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 48 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still holding her down, and then would dive again as many times as would be necessary, and only when the curtain came down on her for good, would I permit myself to yell for help. And when some twenty minutes later the two puppets steadily growing arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the smiling surface of Hourglass Lake. Simple, was it not? But what d’ye know, folks—I just could not make myself do it! She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote as I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any other day or night, could I make myself put her to death. Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her—and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly and making him say “akh!” and sit down. But I could not kill Charlotte—especially when things were on the whole not quite as hopeless, perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that miserable morning. Were I to catch her by her strong kicking foot; were I to see her amazed look, hear her awful voice; were I still to go through with the ordeal, her ghost would haunt me all my life. Perhaps if the year were 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At last our anger and my fear and my sister’s spite are spent. We subside into silence. It’s my turn to sleep on the floor; tonight my sister and mother will have the twin beds. Defeated, silent, embarrassed, all three of us take turns in the bathroom. Mother is sad. “If only you kids could behave. Just one night. Is it too much to ask? Why do you hate each other so much? Do you hate yourselves? Do you miss your daddy? I miss him. I don’t see how a fine man like him could have left me for that cheap—that common, that cheap woman.” As the bottle slowly empties, its brown liquid, like kerosene fueling a lamp, radiates, in words and more words, the intense heat of despair. The next morning Mother has decided that we all deserve a treat to pick up our defeated spirits, something cultural, something uplifting. My sister complains about her hand and refuses to leave the room. “Well, if you’re going to be such a baby, then I’ll just take your brother. He has an open mind, an adventurous mind. He wants to learn.” Together my mother and I drive downtown to a museum. On the way we dial in a classical music station. We try to guess the composer; she votes for Haydn, I for Mozart. Neither of us is right—it’s early Beethoven. She asks me to read to her. “You know I learn best auditorily,” she mentions. The book she has brought along is something uplifting, inspirational. At every insight or poetically phrased generalization, my mother and I exclaim, “Isn’t that wonderful!” “I’d like to memorize that.” “Turn down the page, we’ll come back to that.” “Where does an author find such beautiful phrases?” By the time we reach the museum we’re both glowing with wisdom and a lofty love of culture and humanity. I’ve forgotten that I smell bad. In fact, by now I smell wonderful, I’m a paschal lamb, but one rendered in cake and icing. We stand in front of a gloomy masterpiece of the Spanish Renaissance, a Christ whose wounds are shockingly deep and black and whose skin is livid; Christ seems less a god and more an addict tossed here, in the public morgue, after a fatal overdose, the puncture marks still open but no longer bleeding. My mother trembles. “I don’t like depressing things,” she confides, and hurries us to the French Impressionists. Outside, in the feeble winter sunlight, she grabs my hand and says, “I feel you’re such a perfect companion. When I’m with you I feel such total spiritual union that I sometimes forget I’m with you. I think we’re two halves of the same soul, don’t you?” I look her deep in the eyes and tell her, “Yes. I’ve never felt so close to anyone.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.” Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? “You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?” “No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect). “You’re crazy,” she said, her features working. “Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps—well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your … trousseau.” “No kidding?” asked Dolly. I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more. Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and then her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us four thousand bucks?” I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist. “I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.” “No,” she said. “No, honey, no.” She had never called me honey before. “No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean—” She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”). “I think,” she went on—“oops”—the envelope skidded to the floor—she picked it up—“I think it’s oh utterly grand of you to give us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Except, with a plane, eventually you see the city. There was no city for me.” “Oh, Lionel,” she said. She rested her palm in his palm again, and he squeezed. It was the first time he had told someone about it. The whole of it. His throat was hot from talking and from trying to make himself known to another person. He put his head down on the table but went on squeezing Sophie’s hand. She threaded her fingers through his. “Anyway. I was okay until last week.” “You went back?” “I had this feeling—this totally random sensation. It was kind of a thought and kind of not a thought. A voice, maybe? Something.” “What did it say?” “You’ll think I’m nuts,” he said dryly. “If you don’t already.” “Then you’ve got nothing to risk.” “That’s true. It said—or showed me?—this image of myself, stepping out into traffic. I was on a sidewalk on my way home from the grocery store. And I was waiting for the light, and there were these cars coming on, and it just seemed possible to step out there and get swept away. It felt so real, for a minute I thought I had done it. But then I was just standing there on the sidewalk. And the cars were going by. And it was so cold. So I checked myself in.” “I think I know what you mean,” she said. People sometimes thought they knew what he meant, but what they usually meant was that sometimes, in their own lives, they had been disappointed. They had been a little unwell in totally manageable ways. What they meant was that they had suffered in the small ways that everyone suffered. But Sophie set the mug down and stroked his wrist as though she were stroking the head of a small animal. “My parents died. And then my sister, a few years ago, died. Overdose. And sometimes, I think, Fuck. Enough. Or sometimes, it’s like, Why not make it a full set?” “Yeah,” he said. “I used to purge. Everybody thinks it’s about being skinny and being light for ballet. They think it’s to look a certain way. But I think most of us purge because of the control. Like, there’s a moment when you go from feeling full and awful to feeling clean and clear and bright. There’s just a moment, right before you get it all out, before you’re burning up and convulsing, when you feel something go ping and you know it’ll be all right. That’s what it’s about. That little ping of clarity. Anyway, I used to purge. When I lived with my grandma. All the other girls in ballet did, too. It’s not special or anything, but I did. And then I got these awful ulcers. And I couldn’t dance because I had no energy and my vision started to get weird? I felt like my body was betraying me.” Lionel sat up then.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He rested his back against the legs of the chair. And he took the pieces of the ruler from Charles. He felt safe with them there. A part of his old life, who he used to be. “Why’d you do it?” Charles asked, and when Lionel did not answer, he added, “It must have hurt like hell.” “You know how sometimes an animal will chew its arm off to get loose if it’s desperate enough?” Lionel turned his arm over and looked down at the scars there. They were mute. Whatever wisdom or clarity they had given him was gone. What he saw was a mass of tissue stitched back together. What he saw was only evidence of his body’s history. And to try to discern old moods, old insights, was just chasing shadows. “Be serious, Lionel.” Lionel wanted to laugh at that, being accused of not taking his own suicide seriously enough because he had tried to tell the truth about it. There was no why. No coherent theorem. It had been all gesture, as empty an idiom as the references from the potluck last night. When you tried to explain it, all the meaning went out of it. But Charles was looking at him with the expectation of an answer, and Lionel did not have one. Not a satisfactory one anyway. He felt as unprepared now to answer the question of why as he had when his mother first asked him last year. Why was an anachronism. “You only ask why if you’ve never tried it,” he said. Charles took Lionel’s hand in his own. Lionel saw Charles’s eyes flick to the particular array of scars. The hashwork of them. Nothing systematic or intentional about it. “I think you’re very brave,” Charles said with a degree of sincerity that made Lionel wish he could take back everything he had said. Sincerity was a condescending emotion. People went around calling you brave when you tried to kill yourself and failed. They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valor. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavor to exit one’s life. There was nothing courageous about the persistence of life, the prolonged project of living. People called you brave for going on because it affirmed their own value system. They considered their own life worth living, and so they considered every life worthy. But it had to be true that life could be discarded when it was no longer of use. It had to be true that a person could ball their life up and throw it out with the trash if they found they had no desire to go on. Some lives, Lionel thought, had to be ordinary or ugly or painful. Ending your life had to be on the table.

