Joba Cane

THE RECKONING OF JOBA CANE

A Chronicle of the Brass Promise¹

The men who work the Bridgetown² docks in what passes for morning — that greasy half-light before the sun burns the harbor stones — do not call him Prophet anymore.

They call him Cobble, and the

They call him Cobble, and the name sticks because it fits like a notch worn into timber: Joba moves through the wharves with an uneven gait, his left knee the victim of some long-ago violence, the joint bending wrong so that he pivots slightly at each step, like a wheel catching on its rim.

The limp is older than his piracy. Some say it came from an overseer’s boot; some say a horse. Joba himself has never corrected the story. The limp serves him better than the truth would.

What matters is the way it slows him down just enough to seem harmless — a crippled man with useful eyes and a mouth that knows which questions not to ask.

A man like that can stand

A man like that can stand in a taproom corner, broken cup of rum balanced on a cask, and listen to merchants argue about cargo manifests and harbor duties while the able-bodied men assume he understands nothing.

Cunning lives in that space between what a man appears to be and what he actually knows. Joba Cane was born into it.

His mother, Ayana, arrived in Barbados³ in the hold of a slaver when she was fourteen, her belly already swollen with a child that died before she felt it move. The plantation ledgers noted her arrival in ink the color of dried blood: damaged goods.

The notation cost her owner money

The notation cost her owner money and cost her dignity in a quantity no quill could quantify.

By the time the traveling merchant came through the colony in 1690, seeking to edge up from factors’ clerk toward something resembling independence, Ayana was twenty-three and had learned the arithmetic of survival under the lash — learned it the way a woman learns to breathe in water, through accumulated drowning.

A white man’s attention could elevate her, or it could annihilate her. The choice was not hers to make.

The merchant was Irish enough to

The merchant was Irish enough to read English law and ambitious enough to exploit the gap between what the planters needed and what they paid for labor. He was also a man with appetites and no particular conscience.

What happened in the shed behind the Whitmore plantation house belonged to the vast economy of colonial violence, where the powerless have no witnesses and no defense.

When Joba emerged into the world in the spring of 1691, he carried the evidence in his blood — cinnamon skin where his mother’s was darker, sun-streaked brown waves where hers lay in tight coils against her scalp.

But here the ledgers bent in

But here the ledgers bent in Joba’s favor. Under a clause few colonists bothered to enforce, a child born to a free woman inherited her status.

Ayana, by some accident of legal technicality and the merchant’s casual indifference to his own progeny, had been manumitted after five years’ service — freed with nothing but her name and the clothes rotting off her back.

That freedom, thin as it was, became Joba’s inheritance. He was born into the colony, not imported into it. He was born into a mother’s protective shadow and a father’s studied forgetting.

The docks made him

The docks made him.

From his fourth year onward, Joba worked the wharves alongside his mother, learning the vocabulary of labor that required no formal education: the grunt-language of the bilge pumper, the precise violence of the flenser’s knife, the patient degradation of the oakum picker’s fingers.

He moved between the classic trades and the necessary horrors — gravedigger, knacker, plague-cart driver — never staying long enough in one service to be owned by it.

His mother taught him the most

His mother taught him the most valuable skill of all: how to make himself useful without making himself visible, how to hear what merchants and ship captains said when they thought no one was listening.

By his sixteenth year, Joba had developed the facility that would define him. His cunning was not the cunning of the educated man — his schooling had consisted of overhearing and observation, his arithmetic learned in the currency of cargo and corpses.

But he could read a man’s weakness the way a flenser reads the seams in a whale’s hide. He understood which secrets were worth the holding, which debts could be leveraged, which silences cost more than speech.

When he took work as a

When he took work as a pawnshop hand, he learned which items were stolen and which belonged to broken men covering gambling debts. When he worked the crime scene, moving through the aftermath of dock violence with a grave digger’s methodical patience, he gathered information the way other men gathered coins.

The limp crystallized everything. It came in his nineteenth year — a confrontation with a leg breaker employed by a merchant he’d learned too much about. Joba survived it, but his knee never straightened properly. The injury should have ended him.

Instead, it perfected him. A man who moved with that distinctive hobble became memorable and harmless simultaneously. People watched him while assuming he was simple. Cormac O’Pry noticed him first, saw past the pivot and pause to the intelligence underneath.

