Fear

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 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  His taut, cruelly bound body shuddered with one protracted groan after another, and then he lay still as Squire Felix drew back and moved into the shadows. It seemed he spoke to Prince Alexi then. Beauty leaned her head against the stone balustrade. After a little while, Squire Felix told Prince Alexi to wake, and he gave the organ those tormenting slaps again when it seemed reluctant, Squire Felix seemed fearful and became threatening. But Prince Alexi was deep asleep in his painful tethers, and Beauty was very pleased to see this. She turned and silently made her way back to the bedroom door when she realized that someone was near her. She was so frightened that she almost screamed, a mistake which would surely have destroyed her. But she covered her mouth, and lifting her eyes, she saw in the distant shadows the figure of Lord Gregory watching her. This was the gray-haired Lord who had wanted so to discipline her properly, who had called her spoilt. Yet he did not move. He stood still watching her. And when she stopped trembling, she rushed as quickly as she could back to the Prince's bed, and slipped under the coverlet beside him. He had never awakened. She lay in the dark waiting for Lord Gregory to come but he did not, and she soon realized he would not dream of waking the Prince, and then she was half dozing. She was thinking of Prince Alexi in a thousand ways, of the redness of his sore flesh after the paddle, of his beautiful brown eyes, and his strong, somewhat compact body. She was thinking of his glossy hair against her, the secret kiss he gave her thighs, and how, after this terrible humiliation, he had given her that smile which was so serene and affectionate. The torment between her legs was no worse than before, and no better. She dared not touch it with her fingers, lest she be discovered, and it was too shameful to think of such things, and she was sure the Prince would never allow it. THE SLAVES' HALL IT WAS late afternoon when Beauty awoke. She realized that the Prince and Lord Gregory were in an argument. Immediately, she was afraid, but as she lay still she perceived that Lord Gregory had obviously not told the Prince what he had seen. Surely her punishment would be terrible if he had. Rather Lord Gregory was arguing only that Beauty must be taken to the Slaves' Hall and properly groomed. "Your Highness, you are enamored of her, of course," Lord Gregory said, "but you remember, surely, your own censure of other Lords, especially your cousin, Lord Stefan, on account of his excessive love for his slave..."

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She shuddered almost instinctively but they were firmly attached, and he told her to fold her arms behind her back tightly. "Now forward, only you are to bend your knees slightly and to march, lifting each knee high," he told her. She started, awkwardly, reluctant to obey, but then she saw all about her other Princesses marching in an almost sprightly manner, their breasts bouncing gracefully as they moved into the corridor. She hurried, the heavy boots difficult for her to lift with any decorum, but soon she had fallen into a rhythm and Leon was walking beside her. "Now, darling," he said, "the first time is always difficult. Festival Night is frightening. I had thought some easier duty would be yours this first time, but the Queen has ordered you especially for the Bridle Path, and the Lady Juliana will drive you." "Ah, but what..." "Shah, or I shall have to gag you and that will very much displease the Queen as well as make your mouth quite ugly." All the girls were now in a long room, and through narrow windows on one wall, Beauty could see the garden. Torches flared in the dark trees, throwing an uneven glare on the leafy boughs above them. The line of girls formed right beside these windows, and Beauty was now able to see more of what lay beyond them. There was a great roar as of many people conversing, laughing. And then to her shock Beauty saw slaves all through the garden positioned in various ways for their torment. On high stakes here and there were strapped Princes and Princesses painfully contorted, their ankles bound to the stakes, their shoulders bent over the tops of them. They seemed no more than ornaments, the torchlight causing their twisted limbs to glow, the hair of the Princesses falling free in the air behind them. Surely they could see only the sky above, though all could see their miserable contortions. And everywhere beneath were the Lords and Ladies, the light falling upon a long embroidered cloak here, a pointed hat there with a veil trailing airily from it. There were hundreds in the garden, these tables placed far back into the trees, as far as Beauty could see in all directions. Beautifully adorned slaves moved about, pitchers in hand, little gold chains fixed to their breasts, the Princes adorned with gold rings on their erect organs. They hurried to fill the goblets, pass the platters of food, and as in the great hall there was music. The line of girls before Beauty grew restless. Beauty could hear one girl crying as her groom tried to comfort her, but most of the others were obedient. Here and there a groom rubbed more oil into plump buttocks or whispered in a Princess's ear, and Beauty's sense of apprehension deepened.