Excitement

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 Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Just off the mats at Hempstead High, he appears utterly relaxed, now clowning with his teammates in the bleachers, now putting in the earbuds of his MP3 player to listen to music, waiting for the opening bracket of the 171-pound class to finally come around. He gets to go to work today. At this point, that is all he asks. Jay has been here before. Nobody has to tell him how to deal. When the time for his first match comes, Jay is ready, bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet, his calf muscles flexing with each movement, upper body loose, arms already well into rehearsals of his moves. Jay switches from court jester to mat dominator with a speed that even his super-senior buddies find severe; you could get whiplash watching him morph from the guy with the tattered T-shirt and the squirt-bottle of water into the three-time state champ who is chasing his Iowa immortality. He is on the mat for barely 30 seconds before pinning his first opponent, a complete testament to the kind of day it is going to be for Jay. The early rounds aren’t always pretty for a top seed, anyway, wrestling against kids who haven’t yet arrived in terms of match readiness, but Jay is especially focused here. He has his friends here today, his wrestling peers. These are the people for whom he had better bring out his best game to show off. Jay wouldn’t have it any other way. Up on the catwalk above the action, Kevin McCauley smiles and shakes his head in light wonder. This is what McCauley stayed around for as a coach, to see days like these, with Jay on the floor tearing a tournament bracket inside out and all the people on hand to witness just how magnificent a wrestler he can be. Jay is so quick for his size and almost impossible to turn over, and yet he prefers an offensive match. He likes to attack, not to stand still. He loves the action of wrestling, not the nuance—but he gets them both, understands them almost instinctively. And Kevin, one of the people who helped develop that instinct in Jay, has stayed around to see the best of it. As a coach, McCauley had one foot out the door at the end of last season. A former Linn-Mar wrestler himself, Kevin looked up one day and realized that, nearing age 40, he had spent more than a dozen years shaping and caring for other people’s kids in the wrestling room—that in addition to his duties for the school district, working with at-risk students. Now, with two young children and a third on the way, Kevin’s own family needed his attention. His wife was a nurse, and she had discovered that she could receive full-time pay and benefits by working two full-shift details at the hospital through the weekends, essentially cramming a week’s work into two long days.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "This is over!" he repeated. 'It must come to an end! I'm wasting, I'm getting bogged down, I'm getting sillier than Christian!' Oh, it was infinitely thankful that he wasn't in ignorance of how things were with him! It was now in his hands to correct himself! By force!... Let's see... let's see... what was the offer that had been made to him? The harvest... The Pöppenrader harvest on the stalk? "I'll do it!" he said in a passionate whisper, even shaking a hand outstretched index finger. "I will do it!" Wasn't it what you call a coup? An opportunity to quite simply - and to put it a little exaggeratedly - double a capital of, say, forty thousand Kurantmarks?... Yes, it was a pointer, a nod to get up! It was a start, a first blow, and the risk involved was just one more refutation of all moral scruples. If it succeeded, then he was restored, then he would dare again, then he would hold the fortune and power again with those inner elastic clamps... No, unfortunately this catch would elude Messrs. Strunck & Hagenström! There was a local company that in this case had the upper hand because of personal connections!... In fact, the personal was the decisive factor here. It was no ordinary business, done coolly and in the usual manner. Rather, as initiated through Tony's mediation, it had more or less the character of a private matter to be treated with discretion and commitment. Oh no, Hermann Hagenström would hardly have been the man for it!... Thomas used the business cycle as a businessman and also when selling, later, by God, he would know how to use it! On the other hand, however, he performed a service for the beleaguered squire, to which he alone was called, through Tony's friendship with Frau von Maiboom. So write . A tricky thing anyway. A somewhat slippery ground, on which one had to move with some grace... All the more for him! And his steps became even quicker, his breathing deeper. He sat down for a moment, jumped up and wandered through all the rooms again. He thought the whole thing through again, he thought of Mr. Marcus, of Hermann Hagenström, Christian and Tony, saw the yellow-ripe harvest from Pöppenrade swaying in the wind, fantasized about the general upswing of the company that would follow this coup, angrily dismissed all misgivings shook his hand and said, "I'll do it!" Frau Permaneder opened the door to the dining room and called out: "Good night!" He answered without knowing it. Gerda, to whom Christian had said goodbye at the front door, came in and her strange, close-set brown eyes had that enigmatic gleam that music tends to give them.