Despair

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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Would it be all right, do you think?’ And on and on, a desperate, crazy barrage of incoherent appeals. I’m sure nothing I said persuaded him more than the look on my face as I said it. A tall, white-faced woman with wind-wrecked hair and exhausted eyes was pleading with him on a quayside, hands held out as if she were in a seaside production of Medea . Looking at me he must have sensed that my stuttered request wasn’t a simple one. That there was something behind it that was very important. There was a moment of total silence. ‘All right,’ he said. And then, because he didn’t see me believe him, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure that’ll be OK.’ 4 Mr White It is 16 March 1936. On the east side of the great Palladian palace that is Stowe School, jackdaws fuss in the sweet chestnut trees, water drips from the roof of the block of rooms that used to be the stables, and inside them, Mr White, Head of English, blankets bunched up against his shins, is balancing a notebook on his knees and writing fast in a small, clear hand. He wonders if this is the most important book he’s ever written. Not because it will make his fortune. But because it will save him. He thinks he will leave. School life is unreal. All this is unreal. He has had enough. He can’t bear his colleagues. He can’t bear the boys any more either; en masse, he thinks, they’re horrible, like haddocks. He has to get out. He’ll live on his writing. His last book did well. He’ll write more. He’ll take a cottage in Scotland and spend his days fishing for salmon. Perhaps he’ll take the barmaid with him as his wife, the dark-eyed beauty he’s been courting for months, though he’s only in love with her emotionally , so far, and he hasn’t got anywhere, really, and those long hours sitting at the bar reduce him too often to hopeless drunkenness. He drinks too much. He has drunk too much, and he has been unhappy for a long time. But things are certain to change. The notebook he writes in is grey. He’s stuck a photograph of one of his grass snakes on the cover , and written ETC above it in ink. The snake is suitable because this is his dream diary, though there are other things in it too: scraps of writing, lesson plans, line drawings of sphinxes and clawed dragons rampant, and the occasional stab at self-analysis: 1) Necessity of excelling in order to be loved. 2) Failure to excel. 3) Why did I fail to excel? (Wrong attitude to what I was doing?) But mostly the notebook records his dreams. There are dreams of women with penises, of boxes of maidenheads like fingernail parings, of hooded cobras that rear up but turn out to be harmless.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I knew I wasn’t mad mad because I’d seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong. I began to notice curious connections between things. Things of no import burst into extraordinary significance. I read my horoscope and believed it. Auguries. Huge bouts of déjà vu. Coincidences. Memories of things that hadn’t happened yet. Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past. Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was. Because these were the normal madnesses of grief. I learned this from books. I bought books on grieving, on loss and bereavement. They spilled over my desk in tottering piles. Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers. Was it reassuring to be told that everyone sees ghosts? That everyone stops eating? Or can’t stop eating? Or that grief comes in stages that can be numbered and pinned like beetles in boxes? I read that after denial comes grief. Or anger. Or guilt. I remember worrying about which stage I was at. I wanted to taxonomise the process, order it, make it sensible. But there was no sense, and I didn’t recognise any of these emotions at all. Weeks passed. The season changed. The leaves came, the mornings filled with light, the swifts returned, screaming past my Cambridge house through the skies of early summer and I began to think I was doing fine. Normal grief, they call it. That’s what this was. An uneventful, slow climb back into life after loss. It’ll be healed soon. I still break into a wry smile thinking of how blithely I believed this, because I was so terribly wrong. Unseen need was motoring out through me. I was ravenous for material, for love, for anything to stop the loss, and my mind had no compunction in attempting to recruit anyone, anything, to assist. In June I fell in love, predictably and devastatingly, with a man who ran a mile when he worked out how broken I was.

• From Educated (2018)

