Exposure Dread

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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Chris- tian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of fl ux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consumma- tion. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human con- ventions, are transient.”  As in the pagan romances, the Acts reveal deep generic similarities in the treatment of sex, so that there is a sense in which the genre speaks collec- tively, or at least uses a shared syntax of conventions and symbols. Even in the apostolic traditions that rely least on the manipulation of sexual proto- cols, certain formulas recur. Th e Acts of Peter focus principally on the ri- valry between the apostle Peter and the mountebank ur- heretic, Simon Ma- gus. Sexual tropes are not, in the Petrine legends as we have them, a dominant thread. But they do suddenly play a commanding role when the story turns abruptly from the rivalry with Simon Magus toward the death of Peter. Th e fatal sequence begins when four concubines of the prefect Agrippa hear the “teaching about purity, and all the teachings of the Lord” and withdraw their sexual favors from the powerful offi cial. Peter’s next triumph is a “a superlative beauty,” X anthippe, the wife of a powerful man. Finally, “many other women” left their husbands, and husbands their wives, in the name of sexual purity. With so many marriage beds abandoned, Peter has put Rome in an epic stir of erotic frustration. Peter sneaks out of the city in disguise but, i n a touc h i ng sc ene, enc ou nters Ch rist a nd f a mou sly a sk s h i m, “ W h it her  FROM SHAME TO SIN goest thou?” Peter marches back through the gates to his certain death. Th e apostle’s preaching on sexual chastity is the proximate cause of the most famous scene in apocryphal literature and the most hallowed martyrdom in Christian history (save one).  In the Acts of Peter, the “word of purity” that leads to the apostle’s death is abrupt and almost mechanical in its exaggerated predictability. In the Acts of Th omas, the pattern of events is identical, although the drama is more elaborately developed. To the fi gure of Th omas stuck the most exotic legends of the early church. His Acts describe his mission to India, where he converts an aristocratic woman, Mygdonia, to the gospel.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They’re not as strong as they used to be and Gavin tries to teach me to laugh them away.” Her serious expression had not faded. “It works some of the time.” Karen’s story is fascinating because it illustrates how even a happy marriage carries a residue of the past that can ricochet into the present at any time. Such triggers can be an unexpected absence, a moderate disagreement, or a flash of anger. The child of divorce thinks, “This is the other shoe dropping. Here it comes. I always knew it couldn’t last. The man is gone. The marriage is over. I am alone and abandoned, just like I always knew I would be.” Karen’s logic is impeccable: if you’re afraid of loss, you’re safe only if you have nothing to lose. But if you have a happy marriage, a loving man, a beautiful child, then you’re in danger. One young woman stated it plainly: “No matter how much I love someone, no matter how much I trust him, no matter how good and trustworthy he is, there is a tiny corner of me that does not believe he will stay. I will never believe it.” Many grown children of divorce ask me: Why do I feel the way I do? Why am I having so much trouble finding someone to love me and someone I can trust? What’s wrong with me? Why am I so afraid of change? Why am I so afraid of loss? If my wife is thirty minutes late, I wonder who she’s with. Why, if my husband is delayed, do I panic and think I’ll never see him again? Why does getting close to someone I love and having sex seem so scary? I get anguished letters from all over the country every week that pose the same questions, asking for advice. One that came yesterday is typical. “Dear Dr. Wallerstein, I am a child of divorce. I’m thirty-nine and have a loving husband and two wonderful sons. Yet I go to bed every night worried that when I wake up, they’ll be gone. Can you help me?” I think I can. The key phrase they all use is, “I am a child of divorce.” I hear it repeatedly when I talk to people in their thirties, forties, or even sixties. What exactly does it mean? Divorce in childhood creates an enduring identity. Because it typically occurs when a child is young and impressionable and the effects last throughout her growing up years, divorce leaves a permanent stamp. That identity is made up of the childhood fears that you can’t shake despite all the successes and achievements you’ve made as an adult. These are the consequences of the broken template I talked about earlier.