Free Love Is the Law by Nick Mamatas

Mutant Ninja Turtles was a cartoon now, and everyone knew about indie comics, but the store was still wallpapered with Batman posters and graphic novels of all sorts, and one color—bluish-black—thanks to the movie. Girls were rare as comets around here and twice as hard to communicate with, so nobody bothered to try.
    I poked around for a bit, just enjoying the smell of the ink and the way conversations would end as I drifted past, when I saw the flier for yesterday ’ s “event via the Abyssal Eyeballs.” That ’ s what the text read, in part.
    BEHOLD!
    A happening
    and event
    via
    The Abyssal Eyeballs
    9pm
    9/18/89
    (718) 555-6666

    Obviously not the typical punk flier. No stencils, no logos, no hand-scrawled instructions or commentary, and no shadows left behind by photocopying cut-out letters or words. It was laid out on a computer, by a word processing program, and just printed out. And there was a tiny unicursal hexagram, and that was some sort of clip art, not hand drawn or cut out either. The number for the venue was the usual concert phone number. But the flier did narrow things down quite a bit—someone with a computer, and probably some money. Not the usual punk rock kid, but I knew that already. More importantly, someone with almost no idea what a proper concert flier should look like. And someone had been here to drop them off.
    I took a flier up to the cashier, who was yet another tall fellow in glasses, with bushy hair. “Do you remember this flier?”
    “Uhm . . .” he said. He was reading about the friggin ’ Hulk of all things, but he put down the comic. “I do. There ’ s a whole bunch over there already.”
    “Yes, I know. Do you remember who dropped these off, or when?”
    He smiled. “I thought you had dropped them off, with that guy?” Then he pointed a finger at the top of my head and drew a circle around my hairdo. “But I guess it was someone else.”
    The Chelsea girl. There are innumerable subtle differences between a Chelsea and a proper Mohawk, but most of them would be invisible to the sort of poor pathetic bastard who ’ d end up working in a comic book shop in his midthirties. He wasn ’ t even my usual cashier, but I normally came in on Wednesdays anyway.
    “And was the guy Spanish?” He just looked at me. “You know, Hispanic? About my age and yay tall. Name of Roderick?” I held a hand over my head. He actually reached out to touch me, and moved my palm about seven inches higher. If he noticed the look on my face—if I could kill someone with my mind, I would have—he didn ’ t register it on his own ugly puss. Then he said, “Nah, an older guy. Big nose. You know . . .” Then sotto voce, “Jewish looking.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “Oh, a few weeks ago,” the cashier said. “It was so memorable. To be honest, we don ’ t get a lot of female customers, and they certainly don ’ t come in with older gentlemen. I was sure something kinky was going on.”
    “I ’ ll be back here soon,” I said. “With a picture. Will you be here to identify him as the person you saw?”
    “You a cop?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “I mean, you don ’ t look like a cop.” Then he laughed. “What is this, like, Baker Street or something?” He meant the comic about a punk Sherlock Holmes that sounded much better than it actually was. His behavior was strange. Never before had a clerk at Farpoint, or any comics shop, not simply fallen all over himself to answer any question I might have.
    “Listen, dude, whatever,” I told him, and left. I got some ice cream and headed back out to the parking lot. That guy was too husky to walk to work—it was just a matter of figuring out which car was his, and there were few enough in the lot. It was a demographic inevitability that his car would be a piece of shit, and thus I didn ’ t even need to see the not all who wander are lost bumper sticker on the off-white 1983 Chevy Chevette to know it belonged to him. And