The next morning broke with a bright sliver at the edge of the horizon—the air was thin and dry after the storms. Jack pull’d on his breeches in the pre-dawn dark. Bess was still in a curl under blankets—the room had taken on a creeping Anonymity. It could hold them no longer.
They gather’d their things—though there was not much, truly—and sort’d through what was untorn and unbroken after the centinel-trampling. A few dresses and petticoats—some vases and bowls—Bess’s copy of Spinoza’s Ethics—the waning bottle of elixir from under the floorboard near the bed—some duds. Jack duck’d out to look for burlap sacks to transport their items. He headed for the refuse pile behind James’ Linen and Textile shop.
He rushed down the alleys quickly, the wind beating his ears Sore, and cooling the sweat at his temples and under his arms.
He pistoned along. Muscles and nerve fibers crisscrossed his chest, flexing and twanging. Jack spy’d some sacks behind the shop, then—unthinking—nick’d a handful of cherries from a cart. It was stupid to pull off any jilt at the moment, but force of habit and Hunger (and some still-Strange Boldness) puppet’d his arms.
He rounded the corner back to the bat house, slipped in with a fly*1 nod to the Lady Abbess, and chugg’d up the narrow stairs—two at a time, his topcoat emitting fumes of ash and coal from the street. When he opened the door, that warm, close scent he lov’d—Bess’s musty-violet-scented-breech—pour’d through the cracked doorway.
There was her valise by the door. The room was empty of all their things except the remnants of some meal—empty globes of wine, ruby-scummed and dried at the bottoms, and a shiny bit of thyme-roasted duck hardening on a plate.
He pulled the cherries from his pocket and added them to the plate.
Bess’s comportment had shifted. He hadn’t noticed in the busyness of the morning, but—she had a new, open look. One he’d never seen before. Is this to do with the History she gave? Her face had no extraneous architecture but what was there. Not that he would have noted extraneous architecture beforehand. It was the kind of thing one doesn’t recognize until it’s dissipated.
“It’s been sweet”—Bess’s voice was soft—“sharing this room with you. I mean, ’cept for when you say foolish things to beadles. But I was so truly lonely here before you came.”
Two chousers on the run are permitted questionable decisions based only in some miraculous syncopation of the affects.
Bess leaned back a bit on the bed. Regarded him out of the bottom of her eyes. “You’re a beautiful Something, Jack.”
He knew that meant he had that despairing, longing look in his eyes. The one with his sentiments just out there, splash’d all over his phiz for everyone to see. His eyes were bigger and more expressive than a man’s eyes ideally should be. With long dark lashes. He hated their soul-fullness.
But Bess loved it—for it was this somethingness that meant, in her complex lexicon of desire and permission, that he was the one who could touch her without pay.
Jack mov’d across the room—pushed up her slip and knelt between her legs on the dirt-gritted floors.
At the taste of her, his Monies*2 immediately set to boiling—
—He could have stay’d that way for some time, but she pulled him up onto the bed, dropping her legs open. He pushed his breeches down—reaching under the bed for the Horn. She stopped him with a hand on his chest, letting out a small hiccup.
He look’d down. He was straining towards her.*3
Certanly there are Things that defy Description in the languages we have at our disposal.
So, to put it plainly, there was a—
—But language fails here—
—Perhaps a…
…Transfixing Shape?
—blooming thick at his nethers.*4
In any case, not the arborvitae of other coves—the ones possessed by childish glee. This was something else.
Less a—
or, rather, more a—
Well, one is driven into the arms of metaphor—
What was there was something of a creature—some partly mythical creature—or else an ordinary creature behaving mythically—a wolf emerging from the forest, dragging brambles, dripping fire from its teeth like blood. A wolf emerging from the forest bearing an expression never before known to wolf. Shame, strange Hopefulness, furious Hunger. A wolf emerging from the edge of the woods, breaking into the tiniest, most hesitant and yet utterly unchildlike Smile. Licking back fire along a dark wet muzzle. Wondering: Am I home?*5
And it wondered this in a Not-So-Nice Way.
The thing grew larger under Bess’s gaze and in her marvelous proximity.
