on like a high hair on her way to the mall. It was the haircut that was out of place; that was her invisibility.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You know where,” the Chelsea girl said.
“What’s your name?”
She glanced up at her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Chelsea will do.”
So Bernstein had had another girl. Was I his girl? Maybe Chelsea actually went all the way with him. But I’d never seen her around before, and there are few enough punks around the North Shore that we mostly all know one another. But her haircut was new. Maybe Bernstein had put her up to it—a bit of antinomian praxis. I grinned to myself, imagining some high hair chucking her Aqua Net into the Long Island Sound, then getting on her knees before Bernstein to submit to a head shaving.
“So Chelsea, how did Bernstein get you to fuck him?” I asked. “What did he show you?”
“Maybe I’m the one who showed him a thing or two,” she said. The Volvo had a very loud blinker. “Maybe I was the teacher, and he was the student.”
“I doubt that.”
“Because I’m young. Because I’m a woman. Because you’re ineffectual, and so you think all young women must be ineffectual. Looking for
daddy
, princess?” She pulled up close to what was left of Bernstein’s house but then drove past it and off the road. The Volvo steered onto a secret path, one little more than a pair of tire ruts, and climbed a grade up behind the house and into a clearing. There were plenty of branches, snapped and hanging from trees, and littering the floor of the clearing, but Chelsea wasn’t worried about scratching her car.
I realized that I was making assumptions. When I looked at Chelsea, I’d been seeing myself—a doppelgänger. I just assumed she had been with Bernstein, had been enamored of him, like I was. She was being cagey, trying to get something out of me just as I was with her . . . because she didn’t know very much about Bernstein after all. The “Jewish-looking” guy Joshua said she had been with at the comic shop could have been anybody. Hell, it could have been my father. Even in his saner days, he’d come home from work on Friday nights, upset, when a Lubavitcher would stop him on the street and ask if he were Jewish. “My father’s big fucking nose,” he’d say.
“I’m looking, but you found yourself a daddy, didn’t you?” I said. “Nice Volvo, by the way. Did you have to promise to load and unload the dishwasher every night for a week to get to borrow it?”
“I have a job,” she said. “Get out of the car.” I hustled out before she did and led the way down to the ridge right over Bernstein’s plot of land. Another epiphany: this would be a great vantage point for someone interested in Bernstein’s way of life, and my own comings and goings. Chelsea had been watching me watch Bernstein. I told her as much.
“You’re a fucking genius, aren’t you?” she said.
“And you didn’t kill him.”
“Of course not.”
“You wouldn’t bring me here if you had,” I said.
“No, I wouldn’t. Unless I was some psychopath,” she said.
“Of course, some might argue that magick is a course in applied psychosis.”
The local weather turned cold in a moment. Chelsea’s face was flushed, as if she had sucked all the molecular motion in the air into her pores.
“Is that what he told you? Was it all a joke to you?” There was a razor in her throat now. No more Long Island tough girl; she really meant it.
“Yes. No,” I said. Then I added, “Maybe.” My grandmother used to do that—cover every possible answer—before her memory left her. “But regardless of what he told me, you know it’s true.” I didn’t even know whether or not she was talking about Bernstein at all, who had never called magick
applied psychosis
in so many words. But it was true. It is true.
Chelsea narrowed her eyes. “So, is that why you did it?”
“I didn’t kill Bernstein, if that’s what you’re asking.” I was amazed at how casual the words sounded coming out of my mouth. Chelsea was too.
“That’s not what I was asking!” she said. “You know what you did!”
“I don’t know a goddamn thing, except that I know nothing.”
“We’re both just trying to baffle one another with bullshit,” she said after a long moment. She glanced down at the cabin, and pointed her chin at it. “I’ve seen you skulking around here. And in Port Jeff too. You’re so fucking ridiculous. You’re like a cartoon villain hiding behind a bush and lifting it up to sneak around, tiny feet going
dinka-dinka-dinka
.”
“Nice haircut,” I told her. “Is it new?”
“I was here that night when you looked through the window, and then stumbled backward, then started running.”
“I wouldn’t call it running . . .”
Chelsea gave me the once-over. “Yeah, I wouldn’t call it running either.” A middle-class bitch with a middle-class joke, despite her new lifestyle. No surprises, except what came next.
“He killed himself, you know. Bernstein was all about changing his life to test himself, to find his true Will underneath all the rubbish of society.”
“But—”
“He shot himself with his off hand,” Chelsea said. “Think about it: the guy on the left-handed path, who happens to be left handed. Who is committed to living life to its fullest finding death with his right hand.”
I shook my head. “Poetic, but bullshit.” Chelsea had nothing to say to that. I told her, “Just because you didn’t see anyone come in or out of the house doesn’t mean Bernstein killed himself. I presume you got a police report and read about the gun. You’re just trying to get me to say something, or do something. There’s something you want.”
“Oh, I already have what I want. I just want to keep it,” Chelsea said, but not to me. She glanced away, beyond Bernstein’s house.
“Did you bring me here to get a confession out of me? Just to let me know that you’ve been watching me?”
“Hey girl, you’re the one who’s been looking for me. You jumped on the back of my fucking car.”
“What was your relationship to Bernstein?”
Chelsea twisted her lips, thinking. Then she said, “He was . . . a friend of a friend. I wasn’t sucking his dick or anything, not like some nameless sluts that come to mind.”
I filed that away—both the information and the attack. I had nothing else to say to her, but I knew I’d see Chelsea again. If she were my doppelgänger it stood to reason, for some definition of reason, that she might have her own version of Bernstein. Perhaps the right-handed suicide she knew was my left-handed murder victim, or perhaps there was another person much like Bernstein out there somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island. A rival.