Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “No way,” Sophie said. “You stay put.” He felt her foot then against his knee, keeping in place. She smiled at him, but it was not a joke. Then she turned to Charles and asked him if he wanted some water or a coffee. Charles said that he wanted an espresso, with a tonic back. She made an elaborate bow at him and got up. Charles took her chair, and when she was around the corner, when they could hear her tamping out the used coffee, Charles turned to Lionel. “What’s all this?” “She asked me here,” Lionel said. “I’m not trying anything.” “That is so typical of her.” Charles shook his head, leaned back in the chair. “She’s playing a game. She thinks everything is fucking hilarious.” “She said she knew already. About last night.” “Yeah, I told her earlier—sorry if that was supposed to be a secret or something,” Charles said. Lionel watched his lips shape into an amused smirk, the little dimple in his right cheek appearing, then vanishing. “She seemed fine with it.” Charles turned and gripped the back of the chair, gave his body a hard wrench. Lionel’s breath caught at the mobility of his joints. How easy it was for him to attain such a ridiculous position. The espresso machine hissed. “You all right?” “I can go if you want.” “No, don’t. She’d just make a whole case about it,” Charles said. “Better to let her have her way.” Sophie returned with the espresso and the small glass boot filled with tonic water. Charles shifted over to the empty chair closer to the window, away from Lionel, and Sophie reclaimed her seat. The small espresso cup was a deep caramel color. The crema was beautiful, perfect, and Charles sipped it to test the heat. Sophie had her chin on her palm, appraising his reaction. They had a whole routine down. One that excluded Lionel, made him feel extraneous, with his collar with the hole in it and his scarf and his anxiety. He rolled his sleeves down and buttoned them, and in the process drew Sophie’s attention. Not in any obvious way, but he could feel the tension in her gaze shift slightly in his direction. Charles had seen him naked, of course, and had touched him. But that touching and that seeing had been focused in its particulars. They hadn’t talked about their bodies, only used them. It was different in the café. He had that feeling again, the one like watching an intimate function at a friend’s house, the way two people who loved each other shared a context that had nothing to do with him. He was stupid for staying, for listening, when Charles and Sophie told him to stay put. He should have listened to himself. After all, his duty was to himself. Like that old line from his doctors: Your duty is to your health. You owe yourself that much.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “It’s fine,” Mats said, voice leaping. “It’s so fine. Don’t even worry about it.” “About what?” Octavius said, cutting his eyes across the two of them. “Please,” Mats said, rolling his eyes, this time putting a fine point at the end of the word. Alek coughed into the crook of his arm, and the noise overrode everything else. “You said you’d go to the doctor.” “I did,” Alek said. “I went.” “And?” “It’s nothing,” he said, tossing it off as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “It’s fine.” “It’s been weeks? Months? Is it fine?” “I knew someone with a cough like that once,” Octavius said. “Turned out to be a pretty nasty infection.” “Well, the doctor said I was fine, so I’m fine.” Mats dug an elbow into Alek’s side, which dislodged some hard knot and made the coughing worse. He could taste blood again. The world blotted, shifting. He took a deep breath. “You don’t look so hot, Alek,” Mats said. “Maybe you should go home.” “I’ve never missed a class.” “You should go home,” Octavius pressed. “Do you want me to walk with you?” “You just want to cut class,” Alek said wryly, trying to smile, but there was a hard, jagged heat running down his body, and it hurt to breathe. “Come on, let’s go,” Octavius said, reaching for him, but Alek pulled away. “No, it’s fine.” Mats put his palm to Alek’s back, and Alek looked away from him because he didn’t want to see Mats’s fine features screwed up in a mask of worry. Alek was always causing so much trouble. “I’ll go, I’ll go,” he said. “You two stay. Cavort, whatever it is you do.” He pulled himself up to a standing position, put his palms up as if to say that he had been disarmed by their care, by their love, and he gathered his things and left. • • • On the way home, he paused in the cold and dialed Grigori. Night was not yet upon them. The sky was a bowl of blue light pierced from some other, outer light glowing on the horizon. He stood outside his favorite coffee shop and thought of going in, but he didn’t because it would be loud there and Grigori would complain about the noise on the line. “Hello?” came Grigori’s voice, a bellow even at low volume. “Grigori,” Alek said. “What do you want?” Alek paused on the line. He didn’t know how to begin it, his request, if it was a request. He didn’t know how to say the words. “Hello? Sasha? Hello?” “I went to the doctor today.” “For what? You sick?” “I’ve been coughing.” “So you have a cold? Flu? What?” “I don’t know,” Alek said. He could feel Grigori’s irritation growing. Grigori’s voice was hard when he said: “What do you mean you don’t know? What did the doctor say? Who is this doctor? Some midwestern quack? Who is this? What did he say?”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  At last, a majority agreed that feminism meant all females as a caste, and that antilesbian bias could be used to stop any woman until it could stop no woman. Up to then, I had feared that our opposition was more unified than we were. For instance, the same groups that opposed contraception and abortion also opposed sexual relationships between two people of the same sex. It was irrational on the surface, but the religious right wing was against any sex that couldn’t end in conception. Now a representative majority was united, too, in recognizing that human sexual expression was not only a way to reproduce if we chose to, but also a way of pleasuring and bonding. By the end of the first day’s marathon, Bella got laughter and cheers when she broke the tension by saying, “Good night, my loves!” —MY SURPRISE DUTY AT the conference was a last-minute request from the various women-of-color caucuses to be a kind of scribe. I was to go from one hotel room to the next, one meeting to the next, writing down concerns that were shared by all, combining language for their approval, and appending issues that were unique to each. The goal was to compose a substitute for the so-called Minority Women’s Plank that had come up from individual state conferences, yet women of color hadn’t been able