Bess grabb’d him by the back of his head and they kiss’d deep and then he was—was—
He was inside her. Not—truth be told—all that Deep inside her, but he was inside her.*6 They made a hot Suture. A boiling Suture.
It was like with the Horn.
It was and it wasn’t like that.
Dear God.
Sometime later—
“And then you proceeded from the Red Chapel, through the stout door, into the dark passageway,” cried Bess, standing on the bed, gesticulating wildly with her arms in a pantomime of Jack’s most infamous gaolbreak. Whatever she hadn’t been able to fit into her two valises or the sacks, Jack had stuff’d into his coat pockets and wound ’round his waist.
They were now both drunk. And open and easy with each other again.
“Well, but you c-can’t attack a fillet that way,” corrected Jack, standing and stumbling on the tangled bedsheets. He guided her hand in a mimicry of gaolbreaking.
“It—it’s like this,” drawing her right hand back and then thrusting it up at a mock-fillet. “You strike it hard and precise at the front, and then it shatters—” Jack sprinkl’d his fingers through the air, conjuring falling shards of fillet.
Bess turn’d and they dropp’d to the bed again. Jack’s hands roam’d up and down her high tight bottom, her thighs—and they’d made it three-quarters of the way through a flask of brandy, when Bess look’d down at him, her dark hair messed across her eyes—and fell giggling on his chest. He liked her a bit soused—how Undone she’d become with liquor—his ice-queen, composed and Brilliant during the day, but unraveled and somewhat silly by night’s end.
“We will beat them, Jack,” she said into his chest. “We will.”
“I know,” he said, into her hair.
They should have left hours ago.
Fortunately the centinels were quiet that day.
They hired a hackney coach—and so, what was going to be a melancholic procession from their rooms was transform’d into a tumult of laughter, dragging sacks and suitcases, and then they were riding past Newgate with the windows down, screaming in joy at their freedom and youth and pleasure. They were too soused to find this Foolish—even Bess, who now had splashes of Red warming her cheeks on account of the quantity of brandy and clicketing.
They hung out the windows, calling for the warden, the Inmates, anyone to hear that they were free and ungaolable. It felt good to forget everything—to drown together in perfect Freedom, rolling side to side in the coach, feeling the able Irish Roans pulling them forward like Poseidon sporting the waves, immune to tide and currents.
The gargoyles outside Newgate appear’d even more immense from street level, and Jack was draped out the window of the coach backwards, looking up at them drunkenly, Bess with her face pressed into his breeches, her breath in some consummate syncopation with the cart’s rocking. His body blush’d all over with a sustained, unpeaking exquisite Pleasure, and he was looking up at the huge gray flint faces, the scudding glowing clouds.
Sometimes—albeit rarely—but especially when one is young, Revelry is the verso face of misery and Terror.
When the coach pull’d up outside Dennison’s, the driver lash’d the horses to the post and stepp’d down to piss in the gutter. There was a broadside pasted to the horse post.
“King’s Menagerie tonight,” read Bess, idly.
Jack meandered over, scann’d the advertisement. “Eagles, a Sea-Bear, and a Lion-Man straight from Borneo.”
“A what?” She put his hand on his arm.
“A Lion-Man straight from Borneo.”
“Jack”—she tore off the advertisement, peered at it—“a Lion-Man.”
“Didn’t know you were interested in those blasted human zoos.”
“No, remember when Evans was dying—well, I mean, right before the dying part—and he said something about how this wasn’t his first operation?”
“Don’t remember much o’ that day.”
“The note we found?” She rustl’d through one of the bags. “See!” She point’d to it. “Met with Okoh and the Lion-Man.”
Bess had her look of unfettered Glee, the look she got when seemingly unrelated things began to connect. Her Spinozist look.
But first upstairs to Dennison’s to drop off their goods. A quick hello to the new Abbess—a wrinkled small woman hardly as well off as the other, but hopefully, Jack thought, less likely to turn them in to the magistrates. This bat house was Somber, quiet in the anterooms with an occasional down-at-the-heels cove shuffling through. At least no centinels would think to look for Bess at this sinking establishment.
The new chambers were larger than the old, but dark and Close-ceilinged. There was a tiny mildewed hearth area along with a Bed and ottoman. And a hooked rug with patches missing—a sad archipelago of wool.