• From Escape (2007)

  In the coming weeks, I asked my sisters to come and help. Each time I had a chance to go back to Colorado City I moved some of my things back home. I didn’t want anyone to realize I was quitting Caliente. But my bedroom had an outside door and I deliberately moved things in after dark. I was finally ready to leave Caliente for the last time. I walked to James’ trailer to say goodbye. Again he told me that I had to leave Merril. I said I understood his concerns but still didn’t know how I could. My seventh child was due in a few weeks. I told Merril I would not be going back to the motel. He sent Barbara to run things, which was a disaster, and then sent Tammy. The rest of the family thought I was worthless for staying at home. But I didn’t care. My life with Merril had ended. I was finished with his family and its sick games. I didn’t know how I would ever escape or where I would go. Leaving seemed impossible, but staying wasn’t an option. My obstetrician did not want me to go into labor naturally because I was too high-risk. He felt it was safer to induce labor and deliver the baby on a day when he knew he could set aside the time to monitor things properly. The only date that fit his schedule turned out to be on my thirteenth wedding anniversary, May 17, 1999. I didn’t care. My marriage was never something I celebrated. When Merril heard the date, he insisted on being there. I was upset. I would have much preferred having one of my friends accompany me. But this was not a time to say no to Merril. He was driving down from Salt Lake City. I agreed to meet him at a hotel the night before in St. George since I had to be at the hospital at 6 A.M. As soon as we were alone in our room, Merril started kissing me. I was revolted. Everything about him repelled me. His cell phone started ringing. It was Barbara. He quit kissing me to talk to her. But as soon as the call ended, he was all over me again. Thirty seconds later, Barbara called back and they talked for twenty minutes. I crawled into bed welcoming the last night of a difficult pregnancy. Merril joined me. The kissing began again. But within minutes, Barbara called back and I finally fell asleep. We were at the hospital by six the next morning. I was taken into the labor and delivery area and was put on a drip to induce labor. Merril stayed for an hour and then left. He said Barbara was bringing his truck back from St. George and he was going to meet her at the hotel and get some rest.

