Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

  “What’s that for?” Aurie ask’d, grimacing.

  The horse-ship was calming in his arms. “I jus’ need it.”

  He blushed.

  Aurie nodded. “Say no more.”

  * * *

  —

  Some far-off rustle of the city’s Awakening was making itself felt. The accelerating stream of Footfall towards the slaughterhouses and the coalworks—the collective press of the laborers towards labor. The chirruping, hectic racket of burghers discussing quantities, numbers, methods of extraction. Doors clanking open, whooshing shut.

  Aurie nodded at him. They jetted out the open sash and clambered back up to the roof. Jack achiev’d this one-handed. Aurie took note.*7

  *1 On the Propertization of Offal:

  Britain declined to cover its shit until well into the nineteenth century. Canals of garbage, animal carcasses, feces, rotten vegetables, etc., ran in open channels down the streets. You might think the upside of this was that, in a pinch, you could probably glean some sustenance from the sewer. But even by 1670 the sewers and their surround were quite regulated.

  Viz., the 1670 Sewer and Paving Act: “The said Mayor Alderman…shall…have power and authority in order and direct the markeing of any new Vaults Draines and Sewers, or to cut into any Draine or Sewer already made, and for the altering enlargeing amending cleansing and scowring or any old Vaults, Sinks or Common Sewers.”

  In short, the management of capitalism begins with the management of its waste.

  *2 Wherever I can get.

  *3 What species of thieving do you specialize in?

  *4 A friend

  *5 Partner in crime

  *6 In none of the records is “Blueskin Blake” ever noted as Afro-Roman. Though I suppose this is entirely likely (for more on which, see David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History, Pan Macmillan, 2016). Furthermore, I believe that The Complete Newgate Calendar (aka Malefactor’s Bloody Register, aka the Ordinary’s Reports) suggests, in fact, that Blake may have once been Wild’s underling. I’d like to double-check any of these so-called facts, but the University has cut off my access to the online library system. Some fuck-you from Dean of Surveillance Andrews, no doubt. Goes with the unpaid leave.

  Let me bookmark this for later. For now I am left to suppose that either the author of this text had personal reason to cloud the truth, or else the author has more knowledge of Blake than the Newgate Ordinary did.

  *7 What must it have been like to witness the rise of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats? The awful weather system of them closing in, raining banality and evil.

  On which topic: so today I go into the Rite Aid to pick up my prescription. I’m psyching myself up to be less weird than I was at dinner. Maybe I can recapture whatever Ursula was throwing my way that night.

  Worth a shot.

  So I stroll in. I’ve got a Dunkin’ Donuts this time due to cash-flow issues. When I get there, Ursula’s kind of busy. The line is stacked with people picking shit up. Flu season, I guess. Or oxycodone season.

  I wander around the store, killing time, needing nothing. Maybe twenty minutes later, when the line has died down, my arms laden with the now-cold Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, batteries, a bottle of seltzer, gummy vitamin C, melatonin and antibacterial wipes, I trundle up to the counter.

  Sorry, I gesture apologetically at the coffee with its now unappetizing splashes of dried murk on the plastic lid. It got a bit cold.

  It’s all good, Ursula says, kind of abstractly.

  She’s putting my stuff into a bag when I get a call. I don’t answer. It rings again. And again.

  She pauses. Don’t you want to answer that?

  I look at my phone. It’s the University main number.

  No, I definitely don’t want to answer that.

  Sounds important.

  Probably some bureaucratic bullshit.

  I’ve now ignored the phone for three consecutive sets of rings, which just makes embarrassingly apparent to Ursula how desperate I am to chat with her. Not good.

  So, I say, grabbing things to help bag, and just making the process awkward. Do you want to have dinner again?

  Way too long of a pause. And then, Sure. I’ll give you a call. She puts the gummy C’s in the bag and pushes it across the counter toward me.

  And I go, Yes, thank you, I’ll look forward to your call—painfully formal, while trying to sound blasé, stumbling backwards out of the Rite Aid, my elbow unseating a row of alcohol pads and nose strips.

  Just leave that, she says.

  When I get to my car I listen to the message. It’s Dean of Surveillance Andrews’ office manager. Wanting to make another appointment with me.

  17.

  Jack near broke the window, knocking against it with the horse’s base. Dammit if she’s with someone. He toss’d the horse in—swung through.

  Bess observed this frantic entry from the bed. The horse clattered at length to a stillness against the floor Beams—Jack was panting hard and wet-faced with rain. She looked back down at the news broadside in her lap.

  Bess was smoking Tobacco—a gift from some expensive job—her back against the wall, knees tucked up, tea-stained pages strewn across her legs, attired in an attention-transfixing ruby silk nightgown. A dirty plate sat on the side-cabinet, Flies cavorting in chicken-oil going rancid.

  “Were you w-with someone?” His voice cracked. Damn.