Quickly they were back in the coach and Bess said, “Drury Lane, please,” to the driver, and the horses jolted forward, while, back in the compartment, Jack and Bess fell over each other again, scrambling to get their hands on anything of each other’s that they could, panting in joy.
*1 Knowing
*2 Private parts
*3 Thank God I don’t have to field a question from Sullivan now.
*4 Narrator declines to give further details. To my mind, further evidence of document’s authenticity.
I will say, however, that this is a quite unique instance of figurative language. In eighteenth-century pornography, evasion or metaphor in this manner is uncharacteristic.
See, for example, John Cleland, Fanny Hill: “Her fat brawny thighs hung down, and the whole greasy landscape lay open to my view.” Or, “For the first time did I feel that horn-hard gristle battering against the tender part.” Euphemism there may be in Fanny Hill, but not the teasing aestheticizations of figurative language.
*5 Now, this interests me quite a bit.
The figurative constellation of genitals and wolves comprises (some might argue) one of the defining erotic constellations of Western modernity.
—A topic on which, incidentally, I have been accused of obsessing!—
Forgive me this fixation, but who could dispute that the description of genitalia as a “wolf” brings to mind Freud’s famous “Wolf Man” case (some artistic license taken here):
Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff: I wake with nightmares. There are wolves sitting in the tree outside my window.
Freud: Naturally, those wolves are your father, your castrating hateful father. He wants to come inside, bite off your dick and run into the woods with it, then he’ll go fuck your mother.
According to Freud, the dream recalls an event from Sergei’s childhood, when, in a spell of summer flu, he woke from a nap in his parents’ room and saw his father giving it to his mother. The primal scene.
The array of feelings this occasioned in him—jealousy, desire, etc.—inaugurated a desire to get fucked by his father accompanied by the simultaneous realization that to have that he’d need to be castrated like his mother. The ensuing anxiety takes shape as the wolf-nightmare.
But the real interest comes later. Circa 1968.
At which point Deleuze and Guattari were like: fuck Freud; genitals aren’t about parents. They’re about enclosure and privatization. Let me put this in terms appropriate to the eighteenth century. Just like you can’t pick up a wilty, shit-coated carrot from the burbling sewer and eat it, because the sewer is regulated by the city and the Nightsoil Concern—well, for Deleuze and Guattari your genitals are enclosed as well. Except instead of anti-vagrancy laws, your genitals are enclosed (and privatized) through the institution of the family and also through psychoanalysis, which insists that all your anxieties have to be traced back to Oedipus and how much you hate your father and want to sleep with your mother. Or how much you want to get fucked by your father in the style of your mother, etc.
Basically Deleuze and Guattari are formulating an anticapitalist theory of genital vagrancy.
And so they reimagine the scene of the Wolf-Man’s analysis as such:
Pankejeff: I wake with nightmares. There are wolves sitting in the tree outside my window.
Deleuze and Guattari: Look, you Russian aristocratic fuck, those wolves are the Bolsheviks, those wolves are the multitudes, those wolves represent all the terror and the possibility of the social world, the common folk who are waiting outside your window to extinctify you and your kind. And for this reason not every nightmare you have is about Mommy and Daddy and all that same shit all the time.
Do you know what else Deleuze and Guattari said? This is actually relevant, because it’s a non-Oedipal theory of fucking. They said,
“[W]henever someone makes love, really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people. A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that which serves as organs [wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?] is distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the form of molecular multiplicities.”
Don’t be perplexed by the weirdness of these claims. It’s just that making love is not really about getting your organs serviced. Rather, when you’re making love, the organs that have been forced into this Oedipal narrative get rearranged. Rewritten. Sort of liberated (there’s some debate around how liberated; just bracket that for now). And that rewriting—that’s making love. Actually, it’s kind of like the epigraph to this manuscript—“Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book.” The body is written (like a book is written)—or rewritten—in the process of making love. I mean, if you’re “really” making love.
*6 Mercifully, in the absence of Sullivan’s pestering, I am in a position to decline to estimate how far inside her he is. Anyone who really wants to know these specifics has clearly never made love.