Ten years of Servitude. Ten years of Polhem Locks.
Jack lived one life during the days he was sent to the market. More and more the brims*1 of the streets took him for a boy. (Once, even, a bulky cove*2 with a ginger-and-black speckled beard, scuffing at some cobblestones in Lamb’s Conduit alley, tried to sell him some stolen kerchiefs. Fancy some fine linens, boy? he’d whispered. Jack had not realized ’til he’d gotten some way down the street that the man had been speaking to him.) He anticipated traveling to and from the sellers’ stalls in Covent Garden, oiling his curls so they would fall just so over his eyes, conditioning his apron with sheep’s-fat so it shined. He liked how it sat on his thighs when he bounc’d down the lanes.
At the Kneebones’, he lived another life. The life of an ugly, misshapen girl chain’d to workbenches to turn out useless items for aristocratic dogs. There was a constant knot at the back of his neck where his spine met his skull. An Ache that he associated with his vex’d relationship to breathing. It was as if he had been born with a spike between his vertebrae, and, with each failed attempt’d full breath, some Demon hanging just over his shoulder nailed it deeper, deeper. Anyone else looking through his eyes would have known immediately how to remove this Torment. Flee the house, and the spike will work itself loose. Even an animal will seek out relief. But Jack mistook his Suffering for subjecthood. And consequently, he desired the doubleness to which he had been forc’d to resort as a form of survival.
There had been opportunities for Jack to escape. But he had always come back right away, hadn’t he. Wide-eyed and full of longing for the free World. Full of longing, too, for the women he’d begun to notice, the women who began to populate his imagination at night.
But he had always come back.
Because of his Demon. This Something that hung over his shoulder. This something that set him apart from other coves. Something that had caus’d him to dress his own chest in taut bandages under his clothes since his twelfth year, pinching at his ribs, throttling his every Breath to a forced shallow bird-sipping of the air.
And this Something was the same something that made his mother not look back at him when she walked from Kneebone’s door, though Jack watched after her until she turned the corner and was gone. This Something—what he thought of as his something—made his servitude, while a miserable confinement, a hidey-hole too. His whole life was some hidden, rank place. And so his confinement became the door inside him between his waking life and something still unwoken, something lying close-packed like a bomb at his core, poised to shiver into a coruscated, glinting shower of—of—of what, he knew not. But there was Something just beyond the door inside him. Some difference within that he did not yet want to know.
A snapping, muttering billow of voices, badgering and chafing, scudding just underneath his thoughts like a low-lying Thunderhead.
Until 12 March 1724.
En route to the New Exchange, Jack caught the eye of one particularly dark-eyed doxy resting against the side of the Ewe’s Nest doorway. She was startlingly fetching. Deep-set eyes with a piercing, Haunted look. His preferred sort. The sort he had begun looking at more regularly—a great deal more regularly, truth be told. None had yet look’d back.
This woman held his gaze.
Something loosen’d inside him, spiraling down from his heart to his torso’s nether root. It was a Feeling he had always known—it flashed up at the sight of a wash of hair down the shoulders of a cloak—the blink of kohl on an eyelid—the dusty fume of rose blowing off night-chilled skin—but it made itself much more Urgent now. When his eyes caught hers, the word “thamp” occurred to him. His heart was thamping against his chest, some combination of thumping and stamping.
With his heart thamping, he rounded the corner, a tuffet in each hand, his walk a bit stilted against the load. He was reviewing in a fizzly, excited manner the way the doxy’s eyes had blinked shut for a flicker that practically stopped his Heart—when a butcher’s cart loaded with carcasses, dead legs swinging from the sides, blast’d out of the dark at the end of the alley, plowing towards him, raising a complex squall of clove-scented holly berries crushed under wheels, the stale dank of rodent musk, and the rotted rush of drying Blood—and just at that moment, a vision of underparts slamm’d into his Consciousness.*3
Naked, bared Muff between wide-spread legs—open for him.
There in the alleyway, as he leapt to the side of the oncoming butcher’s cart, this sudden and absolute obsession was imprinted upon him. He wip’d his face in the crook of his elbow. Shook his head, blinking. His nethers were pounding. Several years of the incessant hounding of his waking and dream lives with thoughts of women cohered its chaos into a simple thought. He wanted this— He wanted women not as objects of fascination, dream-images, figments— He wanted them body and soul like he wanted food, drink, air, sleep. He wanted them all over—and he wanted them very especially at their Boiling Spot. But what did he want to do with it? He couldn’t make this vision of nethers go away, but he couldn’t quite understand what he was supposed to do about it either.
As he stagger’d a bit in the street, the breath knocked out of him, he re-heard what the doxy had uttered as he’d passed: Handsome Boy, she’d said. She’d called him Handsome. He adjusted his smish into his trousers, and found himself smiling for the remainder of the walk to New Exchange. The din and clamor of the sellers’ stalls didn’t bother him near as much as they did usually. He let the world wash over him.
Because he’d heard Boy, handsome Boy—her throat caressing the words as they slid out of her mouth—and the whoop and clatter of commerce cottoned softer, fading into the background.
Later that evening, Jack sat under the windowsill plucking through a news broadside on the Protestant émigrés, the French Prophets stockaded at Smithfield and pelted for days with rotten fruits, accused of false Visions and inciting Panicks in the Queen’s Publick.
As he shift’d, Jack felt the heft of a steel file thump his leg. He’d forgotten to return the tool to Kneebone before lock-in. And Kneebone—distract’d by some escalated fear of an ague, as he’d heard a vagrant cough outside the window earlier that day—had forgotten to check his tool inventory as they vacated the workroom in the evening.
Jack palmed the file. He thought of Kneebone’s warning: “This lock can’t be picked.”
He heard it, now, in a new way.
Jack bent over his ankle, considering the mechanism. Then he inserted the file into the Slot and jiggl’d four times in a rattling downward motion. The teeth slipped free. The Polhem Lock was even easier to pick than the standard British padlocks he affix’d to the hasps of the chests he built. Jack stared at the open jaw of the contraption in his hand. He almost felt sorry for Kneebone for being so mistaken about the lock. Then felt sorrier for himself for not having thought—not once in nine years—that Kneebone had not been so mistaken.
He had been lying.*4
Now that he was Free, Jack’s mind turn’d to the doxy from the afternoon. Who would—he hoped fervently—be where all the best rogues went after nightfall: the Black Lion Inn.
A quick dash into the street? He wouldn’t be missed. He knew the Kneebones’ routine as well as his own. After locking Jack inside his attic room, Kneebone would descend to the plain chambers he shared with Lady Kneebone and—as it was a Sunday—calculate that week’s Accounts, read together briefly from their Bible, then blow out the Lantern (Jack catching the reflection of the flicker puffing out in the glazes across the way) and fall to sleep. This was Jack’s best surmising of the Kneebones’ nightly affairs, as he never had heard any sort of Screwing from the room below, nor indeed any suggestive creaking of the floorboards.
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.)