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  On the other side of the Atlantic, migrants from the Middle East and Africa have washed up on the Italian and Greek coastlines and thronged to the rim of Eastern and Central Europe. While thousands have died en route to “Fortress Europe,” many of those who reach the borders of the world’s wealthiest economic bloc end up languishing indefinitely in detention centers as they plow through the asylum bureaucracy. A churning shadow population of “irregular” migrants floating through European cities is filtered into a professionalized humanitarian aid regime, or they fall into the underground economy’s smuggling and human trafficking industries. European Union ministers, meanwhile, remain continually deadlocked in negotiating a continent-wide humanitarian resettlement policy, reducing refugee bodies to political talking points in Brussels while rape survivors may be left to camp outdoors along border fences. Survival Rape The worst violations often happen before migrants reach Europe. On the route through Africa to the tip of Libya, which is the main hub for smuggling boats across the Mediterranean and itself engulfed in civil conflict, sexual violence becomes a routine hazard, prompting women to preinject contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. Rape is endemic at the migrant camps around the Libyan port—sometimes in official facilities, other times just in repositories where smugglers hold human cargo before sending them off to sea. An Eritrean woman described to Amnesty International how rape was systematized at her camp in Libya: “The guards would drink and smoke hashish [cannabis] and then come in and choose which women they wanted and take them outside. The women tried to refuse but when you have a gun pointed at your head, you don’t really have a choice if you want to survive. I was raped twice by three men . . . I didn’t want to lose my life.” Vulnerability to sexual violence also hinges on other social hierarchies: wealthier refugees have the money and connections to purchase access to safer routes; black African migrants are often subjected to more abuse than lighter-skinned counterparts; labor and sexual exploitation blur into each other, generating subcategories of rape like “survival sex” or “protection sex.” In a study of African migration into Europe in recent years, researchers Sharon Pickering and Alison Gerard quote one migrant, Aziza, describing a climate of sexual coercion while held under armed guard in Libya: “The living situation is difficult because you are not free. There are people standing over you and you have to negotiate to leave. Some people pay money to leave, others provide sex or are raped.” In a UN-led study, “Oumo” recalled the banality of transactional sex, which she undertook twice to obtain a fake passport and then to get a spot on a smuggling boat from Turkey to Greece. “I had no choice. I fear that I will go crazy.” The notion of freely offered consent becomes murky; the cost of returning home, rather than moving on, is too high.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  If you have ten feelings of fear that involve a particular brain network, each feeling can involve different neurons from the network. * This is degeneracy at the network level. Additionally, cookies and bread are discrete, physical objects, whereas instances of emotion are momentary snapshots of continuous brain activity, and we merely perceive these snapshots as discrete events. Nevertheless, you may find the kitchen analogy useful to imagine how interacting networks produce diverse mental states. 1 9 The core systems that construct the mind interact in complex ways, without any central manager or chef to run the show. However, these systems cannot be understood independently like the disassembled parts of a machine, or like so-called emotion modules or organs. That’s because their interactions produce new properties that are not present in the parts alone. By analogy, when you bake bread with flour, water, yeast, and salt, a new product emerges from the complex, chemical interplay of the ingredients. Bread has its own emergent properties, like “crustiness” and “chewiness,” that are not present in its ingredients alone. In fact, if you try to identify all the ingredients by tasting the finished bread, you are in for a difficult time. Consider the salt: bread doesn’t taste salty even though salt is absolutely essential. Similarly, an instance of fear cannot be reduced to mere ingredients. Fear is not a bodily pattern—just as bread is not flour—but emerges from the interactions of core systems. An instance of fear has irreducible, emergent properties not found in the ingredients alone, such as unpleasantness (as your car skids out of control on a slippery highway) or pleasantness (on an undulating rollercoaster). You cannot reverse-engineer a recipe for an instance of fear from a feeling of fear. 2 0 Even if we did know the ingredients of emotion but studied them only in isolation, we’d get an inaccurate understanding of how they work together to construct emotion. If we study salt in isolation by tasting and weighing it, we will not understand how it contributes to the creation of bread. That’s because salt interacts chemically with the other ingredients during baking: controlling yeast growth, shoring up the gluten in the dough, and, most importantly, enhancing flavor. To understand how salt transforms a recipe of bread, you must watch it work in context. Likewise, each ingredient of emotion must be studied in the context of the rest of the brain that influences it. This philosophy, known as holism, explains why I get different results each time I bake bread in my own kitchen, even using exactly the same recipe. I weigh every ingredient. I knead the dough for the same amount of time. I set the oven to the same temperature. I count the number of sprays of water I spritz into the oven to make the bread crusty.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest like Reva banging on my door. I gasped. I breathed. I’m here, I thought. I’m awake. I thought I heard something, a scratching sound at the door. Then an echo. Then an echo of that echo. I sat up. A rush of cold air hit my neck. “Kshhhh,” the air said. It was the sound of blood rushing to my brain. My vision cleared. I went back to the sofa. I watched Jenny Jones and Maury Povich and Nightline. • • • WHEN THE TWENTIETH CAME, I went downtown to see Dr. Tuttle. I felt drunk and crazy getting dressed and lacing up a pair of rubber-soled boots from the closet, which I hadn’t remembered buying. I felt drunk in the elevator, I felt drunk walking across York, I felt drunk in the cab. I toddled up the steps to Dr. Tuttle’s brownstone and leaned on the buzzer for a good minute until she came to the door. The snow-covered street blinded me. I shut my eyes. I was dying. I would tell Dr. Tuttle that. I was the walking dead. “You look troubled,” she said matter-of-factly through the glass. I looked at her standing in the foyer. She wore red long underwear under a fleece cape. Her hair came down over her forehead and covered the top halves of the lenses in her glasses. She had her neck brace on again. “I’ve done some reorganizing,” she said, opening the door. “You’ll see.” I hadn’t been to her office in over a month. A full menorah of candles had melted in a baking dish on top of the radiator in the waiting room. A fake Christmas tree had been wedged into the corner, the top third lopped off and placed next to it in a milk crate. The main part of the tree was decorated with purple strands of tinsel and what looked like costume jewelry—fake pearl necklaces, gold and silver bangles, children’s rhinestone tiaras, baubley clip-on earrings. Her office smelled like iodine and sage. Where the unsittable fainting sofa had been there was now a large, Band-Aid–colored massage table. “I’ve just been certified as a shaman, or sha- woman, if you please,” Dr.