Despair

Passages

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

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• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀψοφητί, Adv.ofsq., Plat. Theaet.144B, Dem. 797.12, Arist. H.A. 4.8, 15. ἀψόφητος, ov, (Wopew) noiseless; c. gen., a. κωκυμάτων without sound of .., Soph. Aj. 321; cf. ἄπεπλος, ἄσκευος, ἄχαλκος. ἀ-ψοφοποιός, dv, -- ἄψοφος, Epiphan. ἄ ψοφος, ον, = ἀψύφητος, Hipp. 344. 51, Soph. Tr. 967, Eur. Tro. 887. Ady. —pws, Greg. Naz.; —pews, E. M. 183. 20. ἀ-ψυδρακίωτος, ον, without pustules or pimples, σῶμα Diosc. 2. 81. ἀ-ψύθής, ἔς, -- ἀψευδής, Hesych. ἄ-ψυκτος, ον, not capable of being cooled, Plat. Phaedo 106 A. ἀ-ψυχαγώγητος, ov, not rejoicing the heart, Polyb.9.1,5. Adv.-rTws, without being rejoiced, Julian. 252 A. ἀψυχεί, Adv. of ἄψυχος, Hdn. Epim. p. 257. ἀψύυχέω, to be lifeless, to swoon, Hipp. 463. 15., 1207 A. ἀψυχία, ἡ, want of life, swooning, Hipp. Vet. Med. 12, Coac. 155. ΤΙ, want of spirit, faint-heartedness, Aesch. Theb. 259, 383, Eur. Alc. 642, etc. ἀψῦχόομαι, Pass. to be lifeless, Boiss. Anecd. 3. 453. ἀψῦχο-ποιός, dv, making lifeless or faint, Eust. 611. 5. ἄ-ψῦχος, ov, lifeless, inanimate, opp. to ἔμψυχος, Archil. 77, Simon. 111, Soph. Fr. 743, Eur. Tro. 619, freq. in Plat. and Arist. 2. ap. βορά non-animal food, Eur. Hipp. 952. II. spiritless, faint- hearted, κάκη Aesch, Theb. 192; ἀνήρ Com. Anon. 253; ἀψυχότεραι ai θήλειαι Arist. H. Α. 9. 1,30: of style, Dion. H. de Dem. 20 :—Adv. —xws, Poll. 2.227. dw (Α), --ἄημι (q.v.), to blow, used only in impf. dev, Ap. Rh. τ. 605., 2. 1229, but cf. διάημι. 11. =iavw, dwréw, to sleep, used only in aor., ἐνὶ κοίτῃ ἄεσσα Od. το. 341; νύκτα μὲν ἀέσαμεν 3.151; ἔνθα δὲ νύκτ᾽ ἄεσαν Ib. 490; 50 ἴπ the contr. form, νύκτ᾽ ἄσαμεν 16. 367. dw (B), to hurt, contr. from ἀάω (4. v.): cf. ἄτη. dw (0). Ep. inf. ἄμεναι (contr. for déu—): fut. dow 1]. 11. 817: aor. 1 subj. dow Ib. 281, inf. doae Il.:—Med., Ep. 3 sing. ἄἄται Hes. Sc. 101 (v. Buttm. Lexil. 5, v. ἀάατοΞ) : fut. ἄσομαι and aor. ἀσάμην 1]. To satiate, αἵματος doa ᾿Αρῆα to give him his fill of blood, Il. 5. 289: but, II. mostly intr. to take one’s fill of a thing, ἱεμένη χροὸς 269 ἄμεναι 1]. 21. 70; ἱεμένη χροὺς doar Ib.; λιλαιομένα χροὺς ὅσαι 15.317; γόοιο μέν ἐστι καὶ doa 22. 15} :—Med., ἄσεσθε... κλαυθμοῖο 24. 717; ποτῆτος ἄσασθαι φίλον ἦτορ 10. 307.—V. also sub v. ἑῶμεν. (For the Root, v. sub anv: hence Verb, Adj. ἄ-ατος, ἅτος.) ἀώδης, ες, (ὄζω) without smell, Theophr. Odor. 18, Plut. 2. 1014 F. ἀῶθεν, Ady., Dor. for ἠῶθεν, Theocr. ἀώιος, for ἠῷος, ἀστήρ, lon 11. dev, advos, ἡ, Dor. for niwy, Mosch. adv, ovos, 6, a kind of fish, Epich. 34 Ahrens. [ἃ] ἄωρ, 6, v. sub ἄορ. dwpéw, to be careless, Hesych., Suid.

