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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Accustomed to reaping nothing but the first fruits, how, without this ceremony, should I be able to harvest any pleasures from this creature ?" Saint-Florent had the most violent erection, they were currying and drubbing his device to keep it rampant; grasping that pike, he advances: in order to excite him further, Julien enjoys Cardoville before his eyes; Saint-Florent opens the attack, maddened by the resistance he encounters, he presses ahead with incredible vigor, the threads are strained, some snap. Hell's tortures are as naught to mine; the keener my agonies, the more piquant seem to be my tormenter's delights. At length, everything capitulates before his efforts, I am ripped asunder, the glittering dart sinks to the ultimate depths, but Saint-Florent, anxious to husband his strength, merely touches bottom and withdraws; I am turned over; the same obstacles: the savage one scouts them as he stands heating his engine and with his ferocious hands he molests the environs in order to put the place in fit condition for assault. He presents himself, the natural smallness of the locale renders his campaign more arduous to wage, my redoubtable vanquisher soon storms the gates, clears the entry; I am bleeding; but what does it matter to the conquering hero? Two vigorous heaves carry him into the sanctuary and there the villain consummates a dreadful sacrifice whose racking pains I should not have been able to endure another second. "My turn," cries up Cardoville, causing me to be untied, "I'll have no tailoring done, but I'm going to place the dear girl upon a camping bed which should restore her circulation, and bring out all the warmth and mobility her temperament or her virtue refuse us." Upon the spot La Rose opens a closet and draws out a cross made of gnarled, thorny, spiny wood. 'Tis thereon the infamous debauchee wishes to place me, but by means of what episode will he improve his cruel enjoyment? Before attaching me, Cardoville inserts into my behind a silver-colored ball the size of an egg; he lubricates it and drives it home: it disappears. Immediately it is in my body I feel it enlarge and begin to burn; without heeding my complaints, I am lashed securely to this thorn-studded frame; Cardoville penetrates as he fastens himself to me: he presses my back, my flanks, my buttocks on the protuberances upon which they are suspended. Julien fits himself into Cardoville; obliged to bear the weight of these two bodies, and having nothing to support myself upon but these accursed knots and knurs which gouge into my flesh, you may easily conceive what I suffered; the more I thrust up against those who press down upon me, the more I am driven upon the irregularities which stab and lacerate me.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The issue of women’s entrance into the professions is a spectacular case of the contradictions in the chivalrous mentality with which the sexual revolution had to contend. Women have always worked. They have generally worked longer hours for smaller rewards and at less agreeable tasks than have men. The issue of employment during the period of the first phase was simply their demand that they be paid for their efforts, have an opportunity to enter the most prestigious fields of work, and when paid be allowed to retain and control their earnings. Even before the industrial revolution brought them to the factory, women had always done menial labor, most of it physically exhausting and tedious, much of it agricultural. Yet chivalry’s accessory police ethic, “decorum” found it outrageous for a “lady” to use her mind rather than her hands and back. Such powerful feeling against such infraction of taboo affords a glimpse of how economically and politically useful taboo can be. In embarking upon the intellectually and socially responsible employment which the professions constituted, pioneers in each field met with ruthless and nearly overwhelming opposition in law, medicine, science, scholarship, and architecture. If among the middle classes the obsessive fetish of decorum could be damaging to women’s own interests, among the working class the passivity it implied took another form-despair. When the settlement houses began to reach the poor, they found, much as they would find today, that the women were at the bottom of the heap among slum dwellers; no one was paid less or needed unions more desperately than the women, more often unskilled and held back by the more severely inhibiting traditions of European patriarchy. Inured to servitude, they were listless and afraid to pursue their own interests, no matter how great their suffering. One of the pioneers in labor organization reported the situation in these depressing terms: …the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope. Such people cannot be said to live, as living means the enjoyment of nature’s gifts, but they simply vegetate like partially petrified creatures…many women are deterred from joining labor organizations by foolish pride, prudish modesty, and religious scruples; and a prevailing cause, which applies to all who are in the flush of womanhood, is the hope and expectancy that in the near future marriage will lift them out of the industrial life to the quiet and comfort of a home, foolishly imagining that with marriage their connection with and interest in labor matters end; often finding, however, that their struggle has only begun when they have to go back to the shop for two instead of one. All this is the result or effect of the environments and conditions surrounding women in the past and present, and can be removed only by constant agitation and education.32