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They may consider these accusations vengeful or manipulative strategies to withhold the child. So who is left to help the children who deep down know what they witnessed and are thoroughly confused, distressed, and lost? They have no say in proceedings that presumably center on their best interests. Who speaks for the child or to the child? The courts have a window of opportunity to help children deal with issues of morality and controlling aggression, yet, incredibly, they turn away from what may be their most important task. 4 There is no mechanism for bringing domestic violence to light except in a custody battle. How many judges instruct violent fathers to help their vulnerable children? How many magistrates tell women how important it is to advise their daughters how to avoid the perils of abusive relationships? A small number of courts require perpetrators of abuse who sue for custody or unsupervised visitation to complete classes in curbing violent impulses, but such courses rarely address how parents should or could help their children. The children, alas, are lost in the shadows. I’m not suggesting that children should be barred from visiting fathers who were violent in their marriages. We know this kind of ruling can boomerang. A father who is a forbidden figure can become, in the child’s heart and mind, an epic hero or martyr. But I am suggesting that we should undertake programs to counsel children and parents in these issues before the visits are allowed. When violence occurs behind closed doors, as we know it does, it is very difficult to reach these families. But when a divorce occurs, violent families including these children can and should be given help. (I’ll discuss providing help to violent families further in the conclusions.) The Mother’s Role IN LEAVING VIOLENT marriages, many women manage to escape. Unfortunately, their children continue to be trapped by internal images and memories of violence. Direct intervention with such children is critical. Here a mother has a very important responsibility in helping her children understand why she is leaving the abusive relationship. Her tender loving feelings will go far in soothing the trauma that they have witnessed. But even this is not enough. After she musters the courage to leave and faces the rigors of reconstructing her life, she owes her children the story of what really happened. It is their history as well as hers. Through telling it, she needs to convey the moral message of why violence is not acceptable. Most of all, she needs to help her children understand what love between a man and a woman is about and how it can go awry, how it can lead to hurt and eventually to destruction. Hard as it is, she needs to explain to her daughters, when they are old enough to understand, how she was misled. Many women who marry violent men are aware of the behavior during courtship.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I try to breathe through my mouth but I can’t. I’m trapped. I have to watch, I have to smell. I think the war has made me a little mad—the dead corporal from Georgia, the old man that was shot in the village with his brains hanging out. But it is the living deaths I am breathing and smelling now, the living deaths, the bodies broken in the same war that I have come from. I am outside now in the narrow hallway. The young black woman is pushing my frame past all the other steel contraptions. I look at her face for a moment, at her eyes, as she pushes my frame up against another. I can hear the splashing of water next door in the shower room. The sun has come up in the Bronx and people are walking through the hallways. They can look into all the rooms and see the men through the curtains that never close. It is as if we are a bunch of cattle, as if we do not really count anymore. They push me into the shower. The black woman takes a green plastic container and squirts it, making a long thin white line from my head to my legs. She is turning on the water, and after making sure it is not too hot she hoses me down. It’s like a car wash, I think, it’s just like a big car wash, and I am being pushed and shoved through with the rest of them. I am being checked out by Tommy and hosed off by the woman. It is all such a neat, quick process. It is an incredible thing to run twenty men through a place like this, to clean out the bodies of twenty paralyzed men, twenty bloated twisted men. It is an incredible feat, a stupendous accomplishment, and Tommy is a master. Now the black woman is drying me off with a big white towel and shoving me back into the hallway. Oh get me back into the room, get me back away from these people who are walking by me and making believe like all the rest that they don’t know what’s happening here, that they can’t figure out that this whole thing is crazy. Oh God, oh God help me, help me understand this place. There goes the nurse and she’s running down the hall, hitting the rubber mat that throws open the big green metal door with the little windows with the wire in them. Oh nurse please help me nurse, my stomach is beginning to hurt again like it does every time I come out of this place and my head is throbbing, pounding like a drum. I want to get out of this hall where all of you are walking past me. I want to get back into my bed where I can make believe this never happened. I want to go to sleep and forget I ever got up this morning.