• From The Historical Jesus (2000)

  “And there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom, but you are cast out; and people will come from east and west and from north and south and recline at table in the kingdom of God.” (Q: Luke 13:23-29; cf. Matt. 8:11-12) II. While the arrival of the kingdom was “good news” for Jesus’ followers, it was not good news for everyone. In a mighty act of judgment, evil rulers will be toppled and punished, and the oppressed will be raised up. A. This judgment will be universal in scope. Compare the saying in our earliest Gospel: “And in those days, after that affliction, the sun will grow dark and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11 heaven, and the powers in the sky will be shaken; and then they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send forth his angels and he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of earth to the end of heaven.” (Mark 13:24-27) B. This coming judgement is the subject of a number of Jesus’ parables. Consider this one that is multiply attested in Matthew and Thomas: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, they hauled it ashore, and sitting down chose the good fish and put them into containers, but the bad fish they threw away. That’s how it will be at the completion of the age. The angels will come and separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and cast them into the fiery furnace. There people will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Matt. 13:47-50) B. As seen in these references, Jesus calls this coming agent of judgment, who is regularly accompanied by angels, the “Son of Man,” a title deriving from a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Dan. 7:13-14. 1. In some of the sayings about the future coming of the Son of Man, Jesus does not appear to be speaking about himself. These sayings, pass the criterion of dissimilarity, because Christians would be unlikely to make up sayings in which it was unclear that Jesus himself was the future judge. 2 . These sayings also pass the criterion of contextual credibility — cf. Enoch, ch. 69, a contemporaneous Jewish apocalyptic prophecy referring to the “son of man” as an agent of God’s judgment. 3 . In other sayings, though, Jesus clearly does speak about himself using the term “son of man.” These obviously do not pass the criterion of dissimilarity.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  One piece of correspondence from her came in the form of a large heart cut from construction paper, with the words “I Love You” written in the center. When I read those words, I realized I did not want to live anymore. I did not want to be in Synanon. At my core, I felt abandoned. Carefully, underneath, I wrote “Good by Momy I Am Died” and sent the red heart back to her. When she questioned me about it later, embarrassment curdled my insides and I shrugged away from her scrutiny. So much time had elapsed that I’d moved beyond those feelings and further into my role as a Synanon kid. My earlier transgression seemed babyish and shamefully silly. Just before my eighth birthday, Theresa received approval from upper management to move from the Synanon San Francisco house to the Walker Creek property where I lived. Management had taken advantage of her passion for wanting to participate in the school by giving her a job that nobody wanted with the promise that after a few years she could work her way into the role of demonstrator. The job involved the care of a physically and mentally disabled girl named Gwyn, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. Because Theresa had questioned the lifestyle values of the school program, senior demonstrators wanted time to scrutinize her behavior. Her charge of Gwyn was a sort of probationary situation. During a game, Theresa’s suggestions that children spend more time with their parents and that parents be more involved in the school had settled in the VIPs’ addled minds like indigestion. They burped up their distaste in following games, spewing their disregard for her parenting philosophy. Her belief that children need to have a relationship with their parents was in direct conflict with Chuck’s theory and experiment of creating distance and obliterating focused parental love, which he believed only weakened the individual. However, Theresa was not deterred from speaking her mind on this issue. Although she received a lot of flak for her “ridiculous and dangerous” ideas, she continued to stick to her unpopular opinion. When Theresa could not be with me physically, she wrote; and when she visited, her visits were much longer than the usual parental visit. It seemed that every chance she had, she wanted to remind me that I was her daughter and that she deeply cared for me. Her love, when she could parcel it to me in the form of a quick kiss, wave or chat if we crossed paths, emotionally sustained me in the school’s otherwise psychically erosive environment. I knew I was loved, and it helped me hold myself together. Once Theresa and I were living on the same property, we began spending as much time together as we could. There were many weekends when she arranged for us to go on a picnic or have a sleepover.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  As time wore on and our parents worked on trying to make arrangements for themselves, the games became more aggressive. A week later, Sara and I listened, wordlessly, to one of the men from upper management yelling about our family on the Wire. “Theresa and Ray can get the fuck out! But Celena and Sara stay! They are Synanon kids and Synanon’s going to fight to keep them.” Chapter Thirty-TwoG oodbye It had never occurred to me that Theresa might leave Synanon without me. As Sara and I waited to hear our fate, my morale plummeted. I unpacked some of my clothes, but three or four boxes, mostly of books and writings, remained stacked between the twin beds of my loft bedroom. Following the announcement on the Wire, Theresa was nowhere to be seen. I could not imagine being in Synanon without her, never to see my mother again, never to rejoin the world to which I knew I belonged. Would I remain in Synanon forever? The demonstrators, not sure what to do, let me keep my belongings packed, just in case. I walked over to Sara’s cabin a few times every day to ask whether she knew anything I didn’t. She had kept her stuff packed, too, but had no extra information. After several days, she said, “We might have to stay.” “How do you know?” I asked. “Did you hear something?” She shook her head. “It’s just that it’s been a while, and I’m guessing Ray and Theresa are probably going to cancel their plans, or maybe they’ll get thrown out. I don’t know. But I don’t think they’re going to let us go.” “But they’re our parents.” Sara’s dark eyes, ringed by a faint