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "It was late at night, and I walked on without exactly knowing where my steps were taking me to. I had not to cross the water on my way home, what then made me do so? Anyhow, all at once I found myself standing in the very middle of the bridge, staring vacantly at the open space in front of me. "The river, like a silvery thoroughfare, parted the town in two. On either side huge shadowy houses rose out of the mist; blurred domes, dim towers, vaporous and gigantic spires soared, quivering, up to the clouds, and faded away in the fog. "Underneath I could perceive the sheen of the cold, bleak, and bickering river, flowing faster and faster, as if fretful at not being able to outdo itself in its own speed, chafing against the arches that stopped it, curling in tiny breakers, and whirling away in angry eddies, whilst the dark pillars shed patches of ink-black shade on the glittering and shivering stream. "As I looked upon these dancing, restless shadows, I saw a myriad of fiery, snake-like elves gliding to and fro through them, winking and beckoning to me as they twirled and they rolled, luring me down to rest in those Lethèan waters. "They were right. Rest must be found below those dark arches, on the soft, slushy sand of that swirling river. "How deep and fathomless those waters seemed! Veiled as they were by the mist, they had all the attraction of the abyss. Why should I not seek there that balm of forgetfulness which alone could ease my aching head, could calm my burning breast? "Why? "Was it because the Almighty had fixed His canon against self-slaughter? "How, when, and where? "With His fiery finger, when He made that coup de théâtre on Mount Sinai? "If so, why was He tempting me beyond my strength? "Would any father induce a beloved child to disobey him, simply to have the pleasure of chastising him afterwards? Would any man deflower his own daughter, not out of lust, but only to taunt her with her incontinence? Surely, if such a man ever lived, he was after Jehovah's own image. "No, life is only worth living as long as it is pleasant. To me, just then, it was a burden. The passion I had tried to stifle, and which was merely smouldering, had burst out with renewed strength, entirely mastering me. That crime could therefore only be overcome by another. In my case suicide was not only allowable, but laudable—nay, heroic. "What did the Gospel say? 'If thine eye …' and so forth. "All these thoughts whirled through my mind like little fiery snakes. Before me in the mist, Teleny—like a vaporous angel of light—seemed to be quietly gazing at me with his deep, sad, and thoughtful eyes; below, the rushing waters had for me a syren's sweet, enticing voice.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "My comrade has certainly hurt you, Therese," says Julien, "and I am going to repair all the damage." He picks up a flask of spirits and several times rubs all my wounds. The traces of my executioners' atrocities vanish, but nothing assuages my pain, and never had I experienced any as sharp. "What with our skill at making the evidence of our cruelties disappear, the ladies who would like to lodge complaints against us must have the devil's own time getting themselves believed, eh, Therese?" says Cardoville. "What proofs do you fancy could be presented to support an accusation ?" "Oh," Saint-Florent interrupts, "the charming Therese is in no condition to level charges; on the eve of being immolated herself, we ought to expect nothing but prayers from her." "Well, she'd be ill-advised to undertake the one or the other," Cardoville replies; "she might inculpate us; but would she be heard? I doubt it; our consequence and eminent stations in this city would scarcely allow anyone to notice suits which, anyhow, always come before us and whereof we are at all times the masters. Her final torture would simply be made crueler and more prolonged. Therese must surely sense we have amused ourselves with her person for the natural, common, and uncomplex reason which engages might to abuse feebleness; she must surely sense she can-not escape her sentence, that it must be undergone, that she will undergo it, that it would be in vain she might divulge this evening's absence from jail; she'd not be believed; the jailer Ä for he's ours Ä would deny it at once. And so may this lovely and gentle girl, so penetrated with the grandeur of Providence, peacefully offer up to Heaven all she has just suffered and all that yet awaits her; these will be as so many expiations for the frightful crimes which deliver her into the hands of the law; put on your clothes, Therese, day is not yet come, the two men who brought you hither are going to conduct you back to your prison." I wanted to say a word, I wanted to cast myself a suppliant at these ogres' feet, either to unbend their hearts, or ask that their hands smite away my life. But I am dragged off, pitched into a cab, and my two guides climb in after me; we had hardly started off when infamous desires inflamed them again. "Hold her for me," quoth Julien to La Rose, "I simply must sodomize her; I have never laid eyes on a behind which could squeeze me so voluptuously; I'll render you the same service."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  It would be perfect. A chance for all of them to start over without the threat that at any moment they might be dragged out of their beds and shot against some lonely wall. Except Indi couldn’t do it. Her knees, her back. She’d fall apart before we left New Hampshire. Get us caught. Get us eaten. And without Indi to extract and refine E for them, they were just another pair of manhunters. No one wanted to buy bags full of ballsacks from unshowered transsexuals, but tidy glass vials of estrogen from stern, no-nonsense—and, most importantly, cis—Dr. Indiresh Varma in her office on Main Street were another story. Maybe we could make it north, head through Vermont for Canada. We could get a car running good enough before fall. Lost in thought, she almost walked into Beth when the taller woman stopped dead in her tracks. In the gathering dusk a herd of goats was crossing the highway a few dozen yards on. They poured through a gap in the guardrail where a car must have run off the road, though there was no sign of one in the long, waving grass that covered the shallow slope of the hill running down from the highway to its southbound stretch. They moved in silence aside from the clop of their cloven hooves against the pavement, their kids trotting faster to keep up. “Their ears look so soft,” Beth murmured. There were tears in the big girl’s eyes. Fran glanced at the tree line on the far side of the southbound, watching for any sign of movement there. A herd this big, thirty or forty animals, it was a miracle they weren’t trailing a whole swarm of men. Maybe they were lucky, or all the loud goats were dead and these were the quiet, unassuming wallflowers. Fran wondered what they did all day. The goats went over the far guardrail in neat little hops, hooves together and necks arched, and streamed uphill toward the sumac and leaning beech trees on the ridge. One, a shaggy white nanny with a dangling udder, paused to look back at the lonely stretch of road. Her square pupils looked alien to Fran, like little copies of Kubrick’s monolith suspended in the amber jelly of her irises. She imagined throwing her arms around the nanny’s neck and burying her face in her soft coat, inhaling the warm, musky smell of her, and knowing those strange eyes were watching over everything. I want to feel safe again, she thought as the herd melted into the trees and the shadows under their branches. The nanny trailed after them, last in line. Just for a little while.