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

  I represented George in his federal court proceedings. There, the State acknowledged that Seger was an imposter but wouldn’t agree that George was entitled to a new trial. We eventually won a favorable ruling from a federal judge who overturned his conviction and sentence. Because of his mental illness and incompetency, George was never retried or prosecuted. He has been at a mental institution ever since. But there are likely hundreds of other people imprisoned after an evaluation by “Dr. Seger” whose convictions have never been reviewed. — A lot of my clients on death row have had serious mental illnesses, but it wasn’t always obvious that their history of mental illness predated their time in prison, since symptoms of their disabilities could be episodic and were frequently stress-induced. But Avery Jenkins’s letters, handwritten in print so small I needed a magnifying glass to read them, convinced me that he had been very ill for a long time. I looked up his case and began to piece together his story. It turned out he’d been convicted of the very disturbing and brutal murder of an older man. The multiple stab wounds inflicted on the victim strongly suggested mental illness, but the court records and files never referenced anything about Jenkins suffering from a disability. I thought I’d find out more by meeting him in person. When I pulled into the prison parking lot, I noticed a pickup truck there that looked like a shrine to the Old South: It was completely covered with disturbing bumper stickers, Confederate flag decals, and other troubling images. Confederate flag license plates are everywhere in the South, but some of the bumper stickers were new to me. A lot were about guns and Southern identity. One read, IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS, I’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN DAMN COTTON. Despite growing up around images of the Confederate South and working in the Deep South for many years, I was pretty shaken by the symbols. I’d always been especially interested in the post-Reconstruction era of American history. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. She was born in Virginia in the 1880s, after federal troops had been withdrawn and a reign of violence and terror had begun, designed to deny any political or social rights for African Americans. Her father told her stories of how the recently emancipated black people were essentially re-enslaved by former Confederate officers and soldiers, who used violence, intimidation, lynching, and peonage to keep African Americans subordinate and marginalized. My grandmother’s parents were deeply embittered by how the promise of freedom and equality following slavery ended when white Southern Democrats reclaimed political power through violence.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Woe to the woman like the twenty-four-year-old middle-class Boston wife who threatened to destabilize that belief and the entire social order by speaking, even privately to her physician, about wanting and needing sex. In 1856, an unfortunately honest patient the gynecologist Dr. Horatio R. Storer called “Mrs. B.” told him of her vivid dreams of sexual intercourse with men other than her husband. These adulterous visions tormented her in her sleep. And even in her day-to-day life, she confessed, speaking to a man might trip off nearly overwhelming sexual feelings, fantasies, and urges about him. Mrs. B. further confided in the doctor that, while she had remained true to her husband, she feared she might not be able to hold off temptation forever. She attributed her problems to being childless, and also to her husband’s trouble maintaining an erection and so his inability to have intercourse with her daily, as had until recently been their habit. In her book Nymphomania, Carol Groneman notes that given the prevailing beliefs about women being asexual, Mrs. B. must have been extremely worried about her adulterous thoughts and what we would today call her libido in order to override the fear of censure and discuss them at all. After a physical exam, Dr. Storer reported that “her clitoris was normal-sized, her vagina slightly overheated, and her uterus somewhat enlarged.” He also reported that Mrs. B. complained her clitoris always itched. When Storer touched it, he wrote, she shrieked with excitement. The shaken doctor told her that if she did not immediately undergo treatment, she would probably need to be committed to an asylum. His prescription: that she abstain from intercourse with her husband, who moved out of their home temporarily, and that her sister move in to supervise her course of treatment. Mrs. B. was forbidden to eat meat or drink brandy and directed to avoid any stimulants that “might excite her animal desire.” The patient was ordered to replace her feather mattress and pillows with ones made of hair to limit the sensual quality of her sleep. To cool her passions, she was to take a cold sponge bath morning and night, a cold enema once a day, swab her vagina with a borax solution…[and] give up working on the novel she was writing. Agency was the issue. While it was fine to require that an orgasm be administered while one lay prone, splayed, and immobile on an examination table, a married woman needing or desiring one from a lover or even her own husband was pathological. Thus merely speaking about it would bring down a vast array of sadistic containments masquerading as cures—everything from chemical torment of one’s vagina to the quashing of artistic ambition.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Hi,” she said, bobbing her head. She turned to Bernard and rolled her eyes as she walked him to the door, knowing that he would enjoy this open display of contempt. “See you soon,” he said. He held her against him for a second, and she experienced a disorienting sense of comfort and safety that made walking back into the invading stares of her prospective boyfriends almost voluptuously exposing. She stood before them, and the canned laughter sounded once more. — That night she went to a group show at a small gallery in Soho that included work by her friend Sandra. As usual, she was one of the few non-artists there. Sandra, nervous and carefully chic in a bright blue pillbox hat and a long black velvet skirt, introduced her as “my friend Stephanie, who writes for The Village Voice.” This impressed people, even when Stephanie said, “I just wrote one thing for the Voice and that was a year and a half ago.” “Yes, but you look like a writer for The Village Voice,” said a painter. “That sounds like an insult to me.” “It’s not an insult, but it’s not a compliment either.” He barked out a laugh. Stephanie attached herself to another conversation about the embarrassing failure of an art gallery that she had never heard of, which, after a rapid shift of participants, became a discussion about somebody’s review in the Times versus somebody’s review in the Voice. Sandra rapidly crossed and recrossed the floor, darting in and out of conversations with apparent pleasure and animation. “Nobody’s here,” she hissed finally, near the hors d’oeuvres, even though there were dozens of people present. Stephanie wandered from conversation to conversation, having an almost panicky feeling that although there were nice, interesting people in the room, the situation, for all its seeming friendliness and ease, precluded her from connecting with the nice and interesting aspects of them. She tried to figure out why this was and could not, beyond the sense that the conversations around her were opening and closing according to the subtle but definite rules that no one had told her about. Then she saw Dara, Sandra’s other non-artist friend, standing regally alone. Dara was trying to become a fashion designer, and she looked unusually beautiful that night in a strapless satin dress that was dramatically faded in the middle where someone had probably spilled something on it a long time ago. Stephanie had always admired Dara, even though she was not friendly and had once been very rude to Stephanie on the phone. But Dara seemed pleased to see her and hung on to her presence throughout a shockingly dull conversation that stumbled awkwardly through Sandra’s work, Sandra’s husband’s work, a writer Stephanie liked and a movie. Still, Stephanie resolutely held on to her idea of Dara as an interesting person. She said, “You seem like someone who is at home in the world.”