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Beauty's cries were wordless pleas, but Lady Juliana's tone was angry, unsatisfied. It was dreadful to be struck in anger. "Hurry! Do you hear me!" Lady Juliana sounded almost contemptuous, spanking Beauty all the harder, and making little tisks now of impatience. Beauty's nipples scraped the carpet as she bent to obey, and with a shock she felt the toe of Lady Juliana's slipper in her pubis. She gave a startled cry and rushed back to the Queen with the rose as all about her it seemed was the muted laughter of the Pages and the Queen's higher laughter. But Lady Juliana had found the tender spot again, forcing that long pointed satin slipper right into Beauty's vagina. Suddenly as Beauty turned and saw yet more roses scattered before her, her sobs went into muffled shrieks and she turned to Lady Juliana even as the paddle spanked her thighs and her calves, and kissed and kissed those pink satin slippers. "What?" Lady Juliana said with genuine outrage. "You dare beg me for mercy before the Queen? Wretched, wretched girl!" She smacked Beauty's buttocks, but she had Beauty by the hair with her left hand and pulled her up, snapping her head back so that Beauty's knees went wide apart to keep her balance. Beauty's open-mouthed sobs were choked and uneven. And she saw the paddle being passed to one of the Pages who offered the Lady a heavy broad leather belt immediately. The belt struck Beauty's buttocks with a resounding wallop. Again it struck her. "Take another rose, another, two, three, four in your mouth at once and give them to your Queen immediately!" Beauty ran to obey, and it seemed for a moment all perception left her. She was frantic to obey, to outdistance Lady Juliana's anger. It was hotter, more frenzied than the Bridle Path at its worst, and as she turned to gather more of the little roses, she felt the Queen catch her face in both hands and hold her still so that Lady Juliana could beat her. It did not matter. She could not please. She deserved to be beaten. She quivered with every blow of the strap, yet, drenched with tears, she even lifted her buttocks to receive the punishment. But the Queen was not satisfied still, and she turned Beauty around, her hand on Beauty's hair to pull her head back, as Lady Juliana now smacked Beauty's breasts and her belly and made the wide leather strap lick at her pubis. The Queen held Beauty's hair fast. "Open your legs!" Lady Juliana commanded. "Oooooh..." Beauty sobbed aloud, but she obeyed, and desperately she thrust her hips forward to receive the angry punishment.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She turned the radio up, put the heating on full blast. Her face was tight and serious, but calm. I was surprised by my curiosity to know what she was thinking, but I kept quiet. When we got onto the Long Island Expressway, the radio DJ told listeners to call in to share their New Year’s resolutions. “In 2001, I want to embrace every opportunity. I want to say ‘yes’ to every invitation I receive.” “Two thousand and one is the year I finally learn to tango.” “I’m not making any resolutions this year,” Reva said. She turned down the volume on the radio and changed the station. “I can never keep my promises to myself. I’m like my own worst enemy. What about you?” “I might try to stop smoking. But the medications make it difficult.” “Uh-huh,” she said mindlessly. “And maybe I’ll try to lose five pounds.” I couldn’t tell if she was trying to insult me with sarcasm, or if she was being sincere. I let it go. The visibility was bad. The windshield wipers screeched, clearing away the wet splats of snow. In Queens, Reva turned up the radio again and began to sing along to the music. Santana. Marc Anthony. Enrique Iglesias. After a while, I began to wonder if she was drunk. Maybe we’d die in a car accident, I thought. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the dark water of the East River. It wouldn’t be that bad to die, I thought. Traffic slowed. Reva turned the radio down. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked stiffly. “I don’t want to be needy, but I’m afraid of being alone right now. I don’t feel like myself and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen.” “Okay,” I said, though I assumed she’d change her mind a few minutes past midnight. “We can watch a movie,” she said. “Whatever you want. Hey, can you dig my gum out of my purse? I don’t want to take my hands off the wheel.” Reva’s fake Gucci bag sat between us on the console. I fished around tampons and perfume and hand sanitizer and her makeup kit and rolled up issues of Cosmo and Marie Claire and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and her huge wallet and her cell phone and her datebook and her sunglasses and finally found a single piece of cinnamon Extra in the little side pocket otherwise full of old LIRR ticket receipts. The paper had turned pink and oily. “Wanna split it?” she asked. “Gross,” I said. “No.” Reva put her hand out. I watched her watching the road. Maybe she wasn’t drunk, I thought, just exhausted.