  “Job.” She flick’d ash into her palm. Jack peer’d into her eyes. Amber glass. All reflection.

  He breath’d out.

  “Brought you something.”

  An amused smile twitched across her lips.

  “You built this?”

  “Nick’d it,” he said, and it came out fine and strong. But he’d been holding his breath, and so after achieving the announcement, he found himself heaving inwards like he’d been kicked in the guts. He coughed into his fist.

  Bess put her paper to the side.

  She stood, and her nightgown fell from her bosom to her Hips—an exhale of red silk. Jack fought gasping for breath again. “And you want to see me ride it.”

  Now she cross’d the room, pulled up the red silk to spread her legs open above the horse, settled her quim against the oiled wood, and rocked back and forth—this latter so slowly—while holding his gaze. A firework exploded inside him as he watched the meeting point of her notch against the wood, the Resin growing soaked and tart. He wanted to fall to his knees and lick the Wet from the darkened grain.*1

  And it was something else, too—watching her ride the horse. Something like what happened between them when he’d cleaned her with his handkerchief. Something tender and deprav’d at once. A fatherliness that had nothing to do with age or familial Relation and everything to do with care and precious violation delivered together. He understood why she wanted more. Why she wanted to be taken with as much Force as the Kindness he showed her suggested. Though it sounded like a Contradiction, his Body knew it wasn’t.

  Leaning over, Jack push’d Bess’s legs open—flicked her quim with his finger. Their mouths met, and her tongue danced over the tip of his and they were breathing each other in again after only one night that had felt like a terrible stretch of Months.

  Bess put her hand to his trousers front.

  He pull’d back.

  “Have you never clicketed?”

  “That’s not it,” he trailed off.

  But that was it.

  Bess lean’d back on the horse, letting him see her. The rain hissed down beyond the windows and a riverbottom scent blew in, cooling his face. The air raised a series of puckers across Bess’s skin.

  Jack knelt— Her breasts were ——, her nipples ——.*2 —and he engag’d himself in a quantity of time at her bosom. Reach’d down again—rocked he
r slowly against his hand. Bess was so sweetly passive under his touch. He rocked, flick’d her quim, made an indisputable kind of love to her breasts.

  But when it had grown still later without any sign of proceeding—“Will you run into the night again if I take liberties?”

  Jack startled backwards. Bess scuff’d her foot against the floor.

  “Do you think I’m filthy. A filthy Bat, is that what you think?”

  “No— God, no.”

  She stood—cross’d the room—threw herself onto the bed on her back—pulled the nightgown over her breasts.

  “Don’t do that,” he whined.

  “Afraid to fuck the whore?”

  Silence.

  “You’d rather talk?”

  “No.”

  “Then come over here and—”

  And he was on top of her, pushing his hand between her legs. Bess moaned into his mouth, pulled at Jack’s breeches.

  “Please,” she said. “All of—you.”

  She reach’d for his hip—pushed his breeches down—she held her legs farther open—he pressed against her—Bess gasped at the heat between them, then—glancing down—

  In his ear—“Yes.”

  The yes (in that inimitable fashion particular to women of a certain predilection), referr’d, of course, to what was and was not there.

  Jack hover’d, afraid Bess would say something wrong. And the catalogue of wrong things was infinite, ranging from the gracious but hesitant—“Thank you for showing me”—to the disappointed and horrified.

  She could also do something wrong. Such as try to touch him the way he touched her.

  She could try to engage him in discussion. She could want to philosophize him at this moment.

  But she didn’t do any of these Things.

  She open’d her legs wider. Held his Gaze.

  Jack look’d down at himself. “Do you think I’m a Monster?” He said this half-ashamed but half—something Else.

  If she said no it would be the wrong answer.

  Same with yes.

  “Well, you’re Something.”

  How did she know his word—his secret Word for what was behind the door in himself that he could not open?

  “A wonderful, fetching Something.” She brought her hand down between them and drew her fingers across the front of it*3, tracing his outline with a Fingertip.

  “Daemon. Sphinx. Hybrid. Scitha, man-horse, deep-water Kraken, Monster-flower—”

  The thing between Jack’s legs swelled bigger.

  “Cinamoli.” Bess placed her fingers around it and tugged him towards her, tickling herself with the tip. “Man and dog, dog and—”

  Bess spun so she was atop him, legs astride his thighs. The heat of her surrounded his Swollenness.

  She twitch’d against him. Rocked in his lap until—with a little bleat—heat pour’d from her and she fell upon his chest.

  Jack try’d to sit up but she pressed him down at his shoulder, then stood and crossed the room to a small cabinet hunched in the corner. Returned with an arched, smooth horn, which she press’d into Jack’s palm.

  He would have known what it was even if she didn’t whisper “For screwin’ ” in his ear. He would have known because it spoke to him the way a block of wood at Kneebone’s spoke to his Chisel when it wanted to be shaped. He would have known what it was that she handed him, what it wanted, and what to do with it. Even though this wasn’t the door to an armoire, a tuffet for an aristocrat’s poodle, or a jar for holding flour. It spoke to him the way any material spoke to him. Spoke of what it wanted and what it could do.