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  In the time of the last Duke Charles there was at Alengon an advocate named Antoine Bacheret, a merry companion, and fond of breakfasting o' mornings. One day, as he was sitting before his door, he saw a gentle- man pass whose name was Monsieur de la Tireliere. He had come on foot upon business he had in town, and the day being cold, he had not forgotten to take with him his great robe, lined with foxskin. Seeing the advocate, who was much such a man as himself, he asked him how he was getting on, and observed that a good breakfast would not amiss. The advocate replied that a breakfast would be found soon enough, provided some- one could be found to pay for it. Thereupon La Tire- liere took him by the arm, saying, " Come along, gaffer, perhaps we shall fall in with some fool who will pay for us both." There happened to be behind them an apothecary's man, a cunning and inventive young fellow, whom the advocate was perpetually making game of. That mo- ment the thought of having his revenge came into his head, and without going more than ten steps out of his way, he found behind a house a fine, big sir reverence, well and duly frozen, which he wrapped up so neatly in paper that it might be taken for a small sugar-loaf. He then looked out for his men, and passing them like a person in great haste, entered a house, and let fall the sugar-loaf from his sleeve, as if inadvertently. The S:x/i dn:] QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 433 advocate picked it up with great glee, and said to La Tireliere, " This clever fellow shall pay our scot ; but let us be off quickly for fear he comes back."

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Around the Wyoming gym, followers from several different schools have diverted their attention to the LeClere-Bader match—a one-point lead in the final seconds, after all, is one of the most electrifying scenes in the sport, and Nick hasn’t been tested this severely in what feels like forever. Bader thrashes and yanks in his effort to get the match back to even, his fans screaming encouragement. Nick won’t budge. He has locked on to his opponent and decided simply to ride out the storm. Bader strains; he claws. His mule-kicking is not enough. Nick is taking this one home. The referee’s whistle blows to end the match, and Doug flies off his chair to congratulate his son. Nick, even though he has another huge match to wrestle today, willingly accepts his father’s hug. “OK, then,” Nick says with a smile. It is, after all—and considering everything—a hell of an accomplishment at a critical time. It isn’t too late for Nick to do something wonderful this season. Taking the mat after Nick, Tyler Burkle goes into the third period and then pins his opponent, earning himself a championship match against Ryan Morningstar. But after Burkle, another trial faces North-Linn. Shannon Hocken, a senior at 171 pounds who has never made State, runs into trouble in the form of a Tipton wrestler, who locks Shannon up and puts him on his back for a pin almost before anyone knows what has happened. Shannon, a good wrestler who has had a good season, gets up stunned and hurt and walks back to the sideline to sit down. He needs to figure out what went wrong, because he needs to get it right in time to salvage this last chance to wrestle in the Barn. Alas, he is going to spend this day learning precisely how distant Des Moines can feel. Around the North-Linn team, Doug is manic. He can’t sit still, isn’t comfortable standing. He paces for a while and then goes back to sitting for a few seconds, repeating the cycle through the day. Doug worries over his sons, Nick more so than Dan, but he’s also a North-Linn guy through and through. He wrestled here. He was part of the first great migratory group of Lynx wrestlers to the State Tournament. This is his program. Oh, sure, Brad coaches it, and it is clear that Doug has good feelings not only about Bridgewater but also about the job Brad is doing in planting and growing the North-Linn program. As Larry Henderson remembers it, it wasn’t but a decade ago that the school district considered the wrestling team so diminished that it discussed combining the program with some other school’s to produce one presumably more competitive unit. Such mergers now are common among the smaller programs across the state, but the transaction would have driven a stake through the heart of any true North-Linn fan. Doug also nods approvingly at Bridgewater’s practices, so lengthy and demanding.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Once you hear, over the vaguely corroded PA system, the name of a wrestler you want to cheer from any vantage point closer than your upper-level seat, you basically just tear downstairs and elbow your way past the folks standing stump-like around the retaining ropes; and on any night other than Finals Night you can, within perhaps a minute or two of decent scrumming, find yourself within a few feet of the wrestlers themselves, going at it on one of the multicolored mats spread about the floor. You can see and hear everything, even amid the din of eight separate matches and a series of announcements all going off at the same time. You can shout very specific instructions—“Single leg! Single leg! Work it! Drive him!”—at your guy. You can wildly and profanely insult the other team’s wrestler without any real concern over retaliation, a fact which Jay already understands pretty well, considering the number of times through the years he has been called a faggot or a queer—or sometimes, even, an overrated wrestler—by the various loons in the crowd. At the Barn, you can pretty much do as you like. But best of all is this: If somebody either achieves the pinnacle of his fantasies or flames out in a spectacular, soul-crushing defeat, you are right there to witness the kill. You don’t need to strain in order to hear what comes out of the losers, the people who have just had their hearts ripped apart with their parents looking on. You get to hear the testosterone-fueled screams of the winners, the ones moving forward—the kids who still can see the horizon lines of their hopes. You can watch young people uncontrollably burst into tears right in front of you, or leap into the arms of their coaches in a post-victory delirium. Maybe, if you are extremely fortunate, you will see a boy quietly remove his wrestling shoes and leave them in the middle of