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Forgive us, your Highness," the King hastened to say. "But is it the same in this age? Beauty's servitude will not be forever?" "It is the same now as it was always. Beauty will be returned in time. And she shall be greatly enhanced in wisdom and beauty. Now, tell her to obey as your parents commanded you to obey when you were sent to us." "The Prince speaks the truth, Beauty," the King said in a low voice, still unwilling to look at his daughter. "Obey him. Obey the Queen. And though you find your servitude surprising and difficult at times, be confident you will return, as he says, greatly changed for the better." The Prince smiled. The horses were restless on the drawbridge. The Prince's charger, a black stallion, was particularly hard to restrain, so the Prince, bidding them all farewell again, turned and picked up Beauty. He heaved her easily over his right shoulder, clasping her ankles to his waist, and heard her cry out softly as she fell over his back. He could see her long hair sweep the ground just before he mounted the stallion. All the soldiers fell into place behind him. He rode into the forest. The sun spilled down in glorious rays through the heavy green leaves, the sky now brilliant and blue overhead only to vanish in a shifting green-tinted light as the Prince rode on at the head of his soldiers, humming to himself, and now and then singing. Beauty's lithe, warm body swayed slightly over his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, and he understood her agitation. Her naked buttocks were still red from the spanking he had given her, and he could well imagine the succulent vision she was to the men who rode after him. As he walked his horse through a dense glade where the fallen leaves were thick and red and brown beneath him, the Prince tied the rein on his saddle, and with his left hand felt the soft hairy little pelt between Beauty's legs, and leaned his face against her warm hip, kissing it gently. After a while, he pulled her down into his lap, turning her as before so she rested against his left arm, and he kissed her red face and brushed the long golden strands of her hair away from it, and then he suckled her breasts almost idly as though taking little drinks from them. "Put your head on my shoulder," he said. And she inclined to him obediently at once. But when he went to sling her over his shoulder again, she gave a little desperate whimper. He did not allow this to stop him.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Now, as I told you," the Prince said softly to Beauty, "all here admire you, and they enjoy you, the sight of you, your plump little rear, your lovely legs, those breasts which I cannot stop myself from kissing. But there is no one here, not the lowliest, who is not better than you, my Princess, if I command you to serve him." Beauty was frightened. She nodded quickly as she answered "Yes, my Prince," and then very impulsively she bent and kissed the Prince's boot, but then she appeared terrified. "No, that is very good, my darling," the Prince stroking her neck, reassured her. "That is very good. If I allow you one gesture to speak your heart unbidden it is that one. You may always show me respect of your own accord in that manner." Again Beauty pressed her lips to the leather. But she was trembling. "These townspeople hunger for you, hunger for more of your loveliness," the Prince continued. "And I think they deserve a little taste of it that will delight them." Beauty kissed the Prince's boot again, and let her lips rest there. "O, don't think I should really let them have their fill of your charms. O, no," the Prince said thoughtfully. "But I should you this opportunity, both to reward their devoted attention and teach you that punishment will come whenever I desire to give it. You need not be disobedient to merit it. I will punish when it pleases me. Sometimes that will be the only reason for it." Beauty couldn't keep herself from whimpering. The Prince smiled and beckoned to the Innkeeper's daughter. But she was so frightened of him that she didn't come forward until her father pushed her. "My dear," said the Prince gently. "In the kitchen, have you a flat wooden instrument, for shoveling the hot pans into the oven?" There was a faint movement throughout the room as the soldiers glanced at one another. The people outside were pressing closer to the windows. The young girl nodded and quickly returned with a wooden paddle, very flat and smooth from years of use, with a good handle. "Excellent," said the Prince. But Beauty was crying helplessly. The Prince quickly ordered the Innkeeper's daughter to seat herself on the edge of the high hearth which was the height of a chair, and told Beauty, on her hands and knees, to go to her. "My dear," he said to the Innkeeper's daughter, "these good people deserve a little spectacle. There life is hard and barren. My men deserve it as well. And my Princess can well use the chastisement." Beauty knelt crying before the girl who, seeing what she was to do, was fascinated. "Up over her lap, Beauty," said the Prince, "hands behind your neck, and lift your lovely hair our of the way.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (On vacations we tried to pretend we were just an American couple living in Europe for the hell of it.) And then on New Year’s Day, there was the telegram—garbled as such messages often are, and coming on that dismal gray Saturday afternoon when the entire male population of Klein Amerika was engrossed in polishing the family car and the entire female population was walking around in hair rollers and the Germans on the other side of Goethestrasse were already breaking out the first bottle of Schnaps in preparation for the new year…. grandpa died six fifteen tuesday stop revived by massage stop heart failure stop rectal hemmorage stop nothing could be done stop funeral january 4 stop love mother I read the telegram first, then gave it to Bennett. I had that sick feeling I always have when I know something awful is going to be blamed on me. I knew that Bennett would somehow find a way to blame me for his grandfather’s death. My mother’s parents were still alive. I put my arms around Bennett and he drew away. I remember thinking I was not so sad that his grandfather had died, but that I was going to have to die a little bit more for it in penance. Bennett sat on the living-room couch with the telegram in his hands. I sat next to him and