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.

Page 29 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Wind stirs the water in the puddle beneath them. When Reese speaks, she doesn’t respond directly. “There’s that Reagan-era saying that weed is a gateway to hard drugs like heroin. I feel that way about a vagina. It’s a gateway drug. I used to want surgery; but I’m pretty sure that would just have been the gateway to wanting a uterus. And if I had a uterus, that would be the gateway to wanting a baby in it. I hear how that sounds. You add it all together and it sounds like my deepest desire is to go shopping for some other woman’s organs. I don’t lie to myself about my situation. If I want a baby, I have to take one from some other woman. Can you imagine how that feels for me? I gave everything for my womanhood and here I’m talking about taking things from women. I’m bitter bitter bitter about being in that place.” Katrina pauses, then asks, “Why do you have to use these words? ‘Take’? ‘Give’? This isn’t a zero-sum game. I’m not even offering to give you anything. I’m inviting you to join me, to put in commitment and work. I don’t think of a child as something given back and forth, and I actually think you wouldn’t either. That’s not how families work.” Katrina gestured to where the mom and girl had been on the sidewalk. “You think that scene doesn’t make me ache? That’s a scene that you build, not a scene you take from someone else. That’s what I want to build with other people. With children and mothers.” Reese pursed her lips, as if Katrina had invoked something sour. “Do you remember that I just went to a funeral? I’ve been doing this for the better half of my life. I know how things turn out when it comes to trans girls. Believe me, there can only be one mommy. You'll see. It’ll be the one with the right body for it.” Katrina opens her mouth. Abruptly she laughs. “I can’t believe that ’m more willing than you to think openly. Maybe the way you’re seeing things isn’t working. You're so sure how things are, how to do things. But the way you do things ends in funerals. Maybe instead of saying what the inevitable outcome is, just make a fucking leap. Because maybe I’m ready to. Maybe try recognizing the chances you have, recognize this chance with me, and be a mom if you want to. In a few weeks, my doctor is supposed to call and initiate care. I’ll get an ultrasound to hear the heartbeat. Why don’t you come along?” CHAPTER EIGHT Three years before conception

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She knew that in only a few moments the guillotine of sadness would slam down upon her, severing her from her pride, and anything that might keep back despair. She would beg, she would cry. But it hadn’t yet come down. The sentence had not been executed, and her sense of pride, in its last moments, remained defiant—say anything, no matter how stupid, don’t go down crying. “T guess I shouldn’t have taken off my panties,” she spat out, then hung up, and waited for the agony of heartbreak to hit as she considered the thousand other more biting or pleading ways she could have said goodbye. The trans lady picnic occupied a clearing atop a hill across from the Picnic House in Prospect Park. Reese had to admire how, in the way that trans women can be ever and subconsciously vigilant, the picnic’s organizers had chosen a militarily advantageous hill, the kind of hill a general would have chosen to make a stand: wooded on three sides, with a view of the grassy fields below as well as every path by which a pedestrian could approach. Arrivals to the picnic were spotted and identified among the drifting weekend crowds of Park Slope parents long before they had summited. No one would be sneaking up to surprise the transsexual women. Which is not to say that the passersby were not themselves surprised. Among many other instances, Reese saw it in the body language of a pair of teenagers ambling by. The moment the two boys glanced up the sloped lawns to the group of women sprawled on blankets passing Tupperware back and forth, their teenage figures suddenly huddled into each other to confirm and broke apart with a laugh. When Reese turned back from the teenagers, she found Sebastian As a Girl watching her. A jolt ran through Reese. In the intervening years, she’d downgraded Sebastian from real love to a teenage affair, and her own feelings from tragic to immature. But the near-familiar face planted doubts about that revision, the lingering suggestion that she’d downgraded defensively to spare herself. Sebastian As a Girl held Reese’s gaze for a beat or two, the almost-known features wobbling from an uncertain frown into a friendly, even smile, a slight nod, before she turned back to other women beside her. Iris tapped Reese’s knee, drawing her attention. “T know Felicity,” Iris indicated with a nod toward the pretty Latina girl who had somehow skateboarded there in a dazzlingly white dress and was just then making Sebastian As a Girl laugh. “Wanna go over and talk? Get an introduction?” “No, of course not,” Reese replied. “I’ve lost control of my heterosexuality, not my dignity.” Iris snorts. “As if you have dignity. You had to sneak out of Daddy’s house today.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At the end of three months in New York, Reese had an evil genie’s facsimile of her dream life: surrounded by children, with a man who promised to take care of her. Only the children were not her own, and her man lived an ocean away and rarely called her anymore. When she and Sebastian did talk, he was often drunk. Increasingly panicked, she held back the need to ask about the plane ticket, about the plan, about his love. When she finally blurted something out, on a low-quality VoIP call from some third-rate bodega calling card, it came out resentful, half-formed, and not at all the first move in the meticulous chess match she’d planned to get him back on track. “You’re never going to fly me to Norway, are you?” “T have a theory,” he responded. “What are you talking about?” “IT have a theory,” he said again, then went on when she didn’t speak. “My theory is that the only thing I enjoy doing is destroying my own innocence. I have no more