Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

  When Sullivan requested the page I had “misplaced,” I was flat fucking broke. Plus, you know, the threat of the lawsuit!

  So, in order to be paid and to evade legal consequences, I did send him…something. It was not, however, a missing page of the manuscript, although I could not let the reader know this at the time of the original footnote, for obvious reasons.

  Indeed, I have, frankly, no idea if this page ever existed—and, if it did, at what point it may have been removed. I like to imagine, though, that it was redacted by consensus of a radical librarian subcommittee of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1978 (on more of which, see Reina Gossett’s archival work on STAR: www.reinagossett.com/​reina-gossett-historical-erasure-as-violence).

  But back to my point about that footnote and my necessary lies. What actually happened was this: Sullivan and I were going back and forth about the manuscript—that much is true. But when I said that I had sent him the missing page of the manuscript, containing an illustration of Jack’s genitalia, what I actually did was Google “waterlogged slug,” and I found an illustration in a garden book (more specifically: advice on how to slay flower-pests) of a creature that had been salted, fatted and then left to perish on a deck. I cut the illustration of the slug from its background and pasted it into some Photoshop template of a pitted and moth-eaten page. It looked, in fact, quite like an “authentic” eighteenth-century manuscript page.

  I saved the document as “MissingPageChimeraJunk.rtf” and sent it to Sullivan.

  He motherfucking loved it.

  8.

  In the Press Yard of the Tower of London, inmates congregated over pints of ale and gin from the prison distillery and sold for several guineas apiece. In his previous Arrests, Jack had always been confin’d to the Condemned hold. Now he was allow’d to mingle with the other prisoners. Some strategy of the wardens to inflict Fear on the population. The Gaolbreaker General locked up like any other piece of riff-raff.

  The Yard was packed with inmates. The dirt was peppered with shite, piss and vomit. It was near sundown. Oaks overhung the walls, their branches thinned and darkened into silhouettes against a dirty cherry-colored sky. In the far corner, thieves prepared for a mock trial, schooling one another in the art of legal Logic.

  Fires were going up in small piles of kindling, flickering orange against the Gloom of the yard. Ruby sparkles shattered into the dirt, and bangers sizzl’d in pans, adding smoke to the already thick air.

  Jack was present’d a chicken leg.

  “Jones,” a crooked, bird-thin inmate said.

  “Sheppard,” Jack mumbl’d.

  And now Jones was bowing—flourishing the chicken leg—while booming, “Hear ye, Denizens of the Tower Hold, we have amongst us the eminent Jack Sheppard, Thief of Thieves, Breaker of Latches, Nabber of Horses, Watches, Guineas, and Pence. Son of Eternal Night. The House-Breaker General. No gaol can hold him, so pay your respects!”

  The Condemned Birds rais’d their glasses; beer and gin sloshed into the dirt.

  “All hail the Gaolbreaker, House-Breaker, Doxy-Lover General Jack Sheppard!”

  But the usual rounds of Praise and hailing weren’t able to rouse Jack. His heart was racing. The ring of admirers was a wall of stares. And he was somewhere else—unscrolling before him all the occasions he and Bess had reach’d for each other. The way she woke his Something into life. She had never been afraid of his strangeness, had pett’d between his legs like she loved—no, hunger’d for—his wild Part—the thing that swelled and reddened at the sight of her, quite beyond his control. He could not help but show her how much he loved and desir’d her. She had rewritten his Body, after all. Images of the way they were together were stamp’d on his brain like silver nitrate blooming against chalk tablets. Etched in shadow, frozen in aching memory.*1

  “Have any of you g-got a pint for a man newly nabbed?” he squawk’d. The crowd was graying to a kind of blur, and his chest was getting that fluttery feeling that reminded him of his bandages—the bird-breath gasping he used to do—and then one of ’em was putting something in his hand and he was drinking back deep, letting himself remember that first time he saw her. That day with the deadcart in Lamb’s Conduit Alley when she called him handsome boy, and he was mercifully losing his grasp on sobriety, dropping into some otherworld of memory where all his being—all his intention and longing—was spinning towards that now long-lost Horizon that lived between her legs.*2

  *1 To return to an earlier discussion: I am now considering the possibility that “a wolf dripping fire from its teeth like blood” (see this page) was added by what I have learned was a “chimera caucus” that formed in 1969 at the communist psychoanalytic institute with which Felix Guattari was affiliated, La Borde.

