Granulated Strength Elixir
Available exclusively at Mr. Jonathan Wild’s House of Waste
He frowned. Looking up.
“Have y-you heard of the H-house of Waste?”
Damn, his stutter was in fine form, filling his throat with hiccups and impossibility. Jack cough’d—just to make a sound that wasn’t himself stammering like a slouch.
“Like a pub?”
“I mean The. The House of Waste.”
“What house of waste?”
“Waste like this.” He placed the bill of lading on the bed.
She lean’d over, silent for a moment, reading.
“You robbed Wild?”
“Uhmmm—”
“You robbed Wild,” she said again, breathing out slowly. “Jack, you’ve choused*4 the most vexacious chouser in London. Stolen from the Thief-Catcher General himself.”*5
*1 ME: As it is Friday, I notice I have not received payment for the most recent editing work. A mix-up with the bank? Please advise.
SULLIVAN: UNTIL SATISFACTORY RESOLUTION IS REACHED REGARDING THE MISSING PAGE, PAYMENT IS WITHHELD.
ME: There is no missing page. I would appreciate prompt payment or I will be forced to contact my lawyer.
SULLIVAN: NO PROBLEM! SHALL WE HAVE OUR LAWYER CONTACT YOUR LAWYER? OUR LAWYER IS EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD.
ME: I should have clarified. Once I obtain a lawyer I will be forced to contact that lawyer regarding payment. In the meantime, I have no recourse but to withhold footnotes.
SULLIVAN: MEANING?
ME: I hereby declare an ad hoc strike until payment arrives.
SULLIVAN: LOL!!! A STRIKE OF ONE!! GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.
*2 Dear Reader: Well, I’m broke again. But hey, I’ve been living off credit cards for decades now. What’s the difference between no money and negative money, I always say. At least, thankfully, we’re alone again. I’ve missed speaking more frankly to you.
*3 See, this is what I’m fucking talking about, Reader. This is why it’s good to be just you and me again.
What would P-Quad even do with this material? Call me thin-skinned, but I can’t handle it with the badgering, prurient questions. Not about this. Not about Unheldness. I’m not breaking this shit down for some manager of a private testing corporation. I’m honestly—quite honestly, if you want to know the truth—not even going to do it for those queers from “nice” families. You know, the ones with supportive, rolling-in-the-dough, loving parents chauffeuring them to the mall to fulfill whatever sartorial needs they have, etc.! I mean, good for these people, obviously. But then: Where are my people? Am I the only one who’s been puked up by the bowels of history?
On the very good chance that the answer is no, I’m editing this for us—those of us who’ve been dropped from some moonless sky to wander the world. Those of us who have to guess—wrongly, over and over (until we get it right? Please god)—what a “home” might feel like. So forget the held ones just for a second, they’re doing fine; I’m speaking to you—to us—to those of us who learned at a young age never to turn around, never to look back at the nothing that’s there to catch us when we fall.
*4 Robbed
*5 Speaking of revolutionaries and love, I suppose it’s about time to tell you about her. My ex.
Our first date was technically our second date, but it was the first one I could remember.
On that date, which was either the first or second depending how drunk you were on the first, my ex spent the entire evening grilling me about world history, current affairs and the hidden stakes of seemingly innocuous state-level legislation. It was clear that she was in possession of the answers, whereas I had fumbled my way into a decent but unglorious position as a literature professor at the flagship campus of a demoralized and floundering public institution.
It was a night of being endlessly harangued by a beautiful woman. Not unpleasant but a bit exhausting. She had asked me if I wanted children. I shrugged, but it was a shrug of: Kind of, yes. Which she had opinions about too. Something to do with the narcissism of how all of our hopes and dreams for futurity had been funneled into the project of children: mini reproductions of the self, she called them. Her point was, what ever happened to throwing your hat in the ring with masses of people who you didn’t, couldn’t know—who would never know you by name, but towards whose better good you would devote yourself. I’m talking about the future of all of us, she said. Not just some little family unit.