innocence to destroy with you.” She had, after only three months of dealing with young men in New York, come to recognize the grandiloquence of a man in love with himself, the hero of his own private movie—and Sebastian’s movie included a dalliance with a transsexual, to establish his libertine character. “What the fuck does that mean? Am I supposed to find that some kind of tragedy?” “Tt means I can’t fly you to Oslo.” She knew it was coming. But still the pressure inside her chest made it hard to breathe, and when she finally spoke it was because something inside her had broken. “I waited for you,” she said into the crackling VoIP line. “You promised me.” “My promises are no good.” He sounded sad about it. “I want a family someday. I don’t think you can give me one.” How cruel to be accused of lacking the one thing she most desperately wanted, a thing she felt sure he could easily give her. She let out a low moan, but then, even in her incipient grief, hated how low the pitch sounded and cut herself short. She needed an unguarded moment, a moment of actual pain. But instead, fear of a non-passing voice shocked her into doing what she always did: Push down her feelings. Get cold. “We can fix this,” she said as evenly as she could. “I know we can. I love you. You love me. Just tell me what you need.” “No,” he said. “I just...you’re not a forever person.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Before it gets cold.”The grease had separated and congealed around the edges of my plate, and the bite of goulash I took before Brother Terrell came into the kitchen lay in my mouth like a dead thing. I gagged and ran to the trash can to spit it out, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and walked back to the table. Randall dropped his head into his hands. The nurses in the hospital had warned that Randall shouldn’t get upset, that it could aggravate his bleeding condition. Gary took his thumb out of his mouth and patted his arm. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Randall jerked his arm away, pushed back from the table, and walked out the back door. Through the window I watched him pick up an old baseball bat and beat it against the skinny trunk of a tree. His belly swayed with each swing. It seemed to get bigger every day, a sure sign that the blood was backing up in his stomach again. We had not taken him to the hospital because Brother Terrell said we had to hold on to the promise that God had healed Randall and not let the devil steal our faith. The Bible was filled with stories of people who, as Brother Terrell often reminded us, paid the price for their faith. How much would we have to pay? I slid my fork tines through hollow tubes of macaroni. The bare scraggly branches of the tree trembled each time Randall cracked the bat against its trunk. Everything seemed harder in winter. Bark flew off, exposing the soft white flesh beneath.“I wish he’d stop.”Gary looked up at me. “What?”“Nothing. Just eat.” Brother Terrell eased himself down on the edge of the platform, resting his feet on the prayer ramp below. “Somebody bring me my guitar.” He slipped out of his suit coat and held it up. Brother Cotton exchanged the guitar for the coat. “Can I have a little water too?” Three men jumped up to get the water.“Fasting leaves a funny taste in your mouth. Y’all ever notice that?”Yes, amen, they had noticed.He strummed the opening chords of “They That Wait Upon the Lord.” “It’s hard to wait on God, but if you’re a man of God, there ain’t nothin’ else to do.”He closed his eyes, strummed his guitar, and began to sing.They that wait upon the LordShall renew their strengthThey shall mount up with wings of an eagle . . .The lyrics are an affirmation of faith, but the tune is slow and melancholy. That night Brother Terrell’s bare-bones guitar playing and his ragged voice turned the song into a lament. Mothers stopped shushing their children. Teenage girls held on to the notes they were supposed to pass.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The paramedics—two young guys, one white, one black, equally fit —have Reese wrapped in one of those shiny Mylar reflective blankets, and have pulled the ambulance out to a patch of asphalt near the road, away from the beach. Reese has denied her swim was a suicide attempt. But she has regained her wits enough to know better than to shout “Wim Hof Method!” at paramedics responding to a supposed mental health crisis. It was a polar bear swim, she tells them. One of the guys interviews Thalia, then comes back. “She says you’ve lost a baby,” he informs Reese, “that you’ve been upset about it. Does that have anything to do with what just happened?” How dense are these guys? Why would they remind a grieving mother of her lost child? Besides, her clothes are still down at the beach; she’s sitting there untucked in a one-piece. “I’m trans, duh,” she snaps. “I can’t have a baby.” The men exchange glances, and Reese understands she has miscalculated. Transness is not the most direct route to non-suicidal credibility. The guy who interviewed Thalia has also asked some other people what happened, and everyone has described the same scene: a woman walking soberly and purposefully into a sea of lethal cold, refusing to turn back no matter what they shouted. Reese lets out a little derisive laugh. Who did they think she was to wear a bathing suit for that? Did they think she had no sense of theater or gravitas? Can you imagine Virginia Woolf being so undignified as to put on a bathing costume to walk her intolerable despair into the river? If she wants to be taken seriously when she walks tragically into the sea, she needs a big skirt weighed down with stones, not a polyester one-piece. The paramedics tell her that they want to take her to the hospital, and she refuses. She’s got the worst insurance that’s still legal; she can’t pay for an ambulance trip. Nonetheless, they say, she should go to the hospital. They can’t make her go, they admit, but in a mental health crisis in which a suicide attempt has been reported, she must speak with proper authorities. She has the option of doing an evaluation at the hospital or waiting here for those authorities to arrive. “Like what other authorities? The police?” The white guy shrugs as if to say, this choice is your doing. She imagines speaking to police on the side of the road while a sizable portion of Brooklyn’s queer population files past on the way home from the beach. She waves her hand angrily. “Hospital,” she commands. Reese enters the waiting room with a drawn, tight expression. She wears the cover-up and flip-flops that she had worn to the beach, an off-kilter outfit that seems a cruel joke to Ames. One that confirms the suspicions that one might have of anyone emerging from the psychiatric ward.