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The wind sighed, the custodian’s house creaking as it settled, and Indi looked out into the scudding dark and thought of screwflies laying eggs in living flesh, of maggots feasting on blood and tissue. We looked at ourselves, and that’s what we saw. Just a wriggling mass of parasites chewing at whatever they could get into their mouths. She imagined someone cracking an ampule next to a circulation vent, or maybe leaving an aerosol mister in a restroom at a fast food joint or in a subway car. Who hasn’t thought that we should be exterminated? Who hasn’t imagined doing it? I guess someone finally did. Once upon a time there had been a billion-dollar industry dedicated to teaching women how to make men chase them. Cosmo quizzes. Pinterest fashion blogs. Makeup tutorials sprawling across YouTube’s algorithmically sorted wasteland like popup housing developments. Perfumes scented with the barest traces of rot and rut and stinking civet. Now all you had to do was blast Meek Mill out a speaker in the bed of your truck and you could pull a few hundred in a matter of minutes. Chum the highway with rotten meat scooped from a bucket and flung out over the tailgate and you’d start drawing stragglers who caught the scent, and as they got closer they’d hear the music or the sound of the engine. Some of them would start screaming. In an afternoon you could pull a thousand of them out of their burrows and dens. A bellowing horde of Pepé Le Pews chasing the scent trail of a Drake verse and some rancid pigs’ blood. Alyssa loved kiting detail. She’d been on one of the cross-country crews that pulled the horde down on Detroit in ’20, back when the Matriarchy was still getting its feet under it. Now, kneeling in the bed of a battered Ford pickup as Layla cruised down 93 doing a sedate ten miles an hour with occasional bursts of speed to keep them ahead of the tide of diseased flesh gathering in their wake, she felt that same thrill. Men drooled out of the woods singly and in twos and threes. Sometimes a whole pack emerged at once, snapping and screaming, to follow the trail of chum Alyssa scooped out of a Sheetrock bucket full of roadkill and rotting chicken shreds and dumped over the truck’s tailgate every half mile or so. She liked to look back at the surging wall of men behind them and see the frustrated rage in their eyes, almost the way Billy had looked at her when she said the wrong thing or dropped a glass or ate something he’d wanted for himself. There was something oddly comforting about it, something that gave her a case of the giggles just like she’d used to do when Billy got that look on his face.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I hadn’t thought , just hadn’t thought about any of that.” Mother says the word thought like she’s stomping out something, or as if the weight of it fell on her like a blow. Then Mother did what seemed at the time the Right Thing, though had she Thought, she may have Thought Twice about how Right the Right Thing would wind up being, for surely it drove her mad. She sat in that ladderback chair and tore up the papers giving her sole custody of the two minor children, Tex and Belinda. She tore them up under the smug smile and predatory eye of the monolithic Mother-in-Law. The constable showed visible relief. But the kids were still skittish, which was partly why Mother didn’t even hug them good-bye, for they would have winced in her arms. “I couldn’t have stood that,” she said. “What’d you do then?” I asked. “Then I flew back to New York and started looking for somebody to marry who’d help me get my kids back.” The room around us had vanished completely. We were held close in this timeless bubble of bad neon. “But after I got married, whoever it was”—she waved her hand at the various husbands—“would lose interest in getting me my kids. And I’d get sick of them and run off. Your daddy would have taken them, finally. Your daddy was the only one.…” In fact, after Mother and Daddy married, she wrote for the kids, but they were too big by then. “They didn’t want to come,” Mother said. The stepmother sent a letter to that effect. “Then it was like a big black hole just swallowed me up. Or like the hole was inside me, and had been swallowing me up all those years without my even noticing. I just collapsed into it. What’s the word the physicists use? Imploded. I imploded.” Those were my mother’s demons, then, two small children, whom she longed for and felt ashamed for having lost. And the night she’d stood in our bedroom door with a knife? She’d drunk herself to the bottom of that despair. “All the time I’d wasted, marrying fellows. And still I lost those kids. And you and Lecia couldn’t change that. And I’d wound up just as miserable as I started at fifteen.” Killing us had come to seem merciful. In fact, she’d hallucinated we’d been stabbed to death. “I saw blood all over you and everything else. Splashed across the walls.” As to why she hadn’t told us all this before—about the marriages and the lost children—her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: “I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.” The next day Lecia hired a detective to find the lost kids, who were kids no longer, of course, being well into their forties by then. They were also damn eager to be found.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I handed these lines to the negress, and hastened away as fast as I could go. I arrived at the railway-station all out of breath. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my heart and stopped. I began to weep. It is humiliating that I want to flee and I can’t. I turn back—whither?