the mat—a compelling and emotional symbolic announcement of his retirement from the sport, right there on the spot, seconds after completing his final struggle. And if either Dan or Jay should somehow screw up this time—well then, the Barn will bear witness to his failure and, simultaneously, to that great moment of ascendance in some other young wrestler’s career. Whoever beats one of these guys is going to be anointed a star. For early arrivals at the State Wrestling Tournament (and they’re all pretty much early arrivals), the sense of time having slowed a little is always near. The fans file inside to the sounds of Foghat and Van Halen being pumped through the building. The tickets cost seven dollars, and with the exception of Finals Night they cannot be purchased beforehand. The people drive from their hometowns, Wapello or Mapleton or Council Bluffs, and check in at the hotels they have had to reserve months in advance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I have omitted to mention the smell, which as soon as the ship docked & the wind it made was stilled, rose to the nostrils from the land. ‘Ah, the East!’ Harrap had said connoisseurially. It is not a smell one could anticipate, or even much care for in itself, but I relished its authenticity at once—a dusty dryness, & a sweetness, a foetor, as it might be near some perpetual meat-market, a smell utterly unhygienic and inevitable. The other streets here might have borne exploring, but I was thirsty & went to sit in the shade of the tea-terrace. The tea, served impractically in a glass, was refreshing, somehow muddy & more sustaining than tea I am used to. All the while there was Sinai, very hazily apparent in the distance, & near to the spectacle of the ship being refuelled, which is done by an endless chain of Egyptians, some in blue or white djellabas, others naked but for a knotted nappy around the loins, lean, by & large, & sinewy. All the while they pass on baskets of coal, their foreman leading them in monotonous chanting, a call raised, a general echoing response, the words, indistinguishable to my Oxford Arabic, intensifying the impression of changeless pharaonic labour. Meanwhile on the quay, & even for a while from the bows of the ship until an official stopped them, three or four youths, virtually naked & entrancingly wild & fearless, were diving for coins. As I sat & watched them, my pleasure & fascination evident perhaps in my gaze, a handsome young man with the immemorial flat, broad features of the Egyptian, a blue djellaba & a circular embroidered hat that made him look like an exotic afterthought of Tiepolo, sidled among the tables towards me, half-concealing behind him a battered valise. I had been thoroughly trained to expect him & his inevitable offers of fake antiquities, but as I was still alone—the others not yet having arrived at the rendezvous—& in my mood of exultant curiosity & celebration, I let him approach. The major-domo, I noticed, kept an eye out for my reaction, & when I did not object, looked at the youth in a way which suggested some sinister understanding between them, as if, the protocol of deference having been observed, I was now a legitimate victim of their antique trade. ‘You see Lesseps statue, m’sieu,’ he said, standing over me solicitously. ‘No, no,’ I replied tolerantly. ‘Is very good, m’sieu. You like. You like, I take you. Only 50 piastres. Is most instructive.’ ‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, but with an amused look, I suppose, which may have encouraged him—if encouragement were needed—to carry on. He hoisted his case up then on to the table, although I raised a hand to promise him it was no use.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Iowa led the nation in the per-capita obtaining of college undergraduate degrees, and it was said to be the No. 2 book-reading state in the union. The kids show up for school and actually learn something, and they have the diplomas to show for it. Today, Sunday, driving along the snow-blanketed roads that lead to Troy Mills and eventually over to the high school, it is a jolt to come upon a North-Linn parking lot that is absolutely packed, to the point of cars hanging off its edges and parked at all sorts of squeeze-in angles. This is the day of the Little Lynx tournament, a chance for kids from kindergarten through eighth grade to come find competition against like-minded wrestlers. These are the ones who’d rather be inside sweating and grunting than outside in the snow—or, at the very least, the children of parents who feel that way. Inside the North-Linn gymnasium, the world is a blur of color and action and—to put it plainly—the piercing shrieks of the wrestling moms and dads. They say that you haven’t experienced the mania of wrestling until you have seen its littlest practitioners in action, but it’s their parents who put on the real show. There is probably a doctoral thesis in practical psychology to be written about the gyrations and dramatics of the parents, some of whom have come to the conclusion that their 5-year-olds are on track for college scholarships despite their never having wrestled competitively before. They dream of kids who are young and know a few moves but who will become, in time, quicker, stronger, more tolerant of pain. They will become technicians of the sport. They will see two moves ahead of their opponents, like a great shortstop anticipating where a ground ball is likely to be placed by a particular hitter. The parents see these little tykes in the gym on Sunday and they do not see children wrestling on a mat. They see, many of them, a future. In Iowa, the kids’ clubs provide the foundation for almost every top-level wrestler at every class of high school competition. They get the boys early and teach them right, a formula that would come as no surprise to anyone who has ever run a Little League baseball team or a CYO basketball league. Sports are about traditions handed down and coaching secrets passed along early, and it happens that in Iowa, wrestling matters exactly enough for it to be treated with the same care and ultimate respect as the major sports might be anywhere else. The kids clubs are no joke. They are the seeds of serious sport, and they will someday sprout champions. The gym is overflowing with wrestlers and coaches and families, the older athletes working not only on behalf of their schools but as a sort of living example of what the young wrestlers might aspire to.