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving. And what is an “instant” death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous. Was there time for her life to flash before her eyes? Was I there? Was Jake? And she promised, I remembered, she promised to be continued, but I knew, too, that she was driving north when she died, north toward Nashville, toward Jake. Maybe it hadn’t meant anything to her, had been nothing more than another grand impulsivity. And as Hank stood in the doorway, I just looked past him, looking across the too-quiet dorm circle, wondering if it had mattered to her, and I can only tell myself that of course, yes, she had promised. To be continued. — Lara came next, her eyes heavy with swelling. “What happeened?” she asked me as I held her, standing on my tiptoes so I could place my chin on top of her head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Deed you see her that night?” she asked, speaking into my collarbone. “She got drunk,” I told her. “The Colonel and I went to sleep, and I guess she drove off campus.” And that became the standard lie. I felt Lara’s fingers, wet with her tears, press against my palm, and before I could think better of it, I pulled my hand away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Eet’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be een my room eef you want to come by.” I did not drop by. I didn’t know what to say to her—I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side. — That afternoon, we all filed into the gym again for a town meeting. The Eagle announced that the school would charter a bus on Sunday to the funeral in Vine Station. As we got up to leave, I noticed Takumi and Lara walking toward me. Lara caught my eye and smiled wanly. I smiled back, but quickly turned and hid myself amid the mass of mourners filing out of the gym. — I am sleeping, and Alaska flies into the room. She is naked, and intact. Her breasts, which I felt only very briefly and in the dark, are luminously full as they hang down from her body. She hovers inches above me, her breath warm and sweet against my face like a breeze passing through tall grass. “Hi,” I say. “I’ve missed you.” “You look good, Pudge.” “So do you.” “I’m so naked,” she says, and laughs.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She shuffled her thick legs behind a walker and talked about the day the Lord would heal her.“I just want to walk without pain one more time before I die.”The three of us, Sister Coleman, Aunt Eunice, and I, were desperate for God’s attention: Sister Coleman for Bug, and Aunt Eunice for her legs. As for me, I prayed all the time for forgiveness. I was sure I had done something to make God hate me. How else to explain my mother’s abandonment. How else to explain Sister Coleman, a woman who couldn’t decide whether she loved or hated us. How else to explain why no matter how hard I prayed or what I promised, no deliverance came. Sister Coleman strapped Bug into his special seat in the back of the car and Gary and I climbed in beside him. Aunt Eunice lowered herself into the front seat, her walker stowed in the trunk. Sister Coleman slid behind the wheel. Her aunt grabbed her hand. “I believe Bug is going to walk out of the tent tonight, Lib. And I may leave my walker at the altar and walk out with him.”The tent was smaller than Brother Terrell’s but everything else about it looked and smelled like home. The dust from the cars driving across the field, the moldy canvas, the sawdust, the way people greeted one another.“Sister Mayfair, how are you? Come on over here so I can hug your neck.”The familiarity filled me with despair. Sister Coleman marched us to the front row of the middle section, so that we could sit in front of the prayer ramp. She had me spread a pallet for Bug on the ground. Once he was settled, she bowed her head. Aunt Eunice positioned her walker to the side of her chair and eased herself into the seat. She looked around, bright and expectant. She had told me once that she never left disappointed.“Even if you didn’t get healed?”“That just means the healing is still out there waiting for me.”I covered my eyes with my hand and pretended to pray. The organ music started, and it sounded so familiar that for a moment I thought it might be my mother sitting at the Hammond. I opened my eyes and raised my head. I recognized the woman. Evelyn. She had approached Mama at one of Brother Terrell’s revivals and said she wanted to play just like her one day.I recognized the preacher too: Ronnie Coyne, the man who could see through a glass eye. A picture of Brother Coyne would eventually end up on the cover of the Weekly World News , a tabloid cousin of the National Enquirer , under the headline, IT’S A MIRACLE AND A MYSTERY, SAY DOCTORS. That night he yelled into the microphone for a long time, then he taped up his good eye and had someone write a few words on paper and hold it in front of him.