—to her, whom I abhor, and yet, at the same time, adore. Again I pause. I cannot go back. I dare not. But how am I to leave Florence. I remember that I haven’t any money, not a penny. Very well then, on foot; it is better to be an honest beggar than to eat the bread of a courtesan. But still I can’t leave. She has my pledge, my word of honor. I have to return. Perhaps she will release me. After a few rapid strides, I stop again. She has my word of honor and my bond, that I shall remain her slave as long as she desires, until she herself gives me my freedom. But I might kill myself. I go through the Cascine down to the Arno, where its yellow waters plash monotonously about a couple of stray willows. There I sit, and cast up my final accounts with existence. I let my entire life pass before me in review. On the whole, it is rather a wretched affair—a few joys, an endless number of indifferent and worthless things, and between these an abundant harvest of pains, miseries, fears, disappointments, shipwrecked hopes, afflictions, sorrow and grief. I thought of my mother, whom I loved so deeply and whom I had to watch waste away beneath a horrible disease; of my brother, who full of the promise of joy and happiness died in the flower of youth, without even having put his lips to the cup of life. I thought of my dead nurse, my childhood playmates, the friends that had striven and studied with me; of all those, covered by the cold, dead, indifferent earth. I thought of my turtle-dove, who not infrequently made his cooing bows to me, instead of to his mate.—All have returned, dust unto dust. I laughed aloud, and slid down into the water, but at the same moment I caught hold of one of the willow-branches, hanging above the yellow waves. As in a vision, I see the woman who has caused all my misery. She hovers above the level of the water, luminous in the sunlight as though she were transparent, with red flames about her head and neck. She turns her face toward me and smiles. * * * * * I am back again, dripping, wet through, glowing with shame and fever. The negress has delivered my letter; I am judged, lost, in the power of a heartless, affronted woman. Well, let her kill me. I am unable to do it myself, and yet I have no wish to go on living.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I was unable to reply. “Severin,” she continued softly, “what is the matter? Are you ill?” Her voice sounded so sympathetic, so kind, so full of love, that it clutched my breast like red-hot tongs and I began to sob aloud. “Severin,” she began anew. “My poor unhappy friend.” Her hand gently stroked my hair. “I am sorry, very sorry for you; but I can’t help you; with the best intention in the world I know of nothing that would cure you.” “Oh, Wanda, must it be?” I moaned in my agony. “What, Severin? What are you talking about?” “Don’t you love me any more?” I continued. “Haven’t you even a little bit of pity for me? Has the beautiful stranger taken complete possession of you?” “I cannot lie,” she replied softly after a short pause. “He has made an impression on me which I haven’t yet been able to analyse, further than that I suffer and tremble beneath it. It is an impression of the sort I have met with in the works of poets or on the stage, but I always thought it was a figment of the imagination. Oh, he is a man like a lion, strong and beautiful and yet gentle, not brutal like the men of our northern world. I am sorry for you, Severin, I am; but I must possess him. What am I saying? I must give myself to him, if he will have me.” “Consider your reputation, Wanda, which so far has remained spotless,” I exclaimed, “even if I no longer mean anything to you.” “I am considering it,” she replied, “I intend to be strong, as long as it is possible, I want—” she buried her head shyly in the pillows—“I want to become his wife—if he will have me.” “Wanda,” I cried, seized again by that mortal fear, which always robs me of my breath, makes me lose possession of myself, “you want to be his wife, belong to him for always. Oh! Do not drive me away! He does not love you—” “Who says that?” she exclaimed, flaring up. “He does not love you,” I went on passionately, “but I love you, I adore you, I am your slave, I let you tread me underfoot, I want to carry you on my arms through life.” “Who says that he doesn’t love me?” she interrupted vehemently. “Oh! be mine,” I replied, “be mine! I cannot exist, cannot live without you. Have mercy on me, Wanda, have mercy!” She looked at me again, and her face had her cold heartless expression, her evil smile. “You say he doesn’t love me,” she said, scornfully. “Very well then, get what consolation you can out of it.” With this she turned over on the other side, and contemptuously showed me her back. “Good God, are you a woman without flesh or blood, haven’t you a heart as well as I!” I cried, while my breast heaved convulsively.

• From The Art of Memoir

  able to articulate: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” As you watch the narrator feel around the edges of consciousness for its “slippery hold”—probing for what really went down—you enter a singular set of psychic perceptions. But craving that “hold” or permanence in what’s past is Nabokov’s inner enemy. Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all? The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line—some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end. However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward. Often the inner enemy dovetails with the writer’s own emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it’s to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity. Frank Conroy’s inner enemy is his inability to maintain balance and control in the chaotic world of his feckless family without either disassociation or rebelling in self-destructive ways. Stop-Time shows the power of spacing out to protect a kid in pain. That inner blankness or emptiness provides the place where Conroy—a professional jazz pianist when I knew him—could shape “music” or form out of his environment’s painful disorder. He enacts how a deprived kid survives, not just suffers, and it’s through disassociation —a consciousness leaving time and place. For an hour or more I lay motionless in a self-induced trance, my eyes open but seldom moving. . . . In this state my ears seemed rather far away. I was burrowed somewhere deep in my skull. And the undercurrent of the book is the aimless boredom of childhood. Since kids lack power and agency over much, they must embrace empty time. Conroy does it with bitterness.