  coming, something that would obliterate everything I’d known before. And what would replace it? I tried to imagine the future, to populate it with professors, homework, classrooms, but my mind couldn’t conjure them. There was no future in my imagination. There was New Year’s Eve, then there was nothing. I knew I should prepare, try to acquire the high school education Tyler had told the university I had. But I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want to ask Tyler for help. He was starting a new life at Purdue—he was even getting married—and I doubted he wanted responsibility for mine. I noticed, though, when he came home for Christmas, that he was reading a book called Les Misérables, and I decided that it must be the kind of a book a college student reads. I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to distinguish between the fictional story and the factual backdrop. Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either. * Asked fifteen years later, Dwain did not recall being there. But he is there, vividly, in my memory. PART TWO On New Year’s Day, Mother drove me to my new life. I didn’t take much with me: a dozen jars of home-canned peaches, bedding, and a garbage bag full of clothes. As we sped down the interstate I watched the landscape splinter and barb, the rolling black summits of the Bear River Mountains giving way to the razor-edged Rockies. The university was nestled in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains, whose white massifs jutted mightily out of the earth. They were beautiful, but to me their beauty seemed aggressive, menacing. My apartment was a mile south of campus. It had a kitchen, living room and three small bedrooms. The other women who lived there—I knew they would be women because at BYU all housing was segregated by gender—had not yet returned from the Christmas holiday. It took only a few minutes to bring in my stuff from the car. Mother and I stood awkwardly in the kitchen for a moment, then she hugged me and drove away. I lived alone in the quiet apartment for three days. Except it wasn’t quiet. Nowhere was quiet. I’d never spent more than a few hours in a city and found it impossible to defend myself from the strange noises that constantly invaded. The chirrup of crosswalk signals, the shrieking of sirens, the hissing of air brakes, even the hushed chatter of people

• From Educated (2018)

  years since I’d seen her face. Would she come? I waited for her reply in the parking lot at Stokes. I didn’t wait long. It pains me that you think it is acceptable to ask this. A wife does not go where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant disrespect. * The message was long and reading it made me tired, as if I’d run a great distance. The bulk of it was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life. The past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be shoveled fifty feet under and left to rot in the earth. Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for the day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m home!” I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth. Mother’s message amounted to an ultimatum: I could see her and my father, or I would never see her again. She has never recanted. — THE PARKING LOT HAD filled while I was reading. I let her words settle, then started the engine and pulled onto Main Street. At the intersection I turned west, toward the mountain. Before I left the valley, I would set eyes on my home. Over the years I’d heard many rumors about my parents: that they were millionaires, that they were building a fortress on the mountain, that they had hidden away enough food to last decades. The most interesting, by far, were the stories about Dad hiring and firing employees. The valley had never recovered from the recession; people needed work. My parents were one of the largest employers in the county, but from what I could tell Dad’s mental state made it difficult for him to maintain employees long-term: when he had a fit of paranoia, he tended to fire people with little cause. Months before, he had fired Diane Hardy,

• From City of Night (1963)

  She turns in demented raging fury, ready to slap him. He hurls the beer at her in a stream. “Dirty whoor,” he yelled, “huccome you don wanna screw with me?” He slaps her. She smashes the beer bottle on the counter, threatens him with the sharp glassy teeth. He runs out. Someone calls: “Go join the army!” Next in the competition on the stage is a giant of a man, introduced as “The Growling Bear.” In a cracked, beer-slurred voice, he begins to sing. Noticing the lack of response, in desperation (the five dollars!... the wine!...), he sprawls on all fours, pretends to be an animal, having, while the master of ceremonies, trying to inject something of comedy into the tragic moment, hops on him. Now the gigantic man groans like a dying animal. I didnt wait to find out who had won The Prize. Outside, I walked along the bleeding nightstreet, toward the park.... The faces of hustlers and scores... queens. Always waiting. And I walked, that night, along the impassive nightlake—northward beyond the couples making love under the silhouetted trees.... Along the dark lake.... And I looked back toward the magnificent Chicago skyline: that magic cyclorama embracing the water. Even the buildings which earlier seemed like giants marching snobbishly into the lake, now softened, blended into a glittering network of lights, lighted checkerboard.... Black and mysterious, the water trembles toward the shore uncertainly. A distant light shatters the black water in a shimmering streak.... A man who has been following me propositions me. I say no. As he moves away, I stare beyond, along the drive, where cars move as if in slow motion along streetlights strung blue-white in a curve. And I see: Dominating the skyline, at the top of a tall building, a giant searchlight scanning the city. It glides eerily, swirls over the black water. It floats, soars above the skyline, encircles the nightcity. And crazily excited I wonder suddenly if that spotlight swirling nightly is not trying somehow to embrace it all—to embrace that fusion of savage contradictions within this legend called America. And I know what it is I have searched beyond Neil’s immediate world of sought pain—something momentarily lost—something found again in the park, the fugitive rooms, the derelict jungles: the world of uninvited, unasked-for pain... found now, liberatingly, even in the memory of Neil himself. And I could think in that moment, for the first time really: It’s possible to hate the filthy world and still love it with an abstract pitying love. CITY OF NIGHT EACH YEAR, NEAR THE EARLY PART of January, a strange exodus prepares to depart from the Cities of Night. From East to West, a private call will murmur throughout the darkcities. Along Times Square, in the midst of the dogged winter, when the wind lashes at the concrete City like an icy scythe, the tattered army of young vagrants will raise their collars shelteringly and receive the calling....

