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rmTitle: Because Men Once Went West
Rating: PG
Pairings: Jack/OCs
Summary: Jack in America in the 1890s
Author's Note: I did a ton of research to write this, and I've still probably gotten stuff wrong; the information I dug up was consistently disturbing and contradictory. I also moved the date of the SF plague outbreak from 1900 (thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wordsofastory for informing me of this odd, horrible and poorly-handled event in the first place). This is one of those stories that, while containing no explicitly disturbing content, has a lot of implicitly disturbing content and might be distressing for some folks.
A/N #2:iamshadow correctly points out that, as far as we know, Jack gets shot on Ellis Island, not stabbed. My bad -- in the midst of history research to have a bit of canon fail. So let's just say Jack is a lying liar who lies, yeah?
By the time Jack gets to Ellis Island, he already knows there’s something seriously wrong with him; he hasn’t been aging, and it makes him feel not just unreal, but full of lies.
So, of course, he gets stabbed, the knife puncturing and then ripping his kidney as he’s standing in the immigration line.
Okay, not just standing, but really, who the fuck hits their pregnant wife while trying to get into a new country? It was a bit too much for Jack, and the guy kept jostling him besides. Later Jack thinks he should have punched first and said something clever second, might not have died then.
That, the dying, scares the shit out of him.
Literally.
And it takes him a long time to decide later what he hates about it the most, the dying or the being dead, the stench of it or the first burn of air. It is terror replaced with terror replaced with terror and then the light of the world, which is no fucking picnic either.
After Ellis Island, he gets the hell out of New York as fast as he can, lest people cleave to him and remember the miracle of his rising. Religion, on top of it all! It seems there is no indignity he is to be spared.
He goes west, as it seems men do. There are jobs in the west, building the rails, and Jack thinks it sounds perfect.
If not for the rails robbing the continent of its space, men would not have tried so diligently to take to the air.
Jack decides he will lay steel. Jack decides he will make his future true.
The camps are squalid, dingy and brutal. No equally miserable company towns for the men laying track, just tents and the occasional shack, open-air barracks really, considering their state of repair.
Jack works harder than he’s ever worked in his life, and falls into bed each night exhausted. He doesn’t touch himself; he doesn’t even fantasize. Sex seems distant, abstract, despite what most of the men do with most of their pay. Jack discovers he is grateful to have suddenly been taken over by such asceticism; it makes him feel alien; it reminds him that he is.
So it surprises him less, the next time he dies.
It’s still awful beyond the telling of it, and it’s not pleasant, waking up in the doctor’s tent. The first thing Jack reaches for as he gasps back into life and tries to hold onto it is a corpse’s arm. He manages to knock both himself and the body onto the floor.
The doctor is matter of fact.
“You were dead,” he says.
“And now I’m not,” Jack tries. If you act like it’s normal…. well, it worked in conning, but the doctor just looks at him skeptically.
“Look, don’t tell, all right?” Jack eventually tries into the curious silence.
“All right,” the doctor says, grudgingly, like he wants to cut Jack open.
In dying, Jack finds he has lost muscle; the work of the railroad on his body gone in a brawl. The labor of the place feels impossible all over again and the men tease him about having fainted. But there are nerves in their voices, and they steer clear enough, after. Jack’s grateful about that; these days are not about other people.
Notices come into the camp: rules for the workers and journals of the company way of life. The men who can -- and it’s most of them to Jack’s surprise -- take turns reading aloud, himself included.
It’s harder than he expects. Awkward. This English is not his first language, or even his second. There are idioms he doesn’t know and spellings unfamiliar. He speaks so little during the day that even without these ways of fumbling, his voice is still rusty, but few of these men have an education much past boyhood, and they smile at him like they understand. They don’t.
Jack is embarrassed.
The second time he dies, he gasps to life in the camp doctor’s face.
“Thought you might do that,” the man says.
There’s a hint of a smile and Jack, after not so much as even touching himself for months, finds he wants to kiss the man. And sure, he’s sore and filthy from dying, but he realizes he feels good not to be encased in the corded tension that the rails have brought to his flesh. He realizes he’s hated it, the way the labor has thickened his neck.
“I think I’m leaving,” Jack says, pushing the doctor away and sitting up. “Tonight. You got any clothes you want to give me?”
The doctor looks skeptical and starts to yammer about Jack’s next pay packet. But Jack smiles, charming again, and says, “I wasn’t here for the money.”