• From My People (2022)

  Shortly thereafter, as I walked through Siena’s breathtaking art museum, so rich in ancient history and its legends and realities, I was stopped by a vivid painting portraying in Bethlehem the murder of all babies two years old and under, ordered by King Herod, who was said to have been angered over the escape of baby Jesus and obsessed by any threat to destroy him and his kingdom. Soon after I arrived back home in Oak Bluffs, another attack in London—this one, as my friend and now Vineyard summer regular, the screenwriter Misan Sagay wrote me from her winter home in London, “again targeting children.” And of course others followed, most recently Paris. One chilling moment after another—and alas, all coming around again. Urban League Director Accuses the Press of Ignoring BlacksThe New York Times MAY 5, 1975 Vernon E. Jordan Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, accused the nation’s press last night of “settling back into the spirit of ‘benign neglect’ of black people.” In a speech before the Capital Press Club in Washington, a group of predominantly black people, Mr. Jordan lauded the press for its coverage of Watergate but contended that the press, “after a fling at tokenism and liberalism”—a reference to its coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s—“has Watergated black people in its treatment of us in the news columns.” “I thought there would be an outcry from the liberal press about the San Francisco stop-and-frisk dragnet aimed at blacks,” Mr. Jordan said. “But I didn’t hear a peep out of the big-city newspapers that used to be so concerned about the rights of black people in the South.” Mr. Jordan also cited coverage of the energy crisis, focusing on middle-class whites in gasoline lines and neglecting, he said, the 7 percent rise in unemployment among black male family heads—“the first time this group’s unemployment went up while rates for teenagers and women were stable.” Mr. Jordan also criticized what he described as the low employment rate of blacks in the newspaper and broadcasting industries—“still on the order of two to four percent,” he said—and the small number of blacks in policy-making positions. “That’s another story neglected by the media,” he continued, “its own inability to reconcile its editorial liberalism with its employment policies.” In the speech, which was released here, Mr. Jordan praised the black press as “the great exception” for its coverage of events relating to black people. “In a nation apparently devoted to keeping black people under the hammer, it’s been the black organizations and the black press that has tried to tell their story and to relieve their suffering,” he said. On the Case in Resurrection CityTransaction OCTOBER 1968 Resurrection City—where the poor had hoped to become visible and effective—is dead.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Did he give me back my baby girl from Satan’s arms?” And through her tears her eyes were sharp, her gaze as cold and patient as a snake’s. “Did he make you whole?” He leaned his head against her breast and let her stroke his sweaty hair, and he said “Yes, mama,” with as much peace as he could summon, but the prayer still echoed in his ears. Lord, make me a man. Indi lay awake, sheets kicked to the foot of her new bed, and thought of the thing in the pit that had once been a man named Mackenzie. That odious rich kid name. Whiteness. Old money. Spoiled and unloved packs of boys like that had roamed the streets of Bridgeport in her childhood. Probably they still did, only now with less discernment as to who they preyed on. If I don’t give her what she wants, will she let us live? And if I do, what would it mean to put the future of the world into those little ombré claws? She rolled onto her side and drew her legs up against the comforting weight of her belly, filtered air blowing over her bare skin and carrying her sweat away into a world of dark, clean vents scoured bare by endless wind. If, if, if. I’d need computers that are nothing but rust and rat nests. Software that doesn’t exist anymore. Isolating embryos, testing chromosomes. And the baby. Am I going to do that to a kid? She closed her eyes, the room swaying around her like the hold of some dark ship. Still drunk, she thought, picturing again the pit and the thing and its dripping tongue wrapped around Sophie Widdel’s pale, clear skin. Where the fuck did I bring us? “So, you were a manhunter?” The woman in charge of worker placement, what the bunkerites called “pitching in,” wasn’t much older than Fran. In her cat’s-eye glasses and Penn State sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she looked like a tired postgrad catching up on work over the weekend. She smelled pleasantly—her odor filling the cramped closet of her office at the bunker’s midmost level—of sandalwood and something like vanilla. “Harvesting and selling,” said Fran. Slitting ballsacks open with a penknife while flies swarmed over her bloody hands. Arguing with armed premenopausal butch dykes outside Penacook over how much bear meat and block salt a Ziploc full of kidney lobes was worth. “My friend Beth did the actual hunting.” The other woman made a note on her clipboard. “And how well would you say you’re known in the greater Boston area? Up through coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire?” “Known. Definitely known. We’ve been to Fort Fisher twice a year, three years running, and to Boston, Worcester, Manchester, Nashua—we trade in bulk to Lakeesha Wallis’s store.” Penn State scribbled for a minute, squinting as she hunched over her board, then capped her pen with a decisive click.