Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

  * * *

  —

  There are moments that do not arise as the result of Conscious determination or thought. Such moments—far more than the plann’d ones—are those that shape the course of a Life to come. Such moments alter a being in ways that plotting, synthesizing, and future-izing can never do. That is to say, a reaction to Chance is the only method for developing character. This much Jack had gleaned from the novels Kneebone had supply’d him, the pirate romance Captain Singleton being an excellent case in point.

  And so, unwilled and unbidden, Jack found himself seizing on his Liberation. It was only a matter of jiggling the file into the frail little window hasps ’til it click’d, and popping the nails out of the hinges with the backside of the file. His teachings had given him a powerful sense of exactly how far down the tips of the nails should rest, so it was an easy one-two-pop, one-two-pop. And lo and behold, the glazes swung open to the high nasty air of a March twilight, cramm’d down to the last particle with tanning salts, animal excrement, and the gas puffing from the coal piles upon the decks of the Newcastle boats as they plowed up the Thames.

  The stench was an Ambrosia to Jack. Ordinarily he was admitted out only on Tuesdays to the butchers’ stalls to pick up the slightly off meats Lady Kneebone reserved at a fraction of the cost of fresh, or to quickly deliver tuffets to market, or to watch the executions at Tyburn with the rest of the rabble. (This here’s a precautionary tale. Kneebone would nod at the nooses swinging in the wind, flicking his eyebrows meaningfully at Jack.) Now—truly Free—he rampag’d across the roofs—sliding down a gutter at Drury Lane—and into the crowds streaming towards the Black Lion. The haunt—as he was soon to learn—of Bess Khan, moll*5 extraordinaire.

  *1 Lewd women

  *2 Man

  *3 Seduction isn’t seduction unless it carries a whiff of the perilous—of death, frankly—right?

  Be grateful for my dime-store psychoanalysis; at least I’m not quoting Roland Barthes at you.

  (Though, for a more considered account of sex and the death-drive—S&M as “embodied subversion”—see Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power and Masochism, New York University Press, 2014.)

  *4 They take everything from you. Even your imagination. Then and now.

  Which calls to mind an extremely regrettable exchange I’ve just had with Dean of Surveillance Andrews.

  I knew something was amiss when, instead of receiving his comments on my annual review by email, I got a call from his office manager during my office hours to set up an appointment to discuss it. She suggested I come in immediately.

  I hastened to the meeting midway through my lunch.

  Things did not have a collegial tone.

  Sit down, Dean of Surveillance Andrews blared as I entered. He was standing, gesturing in a very threatening manner—not even a parent scolding a child, more like a dog owner pointing out shit to the creature who made it; I will add that it was not clear whether I was the dog or the shit—to the ergonomic chair opposite his desk.

  I sat.

  It was my first view of his new office on the seventeenth floor of the library. They really had done a spectacular job renovating in the style of a high-end Marriott.

  I still had my half-eaten turkey sub hanging from my right fist. Should I finish this sub while he fires me? I thought. This seemed a step too defiant. But then I couldn’t let it just hang there, stinking up the office with its warm turkey scent. I considered tossing it in the trash, but of course the deli odor would intensify and bloom from the bin. Honestly, only a psychopath throws away a half-eaten turkey sub in someone else’s office trash bin. If he definitely is firing me, I promised myself, then I’ll throw this sub in his garbage can and walk out.

  I opened my briefcase and stuffed the sub, spilling from its mustard-spattered bouquet of butcher paper, in between my University-owned crappy laptop and the “attendance book” I always mean to utilize in class, but then I’m both too scattered and too Marxist to actually police my students that way.

  I snapped the briefcase closed.

  Dean of Surveillance Andrews really had a nice office. I mused silently about how much thought had gone into appareling this room to make it seem like you were being pampered while being fired. I wondered how many people had sat in this strangely buoyant chair while being canned.

  Dean of Surveillance Andrews had been talking the entire time, of course. When I tuned back in, it seemed to have something to do with the language of my contract.