By 1710, Joba had found his

By 1710, Joba had found his crew on the Brass Promise, where cunning mattered more than the ability to run.

He has never forgotten his mother’s whisper — that name spoken only in solitude, like a prayer to a god who did not answer. He carries it the way he carries his limp: as proof that survival has a price, and that the price is always paid by someone.

THE RECKONING OF JOBA CANE

A Chronicle of the Brass Promise

A Chronicle of the Brass Promise

---

The men who work the Bridgetown docks in what passes for morning — that greasy half-light before the sun burns the harbor stones — do not call him Prophet anymore.

They call him Cobble, and the

They call him Cobble, and the name sticks because it fits like a notch worn into a timber beam: Joba moves through the wharves with an uneven gait, his left knee the victim of some long-ago violence, the joint bending wrong so that he pivots slightly at each step, like a wheel catching on its rim.

The limp is older than his piracy. Some say it came from an overseer’s boot; some say a horse. Joba himself has never corrected the story. The limp serves him better than the truth would.

What matters is the way it slows him down just enough to seem harmless — a crippled man with useful eyes and a mouth that knows which questions not to ask.

A man like that can stand

A man like that can stand in a taproom corner, broken cup of rum balanced on a cask, and listen to merchants argue about cargo manifests and harbor duties while the able-bodied men assume he understands nothing.

Cunning lives in that space between what a man appears to be and what he actually knows. Joba Cane was born into it.

His mother, Ayana, arrived in Barbados in the hold of a slaver when she was fourteen, her belly already swollen with a child that died before she felt it move. The plantation ledgers noted her arrival in ink the color of dried blood: damaged goods.

The notation cost her owner money

The notation cost her owner money and cost her dignity in a quantity no quill could quantify.

By the time the traveling merchant came through the colony in 1690 — a man whose name Ayana would later teach her son never to speak aloud, as though utterance might conjure him — she was twenty-three and had learned the arithmetic of survival under the lash.

She had learned it the way a woman learns to breathe in water: through accumulated drowning.

The merchant was Irish enough to

The merchant was Irish enough to read English law and ambitious enough to exploit the gap between what the planters needed and what they paid. He was also a man with appetites and no particular conscience.

He had come to Whitmore’s plantation seeking to edge upward from factors’ clerk toward something resembling independence, and he understood that the space between necessity and transgression was where opportunity nested.

The plantation’s overseer owed him a favor — a quiet word to a customs man, a shipment of sugar overlooked.

The transaction was negotiated with the

The transaction was negotiated with the precision of contract law: ten minutes, a shed behind the works, and the overseer paid, his silence purchased for a shilling and the knowledge that he had sacrificed nothing he owned himself.

What happened there on a March night in 1690 belonged to the vast economy of colonial violence, where the powerless have no witnesses and no defense. Ayana’s screams were absorbed by the wooden walls.

Her terror was noted only by the rats that nested in the rafters. The merchant emerged buttoning his coat and walked back toward the great house as though he had done nothing more than negotiate a price for sugar.

When Joba emerged into the world

When Joba emerged into the world in the spring of 1691, he carried the evidence of that act in his blood — the merchant’s light eyes, his mother’s angle of cheekbone, the particular weightlessness that comes from belonging fully to neither category.

He was cinnamon-brown in a world that required men to be either white or enslaved, and that middle ground was a sentence unto itself.

Ayana had been transferred to kitchen work by then. Her body had been assessed, found serviceable enough, and she had been given to understand that keeping the child was her own affair, provided she did not let it interfere with her labor.

She named him Joba because the

She named him Joba because the word meant strength in a language the island was designed to erase from her mouth. She whispered it to him in the dark of the slave quarters, where the overseer could not hear and the child could absorb it like milk.

She taught him the merchant’s name was unspoken, a void, a sin against naming itself. To speak the name was to give the man power. Silence was the only weapon she possessed.

The boy learned to move through the plantation with the particular invisibility of mixed blood.

Too dark for the colonial hierarchy

Too dark for the colonial hierarchy, too light to be wholly trusted by the enslaved — he occupied a crack in the system, and into that crack he poured everything he possessed.

His mother had been freed upon her twenty-fifth year by a dying planter who had carried some shred of conscience into his deathbed.

