Love Is the Law Read Online Free PDF Page A

fuck me if you can buy a copy of the fucking book. I ’ m not even joking. I ’ ll put your balls in my mouth. I ’ ll do it even if you just say you can buy a copy.”
    Greg snorted. “Communism ’ s fucking over. People are running away from it. They want blue jeans and the Scorpions.”
    “So, no cock sucking?”
    “No.”
    “Then you, my friend,” I said, “have a cop in your head. What are you, a rebel and a tough guy who wants to grind the weak under his heel just because he can, or . . .” I let it hang there. Before Greg could even say his snotty little, “Or what ?” I added, “A proud American?”
    “I am a proud American!” Greg said. He caught himself, blushed again, but too late. “I mean, we ’ re the fucking best. We rock.” He added, more quietly, “Fuck you, Dawn.”
    “Keep America beautiful,” I said. “Let ’ s pick up some of this stuff and see what we can see.” We were atop the hill over Bernstein ’ s cabin. There was yellow police tape everywhere, but it drooped into puddles and piles of leaves. LILCO, or the county, or whoever was supposed to be in charge, hadn ’ t bothered to remove the tree. Some of Bernstein ’ s papers had escaped through the gash in the roof and were tangled up in the grass, in those fingery autumn branches he loved, or had just dissolved into blue-and-white piles of pulp from exposure to the elements. I did find an old Love and Rockets comic I had left there and hugged it to myself. Greg asked, incredulously, “Girls read comics?” I rolled my eyes at him.
    Most of the papers were beyond salvaging. The ink had fallen right off the pages—Bernstein was a snob for fountain pens and never typed or printed anything up. Letters to Bernstein were in better shape, but often full of schizophrenic gibberish or plaintive begging for secrets, insights, and money. After a few disappointing minutes, I convinced Greg, wiry as he was, to climb the tree and see if he could drop down through the hole in the roof to get to the file cabinets.
    “Wouldn’t it be cool if the body was still in there?” he asked as he scaled the slantways trunk. My heart clenched and died, but I said sure. Greg wormed through the tear in the house and was gone for a few minutes. Then he called for me to meet him by the window, the one through which Bernstein could always see me.
    “The cops took a lot of stuff, but the bottom drawers of both cabinets were full. I couldn’t get them out, but I pulled the folders.” Greg handed me a bunch, then ducked down and came up with more. Wouldn’t it be cool if he were trapped in this little gray shack forever, starving and decaying but never dying? I thought while waiting for him to make his way back up the hole and around the yard, but he managed it anyway. Greg lost interest in the materials right away, when he saw that a lot of it looked like math and much of the rest like train schedules from unknown cities. Indeed, much of it made little more sense to me than 777 did, but I had some understanding of what was being described and discussed. And occulted, of course.
    Greg, in his invincible ignorance, noticed something I didn’t. “Some of this penmanship is weird,” he said. We were sitting against the side of the house, open folders on our laps. “Same pen, right?” He held up two pieces of paper—originals, not carbons. Bernstein had always mailed people carbons but kept his own work close by. Something about art in the age of mechanical reproduction. “Different handwriting. Are any of these yours, maybe? This one looks girly.”
    It was automatic writing. Correspondence between Bernstein and himself, or his Holy Guardian Angel. It looked almost like but not exactly like his usual penmanship. I took the folder from Greg and started skimming. Greg was attracted to these letters because they were actual letters—a Platonic dialogue of sorts, almost comprehensible to someone like him. Bernstein had had a crisis of “faith,”