Philip Habsburg
This morning as I sit atop this watchtower situated on the highest point in Fort Greene Park and gaze down upon my brethren in the struggle who scurry along Myrtle Avenue as if not to scurry would be to die—and it could—I contemplate the trouble; not the trouble of the world, which is coincident, coextensive, and will be coterminous with it, but the trouble of another dear and finite entity, my son, John Martin. Someone blundered, maybe his mother, if a force of nature could be said to blunder; one cannot fault and cannot but love a woman who mates like a man, fuck and move on, fuck and move on. Where is she now? Myrtle Avenue, Flatbush, DeKalb, the long view down to Coney Island, Myrtle, Flatbush, DeKalb, I am spinning around in an ancient wheeled office chair spinning around in an office chair spinning in an office chair spinning in a chair spinning my beloved son are you dead or alive? What had happened when you came home from school on that first afternoon of your thirteenth year and wept and continued to weep past nightfall? What did it mean when you came home afternoon after afternoon and wept? The torn bedclothes, the marks on the wall, the cuts on your thigh and forearm and wooden floor, the episodes of swollen feet and hands and lips, the hours in the basement, the diaries written and burned, written and burned? In week four of your daily weeping I deployed a strategy of unwavering irritability to see you through the crisis. Your stepmother, the first official Mrs. Philip Habsburg, may she remain deceased, chose as her strategy incomprehension and oft-articulated impotence. “I’m scared,” you eventually shrieked, to whom I forget, “I’m scared of the other boys. They are horrible, horrible creatures,” as if that explained anything. I hadn’t yet defected from Manhattan then. I put you in the finest school and when you squirmed and wailed I held you there. And now you are a vicious, willfully stupid twit, weakling, and my mortal enemy, as is Jimmy Stuart your boss, as is Penny Ratcliffe my erstwhile concubine, now his. Manhattan’s finest schools produce Manhattanites and for that reason must be destroyed. At this moment multiple phalanxes of assassins are moving across the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges in what I hope will be a decisive maneuver in our peaceful ongoing diplomatic exchange with the people of that fetid isle. And here up the side of the tower comes a Manhattanite in skintight black jumpsuit and mask. I steady my rifle down the tower’s vertical wall, sight him, pull; a liquid wad of red springs up from a hole in the black mask, dissipates, and falls in separate droplets to the flagstones below, followed moments later by the Manhattanite himself. He is swept up by the tattered remains of the patrol he hasn’t killed and I shout down to them, “Someone relieve me!” Expert work by this assassin, he seems to have dispatched ten of my men; slightly more expert work by me. I stroll now down the hill to the tented outdoor command center on the erstwhile tennis courts. These are the few last fine days of spring. In a week we’ll move in out of the beastly sun to our bunker in South Portland Street. Johnny Martin, where are you, and are you my fault? Before I die I’d like to see you, hail you, hug you, kiss you, love you, plumb your depths, and kill you.
Sidney Feingold
JOHN ROLFE. The “communications officer,” this should be interesting. Looks more like an aesthete—a worn-down aesthete, a sad and angry aesthete, is there any other kind?—than someone who can communicate or accomplish anything. His long greasy brown hair adheres to his skull and neck; they all have greasy hair but one senses the present subject’s hair would be styled the same even were he not on the rag end of nowhere. Dark and sunken eyes with a crepuscular lividness to the skin surrounding them. Dark purple lips of medium thickness coming to two sharp gynecoid points beneath the nose, ever pursed as if to kiss or make a remark so subtle only a listener with a self-endangering degree of empathy for the speaker would discern its full meaning. Skin in the same deplorable condition as that of his comrades, though one suspects in his case he’s let a quarter-inch paste of grease build up atop the skin as a form of shield for an organ twice as sensitive as that of an average man. Posture: snakelike, wound around his own body as if to strangle and consume himself.
“This chair is uncomfortable,” says the subject.
“Apologies.”
“Say something else.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“You speak English perfectly well, don’t you, only with that same odd emphasis and inflection as the girl we discovered you with in the corn shack when we arrived, Poke-a-huntress.”
He blushes. I shrug. Under the languor and grease he knows what’s going on.
“So then what the hell was the charade with the translation software?”
I shrug again. To be seen through and yet maintain a nearly expressionless psychiatric neutrality is so delicious I’m getting a bit of a junior erection that I hope the subject can’t detect from where he sits.
Subject’s response to image two: “The two main dark forms are horned and hunchbacked beasts. They’re holding hands and very much in love. And each had been alone for many years. And each had been vicious and felt doomed. A standard night for either beast had been to wake up late in a cave that was its transient home, bathe in a nearby stream, dry itself with leaves, gallop to the closest town, kill as many humans as quickly as it could with its diamond-hard teeth and sharp claws; when fatigue began to cramp its back and arms and legs and jaw, it dragged a last girl—always a young girl with smooth skin, blonde hair, a throaty scream, and much to live for—off into the woods to sodomize and eat her; in the wee hours, a crushing melancholy came, for the goal of all the death—especially the death that was the meal—was revenge, the dish that leaves the belly wanting more.