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Bitch, he said softly several times, softly but viciously, mrusna kuchka , dirty bitch, get out. It was a reprieve, permission to leave, and I pulled the chain from my neck and stood, after a fashion, hunched as I was around pain. I felt nothing of what I had thought I might feel in standing, I reclaimed nothing, nothing at all returned. I dressed as quickly as I could, though it seemed I was moving slowly, as if in a fog or a dream, I put my socks and my belt in my pockets, I left my shirt unbuttoned. I watched the man where he watched me, sitting now with his back to the wall. I turned away from him finally, I went to the door and felt something like panic again when the knob refused to turn. Like all doors here it had several locks and I looked at them hopelessly, turning first one and then another and finding the door still locked, more locked now that I had turned more latches, and this was like a dream also, of endlessness and the impossibility of escape; stupid, I thought, or maybe I whispered it to myself, stupid, stupid. The man rose then, I heard or felt him heave himself up and walk to the door. Kuchko , he said, not angrily now but mockingly, shaking his head a little, pacified perhaps by the fear that was evident as he reached around me to unlock the door, as I pressed myself as best I could into the wall behind me; there was nowhere to go, the corridor was narrow, and it was hard not to touch him as he opened the door, as I tried to slip past, feeling again what he wanted me to feel, I think, that if I left it was because he let me leave, that it was his will and not my own that opened the door. And then he seemed to change his mind, when I stepped into the dark hall he grabbed my shoulder, gripping me hard, not to pull me back but to spin me around, making me face him a final time. Things happened very fast then, I had brought my hands up when he grabbed me, to ward or fight him off, though I couldn’t have fought him off, I’ve never struck anyone, really, never in earnest. Still, I lifted my hands, palms up at my chest, and when again as at the beginning of our encounter he spat into my face, which was why he had grabbed me and spun me around, to spit again with great violence into my face, I placed my hands on his chest and pushed or tried to push him away from me.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being. The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again . . . no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken, let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers—and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different. It’s almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you’re trying to throttle all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape. Some cities you don’t even have to pass a night in—just an hour or two is enough to unnerve you. I think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the night with a few addresses that had been given me. I had a brief case under my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . I was supposed to go under cover of dark and sell the bloody encyclopedia to some poor devils who wanted to improve themselves. If I had been dropped off at Helsingfors I couldn’t have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets of Bayonne. It wasn’t an American city to me. It wasn’t a city at all, but a huge octopus wriggling in the dark. The first door I came to looked so forbidding I didn’t even bother to knock; I went like that to several addresses before I could summon the courage to knock. The first face I took a look at frightened the shit out of me. I don’t mean timidity or embarrassment—I mean fear. It was the face of a hod carrier, an ignorant mick who would as lief fell you with an ax as spit in your eye. I pretended I had the wrong name and hurried on to the next address.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  People think that O’Rourke goes around snooping and spying, that he derives a special pleasure in performing this dirty work for the company. Not so. O’Rourke is a born student of human nature. He picks things up without effort, due, to be sure, to his peculiar way of looking at the world. Now about you . . . I have no doubt that he knows everything about you. I never asked him, I admit, but I imagine so from the questions he poses now and then. Perhaps he’s just giving you plenty of rope. Some night he’ll run into you accidentally and perhaps he’ll ask you to stop off somewhere and have a bite to eat with him. And out of a clear sky he’ll suddenly say—you remember, Curley, when you were working up in SA office, the time that little Jewish clerk was fired for tapping the till? I think you were working overtime that night, weren’t you? An interesting case, that. You know, they never discovered whether the clerk stole the money or not. They had to fire him, of course, for negligence, but we can’t say for certain that he really stole the money. I’ve been thinking about that little affair now for quite some time. I have a hunch as to who took that money, but I’m not absolutely sure. . . . And then he’ll probably give you a beady eye and abruptly change the conversation to something else. He’ll probably tell you a little story about a crook he knew who thought he was very smart and getting away with it. He’ll draw that story out for you until you feel as though you were sitting on hot coals. By that time you’ll be wanting to beat it, but just when you’re ready to go he’ll suddenly be reminded of another very interesting little case and hell ask you to wait just a little longer while he orders another dessert. And hell go on like that for three or four hours at a stretch, never making the least overt insinuation, but studying you closely all the time, and finally, when you think you’re free, just when you’re shaking hands with him and breathing a sigh of relief, he’ll step in front of you and, planting his big square feet between your legs, he’ll grab you by the lapel and, looking straight through you, he’ll say in a soft, winsome voice—now look here, my lad, don’t you think you had better come clean? And if you think he’s only trying to browbeat you and that you can pretend innocence and walk away, you’re mistaken. Because at that point, when he asks you to come clean, he means business and nothing on earth is going to stop him. When it gets to that point I’d recommend you to make a clean sweep of it, down to the last penny.