Jamestown (15 page)

He's walking away. Come back. He's gone, off the bus. The boredom of confinement now unrelieved by a decent enemy to menace me. Now time, who'll guide me slow or fast to my death, is my comrade. The little man has given up for now. Against the chest of the bigger man he sighs and rests. The big one must not love the pollution of his white shirt with the viscous mix of juices of which the little one's noggin offers a steady supply from multiple holes, some made by gods, others by men and beasts. A cloud stands still outside the window here. Time creeps.

Sidney Feingold

Subjects presented themselves two a day for four days, a representative sampling. Each predictably offered considerable resistance, which we softened with broiled venison in a busthead reduction, a savory meal that combines rich and complex flavor with the obliteration of a subject's inhibitions. After the meal, subjects reclined and were engaged in conversation neither substantive nor heavy, this and that, where are you from, what was that like. When the clinician observed them to be sufficiently pliant he introduced a series of inkblots and encouraged them to comment freely on each without concern for logic or coherency. Transcripts of responses follow, with commentary.

J
OHN
R
ATCLIFFE
. Subject still has baby fat, a smooth face expressive mostly not by muscle movement but by continual shifts in coloration. The relative amounts of blood in each of the thousand facial capillaries tell a thousand different stories of his moods, of which there seem to be four or five per minute. An earnest face in ongoing rebellion against the cynic's mind that struggles to govern it. A man vying for control of his face and losing every day in every way. Posture: regal, petulant. Clothing: fine, tired, soiled.

Subject's response to image two:
“It's that bitch my mother making love to, well, half the Upper West Side—the half that did not include my father. My mother's the one on the left. I called her a bitch but that's just a little joke between her and me. I love my mother. I understand her. I understand that she is the one on the left, someone asymmetrical when not in love. The dark place where the two figures come together is me, an unarticulated pre-larval mass, the cloven single-cell creature produced when a female copulates with a thousand males seriatim, or all at once.”

“What about the negative space?”

“The white part? The white part at the very top in the middle is also me—just that very top white portion that looks a bit like a lady's ass or upside-down heart that's truncated, cut off. Just below that, well, sometimes when two dogs fuck you need to separate them with a powerful stream of cold water, so that white shape there's a fire hydrant to separate and cool down the dogs. The white figure below that is a man bound at the waist and falling through the sky helplessly toward earth. Now I'm looking at the black blobs and loops and smudges at the bottom. They are shit. Everyone shits. Some people aren't very discriminating about where; myself, for instance, lately. Do you people have a decent water source or do you just have constant diarrhea all your lives?”

J
OHN
M
ARTIN
: A small young man with a high forehead. Garments, skin, and perceivable orifices filthy; garments obviously once quite fine and still in possession of a vestigial dignity. Subject unusually battered: left ear half gone, face nicked and bruised, extremities swathed in grimy gauze, right forefinger half gone, walks with a limp. Wounds appear not to be self-inflicted but one is tempted to surmise he sought them out.

Subject's response to image four:
Upon being presented with this image, subject wept vigorously for ten minutes, pausing only when unable to breathe. In the fifth such interval of breathlessness, I slapped the subject and reminded him in an artificially broken English that while I am trained as a healer, he was in this context being not healed by me but assessed for his mental state, and that his compatriots were relying on him for the success of their mission to pull himself together. Subject gazed dreamily at the image, at me, at the walls of the room, at the air and a phantasm he seemed to see in the air; I estimate that he was at most half-cognizant of the purpose of the interview and of anything else many of sound mind would refer to as the world.

Subject said, “You're playing heartball, son, that's the name of the game and there's no other game in town, you can bet on it, you don't swing for the bleachers you might as well not come up from the dugout, you can do it, son, elbows high, eyes on the ball, gameface, gameface, in the zone 24/7, don't
be
a pussy,
do
a pussy. Oh Daddy, where are you now? Can you hear me? No, the caterpillar of death has spun you up in its cocoon. The cocoon devours all life in its path, bodies broken down and spun into moth flesh, the moth consumes the sky itself. Winged darkness.”

“Is that what you see?”

“See?”

“In the inkblot.”

“What inkblot?”

“This inkblot.”

“What are you talking about?”

I stared at him.

“Hey, I'm just playing with you, you gaunt, bespectacled Indian fuck, glasses-wearing brainiac rimjob.”

I restrained myself from laughing and looked at him with what I hoped would appear to be incomprehension. “Tell me what you see in the inkblot. What does it look like to you? What does it remind you of?”

“Your ass.”

Though it was probably in violation, strictly speaking, of the protocol of this assessment procedure, I chose to stand up, turn my back to the subject, pull down my pants, and show him my ass while remarking, “Perhaps this will give you a more accurate point of comparison.”

The subject, who had been leaning forward rather tensely in his seat, now leaned back, extended his legs, cupped his genitals, massaged them briefly through his pants with his bandaged right hand, ran the same hand down and up from high hairline to chin as if to erase his face, dropped both hands limply to his sides, tilted his head back, opened his mouth, closed his eyes, wept again, stopped himself from weeping moments later, sighed. “All right, all right, it's like a half-man, half-autobus creature that roams in the night. Its eyes are also headlights, its function is to crush. You can see two guys' legs oozing out from under it, one on either side. Its tailpipe is its dick. Two giant flaps open up in its rear to expose the penis for, you know, various penile functions. It backs up into its mate. Right now it has a probe in its urethra and it isn't liking that too much. It doesn't feel pain the way we do because it's half-autobus, but I think you'll agree there's no getting around how much a probe in the dick is going to hurt even something that's half a machine or whatever. The man-autobus is enormous, even bigger than the autobus we arrived in. I think it's safe to say that the entity that's doing the probing can expect violent retaliation and I don't mean an eye for an eye but I'd have to guess somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred eyes for an eye if I'm making myself at all clear.”

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

J
OHN
R
OLFE
. 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.