• From Escape (2007)

  But women didn’t have to commit adultery to be severed from their families. Another woman we heard about was taken in to see Warren by her husband, who felt she was unhappy in his family and he didn’t know how to help her. He complained that she was pulling away from him. Warren condemned her for being rebellious and removed her from her husband. The husband wept uncontrollably; this was not what he wanted to have happen. She was forced to move out of her husband’s home and into a small apartment in the community as an example of what could happen to a woman who wasn’t “keeping sweet.” When we talked about this at the coffee party we all felt that she should have taken her children and left the community. But women risked so much in standing up for themselves. If Diane had stood up to Warren, her husband never would have allowed her back into his home. He loved her and hated losing her, but he loved the prophet even more. It is hard for someone on the outside to fathom, but men would have died for Warren Jeffs. Jeffs was also cagey; he’d often hint at the possibility of eventual forgiveness if they did what he wanted them to do. What was most unsettling was that families could be torn apart for no reason—or reasons Warren would never reveal. We knew that he could turn on any of us the way he did with the others. A man who wanted to get rid of a wife could now march into Warren’s office and know that even with the flimsiest complaint or accusation he would be likely to get a fresh start with someone else. Cathleen and I were still having our morning coffee together when an episode with a Canadian bishop came up. Cathleen was critical of those in Canada who were defying Warren Jeffs and refusing to follow the newly ordained bishop. I could not believe her unquestioning support for Jeffs. “Cathleen, Warren can’t upset the leadership in Canada just because he is in a bad mood one day and think there will be no consequences.” She looked at me in disbelief. Cathleen still thought that Warren Jeffs was a god despite what he had done to her. She got up and left. We never had coffee again and she rarely spoke to me. Ordaining a new Canadian bishop was one of the rare instances when an action backfired on Warren Jeffs. Uncle Rulon was so incapacitated that he had no real power anymore. It had all been ceded to Warren—except that the old man had a few tricks up his sleeve. We saw this play out in Warren’s feud with the Canadian bishop of the FLDS, who had always been close to him.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The kitchen is muggy with steam. She wishes she could get up and go outside, sit on the porch swing to watch the storm roll in. But she would have to ask someone, and they’d look at her with worry and pity. In truth, if she could get up, she’d walk out of this house and keep walking. Nothing would stop her. She’d keep going and going until she got to her brother in Maryland. She’d take his hand and walk both of them into the sea, far away from here. The thought feels like a betrayal—leaving home, leaving Enid and Big Davis—but she wants to take her brother away because it seems like the only way to protect him from the inevitable hurt of their grandfather dying without forgiving, kissing and making good. There is no reason that it should be Grace here and not Davis. When they were young, their grandfather always favored Davis. She wants to call her brother now and tell him to come, urge him to get in the car, to break any speed limit, to come home and have dinner. But she knows she can’t. She’s promised to work on Big Davis, to try, in small, slow ways. She has no skill for this sort of game. When they were little, Davis always beat her at checkers and chess. She was always the one to grow impatient before the game was done, to turn away and pout, sometimes to throw the board over. Davis played the long game, but he played it boldly, directly, in strong, clear moves. She was scatterbrained, collecting in small flurries of movements, tiny advancements, minor miracles of displacement. But in truth she never got far across the board before her willpower gave out. She never completed the game, begun in all the earnestness of childhood and the eagerness of believing that this time she would win. Davis is a fool for entrusting her with this task. Big Davis puts the plate in front of her. It’s full of greens with white turnip roots sliced and spread around the plate. The roast portion is tiny, minuscule, and yet it is still more than she can bear. But it smells rich and a little musky from the vinegar. “So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?” he asks. He neatly slices his roast portion, much larger than either of theirs. Grace feels awkward, coltish, her body starting and jutting into curious directions with even the smallest movement. Enid watches her keenly. “I’ll do what I do every day—lay around until I have to hobble to the bathroom.”