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I kept him at it for about an hour, never stopping as, under the DJ’s gurgling patter, the rhythms of one track, clean and fierce, cut across and then went under the rhythms of the next. It was a sport, where exhaustion was only a spur to more effort, the blood-opiates sang through the system, lap succeeded lap. On the floor there was competition, more athletic than sexual, and I would find myself challenged, magnetised by strangers, drawn into faster and faster action, though no words were said, we affected not even to look at each other. And some of the kids there could dance. Sometimes a ring would suddenly form around one or two of them, and we hung on each other’s shoulders to see them—their brief, fizzy routines of backward handsprings, jack-knife jumps and other crazy things. Boy after boy would follow, explode in action, stumble back into obscurity; and then the ring would dissolve, the crowd would repossess the floor. At last Phil rocked to a stop and gestured for drink. I gasped ‘Lager’ in his ear. Both of us were parched—and all wet outside, so that his hair, when I roughed it and sent him off, stood up, and the bristly back of his neck glistened as if it had been dressed. I lurched off the dance floor and into Stan. Stan was a colossal Guyanan bodybuilder, not only gigantically muscular but six feet six inches tall. ‘Love the arse on your chum,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching him.’ ‘Heaven, isn’t it?’ ‘Yeah. Where d’you find that then?’ ‘I took him under my wing at the Corry.’ He craned to see where Phil had got to in the further spotlit half-dark. ‘Still go there then?’ ‘Daily. You should come back. We all miss seeing you.’ Stan smiled sweetly and said, ‘I bet you fucking do.’ His mouth, like the rest of him, was vast, so that when he laughed it seemed his whole head would open up like a canteen of cutlery. I had met him at the Corry during my first Oxford vac and fooled about with him rather unsatisfactorily in an alley off the Tottenham Court Road. I remember how struck I was by the contrast of his rocky physique and the beautiful, almost smothering softness of his lips. A term later he had left, for some north London gym more suited to his championship needs. But I would run into him from time to time in clubs and bars, and though we had nothing much in common I seemed to charm him somehow, so that despite his superhuman body he was slightly in awe of me. I rested a hand on the side of his neck, whose shaft, thicker than his head, was buttressed by the gathered, sloping muscles of his shoulders.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After some efficient sex, we had a glass of Pimm’s and sat on the window-seat in the evening sun. The air was streaming with seeds, to which Colin was sensitive, and after sneezing and screwing up his eyes for a few minutes, he announced that he had to go. I was not sorry; my mind was already running on to the prospect of opening the bag and getting a feel of what lay ahead. When I closed the door of the flat behind Colin, there the bag was, where I had propped it on a chair before making a grab at him. Retrieving it now, I saw how disrespectful I had been to cast it so hastily aside for the sake of that good but rather professional and chilly trick. I took the bag into the dining-room, tugged open its straps and pulled the contents on to the table. I closed the window to prevent papers from blowing round; since Arthur’s disappearance I had been a fiend for light and fresh air. The main part of the archive was a set of quarto notebooks, bound in brown boards, rubbed and worn at the edges—most of them with a clear ink inscription on the front cover; ‘Oxford, 1920’ and ‘1924: Khartoum’ were the first two I picked up. They were written in a fast, elegant and not especially legible hand, in black ink, and there were odd items tucked between the pages—postcards, letters, drawings, even hotel bills and visiting cards. There was also a fat five-year diary, of the kind which can be locked, with other letters and documents, and a large buff envelope bulky with photographs. I drew up a chair at once to look at these, as I believed they would be, although enigmatic, the keys or charms to open the whole case to me. There were snapshots, group photographs and studio portraits, all mixed up together. A mounted picture of a set of cocky young men was captioned ‘University Shooting VIII, 1921’ in the amateur Gothic script still favoured at Oxford for matriculation and team photos. After a bit I was sure that one of the standing figures, a big boy with swept-back glossy hair and an appealing smirk, must be Charles. The face was far leaner than now, and his whole person seemed well set-up; I had seen him less and less in control of his life, and was surprised for a moment to find a young man who would have known how to have a good time. He appeared again in a more studied portrait, where he was less handsome: the spontaneity and camaraderie, perhaps, of the shooting photo had animated him into beauty.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The colours were very subdued, the white almost a light brown, the reds rusty like dried blood. ‘Now, what do you make out?’ I thought about it; it was evidently a Roman pavement—a relic of some riverside palace or temple? I knew nothing about Roman London, had forgotten all but a handful of images from some illustrated lectures that Gavin had given several years before. In the top quarter was a large bearded face, with open mouth and the vestiges of neck and shoulders above a broad rent in the fabric where the tesserae merged into the restorer’s grey cement. To the left at the bottom stylised fish shapes, like an emblem of Pisces, could be made out, sliding past each other; and to the right, and above, the upper parts of two figures could be seen, the one in front turning to the one behind with open, choric mouth as they dissolved into the nothingness beyond the broken edge of the pavement. ‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment ; and here are these young boys going swimming.’ I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’ ‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit. ‘And what’s happened to it now?’ ‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here …’ I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said. ‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid—when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas? ’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He asked me about the trip, if I was hungry, if I wanted to go straight to the hotel or explore a bit first, though of course he already knew my answer to these questions. It was a short drive to the hotel he had chosen, a nice place, he said, very close to the sea. And it was nice, in a faded way, two old houses around a courtyard on a narrow street off the city’s main square, the pedestrian avenue leading to the sea. There was a single attendant, an old man who came out of his booth, a glassed-in porch attached to one of the buildings, to greet us. He and Mitko shook hands warmly, and I wondered what their relationship was, whether Mitko came here often with men, whether perhaps they had some arrangement. Our room was shabby and spacious, on the first floor with large windows that faced the street and were inadequate against the wind. There was a stand-alone radiator against one of the walls, and Mitko went over to it and switched it on; he must have been chilled to the bone from his wait. He sat on top of it, sighing with pleasure as it warmed. Without getting up, he reached to the old television against the wall and flipped through the few channels, stopping at a station playing videos of Balkan pop-folk songs; he hummed along, wagging his head from side to side with the jagged rhythms as he fiddled with my iPod, which I had set on the bedside table when we arrived and which he immediately snatched up. It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t the same device that had so fascinated him in Sofia, and when I told him that that one had been stolen, that a man had taken it from me during an encounter, he shook his head in sympathy—such is the world—and then his features hardened. When I’m in Sofia, he said, we’ll look for him, you show me who he is and I’ll take care of him. Samo da go vidya i do tam.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It had all been so rapid and inevitable that it was only when he was breathing regularly and we had laid him down on a coat and done up his fly that I felt shaken by a surge of delayed elation. I raced up the steps into mild sunshine and hung around waiting for the ambulance, unable to stop grinning, my hands trembling. Even so, it was too soon to understand. I told myself that I had scooped someone back from the threshold of death, but that seemed incommensurate with the simple routine I had followed, the vital little drill retained from childhood along with all the more complex knowledge that would never prove so useful—convection, sonata form, the names of birds in Latin and French. The Corinthian Club in Great Russell Street is the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s. I remember he carried on in a pompous and incongruous way, having recently, and as if by mistake, been awarded a knighthood. Even as a child I saw him as a fraud and a hotchpotch, and I was delighted, when I joined the Club and learned that he had designed it, to discover just the same qualities in his architecture. Like Orme himself, the edifice is both mean and self-important; a paradox emphasised by the modest resources of the Club in the 1930s and its conflicting aspiration to civic grandeur. As you walk along the pavement you look down through the railings into an area where steam issues from the ventilators and half-open toplights of changing-rooms and kitchens; you hear the slam of large institutional cooking trays, the hiss of showers, the inane confidence of radio disc-jockeys. The ground floor has a severe manner, the Portland stone punctuated by green-painted metal-framed windows; but at the centre it gathers to a curvaceous, broken-pedimented doorway surmounted by two finely developed figures—one pensively Negroid, the other inspiredly Caucasian—who hold between them a banner with the device ‘Men Of All Nations’. Before answering this call, step across the street and look up at the floors above. You see more clearly that it is a steel-framed building, tarted up with niches and pilasters like some bald fact inexpertly disguised. At the far corner there is a tremendous upheaving of cartouches and volutes crowned by a cupola like that of some immense Midland Bank. Finances and inspiration seem to have been exhausted by this, however, and alongside, above the main cornice of the building, rises a two-storey mansard attic, containing the cheap accommodation the Club provides in the cheapest possible form of building. On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put out their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Dobre , I said, okay, so I’ll help you, you don’t need to worry. Some tension I hadn’t quite registered in him released as he smiled, and I realized that he had been worried, unsure whether my feeling for him would stretch so far. Thank you, he said, and then, you are a true friend, istinski priyatel , and I was disconcerted by the pleasure I took in his saying it. Mitko turned his attention back to the food on his tray, what was left of it, determined not to let anything go to waste. Wanting to get away from him for a moment, I pushed my chair back and stood, saying I would be right back. The bathroom was near the table we had chosen, just across from the locked playroom that seemed to me so oddly baleful. It was small, with a single stall and urinal and a sink mounted against the wall. I stepped up to the urinal, fishing myself out for form’s sake but feeling no urgency to piss; I closed my eyes instead and breathed deeply, grateful to be free from Mitko and what he had made me feel, that pleasure that was too sharp. I would wonder, later, whether that feeling itself was an invitation for what happened next, whether I allowed Mitko to see it; but I don’t think so, I think I was surprised when I heard or felt the door open, felt more than heard, I think, the tiny shift in pressure, the resistance of the air collapsing like my own resistance, which was swept aside when I felt the sudden warmth of Mitko behind me. I had known it was he when the door opened, it never occurred to me it could be anyone else, as it never occurred to me to tell him to stop, or occurred with so little force it was lost in the sweep of my excitement. There wasn’t a lock on the door, we could have been interrupted, and maybe the risk heightened my pleasure as Mitko pressed his whole length against me, placing his feet beside mine and leaning his torso into my spine, his breath hot on my neck. This was reality, I felt with a strange relief, this was where I belonged, and I thought of R., though it shames me to recall it, as though our life together, open and sunlit and lasting, were entirely without substance; I felt it disappear, simply disappear, like a flammable shadow, and part of me was glad to feel it go.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And I don't doubt that I also intended to best my father on his own grou nd. Anyway, very shortly after I joined the church, I became a preacher a Young Minister-and I remained in the pulpit for more than three years. My youth quickly made me a much bigger draw ing card than my father. I pushed this advantage ruthlessly, for it was the most effective means I had found of breaking his hold over me. That was the most frightening time of my life, and quite the most dishonest, and the resulting hysteria lent great passion to my sermons-for a while. I relished the attention and the relative immu nity from punishment that my new status gave me, and I relished, above all, the sudden right to privacy. It had to be recog nized, af ter all, that I was still a schoolboy, with my schoolwork to do, and I was also expected to prepare at least one sermon a week. During what we may 306 THE FIR E NE XT TIME call my heyday, I preached much more often than that. This meant that there were hours and even whole days when I could not be interrupted-not even by my father. I had im mobilized him . It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever. The chur ch was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. Ther e is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and cry ing holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfig ured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Lead belly and so many other s have testified, to "ro ck."

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Mitko seemed eager, too, full of an energy that propelled him forward, and as we walked down Vasil Levski toward Graf Ignatief, crossing innumerable side streets and alleyways, more than once I had to grab his arm and, saying to him again Chakai chakai chakai , pull him back from oncoming traffic. When we turned onto Graf Ignatief, he stopped in front of the many electronics stores and pawnshops, evaluating the products laid out in their windows. I was surprised by how much he knew about these phones and tablets, his monologues punctuated by English words for the various devices’ specs, pixels and memory cards and battery life, information he must have gleaned from the advertisements and brochures he picked up wherever they were offered. I tried to hurry him along, impatient to get home and uneasy at what seemed more and more like hints, especially when Mitko told me that his current phone, a model he clearly hoped to upgrade, was a gift from one of his friends. This word, podaruk , gift, would recur again and again in Mitko’s conversation that evening, applied, it seemed, to nearly everything he owned. Finally we came to the end of Graf Ignatief, and as we approached the small river that circles central Sofia, really little more than a drainage ditch, Mitko said Chakai malko , wait a little, and stepped off the sidewalk toward the sparse vegetation at the river’s bank. I walked on a few steps, then turned to look back at him, though I could barely make him out (it was dark now, the autumn night had fallen as we walked) as he stood at the bank to relieve himself into the water. He seemed entirely unconcerned by the passersby, the heavy traffic on one of Sofia’s busiest streets; and when he caught me watching him, he stuck his tongue out and wagged his cock in his hand, sending his piss in high arcs over the water, where it glimmered in the lights of oncoming cars.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But enough of me. How are you?’ ‘In a strange position.’ ‘Tiring of His Speechlessness the Khedive of Tower Hamlets?’ ‘Oh—no, that’s all over ages ago.’ ‘Oh …’ A veneer of commiseration covered a discernible pleasure at the news. I chose not to expand on it. ‘No, it’s my queer peer, you remember? He wants me to write his life.’ James gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘Whitewash, I imagine?’ I considered this. ‘I think not, actually. He talks of handing over diaries, telling all.’ ‘But what is there to tell?’ ‘I think a lot. I’ve just been to see his memorabilia. It’s all very suggestive. He was in Africa for a long time, I gather. It’s the queer side, though, which would give it its interest. I have the feeling that’s what he wants made known.’ ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Nantwich, Lord, Charles.’ ‘Oh really,’ said James irritatingly. ‘Well, it would be interesting, then.’ ‘You know about him?’ I stumbled. Because he had come into my life up the back-stairs, I had fatuously assumed that no one else could have heard him announced. ‘A certain amount. He’s the sort of chap who crops up in the lives of other people. Kind of diplomatic-artistic, Harold Nicolsony circles. In fact, he must be about the last person in those circles not to have had his life written. You must do it.’ ‘Well, I’m glad I asked you. I’ll get reading.’ ‘He’s surely incredibly old.’ ‘Eighty-three, he claims. He wanders rather, and it’s hard to tell what’s what and what, as it were, isn’t.’ ‘What’s his house like, frightfully grand?’ ‘Frightfully grandish. Very nice, actually—stuffed with pictures, blacks, for the most part. He has a somewhat terrifying servant who’s horrible to him and looks like a criminal. I must say I’ve become rather fond of the old boy. He has a Roman mosaic in the cellar and there are rather awful decorations of Romans with great big willies, Tom of Finland avant la lettre , but not what you expect to see in the homes of the aristocracy. Lord Beckwith, certainly, would frown on them …’ ‘It’s too exciting. I’ll look some things up for you when I go home.’ I didn’t sleep well that night. It was hot enough to sleep without any covering, but I woke in the small hours feeling just perceptibly cold.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by Myers and Hooks at the trial. I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would become the most significant break in the case. The voice said, “Mr. Stevenson, this is Ralph Myers.” Our secretary had told me there was a “Mr. Miles” on the phone, so I was a little shocked to hear Ralph Myers on the other end of the line. Before I could compose myself, he spoke again. “I think you need to come and see me. I have something I need to tell you,” he said dramatically. Myers was imprisoned at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, and Michael and I made plans to meet him there in three days. Michael and I had started running a few miles at night after work to help us wind down from the increasingly long work days. Montgomery has a beautiful park that houses the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which brings nationally acclaimed playwrights and actors to Alabama to perform Shakespeare and modern theatrical productions. The theater is set among hundreds of acres of beautifully maintained parkland with lakes and ponds. There are several trails for running. That evening we spent most of our run speculating about what Myers would tell us. “Why would Myers call us now?” Michael asked. “Can you imagine just going into a courtroom and straight-up making up a story that puts an innocent man on death row? I’m not sure we can trust anything he says.” “Well, you may be right, but he had a lot of help in putting together that testimony. Remember, they also put Myers on death row to coerce some of those statements. Who knows? He may be in touch with the State now, and this is some kind of setup where they are trying to mislead us.” I hadn’t seriously considered that possibility until our run that night. I thought again about how sleazy Myers had been during the trial. “We have to be careful to not reveal information to Myers—just get information he has. But we have to talk to him because if he recants his trial testimony, the State has nothing on Walter.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It had all been so rapid and inevitable that it was only when he was breathing regularly and we had laid him down on a coat and done up his fly that I felt shaken by a surge of delayed elation. I raced up the steps into mild sunshine and hung around waiting for the ambulance, unable to stop grinning, my hands trembling. Even so, it was too soon to understand. I told myself that I had scooped someone back from the threshold of death, but that seemed incommensurate with the simple routine I had followed, the vital little drill retained from childhood along with all the more complex knowledge that would never prove so useful—convection, sonata form, the names of birds in Latin and French. The Corinthian Club in Great Russell Street is the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s. I remember he carried on in a pompous and incongruous way, having recently, and as if by mistake, been awarded a knighthood. Even as a child I saw him as a fraud and a hotchpotch, and I was delighted, when I joined the Club and learned that he had designed it, to discover just the same qualities in his architecture. Like Orme himself, the edifice is both mean and self-important; a paradox emphasised by the modest resources of the Club in the 1930s and its conflicting aspiration to civic grandeur. As you walk along the pavement you look down through the railings into an area where steam issues from the ventilators and half-open toplights of changing-rooms and kitchens; you hear the slam of large institutional cooking trays, the hiss of showers, the inane confidence of radio disc-jockeys. The ground floor has a severe manner, the Portland stone punctuated by green-painted metal-framed windows; but at the centre it gathers to a curvaceous, broken-pedimented doorway surmounted by two finely developed figures—one pensively Negroid, the other inspiredly Caucasian—who hold between them a banner with the device ‘Men Of All Nations’. Before answering this call, step across the street and look up at the floors above. You see more clearly that it is a steel-framed building, tarted up with niches and pilasters like some bald fact inexpertly disguised. At the far corner