to meet as a group. Asian Americans were spread from Hawaii to New York. The Hispanic Caucus was mainly Chicanas on one coast and Puerto Ricans on the other. African Americans came from everywhere, and members of the American Indian and Alaskan Native Caucus were the most spread out of all. Houston was their first and only chance to meet and come up with a plank that included their shared and specific issues. Yet if they met during the day, they would miss crucial floor votes. As usual, double discrimination meant double the work. I was to be what they referred to cheerfully as “our token,” that is, the only one who wasn’t a woman of color, going early in the morning or after hours at night from one drafting group to the next as they met in different hotel rooms. I would combine language where possible and list unique issues, then give the result back for the approval of all. This was an honor, but it also upped my already high anxiety level. I was afraid I would mess up. I wasn’t even sure I could physically get to each meeting in the midst of conference chaos. As I went from one caucus to the next, I saw women camped out on every surface around breakfast or late-night snacks, from Houston’s idea of bagels to Tex-Mex pizzas.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Staring into the darkness. Feeling his own presence, electric, in the silently whispering dark. He returns to the concrete grotto. Along the path a shadowy figure emerges slowly. Jim moves into an arc of light. The figure advances, looks at him, and avoids the concrete grotto—and Jim—by climbing over the slight incline to one side. Without looking back, he crosses the road to the other side. Am I looking too tough? Jim wonders. Unapproachable? He remembers the two in Griffith Park this afternoon who turned to each other in the arena while he was there. His present need increases. Time. He feels a retreating hint, like a brushing wing, of the hellish judgment the streets and dark parks can hurl in empty hours, the hunt turning vengeful. He reminds himself that times of similar despair have invariably been followed by surfeit, mere islands in an ocean. And, Christ, he tries to laugh at himself, there's no one here to be desired by! … Just that one man who ignored him. And the driver of the car earlier. He glances at his watch. He drives to the area of a costume bar on Oak Street. The bar caters to makebelieve motorcyclists, makebelieve construction workers with steel helmets, makebelieve cowboys, even makebelieve foresters. The bar itself doesn't thrive until after 2:00 in the morning, when it becomes an after-hours club. But nearby, in an abandoned garage, outlaws gather sporadically throughout the night. Two cars, single hunters in each, are parked before it. Anxious for his sexuality to be acknowledged, Jim gets out of his car. He waits before the crumbling garage. Its sides and back are cluttered with weeds, papers, cans, broken bottles. Barbed wire perhaps at one time meant to keep out the outlaws has been pushed back sternly, a tangle of iron and weeds. The site of orgies late at night is now a deserted battlefield. Across the street is another world, a clutter of apartments and small houses. The garage is flanked by empty weedy lots. Neither of the drivers of the two cars gets out. Still, Jim waits. Longer. One car drives away. The other driver remains seated. Jim walks by slowly. The man gives him no signal. Suddenly Jim returns to his car, drives around the block. When he returns, another car has joined the one still there. Again, Jim stands by the tangled barbed wire. A third car drives, pauses, drives on. Jim feels the brutal passing of time. Nothing is happening! It does not matter that earlier he was paid for sex, that he was abundantly desired in the park, does not matter that he has survived, triumphantly, season after seasons that have spewed others out of the demanding arena.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  A few cars cruise the blocks of pretty houses and new condominiums. Jim wants a close connection beyond what he's experienced all day today. He sees no one here he really wants. Moments later he's standing on upper Santa Monica Boulevard near a strip of gaybars. Just standing. Not hitchhiking. A man stops his car; he's not especially attractive—ordinary. But Jim gets in, to push time. “God, you've got a beautiful body! How old are you?” Jim's heart freezes. The man guesses—way below Jim's actual age. The warmth flows. Jim let the man blow him in the car for moments. On Santa Monica Boulevard he walks back to his car. The restiveness grows. He drives back to Selma. Tonight this beloved street is being raided by ugliness: Two cops are frisking three hustlers, the spectacle framed harshly by the icy lights of the squad car. Motherfuckers. Jim drives along Sunset Boulevard. The hunt. Sunday night's hunt different from Saturday's, but almost as heavy, with the fresher waves of hunters who will be off tomorrow instead of Saturday. And Monday's hunt is different from Sunday's. Tuesday's, subdued. Wednesday's different from Thursday's, and Thursday's different from Friday's. The varying but unstopping cycle of sex in the city of lost angels, paused only once each day—vengefully—at dawn. The Bierce Place garages. Two hunters draped in the darkness under a stairway. As Jim walks along the deserted alley, a car drives along the intersecting street. It stops. Jim waits. He hears a door open, close. The memory of the violent scene on Selma alerts his body for quick motion. Footsteps. He sees a shirtless man. The same muscleman he left flexing in the bushes and then again earlier in the bar! And there he is posing again in the dark, expecting Jim to “reciprocate” in kind. Jesus, Jim thinks, we're practically lovers! … For a moment, he considers pulling out his cock in overt invitation of sex; the other will then approach, and then they'll make it, yes, at home. But, no, that's clearly not the other's trip. Driving to another dark alley. No one here, but within minutes the soundless dark may explode with moaning shadows. Near Sutton, the man still guards his tunnel. Parking on another street, to avoid the old man rapping on the window, Jim walks into the gray cavity of the tunnel. But there is another man there too, and Jim moves away. At Greenstone, several cars are parked in the concrete arc. Many hunters in the arena. As Jim crosses the street toward the stone grotto, he sees the kid he made it with last night—Steve; they exchanged phone numbers, came so close. They both stop suddenly, facing each other. For a moment they seem about to smile, even to speak. They move slightly closer. Then simultaneously they turn from each other, walking away quickly in opposite directions. VOICE OVER: Attack! VOICE OVER: Attack!