  And what this Horn wanted, simply, was to make itself a part of him.

  Watching Bess watch him strap the leather Lacing around his hips, observ’ng her eagerness when the Horn arced up and out, he was possess’d of a calm unlike any he’d ever known—a thread connect’d them, and now he had simply to follow it.

  He knelt over her and they kissed a series of alternately hummingbird-like and wolfish and wet kisses. The Horn was tickling against Bess’s quim, and Jack whisper’d to her nasty, loving things while he warmed it in his palm so it wouldn’t jolt her when he slid inside.

  His Something had made Bess gasp when she bobbed on it. And she had gasp’d and shudder’d and soak’d herself and him too. But the Horn made her clutch. She shudder’d again—differently than before, this time from some profound Depths. This shudder took her very far away—and then return’d her to him—softer, meltier, and deeper still.

  A pause. He was still inside her Boiling-Place. And she began rocking them again—so impossibly sweetly, on the hard-packed straw Mattress. A Togetherness rose up inside him. His hands and the unnameable Knob between his legs, and even now his skull began to shudder, and he knew then that all the invigorating Bess-ether cramm’d in his nostrils and Veins and down his throat—all the sweet-and-salt aroma of Bess that had bloomed out from her and streamed up Jack’s nose in a feverish dust, pouring through him—would spray out of him, would fog the room with a million crimson Petals, with a wave of soft silver gunshot, with a rolling meadow of grass-green fire, heaving under them and pouring over them and it would bury them, in the best ways, together, and alive.

  * * *

  —

  Later that Evening, Jack told Bess about the toy shop. The way the objects call’d to him, bawling out their miserable Biographies, their wants, their needs, their Histories and Travels. The way they told of the entire crowded consecutions of labor, Exchange, and Fraud congealed in them. Killarney. Smelt. Furious hollows.

  “It was objects speaking? Sounds a bit like they’re describin’ the bog-iron smelting works in Galway.”

  “Do you think I’m mad?”

  “I think the world is quite mad. Not you.” Paused. “Are any of the objects in this room speaking to you now?”

  “No.”

  “Have they ever?”

  He shook his head against the pokey straw pillow.

  “What about at Newgate?”

  “What about it?”

  “You heard something there, too.”

  “Maybe other inmates?”

  “But only when you were put on display by Wild, right? Only when you—or your imprisonment—were briefly”—searched for a word—“commoditized?”

  “Suppose so.” He nodded.

  Bess twirl’d her finger in the ends of his curls, kissing his ear. Thinking. And then, her hands crafting concepts in the indigo, night-falling air above their faces—Jack didn’t see them so much as he felt the air move near his cheeks, the Stars winking in the window beyond momentarily blott’d out—she explained it.

  Objects were speaking to him, she said, like a Lover, or a Priest.

  “Jack,” she said, “they need something.”

  And so with the sooty London evening trickling into the room, she told him: They are asking for your help. Told him that each one was telling a different version of the same sermon: the Alpha and Omega of their Genesis. And each one was asking for the same thing. Liberate us.*4

  *1 I—I—I hate to interrupt, especially when I’m about to (—ahem—never mind). But I had to point out a certain resonance here with Sterne’s rather infamous theory of obsession (as figured in the hobby-horse) as the fundament of character.

  The relevant section is as follows:

  Viz.,“A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies,—and that by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the HOBBY-HORSE.—By long journies and much friction, it so happens that the body of the rider
is at length fill’d as full of HOBBY-HORSICAL matter as it can hold;—so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion of the genius and character of the other.”

  So, one thing comes into contact with another over and over again—maybe in an…excitable place on the body—and that friction, over time: that’s character.

  Of course, this document predates Sterne’s by some decades. So perhaps the concept of the hobby-horse was more widespread than I’d thought?

  *2 In what can only be described as gallantry, the speaker declines to showcase Bess’s body for the reader. Incidentally: a much better boyfriend than I ever was.

  *3 It is almost certainly the case that if there were a hack job this section would include a voyeuristic depiction of Jack’s genitalia. I consider this elegant declining-to-describe to be strong evidence of the document’s authenticity.

  Of course, personally, I’m more than happy to go on at length about my prodigious genitalia. But there’s a difference between a confession one wants to give, and one that is taken.

  *4 While no previous Sheppard accounts have given him this ability of supernatural hearing in specific, we can consider supernaturalness to be fully within the conventions of the genre. For one thing, the talking-commodity (or “it-narrative”) was quite popular within the period, beginning with Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs and continuing through The Secret History of an Old Shoe, The Adventures of a Black Coat and of course Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom. Or, to be frank, we need look no further than Moll’s infamous communion with objects in Moll Flanders.