purplish shadow, met mine. Her face was pale and she looked like she hadn’t slept in days. “So, it doesn’t matter if they’re our parents or not. They can keep us here if they want, and Ray and Theresa can’t do anything about it.” After a few hours, I left her room and wandered in a daze to a nearby play area atop a knoll, where a rope swing hung from a sturdy branch of a large oak tree. It was in use and several kids waited their turn. I stood and watched as the girl on the swing, Erica, flew high, whooshed back and zipped forward again in a wide arc. As she flew forward, she yelled, “Go away, Celena! We don’t want you here. We can’t wait for you to leave.” The swing slowed, and another girl steadied Erica so she could jump off the seat. Erica was short for her age and had to stand on tiptoe to whisper into her friend’s ear. They both laughed and looked at me. I walked back down the little hill and to the dorms. At night I lay awake, my thoughts spinning. I tried to soothe myself with the idea that they couldn’t really keep us.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But her voice—speaking daily to me on the phone—keeps me postponing the drink I often feel myself barreling toward like a boulder rolling downhill. With her ministrations, I do not—for two months—drink: a white-knuckled, tooth-grinding effort that impresses no one outside the church basement I go to a few nights per week. The sun rises and sets. The moon makes two arcs over the house I fail to sleep in. I remember no intersecting days with Warren, aside from how he takes evening shifts with Dev when I go to meetings. It’s as if he doesn’t even live there, which can’t be right. I don’t write. I can barely read enough to grade the bushels of essays I lug around. And when I long to drive off to the liquor store to buy and suck down fiery elixirs, spiritual directress Joan the Bone—a nickname picked solely for the rhyme—tells me I can do it first thing I wake up: even before you brush your teeth. And while I mock her one-day-at-a-time ploy as a trick for the dim-witted, since it actually means no day dawns in which drinking is a good idea, I have to admit that—sixty days in—when she buys me a celebratory bagel with my coffee, I feel fresher inside, albeit a bit scooped out, like a gourd. Stick a candle in my mouth, and you could use me for Halloween decor. It’s September fifteenth. We sit at a nameless coffee shop I call Now Baking, for the neon sign in its window. It’s before the age of bottled water, when ordering a cappuccino gets you crap coffee dollopped with whipped cream, a zigzag of grenadine syrup, and a cherry on top. So we drink that day unadorned diner coffee, mine laced with fatty cream and enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma, sugar craving being the curse of the newly sober. (One newly sober pal stole half-sweetened baking chocolate from the kitchen of a friend he was visiting—the host later found the wrappers stashed under the guest room mattress.) Leaves aren’t yet tumbling from the trees, but for me, all color is leaching from the landscape. I’m blunted, muted, starved, yet stubbornly refusing the one suggestion everyone sober for very long makes: prayer. I recoil from any talk of spiritual crap, though I can’t fail to notice that the happier, less angry ex-drunks talk about such matters without any strapped-on, phony-sounding zeal. Joan the Bone claims some nonbelievers use the group as a higher power. Here, she says, are a bunch of people. They outnumber you, outearn you, outweigh you. They are, ergo—in some simplistic calculation—a power greater than you. They certainly know more about staying sober than you. She sips her coffee. If you have a problem, bring it to the group. You’re asking me to put my life in the hands of strangers who give not one real shit for my true well being?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The mind I thought would save me from the trailer-park existence I was born to is not—as I’ve been led to believe—my central advantage. When does the idea of suicide become a secret relief, a pocketed worry stone I can rub a slight dip into? It’s an old specter. As a kid, I watched Mother disappear into the occasional locked bathroom with a gun, and I’d alternately banged my fists on the door, begging her to come out, then stood back and hollered she should go ahead, I was sick of her shit. My best friend from high school, Meredith of the leonine hair, tried after law school to cut her own plump throat and nearly bled to death—the first of ten or twelve attempts over ten years. I’d flown her to stay with me a few times, checked her in to the hospital a few times, more than once gone to a shrink with her. (She’d die of liver cancer fifteen years later after a brief but brilliant legal career, medicated into a stupor, weighing near—no exaggeration—four hundred pounds, which size kept her off the transplant list.) Before I was twenty-two, I knew a spate of successful (is that the parlance?) suicides. On my childhood block, three fathers took the wrong end of a gun into their mouths. Of my six California roommates, I buried two as drug casualties. Quinn the Eskimo shot himself with the gun he’d brought to California to defend his old man’s honor. But Forsythe went most crazy of us all. On the beach, he’d picked up and brought her home a girl with a baby, and after the girl passed out in his room; he dumped a bag of pot all over the infant in its portable bassinet. Forsythe’s roommates found the walls scrawled with toothpaste, the baby wallowing in marijuana, and an album going on the turntable with a framed photo of Forsythe’s father propped up and circling. Within the year, Forsythe died in the family garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. Suicide as an idea seeps into your lungs like nerve gas. No precipitating event prompts my fixation on dying, just the dull racket of my head’s own Chihuahua-like bark— death death death . It becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be. Picking up a drink would betray everybody who’s poured effort into my sobriety—like my suicide wouldn’t? But death—now, there’s a one-stop-shopping idea. Over the months, I start to convince myself that Dev’ll be better off without me (a grotesquely self-indulgent notion no parent can afford). One Saturday morning, after sitting up all night rewriting a sui cide note whose maudlin, pathetic details are thankfully lost to time, I take a call from Deb in the halfway house. She offers to buy me lunch. I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note made me feel good enough to have lunch.