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  And so, every lesson, Alek tried to be more than good. Every lesson, he tried to be perfect. Every position, every line, every angle, every turn, everything perfect. If he didn’t get something right, he tried harder, again and again, each time imagining himself going sharper and sharper, until he was so sharp he felt he might cut himself. It was a ferocity in him that he’d never known he possessed—a ferocity that gave him something—and for the first time, he felt his parents were proud of him, that he wasn’t just messing up. It was not an original story. Every ballet parent was a monster of ambition. Every ballet parent knew the terrible math. Only a few people got to be elite dancers. Everything else was just preparation for a time when dance would be something they used to do, a person they used to be. Starting ballet was like entering a second, more intense gravitational field. At any moment, an injury could end it all. Or the mind could snap and there you went, done, burned out, exhausted. A mass in his body meant that something had gone wrong, and if that was true, he might not be able to dance again. If he couldn’t dance again, what would he do? And there was the possibility that the mass meant cancer, and cancer might mean death. What would he tell his mother? What would she do? How could he tell her this, so soon after his father had died in a way that was somehow both slow and quick? He’d be betraying her. Alek climbed out of the bath and wrapped a towel around himself. He made a sandwich and sat on his bed. The afternoon was over. He had a view of the lake from his window. People were skating. Their voices were lost to him, but he could hear the sounds of their happiness. • • • The rehearsal hall was empty when he arrived. How long would it be before the evening class began? True, there were fewer people in the evening class because, unlike the morning class, attendance was not compulsory. Instead of one of the main ballet masters, evening class was led by a retired senior soloist. The evening class was mainly a way of working out things that had gone wrong during the day or had been skipped in the morning. It was during an evening class that he had first begun to cough, back in the summer. The cough had come on slowly, small little fits of tension in his chest, an irritating heat, a scratchiness in his throat and chest. At first, he didn’t notice at all, or he didn’t think very much of it. In the morning he was phlegmy, spitting yolky goop into the sink or the toilet. But he couldn’t get it all out. Inside he felt both wet and dry.