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car. It happened on a Sunday. I know it was on a Sunday because we were coming home from church, and every Sunday in my childhood meant church. We never missed church. My mother was—and still is—a deeply religious woman. Very Christian. Like indigenous peoples around the world, black South Africans adopted the religion of our colonizers. By “adopt” I mean it was forced on us. The white man was quite stern with the native. “You need to pray to Jesus,” he said. “Jesus will save you.” To which the native replied, “Well, we do need to be saved—saved from you, but that’s beside the point. So let’s give this Jesus thing a shot.” My whole family is religious, but where my mother was Team Jesus all the way, my grandmother balanced her Christian faith with the traditional Xhosa beliefs she’d grown up with, communicating with the spirits of our ancestors. For a long time I didn’t understand why so many black people had abandoned their indigenous faith for Christianity. But the more we went to church and the longer I sat in those pews the more I learned about how Christianity works: If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense. My childhood involved church, or some form of church, at least four nights a week. Tuesday night was the prayer meeting. Wednesday night was Bible study. Thursday night was Youth church. Friday and Saturday we had off. (Time to sin!) Then on Sunday we went to church. Three churches, to be precise. The reason we went to three churches was because my mom said each church gave her something different. The first church offered jubilant praise of the Lord. The second church offered deep analysis of the scripture, which my mom loved. The third church offered passion and catharsis; it was a place where you truly felt the presence of the Holy Spirit inside you. Completely by coincidence, as we moved back and forth between these churches, I noticed that each one had its own distinct racial makeup: Jubilant church was mixed church. Analytical church was white church. And passionate, cathartic church, that was black church.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Trying to Be Stephanie wasn’t a “professional lady” exactly; tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work, or when she couldn’t pay her bills. She even liked a few of her customers, but she had never considered dating one; she kept her secret forays into prostitution neatly boxed and stored away from her real life. She was thus a little dismayed to find herself standing in high heels and underwear in front of the smeared mirror in the “Shadow Room,” handing her phone number to Bernard the lawyer. She felt she was being drawn deeper into something she had no business doing in the first place, but she had no boyfriend, she liked the lawyer and, since he was married, it seemed likely he would leave only a faint impression on her life. She had been working at her current “house” for three nights when she met him. It wasn’t as posh or expensive as the other two places she’d worked, but it was comfortable and safe. She hadn’t wanted to go back to the first place because of the peculiarity of the manager, who’d read the girls’ auras daily and made them chant over anointed candles in the kitchen to “purify the space”; and she couldn’t go back to the second because it had been closed by the Mafia. She wasn’t well connected or knowledgeable enough to systematically search for the best establishment, so she had settled for this—a run-down townhouse apartment with poor ventilation and sad old smells coiling through the rooms. It was called “Christine’s” after the woman who ran it, a tiny frantic blond tyrant who rather desperately fancied her hideous paisley sitting room to be a salon and forced long minutes of excruciating conversation between women and johns before allowing them to escape up the stairs. “We’re known for our intellectual women,” she told Stephanie during her interview. “Everybody here does something. Alana here is an artist. Suzie is a fashion designer and Beatrice is a nurse.” The three women on the couch regarded Stephanie blankly. Christine gave Stephanie the working name “Perry” and told her to wear something in which she could “meet her mother for lunch and then rendezvous with her boyfriend for cocktails.” This ridiculous pretense, teetering pathetically toward aspiration, appealed to her. She thought: It’s only for a few weeks, and showed up two days later in a tight silver minidress. She had come downstairs, after being summoned through the intercom to “meet someone,” hurried and disheveled, one stocking badly run, having left her portly, huffing client to finish his ablutions alone.