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Suicide as an idea seeps into your lungs like nerve gas. No precipitating event prompts my fixation on dying, just the dull racket of my head’s own Chihuahua-like bark—death death death. It becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be. Picking up a drink would betray everybody who’s poured effort into my sobriety—like my suicide wouldn’t? But death—now, there’s a one-stop-shopping idea. Over the months, I start to convince myself that Dev’ll be better off without me (a grotesquely self-indulgent notion no parent can afford). One Saturday morning, after sitting up all night rewriting a suicide note whose maudlin, pathetic details are thankfully lost to time, I take a call from Deb in the halfway house. She offers to buy me lunch. I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note made me feel good enough to have lunch. At some point, I confess that I have a garden hose and duct tape in my car trunk. She signals for the bill and stands, saying, C’mon, I’m checking you in to the bin right now. But I begin to backpedal and prevaricate. I’m joking, I say. She presses, and I press back. Warren could get custody of Dev if I go into the hospital. We may divorce, and he has all these lawyers in his family, and he’ll get custody…. Promise, she says, promise you’ll call or go to the hospital if you need to. The next day, after a sleepless night when the dead space inside me spread like spilled ink, I drive off under the cobalt blue summer sky with the garden hose in the back of my car. But with every small click of the odometer, my doubt grows, for starting to glow inside my shadowy rib cage like a relentless sun is Dev’s face. I can’t leave him the legacy of suicide, I think. I just can’t. He’ll find out somehow. Flying past me are objects I might swerve into instead—telephone pole, tree, a ramp I could sail off the edge of into oblivion. I unclick my seat belt and try to imagine my face shattering the glass into exploding stars. But I’m a coward, and I also suspect it’s just my luck that I’ll only crush my body to live on wired up to a breathing machine. Finally, I pull off the road into a gas station, where I bend my head to the steering wheel, sobbing, and suddenly flying through me comes a new image of Dev charging around my study with his red cape behind him. He’s coming for me, I think, like a superhero. He’s flying me out of myself.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἐρημο- -φίλης ΠῚ, ov, 6, loving solitude, Anth. P. 9. 396, Plan. 256. ἐρημόω, fut. wow, (ἔρημοι) to strip bare, to desolate lay waste, ἱερὰ θεῶν Thuc. 3. 58; τὴν χώραν Andoc. 26. 10:—Pass., Κρήτης ἐρημω- θείσης Hdt. 7.171; πόλεις ἠρημώθησαν Thuc. 1. 23, cf. 2. 44. ΤΙ. to bereave one of ἃ thing, c. dupl. acc., ἐρ. τινα εὐφροσύνας μέρος Pind, P. 3. 174 (cf. στερέω, ἀφαιρέω): but c. acc, et gen., ἀνδρῶν ἐρ. ἑστίαν Ids Te 4:27 (2:28); ep: ναυβατῶν ἐρετμά to leave the oars without men, Eur. Hel. 1610; σεαυτὸν ἐρημοῖς [φίλων] Plut. Alex. 39, :—Pass. to be bereft of, ἀνδρῶν Hdt. 1. 164; συμμάχων Id. 7.174; ἀρσένος Aesch. Ag. 260; πατρός Eur. Andr. 805; τὰ ἐρημούμενα φυλακῆς left without, Xen. Eq. Mag. 4, 18. 2. to set free or deliver from, Διὸς ἄλσος ἠρή- μωσε λέοντος Eur. H. F. 360; ᾿Ασίαν Περσικῶν ὅπλων Plut. Cim. 12: —Pass., πνεῦμα ὀσμῶν ἐρημωθέν being free from.. Plat. Tim. 66 E. III. to abandon, desert, ἑὸν χῶρον Pind. P, 4. 479; τάξιν ἠρήμου θανών Aesch. Pers. 298, cf. Eur. Andr. 314, Plat. Legg. 865E; ἐρ. Συρακούσας to evacuate it, Thuc. 5.4; τόνδ᾽ épnuwoas ὄχον having left it empty, by stepping out of it, Aesch. Ag. 1070. IV. to heep i in solitude, isolate, Aesch. Supp. 516, Eur. Med. go :—Pass., ἐρημω- θέντες τοῦ ὁμίλου being isolated from .., Hdt. 4. 135. ἐρήμωσιν, εως, ἢ, α making desolate, xaplov Arr, An. I, 9, 13. ἐρημωτής, οὔ, 6, a desolator, Anth. P. 6. 115. ἐρημωτικός, ή, Ov, desolating, Epiphan. 1. p. 458. ἐρηρέδᾶται, πατο, Vv. sub ἐρείδω, ἐρήριμμαι, v. sub ἐ ἐρείπω. ἐρήρισται, vy. sub ἐρίζω. ἐρητύω, Dor. ἐρᾶτύω : impf. ἐρήτυον (without augm.) 1]., Ion. -ὕεσκον, Ap. Rh. 1. 1301, Q. Sm.: fut. vow Ap. Rh., (κατ--) Soph. Ph. 1416; aor. ἐρήτυσα 1]. 1. 192, Eur.; ἐρητύσασκε 2. 189., 11. 567 :—Pass., v.infr. [Ὁ before a vowel, unless it be a long syll., as, ἐρητῦοντο pe- νοντες Il. 8. 345; but long before o, and in Aeol. 3 pl. aor. pass. ἐρή- τῦθεν : but Soph. O. C. 164 has ὕ before a long syll.] Ep. Verb (used twice in Trag.), to heep back, restrain, check, κήρυκες δ᾽ ἄρα λαὸν ἐρήτυον Il. 18. 503; ἐρητύσασκε φάλαγγας 11. 567; ἐπέεσσιν ἐρήτυε φῶτα ἕκαστον 2. 164, cf. 75, 189, Od. 9. 493; ἐρητύσειέ τε θυμόν Il. 1. 192; πολλὰ κέλευθος ἐρατύοι (so Muser. for —vet) let a long distance bar thy approach, Soph. Ο. C. 164 :—Med., epnTvovTo δὲ λαόν Il. 15. 723 :—Pass., ἐρητύοντο μένοντες 8. 3453; ἐρητύετ᾽ ἐν φρεσὶ θυμός ο. 462 (458), cf. 13. 280; ἐρήτυθεν (ager for - θησαν) δὲ καθ᾽ ἕδρας 2. 99, 211; παρὰ νηυσίν ἐρητύοντο 8. 345, al. 2. later c. gen. to keep away from, τέκνα δεινῆς ἁμίλλης Eur. Phoen. 1260; [κύνας] ὑλαγμοῦ Theocr. 25. 75 :—Pass., c. inf., ναυτιλίης . . ἐρητύοντο μέλεσθαι Ap. Rh. 2. 835. épt, τό, indecl. form of ἔριον wool, Philet. 18.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The warmth beaming from her face can’t reach me. I’m too bent over some rotted core, as if to protect it from her. She stands, and a glance from the golf-clothes guy makes me want to crawl under her desk. God how pale I look in the hospital. Crying through my globbed-up mascara has pinched my lashes into clownlike points, and the swollen eyes give me a lizard look. And rivers of snot I keep honking into wads of pink tissue. How long have I been crying? Days, in some ways, years. (If I could tap my own shoulder, I’d say, Of course you’re crying, honey. You’re fucking starving. Drive through a burger joint. Hell, super-size it, spring for a shake. Then go home and take a bath with some dish detergent. Tell your son you’ve gone to Tahiti for an hour. Take the longest bath in the world.) I’m so watery at my edges, so permeable, so easy to hurt, and my inner monologue—what you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on it—went, Oh shit, stupid bitch. What’ve you done now? Fuckup fuckup fuckup…The only way I know to twist the volume off is to choke it with exhaust. Hence my need for custodial care at the place all Harvard spouses go. The diagnosis was underwhelming: severe depression, along with insomnia and unfettered sobbing. With the tagline—persistent suicidal ideation—came the inpatient recommendation of my therapist, whose house I’d been driven to by Granada House staff. My shrink had been on her way out of the country, and maybe I had the sense to go inpatient before she vanished. The intake nurse brings me back a steaming mug of tea, taking from her drawer packets of honey and sugar and little red plastic stirring sticks, and the small civility of this makes me want to run out the door. I’m in a state of mind that can only be described as feral. She settles back to typing the form, asking, You and your husband are at the same address? We go back and forth, I say. We’ve been separated less than a month. I’ve refused to call my husband so far, though my therapist rang him before she arranged for me to get admitted. The mere sound of Warren’s voice would slam down on me a sledgehammer of guilt at leaving him to care for Dev solo. If my four-year-old has a nightmare—a new trend since his dad and I split up—I pretend to unscrew his head and shake the scary parts out, and that’s what I hope the hospital staff can do for me. (Ever notice, a lady in a meeting once said, that people only shoot themselves in the head?) After the paperwork is done, two large but understated men show up to steer me to the ward.