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 Escape (2007)

  Merrilyn wanted a life with a man. She wanted love and children. Being married off to a man six decades her senior terrified her. Merrilyn knew it was unlikely that she would have children with him because he was so old and feeble. But there was no way out. The wedding was in Salt Lake City. Merrilyn had been making wedding dresses over the year, thinking that she’d be married any day. She had three dresses by the time she married Uncle Rulon. The one she wore was the least fancy of the three. Merrilyn looked stunning. Uncle Rulon’s younger wives were telling Merrilyn how happy they were she was coming into the family and how much she’d love it. As for the prophet, he was again too feeble to stand, and his hands shook with palsy as he held hers. Merril was now one of the most exalted men in the community since he had married three daughters—Loretta, Paula, and now Merrilyn—to Uncle Rulon. Merril was still abusive to his own wives, but I was more skilled in navigating around him. He was not as predictable as my mother, but I had studied him so closely for so long, I could usually tell when he was ready to explode and would find a reason to leave the room, one that wouldn’t make him suspicious. When he did blow, he’d accuse any wives who happened to be around him of being rebellious and having weak characters—a terrible insult. Merril decided the worth of each wife: Barbara was a goddess. Faunita, the lowest of low. I knew that when he had two wives crying it was safe to return. What made Merril different from my mother was that she would quit after beating one of us. Merril, unlike my mom, seemed to crave more. Humiliating just one wife was never enough. As strange as it might sound, I’d adapted to my bizarre environment and was, by 1993, feeling more grounded than I’d been in years. My world consisted of children: my second-graders at school and my own four at home. Arthur, Betty, LuAnne, and Patrick were bright and loving. I drew strength from activities and events in the community. We had a huge Harvest Festival that would consume the family for days in preparation. One year we made four hundred pies in the week leading up to the three-day event. The Harvest Festival was our version of a county fair. Large families were assigned booths; our booth was for pies. There were games and other activities for kids. The children loved it, and I was always happy for any focus beyond Merril’s family. But the reality was that despite my success in making a reasonably stable life for myself and my children, I knew I was walking a tightrope and was never more than one step away from danger.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lionel almost missed the chatter of the party, missed talking to Sophie and Charles. Charlie. It hadn’t felt comfortable, exactly. But he’d felt good talking to them. Sparring a little. It was easier to forget what lay in wait for him at his apartment: The dishes in the sink. The laundry he’d left. The dust covering all his possessions. Not for long—just a week and a half—but still. When he’d come home from the hospital, his apartment was stale and unfamiliar. Like it belonged to someone else. It had been the water sitting in the sink, he knew. The crusty dishes and soggy pasta. He’d done the dishes before the potluck, at least. His phone vibrated, and he checked the screen. He did not recognize the number. where r u? Lionel looked up the long gray street. The little houses finally giving way to stone-and-brick apartment buildings. Near the capitol but not on the square. The snow had dampened the cuffs of his jeans and soaked through his socks. The drifts were high and thick. He checked the cross streets and saw that he was almost home. He had been walking for fifteen minutes without realizing how much time had passed. He texted his location to the number he did not recognize, feeling a kind of drugged, silly courage. His phone pulsed again: on my way This was different. This was not a question but an answer. Something was on its way toward him, and he did not know what or who it was. He had texted his location as a joke, almost, but here was its echo, bounding back at him, and he felt a prick of something, a little bee-sting sensation at the base of his skull. Then another text: c u soon Lionel went on walking, texting briefly: who are you? Another pulse, another text from the ether: ;) Lionel looked behind himself along the street from which he’d come. He felt a pale version of fear. As if his whole body were numb, but trying to wake up, registering sensation only through a dense haze. He kept walking. He would get home and forget about the potluck and Charles and Sophie. He would fold his laundry. He would get under his blankets and sleep. He would be okay. He would be fine, fine, fine. Another text: where are you? i don’t see you Lionel did not answer. He kept going. But then came a voice calling down the street after him. He did not turn, just crossed the street. The voice grew louder and closer. He began to sweat. Heat covered his back and his stomach. Keep going, he said to himself. Keep going.