reread it over his shoulder. “The moving finger writes and it misspells words,” I thought. I hardly knew Bennett’s grandfather (an ancient Chinese man who was either 99 or 100, looked like a yellowed ivory statue, and spoke barely any English at all). I pretended it was my own grandfather who had died and began to cry. I was really crying for myself, dying slowly at the age of twenty-five. Bennett was marked by death, up to his neck in it. He carried his sadness on his shoulders like an invisible knapsack. If he had turned to me, if he had let me comfort him, I might have borne it with him. But he blamed me for it. And his blame drove me away. But I was afraid to go away. I stayed and grew more secret. I turned more and more to my fantasies and to my writing. And that was how I began to discover myself. He retreated into his sadness, barricaded himself in it, and I retreated into my room to write. All that long winter, he mourned his grandfather, his father, his sister who had died at sixteen, his brother who had been born retarded and died at eighteen, his friend who had died of polio at fourteen, his poverty, his silence. He mourned the army, the life he’d left in New York. He mourned the dead and his own preoccupation with death.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Lacking an amygdala, these monkeys approached objects and animals that would normally frighten them, like snakes, unfamiliar monkeys, or others that they’d avoided before the surgery, without hesitation. Klüver and Bucy attributed these deficits to an “absence of fear.” 3 0 Not long afterward, other scientists began studying humans with amygdala damage to see if those patients continued to experience and perceive fear. The most intensively studied case is a woman known as “SM,” afflicted with a genetic disease that gradually obliterates the amygdala during childhood and adolescence, called Urbach-Wiethe disease. Overall, SM was (and still is) mentally healthy and of normal intelligence, but her relationship to fear seemed quite unusual in laboratory tests. Scientists showed her horror movies like The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs, exposed her to live snakes and spiders, and even took her through a haunted house, but she reported no strong feelings of fear. When SM was shown wide-eyed facial configurations from the basic emotion method’s set of photos, she had difficulty identifying them as fearful. SM experienced and perceived other emotions normally. 3 1 Scientists tried unsuccessfully to teach SM to feel fear, using a procedure commonly called fear learning. They showed her a picture and then immediately blasted a boat horn at one hundred decibels to startle her. This sound was meant to trigger SM’s fear response if she had one. At the same time, they measured SM’s skin conductance, which many scientists believe to be a measure of fear and is related to amygdala activity. After many repe titions of the picture followed by the horn blast, they showed SM the picture alone and measured her response. People with intact amygdalae would have learned to associate the picture with the startling sound, so if just shown the picture, their brain would predict the horn blast and their skin conductance would jump. But no matter how many times scientists paired the picture and the loud sound, SM’s skin conductance didn’t increase when viewing the picture alone. The experimenters concluded that SM could not learn to fear new objects. 3 2 Overall, SM seemed fearless, and her damaged amygdalae seemed to be the reason. From this and other similar evidence, scientists concluded that a properly functioning amygdala was the brain center for fear. But then, a funny thing happened. Scientists found that SM could see fear in body postures and hear fear in voices. They even found a way to make SM feel terror, by asking her to breathe air that was loaded with extra carbon dioxide. Lacking the normal degree of oxygen, SM panicked. (Don’t worry, she was not in danger.) So SM could clearly feel and perceive fear under some circumstances, even without her amygdalae. 3 3 As brain lesion research progressed, other people with amygdala damage were discovered and tested, and the clear and specific link between fear and the amygdala dissolved.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Finally, let us see what happens if you, a minor, accused of having impaired the morals of an adult in a respectable inn, what happens if you complain to the police of my having kidnaped and raped you? Let us suppose they believe you. A minor female, who allows a person over twenty-one to know her carnally, involves her victim into statutory rape, or second-degree sodomy, depending on the technique; and the maximum penalty is ten years. So I go to jail. Okay. I go to jail. But what happens to you, my orphan? Well, you are luckier. You become the ward of the Department of Public Welfare—which I am afraid sounds a little bleak. A nice grim matron of the Miss Phalen type, but more rigid and not a drinking woman, will take away your lipstick and fancy clothes. No more gadding about! I don’t know if you have ever heard of the laws relating to dependent, neglected, incorrigible and delinquent children. While I stand gripping the bars, you, happy neglected child, will be given a choice of various dwelling places, all more or less the same, the correctional school, the reformatory, the juvenile detention home, or one of those admirable girls’ protectories where you knit things, and sing hymns, and have rancid pancakes on Sundays. You will go there, Lolita—my Lolita, this Lolita will leave her Catullus and go there, as the wayward girl you are. In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analyzed and institutionalized, my pet, c’est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell (come here, my brown flower) with thirty-nine other dopes in a dirty dormitory (no, allow me, please) under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?” By rubbing all this in, I succeeded in terrorizing Lo, who despite a certain brash alertness of manner and spurts of wit was not as intelligent a child as her I.Q. might suggest. But if I managed to establish that background of shared secrecy and shared guilt, I was much less successful in keeping her in good humor. Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything—a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a café, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever—but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us. “I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace. We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001. “Judging by the terminal figure,” I remarked, “Fatface is already here.” “Your humor,” said Lo, “is sidesplitting, deah fahther.” We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace. Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely, I must admit—and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbed—seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely—Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector. As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause—a sound my nerves cannot stand—began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child, myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of the joint authors—a man’s tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawklike, black-haired, strikingly tall woman.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I had instructed Ping Xi to bring me one large mushroom pepperoni pizza with extra cheese every Sunday afternoon. Whenever I came to, I’d drink water, eat a slice of pizza, do some sit-ups and push-ups, some squats, some lunges, put the clothes I was wearing into the washer, transfer the washed set into the dryer, put on the clean set, then take another Infermiterol. In this way, I could stay in the black until my year of rest was up. When the locksmith came, I told him to install the new lock on the outside of the door, so that anyone inside the apartment would need the key to get out. He didn’t ask why. Locked inside, the only way out would be through the windows. I figured that if I jumped out while I was on the Infermiterol, it would be a painless death. A blackout death. I’d either wake up safe in the apartment, or I wouldn’t. It was a risk I’d take forty times, every three days. If, when I woke up in June, life still wasn’t worth the trouble, I would end it. I would jump. This was the deal I made. • • • BEFORE PING XI CAME over on January 31, I took a final walk outside. The sky was milky, the sounds of the city muted by the hard ruffling of wind hitting my ears. I wasn’t nostalgic. But I was terrified. It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey. So far, I thought, I’d been wandering through the forest. But now I was approaching the mouth of the cave. I smelled the smoke of a fire burning deep inside. Something had to be burned and sacrificed. And then the fire would burn out and die. The smoke would clear. My eyes would adjust to the darkness, I thought. I’d find my footing. When I came out of the cave, back out into the light, when I woke up at last, everything—the whole world—would be new again. I crossed East End Avenue and shuffled across the salted walkway through Carl Schurz Park toward the river, a wide channel of cracked obsidian. The collar of my fur coat tickled my chin. I remember that. A couple was taking pictures of each other by the railing. “Can you take one of the two of us?” I pulled my limp, pink hands from my pockets and held the camera numbly. “Stand closer together,” I said, teeth chattering. The girl rubbed the wetness from her top lip with her gloved finger. The man lurched forward in his stiff wool coat. I thought of Trevor. In the viewfinder, the light did not find their faces but illuminated the aura of the wind-whipped hair around their heads. “Cheese,” I said. They repeated it.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  “No, no, no,” I said as I held my hands fanned and spread out to try and cover as much of my body as possible. My eyes flew open and then he resumed thrusting to my cries, as if he were trying to silence me with his pounding, as if he were imagining my screams could be something other than pain and terror. “HOW DOES THAT SOUND, TRACEY?” THE HAZY BLOB CALLING me by my wrong name said, pulling me out of the memory of my rape. “Your parents have agreed to take you to Magic Mountain, all three of you. A family trip!” “Fine.” Tracey was fine with whatever they said. Sharisse was shattered, she wanted to yell and refuse to go and never forgive, but Tracey would say whatever the therapist wanted if they would all leave her and Sharisse alone. “This is a good sign, Mom and Dad,” he said to my parents, who were still rigid on the opposite couch, not touching, looking anywhere but at my face. “This will be good for all of you.” The doctor continued to speak to my parents and I tried to tune him out but couldn’t entirely. Divorce is hard on any family, he explained, but it would be a real tragedy for a Black Family to divorce. A broken home is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a child. (Worse than getting raped by your father? I thought to myself.) “Are any of your friends’ parents divorced, Tracey?” “Uh-huh.” “You’re very lucky to have two parents that love you,” he said, as if parents who got divorced loved their children less. “What happened to you is a terrible thing but I don’t think it will happen again. Go to Magic Mountain, Tracey. Have some fun and come back to tell me all about it.” The more he said it, the more it took on a mystical quality—Magic Mountain—like it was a bonus quest in Lord of the Rings. Magic Mountain would erase the trauma of my rape, would instill in me some trust in my father that I’d never had, and would restore our cohesion as a Black Family. So we went. My father paid for my admission, he bought me a rainbow twirled lollipop from the souvenir shop at the entrance and even agreed to go on my favorite ride, a roller coaster, first, despite the long lines. “Just father and daughter today,” the attendant said cheerfully, when we were finally ushered in; my mother refused to get on a roller coaster. My father smiled but showed no teeth. I just looked at the attendant as he assisted us with our red safety harness. “Give it a tug, make sure she’s safe and secure now,” he said. My father pulled on the harness. “She’s daddy’s little girl,” he said, “I’m sure you don’t want anything to happen to her.” We took off.