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She heard herself scream. Crack. The man lying across her legs had fallen still. She crawled away from him, dragging her injured leg, elbows digging into the soft ground. She saw the mantis flying, translucent wings thrumming, and the gnats and butter hoppers rising from the undergrowth around her. A dead man lay not far off, a little dribble of blood, bone, and brain laid out beside his head. Two more were screaming from atop the carcass of the big one she’d shot. They’d already eaten most of his face. His thighs were pockmarked with bloody bites. Crack. One went stumbling back and hit the wall of the abandoned house, an eerily human expression of shock painted across his smeared and twisted features. Deep fissures in his lips wept some kind of lymphatic fluid, clear and thin. Crack. He fell with a thumbprint hole in his breast. The other broke and ran, bolting like a roach into the brush. Ferns and wild brambles swallowed him. There was a thump, a grunt, and then Fran was next to her, helping her sit up, asking if she was okay, but that was all a long, long way away. Beth leaned into Fran’s shoulder, inhaling the sweat and skin smell of the hollow of her neck, and closed her eyes. I hope I die, she thought as she slipped slowly into the black oil of unconsciousness. I hope I don’t have to wake up into this again. I hope I never have to see any of it. Please. Robbie skinned his elbows coming down the tree, though he wasn’t quite sure when or how. His flannel should have stopped it, but it was hot out and he’d rolled the sleeves up. The raw skin stung where his sweat touched it. He ran across the overgrown field, rifle slung across his back, briars tearing at his clothes. He crashed through reed-thin saplings and ferns that grew waist-high in the wet, enveloping heat. The air was thick with flies. He told himself again he hadn’t shot her, that he hadn’t misjudged it. They were on her. He burst out onto open lawn, grass swishing around his knees, and slowed, panting. The girl—she looked a little older than him, late twenties or early thirties, big and broad-shouldered with half an ear missing and scars crisscrossing her still oddly innocent and childish face—lay unconscious or dead in her friend’s arms. The men he’d shot were all around them. Jesus, he thought, anxiety digging its fingers into his stomach as he came close enough to see her pallor and the ugly gashes on the back of her right calf. Don’t let her be dead . The other woman saw him.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Indi scrubbed at the wound and Beth held her breath and fought down the lump of bubbling misery at the back of her throat. A fierce stinging pain lit up her cheek as Indi cleaned the cut. It felt as though a swarm of wasps were stinging her along some fault line in her body, some appetizing orifice raw and tender enough to be preyed upon. She let out a muffled groan. “Hold still.” Indi bent down close to Beth, her round face and double chin shining with perspiration, the fine black hairs on her upper lip just visible against her skin. She drew a yellowed Q-tip glistening with some kind of solvent quick along Beth’s wound, then mopped at it with a folded rag. A moment later came the muted sting of the suture needle tugging at her cheek. In and out. Hot, bright flashes of discomfort. The ceiling swam. She felt as though she were being pressed flat against the table by some massive hand, the air squeezed out of her lungs, her whole awareness slowing to a nauseous, muddy churn. For a while Beth drifted in that gray-brown haze of pain, a headache building where the bridge of her nose crossed her eyeline. Indi removed her staples one by one and cleaned the gashes in her leg. Fran came in and made Beth drink something horribly bitter while Indi talked. Beth heard herself crying, flat and miserable, like a baby wailing from the bottom of a well. They lifted up her legs, taking one each, and Indi put a swab inside her. Everything hurt. The room tilted. It came apart. The men were waiting. And then it was dark outside and Indi was beside her again, hips spilling from the edges of her rolling stool, glasses pushed up onto her hair and her nose buried in a book. Kerosene lamps burned in the gloom, casting flickering shadows on the walls and curtains. Indi looked up from her paperback as Beth swallowed. Her mouth was dry and cottony and tasted sour. Her head ached as though it might split down her nose and through her philtrum at any moment. “Indi, will you fuck me?” The other woman sighed, passing a hand over her face. She had little hands, plump and perfect like a baby doll’s. “You need to rest, honey. You’re dehydrated, you have at least two broken ribs, you came within a quarter inch of losing your left hamstring—” Beth slid a hand onto Indi’s knee. Her arm felt as though it were weighted down with bars of lead. The other woman’s skin was cool against her burning fingertips through the thin fabric of her skirt. “Please.” “Bethany, no.” The expression on the other woman’s face told her this fell outside the needling push and pull of their occasional liaisons, the power games of her abjection and Indi’s disdainful refusal. Beth letting her bruised dignity drop like a nightie to the floor.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Courses at the Celebrity Centre focused on communication and self-presentation skills, which were especially prized in the entertainment industry. The drills and training routines would have felt somewhat familiar to anyone who had done scene work in an acting class. Many actors, at once insecure but competitive by nature, were looking for an advantage, which Scientology promised to give them. The fact that anyone was interested in them at all must have come as a welcome surprise. Others who passed through Scientology at the same time as Paul Haggis were actors Tom Berenger, Christopher Reeve, and Anne Francis; and musicians Lou Rawls, Leonard Cohen, Sonny Bono, and Gordon Lightfoot. None stayed long. Jerry Seinfeld took a communication course, which he still credits with helping him as a comedian. Elvis Presley bought some books as well as some services he never actually availed himself of. Rock Hudson visited the Celebrity Centre but stormed out when his auditor had the nerve to tell him he couldn’t leave until he finished with his session, although the matinee idol had run out of time on his parking meter. The exemplary figure that Hubbard sought eluded capture. VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “ Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology , six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.” One of the doors the federal agents opened during the raid in Los Angeles led to the darkened basement of the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on Fountain Avenue, newly christened as Scientology’s Advanced Org building. There were no lights, so the heavily armed agents made their way down the stairs with flashlights. They found a warren of small cubicles, each occupied by half a dozen people dressed in black boiler suits and wearing filthy rags around their arms to indicate their degraded status.