• From Escape (2007)

  Uncle Roy traveled to Phoenix and began doggedly tracking down all the children and their mothers. He forbade the women to testify about their marriages and started court proceedings of his own to counter Arizona’s action. In a move that perplexed everyone except those who believed Uncle Roy was getting messages from God, Uncle Roy told his lawyers to find the law that said children couldn’t be taken from their families without a parent’s consent. His attorneys scoffed at the notion that such a law existed. Uncle Roy said it did. Sure enough, a law on the books said just that, and the court case ended. The Short Creek raid actually turned out to be a boon to the FLDS. It generated monumental sympathy for the cult. Once the court case was thrown out, everyone returned home and the practice of polygamy thrived. But the sect became more secretive. People were afraid of the government and became much more guarded about their activities. The dress style became more conservative. No one could show any part of their bodies below the neck. Women were forbidden to wear pants. Marriage also changed. Before the Short Creek raid, women were allowed to choose the men they wanted to marry. The problem was that when women had a say in choosing their own husbands, they chose men close to their own ages. Young women wanted to marry young men. That was bad news for an older man seeking younger wives to enhance his favor with God. The powerful men in the FLDS were older. They knew something had to change because when forced to compete with younger men, they routinely lost out. They also feared that young men from outside the community would entice young women to live outside once they fell in love with them. The future of polygamy was in jeopardy before the Short Creek raid. Several women were thinking of leaving. Back then many women had family on the outside, so leaving was not frightening. Women had some choice. The men in power didn’t like it. The Short Creek raid sabotaged the trust women had in the outside world. They now felt everyone was against them. They’d seen their terrified babies ripped from their arms. Uncle Roy stood up to the state of Arizona and won. He credited the victory in part to the faithfulness of women who would not turn against the system. The women then believed that they must be even more obedient to the prophet in the future. They were thinking of the terror of losing their children, not of surrendering their human rights, which is precisely what happened.

• From Escape (2007)

  There was one caveat: before God slaughtered the wicked, he would allow them to try to kill his chosen people. (It should have made us wonder, but we didn’t.) We were taught that the government (which was wicked) would move into our community and try to kill every man, woman, and child. But since we had been faithful to God and kept his word, he’d hear our prayers and protect us. When we dashed into the orchard to play apocalypse, the first thing we did was run around looking for good hiding places. The wicked were coming with a large army and they were going to kill every one of us! They were even going to kill the babies. Our screams would make our young siblings panic. They had no idea what the game was about. To them it was noisy, frightening, and chaotic. We pretended we’d been sent to the orchard by our parents to hide. I felt safe and secure in my spot until my cousin Jayne blurted out, “I can see you! You’re going to be killed!” The other kids were shouting that planes were coming to attack us with bombs. There was more screaming and hiding. Some of the youngest children began to cry. It was at this moment that the resurrected Indians came to save us. The resurrected Indians were a uniquely FLDS concept. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it was a belief that originated with Uncle Roy or possibly one of his predecessors. We’d been taught that a lot of good Indians were killed when America was settled. God had already resurrected them because they were worthy and deserving, but he was waiting until the last day to allow them to vindicate themselves. In exchange for being given a shot at revenge, the resurrected Indians were required to take on the job of protecting God’s chosen people. Once saved, we would become the seedlings for a millennium of peace. But the devil had designs on the end game, too. He wanted to wipe us out so no one would be left on earth to do God’s work. The devil would engineer our destruction by using the government and other bad people to destroy us. Then the entire world would be consumed in darkness and he’d triumph. “Here come the bombers!” we’d yell. But then my cousins, who were playing resurrected Indians, would come charging out and start knocking the bombers out of the sky by aiming their tomahawks at a pilot’s head. The pilot would fall dead, crashing his plane to the ground.