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  home. But Salomé did not stay long: she accepted an invitation of Nietz-herself And in this she succeeded with little effort, sche's to visit him, unchaperoned, in Tautenburg. In her absence Rée was for indeed she was a consumed with doubts and anger. He wanted her more than ever, and was woman more to be wooed prepared to redouble his efforts. When she finally came back, Rée vented than to do the wooing. his bitterness, railing against Nietzsche, criticizing his philosophy, and ques-And now listen to the splendid sequel: not long tioning his motives toward the girl. But Salomé took Nietzsche's side. Rée afterward it happened that was in despair; he felt he had lost her for good. Yet a few days later she sura letter which she had prised him again: she had decided she wanted to live with him, and with written to her lover fell into the hands of another him alone. woman of comparable At last Rée had what he had wanted, or so he thought. The couple set-rank, charm, and beauty; tled in Berlin, where they rented an apartment together. But now, to Rée's and since she, like most women, was curious and dismay, the old pattern repeated. They lived together but Salomé was eager to learn secrets, she courted on all sides by young men. The darling of Berlin's intellectuals, opened the letter and read who admired her independent spirit, her refusal to compromise, she was it. Realizing that it was written from the depths of constantly surrounded by a harem of men, who referred to her as "Her Ex-passion, in the most loving cellency." Once again Rée found himself competing for her attention. and ardent terms, she was Driven to despair, he left her a few years later, and eventually committed at first moved with suicide. compassion, for she knew very well from whom the In 1911, Sigmund Freud met Salomé (now known as Lou Andreas-letter came and to whom it Salomé) at a conference in Germany. She wanted to devote herself to the was addressed; then, psychoanalytical movement, she said, and Freud found her enchanting, al-however, such was the power of the words she though, like everyone else, he knew the story of her infamous affair with read, turning them over in Nietzsche (see page 46, "The Dandy"). Salomé had no background in psy-her mind and considering choanalysis or in therapy of any kind, but Freud admitted her into the in-what kind of man it must be who had been able to ner circle of followers who attended his private lectures. Soon after she arouse such great love, she joined the circle, one of Freud's most promising and brilliant students, Dr. at once began to fall in love Victor Tausk, sixteen years younger than Salomé, fell in love with her. Sa-with him herself; and the lomé's relationship with Freud had been platonic, but he had grown ex-letter was without doubt far more effective than if the

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Thousands of years ago, power was mostly gained through physical violence and maintained with brute strength. There was little need for subtlety—a king or emperor had to be merciless. Only a select few had power, but no one suffered under this scheme of things more than women. They had no way to compete, no weapon at their disposal that could make a man do what they wanted—politically, socially, or even in the home. Oppression and scorn, Of course men had one weakness: their insatiable desire for sex. A thus, were and must have woman could always toy with this desire, but once she gave in to sex the been generally the share of women in emerging man was back in control; and if she withheld sex, he could simply look societies; this state lasted in elsewhere—or exert force. What good was a power that was so temporary all its force until centuries and frail? Yet women had no choice but to submit to this condition. There of experience taught them to substitute skill for force. were some, though, whose hunger for power was too great, and who, over Women at last sensed that, the years, through much cleverness and creativity, invented a way of turn- since they were weaker, ing the dynamic around, creating a more lasting and effective form of their only resource was to seduce; they understood power. that if they were dependent These women—among them Bathsheba, from the Old Testament; on men through force, men Helen of Troy; the Chinese siren Hsi Shi; and the greatest of them all, could become dependent on them through pleasure. Cleopatra—invented seduction. First they would draw a man in with an al- More unhappy than men, luring appearance, designing their makeup and adornment to fashion the they must have thought image of a goddess come to life. By showing only glimpses of flesh, they and reflected earlier than would tease a man's imagination, stimulating the desire not just for sex but did men; they were the first to know that pleasure was for something greater: the chance to possess a fantasy figure. Once they had always beneath the idea their victims' interest, these women would lure them away from the mascu- that one formed of it, and line world of war and politics and get them to spend time in the feminine that the imagination went farther than nature. Once world—a world of luxury, spectacle, and pleasure. They might also lead these basic truths were them astray literally, taking them on a journey, as Cleopatra lured Julius known, they learned first Caesar on a trip down the Nile. Men would grow hooked on these refined, to veil their charms in order to awaken curiosity; they

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Finally, the intense attention that the Siren attracts can prove irritating and worse. Sometimes she will pine for relief from it; sometimes, too, she will want to attract an attention that is not sexual. Also, unfortunately, physical beauty fades; although the Siren effect depends not on a beautiful face but on an overall impression, past a certain age that impression gets hard to project. Both of these factors contributed to the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. It takes a genius on the level of Madame de Pompadour, the Siren mistress of King Louis XV, to make the transition into the role of the spirited older woman who continues to seduce with her nonphysical charms. Cleopatra had such an intellect, and had she lived long enough, she would have remained a potent seductress for many years. The Siren must prepare for age by paying attention early on to the more psychological, less physical forms of coquetry that can continue to bring her power once her beauty starts to fade. A woman never quite feels desired and appreciated enough. She wants attention, but a man is too often distracted and unresponsive. The Rake is a great female fantasy figure— when he desires a woman, brief though that moment may be, he will go to the ends of the earth for her. He may be disloyal, dishonest, and amoral, but that only adds to his appeal. Unlike the normal, cautious male, the