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.