• From Escape (2007)

  Doing laundry at Merril’s was an ordeal. The three automatic washers we had were always breaking down. We had a large, industrialsize washer that was very time-consuming to use. Ruth, for whatever reasons, often would come down and take my laundry out of the washer and dump it on the floor. I decided I was not going to fight over laundry. My father had a much better machine at his house and had no objections to my doing laundry there. In three hours, I could do laundry for all eight of us. Merril’s wives complained. Merril called me into his office and demanded an explanation. I told him that it was easier than trying to do it in his house and that my father had no objections. Merril said if I was really interested in doing what he wanted, I would find a way to do it in his home. I agreed. But I knew I wasn’t changing the way I did the laundry. It was a small step away from his tyranny and oppression, but it was a step. Linda’s clandestine coffee parties were still taking place after nine years. I went whenever I could. It was one of the few places where any of us spoke honestly about what was happening within our community. At one of the early meetings I went to, Linda asked if we had heard what had happened to one of Warren’s newest wives when she gave birth to her first baby. I said that if it was another sewing-scissors-and-dental-floss story, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it. “It’s worse,” Linda said. “This time the baby died.” Warren’s wife was in Salt Lake City when she went into labor. Warren was in Colorado City. She had been in labor for hours but the baby didn’t come. The midwife kept calling Warren and asking if she could send her to the hospital. He refused. Linda said the labor lasted more than a day and the baby finally died. When the midwife called Warren she said his wife would be dead within the hour unless she got to the hospital. He relented, but told his wife the death of her baby was the will of God. All of us at Linda’s fell silent. Someone finally spoke. “If the leader of this community is a man so selfish that he would murder his unborn child, then every one of us is in big trouble.” We all picked up our things and started to leave. What more could we say? If anyone heard us talking this way about Warren, we would be in real danger.

• From Escape (2007)

  We stayed at the hospital for several days of tests. It was hell for me. This was more terror than I had ever known and it was a terror I was powerless to understand. Test after test came back negative. Merril came to the hospital once to visit us when he was in St. George on business. He seemed concerned but was also convinced that Harrison would get better. After a few days, Harrison was diagnosed with a postviral infection. The pediatrician told me this could last for three weeks. I didn’t know what I would do. Harrison’s condition had gotten worse. He was screaming all the time and he slept only with strong medication. At home, it was even more awful. Harrison began vomiting from the spasms. I fed him constantly but had to stop nursing him because when he went into a spasm he bit my breast. He seemed famished—the spasms took a lot of energy. But the more he ate, the more he vomited. And screamed. He screamed nonstop seemingly from terrible, terrible pain. The pediatrician prescribed some antinausea medication, but nothing gave him relief. She told me this could last as long as three months. I didn’t know how we would make it. I wasn’t sleeping. His suffering was relentless. I felt so utterly powerless and defeated by my inability to do anything to help him when he looked at me with his big, beautiful, but tortured green eyes. Someone gave me the name of a holistic doctor in Las Vegas. Linda said she’d take us there. Maybe he’d have an answer that eluded traditional medicine. I went to find Merril. He’d been ignoring Harrison and showed zero concern. It was obvious to me that he felt Harrison was my problem. I certainly didn’t think he’d object to my taking him to Las Vegas. But Merril turned on me with a vengeance when I told him what I wanted to do. He berated me for having such an idea. I was exhausted after three sleepless weeks. I didn’t care what Merril thought and looked at him exactly the way I thought of him—as an unbelievable idiot. He grabbed my arm and threw me several feet in the alfalfa field. I stumbled over some clumps of dirt but would not let myself fall on my face. I would not give him that pleasure. It took every ounce of strength that I had. I regained my balance and stood my ground. He grabbed me again and threw me as hard as he could. I landed on my feet again but some distance away from him. I looked at him with disgust and defiance.

• From Escape (2007)