• From City of Night (1963)

  (And I remember the times, the many times, when I had stood before such a mirror, forcing myself to think: I have only Me!) I still look Young. The streets outside.... The Carnival.... In this room, the world is flaunting before me what could, if tested and found false, be its most deadly myth... love... love which, even at the beginning, was revealing itself as partly resignation; perhaps offering only the memory of an attempt to touch... implying hope of a miracle in a world so sadly devoid of miracles. Surrender to a myth constantly belied (a myth which could lull you again falsely in order to seduce you—like that belief in God—into a trap—away from the only thing which made sense—rebellion—no matter how futilely rendered by the fact of decay, of death)—belied, yet sought—sought over and over—as this man himself has searched from person to person... unfound. I returned to the bed. “Well?” he asked me. And I was thinking: It has to happen—I have to be liberated again. No matter what kind of whirling his words have set off within me, I must undo it all. Yes, I knew suddenly... as if it would be the last time... that he must want me again, on my own terms—and that, then, his probing words, their impact on me (my own dangerous thoughts, even now, slowly threatening to succumb to what everything in the world indicates is the most murderous of all myths... Love)—all will be erased.... I took the money he had placed earlier on the table for me—the money which, I knew clearly now, had rested there as a test, and I put it into the pocket of my pants on the floor. Then I lay beside him. I reached again for his hand, and I placed it again on my body. And this time his hand was very, very, cold.... His hand didnt move. And then I pushed it with mine. He turned sideways, toward me, and our bodies touched closely.... For a moment I didnt move—and then I turned away quickly. I leaned back. Now the movements of his hands are his own. “This is the answer?” he asked, smiling strangely. “Yes,” I said. And this time, beyond what I was coaxing him to do, it had to be something else. The symbolic significance! I thought—echoing his words and many other words? And so it had to be this: He turned over on his stomach. My body pressed against his, entering him.... Then it was over. The orgasms have made us strangers again. All the words between us are somehow lost, as if, at least for this moment, they have never been spoken. I washed slowly and dressed. The sound of the anarchy outside is beating on my senses, summoning me. If only for this dangerous time, something vastly important, for me, had been reestablished, I told myself. And yet—...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I pulled the blankets over my head, and groaned; groaning, I found, was rather satisfying, so I groaned still louder... I stopped only when I heard the click of the parlour door - then lifted the blankets from my face to see Florence squinting at me, gravely, through the gloom. ‘You’re not ill again?’ she said. I shook my head. ‘No. I was only - groaning.’ ‘Oh.’ She looked away. ‘Ralph has left some tea. Shall I fetch you some?’ ‘Yes, please.’ ‘And then - then you must get up, I’m afraid.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I shall get up now.’ But when she had gone I found I could not get up, at all. I could only lie. I needed to visit the privy again, rather badly; I knew that it was dreadfully rude to lie abed like this, in a stranger’s parlour. Yet I felt as if I had been visited in the night by a surgeon, who had taken all my bones away and replaced them with bars of lead. I could no nothing at all - except lie ... Florence brought me my tea, and I drank it - then lay back again. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, washing the baby; then she returned and pulled the curtains open, meaningfully. ‘It’s a quarter to eight, Miss Astley,’ she said. ‘I have to take Cyril across the street. You will be up and dressed, now, won’t you, when I come back? You really will?’ ‘Oh, certainly,’ I said; yet when she reappeared, five minutes later, I had not budged an inch. She gazed at me, and shook her head. I gazed back at her. ‘You know, don’t you, that you cannot stay here. I must go to work, and I must go now. If you keep me any longer, I shall be late.’ With that, she caught hold of the bottom of the blanket. But I caught hold of the top. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘I must be sick, after all.’ ‘If you’re sick, you must go to a place where they will care for you properly!’ ‘I’m not that sick!’ I cried then. ‘But if I might only lie a little and get my strength... Go on to work, and I’ll let myself out, and be long gone by the time you get home. You may trust me in your house, you know. I shan’t take anything.’ ‘There’s little enough to take!’ she cried. Then she threw her end of the blanket at me, and put a hand to her brow. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how my head aches!’ I looked at her, saying nothing. At last she seemed to force herself into a kind of calmness, and her voice grew stiff: ‘You must do as you said, I suppose, and let yourself out.’