In what passes for clean clothing, Jack sneaks out under cover of night and feels bad to leave the men who read aloud without a word. It would be too much trouble to explain and all sorts of dangerous to the time line, but in that Jack can’t ignore that they are the closest thing to home he‘s had on this rock of his past.
He goes west, again, further now, as men do.
He remembers words from the history lessons he didn’t quite care about: manifest destiny. It’s stupid. And ugly, and he’d sat in classrooms thinking come on, come on, get to the good part, but he also knows this matters, or once did: men go west, then go to the stars; a woman slips the bounds of the solar system and then humanity splatters out across the black.
The species colonizes and is colonized in return.
The form changes and yet does not die.
His father is born in a zero-G birth, a fad that once established Jack knows pops up every couple hundred years for millennia. The family settles on the Peninsula; Jack’s father is six. He meets a girl, four years his senior and third generation to that outpost of farmers and explorers. They become friends. Eventually, they grow up, marry and have eyes so only for each other they are mocked, monogamy as alien to their time and place as all these tongues of earth. Jack is born.
Because men once went west.
So Jack does.
San Francisco teems; Jack falls in love. He can’t die! The world of the flesh welcomes him back, so on his first day in town he fucks a whore and is awed at how important it is to her not to enjoy it. He is reminded that in this time and place he can’t quite read: not people; not words.
He finds work, both legitimate and not. He gambles. He finds Chinatown and never wants to leave, but that impulse he quickly discovers is a problem and a half. The only things white men do in Chinatown are things Jack’s got no interest in: he’s no missionary; he’s no cop and the rest of what happens there – well, even at his worst, Jack likes to think he was better than that.
So what if he’s lying?
He’s happy to keep lying if it means he can have this place just a little bit longer. Whether it’s the buzz of the language that reminds him of home, of the Peninsula, of his prudish and strange and insular and freakishly happy parents; or the food that reminds him of something he ate his second week at the Time Agency, Jack doesn’t know, but he went west, because that is how men took to the stars, and it does feel better here, in his heart, for all that.
Peng Bao-Yu is the butcher’s daughter; she hangs out ducks cured and smoked, standing on fruit crates to reach the hooks. She’s clever and fearless, and Jack likes her. Her feet are unbound and she says at school her name was Agnes, but that she likes Bao-Yu better.
Jack can’t help but agree with her that names are very important.
The butcher watches Jack watch Bao-Yu and Jack knows what he must think. But the girl isn’t just too young for him; she’s too young for anyone really, except maybe another child on the sands of some planet that Jack’s just starting to be mad enough to believe he can find if he just goes a little bit farther west.
When he's not skulking about Chinatown fantasizing a way home, Jack sits on the cliffs and stares out at Seal Rock. He thinks it is the most desolate place in the world, and the animals disturb him; they seem to know.
He tells Bao-Yu about them; as a girl she rarely ventures outside. Because Jack’s stupid, he offers to take her to see them. The question inevitably means something entirely different than he had intended; their eventual marriage is probably not even legal, but it satisfies her father.
Hell, Jack thinks, it satisfies her.
He tries to be good to Bao-Yu. Tries to do right, be gracious, let her feel like a wife in whatever small ways he decides he can stand.
Some girls get married as young as seven, she tells him, knowing, but their husbands are rarely older than fourteen.
Jack is only vaguely relieved when he discovers the whole of San Francisco is so mad. It is not just her city within a city, his now too; it is not just his heart within a heart.
So Jack tells her stories, buys her dresses and takes her, finally, to Seal Rock. By now Jack knows good Chinese women don’t go outside, but he also knows she probably stopped being good by such standards when she told him her names.
He likes the feel of her tiny - wrong - hand in his, and lets himself forget things, like that he should be dead if not by now then soon, not just of injury, but perhaps of age.
He tells her about the stars like he’s never been there and about steam engines as if he doesn’t know how they work.
He tells her about his mother.
They live in two cramped rooms at the top of a Chinatown tenement. She does their wash and their cooking in a shared courtyard and won’t let him help, so stern and small, although he helps fold clothes and makes the bed a nest of blankets for her because inside they are alone, noise from street and neighbors aside, and there is no one there to see.
In the night, she curls and clings to him and he holds her, loosely and afraid. He wishes he were fifteen; he wishes there were somewhere farther west to go.
The plague comes to San Francisco on boats.
Bao-Yu dies of it.
So does Jack.
He vomits in horror when he comes back, retches and sobs. Then he flees, stumbling down the stairs and into the street, unable to move fast enough, panicked by his own nature, panicked by the flies on Bao-Yu’s face.