I realized then she was handing me something bigger than her, me and a kid.
And we both knew that it was practically a crime to be childless in this day and age, which perhaps accounted for why she’d suggested we go to the Villa Papyri Lounge, a restaurant I was quite sure had been closed for decades, vines growing over its gray-shingled face in that inauspicious bend in the road on Route 17. It wasn’t closed. But it wasn’t exactly open, let’s just say, either.
What she was offering me would involve a sacrifice of the desire for a family, but I was getting the impression that the payoff would be huge. Revolutionaries. Comrades. Lovers.
She played an old Smiths song on her phone. Yes we may be hidden by rags, but we’ve something they’ll never have, she crooned. And then: If they dare touch a hair on your head I’ll fight to the last breath.
Well, I was sunk. This whole time I’d been trying to imagine being a parent and here I was being offered a partner. We were back at my place by then. I was getting kind of drunk off Old Grand-Dad bourbon.
She was sitting on that old desk of my grandmother’s—the only thing she left me, and my only inheritance in the whole world. Her ass was on my inheritance. It seemed appropriate.
Time got extremely slow. She was wearing this black pencil skirt. It had a small pull up near the waist. Gray thigh-high stockings. Her eyes were bright and dark. I looked at her for some time.
She opened her legs a bit, twitched them open, really. I caught my breath, audibly.
“Oh my god,” she said, “you’re such a lesbian.”
She didn’t mean it cruelly. And she didn’t mean that I wasn’t passing as a cis-man, either. Although, since according to her we’d fucked the night before, she knew exactly how un-cis I was.
She meant that she saw something about the quality of my desire: that I could feel her even before I touched her. And that this was part of what it meant to be—or to have been, before my tits became the property of the California Municipal Waste Department—a lesbian. That a woman moving in your line of sight could have an effect that was total, atmospheric. That you could be hesitant, incapable and not particularly interested in establishing a line between touching and seeing. That you would indulge a dead love, dead in the eyes of the world, and valueless. A love that choked and burdened the mind, that might even be the very foundation of melancholy and despair. But, oh Reader, looking at a woman you really get a feel for the way that fire is a phenomenon of touch. And my point is, if you have ever been a lesbian, you will not even have to touch a woman to know that.
But I did touch her. We fucked for what I was told was the second time, and this time it was the fuck you can never get away from.
She let me see her in all her historicity, all her ages at once. Her Before. A cold house on the edge of a field. She had not been cared for. Let’s just leave it at that.
She had hidden in the house’s corners. Taught herself Marx, Mao and all the revolutionaries in a drafty, wood-paneled addition that poked like a bunion off the main frame. By day she was a high school girl learning how to draw the interior structure of combines and backhoes. In her own time, she was slowly becoming the woman who had come to straddle my hips, with my cock still inside her, looking down at me—inscribing me, casting my body anew—saying, There’s something wrong with your political worldview. Let me fix it.
&nbs
p; I don’t want to dwell on what happened. Everything ends. Who knows why. I mean, she was forever being pursued. Ex-boyfriends. Potential new boyfriends. Persistent motherfuckers. Was everyone in the world trying to take care of this woman. I couldn’t be one of several, though I tried.
You—if you are reading this?—know I did.
Well, so that’s one big why. There were others though.
But I’m not going down that road. Because I’m reminded of the epigraph to this manuscript: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book.” And the point is this: when a woman touches you, when she recasts your body in the flame of love, that fire is itself a spark thrown off a much larger blaze. Some distant incandescence called history. Some history of which, it turns out, you are a part. Some history to which you’re responsible.
I’m still thinking of the promises we made to one another.
If they dare touch a hair on your head I’ll fight to the last breath.
What should I do with those promises now.
8.