  I sank to the floor in sobs. Anguish rolled out of me in waves. I pounded the tiles of the floor with my fist. I had no way to protect my children. Merril could take them, starve them, and hurt them. I had taken huge risks to win our freedom, and yet my children were still at the mercy of a monster. This was the lowest moment of my life. I had no way of making it financially. I had left friends and family who would never speak to me again. I felt like I had nothing to show for all that I’d endured. I felt absolutely powerless. It was one thing to be subjected to Merril’s reign of terror when there was no access to outside help. But now I had legal representation. I’d been to court, and yet I was still powerless to protect the children I loved beyond life. They were all I had and all that mattered to me. Despite everything I had done, Merril could still ruin their lives, confidence, and promise. My outrage reached the stratosphere. When my children came home right before Christmas Merrilee told me they were forced to fast again. None of the food they’d taken came back in their suitcases. It was all gone. I called my attorney, but she said there was nothing she could do if the children insisted it hadn’t happened when the court-appointed guardian asked them about it. The kids had just been back for a few hours when the family who was doing our Christmas called. When could they bring presents and put them under the tree? My children were so tense, I thought the presents might provide a happy focus, so we did it right away. In the FLDS, we never celebrated Christmas, so this would be a happy first for them. When the doorbell rang, Santa Claus entered in full regalia with one of his elves. He walked into our small living room with his bells jingling. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you children for all these years, and I’ve finally found you!” My eight children were mesmerized. Even Harrison seemed transfixed. Betty was off to one side, but she was clearly taking in everything. The little ones were wide-eyed and beaming. Santa had more to say. “You have all been such good children, so I had to be sure I brought plenty of gifts to make up for all the gifts I didn’t bring you when I couldn’t find you!” Santa invited the younger children to sit in his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. They didn’t have any idea of what to say. None of us had ever been part of a world where wishes were acknowledged and sometimes dreams came true. Being cherished or feeling special was not something we’d experienced.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He had worked on a new method to extract oil from shale. Before Houston his father had been in North Dakota, and before North Dakota he had been in Wyoming, and before Wyoming he had been married. Lionel’s mother cried when she saw him and asked why he had done it, but the doctor said, We don’t ask that here. That is private . His mother looked at the doctor and said, Nothing about my child is private from me , and Lionel had wanted to say that his mother had taken the locks off his door when he was little and never put them back. His parents left that first time, going back to his place to get his toiletries and a change of clothes. The doctor said Lionel didn’t have to go with them when they returned for him if he did not want to. He could stay. Lionel asked the doctor about the pain in his lower back, and the doctor offered to give him Valium, but said it was habit-forming. It’s not that bad , Lionel said then. The pain was all right. He could live with it. A couple of weeks later, he checked into a private care facility outside Detroit. The facility had large, rolling lawns. There were cedar and pine trees, trails to walk. They called it hiking, though it was really just walking to the top of a modestly steep hill and looking down at the facility. From that height, one could see black fencing around the perimeter of the allotment. The building itself was the typical modernist arrangement of interlocking rectangles, edged here and there with a touch of wood paneling. It was the type of modernity that was hostile to history, to time, seemingly without precedent but utterly referential, almost dully so. The kind of building one saw so often that it had become a kind of visual cliché for money, for comfort, for aesthetic consideration. Lionel had nightmares in which he fell through a slot of air, and he’d wake into another dream about being trapped under a thick sheet of ice. He’d cut his way down through sequential layers of dreams, waking into steadily more dire situations until at last he woke from a too-high bonfire or from wolves chasing him or from feeling lost in the woods at the base of an erupting volcano. The tachycardia left him winded just getting out of bed. He spent his time reading or lying under the gravity blanket his mother had brought him. When he’d been there a few weeks, he got permission to open his window. An aide unlocked it and explained that there was no screen and that he should look out for mosquitoes in the spring. The delicate security bars were impossible to remove. Unless you’re really persistent , the aide said with a wink. Even these had been designed. Their appearance. Their material. The interlocking mechanism that prevented their removal.

• From Escape (2007)

