Love Is the Law by Nick Mamatas Page B

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