The law recognized the child born to her after her freedom as free-born, a technicality of colonial statute that gave Joba a designation without security: he was legally unshackled but economically orphaned, too tainted by slavery’s stain to be accepted in white commerce, too disconnected from the shipboard networks that enslaved and freed men built in whispers.

He learned to read through a

He learned to read through a merchant’s discarded ledgers, the same ones that translated human labor into profit margins. He learned the mathematics of suffering. He learned that knowledge of commerce was a knife, and that a man could use it without ever raising his hand to violence.

The first time he stole, he was twelve.

It was a ledger sheet belonging to a provisioner named Caldwell, who supplied the plantation with rum and salted meat. Joba had been hired as day laborer — no wages, merely food and the chance to remain near water.

He worked the bilge pumps on

He worked the bilge pumps on merchant vessels in the harbor, clearing the brackish filth that collected in a ship’s belly. It was filthy work that no free man would accept and that enslaved men could not refuse. Joba pumped and watched and listened.

Caldwell’s ledger recorded that he had supplied thirty barrels of rum to the plantation over six months. The plantation’s own records showed that only twenty had been received.

The discrepancy represented profit meant for Caldwell’s pocket — a theft so ordinary it barely qualified as crime. But Joba understood that theft was the grammar of colonial commerce, and that knowing who stole from whom was currency in a world where coin was scarce.

He took the ledger page because

He took the ledger page because it gave him leverage.

He carried it to Cormac O’Pry, a shipmaster whose vessel — the Brass Promise, already earning its reputation for harboring men the law had discarded — was loading for a run to the deeper waters of the Caribbean.

He offered what he knew: Caldwell was corrupt, yes, but more importantly, Caldwell maintained ties to naval men who were tracking a particular contraband operation. Cormac understood at once that Joba had not merely stolen information; he had weaponized it.

“What do you want?” Cormac asked

“What do you want?” Cormac asked.

“Passage,” Joba said. “And the chance to be useful.”

His limp was worse by then. The overseer — a different one, meaner and more stupid — had broken his knee during a whipping, and it had healed wrong.

The fracture made him clumsy on

The fracture made him clumsy on land but did not slow him below decks, where the work required cunning more than speed. Joba pumped bilge and listened to men’s debts and lies.

He learned which crew members were thieves waiting for opportunity, which were running from justice, which were running from something worse. He learned that a man with a crippled leg and an unreadable face could move through a ship invisible, gathering truths that other men kept hidden.

He learned his name — not Joba, not to the crew, but Cobble. The name that acknowledged his broken knee and his capacity to serve a ship built on the salvage of broken men.

He accepted it the way his

He accepted it the way his mother had taught him to accept the merchant’s unnamed violation: as a fact of the world that could not be unmade, only survived.

By 1712, he had participated in taking three merchant vessels and had learned that his true skill lay not in fighting but in knowing before the fighting began where the weak points were — in cargo holds, in crew loyalty, in the ledgers that could be doctored and the captains who could be bribed.

He was cunning where brute strength failed. He was patient where haste would destroy.

He belonged to neither the enslaved

He belonged to neither the enslaved nor the free, but to the space between, where piracy offered the only honest economy he had found: theft acknowledged as theft, violence as violence, and a man’s worth measured by what he knew rather than the blood that marked him.

THE RECKONING OF JOBA CANE

A Chronicle of the Brass Promise

---

---

The men who work the Bridgetown docks in what passes for morning — that greasy half-light before the sun burns the harbor stones — do not call him Prophet anymore.

They call him Cobble, and the name sticks because it fits like a notch worn into a timber beam: Joba moves through the wharves with an uneven gait, his left knee the victim of some long-ago violence, the joint bending wrong so that he pivots slightly at each step, like a wheel catching on its rim.

The limp is older than his

The limp is older than his piracy. Some say it came from an overseer’s boot; some say a horse. Joba himself has never corrected the story. The limp serves him better than the truth would.

What matters is the way it slows him down just enough to seem harmless — a crippled man with useful eyes and a mouth that knows which questions not to ask.

A man like that can stand in a taproom corner, broken cup of rum balanced on a cask, and listen to merchants argue about cargo manifests and harbor duties while the able-bodied men assume he understands nothing.

Cunning lives in that space between

Cunning lives in that space between what a man appears to be and what he actually knows. Joba Cane was born into it.