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  feel, I did her packing while she simply stood at the window, turning away from me to look out at the empty street. Early in the morning of the appointed day we set off while it was still dark, with her luggage strapped to a toboggan, and without a word we made the long journey through the snow spinning down around us, along the left bank of the Vltava, past the Baumgarten, and further out still to the Trade Fair Palace at HoleSovice. The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning. We waited there in the crowd of those who had been summoned, a silent assembly stirred only, now and then, by an apprehensive murmur running through it. There were men and there were women, families with young children and solitary figures, there were the elderly and the infirm, ordinary folk and those who had been well-to-do, all of them, in accordance with the instructions they had received, with their transport numbers round their necks on pieces of string. Agata soon asked me to leave her. When we parted she embraced me and said: Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for me sometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much. If you look into the dark water of the pools, perhaps one of these days you will see my face. Well, said Vera, so then I went home. It took me over two hours to walk back to the Sporkova. I tried to think where Agata might be now, whether she was still waiting at the entrance or was already inside the Trade Fair precinct. I learned only years later, from one who had survived the ordeal, what it was like there. The people being taken away were herded into an unheated exhibition hall, a great barn-like building which was freezing in the middle of winter. It was a bleak place where, under faint, glaucous lamplight, the utmost confusion reigned. Many of those who had just arrived had to have their baggage searched, and were obliged to hand over money, watches, and other valuables to a Hauptscharfiihrer called Fiedler who was feared for his brutality. A great mound of silver cutlery lay on a table, along with fox furs and Persian lamb capes. Personal details were taken down, questionnaires handed out, and identity papers stamped EVACUATED or GHETTOIZED. The German officials and their Czech and Jewish assistants walked busily to and fro, and there was much shouting and cursing, and blows as well. Those who were to leave had to stay in the places allotted to them. Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon. They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It was fucking Christmas, man! What was he supposed to do now? "This blows," was all he could muster. He sat there shirtless and forlorn, tugging on the fuzzy little soul patch on his chin and chewing nervously on the filbert-size silver tongue stud that deformed his speech slightly, then finally added, "Fucked up. Thass all I gotta say. This is fuuucked up." Billy, the commis-saucier, said nothing. His situation was somewhat more desperate than that of his colleagues, he guessed, as he was already two months behind on his rent and the Christian-rock band he shared a Hoboken apartment with had been making some very un-Christian noises of late, labeling their containers of yogurt in the refrigerator and even suggesting they might throw him out on the street if he didn't come up with rent, and soon. He looked around the room, trying to discern who might be most sympathetic to his plight. Who might be inclined to lend him money, maybe let him crash on their couch for a while. Thierry? Forget about it. He was French. Kevin? Maybe, though he didn't look too sympathetic now, tossing a spinning boning knife into the air again and again and catching it by the handle. Michelle? She'd turn him down cold. He was out of his league there and he knew it. He barely felt equal to the task of talking to her. Jimbo the garde-manger was a possibility, but Billy suspected he was gay. (There was no other explanation—in Billy's mind—for the music he liked to listen to in the kitchen. No, no way. He'd rather move back to Minneapolis than have to wake up to that music.) "We got a pretty desperate situation here, carnales," said Leon, the pastry assistant. He liked to think he spoke Spanish, though the Mexicans nearly pissed themselves laughing every time he tried. "This puppy is closing, man. Finita la fucking musica. Stick in a fork, papi chulo, turn us over 'cause we are done. This place is going down." "What do you think?" asked Kevin quietly, turning to Michelle. "How long do you think we have? I mean, we're on COD already. The dining room is fucking dead. How long till the checks start bouncing? How long till I gotta find a new job?" All Michelle said was, "you do what you gotta do," then she kicked off her pants and struggled into her jeans. She'd been faxing out resumes for a month already, and with January coming up fast, when every cook in New York who'd been burned out by the holiday season or become pissed at the size of their Christmas bonus or other perceived slight would be looking for work at the same time and at the same places, most of which would already be laying off seasonal help.