PART
II
1.
Aurie, Jack, Bess, and Jenny Diver were at the Black Lion when the first Plague Ships arriv’d in the Thames.
A chilly May evening of unremitting hail. The inhospitality of the night meant little business at the bat houses, all the husbands lock’d down by their hearths with their wives. So the doxies congregated with their Hell-Hounds*1 at the pubs.
An urchin had nabbed a broadside from a street vendor. Aurie flipp’d the kid a coin and handed the broadside to Jack, who pass’d it to Bess.
From Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal*2
A Mail from France, offering the Following Advice to Londoners on the Advance of the Plague in Chandernagore
22 May 1724
Citizens! The contagion rages without ceasing through Chandernagore. The inhabitants have become living ghosts, raving in the streets in deliriums and laying waste to the shut-up shops and markets. Yesterday a band of eight widowed women broke the glazes on a bakeshop, taking whatever flours and grains they could lay their hands on. When approach’d by a Constable, the women laughed and threated him with contagion, screeching:
“If you come nearer we will cough and rage and infect you! We are Plaguers-all! We will breathe on you our fetid breathes, and scatter our effluvia upon your breeches!”
The Constable—arm’d with a musket and a longsword—was more afear’d of the women than they of him, and he retreated to the garrison lately established on the outskirts of town for government bodies and other persons of note.
It was later reported that the band of women also looted an apothecary’s shop and a butcher’s stall, where they made off with a parcel of yarrowroot and elderflower, as well as a stinking quantity of lamb gone very much to rot. They were seen hooting and hollering through the streets, advising residents to come join them if they were also showing tokens of the Plague and wished to make the most of their last days.
The same cases are to be found throughout the Levant, if reports are to be believed. The colonial Physicians are all dead or fled, and native tradesmen and Laborers roam the streets in gangs, seeking work—or provisions, or Opportunities. With nobody to employ them, their heads have turned to thieving and OTHER crimes.
We write to advise the Magistrates and Constables of the City of London to quarantine all trading vessels in the Thames for a period of twenty-eight days to ensure against the possibility of contagion.
More to the point, we urge that the Lord Mayor consider increasing the Centinels in the city’s poorest quarters. It is our Conviction that Plague congregates amongst the poor, so we advise the Centinels be dispatched to the most crowded, filthiest parishes, under direct orders to dispense with any persons suspected of Plague should they attempt to leave their homes—those houses we deem Dead-houses—or to leave the parish. This is a Technique used widely throughout Europe on threat of plague. In fact the magistrates of Holland have put an immediate order to this effect in place on word of the Situation from the VOC.*3 The city should supply padlocks with which to lock the doors of Dead-houses, with entire families inside, as we have reason to suspect that those who live with an infected person are likely to carry the disease themselves, though they may show no outward Signs of it.
Signed,
Humbert Garamond,
City Exchequer (Chandernagore)
* * *
—
“They say the plague travels on the backs of Mice!” shouted the barmaid.
“Next thing they’ll block the Turnpikes out of town—so said Defoe in his Journal,” a ragged scholar declared from the corner. “If that comes to pass, we’re all as good as dead, trapped like inmates of our own City.”
“Even the water’ll be sick,” howl’d an elderly dame. “I heard it from my aunt who lived through the last plague. The water reek’d of sickness, turn’d piss-colored, crept o’er its bounds and into the houses at the shoreline.”
Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?”
Jack chewed his cheek. He thought back to the thefts of the past week—each gauze Kerchief he unpacked, each leather Purse he handled. Each potentially plaguey.
How many goods had come through how many ports? His mind was scrambling to recall a Map he’d once seen. What if the customs-house manager had plague and then touched some fustian and then Jack touched it and then—? And then and then. He saw himself rooting through trunks, plague drifting onto his hands, sucked up in ether-streams into his nostrils.
Aurie’s forehead was pinched in that particular way it got when he worried (which was often). His eyes contract’d under a landscape of scowling Wrinkles. He tugged at his beard.
“Securitizational furor?” He rocked back in his chair.
“No idea, m-m-mate.”
“A securitizational furor,” Bess intoned loudly for all the pub to hear, “means that they’re making up fluff to put more centinels on the streets. They’re blaming the plague on Chandernagore. Betting on no one being able to argue different. So they can unleash whatever plans they mean to unleash on us. Centinels, thief-catchers, plague-watchers, whatever it is. That’s a securitizational furor.”*4
Jack shifted in his Seat. “You don’t think the plague is coming, or—”
Bess’s face closed. She blink’d—sifted him silently into the subset of everyday Anglos—the ones who would never understand.
“I’ll not argue this point further with you.” She nodded with her chin at Aurie, who was frowning into his ale. “Or even you.”
“What’d I do?” object’d Aurie.
“You’re overly-worrying along with him,” she said.
“But we just—” Jack’s interjection was drowned by the pub Din.