• From Educated (2018)

  “Get them, I’m going to read them.” “I don’t have them with me.” This was a lie; they were under my bed. “What the hell am I supposed to think if you ain’t got proof?” Dad was still shouting. Mother sat on the sofa’s edge, her mouth open in a slant. She looked in agony. “You don’t need proof,” I said quietly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve both seen it.” Dad said I wouldn’t be happy until Shawn was rotting in prison, that I’d come back from Cambridge just to raise hell. I said I didn’t want Shawn in prison but that some type of intervention was needed. I turned to Mother, waiting for her to add her voice to mine, but she was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as if Dad and I were not there. There was a moment when I realized she would not speak, that she would sit there and say nothing, that I was alone. I tried to calm Dad but my voice trembled, cracked. Then I was wailing—sobs erupted from somewhere, some part of me I had not felt in years, that I had forgotten existed. I thought I might vomit. I ran to the bathroom. I was shaking from my feet to my fingers. I had to strangle the sobs quickly—Dad would never take me seriously if I couldn’t—so I stopped the bawling using the old methods: staring my face down in the mirror and scolding it for every tear. It was such a familiar process, that in doing it I shattered the illusion I’d been building so carefully for the past year. The fake past, the fake future, both gone. I stared at the reflection. The mirror was mesmeric, with its triple panels trimmed with false oak. It was the same mirror I’d gazed into as a child, then as a girl, then as a youth, half woman, half girl. Behind me was the same toilet Shawn had put my head in, holding me there until I confessed I was a whore. I had often locked myself in this bathroom after Shawn let me go. I would move the panels until they showed my face three times, then I would glare at each one, contemplating what Shawn had said and what he had made me say, until it all began to feel true instead of just something I had said to make the pain stop. And here I was still, and here was the mirror. The same face, repeated in the same three panels. Except it wasn’t. This face was older, and floating above a soft

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He is lost. The barn is a dungeon. He is swimmingly, drunkenly tired. A chill summer wind blows through the walls. White owls hunt outside: powdery, reed-thin shrieks under a low orange moon. He is an executioner, he thinks, and he should be wearing a mask. A black one that conceals his face. He has been measuring time in the bates of the hawk, in the hundreds of times he’s lifted the screaming captive back onto the glove. The barn is the Bastille. The hawk is a prisoner. The falconer is a man in riding breeches and a checked coat. He stands in a Rembrandt interior. A pile of sticks and empty jars on the brick floor; cobwebs on the walls. A broken grate. A barrel of Flowers beer. A pool of light from the oil-lamp, and the hawk. The hawk, the hawk, the hawk. It is on his fist, all the sepia arrowheads on its pale breast dishevelled and frayed from his hands. The man is swaying backwards and forwards like a man on a ship, as if the ground beneath him pitched and rolled like the sea. He is trying to stay awake. He is trying to keep the hawk awake. The hawk is trying to close its eyes and sleep but the swaying pulls it back. I am free, the man is telling himself. Free. He stares at the cobwebs behind the exhausted hawk. I am in purdah, he thinks happily. I must not look the hawk in the eye. I must not punish the hawk, though it bates, and beats, and my hand is raw with pecks and my face stings from the blows of its bating wings. Hawks cannot be punished. They would rather die than submit. Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer. It is an ordeal. I shall triumph. He sways on his feet and suffers and the hawk suffers too. The owls are silent now. They quarter the Ridings over turf drenched with dew. 9 The rite of passage

• From City of Night (1963)