His mother, Ayana, arrived in Barbados in the hold of a slaver when she was fourteen, her belly already swollen with a child that died before she felt it move. The plantation ledgers noted her arrival in ink the color of dried blood: damaged goods.

The notation cost her owner money and cost her dignity in a quantity no quill could quantify.

By the time the traveling merchant

By the time the traveling merchant came through the colony in 1690 — a man whose name Ayana would later teach her son never to speak aloud, as though utterance might conjure him — she was twenty-three and had learned the arithmetic of survival under the lash.

She had learned it the way a woman learns to breathe in water: through accumulated drowning.

The merchant was Irish enough to read English law and ambitious enough to exploit the gap between what the planters needed and what they paid. He was also a man with appetites and no particular conscience.

He had come to Whitmore’s plantation

He had come to Whitmore’s plantation seeking to edge upward from factors’ clerk toward something resembling independence, and he understood that the space between necessity and transgression was where opportunity nested.

The plantation’s overseer owed him a favor — a quiet word to a customs man, a shipment of sugar overlooked.

The transaction was negotiated with the precision of contract law: ten minutes, a shed behind the works, and the overseer paid, his silence purchased for a shilling and the knowledge that he had sacrificed nothing he owned himself.

What happened there on a March

What happened there on a March night in 1690 belonged to the vast economy of colonial violence, where the powerless have no witnesses and no defense. Ayana’s screams were absorbed by the wooden walls.

Her terror was noted only by the rats that nested in the rafters. The merchant emerged buttoning his coat and walked back toward the great house as though he had done nothing more than negotiate a price for sugar.

When Joba emerged into the world in the spring of 1691, he carried the evidence of that act in his blood — the merchant’s light eyes, his mother’s angle of cheekbone, the particular weightlessness that comes from belonging fully to neither category.

He was cinnamon-brown in a world

He was cinnamon-brown in a world that required men to be either white or enslaved, and that middle ground was a sentence unto itself.

Ayana had been transferred to kitchen work by then. Her body had been assessed, found serviceable enough, and she had been given to understand that keeping the child was her own affair, provided she did not let it interfere with her labor.

She named him Joba because the word meant strength in a language the island was designed to erase from her mouth. She whispered it to him in the dark of the slave quarters, where the overseer could not hear and the child could absorb it like milk.

She taught him the merchant’s name

She taught him the merchant’s name was unspoken, a void, a sin against naming itself. To speak the name was to give the man power. Silence was the only weapon she possessed.

The boy learned to move through the plantation with the particular invisibility of mixed blood.

Too dark for the colonial hierarchy, too light to be wholly trusted by the enslaved — he occupied a crack in the system, and into that crack he poured everything he possessed.

His mother had been freed upon

His mother had been freed upon her twenty-fifth year by a dying planter who had carried some shred of conscience into his deathbed.

The law recognized the child born to her after her freedom as free-born, a technicality of colonial statute that gave Joba a designation without security: he was legally unshackled but economically orphaned, too tainted by slavery’s stain to be accepted in white commerce, too disconnected from the shipboard networks that enslaved and freed men built in whispers.

He learned to read through a merchant’s discarded ledgers, the same ones that translated human labor into profit margins. He learned the mathematics of suffering. He learned that knowledge of commerce was a knife, and that a man could use it without ever raising his hand to violence.

The first time he stole, he

The first time he stole, he was twelve.

It was a ledger sheet belonging to a provisioner named Caldwell, who supplied the plantation with rum and salted meat. Joba had been hired as day laborer — no wages, merely food and the chance to remain near water.

He worked the bilge pumps on merchant vessels in the harbor, clearing the brackish filth that collected in a ship’s belly. It was filthy work that no free man would accept and that enslaved men could not refuse. Joba pumped and watched and listened.

Caldwell’s ledger recorded that he had

Caldwell’s ledger recorded that he had supplied thirty barrels of rum to the plantation over six months. The plantation’s own records showed that only twenty had been received.

The discrepancy represented profit meant for Caldwell’s pocket — a theft so ordinary it barely qualified as crime. But Joba understood that theft was the grammar of colonial commerce, and that knowing who stole from whom was currency in a world where coin was scarce.

He took the ledger page because it gave him leverage.

He carried it to Cormac O’Pry

He carried it to Cormac O’Pry, a shipmaster whose vessel — the Brass Promise, already earning its reputation for harboring men the law had discarded — was loading for a run to the deeper waters of the Caribbean.