“And who do you think, Dr. Find Gold, had wronged the beasts?”
“I don’t know, tell me.”
“God. Do you know who I mean when I say God?”
“Well our culture is not monotheistic, and therefore—”
“Shut up, it was a rhetorical question. God had made these beasts to kill, and made their minds to need revenge. They killed to get revenge against the God who made them need revenge.”
“Isn’t that self-defeating on the part of your God?”
“No, that’s what God calls ‘creativity.’ And then the beasts met. Funny story. It happened in a town not far from here. That night the beasts moved toward one another, unaware, from opposite ends of this town, from house to house, slashing little children through the heart, biting the heads off the moms, and then, in some unknowing schmuck’s backyard, each saw the other. They stood still. They thought, Am I dreaming? Looking in a mirror? And each, for the first time, felt love, as strong or stronger than the urge to kill. They ran at each other and crashed, like two moons that collide in cold, dark space. And here’s an interesting anatomical fact about the beasts. Each one had both a vagina and a penis, but one’s penis was located six inches above its vagina, while the other’s vagina was located six inches above its penis. At the moment of impact, the penises slid into the vaginas. Each beast, having paid scant attention to these body parts till now—despite the sodomy of the human girls, which was reflexive, a bodily function if you will, like shitting, or murder—each beast sank its many pointed teeth into its lover’s neck, but not deep enough to kill. While the intended human victim of both looked on from the back porch of his house in horror, bewilderment, and, let’s tell the whole truth here, unwished-for sexual arousal, the two beasts were rolled up in one delicious ball of black fur on the lawn, pleasure mounting and mounting and mounting until, with a long and thunderous double-beastly roar, they came into each other with violent contractions of their planet-moving muscles, and came as they came, which made them come again, which made them come again.
“And so began a beautiful friendship, Dr. Find Gold. They no longer felt the urge to kill. They switched to eating grasses, mosses, fungi, leaves, and grains. They settled in a cave that got lots of late-afternoon sun. They planted a garden of flowers and herbs. They frolicked through the forest hand in hand. Pictured here, each transforms the other’s ugly f
ace with love’s gaze. Playfully they stick their tongues out between sets of teeth made to snap the thickest human bone but no longer used for that purpose.
“And now I call attention to the darker blobs of ink within each large, dark form. These represent the overflow of love from the beasts’ breasts, a soft, black, oozing love that spreads beyond the body of each beast, beyond each beast’s inherent, God-given capacity for love, a blob of dark ink that stands for love’s power to transcend destiny, for all that’s good in life, and is released in each beast by its only beloved—a blob of ink which, in a sense, became the world by blotting out the world.
“And now I would like to call your attention to what is asymmetrical in this picture, namely, the long, thin line of goo that’s coming out the right beast’s ass. It’s a shit, but not an ordinary shit, as you can see. Woven into it are elongated blobs of mucous and blood. The right-hand beast, in its old, murderous life, while sodomizing some nice young lady before devouring her, contracted dysentery from the excreta that clung to the inside of her anal canal, for though she herself was not infected, she carried the germs. Both beasts had had stomach cramps and runny bowels before. Both had had fevers. Neither made much of the illness. When the right-hand beast could not get out of bed, the healthy one brought back berries for it, though the right beast’s appetite was gone. The beast of sound body, being a beast, knew nothing of medical science, and so made little of its companion’s dehydration, the tenderness of its abdomen, the referred pain in its right shoulder, and, toward the end, the yolky yellow fluid that poured from the abscesses in its liver, and down and out its alimentary canal, and again I refer you to the picture if you don’t believe me.
“I don’t know how to tell the rest of this. What can be said about the pain the left beast felt when the right beast died? Nothing, at least not by me. I don’t have the words. Nor do I know how this beast grieved. Did it return to killing girls and men? Did it try to kill itself, or God? I can’t say. What I can say is that it lived for many more years in a state of undiminished grief. And do you know what the living beast is called?”
“No.”
“Nor do I, but I suspect it’s a name we both know, a common name, the name of something ordinary you’d find around the house.”