  Im married, got a wife—kids.” “Not much of a wife,” Sylvia lashed, “if you have to come here to feel youre a man.” Her voice was controlled, but her face blanched. “If I had a queer in my family, I’d kill him!” the man spat venemously. Sylvia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get out of here!” she commanded, pushing him out. And then, instantly, shockingly, it began. Like someone yearning for water—deprived of it for long hot smoldering days, Sylvia brushed past the bartender behind the bar, and she reached for a bottle of bourbon, and she poured out a glass. I could see the taut veins on her neck as she leaned her head back, welcoming the stinging amber liquid. Her hands, which had been trembling as she stared at the drunk man stumbling anxiously out of the bar, relaxed. She gulned another drink in one long thirsty swallow. The bartender is looking at her in helpless pity as if he knew what would happen now; as if perhaps he had witnessed it before. Released, Sylvia turned to face the jammed bar. Her eyes had misted, whether from the harshness of the burning liquor or from something else. And she held the glass out—high—in a toast to everyone here. I left the bar quickly, infinitely depressed. But in the other crowded bars, or on the streets, or walking through Jackson Square, I was obsessed by Sylvia’s face. And I went back to The Rocking Times. Intermittently, she was surrounded by the people she knew, the people whom, I was certain now, she had needfully searched out. She was laughing raucously; but her face was marked clearly by the impact of the liquor and the years-long, clawing desire to understand what everything in her, ancestrally, demanded she hate. Occasionally, someone would place a hand on her shoulder, cautioning her about the fervid, sudden drinking; someone else would coax her to let him take her home. But she pushed the hand away, rejected each suggestion that she should leave. “No!” she said harshly. “This is it!” Her face clouded, as if she were still sober enough not to be certain whether she wanted to go on. To indicate her instant decision, she gulned another drink. “Gonna sell this bar!” she shouted. “Leave New Orleans—never, never, never come back.” “Not even to see Us?” said Desdemona Duncan sadly. Sylvia raised a wrenched face toward her, touched the queen’s cheek tenderly, and began to cry in drunken, convulsed sobs. She slid off the stool and rushed out into the courtyard. I found her there, hidden in the shadows, sitting on the steps outside leading to the upper part of the building.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  10 Darkness He pours another whisky into his emptied glass and broods over the day’s events. He is free, but he has shackled himself to a madman. A lunatic. At the very least, a sufferer of intermittent delusional insanity. He turns down the beam of the paraffin lamp and sinks back into the chair, gloomily rereading the report he has written on the progress of his goshawk’s education. 6.15–6.45 walked round + round Gos, holding out a leg, while he bated whenever I came too close. Came away without feeding him. This is not in the book. I have done the same thing, with the same results, for fifteen minutes in every hour since (until 6 o’clock at night). He despised that rabbit leg. He despised the fur on it, the claws, the crown of pale flesh that grew dry and waxen as the hours passed. He despised it because the hawk did not want it. The hawk did not want him either. He had whistled to the hawk all day and his lips had grown dry as the whistle gave out and his solicitude had thinned to frustration and finally despair. Last night the frustration had reached such a pitch that he’d prevented Gos from regaining the fist after a bate – worse, gloried in the hawk hanging there, revolving slowly on his jesses. It was a terrible sin. He is full of shame. And worry. Gos’s mutes are green. Does that mean his hawk is sick? Maybe that is why he did not want the rabbit. What should he do? Starvation, he thinks. That will cure the stomach upset, if it is one. Perhaps he shall give the hawk some egg tomorrow? But the most important thing of all is this: he shall eat when he jumps for it, not before. White’s plan would have worked, had he stuck to it. But he did not. By dawn Gos had been given the greater part of a rabbit to eat, and he had not jumped to the fist. Another resolution was broken. They all were. Even White’s plan to keep the hawk awake for three days and nights had failed: he’d felt so sorry for Gos he kept returning him to his perch for short bouts of sleep. Freed from White’s presence, Gos remembered how much better life was when not tied to a human who kept stroking it and talking to it and bothering it with slippery rabbit livers, and singing and whistling and moving glasses of liquid up and down. When he came to pick it up again the hawk was always as wild as ever. Poor Gos. Poor, ragged, fearful, broken-feathered Gos.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There was a pause, as if it wasn’t quite the right response. I tried again. ‘Thanks.’ And I was all, Bloody hell! I’m sticking with falcons, thank you very much . I’d never thought I’d train a goshawk. Ever . I’d never seen anything of myself reflected in their solitudinous, murderous eyes. Not for me , I’d thought, many times. Nothing like me. But the world had changed, and so had I. It was the end of July and I’d convinced myself that I was pretty much back to normal. But the world around me was growing very strange indeed. The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater. Things sat in it, dark and very still. Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea. There were imperceptible pressures. Tapping water-pipes. I’d hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn’t touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre from my skin, something vastly wrong , making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects in my house. I ignored it. I’m fine , I told myself. Fine . And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote. But at night, as rain pricked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of the hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else. I wanted to follow it. I sat at my computer in my rain-lit study. I telephoned friends. I wrote emails. I found a hawk-breeder in Northern Ireland with one young goshawk left from that year’s brood. She was ten weeks old, half Czech, one-quarter Finnish, one-quarter German, and she was, for a goshawk, small. We arranged that I should drive to Scotland to pick her up. I thought that I would like to have a small goshawk. ‘Small’ was the only decision I made. I didn’t think for a second there was any choice in the matter of the hawk itself. The hawk had caught me. It was never the other way around. When the rain stopped the heat began. Dogs panted flat in the black shade under the limes, and the lawns in front of the house paled and burned to hay. A damp, hot wind pushed leaves about but failed to cool anything; it was a wind that made things worse, like stirring a hot bath with your hand. Walking in it was like wading neck-deep through thick liquid. I struggled into the furnace of my car and drove to a friend’s house in a village just outside the city.