• From Escape (2007)

  When Arthur was seven months old, Merril started pressuring me to get pregnant again. We were driving somewhere together and he said that Arthur was old enough for me to have another child and we should start trying to make that happen. I felt sickened at the thought because I was still so exhausted. But I knew most of Merril’s other wives became pregnant three months after giving birth. I was still nursing Arthur and weak when I conceived again in October, and I became violently ill. It felt like my body was allergic to being pregnant. My weight plummeted. I lost about twenty pounds and looked anorexic. Wives targeted one another constantly, but when I was so sick, it felt like I was in the bull’s-eye. They attacked my character and made fun of my illness. They didn’t understand why I hadn’t repented after Arthur’s pregnancy so I wouldn’t continue to have the same problems. Merril finally realized how sick I was and, to my amazement, bought me vitamins. He bought them because I didn’t have enough money of my own. I could charge things only where we had an account, so anything I bought came from the grocery store, which usually didn’t carry vitamins. After a few months, I began to feel myself getting slightly stronger. But I still had massive headaches and sometimes vomited nearly every hour. It was hard to keep anything down, but some days were better than others, and on those I might vomit only three times. Since I had not been able to find a babysitter for the whole week and I couldn’t bear being apart from Arthur for more than three days, on Wednesdays I would make the one-hour drive from Cedar back to Colorado City to pick him up and bring him back to school. If I didn’t have someone lined up at school to watch him, I’d bring one of Merril’s daughters back with me to help out. A light snow was falling when I got into the van to head back to Colorado City. In the three years I’d been at school, I’d traversed many snowstorms without a problem. I hadn’t been listening to the radio that day, but there was nothing unusual about the snow that was falling. But fifteen miles outside of Cedar on Black Ridge, I found myself in the middle of a whiteout. Even with the headlights on I could barely see more than a foot or two in front of the van. I slowed down to a crawl of just a few miles an hour. Because I was going so slowly and hugging the side of the road I felt reasonably safe. The van didn’t have snow tires because it was rare to have storm conditions like this in southern Utah. I thought this was a freak occurrence and that it would clear soon.