“Plague’ll kill ya in a single solitary day!” shouted the Urchin from the back of the pub. “Coughin’ and gaspin’ and then dyin’ in the street.” He climb’d onto the bar and open’d one side of his little filthy Waistcoat. “I’ve three bottles of Mr. Lecher’s Famous Plague Killer Oil—secret formula brought from the Levant, where they know a thing o’ two ’bout plague.” The bottles clinked as he shook his coat to draw Interest.
The hum of Discussion bloomed louder as the Denizens gathered ’round the urchin. Only the too-soused remained seated. The too-soused, and Bess, who had returned to Jack’s lap. A full-body sweat emitt’d from him. He wanted to stand and haggle for his own bottle.
“You know who’s runnin’ the centinels.” Bess turn’d to look at Jack now. “Don’t you.”
He shook his head.
“Jonathan Wild. Thief-Catcher General,” she proclaimed, loud enough for the pub to hear.
“The lizardy fuckwit!” repris’d Jenny, nose-deep in her mug of ale.
“The lizardy fuckwit.” Bess faced the group again, most of whom congregated ’round the urchin selling plague-remedy. “And, look, this so-called plague’s a colonial furor too. An excuse to send the Bombay Navy down the Coromandel coast. To war against the Froglanders and the French and whoever else is vyin’ for fortune. It’s all bollocks. An Imperial trick. This worry over ’fection from the east. Constructed to cover up somethin’ else.”
But what? mouthed Aurie at Jack. “T’cover up what?”*5
*1 Roguish boyfriends
*2 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal (1715–1737). As of now I cannot confirm this particular report.
*3 Dutch East India Company
*4 If accurate to the text, Bess has delivered the first known usage of “securitizational” in known history.
Lacking easy access to the online Oxford En
glish Dictionary, thanks to my unpaid leave, I’m bookmarking for later.
*5 So I go by Dean of Surveillance Andrews’ office today.
The library looks grander than ever. Relieved of a vast proportion of its books, the space has really blossomed into the spectacular, vacant anomie of an insurance tower in a second-rate city.
When I arrive at Dean of Surveillance Andrews’ office, he’s got company. This guy in a drab gray suit is sitting in one of the chairs opposite the desk.
Ursula is in the other one.
Strange. They hauled Ursula in here just for associating with me? Jesus.
Welcome, says Dean of Surveillance Andrews. He doesn’t stand up.
The other guy does, though. He shakes my hand and there’s this pungent waft of body odor coming off him. Just incubating in his suit and poofing out when he raises his arm. It isn’t terrible. Just musky. Like maybe this guy never dry-cleans his suits.
Sullivan, he says. North-Northeast Senior Marketing Director of P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals.
I realize we’re still shaking hands, and I’m nodding dumbly at him.
And Pharmaceuticals? I finally croak out, flicking my eyes at Ursula. She’s staring down at the table. Pharmaceuticals? I say again.
Mm-hmm. We’re a subsidiary.
I don’t know if he means that the publishers are a subsidiary of the pharmaceuticals, or that the University is a subsidiary of the publishers (and the pharmaceuticals), or what.
You know how it is with neoliberalism these days, he furthers, with a nasal chuckle. Everything’s a subsidiary of everything!
Oh god, one of these corporate meta-neoliberal comedian types.
I sent you an email last week regarding some editing work, he continues, smoothing his tie.
Uh-huh, I manage.
You responded negatively, and I—we—he gestures at Dean of Surveillance Andrews—thought you might prefer to meet in person, to personalize things. It’s best to meet in person, don’t you think?
I just stand there.
We’re prepared to offer you a choice, chimes in Dean of Surveillance Andrews. A choice between your current unpaid leave and a small outsourced project for P-Quad, who we’ve recently partnered with in some…areas.
Areas, Sullivan cuts in, which the University could use to have optimized.
Optimized, repeats Dean of Surveillance Andrews.
In fact, says Sullivan—P-Quad has made some generous donations to the University.
—The agriculture school as well as the library—
—And is currently, as a side interest, expanding into the Archival-Text-Documentation Field, and we’d love to have your assistance on a matter which Ursula—now Sullivan gestures at her—has apprised us of.
Of which Ursula has apprised us, I correct.
Only after I shmuckily fix his grammar do I realize: Ursula hasn’t been hauled in there at all.
Memories are flashing up.
The day I told her about the manuscript.
The so-called “date” when I told her about the unpaid leave.
The timing of P-Quad’s email.
The phone call at the pharmacy.
Ursula??
She gives me an apologetic look just as Sullivan hands me a flyer:
In an Age of Toxins and Atrocities, P-QUAD, Inc. Offers the Most Humane™ Pharmaceutical Product. Don’t take barbaric pharmaceuticals! Take Only Humane™ Pharmaceuticals!
I look up. Sullivan straightens his tie again. He keeps smoothing it to his chest and then down his belly. It’s a little compulsively autoerotic and sad.
Let me ask you a question: Do you buy organic produce? He pauses. No need to answer that! He chortles. You’re a professor, after all!
He’s doing that furniture-salesman thing of leaning back and pointing both index fingers like guns at me while delivering this “joke.”