  I knew I needed to get a birth control shot, but it became impossible because Harrison continued to go downhill. I was too overwhelmed with his care to do anything else. The IV therapy he was getting gave him some minor relief for his spasms but did nothing to prevent his nausea. He sometimes vomited several times a day, and as a result he came down with chronic aspiration pneumonia. During the winter of 2001, I called the ambulance far more than I called his doctors. I also had to start monitoring his oxygen with a pulse oximeter. When he had terrible screaming bouts, I medicated him with Versed. At night he needed Ambien and chloral hydrate to sleep, but sometimes they worked for only a few hours. Now, at twenty months, he could no longer lift his head. I was devastated. Exhausted, depleted, and wrecked, I had no longer any reservoirs of strength to draw on. I had to keep going. But each day felt progressively worse as it blurred into the next. I did not dare imagine Harrison’s future. The present was terrifying enough. Time after time the ambulance sped us to the hospital in St. George with sirens screaming. The doctors and nurses there fought like hell to keep Harrison alive. Their determination and valor made me realize how much more compassion there was for me in the outside world than there was within my own home. I knew my future in the FLDS was over. Because of my “rebellion” I had produced a disabled child, disgraced my husband, and brought shame to my family. No one in Merril’s family cared about my welfare except Cathleen. Cathleen had become my rock. Despite Warren’s ban on our ever speaking to each other—or maybe because of it—our friendship solidified in ways that gave me courage and strength. We had coffee together every morning and talked about the day ahead. If I went flying to the hospital with Harrison, she looked out for my children and saw that their laundry was done, their rooms tidy, and they were fed. Barbara and Tammy hated this. They would try to get Cathleen in trouble with Merril whenever they could. But Cathleen tried not to let it get to her. She had a full-time job at the grocery store in the community. She did not turn her paychecks over to Merril. Cathleen had carved out a niche of both obedience and defiance. Harrison’s doctor, Dr. Smith, decided that something more had to be done for him. She felt his spasms might be a long-term condition and that he needed to have a G-button surgically implanted in his stomach as well as a procedure called fundoplication.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  I thought then that it was the worst night of my life, but I soon found out that worse were coming. I slept on a friend’s couch for a couple of months, until his parents claimed that they could not support me further. I tried calling home, but my mother hung up when she heard my voice. That night I slept on a bench in the Park Blocks, which turned out to be some wine guzzler’s favorite bench. His psycho friends roughed me up and would have robbed me if I’d had anything to steal. Two months away from graduating high school, I stopped going altogether. Surviving the streets was too hard to include academics. My education was different from that of my classmates. I learned how to eat garbage, sleep in doorways, beg for money and run con games on tourists. Edible food can be found in Dumpsters and people toss out all kinds of cool stuff. I learned how to panhandle too, though I was never as good as others. I’d been living on the street for almost a year when I met Pop Tingle. I was squatting in the stairwell of an unkempt parking garage with about fifty other kids ranging in age from twelve to twenty-nine. We’d fixed up the stairwell, even hauling in castoff furniture so the landings were homey. I’d spent a hard evening panhandling. After raking in four bucks, I was dragging my hungry ass back to the parking garage when an older dude sitting at a sidewalk café beckoned me. “I’m not doing anything,” I yelped before he could accuse me of stealing his shit. Smiling, he gestured toward an untouched piece of cheesecake covered with a chocolate sauce. “What would you do for this?” he taunted. “What do you want?” I asked. I lusted after that cheesecake, but the streets had taught me the ways of older dudes. Their malevolent tactics entailed barebacking a boy’s ass, shooting him full of diseased cum and kicking him out before the wife got home. Many of the kids sold their asses and got infected for their trouble, but I’d kept mine intact. This guy acted as if my natural caution was a malady. “You’re a suspicious bugger, aren’t you?” “I got good reason,” I said. Lots of men had wanted to use me—plenty of women too. “Let me take a few pictures,” they’d say, offering pizza in trade, sometimes dope or booze. I kept refusing. The payment could not be worth what I would endure. I’d seen too many young kids die, their eyes wild with terror. I started to walk away, but the man called me again. “What’s your name?” he asked, holding out the plate. I drooled onto my decrepit sneakers. “Eric,” I said. “No,” he said, withdrawing the plate. “Shit.” I didn’t want to waste more time on this asshole. His eyes glinted with weird amusement, a kitty toying with a mouse. “No, Eric isn’t your name.”

• From Escape (2007)