• From Querelle (1953)

  223 I QUERELLE was doomed: his name would always and everywhere �e accom panied by the word "murders." 'We11, here's a plan, old buddy. You go out and get yourself a little hard cash, and then you take off to Spain. Or America. I'm a sailor, I can get you aboard a ship. I'll take care of that." Gil dearly wanted to believe in Quere11e. Surely a sailor had to be we11 connected to a11 the sailors of the world, to be in secret communication with the most mysterious crews, with the sea itself. This notion pleased GiL He snuggled up in it, it rom forted him, and as he derived a sense of security from it, he was not about to analyze it at aU. "So what have you got to lose? If you pull a stick-up job, and they catch you at it, that won't make any difference at aU. \\'hat's a stick-up compared to murder?" Quere11e no longer mentioned the murder of the sailor so as not to ca11 forth Gil's denials, not to rouse that sense of true justice that lives in everyone and that might cause him to go and give himself up. Coming from the outside world as he did, calm and co11ected, Querelle knew that the young mason dung to him with anguished intensity. His anxiety betrayed Gil, betrayed the slightest inner tremor and amplified it, played it out loud, like the needle passing over the grooves of a record. Querelle was able to register aU these shifts and fluctuations and made use of them. "If I wasn't just a sailor ... but, that's what I am, and there's little I can do to help you. But there's one thing, I can give you some advice. And I believe you can do it." Gil listened, in silence. By this time it had become clear to him that the sailor would never bring him anything else but a chunk of bread, a can of sardines, a pack of cigarettes, but never any money. Hanging his head, his mouth bitter, he feU to pondering the notion of those two murders. An enormous weariness forced him to resign himself to them, to admit them, to admit that he would henceforth travel the high road to he11. Toward Querelle he felt great anger and at the same time he

• From Querelle (1953)

  She couldn't go on. T\1adame Lysiane sat up, switched on the light again. Robert looked at her, surprised. "Listen, I don't care what you say, man . . . ( Robert's awkwardness, his basic indifference toward women had prevented him from acquiring an even minimally courteous way of addressing them. To speak tenderly to a woman, to acknowledge her femininity, woul3 have made Robert look ridiculous to himself) . . . you're just being difficult. Jo and me, we're the way we are because that's the way we are, goddammit. Right from the start . . ." "But it does bother me. And I have no reason to keep it a secret." She was the boss lady. For a long time now that resemblance had tortured and persecuted her lovely flesh. She was the patronne. The brothel was a great piece of property. If Robert was a handsome male-one •'who could afford to"-she herself was a strong female, strong by virtue of her money, her authority over the girls, and the solidity of her prose. 441t exhausts me! it exhausts me, to think about how alike you are." She suddenly heard herself, plaintive as any weak little woman. "Now you just stop that, do you hear me. I'm telling you, there ain't nothing one can do about it." Robert sounded angry. At the beginning of the scene he had thought, mistakenly, that his mistress was alluding to some very tenuous sentiments that only a woman as distinguished as herse1f was able to experience, but as she kept on about it, he became annoyed . .. I can't help it, how could I. Back when we were little kids they couldn't tell us apart." l\.1adame Lysiane drew a deep breath, as if preparing for her very last sigh. Before he opened his mouth and while he was saying what he had just said, Robert knew, although vaguely, that it would hurt her terribly, but while he didn't really want to do that, maliciously, with a clean yet obviously dim conscience, he 184 I JEAN GENET

• From Escape (2007)

  Barbara was typical of a woman exalted in her status as the favorite wife. She genuinely believed she was superior to us all. As a favorite wife, both she and her children were untouchable. Her children looked down on their half siblings as inferior, which was also common in these large polygamous families. The caste system in Merril’s family was entrenched before I even arrived. But in that our family was an exception. Warren’s new decree meant other families would now become more like ours. Many men in the FLDS tried to be fair to all their wives. They felt it was their religious duty not to play favorites. There were schedules for sex in the home so no one felt hurt or left out. If a man had three wives, each woman knew that according to the schedule, she would sleep with her husband every third night. But this new sex policy gave men a freedom they never had. There was no longer any obligation to sleep with a woman unless he wanted to have a child with her. So expectations about decency were off. Once free from sleeping with a wife, most men singled out their favorites and locked in a caste system in their families. Caste systems in families are breeding grounds for family members to harm one another. As the months and years wore on, Warren would underscore this by preaching that a man had the right to treat one wife better than another if she was more worthy of love. Sex was the only hope a woman had in this life. If she pleased her husband sexually, she and her children would be protected by him. Since he was her passport to eternal life, she could not risk displeasing him sexually. So it was emotionally destabilizing to women when their husbands only had sex with them once a month or stopped altogether when they were pregnant. Their chances to seduce, impress, and satisfy their husbands were so drastically limited it threatened their very being. But, like everything else, this new decree was done in the name of God. Warren was preaching that Christ would come to our community because we were pure and abstained from sex except to create children. He preached that we were now living at a higher spiritual plane, but to me, it felt that we had crossed a new and dangerous threshold. One morning when I was in the bathroom vomiting, Tammy came and pounded on the door. “Carolyn, Merril had a heart attack this morning. The ambulance is here to take him to the hospital. Barbara’s going with him and the rest of us will meet them at the ER.” Tammy drove the small family car and I sat in the backseat, upset and so sick it was hard to stop vomiting. What if Merril died?