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Such was the interview that landed me in a school far beyond my meager qualifications. For years I stayed grateful that the whole deal had been fast—a small price to pay for getting out of Leechfield. Though it was smaller than more violent assaults that had happened as a kid, which I paid for longer, it touched the same sore place—did I draw these guys somehow? But for ten years or more, when I was spent or hurt and totting up unnecessary gloom, his bearded face would float to mind, and I’d conjure a deep fry pot big enough to lower the pasty bastard into. Later, I pitied him more, for he was no doubt writhing in his own private hell. Which point is moot, since by now the worms have eaten him, and slowly. What’s a typical journey to college? I couldn’t tell you. I hope my son, Dev, had one last summer. His dad was staring owlishly into the computer screen, trying to download music, while I slipped folded shirts into fiberboard drawers and ran extension cords. Before I left, Dev heard a series of moist-eyed platitudes till he said, Mom, don’t Polonius me with this nagging. Still, he hugged me—his huge form ripe with shaving lotion—hugged me right in front of his backward-ballcap-wearing roomies. Dev’s parting words: Love you. Don’t forget to mail those CDs. My passage involved three blue-ribbon hangovers and the genial loneliness of a South American novel and an image of Mother charging out of a liquor store in blinding sun holding a gallon of vodka aloft like a trophy. On the morning Mother’s yellow station wagon deposited me at a dorm and pulled away from the curb, I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow stitched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. I didn’t cry when she pulled away, for there were cute hippie boys playing guitar cross-legged on the lawn, but my throat had a cold stone lodged in it. I was thirsty. 3Lackluster College Coed…I had a friend who thought the secret was turning a turntable backwards. One pill made you stronger, one pill and you could fly. I had a friend who crashed us through a cornfield and all the husks could do was sing, but that was all right, it was singing that mattered to us, had weight, occupied space, in motion tended to stay in motion, in rest rest. You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you. —Dean Young, “Bright Window”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  You’ve stripped me of all my possessions, robbed me of anything I held dear. Mother, what are you talking about? I’ve been sitting here wondering whether it would make you happy to come in and find me with my brains blown out. That’s what would really make your day. It’s an ambush I never saw coming, and where I’d been sizzling with tired satisfaction before, I’ve suddenly got a kink between my shoulder blades. I say, I’m exhausted, Mother. Don’t start this shit now. (Maybe normal people don’t have to beseech God at such junctures to stay level, but I do. But it’s as if I’ve never prayed. No space exists in me for any perspective.) In a flash, the fishy crab taste sours my breath, and I bend to rummage my bag for a toothbrush. Instead, I get a glowing vision of my toiletries bag, forgotten in the old house. I ask Mother if she has a fresh toothbrush or some mouthwash. I have nothing, she says. She’s sobbing. I have nothing. To escape the image of her pitched forward, her back heaving, I shut the bathroom door. I wash the grit off my face and neck. Spying a frayed toothbrush upside down in a glass, I squeeze paste on it and start to scrub my mouth out when I taste bleach—and do I detect the odor of shit on its bristles? It’s been used to scrub the toilet. I spit and rinse my mouth and spit, holding back the urge to vomit. And, in that instant, my mouth scalded with bleach and shit, I feel the entire fabric of the world began to undergo a profound shift. I cease to be myself, or rather, my adult self. Time arcs back, carrying me in it. On the ends of my arms, I feel the length of my fingers dwindle. Though standing upright, I sense the floor escalating closer as my legs get shorter. My arms shrink in their sockets. My eyes no longer sit flush to the front of my face; they’ve retreated far back into my head, as if my true self is crouched in terror in the back of my skull, staring out at Mother from far off. And, into each strand of my mother’s white hair, fiery color floods back. Her shoulders square, and she’s tall and slim again, facing me with the enraged pout of her former drunker self. In an eyeblink, our old forms devour us. When you’ve been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it’s like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  A teenage girl taps the far side of my windshield to ask, Are you okay, lady? And I nod and wipe my eyes. I reattach the seat belt and edge up to the road with my blinker on to turn around. Heading to the halfway house, I drive for the first time in my life under the speed limit, obeying every arcane law, slowing to let grandmothers cut in front of me. It’s a relief to place myself before the staff person on duty, asking him to call my doctor, because I’m fixing to off myself. PART IVBeing Who You Are Is Not a DisorderBeing who you are is not a disorder. Being unloved is not a psychiatric disorder. I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual. I can’t find being born to a mother incapable of touching you. I can’t find being born on the shock treatment table. Being offered affection unqualified safety and respect when and only when you score pot for your father is not a diagnosis. Putting your head down and crying your way through elementary school is not a mental illness… —Franz Wright, “Pediatric Suicide” 31A Short History of My StupidityThe history of my stupidity would fill many volumes. —Czeslaw Milosz, “Account” Remembering the day of my suicide, I see myself at the hospital’s intake desk, holding in my nail-bitten hand a red and white health insurance card embossed with the seal of Harvard University. Veritas, it promises: Truth. Weighing in the low triple