  La Borde, where the patients ran free, where schizophrenia was a communiqué from the verso side of our cruel reality: some flicker of liberation. At La Borde the patients produced plays with the doctors, schemed together on capitalism’s overthrow.

  Note to self: investigate whether the chimera caucus at La Borde ever mounted a play titled Confessions of the Fox.

  *2 On the manuscript’s continual theme of Spread Legs. Well, this obsession I frankly postulate to be an inversion of Marcel Duchamp’s genius/sick-fuck masterpiece, Étant Donnés, which aimed to be the last word on spread legs. Thankfully it is not.

  If you’re not familiar with this piece, go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Or don’t. I’ll just tell you about it.

  You must pass through the larger Duchamp exhibit, where you will find all his major works—the urinal and the massive Bride Stripped Bare (heterosexual union depicted as a severed window, with “the men”—a cluster of spidery machines—lurking in the bottom frame, and the big shit-like log of the “woman” hovering in the upper frame, a taunting zeppelin). Don’t stop in this room. Go past the urinal and the violent window of sexual difference. Beyond these is a room even further back, a hidden abode within the museum. There you will find a thick wooden door with a tiny window set in its upper region at approximately eye-level. Only one museumgoer can look through the peephole at a time. When you do, you will find the cast of a woman spread, Black Dahlia–style in a field, naked, holding out a lantern, beckoning you like some Virgil or Beatrice. And you’re looking straight at her pussy.

  It’s like a bombed-out building, this pussy. Tortured rubble. The hole is shorn of any hair, any color. Ash-white vagina against a ruined picturesque—torn brown weeds, bright sky, some shy clouds and shining, erect trunks of fir, maple and oaks festooned with dun and silver winter colors. Duchamp’s peephole is a dastardly portal birthed in violence, dripping sawdust and splinters. And, god help us, desire.

  Well, I mean, desire as that whole Bataillian Erotism shtick. Eros as the birth of consciousness—fucking as synonymous with the shame of fucking.

  ’Course, the only subject with this version of consciousness, shame or desire in Duchamp’s scenario is the (cis)man. This point is so obvious it hardly needs stating.

  So let them have Étant Donnés. And The Bride Stripped Bare and all of it. Good fucking riddance.

  You do know there’s another room, don’t you? Back behind Étant Donnés. The museum guards built it, of course.

  Or, in any case, so says the book I found on the top floor of the Stretches, which takes its title directly from Duchamp’s Green Box—which, if you are not familiar, contains his notes on artworks as a shadow cast from a fourth dimension. (FYI, that dimension is time.)

  The full title of the book I’ve found is too long to explain to you. I’ll just call it Make a Picture of Shadows Cast.

  In Make a Picture of Shadows Cast, we learn about this back room. A room for study, contemplation and—perhaps?—the occasional revision of an apocryphal manuscript titled Confessions of the Fox. Could the guards have made some alterations to the Confessions?
A procession of spread legs to rival Duchamp’s?

  What better place to do such a thing than in this back room—this living diorama of flesh worship. The kind that only queers truly understand. We who have given our lives for the love of flesh.

  In the museum guards’ room, or so I have read, you do not stand and watch. You do not ogle through a peephole. You drop to your knees. A woman’s hand presses the back of your head to her “quim” (as the rogues say!). And you take it in your mouth and pray.

  9.

  “You’re being neither Rational nor Virtuous, Jack. The prison recommends you take our offer of a Bible, consider your Fate, and make your Confessions.”

  The Tower Ordinary sat at the table in the common hold, his hand running over the few strands of hair populating his pink dome.