• From Escape (2007)

  Harrison had a hard time sleeping at night. I gave him chloral hydrate, a strong sedative, but it did not always work. In an effort to wean him off the IV therapy, his doctors had given him a drug to control his neuropathy, but it sent him into major anxiety attacks. For weeks, it felt that I was always on the phone with Harrison’s doctors, constantly juggling medications, adding here, subtracting there, to try and find the balance that would stop the spasms and his screaming. One day blurred into the next. Despite his feeding tube, which pumped nutrition into him twenty-four hours a day, Harrison had a hard time maintaining weight. He was switched from a high-calorie formula to a lower-calorie one because he had a leak of his lymphatic fluids. Lymphatic fluids are produced by fat, so with less fat in his system, the leak slowed. The fat content of his diet had to be closely monitored until he healed. But he lost weight with the low-calorie formula. I was supposed to try to wean him off the feeding pump and feed him directly because I could get more food into him that way. But when I tried that he’d get sick and throw up. I didn’t have time to think. I was sleep-deprived and burned out from the relentless stress and fear of seeing my healthy baby boy, who had been just on the verge of walking, reduced to screaming spasms that were stripping him of every ability he once had. His vomiting led to a case of aspiration pneumonia. Do I call an ambulance today or not? That thinking went on for months. The minute it looked like he was having difficulty breathing I called for help. The local ambulance had to come (even without Merril’s okay) because Harrison was now known to the system and was being watched. I was on the phone with his doctor all the time, and if the ambulance refused to transport us there would have been an uproar. Finally, Harrison’s doctor in St. George said he needed to go back on IV therapy because he was not improving enough and was still constantly plagued by spasms. With two IV treatments a week, he got a little relief from the spasms. Initially, his doctor felt it wasn’t helping him enough to warrant continuing, but finally she realized that any relief at all was a plus for both of us. So we made regular trips to St. George for IV therapy and frequent trips to Phoenix to see his oncologist. Cathleen volunteered to drive me to Phoenix, which was an enormous relief because it was eight hours away. I was terribly concerned when I had to leave my other children at home to take Harrison to the doctors. This was the first time in my married life when I hadn’t also had a full-time job. So I was home more, but consumed by the demands of Harrison’s care.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I was weeding old clothes out of my drawers when I found the vibrator. Still purple, still sparkly. I turned it on. The batteries still worked. I removed my clothes and lay on the bed. The breeze from the open window was sharp and my nipples grew hard. Alone in the house, I imagined my husband, how we used to make love. How he’d say, so gently, You can come again. I know you can. And he’d give me that gift. And now, how I couldn’t stand to kiss him. He tasted like copper in my mouth. Intimacy replaced by something far more desperate. He’d been staying up late, unable to sleep. His speech, fast and hard, like a train with no destination. It scared me. Instead of sex, I’d pull off his pants. How he’d be so hard, which always surprised me because we’d done nothing to get to that point. He was always ready. How he’d put his hand on my head and move me. I contributed nothing but an open cavity. As I rubbed my nipple lightly with a finger, pleasure rippled through my body, a feeling I’d not had in months. I turned the vibrator on and spread my legs. But it was awkward. I didn’t know whether to put it in me or on me. All I felt was a deadening throb. your clit will go numb That hairy man behind. The dildo jamming again and again into the woman’s gaping hole. I turned the vibrator off. In the wake of its buzz, an aching silence. It was so quiet in Connecticut. Cars rarely passed our house. No sidewalks. Trees competing for open sky. I closed my eyes and laid the vibrator on my belly, crossing my hands over it. It’s hard to tell people when something is wrong. Hard to whisper, out loud, that your husband might be going crazy. Because maybe it’s not him, it’s you. The woman married to the bright, young doctor. The woman with two beautiful daughters and two acres of land and two cars. The woman at the party who grabbed the vibrator. I CAME OUT THE FRONT DOOR, WRAPPED IN MY BATHROBE, vibrator in hand. In front of our house a doe stood, head raised to the branches of a laurel tree, pulling off leathery leaves with her teeth. She skittered off as I made my way into the yard. It felt good to be outdoors. How desperately I longed for the seasons to turn. Animals, plants, the land—they demanded nothing from me. For once I was glad our house was set back from the road, surrounded by a dense cover of trees. No one could see me out here.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Afraid that he might seem tactless and rile the boss, Querelle did not pursue the question. The main parlor of the brothel was silent and empty. It seemed to be recording their meeting, quietly, attentively. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the ladies would be having their meal in the "refectory." There was no one about. On the second floor, in her room, Madame Lysiane was doing her hair by the light of a single bulb. The mirrors were vacant, pure, amazingly close to the unreal, having nobody and nothing to reflect. The boss tilted and drained his glass. He was a formidably husky man. If he had never been really handsome, in his youth he had no doubt been a fine specimen, despite the blackheads, the hair-thin black wrinkles on his neck, and the pockmarks. His pencil-line mustache, 30 I JEAN GENET trimmed "American style," was undoubtedly a souvenir of 1918. Thanks to those doughboys, to the Black Market, and to the traffic in women he had been able to get rich quick and to purchase La Feria. His long boat trips and fishing parties had tanned his skin. His features were hard, the bridge of his nose finn, the eyes small and lively, the pate bald. "What time d'you think you'll get here?'' "I'll have to get organized. Have to get the bag out of there. No problem, though. I've got it figured out. " With a flicker of suspicion, glass in hand, the boss looked at Querelle. "Yeah? But, make no mistake, you're on your own. It's none of my business." Mario remained motionless, almost absent: he was leaning against the counter with his back reflected in the mirror behind him. Without a word he removed his elbows from the counter, thus changing his interesting posture, and went to the big mirror next to the proprietor: now it looked as if he were leaning against himself. And now, faced with both men, Querelle experienced a sudden malaise, a sinking of the heart, such as killers know. Mario's calmness and good looks disconcerted him. They were on too grand a scale. The brothelkeeper, Norbert, was far too powerful-looking. So was Mario. The outlines of their two bodies met to form one continuous pattern, and this seemed to blur and blend their muscular bodies as well as their faces. It was impossible, the boss couldn't be an informer; but then it seemed equally out of the question for Mario to be anything but a cop. Within himself, Quere11e felt a trembling, a vacillation, almost to the point of losing himself, by vomiting it all out, ail that he reaUy was. Seized by vertigo in the presence of these powerful muscles and nerves that he perceived as towering above him-as one might when throwing one's head back to appraise the height of a giant pine tree-that kept on doubling and merging again, crowned by Mario's beauty, but dominated by Norbert's bald head and buUish neck, 31 I QUERELLE