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then I come down with a fever. The sickness defeats all purpose, all purchase on the hawk. I feed her on the sofa, put her back on her perch and watch her drift into the place where goshawks go when they’ve eaten. It is very far away. I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder. I shut my eyes and guess. Blood, I am sure. Smoke, branches, wet feathers. Snow. Pine needles. More blood. I shiver. And the days pass and the fever continues. The rain continues. It dampens the house. Wide parchment stains bleed across the wall in the hall and front room. The house smells of stagnant water in the coal-cellar, hawk mutes, and dust. Nothing is moving, nothing improving, nothing heading anywhere. I am packing up boxes to leave, still not knowing where I’d live when the house was gone. In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. It is dark. No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here. I curl up in the box to hide. Even in my state of sickness I know this is more than a little strange. I am not going mad, I tell myself. I’m ill. That is all. 17 Heat The days of rain are followed by heat and insomnia and white nights that go on for ever. Outside at three in the morning a woman is calling ‘William! William!’, over and over again in a hoarse, stagey whisper. I have no idea why she is whispering; her hammering on William’s front door is waking the street. I give up after that, go downstairs, tiptoe past the sleeping hawk, sit outside on an upturned flowerpot and smoke a cigarette. A thick black sky, clear stars, an end-of-summer sky. Mabel had flown perfectly for the last two days; she’d come fifty yards instantly to my upraised fist. Everything was accelerating now towards that crucial point. Point in the sense of time. Point in the sense of aim. Point in the sense of something so sharp it hurts. Flying the hawk free, unencumbered by the creance, nothing stopping her headlong flight out and away but the lines that run between us; palpable lines, not physical ones: lines of habit, of hunger, of partnership, of familiarity. Of something the old falconers would call love. Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it’s not a thing that’s easy to do when you’ve lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White rushes from the house. The postman brought him news of agitated rooks in nearby woods. Breathless, he runs to the trees. Gos is not there. Of course he is not. He cannot find the sparrowhawks either. He thinks he hears them sometimes, but perhaps the calls are owls. He exists, now, in a landscape of hearsay; there are rumours of hawks like rumours of war. He stares at the sky. He litters the country with traps. He sits for days on end in the woods, from dawn until dark, cramped and shivering in his hide. Nothing. He buys a gamekeeper’s pole trap with jagged metal jaws. He files away the teeth designed to break hawks’ legs and pads its spring-shut jaws with felt. Then he makes another trap, a falconer’s trap from a description in a book: a noose of running twine around a ring of upturned feathers, and in the centre of the ring a tethered blackbird. He’ll hide with one end of the twine in his hand, and when the hawk takes the bird, he’ll pull, so the twine slips over the feathers and catches the hawk by its legs. It might work, if he can trap a blackbird to use as bait. He cannot trap a blackbird. He despairs. He starts a letter. Dear Herr Waller, it begins. He writes in English because his German is poor. He asks the man who’d sent him Gos for another hawk. He knows it might be too late in the year to get a young one, and passage hawks – those trapped when already on the wing – are few and far between. But he ends the letter with hope, takes it to Buckingham and posts it to Berlin. He waits for a reply, he waits for the hawks, he waits in penance and suffers for his sins. Nothing comes and there is no answer. My job was over. It was time to move. I was already an emotional mess, but the stress of the move pushed my dysfunction to spectacular proportions. The new house in the suburbs was nothing like the old house in the city: it was huge and modern, with a vast front room for the hawk to sleep in and lawns to sun herself upon. I filled the freezer with hawk food and a stack of frozen pizzas. Dragged my clothes upstairs in their plastic sacks, dumped them in a pile by the bedroom door. The rain came again, thin and sour, and I spent my first day there sprawled on the sofa with a notepad on my knees, failing to write my father’s memorial address. I have five minutes, I kept thinking, dully. Five minutes to speak of my father’s life.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  This awfulness you’ve been experiencing…this isn’t who you are. ” As her words pierced my inner chaos and penetrated my mind, I let my eyes fall shut and nodded my head. Truth Breaks Through The catalyst of my emotional meltdown in that Ugandan office was the startling experience of hearing a stranger proclaim intimately familiar words. During many of those five-hundred-plus angst-ridden nights back home, the only solace I could find was in obsessively reciting a passage of Scripture that I hoped and prayed would keep me tethered to my faith in God. Years earlier I’d memorized Psalm 139, and there in the black darkness of my bedroom, my mind whirring with doubt and fear, I’d whisper these words: Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol [the grave], you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.1 I was banking on these words being true, specifically the ones where David, the author of this psalm, said that, try though we might, there is in fact no way to escape the presence of God. I wanted that to be true. I needed that to be true. So I’d whispered those words into the dark with desperate passion, again and again and again. There in Uganda, my friends and I were visiting various refugee camps to observe the work being done by Food for the Hungry, an organization we all wanted to support in this effort. It was deeply gratifying to see the progress being made, even as I was in no shape to take it in. Our little team had come in from the field to a cramped office, where we were to meet with the in-country officials who were facilitating this good work. They were all believers, all passionate about the strides being made, all gracious and chatty and kind. “You’ll join us for our devotionals first before our meeting?” one of the men had asked, to which we enthusiastically said yes. I situated myself on one side of the un-air-conditioned room, across from Ann and Esther, and exhaled a thousand distracting thoughts.