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I sighed deeply. “I’ve been hurt. ?m not looking to get married, I’m not looking to disrespect anyone. I guess I just need some comfort.” “That’s it?” she probed. “Like a one-nighter?” I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I told her honestly. Annie weighed my words carefully in the scales of her own need. She turned away from me, but I knew after a moment it was alright to touch her. I kissed the closest cheek. My lips brushed her ear and traveled down her neck. I could hear her breathing change. She turned and looked at me for a long moment before offering me her mouth. We kissed deeply, but still carefully. Slowly we began to move against each other. I could feel how she offered her body to a man as a test. I was gentle. I was slow. Gradually her body became aware that my tempo was slightly behind hers. Her face flushed with heat. She pressed her pelvis against mine and looked at me quizzically. We both knew I didn’t have a hard-on. “Mommy!” Kathy called from upstairs. Annie looked apologetic. I nodded toward the sound of Kathy’s voice. Annie was gone for a few minutes. She came back into the kitchen and filled a plastic Cinderella glass with water. “I'll be right back,” she said hoarsely. I remembered the bag Td left in the other room. Now was definitely the right time to get it. I grabbed the bag and raced into the bathroom. I locked the door and took off my pants and BVDs. The harness and rubber cock fit nicely in my briefs. I pulled my pants back on and checked my wallet for a condom. I heard Annie call my name from the kitchen. I flushed the toilet, ran the tap water for a moment, and came out to meet her. I was out of breath. “What were you doing in there, running?” she laughed. It would take time to get back the feeling. I ran my fingers through her hair. She closed her eyes and parted her lips. The phone rang. We both laughed. “Forget it,” she said. It kept ringing. I pulled her close to me. She pressed her pelvis against mine. This time she smiled. She pulled back and searched my face with her eyes. I leaned against the sink and waited for her to come back to me. Then she took my hand and led me to her bedroom. Annie was afraid. I knew that was true. What she couldn’t know was that I was too. I wanted so much to be in her arms that I was willing to risk exposure and humiliation.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Who is this kid?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t recognize him at all?” “No.” “Teddy never mentioned him to you?” “Never.” At a certain point Mrs. Vorster just started running through a list of all the white kids she thought it could be. “Is it David?” “No.” “Rian?” “No.” “Frederik?” “No.” I kept waiting for it to be a trick, for them to turn and say, “It’s you!” They didn’t. At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them. Eventually they sent me back to class. I spent the rest of the day and the next couple of weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for my mom to get the call. “We’ve got him! We figured it out!” But the call never came. South Africa has eleven official languages. After democracy came, people said, “Okay, how do we create order without having different groups feel like they’ve been left out of power again?” English is the international language and the language of money and of the media, so we had to keep that. Most people were forced to learn at least some Afrikaans, so it’s useful to keep that, too. Plus we didn’t want the white minority to feel ostracized in the new South Africa, or else they’d take all their money and leave. Of the African languages, Zulu has the largest number of native speakers, but we couldn’t keep that without also having Xhosa and Tswana and Ndebele. Then there’s Swazi, Tsonga, Venda, Sotho, and Pedi. We tried to keep all the major groups happy, so the next thing we knew we’d made eleven languages official languages. And those are just the languages big enough to demand recognition; there are dozens more. It’s the Tower of Babel in South Africa. Every single day. Every day you see people completely lost, trying to have conversations and having no idea what the other person is saying. Zulu and Tswana are fairly common. Tsonga and Pedi are pretty fringe. The more common your tongue, the less likely you are to learn others. The more fringe, the more likely you are to pick up two or three.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  It seemed amazing to me that the people of that tiny country had won against such monstrous odds. Maybe all those rallies Theresa had attended helped. 188 = Leslie Feinberg President Ford was expected to pardon the draft resisters so they could finally come home. But I still couldn’t cross the border. I had no valid ID in case I was pulled over at customs. I opened my wallet and looked at my ID. Birth certificate, driver’s license. They were all clearly matked female. How could I get ID as a male? Getting identification required identification. I couldn’t even open a checking account without some sort of ID. A credit card was out of the question. I felt like a nonperson. Even outlaws probably had more ID than me. I turned my license over and looked at the expiration date: July 1976. It was valid for fourteen more months. How could I get a license marked Female renewed as Male? What would happen to me if I got stopped by state troopers on a lonely road in the dead of night and handed them this license? But what if I was caught driving without a license? Either option sounded like a nightmare. Yet it was impossible to work or live in Buffalo without some form of transportation. I stared across the Niagara River, longing to open up my Harley on those roads I knew so well. A feeling of claustrophobia choked me. Even as my world was expanding, it was shrinking. My beard grew in full of color: blond streaked with red and brown and white. In the open fields of life, my beard was a bush to hide behind. Almost no one seemed to recognize me anymore when I was out in public. I hated my breasts more than ever. Binding them every day had flattened the muscles, and they hurt. But I finally saved up two thousand dollars. I called the surgeon Dr. Monroe had referred me to. I told him I wanted to be flat-chested. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Breast reduction.” “Ts it going to be very painful? Will I be out of work a long time?” “No,” he told me. “It’s not a radical mastectomy. We make an incision and remove some of the fatty tissue. Although you'll be uncomfortable, you should be back at work within a week or two.” I felt a little queasy, but all surgical descriptions made me feel that way. “Do you have the money?” he asked. I did. I was ready. I scheduled the surgery and left work Tuesday pretending to be ill. Tuesday night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt anxious, but not scared. I was excited at