Have you considered what it might be like to have access to an organic testosterone—he continues—a truly natural testosterone? Surely you know the synthetic testosterone on the market is altered. A molecule here and there. In small ways, but altered. If it weren’t, the drug companies wouldn’t be able to patent it. Old Lockean principle encoded in law. One mixes one’s labor with an unowned thing in order to take possession of it.
I’m familiar with Lockean theories of possessive individualism, I say, annoyed. It’s the epistemological basis of colonial land grabs.
Yes! he says, as if that’s a good thing. So then you understand, he plows on, that, by the same principle, testosterone variants are patented through these alterations. Inventions. Intellectual labor upon the natural resource allows the company to establish ownership. And, well, what if you could avail yourself of an unaltered testosterone? Derived from humane methods. He looks at me. Clasps his hands and points the prow of them at me in that Leadershippy way. Like a farm share. A humane farm share for hormonal supplementation. Wouldn’t you agree that would be a superior product? A superior and purer product?
This guy is bludgeoning me with his common sense.
Ultimately, we’re talking about an open-source, humane testosterone. One simply needs the means to manufacture it. He coughs. That’s all we’re seeking to do here. Produce an organic, humane, bioidentical open-source testosterone.
From the University’s humanely milked dairy cows, blurts out Dean of Surveillance Andrews.
Cow urine, actually, corrects Sullivan. It’s part of the partnership between the University and P-Quad. Humanely milked cow urine by-product.
It’s a win-win, Dean of Surveillance Andrews says.
Honestly, Sullivan says, the rendering market is at an all-time low. Your University used to sell urine and offal to a Ukrainian protein blending plant but all the plants are using much-cheaper palm oil now. You know palm oil markets these days—he looks at Dean of Surveillance Andrews in that collegial neo-colonizer kind of way, and shrugs. Left with a surplus, P-Quad has helped the University realize that rather than dispose of the fluids, we can, together, make something of them.
My uneasy feeling is becoming more specific now.
Ursula let us know a little bit about your research on the manuscript you found in our library, says Sullivan.
Did he just say “our library”?
And we think you’d be perfect as our resident “expert”! he says, smiling.
Expert in what? I say.
Yes! he “responds.” And as our resident expert, you’d be helping us—we don’t want to say market anything, but our aim is to present a special product. As it’s open-source, we can’t patent it. So we’re looking to distinguish our offering. Our thought here is that we can make our product—he searches for and rejects a lot of different probably disturbing advertising words—unique by releasing it in conjunction with the publication of the manuscript—the authentic memoirs—
Confessions, maybe, I say. More like confessions.
—The earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs known to history—
Western history, I say.
—Well obviously, of course, of course—he waves his hand in the air—the earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs in Western history.
I don’t see why you need me to authenticate that. Anyone reading the manuscript would see that Jack is—
Yes, well, he says, cutting me off, that’s an interesting question, heh heh, as far as our legal department is concerned. He smooths his tie again. As with pharmaceuticals, so with archival manuscripts. The manuscript is no longer copyrighted, of course. But with your footnotes you’ll—he clears his throat—add labor to the document. Invent, if you will. And in so doing, as a freelance employee of P-Quad, you’ll allow us to take exclusive ownership of that manuscript, copyright and sell it.
But I bought it from the kid at the library, I object weakly. So then technically I own it. Shouldn’t you have to buy it from me? Or couldn’t I even make it available to the public for free?
In fact, I hadn’t thought at all about making it available for free. But I often get this itch to be an asshole around administrators, and I like goading Sullivan with this idea.
Actually, he says, the University’s surveillance cameras show that the kid gave it to you. Which he was not authorized to do. It thus remains the property of the University archives. In fact, it’s still essentially out on loan. When you agree to edit it—he says this like I’ve already agreed to it; another mind-control technique from Leadership books, no doubt—you’ll do so as an employee of the company, and any labor you perform on the object will be labor performed in our service and on our behalf.
I really wished I had a turkey sandwich to throw at that moment. I was flooded with my of course feeling. The one I get when everything turns out as terrible as I’m always worried it will be. Even Ursula turned out crappy. My stupid little crush. It was all just—
Fuck this, I say and turn to leave.
Oh, don’t be grandiose, says Sullivan. I suspect the outcome of your decision will affect you more than it affects us. Perhaps you’ll think further about our offer.
I shoot Ursula a look.
Hey, she says, shrugging. The Rite Aid cut my hours. What do you want from me?
2.
Hell-and-Fury and Wild were standing in the midst of the blistering ruckus of Jonathan’s Coffee House, on Exchange Alley. The scent of burned Coal blew downwind, mixing with the sour stench of bean-roasting. Even at the late hour, business was high.
“This a promotion?”
“You? Mr. Hell-and-Pasty?” Wild frown’d, rolling his pocket watch between his fingers.
Hell-and-Fury squint’d. Barely a hint of pupil visible.
“Well, ahh, yes—me.”
Wild squash’d his chin into his neck.
Confessions of the Fox Page 13