• From Educated (2018)

  dreaming of seeing it? I had come to reclaim that life, to save it. But there was nothing here to save, nothing to grasp. There was only shifting sand, shifting loyalties, shifting histories. I remembered the dream, the maze. I remembered the walls made of grain sacks and ammunition boxes, of my father’s fears and paranoias, his scriptures and prophecies. I had wanted to escape the maze with its disorienting switchbacks, its ever-modulating pathways, to find the precious thing. But now I understood: the precious thing, that was the maze. That’s all that was left of the life I’d had here: a puzzle whose rules I would never understand, because they were not rules at all but a kind of cage meant to enclose me. I could stay, and search for what had been home, or I could go, now, before the walls shifted and the way out was shut. Mother was sliding biscuits into the oven when I entered the kitchen. I looked around, mentally searching the house. What do I need from this place? There was only one thing: my memories. I found them under my bed, in a box, where I had left them. I carried them to the car and put them in the backseat. “I’m going for a drive,” I told Mother. I tried to keep my voice smooth. I hugged her, then took a long look at Buck’s Peak, memorizing every line and shadow. Mother had seen me take my journals to the car. She must have known what that meant, must have sensed the farewell in it, because she fetched my father. He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know that?” “I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.” Those words are the last I said to my father. — I DROVE SOUTH; I didn’t know where I was going. It was nearly Christmas. I had decided to go to the airport and board the next flight to Boston when Tyler called. I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months—after what happened with Audrey, it had seemed pointless to confide in my siblings. I was sure Mother would have told every brother, cousin, aunt and uncle the story she had told Erin: that I was possessed, dangerous, taken by the devil. I

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Something about its perfect lightness set against the heaviness of my heart makes me giddy. I shut my eyes and my head is full of hoods. Modern American hoods like this one. Loose-braced Bahraini hoods of soft goatskin for passage sakers and peregrines. Syrian hoods. Turkmen hoods. Afghan hoods. Tiny Indian hoods in snakeskin for shikras and sparrowhawks. Huge eagle hoods from Central Asia. Sixteenth-century French hoods cut from white kidskin embroidered with golden thread and painted with coats of arms. They’re not a European invention. Frankish knights learned how to use hoods from Arab falconers during the Crusades, and a shared love of falconry made hawks political pawns in those wars. When a white gyrfalcon owned by King Philip I of Spain broke its leash during the Siege of Acre and flew up to the city walls, the king sent an envoy into the city to request its return. Saladin refused, and Philip sent another envoy, accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns for the falcon. Was it returned? I can’t recall. Did it matter? No , I think savagely. They’re all dead. Long dead . I think of Saladin taking the king’s falcon onto his own hand and covering its eyes with leather . I own this. It is mine. I think of fetish hoods. I think of distant wars. I think of Abu Ghraib. Sand in the mouth. Coercion. History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something’s sight away to calm it. It’s in your own best interest . Rising nausea. There’s a sensation of ground being lost, of wet sand washing from under my feet. I don’t want to think of the photographs of the tortured man with the hood on his head and the wires to his hands and the invisible enemy who holds the camera, but it is all I can see and the word hood like a hot stone in my mouth. Burqa , the word in Arabic. Hood. I start speaking to the hawk – I think to the hawk – in a voice as low and reassuring as I can make it. ‘When you travel in the car, Mabel,’ I say, ‘there’ll be lots of frightening things out there and we can’t have you crashing about while I drive. It is just to keep you feeling safe.’ And then, ‘It is necessary.’ I hear myself say it. It is necessary . That is what I am telling myself. But I don’t like it. Nor does she. Patiently I offer it again. ‘Look,’ I say carefully. ‘Just a hood.’ I move it slowly up to her feathered chin. She bates. I wait until she settles and move it up to her chin again. Bate . And again. Bate. Bate. Bate. I want to be gentle. I am being gentle, but my gentleness is a veneer on raging despair . I don’t want to hood her . She knows it.