  “I’m going to ask Warren for help. I do have sins.” And she proceeded to tell me about a wrong that she had committed. I begged her not to confess that wrong to Warren Jeffs. “Cathleen, don’t do it. He will eat you for lunch. If you really want to confess, confess to things like not picking up paper from the floor. Don’t give him anything to use against you.” But Cathleen was still a true believer. “If I want his help, I need to be honest.” I knew she was doomed. There was no way she would get any help from Warren Jeffs. Confessing to a sin like that would give him power to condemn her to hell. Cathleen made an appointment to see Warren. He heard another of Merril Jessop’s wives talk about his abusive behavior toward her. Cathleen didn’t say much when she came back. She looked spent. She became more obedient to Barbara. Merril told her there would be no forgiveness for her rebellion and instructed her to turn over her small yellow truck to him. She would not be allowed to have her own transportation again. (Some of us had our own cars and vans, but most of us were not allowed to register them and they had no license plates. So if we left the community, we could not travel far without being stopped by the police. Cathleen needed her truck to go back and forth to Page, so hers was one of the few vehicles that was registered.) Merril also ordered Cathleen to turn over all her paychecks to him. But she told me later she had no intention of doing that. “There is no way I’ll put myself at his mercy financially,” she said. But I knew Barbara would insist that she did. Cathleen told me that she was going to make amends to Barbara by working on a project with her: cleaning Merril’s office. This was the way they were to learn to love each other again as sister wives. I told her I thought this was ridiculous. “You have to act like Barbara’a slave to make up to her because she beat your baby?” Cathleen turned and walked away without responding. The next day I saw Cathleen cleaning Merril’s office. Barbara was sitting in a chair barking orders at her. “Cathleen, I want you to clean the window next, and Father likes his windows cleaned a certain way. Don’t do them the way you usually do.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And then I began to think about one after the other—all those whom I had passed up for one reason or another—until finally I fell sound asleep and in the midst of it I had a wet dream. At seven-thirty the alarm went off as usual and as usual I looked at my torn shirt hanging over the chair and I said to myself what’s the use and I turned over. At eight o’clock the telephone rang and it was Hymie. Better get over quickly, he said, because there’s a strike on. And that’s how it went, day after day, and there was no reason for it, except that the whole country was cockeyed and what I relate was going on everywhere, either on a smaller scale or a larger scale, but the same thing everywhere, because it was all chaos and all meaningless. It went on and on that way, day in and day out for almost five solid years. The continent itself perpetually wracked by cyclones, tornadoes, tidal waves, floods, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, pests, strikes, hold-ups, assassinations, suicides . . . a continuous fever and torment, an eruption, a whirlpool. I was like a man sitting in a lighthouse: below me the wild waves, the rocks, the reefs, the debris of shipwrecked fleets. I could give the danger signal but I was powerless to avert catastrophe. I breathed danger and catastrophe. At times the sensation of it was so strong that it belched like fire from my nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the lighthouse itself—secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world. If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My mother had met a handsome man much younger than she who wanted her to buy him a fishing camp in Kentucky; luckily his greed finally caused her to drop him. On the way down to join him one time in Kentucky, Mother kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station, but my sister and I mocked the corn-pone accents and sad lyrics. Once we were in Kentucky the handsome man, mustached and cologned, took us out fishing in a rented boat. It rained. No one caught anything. A strict silence had to be maintained when the man cast his rod as though blessing the waters. At night my sister and I slept in bunk beds in the man’s sister’s house. My mother wore a new, dazed expression and treated us with great politeness, as though my sister and I were guests she didn’t know very well. She spoke of our accomplishments and of her own trials and powers of recuperation. The man laid a strong hand on my shoulders, but withdrew it when my mother left the room. At night his family and ours sat together; everyone visited as a bowl of pecans and a nutcracker were passed around the room from one grown-up to another on down to silent children in pajamas stained with orange juice. Our mother was betraying us into this dingy house permeated by the smell of hot grease. Mother was losing interest in me; she’d willingly hand me over to this good-looking fool. During the night they fought. The engagement was broken off and the next morning we were in the car again, blinking and exhausted, the radio blaring, the temperature noticeably warmer, familiar plants unseasonably in bloom. Mother started reciting the litany of our lives. She questioned us once more about our father and how he behaved toward his new wife. Each twisted or colored fact we gave her she plaited into a heavy weave. Then she tore that up and started again. He would soon leave his wife or he would never leave her, he was being blackmailed by that woman, no he loved her, he was a man of honor, no he was a man without principle, he had failed us, no he stayed true, he’d tire of her, no she was a born fascinator, this was just an adventure, it was a life, she made him feel superior, she made him feel cheap, he’d soon be back or he’d never return—oh, my mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up. I listened to everything, smiling and in possession of my secret power.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He can see his house from here. His stomach turns. He retches. His throat is hot with vomit. His eyes water. In the distance, he can hear branches breaking. The woods shift with soft, hushed voices of motion. He leaves the woods entirely and steps back onto the street. Milton thinks again of all the homes and their interchangeable lives and wishes that it were as easy as stopping at someone else’s door, knocking, and switching places with the version of himself who lived there. If only he could enter into another version of his life, one in which things have not gone quite as horribly awry—if only he could pass from this world into the next or into the next, some other place without Abe or Tate, some place where he and Nolan might be as they were, though perhaps they have always been this way, full of violence and calamity. Maybe he’s had it wrong this whole time—it’s not that Abe and Tate bring it out of Nolan, and it’s not that Nolan brings it out of them. They’re always in the thick of violence. It moves through them like the Holy Ghost might—except the Holy Ghost never moved anybody to rape a girl or ruin her life. The Holy Ghost never moved anybody to bash a boy’s head in. There was some other god, then, a god for whom the spilling of blood was a prayer, an act of devotion. And they’ve been praying to that god their whole lives. The streetlights glow, and bits of grass stick up coarsely from the pools of shadow below them. Milton puts the butt of his hand to his eye, which is throbbing, low and deep. The pressure in his chest intensifies, and he thinks, in that moment, of cutting himself open to let it out. Toward home, then , he says to himself. Toward home. His steps are stiff, ragged, hard, but he keeps going. One foot in front of the other until he’s at his door. The lights are off. He unlocks the door and pushes it open with his hip. Then it’s down the stairs, into the warm cave of the basement. He tugs on the cord and the basement is once again bathed in dim, yellow light. His mouth is sour and skunky from vomit and spit. His hand feels filmy and gritty, from Abe’s come and blood and the dirt and the grass. He glances down and sees smudges on his palm, white mucosal remnants, like he’s squeezed snails or slugs. There was a time when he and Nolan were boys and playing out by the creek, when they’d catch frogs and other small animals and bash them with rocks until they resembled nothing like themselves or anything else. And when they got older, they shot deer and pulled fish from the river and held them up, grinning into cameras, smiling like Look what I’ve done .