• From Escape (2007)

  Warren was at least six feet tall, and seemed even taller because he was so thin. He had zero charisma, but was polite and well-mannered and chose his words carefully. Warren was the principal at the private school on his father’s property. What disturbed me most about him were the stories I heard about his brutality. Warren thrived on brutality and seemed to love hurting people. He’d pull some kids out of their classroom and beat them on an almost daily basis. Warren targeted the kids from bad homes whose parents wouldn’t make waves even if their kids told. Warren also taught brutality. One day he brought one of his wives into the auditorium, which was packed with boys. Annette had a long braid that fell past her knees. Warren grabbed the braid and twisted and twisted it until she was on her knees and he was ripping hair from her head. He told the boys that this was how obedient their wives had to be to them. This incident was widely reported in the community because so many of the boys went home and reported what they had seen. Uncle Rulon was also reported to have said that the only thing Warren had ever done to displease him was study books on Hitler. Stories like this were in wide circulation about Warren before he took control of the FLDS. Once he did, though, the stories stopped because people feared his wrath. After Merril’s daughter Paula was married off to Uncle Rulon, he sent her to teach in his school. Paula had a college degree and was a certified high school teacher. She told me that Warren saw her as “contaminated” by worldly education and insisted she bring all her college books to school and throw them in the dumpster. “If you’re going to teach in this school you cannot bring worldly contamination into the classroom.” Paula complied because she had no other choice. The daughters Merril married to the prophet and Warren tended to be the ones he had used to spy on his wives and keep us in line. They eavesdropped outside our doorways and told their father everything they heard. Even after they married, they felt like we were still a threat to them. They’d call home and pump their younger siblings for information. But now they would tell the prophet, instead of Merril, what was going on in our home. This became a huge embarrassment for Merril because on several occasions, the prophet called him in to reprimand him for not having more control over his family. We routinely made the trip to Salt Lake City with Merril for the priesthood meeting on the third weekend of the month. Merril never missed a meeting because he got to drink in the personal time this gave him with Uncle Rulon.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  He withdraws his cock from the other's mouth and the other's from his—tempted very vaguely to take the cum but pulling away just as a tiny dot, just a dot, of creamy liquid crowned the other's cock. The man dropped Jim off in the area of the garage. “I think we made it once before,” the man tells Jim. “Uh—maybe.” Jim can't remember. Still long before dawn. The street still thrives. New hunters have left the bar-turned-coffeehouse. There are too many people by the area of the garage, and so Jim crosses the street to the tunnels. Two tunnels across the street from each other; stairs rising connect the lower street to the upper thoroughfare. In the muffled light, a man squats on the landing of stairs. Jim walks up. Suddenly he stops, remembers the strange earlier rejection at Greenstone. And the empty infinite hours of terror. Footsteps from the upper-street level! Another hunter? The cops? Jim moves away—to the other tunnel across the street. There, one man is fucking another blowing a third. Jim retreats. Beyond the cave of the tunnel he passes a forlorn old man, waiting, alone, ignored, wasted; waiting for anybody. Jim moves toward the shed behind a commercial building. The door to the shed is open. Inside the dark room there's a water tank, a blacker presence in the darkness. Gardening tools. A curled hose. And the odor of amyl nitrite. The sex chemical lurking from earlier encounters? His practiced eyes adjust to the dark beyond the door. There are three men at the back of the shed; as he moves forward slightly, a hand attempts to pull him into the cluster. More than three outlaws are here. Again the dark anonymity sends him away. His body is too special for totally crushed darkness. He moves up the stairs into the yellow tunnel again. Two men, startled, pull away. Jim retreats, not wanting to break them apart. On the corner a lightly but definitely muscled young-man stands; perhaps twenty years old. He's obviously proud of his beginning muscles, which he flexes. As Jim passes, the youngman nods. Jim stops a few feet ahead. The youngman joins him. “How long you been working out?” he asks Jim, quickly establishing a bond. The words, so friendly, so easily spoken, challenge the anonymous silence. Jim answers. A squad car passes them, backs up threateningly. But the two don't move. “You got a beautiful body,” the youngman says. He clearly waits for Jim to comment on his. But right now Jim can't. Motor running, the cops still stare at them from across the street. “You got a place?” the youngman asks. “Yeah—a few minutes away.” Suddenly the cops flash lights on them. “Where's your car?” the youngman asks. Jim points it out. “I'll follow you,” the youngman says.