  At the high window, a foggy constant rain. The west wind blew the iron Scent of the Thames through the bars.

  Jack had not been amongst others for a stretch of days—since being sent to the lonely lower hold for “stubbornness.” He inhaled deep the foul scent of the prisoners scattered at tables, thrilled to their rough chatter.

  “I’ve n-no use for a Bible,” he said, returning his attention to the Ordinary. “Nor to give my confessions to you.”

  The Ordinary screw’d up his face.

  “ ’Tis a useful text for such a one in your situation. In need of salvation.”

  “I’ve more use of a f-file than a Bible. With all due r-respect.” Another letter of execution had come down that day. “Salvation? For havin’ plucked a primrose?”

  “A forbidden primrose,” the Ordinary clarify’d. “Property of the Municipality of London. Plus there is the matter of your seven previous convictions. Who are you saving your confessions for, anyway, boy?”

  If Jack would not give his confessions—and make an example of himself—he’d be sent to isolation. The Ordinary marched him downstairs to the lower hold.

  * * *

  —

  Later that evening.

  The constable knock’d his baton against the bars.

  “You’ve a visitor.”

  Jack wiped sleep from his eyes and swung his legs across the pallet.

  He could hear doors clanging open. It was suppertime for the guards and prisoners alike. A fine mess, with the rowdiest of both populations cuckooing up and down the halls and the Yard. All of this Bess would have known. Jack smil’d to himself. It was a good time to visit in the gaol—she could come without being too closely watched.

  He anticipat’d her scent coming closer. And how her eyelids—kohled dark—would flutter at him. He would have to try to stop himself from falling against the bars—from melting with relief at the sight, the scent of her. His heart leapt and danced.

  The figure drew closer.

  Jack’s eyes focused in the Gloom.

  Aurie’s fingertips curl’d around the bars. He was wearing a priest’s neck collar. The constable just behind him stamped and circled in the narrow hallway.

  Jack’s heart plung’d to its depths. Still, he stepped forward, saying Thank you for visiting, Father, kneel’d, and put his lips to Aurie’s nails. Aurie, perfectly on cue, let the file fall from his sleeve into his fingers, and then to Jack’s lips.

  Jack open’d his mouth, let the file in, closed his lips and stood.

  Pinching the file between his teeth, he whispered—“Have you seen Bess?”

  “I’m more concern’d with you getting free,” Aurie hissed back. “Been to every gaol in the city looking for you. You’ve got to spring yourself now. They’re getting more ruthless, accelerating executions.”

  “What does it matter.”

  “What does what matter?”

  “If I ever get free. Bess—” He could not finish the sentence. “Have you seen her?”

  Aurie’s face went blank in a way that seemed very deliberately arranged.

  “Don’t lie to me, Aurie. Please.”

  “Passed by Bess and Jenny on the way here. Walking together close and confecting. They didn’t take notice of me.” Aurie’s breath brush’d Jack’s face through the bars. There was a tinge of tartness on it, the scent of a dry Palate. “But forget about her—you need to get out, brother, or you’re hang’d for certain.”

  “I’m content here.”

  Jack, a rack of bones hunch’d in the dark, was quite obviously not at all content.

  “Give me back the file, then,” said Aurie.

  “Take it. I don’t care for it.” Jack pulled the file from his mouth.

  Aurie pushed his arm through the bars.

  “No mingling with the inmates!” shouted the constable.

  “Gods,” Jack sigh’d. “You’re getting ’im riled.”

  “Open it,” Aurie gruffed, “or I’ll do it again.”

  Jack leaned on the bars, making a show of talking to Aurie while working the file into the lock of the hold with a light click.

  Aurie grinned and, under his breath—“Meet me, brother, on the other side”—then rushed down the hallway.*

  An unlocked door is difficult not to walk through.

  When the guard plodded up the stairwell for his supper, Jack tiptoed the opposite direction down the tight hall, through the inch of chill water collected in the sloping center of the dirt floor. He worked the file into the short thick wooden door at the end of the hall—the Head Constable’s chambers—and peek’d ’round the corner, making certain it was empty.