  It is the right of the University to requisition “improperly utilized” leisure hours if that period of improperly utilized leisure takes place on the premises.

  What “improperly utilized” leisure are you talking about? I managed. I tried to distract him with a metaphysical query. How can you improperly utilize leisure? I lobbed.

  This he ignored.

  There have been reports of you playing phone-Scrabble during your office hours.

  Phone-Scrabble? I sort of shrieked.

  Phone-Scrabble. He nodded at me really seriously. He made a sad frowny mouth to reinforce his point, as if maybe I had murdered someone while playing Scrabble instead of just consistently and spectacularly lost at the game.

  Office hours are basically for phone-Scrabble, I tried to explain. No one really wants to talk about the eighteenth century more than they already have to. My office hours aren’t exactly well attended.

  I realized, too late, that this was not the best approach for self-defense. But also I was thinking: Reports? What reports? Which one of my senior colleagues went out of their way to tattle?

  Then I remembered the newly installed video cameras in the classrooms, and that’s when I realized there must be one in my office as well.

  And while I’m realizing this, he’s giving me the whole official rundown of how, Actually no, office hours are meant for meeting with students and—failing that—office hours are meant for resting the brain and your other capacities for more productive work following the office hours. And that playing phone-Scrabble takes away from that necessary rest. Drying the eyes, preoccupying the mind, etc.

  I’m just gaping at him—gaping because this is the issue and also gaping at how seriously he is taking this issue. Nothing is making sense, and then he says, Why don’t you go to Mindfulness Lunch on the ninth floor of the library like everybody else? As a courtesy, the University has emptied out the ninth floor of its entire collection of psychology and anthropology books to create a “retreat” for all faculty. A kind of self-help spa.

  And I’m, like, Right, well I mean, it’s “self-help.” So, technically, not mandatory.

  It’s not mandatory, he says with that frowny mouth again, but it’s an invitation the University is extending, and it’s strongly suggested that you accept this invitation. And then he spins his desktop monitor towards me. It’s a split screen. On one side, a spreadsheet shows how much phone-Scrabble I’ve played in the past six months, and on the other, a video playback, generated from the University’s in-house cloud-networked surveillance cameras, shows me in clip after clip sutured together by some jerky editing algorithm, my head bent, stuffing sandwiches down my gullet with one hand while moving letters around with the thumb of my other. It was, admittedly, a lot of phone-Scrabble.

  You owe your workplace eighty hours of labor restitution, he says. Next semester you’ll teach an extra seminar.

  And he means, gratis. Just give the University an extra, free, uncompensated class.

  And then the coup de grâce.

  And you’re being put on unpaid leave for the rest of this semester. You will still have access to your office, but we’ve already reassigned your class.

  Access to my office? Oh joy. My shitty office in an OSHA-condemned building. My office that would probably constitute a liability to house anyone who hasn’
t signed the no-fault office-accidental-death clause recently instituted by the person we refer to as “Neoliberal Provost.”

  See how they fuck you. Do you see how they fuck you?

  I was shaking so hard when I left Andrew’s office that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to fling my turkey sub in his wastebasket.

  I took the half-eaten sub out of my briefcase and set about finishing it—Unpaid leave, I chewed sourly to myself—as I began the endless cross-campus trek to my car.

  By the time I got to the parking lot, the molecular weather system in my brain had shifted in that way it always does: devising a method to pour my misery at something else. I had reinvested myself in a project.

  Well, fuck them, I thought with that unnerving optimism of the hopeless. This is good, actually. Now I can immerse myself in the text. Solve the mystery of the origins and authorship of this manuscript. Once my colleagues at better institutions get wind of my work and invite me to keynote the annual meeting in Reno, won’t Dean of Surveillance Andrews be sorry.

  *5 Sex worker. (For a more recent account of sex work as a category of labor more broadly, see Svati Shah, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai, Duke University Press, 2014.)