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Sophie put her face behind her hand and shook her head. She groaned. “It was nice, actually.” “Are you with someone?” “No,” Lionel said. “God no.” “Why not?” Lionel considered the question. Then he unbuttoned his left sleeve and rolled it up to his elbow. His forearm was covered in a network of scars, culminating in a series of deep gouges near his wrist. His forearms were paler than the rest of him, except for this cluster of keloids with their tannish, reddish undertones. And sometimes, in the winter months, they grew dry and rubbery. Sophie took in the view and Lionel watched her for the usual choreography of sympathy and disgust. She reached out and brushed her fingers across his arm and made a low, appraising hum. He could barely feel her touch. With the keloids, it was either too much sensation or nothing at all. Sometimes they burned powerfully or throbbed so much he couldn’t sleep. His doctors had said that it was a real pain, but also not a real pain. They stopped short of saying it was psychosomatic. They didn’t like that term, because it implied an unreal element, no matter how careful they were about contextualizing their comments. “What happened?” she asked. “If that’s not too personal?” “I tried to kill myself. Which, I guess, is a little obvious. But I made a real hash of it. My roommate found me. Then I did some inpatient stuff. And some outpatient stuff. Not a lot of room for extracurriculars.” “Sounds like a lot.” “Yeah, last year, I was just . . . in this bad way. I felt really unsafe. I felt so sick, all the time. Like, really sick. Like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. And I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t think. That was hardest—the not thinking. My mind wasn’t even empty, just hazy. Like standing in a room you know perfectly well, but you can’t see anything because it’s full of this burning smoke. It was just. Impossible, and I was so scared—like this was going to be my life, I was never going to be okay again. I wanted some relief, I guess. I wanted to get out.” “Did you always struggle with that stuff?” “No,” Lionel said. “Well . . . yes? No and yes. I was always anxious. But the first two years of grad school were really hard, brutal. And I found it really hard to cope. It’s like when a plane descends, you know? Gradually, down through the clouds, and suddenly you can’t see anything? Except, with a plane, eventually you see the city. There was no city for me.”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Back in his room he took a swig straight from the bottle. Jeez, the stuff was awful. It burned his throat. Here’s to us, Kathy, he said. This time he poured himself a shot and gulped it down. It got easier. By his sixth shot he was blotto. He lay on the floor while his room spun around. Whirlybeds. It didn’t feel good. He crept on all fours to the bathroom—spinning spinning—and puked his guts out. Then he fell back on the cool tile floor and everything went black. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00033.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00033.jpg] SURVIVORSThey Live to Tell Their StoriesBy Henry AmmermanFEB. 15 — The bus driver’s classic call to “step to the rear” might be heeded by airline passengers. Most of the survivors of the National Airlines DC-6 crash on Feb. 11 had been seated in the rear of the aircraft. When the plane broke apart in the crash it left the rear section less damaged and more accessible to rescuers. Gabrielle Wenders, the stewardess, was the only surviv ing member of the crew. She had been found hanging upside down, still strapped in her seat. “I don’t know how I ever got out alive. It was a fiery nightmare. We were all so helpless. If it hadn’t been for that young man, Mason McKittrick—a name I’ll always remember—I might have died that way.” Chubby little Patty Clausen, age 5, was unharmed, but her mother perished. With her father hospitalized, hospital authorities put out a plea. “Can’t someone take this most adorable child home? She keeps asking for her ‘bow wow.’ ” The dog had been left in a kennel while the family went on vacation. Her uncle picked her up last night, but said he would wait before telling her of her mother’s death. Hospitalized newlywed Linda West, 25, was unaware of the status of William, her husband. They were married at noon on Feb. 10, and pulled from the wreckage 12 hours later. “When can I see my husband?” She begged her mother to bring him to her bedside. Her mother didn’t know how to break the news to her daughter that Mr. West had died of a fractured skull and brain injuries the previous night. In much better spirits was 17-year-old Cele Bell, who was anxious to get on another flight. “I want to go on vacation to Miami! I’d go tomorrow if I could,” she told reporters. She had been traveling with her mother, who was pinned under her seat after the crash. But Cele was able to pull her to safety. They had been in the last two seats on the right side of the plane. Of the 38 who survived the initial crash, two have died in the hospital. Some remain in critical condition, but the prognosis for most is good. 24 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] NatalieNatalie’s parents took her to New York, to the Central Park West office of some old man who smelled bad.