Love Is the Law Read Online Free PDF

for lack of a better word, when people started leaving the Eastern bloc en masse. Bernstein had been a Trotskyist years ago, and even stood around the Long Island Rail Road yards in Queens with a copy of a mimeographed revolutionary newspaper for a few hours every Thursday evening and Saturday morning, hoping to stir up the proletariat. I’d seen an old copy of the rag—it was mostly concerned with sectarian battles against the “Pabloites,” to name something that no LIRR employee was at all concerned with. Bernstein’s international had nine members in New York, three in Chicago, and two in Montreal. It was really an extended family; the Canadians were some cousins of the group’s leader, and his wife and kid were heavily involved as well. But it’s the nature of Trotskyist groups to fission, Bernstein told me, and eventually he found himself a faction of one after the relatives had some horrifying Christmastime argument about El Salvador. Also, half the New York cadre were FBI agents.
    But Bernstein kept at it. Trotskyism was a pure kind of “antinomian praxis,” he explained to his Holy Guardian Angel—to himself—that had opened many psychic doors. Even Nazism, that great bellow of rage and resentment from the disaffected, one that had disguised itself as a manifestation of the Overman, was disqualified for actually having had succeeded for a little while. Nothing supported by that many frumpy hausfraus could truly be a rebellion—Bernstein could be a sexist, like all men, regardless of their politics. Of course, Bernstein was also Jewish, which made the cultivation of Nazi politics problematic. Would anyone at the American Nazi Party ever even write him back? But Trotskyism—there was a political framework that wouldn’t ever win. But now, that was Bernstein ’ s problem. Not only was Trotskyism not winning politically; it wasn’t winning intellectually. None of Trotsky’s predictions had come true. They were all unraveling, every night on television. Soon there would be no alternative to neoliberal capitalism at all. O Holy Guardian Angel, what shall I do ?
    The response wasn’t Shoot yourself in the head, boychik.
    Then Greg said, “Hey, do you think it’s true what they say: the perpetrator always returns to the scene of the crime?”
    “People say that?”
    “On television, they do. But even then it’s . . .”
    “Ironic? A cliché that they’re making fun of.”
    Greg said, “Yeah. But where did the idea come from? Is it true?”
    “Are you worried?” I asked. “Maybe he already came and left.”
    “Maybe he’s here right now,” Greg said. “Or she .”
    “Oh, you think it was me. I see. I thought you were confessing at first.” Greg was getting agitated. The best thing to do with an agitated moron is to fan the flames, so they do something exceptionally stupid.
    “Maybe it was you. Maybe you ’ re trying to frame me. We ’ re interfering with a crime scene, aren ’ t we? God, this was fucking stupid—” He threw down the papers he had been leafing through. “Is this evidence? Are my fingerprints on this evidence now? Holy shit, Dawn, what the fuck are you doing to me?”
    I turned square to look at him, fill his vision. “What are we doing here, Greg? Why did you come with me?”
    “Look, I . . . You owe me.”
    “Oh, I owe?” I laughed. “Oh I oh hi-ho!” Greg needed to know I was laughing at him. The big black thing roared up from the Abyss living under where our asses sat and filled my body, swimming behind my eyes. “What do I owe you, eh?”
    “Fuckin ’ bitch.” He licked his lips. His eyes got wide. He didn ’ t have the Will for what he wanted to do to me—a slap across the face, followed by some bullshit HBO movie love rape—but he was close.
    “C ’ mere,” I told him, and slid my hand around his head to pull him close. We kissed. I slid onto his lap, then I bit his face, hard, tearing into the flesh of his lips and cheeks. He shrieked and pushed