  6.

  The Black Lion gloried in a greater lack of light and air than most London pubs.

  Due to an insufficiency of scrubbing, the bar was an unnaturally dark oak, with the entire chamber smelling like the inside of a cask left to rot. An assortment of tables and low stools faced the bar across a narrow passageway, and if one braved the row of close-packed Bodies, one might fight one’s way to the back garden—rather, a Piss-yard—or down the narrow, dubious stairs to the cellar, where everyone knew the mollies*1 made Love.

  To Bess, it was the anti-Anabaptist Meeting House. A loud hot warren of honest Truths and honest Stenches.

  * * *

  —

  On this particular evening, the pub was ship-like in the gray ocean light of Rain, water sheeting down the thick pane at the front. Bess was tired, wishing the bats had spent the night in the foyer of the bat house, as they often did. But Lily Budge—one of the newer and peachier ones—was in hopes of meeting up with a suitor at the Black Lion—some Rogue lately released from debtors’ prison at the Marshalsea whom she’d encounter’d through the bars on her regular strolls down Borough High Street. The Rogue had profess’d to marry her.

  The entire group was in a Tumult, peering about—is that ’im’ing and what’d ye say he looked like again’ing.

  “ ’S’good we’re here. What if the rogue is not in earnest?” Jenny gestur’d with her ale. Golden froth ran over her fingers. “You’d be here, sitting by yourself.”

  “Or,” said Bess, “what if he is in earnest, and intends to marry you right away here in the Black Lion basement, without pay.”

  Jenny was laughing—they all were laughing—when the door open’d.

  It was the boy Bess was startled to realize she thought of as her boy—the boy she’d seen earlier from the Ewe’s Nest doorway. The one she’d whispered to without forethought. The one who’d caus’d a rush of warmth and fizz, and a boldness that wasn’t usual for her.

  He blew in on a puff of freezing filthy air, black curls bouncing over his eyes. And that odd outfit—an extraordinarily shiny apron and a tattered, too-large Smicket that bagged around his forearms.

  Some coves enter a pub with the frantic glance of one who must be understood to be meeting a waiting friend—or they quickly take on the impatient head-craning of waiting on one themselves. But this boy moved through the pub as if he had never waited on a friend or been waited on. He scann’d the room once, took a table opposite the bar and sat, pulling an apple from his pocket. He had some bites, chewing thoughtfully as Bess continued to chug her ale with the other bats in a loud cluster in front of the window.

  The rain cleared. Ice crusted the pane, sunset tindering red behind the frost.

  * * *

  —

  He’s seen me. He must have. But he’s just sitting there. Chewing.

  Bess cross’d the room—at which, finally, Jack looked up—stood and hustled in her direction, affecting a casual stance.

  “Good evening.” He lean’d into the bar, striving for Gentility—and stabbed his elbow into a cold puddle of ale.

  “Bene-darkmans,” Bess said, feigning not to notice the ring of ale darkening his elbow. Smiled briefly and continued to walk, her neck tucked into an upturned ruffled collar. She’d said more than enough earlier. Let him rise to the Occasion.

  “B-bene-darkmans, rum-dutchess*2,” Jack projected quickly to the side of her retreating face.

  Now this was interesting. She’s figur’d him for more of a naïf. Bess paus’d, turning. Adjust’d her collar, pinched it closed where it plunged low at the front. “D’you jaw the bear garden?”*3

  “I do flash*4.” Jack paid excellent attention to the sounds of the streets—had come to memorize its languages.

  She look’d at his hands, his thumbs hooked into his breeches’ pockets.

  “You’re grinning like a hell-born.”

  “Who here’s heaven born?” He nodded with his chin towards the room.

  She rais’d her hand for him to take.

  “I—I—” His damn stutter. He wiped his hand on his trousers. Cleared his throat. “My paw’s chilled. From the outdoors.” Or Nerves. “I’ll make your acquaintance—formally speaking—later. When I’ve warmed some.”