Jonathan Wild, buttoned up in a maroon cloak, stood beneath the blue plaque outside Lloyd’s of London. He peer’d into the thick glass windows to ascertain whether other customers were inside; then, when satisfied that All was Snug, he harrumph’d, smooth’d his sleeves, and opened the door.
“I hear you’ve had a loss.” Sir Bernard Mandeville—pale as an old bleached gargoyle covered in bird shite—sat on the far side of a gleaming mahogany desk.
Egads, not Mandeville. Mandeville—part-time employee of Lloyd’s and full-time ponderous political economist with foul grapey breath.
Wild grimaced. “I discuss’d that with Richard Bennett privately.”
“All of Lloyd’s son-in-law’s business is my business as well, since Lloyd passed. The family and I have entered into an informal partnership. In fact, if you know of any good sign-makers to produce a new plaque for the entryway…”
Wild ignored this—he was not a sign-contractor.
“This past week I lost something precious to me through the petty thievery of one Jack Sheppard—newly something of a celebrity in this town. And about this”—he loom’d over the desk—“I’m to meet with a Lloyd.”
“Please have a seat.”
Wild did not sit.
“A Lloyd is not in today.” Mandeville shuffled papers. “Please sit,” he repeat’d, looking up.
Wild adjust’d the large leather chair as far from Mandeville’s swarm of air as possible. “If I am forced to discuss this with you, I will share that I require payment on a lost product. However, I have, some time past, lost contact with a companion whose Knowledge I absolutely require.”
“Mmm.” Mandeville feign’d Sympathy.
“Evans,” Wild mutter’d. “Unreliable, mistake-making, flutter-fingered Evans. Where in God’s name—” He paused. Regulated his tone. “In any case, I’ve come to discuss the loss of an Item—a quantity of Item—taken from the Lighthouse Authority.” He could see that Mandeville was unscrolling the document he’d sign’d with Bennett. He twitch’d his nose. Frowned. “The Item is of a delicate nature. I would have preferr’d to keep this between myself and Bennett.”
“And nonetheless,” Mandeville said, with a thin-gummed smile, “here I am.”
“The Item has been stolen.”
Mandeville silently traced down the scroll with his finger.
“And you’re due two hundred pounds.”
“The problem,” said Wild, “is that the Item was invaluable. I require something in excess of compensation. I require to replace it. Bennett and I discussed this.”
“We don’t truck in replacing items. Perhaps you need to see a fencer.” This was a dig.
“I’m no longer in the business of fencing.” How is this buffoon of an economist gaining an upper hand?
“Is that so.” Unconvinced. “What are you now in?”
“Entrepreneuring. Bureaucrating.”
“And what sort of entrepreneuring do you intend here?”
“I’ve come to underwrite a ship. The ship will help me replace my lost product. I thought Bennett had appris’d you.”
“He appris’d me.”
“So then you’re aware of my project.”
“Your fencing, yes.” Glint of a smile.
“It’s not fencing!” Wild squawk’d.
Mandeville pursed his lips into an unconvincing Semblance of taking Wild seriously. “Of course it’s not fencing. It’s simply—you wish to make available to yourself some stock of which you are neither the original owner, merchant, or producer.”
“I was once colleagues with someone who might be a producer of said product. But he has since gone missing through what I can only imagine is some ham-brain’d fault of his own. On account of this frustrating state of affairs, I turn’d to Bennett, with whom I met several days ago in this very office.” Wild had attain’d the air of a defensive child. “He related to me that a captain recently received a king’s ransom for a lost ship and all the enslaved aboard.”*1
Mandeville beamed. “ ’Tis a beauty how insurance makes risk profitable. Loss of life, wreck of property. Something akin to stockjobbing—a rational Gamble no different than any other financial speculation.” He took a sip of tea. “So then did you wish to insure a slave ship, prison ship, or trading vessel?”
“Royal Navy ship.”
Mandeville covered a Honk of a laugh with a cough feign’d into his fist.
“A military vessel?”
“Yes. And its cargo. En route with the Company to the Java Sea.”