BUCKY BRECK. Fatigue, the stress of testing foreigners all day, my body’s aches and pains from sex with Char, and what the evaluator has unequivocally determined is a wicked contact high off the busthead have rendered his remarks in this space more freeform than he’d intended or than is useful given his pragmatic goal. Psychological evaluation is a young man’s game. I’m stiff and tired and sore and wan. Lately when I have time for thought I choose pleasure instead, and one can’t choose both for the two curdle when mixed. I need to think, but not right now. Evaluator, evaluate thyself, but not right now, not when I have their strongest man in a chair in this room with nothing between him and me but a cheap desk and a stack of psychiatric prints. But he wouldn’t hurt a squirrel in mid-flight toward his face unless ordered to. Oh to be young and strong and mindless! You think one thing at a time and between that thought and what you know to be true there lurks no intermediary of doubt.
The evaluator is a gnat on the neck of a flea. The man who sits across from him is sheathed in the pale armor of his skin. The evaluator believes the cut on his own knuckle must have brushed against some dust of uncut bust-head and wonders just how fucked up he will become.
“Looks like you’ve been sampling your own sauce,” the subject says. The evaluator is trying to hold it all together but some of it flies round the room, out the window, and toward the tops of trees, where passing gulls catch it in their beaks, chew it, swallow it, digest it halfway, fly back to their nests, and vomit it into the disproportionately large and obscenely open mouths of their infant children, who then fly from their nest and, taking the first aerial crap of their lives, let it fall on the head of the evaluator to whom it once belonged, restoring this part of himself to himself, but not in a dignified manner. But dignity is just a lie the living tell themselves about the seriousness of their own lives.
“Are we supposed to be doing something here or just staring? Wow, your pupils are mad dilated.”
Subject’s response to image number seven: “Tell you what I see? I see, you know, a bunch of blotches.”
“No, what does it look like, what does it resemble?”
“I’m not following you.”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like some black ink blotches on a—”
“All right, follow my lead here. One might say about this that it resembles a fly with its wings plucked off.”
“Plucked off? Why would someone pluck the wings off a fly?”
“To study it, or to be cruel, I suppose, or some combination of the two, but I was just giving you an example.”
“If you plucked the wings off it, it wouldn’t really be a fly any more, would it? I mean think about the word fly, seems like if you take the wings away you can’t call it fly any more. Maybe the wings are the part that’s really the fly, so whoever did the plucking really plucked the fly off the fly.”
The evaluator is holding back tears.
“Anyway I see more of a mother and her two babies,” the subject says.
“Excuse me?”
“A mother and her two babies.”
“Tell me more.”
“The mother is flinging the babies away from her and now they have to fend for themselves.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she loves them.”
“The mother flings away her own babies because she loves them?”
“So they’ll learn how to get along in the world. That’s how most decisions are: like you’ve been flung and you haven’t hit the ground yet and you’re thinking real fast about how to land with the least amount of pain.”
“So the two larger, uh, blotches on the left and right of the central blotch are the babies?”
“Yes.”
“And the two lines extending out and up from the central blotch?”
“The mom’s arms.”
“They’re not attached to her body?”
“That just shows how much she loves her babies.”
“How so?”
“Well I didn’t make the drawing or anything, but it seems like the person who did was saying that flinging away the babies makes the mom feel like she’s flinging away her own arms.”
“But she does it anyway.”
“She has to, even if the babies will hate her from the time she flings them until just a little bit before they die.”
“That’s a big sacrifice, giving up her children’s love for their survival.”
“Has to be done.”
“You said a little bit before the babies die they’ll stop hating their mother. Why?”
“They will understand that she was preparing them to accept death with a calm heart, and they will forgive her.”
The evaluator tries to look at the subject’s face to see what he might be feeling, but the air in the room has grown dark, and the subject’s face is a part of the darkness. No, the subject’s face is the source of the darkness.
“Hey, Doc, do you need a glass of water or something?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Why you lying face-down on the floor?”
“Resting.”
“Rough night?”
“Rough decade.”
“I hear you, man. What was in that sauce, anyway? I’m feeling weird.”
An observer—say, the ghost of the august medical man who was my mentor, Dr. Ronald McKelty, whose job is now to float behind my left ear and shake his vaporous head in disapproval of everything I do—might think the evaluator has lost control of the interview. Not so. He feels the only way to maintain control is to give in to the wish to lose control. That is why the evaluator is now rolling around and moaning softly on the floor of the evaluation chamber, a floor of dirt the tre
ad of many feet has made shine like gold.
“Am I done? I don’t feel so good,” the subject says. Whoever sweeps this floor does a great job. There’s not a spider web or speck of dust, at least not in the corner of the floor my face now occupies.
“Doctor, let me help you up,” the subject says.
“What’s it feel like to be you?” I say.
“I don’t know.”
A Couple of Fops
“What’s happening now?”
“They’re thinking it over.”
“Thinking what over?”
“Whether to tear us new assholes.”
“We’ll need them if the bad water and rancid food keep using the old ones at peak capacity. Speaking of which, do you have any extra bottled water?
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