  Quickly through the bitter, airless room and on to the narrow wooden stairs. Jack spun around three flights with his feet barely touching the ground, rounded the last bend upwards and slamm’d into a set of thick iron bars. No hinges, no latch, no keyhole. Just bars set into the roofhatch. At the other side: the wet night air.

  Must be an ancient route out of the prison, now obsolete. Jack’s mind was lost in his craft. He remember’d his training in ironwork. Slid the file into the joint of the bar, working the iron just as Kneebone had taught him. It had been sloppily welded with a heap of bubbly nickel. The window-caster must have used a Cheaper ore than what’d been request’d by the architects of Confinement. Jack chuckl’d. The caster’d probably charged the warden for pure iron and steel, too.

  He placed his thumb against the nickel, sensing for the grain—the striated seizures that fix’d in heated ore. Jack saw’d quickly in the direction of the thin rivulets of nickel ’til one bar, then two, and then a third dropp’d into his hands. He slipp’d through and tidily replaced the bars, twisting so the grain lined up again. The break was barely visible. A perfect Restoration of the original sloppy job.

  He ran along the thick prison walls. He wasn’t soaring with his usual unimpeachable Sensation of freedom. In fact—unable to run to Bess, as ordinarily—he found himself rather queasy.

  At this height, he felt himself almost leaking upwards, narrowing through the trees and then out the gash of dense land-bound things into the low winter sky. He look’d down and out along the river, contemplating a thing—a particular thing. He could—well—he could just—Jump.

  —Couldn’t he.

  He imagined a soaring dive and then a hard Smack and he’d be just another bit of flotsam in the river. The clouds ahead bloomed radiant white. It was almost dawn.

  He’d sink to the bottom—to the cold silt crowded with mossy gray mollusks, spongy jade seaweeds and river fronds. He’d molder in the currents.

  It would not be miserable to be dead.

  Then the wind shifted—a balmier current rising off the water, warming his face. There was motion coming up the river. A huge hulking vessel against the pinkening dawn. A wooden creature roaring up the Thames with great Clamor, wind slapping magnificent, tattered world-worn sails. It sounded like a thunderstorm rolling down the water. Jack read the name christen’d on its side.

  It was the
Poor Maria.

  * No one escapes capitalism’s clutches alone.

  On which topic: I want to say that my new friends do not conceive themselves as living in the year 2018. They are living in the year WE ESCAPED! This year has lasted them a long time. They do not know how long it will last. I understand it may be hard for you to grasp what this means.

  10.

  By morning, winter had deepened. The air was thin with cold, and the sun twisted its angle away from the earth. Leaves dried on the trees. Some had fallen to the streets, clogging the sewers.

  Bess and Jenny woke to the sound of an urchin banging on the door, shouting about a note from the Head Constable. Jenny stumbl’d up to shush the urchin and shove a coin at him.

  * * *

  —

  The Head Constable’s feet delivered an ear-splitting clop as he stormed down the pier at Blackfriars Dry Dock. Bess was lying, out of sight, at the stinking bottom of a punt underneath the dock in a mud of fish entrails. She could hear Jenny skipping down the dock above, trailing the Head Constable.

  The Poor Maria was pulling up the Thames, a phalanx of centinel-punts in its train.

  The sun was losing its battle against thick clouds. Only a weak glow emanat’d from the sky, smearing Thames Road and the ship in a dirty gray Light.

  The Head Constable stopp’d in the middle of the pier. “I ain’t searching that ship,” he coughed. He was due at the pub for his afternoon pint.

  “ ’Course,” winked Jenny, “I’m here for the lower work.”

  “Right then.” The Head Constable shift’d, looking about like a child needing a chamber pot. He ruffled through the pockets of his coat, his face rumpling and unrumpling.

  “The ship’s got twelve holds, none of ’em with portholes. You’ll be crawling through the dust, picking through the boxes, the closets—”