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “That’s cool,” Sophie said, and Lionel rolled his eyes. It was the kind of thing you said when you were pretending not to find someone boring. They’d retreated to the inane chatter of dinner parties at last, the shuffling of banal bits of information like so much unwanted food on a plate. “What do you do?” “Oh, I dance. Since I was five. It’s like the one thing I’m good at. Absolutely no money in it, but hey.” “That’s a real thing. Dance. Like, an actual real thing in the world. That’s art.” “Sure, yeah, thanks,” she said. “Actually, Charlie’s a dancer, too.” “Is he?” Lionel asked. Suddenly, the body made sense. “We’re in the grad program.” “How long have you been together?” “Maybe eight months, something like that? I’m bad at this.” She crinkled her eyes and shook her head a little. Charles was looking at them over his shoulder. Sophie waved at him, but Charles shook his head and turned back to look out at the yard. “That’s a long time,” Lionel said. Eight months was forever. A whole life could change in eight months. Or end entirely. “Is it?” Sophie asked. “It doesn’t seem that way. But I guess time flies.” “Yeah. Unless you want it to.” Sophie looked at him sideways. “What are you trying to say?” “Nothing. Well, nothing about you two, anyway,” Lionel said. Sophie watched for a beat longer, and she seemed to make up her mind about something. She said, “He was right. You are hard to talk to.” Lionel felt a frisson then, pleasure and discomfort rubbing up against each other. He hadn’t registered it before, when she’d said that thing about proctoring, but he realized now that they had been talking about him. Lionel ran through what Sophie had said and done since coming to sit next to him, trying to find the subtext. But he found nothing. Just the jangle of her voice, and the warmth of her body next to his under the blanket. Her hand was on his wrist, and then it slid down until her palm cupped his. Her hands were cold, lightly callused, but strong. She flexed her fingers through his and looked at him directly. Lionel wanted to pull his hand away, but he did not. “People are hard,” he said. “Spoken like a true introvert.” “If I were a real introvert, I would have stayed home. Which would have been the wiser choice.” “I think you really believe that,” she said in open awe. “You must really be afraid of yourself.” Lionel shivered. He did pull his hand away from Sophie. But it was just as well, because Charles had jerked the blanket from their legs and whirled it around his shoulders like a shawl. “Some of us are freezing our nuts off out here,” Charles said to them. “I tried to get you to sit with us,” Sophie said. “I didn’t want to,” Charles pouted.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not, of course, new; it is remarkable only because the complacent mechanisms of our culture have made this attitude so widespread. There is observable now, moreover, to an extent unprecedented hitherto, an anxiety on the part of Americans concerning themselves and their heritage. This anxiety cannot yet be called probing; Americans are not noted for introspection and rather disapprove of it. R..·uher, we arc approaching a state of mind which closely resembles shock. In Mr. Lockridge's Republic, whatever goes wrong-and noth ing, of course, is irrevocably wrong-there is room for every one and certain things are sure; but this is not any longer true in fact. Time has challenged us, our dream; and we find now that no one is very clear or specific about the nature of the dream. There were always contradictions, but we assumed that they would be taken care of; and since never before have we been in quite so important a position in the world, the con tradictions have never been quite so glaring before. Some thing has gone wrong, no one quite knows where; no one knows where we are going; we seem to be headed in several directions at once. The strain is made a good deal more un bearable by the fact that Americans passionately believe in their avowed ideals, amorphous as they are, and arc terrified of waking from a radiant dream. Raint ree County is a kind of ultimate defense of the dreaming and the dream. It seeks to explain us to ourselves in the light of the irrevocable past. But this can only be done if the past is truly examined. Mr. Lock ridge has, instead, given us the usual, superficial sunlight. He has exploited nearly every possible device to explain away all contradictions. He holds back the darkness by a perpetual in sistence that darkness is not possible; or, at any rate, not pos sible in America, 'the last best hope of earth.' If it is, indeed, the last, best hope we had better find out more about it. And this will demand an understanding which can only be arrived at through a thorough self -appraisal. This might, at once, make us less complacent and more mature; we might discover that affirmation consists of more than a handful of cheerful slogans. Raint ree County, according to its author, cannot be found on any map; and it is always summer 592 OTH ER ES SAYS there. He might also have added that no one lives there any more. 2. PO STSCRIP T: THE MAN The death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. of carbon monoxide poi soning on the night of Saturday, March 6, wrote the grisliest possible finale to his ambitious novel.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Dr. Ngost put a hand on Alek’s arm, and Alek turned his head toward him slowly, away from the scan that showed his insides, ghostly white on a black backdrop. “One step at a time,” he said warmly. “Biopsy. Then we know.” Alek almost repeated the doctor’s words again but stopped himself by biting the very tip of his tongue. He nodded firmly a couple of times, then climbed from the bench. He pulled up his jeans beneath the crinkling paper gown. The room was cool as a small cave. Dr. Ngost watched him dress, and when they shook hands, Dr. Ngost held on just a little longer: “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” he said. • • • On the bus, Alek considered calling his brothers. Grigori was a first-year surgical resident at Mass Gen, and Igor was starting at Columbia medical school. They would know how to explain it to their mother best, how to articulate the parameters of the thing in a way that wouldn’t scare her. It seemed foolish not to call them. The bus turned onto the more corporate corner of Capitol Square. All that chrome and glass against the slate-gray winter sky. Alek had a seat to himself, which felt like a minor miracle. Downtown was emptying before it began to fill again. Luminescent snowdrifts covered bike racks and lampposts. He had pulled up the text chain with Grigori—they hadn’t texted in months, since he’d first arrived in the Midwest, to say that he’d made it. He’d sent a couple pics of the apartment he’d found. It had come furnished and felt lived in. He’d sent both Grigori and Igor pictures of the tub and the room with its decent but kind of soft mattress. And they’d texted back cool and nice and faggot style :). When they were younger, Grigori’s favorite pastime was to pull hairs from Alek’s body. Igor held him while he twisted and tried to get loose. Then Grigori plucked out his eyelashes one at a time, fine white hairs invisible the moment they left his body. Alek remembered the little shooting stars of pain with each hair. He remembered Igor’s sweaty hands holding him down. He remembered the damp odor of their panting filling the closet.