“I am afraid Bennett has misled you. You cannot insure a vessel of which the Nation is the owner.”
“I beg to differ, Bennett never misleads.”
“Beg all you like. Did Bennett explicitly say he would underwrite a Royal Navy ship? The Royal Navy, I repeat.” Mandeville began to scroll up the contract.
“What does it mean to be a merchant?” Wild interject’d. “It means nothing more,” he continued, “than that one enables the free exchange of goods from one hand to another. In this sense I am indeed the ship’s ‘merchant,’ for I aim—in insuring this vessel—to ease the exchange of goods from the ship to the good people of London. Insuring is—if you follow my logic—merchanting, of a sort, for it assures safe passage of the goods, and if not the goods, the profits to be deriv’d from them. Thus t’would be a Damage and a Hindrance to that free exchange if only the original owner of an item were known to be the merchant of that item. In the case of a Royal Navy ship, ’twould be a damage to the very Nation not to permit an underwriting of the vessel.”
Mandeville was scratching in his ledger book.
“That is not what it means to be a merchant,” he muttered at the page.
“Suppose, for example”—Wild stood to pace the room—“suppose a man sells seed at a profit of 1p per poundage to another man who grows a field of barley with it in Somerset. This man then sells the barley grain at a profit of 2p per bushel to a distiller in Edinburgh, who produces a whiskey from the grain, and sells the whiskey at a profit of 3p per case to a trader who makes the routes from Edinburgh to London weekly. This trader then sells the whiskey at a profit of 4p per ounce to an innkeep in Porter’s Row, who sells it by the glassful to gentlemen such as yourself. Now, when you purchase the glass of whiskey, if you were to pay the original owner of the seed in Somerset you’d pay at the original 1p per poundage for the barley element. Is that the general Cost of whiskey?”
“No.” Mandeville sounded bored.
“No, indeed.” Wild sat again, gesticulating across the desk. “For when you buy the barley, you pay, in fact, the fifth owner of the barley 5p or more, and in doing so, you support the beating heart of Commerce itself.”
“Inarguably.”
“So let us pose the question
again. If to be a merchant is to arrange for the free exchange of goods, then in order to be known as the merchant of an entity, is it necessary to be the original owner, or even any owner at all, of that entity?”
“All solid reasoning,” said Mandeville. “But when the Nation is the owner—”
“Stop saying ‘the Nation’!”
“When the Nation is the owner,” Mandeville press’d on, “the rules of merchanting do not apply. In any case it’s immaterial. Your entire paradigm is wrong.” He look’d down his glasses at Wild. “If you truly design to change your station from reptilian fencer to entrepreneur, you ought to know what it really means to be a merchant, an entrepreneur, and an economist.”
“But I’ve given an indisputable account! And you’ve concurr’d that it naturally follows that one does not need to have originally contract’d for a ship in order to insure its goods.” Wild attempted to modulate his volume.
“I did agree to that.”
“Look,” spat Wild. He came close to the desk, stood over Mandeville, puff’d himself wider. “I require to underwrite a military vessel.”
“If it were a private ship, even a Company ship. But a Royal Navy ship?”
Wild tighten’d in his seat. Bennett had encourag’d him to come in.
Then Wild noticed something. A light—if it could be called a light—in Mandeville’s eye. In fact, not exactly a light—something more like the cold Phosphor illuming the cartilage of a cuttlefish at night as it rises to the surface of a harbor, hanging above a cloud of anchovy-fish it intends to heartlessly spear through with its beak.
“Bennett has shared with me some details of this cargo,” Mandeville spoke. “We discuss’d your situation and concluded that I might suggest another route of securing it.”
“I don’t take your meaning.”
Wild’s facial pores bloomed open with excitement. His phiz was a fiery pink sponge—a mask of small panting animals.
“As it happens, I’ve just return’d from Holland—” Mandeville projected his voice to the far edges of the room.
Confessions of the Fox Page 18