Rake is delightfully unrestrained, a slave to his love of women. There is the added lure of his reputation: so many women have succumbed to him, there has to be a reason. Words are a woman's weakness, and the Rake is a master of seductive language. Stir a woman's repressed longings by adapting the Rake's mix of danger and pleasure. The Ardent Rake For the court of Louis XIV, the king's last years were gloomy—he was old, and had become both insufferably religious and personally unpleasant. The court was bored and desperate for novelty. So in 1710, the arrival of a fifteen-year-old lad who was both devilishly handsome and charming had a particularly strong effect on the ladies. His name was Fronsac, the future Duke de Richelieu (his granduncle being the infamous Cardinal [ After an accident at sect, Richelieu). He was impudent and witty. The ladies would play with him Don Juan finds himself washed up on a beach, like a toy, but he would kiss them on the lips in return, his hands wandering where he is discovered by a far for an inexperienced boy. When those hands strayed up the skirts of a young woman. ] • TISBEA: duchess who was not so indulgent, the king was furious, and sent the youth Wake up, handsomest of all men, and be yourself

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  would wait all night for him to show up. She had never experienced such you that I could never desperation. Somehow she had to seduce him, possess him, have him all again be happy." to herself. She tried everything—letters, coquetry, all kinds of promises— • . . . Now Lancelot had until he finally wrote that he was no longer in love with her and that was his every wish: the queen willingly sought his that. company and affection as he held her in his arms and she held him in hers. Her love-play seemed so gentle Interpretation. Baudelaire was an intellectual seducer. He wanted to over- and good to him, both her whelm Madame Sabatier with words, dominate her thoughts, make her fall kisses and caresses, that in in love with him. Physically, he knew, he could not compete with her truth the two of them felt a joy and wonder of which many other admirers—he was shy, awkward, not particularly handsome. So has never been heard or he resorted to his one strength, poetry. Haunting her with anonymous let- known. But I shall let it ters gave him a perverse thrill. He had to know she would realize, eventu- remain a secret for ever, ally, that he was her correspondent—no one else wrote like him—but he since it should not be written of: the most wanted her to figure this out on her own. He stopped writing to her be- delightful and choicest cause he had become interested in someone else, but he knew she would be pleasure is that which is thinking of him, wondering, perhaps waiting for him. And when he pub- hinted at, but never told. lished his book, he decided to write to her again, this time directly, stirring —CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES, up the old venom he had injected in her. When they were alone, he could ARTHURIAN ROMANCES, T R A N S L A T E D B Y W I L L I A M W . see she was waiting for him to do something, to take hold of her, but he KIBLER was not that kind of seducer. Besides, it gave him pleasure to hold himself back, to sense his power over a woman whom so many desired. By the time she turned physical and aggressive, the seduction was over for him. He had He was sometimes so made her fall in love; that was enough. intellectual that I felt The devastating effect of Baudelaire's push-and-pull on Madame myself annihilated as a Sabatier teaches us a great lesson in seduction. First, it is always best to keep woman; at other times he was so wild and at some distance from your targets. You do not have to go as far as remain- passionate, so desiring, ing anonymous, but you do not want to be seen too often, or to be seen as that I almost trembled 388 • The Art of Seduction

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I feel like a big clumsy puppet with all his strings cut. I learn to balance and twist in the chair so no one can tell how much of me does not feel or move anymore. I find it easy to hide from most of them what I am going through. All of us are like this. No one wants too many people to know how much of him has really died in the war. At first I felt that the wound was very interesting. I saw it almost as an adventure. But now it is not an adventure any longer. I see it more and more as a terrible thing that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. Nobody wants to know that I can’t fuck anymore. I will never go up to them and tell them I have this big yellow rubber thing sticking in my penis, attached to the rubber bag on the side of my leg. I am afraid of letting them know how lonely and scared I have become thinking about this wound. It is like some kind of numb twilight zone to me. I am angry and want to kill everyone—all the volunteers and the priests and the pretty girls with the tight short skirts. I am twenty-one and the whole thing is shot, done forever. There is no real healing left anymore, everything that is going to heal has healed already and now I am left with the wound.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had accepted it, but more and more he was dreaming and thinking about walking. He prayed every night after the visitors left. He closed his eyes and dreamed of being on his feet again. Sometimes the American Legion group from his town came in to see him, the men and their wives and their pretty daughters. They would all surround him in his bed. It would seem to him that he was always having to cheer them up more than they were cheering him. They told him he was a hero and that all of Massapequa was proud of him. One time the commander stood up and said they were even thinking of naming a street after him. But the guy’s wife was embarrassed and made her husband shut up. She told him the commander was kidding—he tended to get carried away after a couple of beers. After he had been in the hospital a couple of weeks, a man appeared one morning and handed him a large envelope. He waited until the man had gone to open it up. Inside was a citation and a medal for Conspicuous Service to the State