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Indi was bent low over Beth’s leg, keeping it propped up with a hand under the knee. “You’re lucky I just skimmed new penicillin from the tank. It looks like a good batch, too. Go to the cellar. Get me four hundred milliliters and a glass of water.” “Sure,” said Fran. As she stepped out of the office, shutting the door behind her, she heard Beth say something in a small, frightened voice. She sounded like a child. “They hurt me, Indi.” And then Indi, gently. “I know, baby. It’s all right.” Beth made a sound like a wounded animal, low and strained and desperate. Fran stared at the door for a while, wondering if she should go back in, if she should tell Beth everything that had gone through her mind when she’d watched her fall off the roof and into the arms of the men below. The words wouldn’t come, and so she stood there, chewing on her lip, and listened to her friend’s high, thin wails of grief. Beth sobbed in the soft circle of Indi’s arms, her chest aching around a hard red knot of despair. The second she’d seen Indi in the door, she’d wanted nothing but to fall against her and dissolve into a screaming, drooling mess, to let the other woman’s body absorb the pent-up misery of the last week. Her stapled leg itched so badly; it was all she could do not to claw at the infected skin. Everything hurt. It hurt to think. It hurt to breathe. “You need to hold still, baby,” said Indi, pressing Beth back down onto the table. Her perfect fingernails traced the raised ridge of the crossbow wound along Beth’s cheek. “I have to take these out and disinfect before I sew it up.” The swab she pressed against the wound stank of hydrogen peroxide, a cutting, acid odor. Tiny scissors snipped next to Beth’s ear, the one missing a chunk where a man had bitten it off four years ago in the dead of winter. Indi drew the catgut out inch by careful inch until Beth could feel the lips of the wound sagging open around the half-scabbed gash. Her tongue probed at the inside of her cheek, feeling where the wound cut close to her mucous membrane. Another few millimeters and it would have left her breathing through a second mouth. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks. She stared up at the ceiling of Indi’s office, at the water stain by the darkened light fixture. The room was painted light blue. The ceiling was off-white. Daylight came in through the yellowing drapes.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  When the news about t. rex started, she hired a bunch of woman contractors—remember Blackwater, those sickos in Iraq? She had them all up at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends and they were all drinking wine, kissing her ass, planning out how to rebuild society. They had their sons, husbands, whatever, in some kind of hermetically sealed guest house she’d had built special in case of germ warfare or something.” Robbie sat down next to her. She hadn’t seen him coming down the beach. Her stomach clenched as he said something to the older woman, June, on his other side and then turned to listen to Zia’s story. He hates me. I had a chance and now it’s done and he hates me and I have nothing. I have nothing at all. “So, they get exactly one day into their girl-power retreat and then it turns out one of the friends has PCOS and doesn’t know it. She flips in the middle of the night and starts ripping into the other guests before someone knocks over a lamp or something. I guess they’d been stockpiling diesel and kerosene.” Zia mimed an explosion with her hands, fists coming together before unfurling into spread palms. “Anyway, the Blackwater bitches who survived the blast looted what was left of the place and bugged out. Left everyone else to burn alive, and finally the whole castle collapsed. Real Masque of the Red Death shit.” A log popped somewhere in the fire. Sparks eddied from its shifting architecture. Fran imagined the beams of that old castle coming down on her, crushing her body like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca because she wouldn’t let go of a dream of a woman who couldn’t be loved, or touched, or known. She imagined the heat searing her skin. The breathless moment of impact. Everyone around the fire sat silent, as though thinking the same thing. Robbie’s hand found hers. Her mind raced even faster for a moment, trying to parse the strength of his grip, the way he slid his fingers into hers, the set of his jaw in the firelight. And then the flurrying thoughts fell away.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  You’re fucking killing us!” She slammed her forehead, hard, into the splintering wood. “V!” Tara shrieked. “Stop!” Again. Beth started back toward the house. Again. Blood on the panel’s peeling paint. V screaming now, battering her fists and face against the door. Again, that sickening thud of bone on wood. And then, from above, another sound. A squeal of tortured metal and the scrape of something heavy shoved over a rough surface. Beth looked up. The air conditioner spun as it fell. Beth hadn’t seen who pushed it. A hand. Curtains swirling. Bone. Blood. A sound like an egg cracking against the rim of a metal bowl. The slow, sluglike glide of the yolk over stainless steel. It looked too real. TV with the motion smoothing on, the actors’ faces home-video raw and sharp. Tara screaming. Her nails digging hard into Beth’s arm. They were scared, she told herself, trying to reach back across those five long years and turn her younger self away from the sight of V’s tottering body and the oozing, open gash from her ruined skull down to her chin. The fissure where her forehead used to be. They were afraid of us, and they hated us. Lily hated us, too, and herself, and they hated Lily but they had no path to let it out. So we got it. We got all of it. She had dragged Tara away from that house, from that sign on the door that said they were safe, from Venus with her head caved in and her jaw split open. Two nights later the other girl took forty Klonopin in a motel bathroom and died what must have been a slow and agonizing death while Beth slept a few feet and a single wall away, and on the silent television set atop the dresser, a helicopter news crew had captured a pack of men fighting over the corpse of a little boy like dogs over a bone, snarling with their blunt teeth buried in his flesh. Or else she’d dreamed it. The trailer door swung open. Beth scrambled to her feet, turning to face the graying middle-aged cis woman who stood on the threshold in a blue skirt and white cardigan, the frigid blast of the air conditioner swirling into the morning heat around her. “Bethany,” she said, not unkindly, but in a voice that was cis and had always been cis and had never imagined anything but cisness, flat and opaque and interminable. “Why don’t you come in and have a seat?” Beth looked back at the farm, inhaling the stink of shit and soil and animal musk, of the compost shed and her own sweat, and then she turned and followed the woman inside. “It’s just where they did the establishing shot,” Sadie shouted in Ramona’s ear over the din of the Indigo Girls blasting on the bar’s speakers. “They didn’t actually film the show here.” “Okay,” said Ramona, who had never seen Cheers .