He offered what he knew: Caldwell was corrupt, yes, but more importantly, Caldwell maintained ties to naval men who were tracking a particular contraband operation. Cormac understood at once that Joba had not merely stolen information; he had weaponized it.

“What do you want?” Cormac asked.

“Passage,” Joba said. “And the chance

“Passage,” Joba said. “And the chance to be useful.”

His limp was worse by then. The overseer — a different one, meaner and more stupid — had broken his knee during a whipping, and it had healed wrong.

The fracture made him clumsy on land but did not slow him below decks, where the work required cunning more than speed. Joba pumped bilge and listened to men’s debts and lies.

He learned which crew members were

He learned which crew members were thieves waiting for opportunity, which were running from justice, which were running from something worse. He learned that a man with a crippled leg and an unreadable face could move through a ship invisible, gathering truths that other men kept hidden.

He learned his name — not Joba, not to the crew, but Cobble. The name that acknowledged his broken knee and his capacity to serve a ship built on the salvage of broken men.

He accepted it the way his mother had taught him to accept the merchant’s unnamed violation: as a fact of the world that could not be unmade, only survived.

By 1712, he had participated in

By 1712, he had participated in taking three merchant vessels and had learned that his true skill lay not in fighting but in knowing before the fighting began where the weak points were — in cargo holds, in crew loyalty, in the ledgers that could be doctored and the captains who could be bribed.

He was cunning where brute strength failed. He was patient where haste would destroy.

He belonged to neither the enslaved nor the free, but to the space between, where piracy offered the only honest economy he had found: theft acknowledged as theft, violence as violence, and a man’s worth measured by what he knew rather than the blood that marked him.

JOBA CANE (“COBBLE”)

A Composite Portrait — Brass Promise Crew Ledger

---

The man who enters a room

The man who enters a room does not announce himself with volume. Joba Cane moves as if he has learned, over years of hauling cargo and cleaning other men’s filth, that attention is a liability.

He is cinnamon-brown in complexion, the particular shade that speaks of sun-work and mixed lineage — neither pure enough for the planter class nor dark enough to disappear entirely into the labor gangs.

His face carries the geometry of a man in his mid-forties now, though the actual mathematics of his age remain unclear, even to those who have drunk beside him for years.

The jaw is square-set, weathered at

The jaw is square-set, weathered at the hinge where a man clenches his teeth against pain or calculation.

His eyes are set wide and deep-shadowed, the whites showing the capillaries of sleepless nights or concentrated thought — it’s impossible to know which, or if the distinction matters anymore. They are watchful eyes, the kind that record details in the margins while maintaining the appearance of vacancy.

His hair, once darker, has been salted through with sun and time into something between brown and grey, a kind of driftwood color that catches light unevenly.

He keeps it shoulder-length, bound back

He keeps it shoulder-length, bound back when he works, loose when he moves through the taverns of Port Royal⁴ or Tortuga⁵.

There is a deliberate shapelessness to the style — nothing that would mark him as belonging to any particular crew or faction until one sees him alongside men who actually command respect, at which point the calculation becomes obvious. The hair is a tool.

His hands tell a different story. They are broad-palmed, the fingers shortened at the tips by callus and old burns, the nails split from work in tar and brine.

There is a knuckle on his

There is a knuckle on his left hand — the index finger — that sits at an angle that suggests it was broken and reset wrong, perhaps never reset at all.

When he works leather, as he sometimes does during repairs aboard the Brass Promise, those hands move with the precision of a man who has flensed hides and cleaned slaughter-house floors, who understands bone and sinew through touch rather than instruction.

The hands never shake, even when the rest of him might reasonably be afraid.

But the defining feature, the thing

But the defining feature, the thing from which his alias emerges and clings to him like barnacle-work, is the left knee.

It bends wrong.

Not dramatically — there is no visible swelling, no grotesque deformity that would make a man recoil.

Instead, the joint articulates with a

Instead, the joint articulates with a subtle offset, as if the mechanics have been slightly misaligned since an injury old enough to have healed into its permanent wrongness.

When he walks, his gait settles into an uneven rhythm: left-right-left-right, but the left leg doesn’t quite straighten, doesn’t quite bear weight in the way nature intended.