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She did not want to look into the yard; it frightened her too much, but she could not prevent herself. And each time she saw some new horror. A great wall to the left, was adorned with spread-eagled slaves, and on a huge serving cart she saw slaves fixed to the giant wheels, turned upside down over and over as the cart was moved forward. "But what will happen to us?" Beauty whispered. The girl in line before her who could not be quieted was now hanging by her ankle from the hand of a strong Page who punished her swiftly. Beauty gasped to see her spanked, her braids falling to the floor beneath her. "Shh, it is best for her," Leon said, "it will exhaust her fear and drain her slightly. And she will be all the more free on the Bridle Path." "But tell me..." "You must be still. You will see the others first and understand, and as we draw nearer to your turn I shall instruct you. Remember this is a special night of high festivity, but the Queen will be watching. And the Prince will be furious if you fail him." Beauty's eyes returned to the garden. The great cart of steaming food had moved along, and for the first time she saw the distant fountain. Here too were bound slaves, their arms linked as they stood knee deep in the water, surrounding the central pillar, its sparkling flow pouring down over them. Their bodies glistened under the water. The groom beside the girl in front of Beauty laughed softly and said that someone was miserable to be missing Festival Night but it was her own fault. "Surely," Leon agreed when the groom glanced back to him. "They are talking about Princess Lizetta," he told Beauty, "who is still in the Hall of Punishments, and cursing no doubt to miss the excitement." To miss the excitement! But in spite of her fear, Beauty nodded at this as if it were perfectly natural. A calm descended upon her in which she heard her own heart and felt her body as if there were limitless time in which to know it. She felt the sheathing of the leather boots, the click of her horseshoes on the stones, the air on her neck, her belly. And she thought, "Yes, this is what I am, so I should not wish to miss it either. Yet I rebel in my soul; why do I rebel?" "O, I despise that miserable Lord Gerhardt, why must he drive me?" asked the girl before her in a low voice. The groom said something that made her laugh. "But he's so slow," she said, "savoring every moment. And I like to run!" The groom laughed at her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  For one moment Beauty knew terror. But a delicious abandon took hold of her. The slaves wailed as they huddled together behind the low railing, and the driver had already taken his place while the cart was surrounded by mounted soldiers. "One more," Lord Gregory called to the Captain of the Guard, and Beauty heard the cries of the slaves grow louder. She was lifted by heavy hands, her legs dangling in the air. "All right, little Princess," the Captain laughed as he set her down in the cart, and Beauty felt its rough wood beneath her feet as she struggled to keep her balance. For one instant, she glanced back and saw the tear-stained face of Lady Juliana. "Why, she is actually suffering," Beauty thought in amazement. And high above she suddenly saw the Prince and Lord Stefan in the only torchlit window of the dark castle. It seemed the Prince saw her look up; and the slaves about her, seeing the window as well, set up a chorus of vain pleading. The Prince turned away miserably just as Lord Stefan had turned his back on the captives earlier. Beauty felt the cart move. The great wheels creaked and the horses' hooves rang on the cobblestones. All about her the frantic slaves tumbled against one another. She looked before her and almost at once saw the calm blue eyes of Prince Tristan. He struggled towards her as she moved towards him, though around them the slaves flinched and squirmed to avoid the spirited thrashing from the guards who rode along beside them. Beauty felt the deep cut of a strap on her calf, but Prince Tristan was no pressed against her. Her breasts were sealed to his warm chest and her cheek rested against his shoulder. His thick rigid organ passed between her wet thighs and stroked her sex roughly. Struggling not to fall, she mounted the organ and felt it slip inside her. She thought of the village, the auction soon to begin, all the terrors that awaited her. And when she thought of her dear defeated Prince and her poor, grieving Lady Juliana she was again smiling. But Prince Tristan filled her mind as he struggled, it seemed, with his whole body to pierce her and enfold her. Even among the cries of the others, she heard his whisper behind his gag: "Beauty, are you frightened?" "No!" she shook her head. She pressed her tortured mouth to his, and as he lifted her with his thrusts, she felt his heart pounding against her.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I moved past him to the pile of coats on the table, searching for mine as I felt him approach from behind. I wanted to shout, Get someone else in the room. But this man, he was power. And me? I was the new girl in town who’d snatched a sex toy out of another woman’s hand. Instead, I turned to face him, placing the packaged device between my thighs, pressing them together, holding it there while I put one arm through my coat, then the other. I pulled the vibrator from between my legs and turned to leave. Be careful, he hissed, if you use that too much, your clit will go numb. But I was out the back door. Fumbling through the dark, across the expansive property, to the long gravel driveway, to the safety of my car. At home, I stashed the vibrator way in the back of my underwear drawer. IN CONNECTICUT, I HAD LONG STRETCHES OF THE DAY TO myself. The school bus would come at dawn to pick up my daughters. And my husband always left early for his long commute to work. It didn’t feel right, liberating the vibrator from the drawer in the harsh morning light, but that’s what I did, the first Monday after I’d plucked it out of the hands of the woman at the party. I extricated it from the complicated plastic