  A truly absurd proclamation. But what if this is my only chance to touch her.

  Better not to touch her at all than repel her forever with a clammy paw.

  She cocked her head. Squinted. What an odd bird he was. But then Bess’s taste ran towards the Odd. “I’m not afraid of chill.” She pursed her lips. “But if you’d rather make that sort of acquaintance later, then…”

  The sun contract’d into its last vermilion clot before setting. The room flickered, illuminating and bedimming at once. A darker Red was briefly thrown across her face, and Jack’s Heart fled out of his body for the doxy with the transfixingly Contradictory visage—an arched aristocratic nose paired with surprisingly doe-soft brown eyes, a tumult of dusk-drenched hair brushing her exposed shoulders.

  “Bess Khan.”

  His mouth formed a P—then he paus’d—brought his lips back against his teeth—his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He’d said his name so many times to himself. In bed, throughout the workday, walking the streets, swinging his market bag of Lady Kneebone’s off-meats and mouse-bitten grains. It sooth’d and excited him.

  For the first time, though, he heard himself say to another person, “Jack.”

  He’d imagin’d this would be easy—this saying himself into being—but now it didn’t feel entirely right or True. He became loosed from his Body, floating up to the splintered-beam ceiling of the pub. He look’d down quizzically at himself saying “Jack,” and it seemed so ridiculous to have thought he could ever be Jack—and now she look’d at him quizzically too—and he wanted to slip through the ceiling-planks and fly out of the pub in Shame.

  Then Bess said, “I told you my surname. And what—you don’t have one?”

  “Oh,” he breathed out. “Shepp—epp—ard.”

  “Jack Sheppard,” she said.

  And when he heard his name in her mouth something happened.

  The apparition-Jack zoomed down from his watching-spot on the ceiling and sank firmly—and with a heretofore unknown warm Pleasure—into his Body.

  “Jack Sheppard, surely you meant to tip me a jack*5?” Kohl arc’d from the corners of her bottom lids. He breathed in, catching an edge of the scents that belonged to her. Powdered amber. Juniper. Warm smoke.

  Was she breathing him in too? He knew his smish wasn’t at all clean. The body-salt of his workdays leak’d out, pa
rticularly in closed spaces. But she was glittering her eyes half-closed. Inhaling.

  “I was hoping for a bit of dry-bob*6.” Jack had not even begun to recover from her face, her scent, her Nearness, and most of all: her saying his name.

  “Even a Dry-Bob costs too much for a cadger*7.”

  Jack’s Spirits typhoon’d into a roiling Jubilance. He had always felt that the lexicon of the streets was Music, but it wasn’t until Bess intoned it that he truly heard it sung.

  “Cadger? Certain I’m a screwsman*8.” This last bit of banter came out clean and strong. Jack grinned. “A cracksman*9.” He cut into his apple with a jackknife, ran his thumb along the Gash. “My dear, I draw latches*10.”

  The moment of his breaking out of Kneebones was metamorphosing into a chain of events, causing a sea change in Jack. Whatever Blur he’d lived in for every year and every moment up to this one, was lifting and sparkling into Nothingness like fog in the sun. All of Jack’s molecules were scrambled and rearranged, and something new was taking shape. Someone new.

  He was becoming Jack Sheppard. He was entering History.

  Something scuttled across the bar.

  Something fast. And hideous. Something with a long frond of legs waving out its back end, a front prow of more waving legs, and long sides of many many legs, like a bristl’d boot brush. An armor of frizzy tentacles—it was a blur of non-color—an odd translucent tan—whizz’ng across the puddle-pocked mahogany surface.

  Jack didn’t relish killing bugs, but this one sped towards Bess. Cringing at the imminent squish, but determin’d to reap the rewards of Heroism, he pulled his hand back. Closed his eyes.

  He heard something hit the bar with a soft thud.

  Bess had her hands cupped in a dome. She smiled.