He pivots slightly on each left-side step, a minute rotation that compounds over distance.

After watching him cross a quarterdeck

After watching him cross a quarterdeck once, a sailor remarked that he moved like a wheel with one spoke shorter than the rest — not broken enough to stop turning, but wrong enough that anyone paying attention could hear the catch.

The origin story of the knee varies depending on who is telling it and what drink they’re holding. The overseer’s boot is popular — speaks to the romance of resistance. A horse-fall comes next, more plausible to those who know plantation life.

Joba himself has never clarified it. He simply lives with the injury the way he lives with everything else: as a piece of information that serves him better unexamined.

His bearing compensates. He does not

His bearing compensates. He does not slouch or favor the knee in the way a man new to injury might. Instead, he has integrated the limp into a posture that suggests patience, stillness, a man content to remain at the periphery.

This is cunning of a particular kind — the kind that does not advertise itself. A Dock Rat watching him fold canvas or pump bilge might assume he is slow, that the limp has slowed him past usefulness. That assumption has cost men who made it.

His strategy scores low on paper, but his cunning is seven on the scale, and cunning in the margins is worth more than strategy at the table.

His voice is not remarkable —

His voice is not remarkable — a Barbadian accent, the vowels worn smooth by colonial English and Caribbean creole, the consonants clipped by efficiency. He does not speak unless the words will change something, which means he is silent more often than not.

When he does speak, his speech moves laterally, approaching subjects from angles that require a moment to understand. A man new to his company will think he is confused or stupid before recognizing that he is simply thinking in a different direction than expected.

In dress, he favors earth tones out of habit or necessity — russet linen when he can acquire it, ochre canvas for work, the kind of grey-brown that neither marks him as crew nor suggests any particular allegiance.

His shirts are loose, long-sleeved even

His shirts are loose, long-sleeved even in heat, the sleeves pushed back when he works and rolled down when he moves through town.

There is a leather vest, heavily worn, the color of old saddle leather, with pockets deep enough to hold tools or documents he has acquired. His breeches are brown homespun, practical, stained in ways that suggest various kinds of labor. He wears no rings, no ornament that might identify him to anyone searching.

His hands, even at rest, seem to be calculating something — measuring distances, assessing weight, planning a specific kind of violence that has nothing to do with aggression and everything to do with efficiency.

This is the hand of a

This is the hand of a man who has worked as a leg breaker, a knacker, a gravedigger — all the skills catalogued in his history. These are not skills learned for their own sake, but rather accumulated as a person learns the languages of commerce and survival in the margins.

What strikes those who have dealt with him across negotiations or disputes is the absence of visible emotion. He does not seem angry, even when anger would be justified. He does not seem hopeful, even when fortune might warrant it.

He seems instead like a man observing a mathematical problem to which he is not personally subject, taking notes on patterns that will repeat long after he himself is gone.

This is partly protective — a

This is partly protective — a man who cannot be read cannot be anticipated — but it may also be something else: the residue of years spent in positions where emotion was a luxury that endangered others.

The scar work is minimal. There is a thin line running from his left temple toward his jaw, old enough to have faded to silver, thin enough that it might be overlooked in certain light.

His hands carry the violence of labor rather than combat — burns, cuts, the particular scoring of a man who has handled rough materials for decades.

There is a flatness to his

There is a flatness to his affect that does not suggest numbness so much as a kind of discipline, as if he has taught himself to remain separate from the events occurring around him, even when he is the architect of those events.

In photographs or formal crew portraits, he tends to position himself at the edge of the frame, half-turned, his weight settled on the right leg, his bad knee bent slightly and hidden behind the stronger side.

His eyes look past the camera, or slightly above it, never quite meeting the lens. This is a man who has learned that being seen and being remembered are dangerous conditions, and that the safest place to be is the margin of someone else’s vision.

He is, by the record, a

He is, by the record, a free man born — born to Barbados, born to that narrow window of space between enslaved and free where a person of mixed blood might survive without legal claim hanging over them.

But freedom, in a colonial context, is always provisional. It is always a position that can be revoked, undermined, or reinterpreted by someone with more authority. Joba Cane has structured his entire existence around that knowledge.

He does not sail for liberty — he sails for the arithmetic of survival, for the calculation of margins, for the perpetual motion of a man moving sideways through a world constructed to crush people who move in straight lines.