• From Escape (2007)

  When I came home that night Merril stormed into my room while I was getting ready for bed. He began hounding me about why I’d refused to help Barbara with cleaning the kitchen. I said I hadn’t refused. I had explained I had a few things to finish before I could help. Merril tried to provoke me into an argument with him. But I kept thinking of Audrey’s stories of how he’d attacked Faunita, and I resisted getting drawn into any confrontations. He finally left, and I closed my bedroom door, relieved that he hadn’t slapped me. Thankfully, he didn’t stay with me that weekend or visit me in Cedar after the weekend. I was relieved by the absence of stress. The next weekend, he came and spent a night with me, but never again would we spend Saturday and Sunday nights together as we usually had. There were times when he would sneak into my room in the middle of the night and have sex with me while Barbara was asleep. He returned to her room right away and she never even knew. But even though Merril was spending less time with me, it didn’t decrease the pressure on me or the abuse directed toward me from everyone else in the house except the children. Tragedy Four months after my marriage I was finishing up my final summer classes at Cedar and feeling reasonably grounded. While Merril’s family seemed dark, strange, and complicated, I knew that if I could stay in college and carve out a place for myself in the world, it would offset the other realities I had to deal with as wife number four. In the middle of my final week, Lenore got a phone call from home with the news that the prophet had decided her sister Rebecca would marry Rulon, a young man in the community who was in his early twenties. Rebecca, at nineteen, was a year older than I, and now that she had been assigned in marriage, all of Merril’s remaining unmarried daughters were my age or younger. Lenore got permission from Merril to go home for Rebecca’s marriage, which was taking place the next day. I stayed at school to keep studying, relieved that I didn’t have to change my final exams again as I had to do when I married. Even though I wasn’t there, the stories reached me about Rulon and Rebecca. He hadn’t met her before he found out she’d been assigned to him. When he went over to Merril’s house for the first time, all of Merril’s daughters waited in the office. Rulon arrived, not knowing which daughter was to be his bride.

• From Escape (2007)

  Dee decided to demonstrate that a woman could take care of herself if she didn’t have a husband. Since I was a little girl I’d been taught that a time would come among the Lord’s people when all the men would be gone. No explanation was ever given for why that might happen. But I remember being told that men would be so scarce that if a child ever saw one she’d go running home to her mother screaming because it would have been such an unusual sight. So maybe Dee was trying to play into that kind of scenario. Dee’s class drew a large audience of parents and children. No one suspected anything when they first got to the park. Dee’s wife was tying down a cow with ropes. But once the cow was restrained, she took out a handsaw and began sawing off the cow’s head. The cow’s screams sounded like a woman’s. Children shrieked in terror. Those closest to the cow were sprayed by its blood. Stunned parents grabbed their kids and started to run away. Some stayed, frozen in shock and unable to move. People were furious. Everyone was talking about it. People were disgusted by what Dee had done and blamed him. No one dared criticize Warren Jeffs or Uncle Fred. The community was united against Dee alone and wanted to see him slammed. That happened a few months later in a way none of us expected. Ruth was in the throes of a breakdown. She’d stopped sleeping and was close to spinning completely out of control. Her oldest daughter, Rebecca, came home for the weekend to care for her. Merril was ignoring her condition, as he usually did. By Monday morning, Ruth was babbling nonstop about being late. She said she was supposed to play her accordion at the Monday church meeting. She was parked in Merril’s office, waiting for him. He came in and put on his shoes, and when he sized up Ruth he told her she wasn’t well enough to perform. Ruth said she couldn’t neglect her duties. “Calm down, Ruthie. You know your duties are to your husband,” Merril said. Ruth waited until Merril left the office with Tammy and several of his children. Then she grabbed her accordion and took off. I was worried about her because she was so unstable, and went to find Merril. I told him she’d escaped. “Oh, don’t worry. She’ll be heading for the meetinghouse and we’ll pick her up along the way.” Dee Jessop was Ruth’s nephew. He saw her running crazily on the road and stopped his truck. He told Ruth to get in and he’d take her home. Ruth wanted nothing to do with him. He did what all of us knew never to do: touch Ruth when she was crazy. Ruth ripped into him, smashing him in the face with her accordion. She kicked him everywhere her legs could fly. Cars coming down the road slowed down to watch.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  18When the bride is a widow and the groom is a widower; when the former has lived in Our Great Little Town for hardly two years, and the latter for hardly a month; when Monsieur wants to get the whole damned thing over with as quickly as possible, and Madame gives in with a tolerant smile; then, my reader, the wedding is generally a “quiet” affair. The bride may dispense with a tiara of orange blossoms securing her finger-tip veil, nor does she carry a white orchid in a prayer book. The bride’s little daughter might have added to the ceremonies uniting H. and H. a touch of vivid vermeil; but I knew I would not dare be too tender with cornered Lolita yet, and therefore agreed it was not worth while tearing the child away from her beloved Camp Q. My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious. Moreover, I discovered that although she could not control her heart or her cries, she was a woman of principle. Immediately after she had become more or less my mistress (despite the stimulants, her “nervous, eager chéri”—a heroic chéri!—had some initial trouble, for which, however, he amply compensated her by a fantastic display of old-world endearments), good Charlotte interviewed me about my relations with God. I could have answered that on that score my mind was open; I said, instead—paying my tribute to a pious platitude—that I believed in a cosmic spirit. Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk. She said it did not matter a bit; but that, if she ever found out I did not believe in Our Christian God, she would commit suicide. She said it so solemnly that it gave me the creeps. It was then I knew she was a woman of principle.