• From Educated (2018)

  waiting for the crucial moment. Five minutes before the ceremony, I vomited in the women’s bathroom. When Emily said “I do,” the vitality left me. I again became a spirit, and drifted back to BYU. I stared at the Rockies from my bedroom window and was struck by how implausible they seemed. Like paintings. A week after the wedding I broke up with Nick—callously, I’m ashamed to say. I never told him of my life before, never sketched for him the world that had invaded and obliterated the one he and I had shared. I could have explained. I could have said, “That place has a hold on me, which I may never break.” That would have got to the heart of it. Instead I sank through time. It was too late to confide in Nick, to take him with me wherever I was going. So I said goodbye. I’d come to BYU to study music, so that one day I could direct a church choir. But that semester—the fall of my junior year—I didn’t enroll in a single music course. I couldn’t have explained why I dropped advanced music theory in favor of geography and comparative politics, or gave up sight-singing to take History of the Jews. But when I’d seen those courses in the catalog, and read their titles aloud, I had felt something infinite, and I wanted a taste of that infinity. For four months I attended lectures on geography and history and politics. I learned about Margaret Thatcher and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and the Cultural Revolution; I learned about parliamentary politics and electoral systems around the world. I learned about the Jewish diaspora and the strange history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By the end of the semester the world felt big, and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen. This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me.

• From Educated (2018)

  off his shirt and begins to beat back the flames. * * Since the writing of this story, I have spoken to Luke about the incident. His account differs from both mine and Richard’s. In Luke’s memory, Dad took Luke to the house, administered a homeopathic for shock, then put him in a tub of cold water, where he left him to go fight the fire. This goes against my memory, and against Richard’s. Still, perhaps our memories are in error. Perhaps I found Luke in a tub, alone, rather than on the grass. What everyone agrees upon, strangely, is that somehow Luke ended up on the front lawn, his leg in a garbage can. I wanted to get away from the junkyard and there was only one way to do that, which was the way Audrey had done it: by getting a job so I wouldn’t be at the house when Dad rounded up his crew. The trouble was, I was eleven. I biked a mile into the dusty center of our little village. There wasn’t much there, just a church, a post office and a gas station called Papa Jay’s. I went into the post office. Behind the counter was an older lady whose name I knew was Myrna Moyle, because Myrna and her husband Jay (Papa Jay) owned the gas station. Dad said they’d been behind the city ordinance limiting dog ownership to two dogs per family. They’d proposed other ordinances, too, and now every Sunday Dad came home from church shouting about Myrna and Jay Moyle, and how they were from Monterey or Seattle or wherever and thought they could impose West Coast socialism on the good people of Idaho. I asked Myrna if I could put a card up on the board. She asked what the card was for. I said I hoped I could find jobs babysitting. “What times are you available?” she said. “Anytime, all the time.” “You mean after school?”

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad yelled. “And she can pay it somewhere else.” At first Mother argued with him, but within minutes he’d convinced her. I’d been standing in the kitchen, weighing my options, thinking about how I’d just given Dad four hundred dollars, a third of my savings, when Mother turned to me and said, “Do you think you could move out by Friday?” Something broke in me, a dam or a levee. I felt tossed about, unable to hold myself in place. I screamed but the screams were strangled; I was drowning. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment, and even if I could the only apartments for rent were in town. Then I’d need a car. I had only eight hundred dollars. I sputtered all this at Mother, then ran to my room and slammed the door. She knocked moments later. “I know you think we’re being unfair,” she said, “but when I was your age I was living on my own, getting ready to marry your father.” “You were married at sixteen?” I said. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You are not sixteen.” I stared at her. She stared at me. “Yes, I am. I’m sixteen.” She looked me over. “You’re at least twenty.” She cocked her head. “Aren’t you?” We were silent. My heart pounded in my chest. “I turned sixteen in September,” I said. “Oh.” Mother bit her lip, then she stood and smiled. “Well, don’t worry about it then. You can stay. Don’t know what your dad was thinking, really. I guess we forgot. Hard to keep track of how old you kids are.” — SHAWN RETURNED TO WORK, hobbling unsteadily. He wore an Aussie outback hat, which was large, wide-brimmed, and made of chocolate- brown oiled leather. Before the accident, he had worn the hat only when riding horses, but now he kept it on all the time, even in the house, which Dad said was disrespectful. Disrespecting Dad might have been the reason Shawn wore it, but I suspect another reason was that it was large and comfortable and covered the scars from his surgery.