He gets out of San Francisco as fast as he can, lest they quarantine it - as they should - lest he be trapped there, like the seals on the rock.
Jack takes the rails, not, thankfully, the ones he laid, east and is a decent approximation of a rich man by the time he arrives in New York, having carefully swindled and stolen his way along the train, letting a porter suck him to keep the secret.
He books passage for England the very same afternoon and waits out the three days until departure shaking and sweating in the arms of a delightfully doughy Romanian girl, who is happy to pet his hair, take his money and actually be fond.
Jack is more grateful to her than he could possibly say, so he tells her that Bao-Yu was his sister; he tells her that her name was Agnes.
He tells her that he is sailing because he wants to see the stars at sea.
He tells her that he is a liar, and it seems to make her glad.
Rating: PG
Pairings: Jack/OCs
Summary: Jack in America in the 1890s
Author's Note: I did a ton of research to write this, and I've still probably gotten stuff wrong; the information I dug up was consistently disturbing and contradictory. I also moved the date of the SF plague outbreak from 1900 (thank you to
wordsofastory for informing me of this odd, horrible and poorly-handled event in the first place). This is one of those stories that, while containing no explicitly disturbing content, has a lot of implicitly disturbing content and might be distressing for some folks.A/N #2:
iamshadow correctly points out that, as far as we know, Jack gets shot on Ellis Island, not stabbed. My bad -- in the midst of history research to have a bit of canon fail. So let's just say Jack is a lying liar who lies, yeah?By the time Jack gets to Ellis Island, he already knows there’s something seriously wrong with him; he hasn’t been aging, and it makes him feel not just unreal, but full of lies.
So, of course, he gets stabbed, the knife puncturing and then ripping his kidney as he’s standing in the immigration line.
Okay, not just standing, but really, who the fuck hits their pregnant wife while trying to get into a new country? It was a bit too much for Jack, and the guy kept jostling him besides. Later Jack thinks he should have punched first and said something clever second, might not have died then.
That, the dying, scares the shit out of him.
Literally.
And it takes him a long time to decide later what he hates about it the most, the dying or the being dead, the stench of it or the first burn of air. It is terror replaced with terror replaced with terror and then the light of the world, which is no fucking picnic either.
After Ellis Island, he gets the hell out of New York as fast as he can, lest people cleave to him and remember the miracle of his rising. Religion, on top of it all! It seems there is no indignity he is to be spared.
He goes west, as it seems men do. There are jobs in the west, building the rails, and Jack thinks it sounds perfect.
If not for the rails robbing the continent of its space, men would not have tried so diligently to take to the air.
Jack decides he will lay steel. Jack decides he will make his future true.
The camps are squalid, dingy and brutal. No equally miserable company towns for the men laying track, just tents and the occasional shack, open-air barracks really, considering their state of repair.
Jack works harder than he’s ever worked in his life, and falls into bed each night exhausted. He doesn’t touch himself; he doesn’t even fantasize. Sex seems distant, abstract, despite what most of the men do with most of their pay. Jack discovers he is grateful to have suddenly been taken over by such asceticism; it makes him feel alien; it reminds him that he is.
So it surprises him less, the next time he dies.
It’s still awful beyond the telling of it, and it’s not pleasant, waking up in the doctor’s tent. The first thing Jack reaches for as he gasps back into life and tries to hold onto it is a corpse’s arm. He manages to knock both himself and the body onto the floor.
The doctor is matter of fact.
“You were dead,” he says.
“And now I’m not,” Jack tries. If you act like it’s normal…. well, it worked in conning, but the doctor just looks at him skeptically.
“Look, don’t tell, all right?” Jack eventually tries into the curious silence.
“All right,” the doctor says, grudgingly, like he wants to cut Jack open.
In dying, Jack finds he has lost muscle; the work of the railroad on his body gone in a brawl. The labor of the place feels impossible all over again and the men tease him about having fainted. But there are nerves in their voices, and they steer clear enough, after. Jack’s grateful about that; these days are not about other people.
Notices come into the camp: rules for the workers and journals of the company way of life. The men who can -- and it’s most of them to Jack’s surprise -- take turns reading aloud, himself included.
It’s harder than he expects. Awkward. This English is not his first language, or even his second. There are idioms he doesn’t know and spellings unfamiliar. He speaks so little during the day that even without these ways of fumbling, his voice is still rusty, but few of these men have an education much past boyhood, and they smile at him like they understand. They don’t.