• From Best Erotic Romance

  “Yes, but I like you inside me even more. Mind if I climb on?” He’d never turned down such a request before, but tonight Justin merely narrowed his eyes. “Don’t you know a proper woman waits for her husband to decide these matters? Besides, when we lie together as man and wife for the first time, you’ll be beneath me, where you belong. Do you understand?” Sophie opened her mouth to protest—where the hell did he get off spouting this patriarchal shit anyway?—but her complaint turned to a helpless whimper as she felt another gush below. “I understand,” she said, her eyes lowered meekly. “Then lie on your back and bring your knees up to your chest so your sopping pussy will be nice and tight.” Trembling, Sophie complied. She felt so naked and exposed, holding her knees open for him, uncertain what rough, domineering treatment awaited. And yet her body seemed to trust him. Every fiber of her being shivered with delicious anticipation. Justin knelt between her legs, his eyes surveying her. “I’m going to consummate our marriage now. Then you’ll be mine.” His tone was gruff rather than loving, but at that moment Sophie felt her chest wrench open, as if he’d reached in and tugged on her heart. As she waited breathlessly, her husband took his dick in his hand and rocked forward. But he didn’t slide it in. Instead he pressed the head of his cock against her clit. She moaned. Justin rubbed her with his tool, like a big, swollen finger, claiming her there first. She was so wet, his penis slipped over her slick flesh with a faint, slurping sound. “Please, take me,” she choked out. On the next stroke, he guided his cock to her hole and buried himself to the hilt. They groaned in unison. He began to move, slowly, pressing tight against her to give her the friction she needed. “You belong to me now and I’m going to make you come,” he hissed in her ear. Another gush of wetness glazed the crack of her ass. Justin’s balls slapped against her cleft as he drove into her, stimulating the tender flesh. He took her nipple in his mouth and sucked hard. Tying the knot—those words had scared her, confused her, but that’s just how Sophie felt now, deliciously tied and tangled, her legs twisted around his ass, a knot of lust throbbing low in her belly. With each thrust, Justin seemed to push deeper, conquering unknown territory. Because no one had ever touched her this way before, not even the sweet Justin she’d watched sleeping that very morning. No one had ever opened her so completely—her cunt, her heart, her head all at once—to expose yearnings secret even to herself. “Come for me, Sophie,” he panted. “I order you to come right now.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Queen would walk next to me and act like she was my mother, and my mother would walk a few steps behind, like she was the maid working for the colored woman. I’ve got dozens of pictures of me walking with this woman who looks like me but who isn’t my mother. And the black woman standing behind us who looks like she’s photobombing the picture, that’s my mom. When we didn’t have a colored woman to walk with us, my mom would risk walking me on her own. She would hold my hand or carry me, but if the police showed up she would have to drop me and pretend I wasn’t hers, like I was a bag of weed. When I was born, my mother hadn’t seen her family in three years, but she wanted me to know them and wanted them to know me, so the prodigal daughter returned. We lived in town, but I would spend weeks at a time with my grandmother in Soweto, often during the holidays. I have so many memories from the place that in my mind it’s like we lived there, too. Soweto was designed to be bombed—that’s how forward-thinking the architects of apartheid were. The township was a city unto itself, with a population of nearly one million. There were only two roads in and out. That was so the military could lock us in, quell any rebellion. And if the monkeys ever went crazy and tried to break out of their cage, the air force could fly over and bomb the shit out of everyone. Growing up, I never knew that my grandmother lived in the center of a bull’s-eye. In the city, as difficult as it was to get around, we managed. Enough people were out and about, black, white, and colored, going to and from work, that we could get lost in the crowd. But only black people were permitted in Soweto. It was much harder to hide someone who looked like me, and the government was watching much more closely. In the white areas you rarely saw the police, and if you did it was Officer Friendly in his collared shirt and pressed pants. In Soweto the police were an occupying army. They didn’t wear collared shirts. They wore riot gear. They were militarized. They operated in teams known as flying squads, because they would swoop in out of nowhere, riding in armored personnel carriers—hippos, we called them—tanks with enormous tires and slotted holes in the side of the vehicle to fire their guns out of. You didn’t mess with a hippo. You saw one, you ran. That was a fact of life. The township was in a constant state of insurrection; someone was always marching or protesting somewhere and had to be suppressed.