Confessions of the Fox

Bess is heartbroken after Jack stormed off. She views Jack’s reaction as narrow-minded and selfish, sacrificing the rest of the city for his chance at acquiring more strength gravel. She spends the evening drunk with Jenny. Reading a broadside, Bess learns that the city government is looking for women to hire as plague searchers tasked with investigating homes and ships suspected of containing the plague. Bess hatches a scheme to get aboard the Poor Maria by enlisting Jenny as a plague searcher.

With nowhere to go, Jack looks for Aurie in a hidden section of the Thames beach. He finds Aurie in a shipwreck that is used as an impromptu community gathering spot for mollies. Without Bess, Jack struggles to remember his name; the two are so intertwined that Bess is part of his identity as Jack. Aurie and Jack watch as an execution train passes over a nearby bridge. The two decide to follow the train to watch the execution.

Voth returns to musing on his relationship with his ex. The relationship was self-destructive for Voth because he could never let himself trust her or be fully vulnerable. He expected his happiness to be taken away at any moment and became an “asshole” because of it (240). Voth turned to a self-help book, The Art of Shprukh-Psikhish, or: The Psychological Mastery of Panic Character (226), to fix his anxiety-induced panic attacks. Voth relied heavily on the book and practiced the exercises contained in the book daily. The book did not help, and intimacy with his partner only exacerbated his anxiety after the glow wore off. One day while doing his Shprukh-Psikhish exercises, his ex gave him a letter from the Dean of Surveillance. Voth had not worked on his research since moving in with his ex and was in a precarious position with his job. Voth’s ex realized that there was nothing she could do to pull him out of his downward spiral of anxiety and self-loathing. The relationship ended, and Voth was left alone to deal with the Dean and his job.

Jenny’s first day as a searcher begins. She accompanies a constable to a dilapidated home that supposedly might contain the plague. The house contains nothing but an impoverished family trying to get by. The constable finds scraps of lace and linen and asks the woman of the house about the scraps. The woman has been taking the useless scraps from her work at the textile factory and turning them into useable goods to supplement her meager income. The constable arrests her for using her business’s private property under the Cabbage Act (cabbage in this instance means scraps and leftovers, like scraps of linen or wood shavings).

Voth learns that P-Quad has access to his university’s server and thus his private copies of the manuscript that contain footnotes about his personal life. Due to the nature of copyright, P-Quad owns even these extremely personal footnotes. Sullivan loves the explicit nature of Voth’s own “confessions.” Following his short-lived “strike,” Voth inquires after back pay since he has been working on the manuscript all along. Under the law, however, Voth’s editing of the manuscript while on strike constitutes vandalism and property damage. Voth connects his footnotes to the cabbage used by the woman arrested by the constable.

Sullivan will only reinstate Voth’s employment on one condition: He must produce the missing illustration of intersex genitals. Voth finally relents and sends Sullivan a text message of the “missing page.”

Jack and Aurie make their way to the execution. Jack’s voice is deepening, and he is growing facial hair thanks to the strength gravel, all of which make him feel more at home in his own body. At the execution, the crowd is greatly agitated, and Jack hears somebody yell “Pa ni mèt ankô,” a phrase he heard once before from Laurent. Jack follows it to the source, finds Laurent, and realizes he is likely a fellow transgender man as well as a pirate with a skull-and-crossbones tattoo.

As the execution of the convicted highwayman proceeds, one of the plague ships begins heading for the shore and straight toward the execution. The ship crashes into the shore, halting the execution. Jack watches as Okoh escapes in the chaos while freeing the convicted highwayman. Okoh gives a rallying speech to the masses, promising that they will all one day be free like the freebooters and mutineers on the seas. Meanwhile, Flanders and Fireblood spring their trap on the cart that is supposed to be carrying the body of the convicted. They snatch an anonymous corpse and disappear in the chaos.