there is a tremendous upheaving of cartouches and volutes crowned by a cupola like that of some immense Midland Bank. Finances and inspiration seem to have been exhausted by this, however, and alongside, above the main cornice of the building, rises a two-storey mansard attic, containing the cheap accommodation the Club provides in the cheapest possible form of building. On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put out their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I received a surprising call one day from the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, who told me that EJI had been selected for the Olof Palme International Human Rights Award. They invited me to Stockholm to receive it. I had studied Sweden’s progressive approach to the rehabilitation of criminal offenders as a graduate student and had long marveled at how focused on recovery their system appeared. Their punishments were humane, and their policymakers took rehabilitation of criminal offenders very seriously, which made me excited about the award and the trip. That they were giving an award named after a beloved prime minister who had been tragically murdered by a deranged man to someone who represented people on death row revealed a lot about their values. The trip to Stockholm was planned for January. They sent a film crew to interview me a month or two before the trip, and the crew also wanted to speak with a few clients. I made arrangements for them to interview Walter. “I can come down for this interview,” I told Walter. “No, you don’t need to do that. I don’t have to travel, so I’m okay to talk to them. Don’t spend time driving all the way down here.” “Do you want to go to Sweden?” I asked, half-joking. “I don’t know exactly where that is, but if you have to fly a long way to get there, no, I’m not too interested. I think I’d like to stay on the ground from now on.” We laughed and he sounded fine. He then became quiet and asked one final question before we hung up. “Maybe you can come and see me when you get back? I’m okay, but we can just hang out.” It was an unusual request from Walter so I eagerly agreed. “Sure, that would be great. We can go fishing,” I teased. I’d never gone fishing in my life, and Walter found that so scandalous that he never stopped questioning me about it. When we traveled together, I never ordered fish to eat, and he was sure I didn’t eat fish because I’d never caught a fish. I tried to follow his logic and made promises, but we had never gotten around to taking a fishing trip. The Swedish film crew was eager to meet the challenge of finding Walter’s trailer in the backwoods of South Alabama. I told them how to get there. I’d always been with Walter when he spoke to the press, but I felt like this was probably safe. “He doesn’t give speeches. He’s usually very direct and succinct,” I told the interviewers. “He’s great, but you should ask him good questions. And it’s probably better if you talk to him outside, too. He prefers to be outdoors.” They nodded sympathetically but seemed confused by my anxiety. I called Walter before leaving for Sweden, and he told me that the interview had gone fine, which was reassuring.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  It was a gesture so innocent, so full of childlike irreverence, that I found myself smiling stupidly back at him, filled with a sense of goodwill that buoyed me toward the metro station and our short commute. There was only one metro line in Sofia (though more were planned and great trenches had been gouged in neighborhoods throughout the city), and during peak hours it seemed as though the entire population were shuttling underground, alternately swallowed and disgorged through the closing doors. There were no seats on the Mladost train, and Mitko and I were separated from each other, standing finally some distance apart in the press of bodies. Mitko studied the maps above each set of doors, watching the stations light up as we passed them, but every now and then he glanced at me, as if to make sure I was still there or that my attention was still fixed on him, and his look now wasn’t innocent, anything but; it was a look that singled me out, a look full of promise, and under its heat I felt myself gripped yet again by both pleasure and embarrassment, and by an excitement so terrible I had to look away. When we emerged at the subway’s last stop, Mladost 1, spilling with the other passengers onto Andrei Sakharov Boulevard, I was surprised to see that Mitko knew the area well. Once he had oriented himself, he pointed toward one of the blokove , the dire Soviet apartment complexes that line both sides of the boulevard, and said that it was the home of one of his priyateli . As was always the case during our time together, I was frustrated by the fragments that were all I could understand of his stories, both because of my poor Bulgarian and because he kept speaking in a kind of code, so that I seldom understood precisely the nature of the relationships he described or why they ended as they did. Never before had I met anyone who combined such transparency (or the semblance of transparency) with such mystery, so that he seemed at once overexposed and hidden behind impervious defenses. We fell silent as we walked toward my building, both of us perhaps thinking of what awaited us there. On my street, the relative prosperity of which marked it off from its neighbors, Mitko turned into a shop for alcohol and cigarettes, a place I stopped at often; the people who worked there knew me, and I wondered uncomfortably what they would think when they saw us together. Mitko walked in first and placed both of his hands palm down on the glass counter, making the shopkeeper wince, and then leaned over to peer at the more expensive bottles displayed on the back wall. He examined several of these, asking the man repeatedly and to his increasing exasperation to pass them over the counter so he could read their labels.