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Angie rested her hand on my arm. “I’m gonna give you a piece of advice—you don’t have to take it. Get yourself a factory job so you don’t end up spending your whole life in the bars. Life in the Tenderloin’s like lickin’ a razor blade, you know what I mean? I’m not saying the plants are heaven, or anything, but maybe you can get into a plant with the other butches, pay your bills, settle down with a girl.” I shrugged. “I know I got some growing up to do.” Angie smiled and shook her head. “No, baby. Tm talking about staying young. I don’t want you to 72 Leslie Feinberg have to grow up too fast. I got old the night I first got busted—I was thirteen. The cop kept yelling at me to give him a blow job and he beat the shit out of me when I didn’t. I just didn’t know what he meant by a blow job. It wasn’t like I’d never had to do it before.” I got up and walked over to the sink. I felt like I was going to throw up. Angie got up and put her hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry, that was a stupid story to tell anybody.” I couldn’t turn around and face her. “C’mon, baby, come sit down,” she tugged on me gently. “You’re OK,” she said as she turned me around. “Are you OK?” I smiled at her, but it wasn’t convincing. She ran her fingers through my hair. “You're not OK, ate your” I was so telieved she said it out loud that I started to cry. She held me against her shoulder and rocked me. She pushed me back against the sink and looked at my face, “You want to talk?” I shook my head. “OK,” she whispered, “it’s OK. It’s just, sometimes it’s good to talk about stuff” She held my chin in her hand. I tried to pull my face away, but she wouldn’t let me. “You know,” she said, “maybe it’s a little bit easier for femmes to talk to each other about this stuff than it is for butches, what do you think?” I shrugged my shoulders. I felt trapped and sick. “Who hurt you, baby? The cops?” She watched my face. “Who else?” she concluded out loud. “Aw, baby, you’re already old, too,’ she crooned as she held me tightly against her. I buried my face in the safety of her neck. “C’mete baby, sit down.” She pulled a kitchen chair up next to me. “Tm OK,” I said. “Uh-uh. You're not talking to the butches now. Do you open up to your girlfriend?” “T don’t have a girlfriend,” I reluctantly admitted. Angie looked surprised, which made me feel flattered. Then she smiled coyly. “Have you ever opened up to a girlfriend?” I felt like a pinned down butterfly. “TI...”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Trevor can’t walk without supervision. It’s because I’m me; that’s why this is happening. I had no other points of reference. There were no other mixed kids around so that I could say, “Oh, this happens to us.” Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.” Whenever the kids in the street saw me they’d yell, “Indoda yomlungu!” “The white man!” Some of them would run away. Others would call out to their parents to come look. Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. It was pandemonium. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids genuinely had no clue what a white person was. Black kids in the township didn’t leave the township. Few people had televisions. They’d seen the white police roll through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever. I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me and they’d stop crying. They’d start whispering. Then they’d wave and say, “Oh!” like they were more shocked by me walking in than by the death of their loved ones. I think people felt like the dead person was more important because a white person had come to the funeral. After a funeral, the mourners all go to the house of the surviving family to eat. A hundred people might show up, and you’ve got to feed them. Usually you get a cow and slaughter it and your neighbors come over and help you cook. Neighbors and acquaintances eat outside in the yard and in the street, and the family eats indoors. Every funeral I ever went to, I ate indoors. It didn’t matter if we knew the deceased or not. The family would see me and invite me in. “Awunakuvumela umntana womlungu ame ngaphandle. Yiza naye apha ngaphakathi,” they’d say. “You can’t let the white child stand outside. Bring him in here.” As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me “white,” even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly. “Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover design by Darren Haggar Cover photograph by Sam Contis Author photograph by Tom Hines Illustration by Daniel Lagin Version_1 For my mother Contents Also by Ocean Vuong Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Part I Part II Part III Acknowledgments About the Author But let me see if—using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone— I can build you a center. —Qiu Miaojin I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers. —Joan Didion I Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. “I don’t understand why they would do that. Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that.” I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you—but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves. I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. — Autumn. Somewhere over Michigan, a colony of monarch butterflies, numbering more than fifteen thousand, are beginning their yearly migration south. In the span of two months, from September to November, they will move, one wing beat at a time, from southern Canada and the United States to portions of central Mexico, where they will spend the winter. They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, the hood of a faded-blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight. It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.