of New York. The citation was signed by Governor Rockefeller. He stuck the envelope and all the stuff in it under his pillow. * * * None of the men on the wards were civilian yet, so they had reveille at six o’clock in the morning. All the wounded who could get on their feet were made to stand in front of their beds while a roll call was taken. After roll call they all had to make their beds and do a general clean-up of the entire ward—everything from scrubbing the floors to cleaning the windows. Even the amputees had to do it. No one ever bothered him, though. He usually slept through the whole thing. Later it would be time for medication, and afterward one of the corpsmen would put him in a wheelchair and push him to the shower room. The corpsman would leave him alone for about five minutes, then pick his body up, putting him on a wooden bench, his legs dangling, his toes barely touching the floor. He would sit in the shower like that every morning watching his legs become smaller and smaller, until after a month the muscle tone had all but disappeared. With despair and frustration he watched his once strong twenty-one-year-old body become crippled and disfigured. He was just beginning to understand the nature of his wound. He knew now it was the worst he could have received without dying or becoming a vegetable. More and more he thought about what a priest had said to him in Da Nang: “Your fight is just beginning. Sometimes no one will want to hear what you’re going through. You are going to have to learn to carry a great burden and most of your learning will be done alone. Don’t feel frightened when they leave you.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  He came to inspect the final preparations for the Armenian expedition, which was preliminary in his thoughts to the attack upon the Parthians. Plotina accompanied him as always, and his niece Matidia, my accommodating mother-in-law, who for some years had gone with him in camp as the head of his household. Celsus, Palma, and Nigrinus, my old enemies, still sat in the Council and dominated the general staff. All these people packed themselves into the palace while awaiting the opening of the campaign. Court intrigues flourished as never before. Everyone was laying his bets in expectation of the first throws of the dice of war. The army moved off almost immediately in a northerly direction. With it departed the vast swarm of high officials, office-seekers, and hangers-on. The emperor and his suite paused for a few days in Commagene for festivals which were already triumphal; the lesser kings of the Orient, gathered at Satala, outdid each other in protestations of loyalty upon which, had I been in Trajan's place, I should have counted little for the future. Lusius Quietus, my dangerous rival, placed in charge of the advance posts, took possession of the shores of Lake Van in the course of a sweeping but absurdly easy conquest; the northern part of Mesopotamia, vacated by the Parthians, was annexed without difficulty; Abgar, king of Osro�ne, surrendered in Edessa. The emperor came back to Antioch to take up his winter quarters, postponing till spring the invasion of the Parthian Empire itself, but already determined to accept no overture for peace. Everything had gone according to his plans. The joy of plunging into this adventure, so long delayed, restored a kind of youth to this man of sixty-four. My views of the outcome remained somber. The Jewish and the Arabian elements were more and more hostile to the war; the great provincial landowners were angered at having to defray costs of troops passing through; the cities objected strenuously to the imposition of new taxes. Just after the emperor's return, a first catastrophe occurred which served as forerunner to all the rest: in the middle of a December night an earthquake laid a fourth of the city of Antioch in ruins within a few seconds. Trajan was bruised by a falling beam, but heroically went on tending the wounded; his immediate following numbered several dead. The Syrian mobs straightway sought to place the blame for the disaster on someone, and the emperor, for once putting aside his principles of tolerance, committed the error of allowing a group of Christians to be massacred. I have little enough sympathy for that sect myself, but the spectacle of old men flogged and children tortured all contributed to the general agitation of spirit and rendered that sinister winter more odious still. There was no money for prompt repair of the effects of the quake; thousands of shelterless people camped at night in the squares.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He puts out a hand. “I don’t know. I am desperate too. What can I do?” “Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Let’s start small. What if I promise to tell you everything you’d ever want to know?” She looks at his open palm. A moment passes. The shadows rotate like a second hand with every streetlight that passes. The whir of tires hiccup regularly over the tarred repairs of the Chicago streets. Tentatively, she presses her forefinger into the center of his palm, and his hand curls around it. “I’d tell you that you're still probably lying, but that I want to hear it.” “Come here,” he says, pulling on her hand. “Come here, please. Sit in the middle seat and lean on me instead of the window.” She hesitates, then fumbles with her free hand to unlatch her seatbelt, slides into the middle seat, where he circles his arm around her shoulders, pulls her in. He wakes up in her bed, his nose inches from a lock of glossy hair that had trailed off her pillow to violate the imaginary DMZ he’d unilaterally marked down the center of the bed. Four empty plastic water bottles, the complimentary contents of which she’d chugged to stave off the hangover, lay scattered on her nightstand and she’s snoring cutely. Quietly, he slips back the sheets, walks down the hall to his own room, and collects the four water bottles the hotel had allotted for his room. She’s peering at him groggily when he returns to set them down beside the empties. “More water for you,” he says. “Fuck.” She sits up and puts a hand to the back of her neck, then fumbles through the empty bottles to check the time on her phone. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck-fuck. Last night was a mess. I’m so sorry, Ames.” “Yeah, it was.” “We've got a meeting with them Thursday. Think we can fix it before then?” “T don’t know. You outed me to them. What’s there to fix?” Katrina scrunches her nose. “Yeah, but those guys were on your side.” He sits on the bed next to her. Quietly he says, “Abby is the project manager for them. And Josh is dealing with the contract. If they tell either of those two what you said. Well”’—he pauses—“you effectively told the whole company last night that I used to be a transsexual.” Katrina’s face goes slack. “Oh god. Oh fuck. Those guys probably won't tell, right? I mean, why would they?” Ames shrugs. “Who knows what they'll do?” He wants to add that she really fucked him over, but she seems to know. Katrina groans. “We can deal with this, Ames. I’m sure we can.” “Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe it’s okay in the long run. Maybe we re even now.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  For trans women: To tuck or not to tuck, that is the question. Reese never tucks. Her math is solid, tight as a geometric proof: to go untucked, to bare her little dickprint for all to see, is brazen enough that she can otherwise wear a tight one-piece without seeming too prudish. Thalia, beside Reese, wears only a pair of boy shorts—but tucked —and is sunning her perfect little boobs golden. Thalia has always had, in Reese’s estimation, the best collarbones in Brooklyn; she recently gave up eating any animal products, and between her new diet and the sun, they’ve taken on the soft gloss of burnished teak. Reese showed up at Thalia’s house the night before, trying to hold it together, to maintain the righteousness of the letter she had emailed to Ames and Katrina, but she fell apart after only ten minutes, sobbing about the cowboy, and AIDS panics, and how she'll never get another chance to be a mother. Despite her amazing collarbones, Thalia’s shoulders are not the most comfortable upon which to cry. Because Thalia grew up with a self-described histrionic Greek stereotype for a mother, whenever Reese got histrionic, Thalia turned edgy and furtive, insecure about the adequacy of her own emotions in response. But for once, Thalia’s reassurances did not falter. “Babe,” she told Reese, “just sleep over, okay?” And she led Reese to her bed, fed her an Ambien, and tucked her in to sleep. Reese woke in the morning to instant coffee steaming beside the bed and Thalia already dressed. As Reese sipped, Thalia announced that she had spent the night thinking about Reese’s problem, and that it was not in fact a problem, but a solution. Ames and Katrina had indeed been the issue all along. Reese was a queer, if she was going to do a queer family model, she ought to do it with real queers. “Ames brainwashed you,” Thalia insisted. “He made you think this is your only chance to have a child. But why should that be? Queers have kids all the time.” “Not trans women.” Thalia listed off five trans women who had children, but Reese protested that they had all had children before they transitioned. They had been fathers. “What about Babs?” Thalia countered. Babs was a trans woman who had married a trans guy and the two of them moved to southwest Florida, where the trans guy got pregnant. “You could pull a Babs!” Thalia suggested brightly.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Four men make the rescue attempt. Three turn back before the sandbar. In the water, in the cold, their bodies won’t respond. Up and down their legs, nerves go incommunicado and muscles turn to lead. The sandy bottom can be seen, but cannot be felt. Only Fredrick, a rent-boy muscle queen in a neon-blue speedo who has been drinking Nutcrackers the color of antifreeze for the past hour, presses on. Between his mass and a blood alcohol level that would keep plumbing running in the dead of winter, he splashes forth to Reese. At the sandbar, his broad back rises from the water and he scans for the woman. She is floating on her back, hair fanned out, lips blue, inhaling and exhaling hard. He dives, comes up, plants his feet, grips her arm, and hefts her, fireman-style, to his shoulders. She opens her eyes, startled. “Hey!” She pushes against him. “T have you!” he bellows. “No, no,” she wheezes out. She is so cold, it is hard to get her lungs to push out enough air to speak. “Wim Hof method.” “Huh?” he shouts, churning with her toward land. On the beach, people cheer. What a rescue. “Wim Hof method! I’m fine. Wim Hof method.” They rise at the sandbar, and he sets her on her feet. The heat of the sun is only a distant memory. The air too has turned arctic. “Can you walk?” he asks dubiously. “Yes, yes,” she says. Her ears ache from the cold, a terrible pain like from eating ice cream too fast, but encircling her whole skull. She hears people shouting, and suddenly is aware of how many people are watching. She can’t believe it. She was only in the water, like, what, five minutes? But she can’t focus on that now. Instinct has reasserted itself and she needs to get warm. Nothing else matters. Wim Hof was right. He discovered, in our backyard ponds and on banal coasts, the lair of a terrible god, a place beyond self-pity, beyond grief. Reese is on the shore, wrapped in a towel, fending off Thalia’s worry, which has turned to rage. Reese’s skin is blue and her teeth clack. She has only a few moments to try to explain herself, uselessly, in between Thalia’s imprecations, before the paramedics arrive. The lifeguards haven’t yet come out for the season, but someone who witnessed Reese’s submersion has called an ambulance and reported an incident of self-harm. What is happening? the newly arrived beachgoers ask each other, as the ambulance lights flash at the end of the boardwalk. The rumor goes around: Another trans woman has tried to commit suicide. They nod sadly, knowingly: Isn’t this kind of performance just what trans women do? Throw themselves in front of trains from crowded platforms? Film themselves downing fistfuls of pills on Facebook Live? Broadcast and perform their pain no matter whom it triggers? Don’t even trans women expect this from each other?