• From Escape (2007)

  But Rosie came to Colorado City occasionally to visit. When she did, Linda had to move out of her bedroom and sleep with Annette and me so Rosie could have it. Linda seemed the most wary of Rosie and concerned about the situation. Her fear was that Rosie would steal Dad away from Mom. Linda became the watcher, making note of things that Dad did with Rosie that he didn’t do with Mom. He spent a lot of time with Rosie in Linda’s bedroom when she visited and certainly seemed happier when she was around. We all knew how tense my parents’ marriage had become. Mom seemed to get a lot quieter once Dad married Rosie. Dad had bought Mama a TV several years before he married Rosie, to placate her. She always complained about not being able to watch TV the way she had when we lived in Salt Lake. It was completely against our religion to have a television set, but my father ignored that and just bought one. The reception was terrible; there were only two channels that were even remotely viewable. But when Dad and Rosie went into Linda’s bedroom, we all sat with Mom in the front living room and watched TV. I remember going to visit Rosie when I went to Salt Lake with my parents. I was impressed that she had her own small house and car. She also had her nursing career. Her freedom and autonomy over her own life made an impact on me. Rosie had more independence than any woman I had ever known. But her freedom was short-lived. Rosie became pregnant shortly after she married my father, and she moved into Linda’s bedroom in our house in Colorado City a month before her baby was born. My mother’s sixth child, a boy, was born a few months before Rosie’s daughter. The dynamic in our family shifted. Rosie and my mother were competing for Dad’s attention. The two babies were compared to each other all the time. We all watched to see which baby Dad seemed to prefer or spend the most time with. My mother could see how happy Dad was with Rosie, so she worked hard to try to outdo her. If Rosie cooked a lovely dinner, Mom put twice the effort into the next meal she made. Mama had her ways of doing things in the house that she insisted Rosie follow. Sometimes I’d hear Mom saying to her friends that only she, not Rosie, really understood what Father wanted and how to please him. There would be times when my mother would accuse Rosie of being selfish and not working hard enough to please my dad.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  By the end of the first day’s marathon, Bella got laughter and cheers when she broke the tension by saying, “Good night, my loves!” — MY SURPRISE DUTY AT the conference was a last-minute request from the various women-of-color caucuses to be a kind of scribe. I was to go from one hotel room to the next, one meeting to the next, writing down concerns that were shared by all, combining language for their approval, and appending issues that were unique to each. The goal was to compose a substitute for the so-called Minority Women’s Plank that had come up from individual state conferences, yet women of color hadn’t been able to meet as a group. Asian Americans were spread from Hawaii to New York. The Hispanic Caucus was mainly Chicanas on one coast and Puerto Ricans on the other. African Americans came from everywhere, and members of the American Indian and Alaskan Native Caucus were the most spread out of all. Houston was their first and only chance to meet and come up with a plank that included their shared and specific issues. Yet if they met during the day, they would miss crucial floor votes. As usual, double discrimination meant double the work. I was to be what they referred to cheerfully as “our token,” that is, the only one who wasn’t a woman of color, going early in the morning or after hours at night from one drafting group to the next as they met in different hotel rooms. I would combine language where possible and list unique issues, then give the result back for the approval of all. This was an honor, but it also upped my already high anxiety level. I was afraid I would mess up. I wasn’t even sure I could physically get to each meeting in the midst of conference chaos. As I went from one caucus to the next, I saw women camped out on every surface around breakfast or late-night snacks, from Houston’s idea of bagels to Tex-Mex pizzas. Among the three hundred African American delegates were legislators skilled in parliamentary procedure and women who’d never been to a conference before, Deltas in silk dresses and students in army boots, radicals with no faith in voting and civil rights veterans like Dorothy Height, who had worked for voting rights since she was a young woman meeting Eleanor Roosevelt.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  In the host’s bathroom, Lionel tried to be easy. His pulse thumped in his thighs, and he thought the force of it would make him slip from his perch on the edge of the toilet. The motion of it made him dizzy. He hated that he had let Charles’s remark, casual and dismissive as it was, jam him up. He’d let it rule him, but worse still, he’d let on how much it bothered him. Lionel stood, bent over the sink, and splashed cold water onto his face. The faucet handles screamed when he twisted them, and the head gave a jittery, anxious stream. He drank from his cupped palms, trying to get his pulse down. He found the water a little soapy, and the dizziness remained, that teetering, swaying sensation, as if his legs might go out from under him. There was a hard knock on the door. “Two minutes,” Lionel said. He ran the faucet again to give the person on the other side the idea that he was washing his hands. His mother would have told him to comb his hair and said that he had the bad habit of letting white people see him nappy and disheveled. He always wanted to tell her when she got on him about it that white people were just people, but he knew that it was a naive and stupid thing to say, because white people were white people. Back in the care facility, his mother had told him that his aunts and uncles down home, which was what she called her own hometown in eastern Georgia, thought his current state was because he’d been ripping and running with all them white kids at school and math camp. His aunts and uncles saw his desire to kill himself as an extension of all those things they didn’t like or understand—how he talked, how he saw things—and they blamed his father and his father’s ways for that. It was dumb. It was pointless. It was nobody’s fault. Things happened. When he cracked the door open, he didn’t immediately see anyone. It was only after emerging fully into the narrow hallway, lined with photos of the host and his family, that Lionel saw Charles leaning against a shut door with his eyes closed. “You good?” Charles asked. “Looks like I should be asking you that.” “I didn’t want to come to this thing.” “Then why did you?” Lionel rested his back against the wall. Directly across from him was a photo of the host as a child, head thrown back in ecstasy. He looked happy. Pleased. A woman in white shorts stood next to a tall bush with a muted expression. “Sophie,” Charles said. “Sophie wanted to come.” “Which one is she?” “The blond one.” Lionel turned his head enough to look through the kitchen doorway and out into the living room. “The flexible one?”

• From Escape (2007)

  But a week earlier he’d started screaming and wouldn’t stop. Twenty-four hours later in a Las Vegas hospital, he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. The tumor had grown into an area that controlled his breathing. He was put on life support, but there was absolutely no hope. His parents signed papers allowing him to die. I could not, would not, even begin to imagine how his mother could cope with the pain from such a catastrophic and unexpected loss. When I got back from the store I found Harrison and held him close. With long, curly eyelashes that touched the tip of his brows, Harrison was so pretty he could have been mistaken for a baby girl. He was a tease who loved to play peek-a-boo and cuddle and to be held. LuAnne, who was eight when Harrison was born, gravitated to him right away and considered him her baby, mothering him in every way she could think of. He was chubby and an excellent eater. Harrison thrived. He met every developmental milestone on time or ahead of schedule. His first birthday was coming up on May 17, 2000, my fourteenth wedding anniversary. I marveled at how healthy he was. He bounced back from illnesses faster than any of my other six babies had. Without a doubt, he was my dream baby. A week later I was mopping the floor. Harrison was sitting nearby and smiling at me. I smiled back at him, then his smile vanished. The right half of his body went into a spasm that lasted for about thirty seconds. I ran across the wet floor and grabbed him. But the spasm had stopped and another smile lit up his face. I was worried. I called the night clinic and made an emergency appointment for him. He was checked out and everything seemed perfectly normal. But I felt uneasy. I had never seen anything so sudden and so frightening sweep over a child before. Two days later he had another spasm. I had started working at the grocery story to save money for my escape. Barbara told me about it when I got home. She said it had happened while she was feeding him lunch. But once again, he’d bounced back quickly and seemed fine. I made an appointment for Harrison in St. George. But the weekend before our scheduled visit he had another spasm, and this time it didn’t stop and it controlled his entire body. I was at my father’s doing laundry and we called an ambulance. Several tests were done in the ER, but the cause of the spasm could not be found. He was admitted and the pediatrician did more tests the next day. At one point, a doctor told me Harrison had the hiccups. He was making a sound similar to hiccups, but I knew that wasn’t it.