digits, I’m sheathed in a black knit minidress with a boat neck (Vogue headline: SUICIDE DRESSING: THE FINAL CHALLENGE). In sobriety, I haven’t so much gone insane as awakened to the depth and breadth of my preexisting insanity, a bone-deep sadness or a sense of having been a mistake. Maybe because I feel I am not now who I was then, I have to stare askance at that time, squint to see past clotted and curdled thunderheads to the initial instant of what then seemed like my last crash—a time I now call my nervous breakthrough. The woman who takes my insurance card has tangerine-colored nails and a soft Caribbean accent. She hands me a fistful of pink tissues and asks do I want some herb tea. She keeps some in her drawer. It’s Sunday, and the office is empty but for her and a guy in golf clothes in the corner. I want the tea but say no thank you, for that’s how I believe the human economy works—on some perverse system in which people who offer to do nice things for me are furtively pissed off by acceptance. So it’s better to refuse most kindnesses I come across, an interpretive model of human behavior that—it’s clear enough now—fosters the crappiest of conceivable attitudes in me. It’s no bother, she says. I’m getting some tea for myself.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (She’d die of liver cancer fifteen years later after a brief but brilliant legal career, medicated into a stupor, weighing near—no exaggeration—four hundred pounds, which size kept her off the transplant list.) Before I was twenty-two, I knew a spate of successful (is that the parlance?) suicides. On my childhood block, three fathers took the wrong end of a gun into their mouths. Of my six California roommates, I buried two as drug casualties. Quinn the Eskimo shot himself with the gun he’d brought to California to defend his old man’s honor. But Forsythe went most crazy of us all. On the beach, he’d picked up and brought her home a girl with a baby, and after the girl passed out in his room; he dumped a bag of pot all over the infant in its portable bassinet. Forsythe’s roommates found the walls scrawled with toothpaste, the baby wallowing in marijuana, and an album going on the turntable with a framed photo of Forsythe’s father propped up and circling. Within the year, Forsythe died in the family garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. Suicide as an idea seeps into your lungs like nerve gas. No precipitating event prompts my fixation on dying, just the dull racket of my head’s own Chihuahua-like bark—death death death. It becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be. Picking up a drink would betray everybody who’s poured effort into my sobriety—like my suicide wouldn’t? But death—now, there’s a one-stop-shopping idea. Over the months, I start to convince myself that Dev’ll be better off without me (a grotesquely self-indulgent notion no parent can afford). One Saturday morning, after sitting up all night rewriting a suicide note whose maudlin, pathetic details are thankfully lost to time, I take a call from Deb in the halfway house. She offers to buy me lunch. I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note made me feel good enough to have lunch. At some point, I confess that I have a garden hose and duct tape in my car trunk. She signals for the bill and stands, saying, C’mon, I’m checking you in to the bin right now. But I begin to backpedal and prevaricate. I’m joking, I say. She presses, and I press back. Warren could get custody of Dev if I go into the hospital. We may divorce, and he has all these lawyers in his family, and he’ll get custody.... Promise, she says, promise you’ll call or go to the hospital if you need to. The next day, after a sleepless night when the dead space inside me spread like spilled ink, I drive off under the cobalt blue summer sky with the garden hose in the back of my car. But with every small click of the odometer, my doubt grows, for starting to glow inside my shadowy rib cage like a relentless sun is Dev’s face. I can’t leave him the legacy of suicide, I think.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  nor the next. Instead our parents were stuck in games in which they were scolded, berated and denigrated for their plans to depart. “Are you crazy?” their peers demanded. How could they leave Synanon for the outside world that offered nothing? Nobody cared about you on the outside, life was tough, it was hard to get by. In Synanon they had everything they needed. All their friends were here. Just what in the hell were they thinking, taking Sara and me out of such a fantastic school and exposing us to mainstream society? They were throwing their daughters to the wolves. As time wore on and our parents worked on trying to make arrangements for themselves, the games became more aggressive. A week later, Sara and I listened, wordlessly, to one of the men from upper management yelling about our family on the Wire. “Theresa and Ray can get the fuck out! But Celena and Sara stay! They are Synanon kids and Synanon’s going to fight to keep them.” G CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO oodbye IT HAD NEVER OCCURRED to me that Theresa might leave Synanon without me. As Sara and I waited to hear our fate, my morale plummeted. I unpacked some of my clothes, but three or four boxes, mostly of books and writings, remained stacked between the twin beds of my loft bedroom. Following the announcement on the Wire, Theresa was nowhere to be seen. I could not imagine being in Synanon without her, never to see my mother again, never to rejoin the world to which I knew I belonged. Would I remain in Synanon forever? The demonstrators, not sure what to do, let me keep my belongings packed, just in case. I walked over to Sara’s cabin a few times every day to ask whether she knew anything I didn’t. She had kept her stuff packed, too, but had no extra information. After several days, she said, “We might have to stay.” “How do you know?” I asked. “Did you hear something?” She shook her head. “It’s just that it’s been a while, and I’m guessing Ray and Theresa are probably going to cancel their plans, or maybe they’ll get thrown out. I don’t know. But I don’t think they’re going to let