Jack is embarrassed.
The second time he dies, he gasps to life in the camp doctor’s face.
“Thought you might do that,” the man says.
There’s a hint of a smile and Jack, after not so much as even touching himself for months, finds he wants to kiss the man. And sure, he’s sore and filthy from dying, but he realizes he feels good not to be encased in the corded tension that the rails have brought to his flesh. He realizes he’s hated it, the way the labor has thickened his neck.
“I think I’m leaving,” Jack says, pushing the doctor away and sitting up. “Tonight. You got any clothes you want to give me?”
The doctor looks skeptical and starts to yammer about Jack’s next pay packet. But Jack smiles, charming again, and says, “I wasn’t here for the money.”
In what passes for clean clothing, Jack sneaks out under cover of night and feels bad to leave the men who read aloud without a word. It would be too much trouble to explain and all sorts of dangerous to the time line, but in that Jack can’t ignore that they are the closest thing to home he‘s had on this rock of his past.
He goes west, again, further now, as men do.
He remembers words from the history lessons he didn’t quite care about: manifest destiny. It’s stupid. And ugly, and he’d sat in classrooms thinking come on, come on, get to the good part, but he also knows this matters, or once did: men go west, then go to the stars; a woman slips the bounds of the solar system and then humanity splatters out across the black.
The species colonizes and is colonized in return.
The form changes and yet does not die.
His father is born in a zero-G birth, a fad that once established Jack knows pops up every couple hundred years for millennia. The family settles on the Peninsula; Jack’s father is six. He meets a girl, four years his senior and third generation to that outpost of farmers and explorers. They become friends. Eventually, they grow up, marry and have eyes so only for each other they are mocked, monogamy as alien to their time and place as all these tongues of earth. Jack is born.
Because men once went west.
So Jack does.
San Francisco teems; Jack falls in love. He can’t die! The world of the flesh welcomes him back, so on his first day in town he fucks a whore and is awed at how important it is to her not to enjoy it. He is reminded that in this time and place he can’t quite read: not people; not words.
He finds work, both legitimate and not. He gambles. He finds Chinatown and never wants to leave, but that impulse he quickly discovers is a problem and a half. The only things white men do in Chinatown are things Jack’s got no interest in: he’s no missionary; he’s no cop and the rest of what happens there – well, even at his worst, Jack likes to think he was better than that.
So what if he’s lying?
He’s happy to keep lying if it means he can have this place just a little bit longer. Whether it’s the buzz of the language that reminds him of home, of the Peninsula, of his prudish and strange and insular and freakishly happy parents; or the food that reminds him of something he ate his second week at the Time Agency, Jack doesn’t know, but he went west, because that is how men took to the stars, and it does feel better here, in his heart, for all that.
Peng Bao-Yu is the butcher’s daughter; she hangs out ducks cured and smoked, standing on fruit crates to reach the hooks. She’s clever and fearless, and Jack likes her. Her feet are unbound and she says at school her name was Agnes, but that she likes Bao-Yu better.
Jack can’t help but agree with her that names are very important.
The butcher watches Jack watch Bao-Yu and Jack knows what he must think. But the girl isn’t just too young for him; she’s too young for anyone really, except maybe another child on the sands of some planet that Jack’s just starting to be mad enough to believe he can find if he just goes a little bit farther west.
When he's not skulking about Chinatown fantasizing a way home, Jack sits on the cliffs and stares out at Seal Rock. He thinks it is the most desolate place in the world, and the animals disturb him; they seem to know.
He tells Bao-Yu about them; as a girl she rarely ventures outside. Because Jack’s stupid, he offers to take her to see them. The question inevitably means something entirely different than he had intended; their eventual marriage is probably not even legal, but it satisfies her father.
Hell, Jack thinks, it satisfies her.
He tries to be good to Bao-Yu. Tries to do right, be gracious, let her feel like a wife in whatever small ways he decides he can stand.
Some girls get married as young as seven, she tells him, knowing, but their husbands are rarely older than fourteen.
Jack is only vaguely relieved when he discovers the whole of San Francisco is so mad. It is not just her city within a city, his now too; it is not just his heart within a heart.
So Jack tells her stories, buys her dresses and takes her, finally, to Seal Rock. By now Jack knows good Chinese women don’t go outside, but he also knows she probably stopped being good by such standards when she told him her names.
He likes the feel of her tiny - wrong - hand in his, and lets himself forget things, like that he should be dead if not by now then soon, not just of injury, but perhaps of age.