Between Chapters 5 and 6 is an unnumbered chapter presented as a short message from Voth to his readers, titled simply “Reader!” The purpose of the message is to appraise readers of a critical discovery Voth has made about the nature of the manuscript. The previous chapter on Okoh’s escape cracked the code for Voth. The phrase Pa ni mèt ankô, a phrase of Haitian Creole origin, translates to “There are no more Masters” (257). Voth learned the phrase from a colleague whom he asked to translate it. His colleague found only one other instance of the phrase in the 1992 novel Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau.

Another term from the manuscript, plitho-hypomnesis (a Greek phrase), has also been illuminated. It translates to “collective diary keeping,” a practice among formerly enslaved and enslaved people during Jack’s time. These two revelations lead Voth to view the manuscript as a collective diary of LGBTQ+ and freedom fighters gathered together over the centuries. The confessions have not been written solely by Jack but added to, improved, and extended by the hands they have passed through over the years. Okoh’s speech, for example, is almost directly lifted from Frederick Douglass’s “Self-Made Men” speech of 1872. Okoh escapes into a “flying Cloud” during the chaos, a phrase also lifted from Douglass.

This revelation recalls an incident from years ago in a graduate seminar Voth taught. A graduate student asks Voth if he has heard of a local activist group disguised as a reading group; the student cannot remember the name of the group because she was drunk when she learned about them. This group sought to “liberate—or rather decolonize” texts kept under the lock and key by university administration and thus to give voice to the marginalized histories often paved over in those texts. These actions are in keeping with the anti-colonial ideas presented in texts such as Sadiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. The student wanted Voth to put her in touch with this group, but Voth had never heard of them. Voth believes that this group may have had a hand in the missing illustration in the manuscript alongside some of the more contemporary edits of the manuscript. He also believes that this student was likely trying to recruit him to the cause.

Realizing the gravity of the manuscript in his possession and P-Quad’s legal claims to it, Voth packs up his things and disappears into hiding.

While Bess tries to sneak aboard the Poor Maria, Jack breaks into Wild’s House of Waste. There, he finds a corpse on a dissection table, revealing that Wild has taken a dark turn away from running thieving operations and fencing stolen goods. Jack finds a stack of papers and an essay by Evans titled “Instructions on the Anatomy of Chimeras” that takes a Java Sea pirate as its subject (262). The paper goes into great detail in describing the intersex genitalia of the subject. Jack hides when he hears voices approaching. He overhears a short conversation between Wild, Fireblood, and Flanders. They bring in the body that Fireblood and Flanders have stolen, but Wild is extremely upset to learn that it isn’t actually the body of Barnes, the highwayman. Jack does not have time to overhear the rest of their exchange and quickly leaves.

Meanwhile, Voth has found a place to hide with other likeminded individuals in a nondisclosed location. The location, and Voth’s new friends, are implied to be quasi-magical, existing apart from the mundane world. In the archives of his new friends, Voth finds a document titled Urine Refracts Starlight With Especial Sparkliness (267) that parallels the language in Evans’s document on chimeras. The language in Evans’s document was edited regarding the urinary functions of the intersex genitals to move away from a scientific gaze on an “abnormal” object to one appreciative of the unique qualities of the intersex genitals. Voth concludes that the people who wrote Urine Refracts are likely responsible for many of the edits in the Confessions manuscript. Voth believes these edits are made to “rescue” the subject from the gaze of the sexologist and instead describe them through the gaze of a lover—one with a sexual interest in urine.

Jack kicks himself for leaving Evans’s papers behind in Wild’s House of Waste. He wanders the city at night; without Bess, he has nowhere to go and nothing to do. Jack finds himself in a park with blooming flowers and tries to pick a primrose for himself. Jack is immediately arrested by a police officer on account of the Anti-Foraging Act. The officer claims that the flower is edible and thus is property of the city.

Voth reveals that he deceived Sullivan with his correction of the “missing page.” When Sullivan pressed him to produce the page, Voth found a picture of a “waterlogged slug” and then edited it onto authentic-looking archival paper. Sullivan was overjoyed by what he thought were intersex genitals and did not realize it was just a bloated slug.