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She took me into the bathroom, where she wanted me to watch while she opened each bottle, emptied all my medications into the toilet and flushed the pills away. Those pills were prescribed to me, and I should have been weaned off them gradually. Going cold turkey put me into a sort of catatonic state for months. Everything felt foggy, and I couldn’t think clearly. I had a hard time following conversations, and life became like a strange dream. I spent most of my days scrubbing cooking pots and dirty dishes. In the evenings, there were games, but they were different from the games at the club. There was a lot of screaming, swearing and verbal attacks, and I was kind of mute through it all. People would attack me and I’d try to organize my thoughts, but I couldn’t seem to form coherent speech. I remember some guy calling another guy an asshole. That was the first time I’d heard that word, and the visual I got was stunning. Then, one day, the fog in my mind lifted and everything became clear and ordered again. I joined a conversation between two other people I happened to be sitting with, and they were both surprised. Everyone was used to me having little or nothing to say. Not too long after that, I started dating this young guy, Tom. He was maybe seventeen, I guess. I don’t remember how the relationship started, but I got a lot of flak for going with someone so young. Tom started talking up one of the other Synanon properties in Marin, the Tomales Bay property, where they had something called “boot camp.” He raved about how much fun boot camp was, what a great time he’d had there and that I should apply. After listening to him for a while, I thought maybe it would be nice to be outside in nature, working in the fresh air, so I applied. My application was accepted, but the “boot camp” wasn’t anything like what Tom had described. It wasn’t fun at all. “Boot camp” was more like labor camp. It was a lot of heavy ranch work, military marching and compulsory long runs, and then in the evenings, when I was completely exhausted, we had to play the game. I couldn’t have my own private thoughts or feelings. The Synanon people were always trying to get me to admit to stuff that I shouldn’t be thinking or feeling, and then they’d attack me for opening up. It was a constant teardown, and I started to really miss you, Celena. I felt miserable that I was separated from you. It was almost unbearable at times. That was when I started to think about leaving, and when I started to think about that, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t know how to leave.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὄλλῦμι, Soph. Ant. 673, Eur. Or. 1302, part. ὀλλύς Il. 8. 472, fem. pl. ὀλλῦσαι Ib. 449; also ὀλλύω, Archil. 23 (προσαπ-ολλύω Hdt. 1. 207) ; and poét. ὀλέκω, v. sub voc. :—impf. ὥλλυν Aesch., 3 pl. ὥλλυσαν Soph. O.C. 3943; Ep. ὀλέεσκον Q. Sm. 2. 414 (cf. ὄλεκω) ; ὥλεσκον Or. Sib. 1. 108:—fut. ὀλέσω Od. 13. 399, Hes. Op. 178; Ep. also ὀλέσσω Il. 12. 250, Od. 2. 49; Ion. ὀλέω (ἀπ--} Hdt. 1. 34, etc.; Att. ὀλῶ, εἴς, εἴ, Soph. O. T. 448, Eur.:—aor. ὥλεσα Il. 22. 107, Aesch., etc.; Ep. ὄλεσα, ὄλεσσα Od. 23. 319., 21. 284, etc. :—Med. ὄλλῦμαι, 1]. 20. 21, Soph. : impf. ὠλλύμην Soph., Eur.:—fut. ὀλέομαι, - οῦμαι, 2 pl. ὀλέεσθε 1]. 21.133; but 2 sing. ὀλεῖται 2. 325, as in Att.:—aor. 2 ὠλόμην, 3 sing. ὥλετο Il. 13. 722, Trag.; Ion. ὀλέσκετο (ἀπ-- Od. 11. 585}; part. ὀλό- μενος, as Adj., v. sub οὐλόμενος :--οἴ. ὄλωλα, ν. Β. UI; plqpf. ὀλώλειν II. 10. 187 :—Pass., aor. ὀλεσθῆναι, fut. ὀλεσθήσομαι (ἀπ--), LXXx, Galen., Lob. Phryn. 732.—The sireple Verb is confined to Poetry, except in late writers, as LxX ; ἀπόλλυμι being the form used in Comedy and correct Prose; cf. κτείνω ἀποκτείνω, θνήσκω ἀποθνήσκω. (The OA, which appears in ὀλ-έσαι, ὀλ-έσθαι, GA-wA-a, 6A-ods, has not been traced.) A. Act., like Lat. perdo, I. to destroy, make an end of, and of living beings, ¢o kil/, Hom., Pind., Trag.; of persons and things at once, νῆάς τ᾽ ὀλέσας Kal πάντας ᾿Αχαιούς 1]. ὃ. 498, Od. 23. 319; so, γένος ὀλέσσαι .. θανάτῳ Pind. P. 3. 71; γένος ὠλέσατε πρέμ- νοθεν Aesch. Theb. 1056; θανεῖται καὶ θανοῦσ᾽ ὀλεῖ τινά Soph. Ant. 751; ὀλεῖ μ᾽, ὀλεῖ με Eur. Andr. 856; ἀφιλοχρηματία Σπάρταν ὀλεῖ, ἄλλο γὰρ οὐδέν Orac. ap. Schém. ad Plut. Ages. 3 ;—also of doing away with evil, νῆστιν ὥλεσεν νόσον Aesch. Ag. 1017. II. to lose, often in Hom., θυμόν, ψυχήν, μένος, ἦτορ ὀλέσαι to Lose life, die; so, πόνον ὀρταλίχων ὀλέσαντες Aesch. Ag. 54; ἄγραν ὥλεσα Id. Eum. 148; Tas ἀνάνδρου κοίτας ὀλέσασα λέκτρον Eur. Med. 347. B. Med., like Lat. pereo, I. to perish, come to an end, and } | | ὁλμειός --- ὀλοόφρων.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ποτιφωνήεις, εσσα, ev, Dor. for προσφ-, also in Od. 9. 456. ποτιψαύω, Dor. for προσψ--, Pind. Fr. 86. 2. πότμος, ὁ, (4/IIET, alae) :—poét. word, that which befals one, one’s lot, destiny : 1. commonly of evil destiny, and often, like μοῖρα, μόρος, of death; so in Hom. always, either of the killer, πότμον ἐφεῖναι Il. 4. 396, Od. 19. 550; or of the killed, πότμον ἐπισπεῖν Il. 6. 412, Od. 2. 250, etc. ; he also joins θάνατον καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν Il. 2. 359., 20. 337, etc. ; more rarely θανεῖν καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν 1]. 7. 52, Od. 4. 562; ὀλόμην καὶ πότμον ἐπέσπον Od. 11.197 (cf. ἑτοῖμος) ; αἴ κε θάνῃς καὶ πότμον ἀναπλήσῃς βιότοιο 1]. 4: 170, cf. 11. 263 :—also in Pind. and Trag., as, πότμον ἐφάψαι --π. ἐφεῖναι, Pind. Ο. 9. 91; πότμον ἀμπί- πλαντες ὁμοῖον, of the Dioscuri who lived on alternate days, Id. N. Io. τού; πότμον εἴληχε βιότου Eur. 1. T. 914. 2. without a sense οἵ evil, π. συγγενής one’s natural gifts, Pind. N.5.74; εὐτυχεῖ π. Aesch. Pers, 709; καλλίπαις π. Id. Ag. 762, cf. 1005; π. ξυνήθης πατρός my father’s customary jortune, Soph. Tr. 88; π. ἄποτμος Eur. Hipp. 1144; θανεῖν ζηλωτὸς ἐν Ἑλλάδι π. Arist. Fr. 625. II. as a person, Destiny, Pind. P. 3. 153. [The first syll. always long in Hom., but sometimes short in late Ep., Jac. Anth. P. p. 572; commonly short in Att., but long in arsi, Soph. Tr. 88, Fr. 713:

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  “One cat per bowl.” The girls began to scream, and I took a step back, scrunching my clothes to hide the lump of the cat sleeping in my pocket. I let my arms hang by my sides. Buddy pried open each girl’s fingers, wrestling the kittens from their grip. One by one the cats were handed to the boy whose chest rose and fell rapidly, his face unreadable as he dropped each baby into the ammonia water. I watched their small bodies writhe until Buddy was standing over me. “That’s all of them,” I told him. “There were only four.” His gaze swept my body. Satisfied that I did not have a kitten, he sent us all outside. Trusting no one, I went to the Shed in search of a box, my hand inside my pocket curled around the sleeping cat. Willing myself not to cry, I searched the back kitchen area, pretending I had some business there. I found a medium-sized cardboard box, picked it up and took it back to my dorm, where I lined it with a blanket before I struck a path into the hills. Once I felt that I had hiked far enough, I sat down in the grass and pulled the mewing cat from my pocket, snuggling it under my chin as hot tears gathered in my eyes and splashed down, dampening its fur. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into its warm little body. Carefully I placed it into the box with the blanket, which I scrunched up for a nest. Hoping for the best, I left it. Later that evening the wind picked up, and to my horror rain began to pelt down onto the bunkhouse. The storm grew stronger, and I lay in bed sick with the thought of the kitten outside. During the night the wind howled and rain pummeled the building, at times with such force that it sounded as if it might break through the roof. The next morning, instead of going to breakfast after inspection, I ran directly up the hill to where I had left the kitten. The box had blown on its side. The blanket was soggy in the flattened, wet grass. The kitten lay still next to the blanket, its fur matted and slick against its body. I squatted, scooping it up, and found it was still alive. It mewed weakly in my hands as I blew warm air onto its cold little body and then slipped it under my shirt to transfer some of my body’s warmth to it. For a long time I sat on the damp ground trying to come up with some kind of plan. In the end I knew I could do nothing. There was nowhere to keep it safely, no place where it wouldn’t soon be discovered. I removed the kitten from my shirt and kissed its head. I had given it some warmth, and it was quiet.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  One piece of correspondence from her came in the form of a large heart cut from construction paper, with the words “I Love You” written in the center. When I read those words, I realized I did not want to live anymore. I did not want to be in Synanon. At my core, I felt abandoned. Carefully, underneath, I wrote “Good by Momy I Am Died” and sent the red heart back to her. When she questioned me about it later, embarrassment curdled my insides and I shrugged away from her scrutiny. So much time had elapsed that I’d moved beyond those feelings and further into my role as a Synanon kid. My earlier transgression seemed babyish and shamefully silly. Just before my eighth birthday, Theresa received approval from upper management to move from the Synanon San Francisco house to the Walker Creek property where I lived. Management had taken advantage of her passion for wanting to participate in the school by giving her a job that nobody wanted with the promise that after a few years she could work her way into the role of demonstrator. The job involved the care of a physically and mentally disabled girl named Gwyn, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. Because Theresa had questioned the lifestyle values of the school program, senior demonstrators wanted time to scrutinize her behavior. Her charge of Gwyn was a sort of probationary situation. During a game, Theresa’s suggestions that children spend more time with their parents and that parents be more involved in the school had settled in the VIPs’ addled minds like indigestion. They burped up their distaste in following games, spewing their disregard for her parenting philosophy. Her belief that children need to have a relationship with their parents was in direct conflict with Chuck’s theory and experiment of creating distance and obliterating focused parental love, which he believed only weakened the individual. However, Theresa was not deterred from speaking her mind on this issue. Although she received a lot of flak for her “ridiculous and dangerous” ideas, she continued to stick to her unpopular opinion. When Theresa could not be with me physically, she wrote; and when she visited, her visits were much longer than the usual parental visit. It seemed that every chance she had, she wanted to remind me that I was her daughter and that she deeply cared for me. Her love, when she could parcel it to me in the form of a quick kiss, wave or chat if we crossed paths, emotionally sustained me in the school’s otherwise psychically erosive environment. I knew I was loved, and it helped me hold myself together. Once Theresa and I were living on the same property, we began spending as much time together as we could. There were many weekends when she arranged for us to go on a picnic or have a sleepover.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Eyes open, sleep had found her anyway. She let out a low mournful whimper. “I want to go to bed. Oh, God, I want to go to bed.” “Shut up! We’re in a stew. Carla said you aren’t keeping your room tight.” Her mouth hung open, her eyes stayed glassy. “My room,” she whispered, trying to follow. Another kid jumped in to help steer things around, bring us back from the dead. “Your room? You’re a pig! When I lived with you, I was always getting in trouble.” I blinked again. Jesus. My neck felt like it was going to snap off. How many more hours till the sun came up? We played endlessly. Those who dozed were slapped awake. “Play the game! Play the fucking game!” Hallucinations of dark shapes clouded my vision. When I closed my eyes for a blessed moment of rest, an electric static raged behind my lids. We were finally sent to our beds at six in the morning, yet I couldn’t sleep. I lay exhausted in my bed, my body humming and crackling, beyond fatigue. During a routine back-to-basics, I was assigned to help Theresa in the laundry room as well as babysit three three-year-olds. Back and forth I carted mounds of linens in a large, square-shaped laundry basket on wheels. I loaded the basket with dirty sheets and then piled the small children on top, pushing my heavy load to the laundry room, where Theresa continuously folded when she was not loading or unloading linens from the machines. The clean, expertly folded sheets went into large, white mesh laundry bags that were placed back into the cart, which I then wheeled, the children atop, to the various adult bunkhouses. At one point when Theresa had to go somewhere, she asked whether I could watch Gwyn as well. Reluctantly, I agreed. It didn’t take long before I became frustrated with Gwyn’s slow walk. After my constant prodding for her to please walk a little faster, she stopped and stubbornly wouldn’t budge. “Let’s go,” I said. “I have things to do.” She refused to move. Instead her lips snaked into the side smile that I knew so well. It was the look of a certain willful mischievousness that overtook her normally bland expression, the same smile that rose crookedly on her narrow little face when she purposely knocked things over to make more work for Theresa. Furious that I had to deal with her at all, I jabbed my finger at her face. “Listen, you fucking retard. You need to move now!” In one moment she leered at me and in the next her mouth had clamped down on my finger. It happened so fast I had no time to react. She bit hard. I thought she might take my finger off. Terrified, I screamed and smacked at her forehead, which seemed harder than rock, while the three-year-olds gripped the edge of the laundry cart, their eyes wide.