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She wants to be inured to hope. When it comes, it always disappoints, and unlike in her twenties, now it never comes simply, instead it arrives twisted, with caveats and strings. What was she doing here anyway? Trying to get some cis woman to share her baby with Reese and Reese’s detransitioned ex-lover? How sad her life has become that such a ridiculous plan was the best peg on which to hang some kind of hope. Reese used to say that she was only interested in people who’d had a major failure in life. She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible. Only after the breakup with Amy did Reese begin to concede that perhaps Amy had been her own first major failure. She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure. A mistake many of the transsexuals she knew made. Such thinking was static. You had to hope for something in the first place in order to have those hopes dashed. With Amy, she had hoped. She made her earlier quips about failure because she believed them, but also partly because she thought they made her sound urbane and worldly. She suspected, however, that actual failure had turned her unlovely. At thirty-four, she feels old. “What are you doing on the floor?” The floorboards creak as Ames steps out of the bathroom, freshly shaven, wearing a snug linen jacket, his fingers deftly manipulating a Windsor knot with practiced ease. “Are you crying?” Reese pushes onto her left arm and, looking up, wipes beneath her eyes carefully with the pads of her fingers so as not to disturb her mascara. “No.” “Yes you are! I didn’t know what I was hearing. What happened?” “T smelled the closet. And suddenly I remembered what it was like when we lived together. It made me so sad and nostalgic.” Ames lowers himself into a squat just beside her, resting on his heels. The joints of his knees crack. Tentatively Ames puts a hand on her back on the fabric of her dress. “It happens to me too.” Reese draws in a quick sniffle, but otherwise doesn’t respond, so he continues. “I read that of our senses, only taste and smell pass directly to the hippocampus, where memory gets stored. Sights, sounds, and touches get converted into thoughts and symbols before they continue on to the memory in the hippocampus. But smell connects directly to memory.”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  What was I thinking? Why did I let him do that to me? I wanted the dark, to explore how bad it could be—but it’s too dark for me. I cannot do this. Yet this is what he does; this is how he gets his kicks. What a monumental wake-up call. And to be fair to him, he warned me and warned me, time and again. He’s not normal. He has needs that I cannot fulfill. I realize that now. I don’t want him to hit me like that again, ever. I think of the couple of times he has hit me, and how easy he was on me by comparison. Is that enough for him? I sob harder into the pillow. I am going to lose him. He won’t want to be with me if I can’t give him this. Why, why, why have I fallen in love with Fifty Shades? Why? Why can’t I love José, or Paul Clayton, or someone like me? Oh, his distraught look as I left. I was so cruel, shocked by the savagery. Will he forgive me? Will I forgive him? My thoughts are all haywire and jumbled, echoing and bouncing off the inside of my skull. My subconscious is shaking her head sadly, and my inner goddess is nowhere to be seen. Oh, this is a dark morning of the soul for me. I’m so alone. I want my mom. I remember her parting words at the airport: Follow your heart, darling, and please, please—try not to overthink things. Relax and enjoy yourself. You are so young, sweetheart. You have so much of life to experience yet, just let it happen. You deserve the best of everything. I did follow my heart, and I have a sore ass and an anguished, broken spirit to show for it. I have to go. That’s it—I have to leave. He’s no good for me, and I am no good for him. How can we possibly make this work? And the thought of not seeing him again practically chokes me…my Fifty Shades. I hear the door click open. Oh no, he’s here. He puts something down on the bedside table, and the bed shifts under his weight as he climbs in behind me. “Hush,” he breathes, and I want to pull away from him, move to the other side of the bed, but I’m paralyzed. I cannot move and lie stiffly, not yielding at all. “Don’t fight me, Ana, please.” Gently, he pulls me into his arms, burying his nose in my hair, kissing my neck. “Don’t hate me,” he whispers against my skin, his voice achingly sad. My heart clenches anew and releases a fresh wave of silent sobbing. He continues to kiss me softly, tenderly, but I remain aloof and wary.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “We’ll never get past that, will we?” My scalp tightens again. He shakes his head bleakly. I close my eyes. I cannot bear to look at him. “Well, I’d better go, then,” I murmur, wincing as I sit up. “No, don’t go.” He sounds panicked. “There’s no point in me staying.” Suddenly, I feel tired, really dog-tired, and I want to go now. I climb out of bed, and Christian follows. “I’m going to get dressed. I’d like some privacy.” My voice is flat and empty as I leave him standing in the bedroom. Heading downstairs, I glance at the great room, thinking how only hours before I had rested my head on his shoulder as he played the piano. So much has happened since then. I have had my eyes opened and glimpsed the extent of his depravity, and I now know he’s not capable of love—of giving or receiving love. My worst fears have been realized. And strangely, it’s liberating. The pain is such that I refuse to acknowledge it. I feel numb. I have somehow escaped from my body and am now a casual observer to this unfolding tragedy. I shower quickly and methodically, thinking only of each second in front of me. Now squeeze body wash bottle. Put body wash bottle back in rack. Rub cloth on face, on shoulders…on and on, all simple, mechanical actions, requiring simple, mechanical thoughts. I finish my shower—and as I haven’t washed my hair, I can dry myself quickly. I dress in the bathroom, taking my jeans and T-shirt out of my small suitcase. My jeans chafe against my backside, but quite frankly, it’s a pain I welcome as it distracts my mind from what’s happening to my splintering, shattered heart. I stoop to shut my suitcase and the bag holding Christian’s gift catches my eye, a model kit for a Blaník L23 glider, something for him to build. Tears threaten. Oh no. Happier times, when there was hope of more. I take it out of the case, knowing I need to give it to him. Quickly, I rip a small piece of paper from my notebook, hastily scribble a note for him, and leave it on top of the box. This reminded me of a happy time. Thank you. Ana I gaze at myself in the mirror. A pale and haunted ghost stares back at me. I scoop my hair into a bun and ignore how swollen my eyelids are from crying. My subconscious nods with approval. Even she knows not to be snarky right now. I cannot believe my world is crumbling around me into a sterile pile of ashes, all my hopes and dreams cruelly dashed. No, no, don’t think about it. Not now, not yet. Taking a deep breath, I pick up my case, and after placing the glider kit and my note on his pillow, I head for the great room.