wrapping. It was bright purple, with sparkles, about six inches long. I had no idea if this was considered a normal-sized vibrator but it was certainly less intimidating than the one I’d seen in the porn long ago. I inserted two batteries and turned it on to the first setting. A slight pulsing. Next setting, more. On the final setting, the vibrator gave off a sound like my neighbor mowing his lawn. I dropped it on the floor and watched it buzz its way under my bed. What was I doing? All of this, ludicrous. Purple, my younger daughter’s favorite color. The drone of it under my bed reminded me of all those women, laughing at me at the party. I wrestled my way under the bed. Balls of dust and fluff clung to the vibrator’s shaft like stubborn pubic hair. I turned it off and thrust it back into my drawer again. MONTHS LATER. SPRING. BUS CAME. HUSBAND LEFT FOR work. There were school functions and the random dinner party but I couldn’t decipher the terms of female friendship in this town. Solitude is one thing but this was a particular kind of lonely, the kind you don’t expect when you’ve checked off the boxes of living a lucky life. All smiles at events, but then, no follow-through. Maybe, I thought, my middle-class midwestern roots were showing—I was an imposter without the financial assets to dilly-dally in elite country clubs and vacation homes.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  WHEN YOU DON’T WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, YOU WISH THAT you did. You remember the times when you used to—before you made that decision (sudden or gradual, conscious or not) to stop. You used to walk the short distance home from the bus stop—never comfortably, but regularly—holding your keys as spikes between your fingers. You used to stride down the center of the street, your cell phone at the ready, then speed-walk diagonally across your back lawn. You pine for these memories. They’re a bleak thing to pine for, but you can’t help but miss those moments, fearful as they were. They seem—compared to the current situation—like a kind of unappreciated freedom. Fifteen Years Before/Two Years After/Ongoing The news had advice for me: put a pair of men’s shoes outside your front door. Don’t wear a ponytail—too easy to grab. Get a sign that says BEWARE OF DOG, even if there’s no dog. Carry pepper spray. Wear complicated pants. Instructions came from the Oprah Winfrey Show, Reader’s Digest, Cosmo: Pee on your attacker. Submission is sometimes a strategy for survival. Kick out the taillights if you’re locked in a trunk. Wave your hands to get other drivers’ attention. My mother told me about a story she’d heard on the radio—a woman who’d covertly dialed 911 and narrated her surroundings as her kidnapper drove. “Where are you taking me? Why are we driving past the McDonald’s on First Street?” I imagined myself as a forced tour guide, pointing out the local library. The stories kept coming: tragic or heroic or both. Real or fictional. Survival is resourceful and marketable—on a winter weekend I read Room and found myself thinking through theoretical escape plans, remembering how I used to carry cups of scalding water when I walked home from my old job at a coffee shop, ready to throw them at the slightest sound. Any and all media told these stories. Stories upon stories upon stories. The stories were not my experience, but they were a cousin to my experience. A violent cousin. And I thought about them every time I was afraid, every time my breath caught in my throat. I slipped into their plots like rotten pieces of clothing. WHEN YOU DON’T WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, YOU’RE A COWARD. You don’t talk candidly with other women, who disembark from the bus at stops that look like sunless galaxies. With grace and confidence, they put one foot in front of the other, moving fluidly into the pitch-black night. They wave back at you as the bus drives off, until the only thing visible is the reflective strips on their backpacks. You envy these women. You wonder, How?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable. Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth—like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like. When we began searching for the table with Bennett and the others, we found ourselves suddenly lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other. We kept walking into ourselves. As in a dream, none of the faces at the tables belonged to people we knew. We looked hard and with mounting panic. I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward. Bennett was nowhere. In a flash, I knew he had left with Marie and taken her home to bed. I was terrified. I’d finally provoked him into it. That was the end of me. I’d spend the rest of my lonely life husbandless, childless, and neglected. “Let’s go,” Adrian said. “They aren’t here. They’ve taken off.” “Maybe they couldn’t get a table and they’re waiting outside.” “We could look,” he said. But I knew the truth. I was abandoned. Bennett had left for good. At this very moment he was cupping Marie’s huge sallow ass. He was fucking her Freudian mind. On my first trip to Washington at the age of ten, I got separated from my family while touring the FBI Building. I got lost in the FBI Building, of all places. Bureau of Missing Persons. Send out alarm. This was at the absolute height of the McCarthy era and a tight-lipped FBI man was explaining various things about catching communists. I was dawdling before a glass case, dreaming into the fingerprint specimens, when the tour group rounded a corner and disappeared. I wandered about, gazing at my reflection in the exhibition cases and trying to keep down my terror. I would never be found. I was more elusive than the fingerprints of a gloved criminal. I would be diabolically interrogated by crew-cut FBI agents until I confessed that my parents were communists (they had been communists once, in fact) and we would all end our days like the Rosenbergs singing “God Bless America” in our damp cells and anticipating what it would be like to be electrocuted. At that point I began to scream. I screamed until the whole tour group doubled back and found me, right there—in a room full of clues. But now I couldn’t scream.