He tells her about the stars like he’s never been there and about steam engines as if he doesn’t know how they work.
He tells her about his mother.
They live in two cramped rooms at the top of a Chinatown tenement. She does their wash and their cooking in a shared courtyard and won’t let him help, so stern and small, although he helps fold clothes and makes the bed a nest of blankets for her because inside they are alone, noise from street and neighbors aside, and there is no one there to see.
In the night, she curls and clings to him and he holds her, loosely and afraid. He wishes he were fifteen; he wishes there were somewhere farther west to go.
The plague comes to San Francisco on boats.
Bao-Yu dies of it.
So does Jack.
He vomits in horror when he comes back, retches and sobs. Then he flees, stumbling down the stairs and into the street, unable to move fast enough, panicked by his own nature, panicked by the flies on Bao-Yu’s face.
He gets out of San Francisco as fast as he can, lest they quarantine it - as they should - lest he be trapped there, like the seals on the rock.
Jack takes the rails, not, thankfully, the ones he laid, east and is a decent approximation of a rich man by the time he arrives in New York, having carefully swindled and stolen his way along the train, letting a porter suck him to keep the secret.
He books passage for England the very same afternoon and waits out the three days until departure shaking and sweating in the arms of a delightfully doughy Romanian girl, who is happy to pet his hair, take his money and actually be fond.
Jack is more grateful to her than he could possibly say, so he tells her that Bao-Yu was his sister; he tells her that her name was Agnes.
He tells her that he is sailing because he wants to see the stars at sea.
He tells her that he is a liar, and it seems to make her glad.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 07:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 07:10 am (UTC)All simile-abuse aside, this is now my canon explanation as to why Jack was in the state that he was in when TW found him.
He doesn't seem like the type to go crazy from maladaptation alone.
There had to have been something that drove him to become a drunken, ranting mess.
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 07:18 am (UTC)Congratulations for being the first person to make me actually invested in a character's pursuit of manifest destiny!
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 07:57 am (UTC)I would never have dreamed of Jack in San Francisco's Chinatown (a stone's throw from where I'm reading this), but you make it fit him: he, too, turns an "exotic" mask to the dominant culture while suffering from the loneliness and harshness of displacement. He's both the colonizer AND the dispossessed, and you put that across in the most tender yet unsettling way.
I love to hear that Jack fumbles with idiom and that he can’t quite read: not people; not words. Because, OF COURSE. This is how I see him.
I haven't half your verbal economy here, but this is a sneaky, brilliant sliver of Jackitude, and every paragraph cuts precisely.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 08:54 am (UTC)I come from a family of immigrants and I see my father struggle with idioms and trying to get people.
It's a feeling of marginality and liminality [sp?] that you captured beautifully.
Jack is and always will be liminal, even when he (finally) gets back to his century.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 09:22 am (UTC)Coupla tiny nits: "When he not skulking about Chinatown" is missing an "is" or an apostrophe+s. And I'm pretty sure it would be either "In what pass for clean clothes" or "In what passes for clean clothing".
Thanks for communicating so well despite the Mercury Rx! PS if you talk to kalichan tell her I think of her often and miss her posts and hope she's coping.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 12:31 pm (UTC)...she’s too young for anyone really, except maybe another child on the sands of some planet that Jack’s just starting to be mad enough to believe he can find if he just goes a little bit farther west.
I love this story, and I especially love the passages which convey Jack's essential "foreignness" and homesickness.
Leaving home...or "going West"... has never been only about finding work... it was and is about finding out who you are and what you're made of.
Edited for caffeinefail.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 02:53 pm (UTC)Thanks for this.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 02:55 pm (UTC)Also, aside from my own long-standing fixaton with Seal Rock, the seals were sort of a shout out to the space whale.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 02:58 pm (UTC)When I write about offensive things, I like to think the audience is smart enough to go "jesus, I knew this part of history was totally upsetting, but yeah, awful" and not assume I'm celebrating it because I'm talking about it or characters are down with it or whatever. This assumption, however, hasn't always been the right one.
But you get it! Yay. So many things.
Also, because you'll think it's funny -- the seals were sort of a shoutout to why Jack freaks the fuck out about the space whale.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:18 pm (UTC)And yeah, as I started writing I was like "shit, this has to be about manifest destiny, how ugly and freakish" and finding a way to ake that work was nervewracking.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:19 pm (UTC)Kali and I talk all the time, so I'll pass the word.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-19 03:21 pm (UTC)