• From Escape (2007)

  When Merril arrived at the house, my younger siblings answered the door and came running to get me. Merril didn’t acknowledge me. He walked past me and into the kitchen, where he said hello to everyone. When he left, it was clear that he expected me to follow him, and I did. His truck was parked outside. He didn’t even bother to open the door for me. I got into the truck thinking we were definitely off to a bad start. Neither one of us said a word. I had no experience with men. I had never really dated a boy. Relationships were taboo in our culture. In theory, we weren’t even allowed to socialize with boys, but there were ways around that, as we’d discovered in theology class. My father was the only man I had ever interacted with. I’d never actually met Merril Jessop. I knew who he was because he sometimes came to our house to talk business with my dad. As his truck pulled away from our house, I felt like I was front and center in a horror movie that was being played out in front of me. Except that the horror was real, and there was no escape. I wanted to say, Merril, you don’t want to marry me, and I don’t want to marry you. Take me home. But that wasn’t an option. We were silent all the way to his house. Once we arrived, he called everyone together to meet their new mother. Faunita, Merril’s first wife, gave me a joyous hug. She said she was absolutely delighted that Merril was getting a new wife because the family really needed one. I didn’t know what she meant. We walked into the living room, and people came from everywhere to give me a hug. I was hugged by at least forty people. I wasn’t used to being touched, and it made me very uncomfortable. Merril ordered his two other wives, Barbara and Ruth, to give me a hug. Ruth made the best of it, but Barbara treated me like the enemy. Battle lines were drawn. I was in hostile territory and it freaked me out. In just twenty-four hours, I had gone from worrying about my finals to preparing for a marriage I didn’t want to a man I barely knew. When I got back home, Mom was still frantically working on my wedding dress. She needed me for a final fitting. I was so scared I felt like a zombie bride. Within hours, Merril’s family arrived at my home. He brought his three wives with him and his favored daughters—the nusses. In high school, I’d thought I couldn’t get through the year with them; in marrying their father, I’d be stuck with them for eternity.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  [image file=image_rsrc2N3.jpg] Figure 2.1a This shows the vicious cycle by which fear and immobility feed off each other. It is what engulfs and traps us in the “black hole” of trauma. Later, Nancy reported that during the session she had seen nightmarish images of herself as a four-year-old child, struggling to escape the grasp of the doctors who held her down in order to administer ether anesthesia for a “routine” tonsillectomy. Until now, she recounted, this event had been “long forgotten.” To my utter amazement, these unusual gyrations turned Nancy’s life around. Many of her symptoms improved significantly, and some disappeared altogether. The panic attack that occurred during the session was her last; and, over the next two years, until her graduation from graduate school, her chronic fatigue, migraines, and premenstrual symptoms improved dramatically. In addition, she reported the following “side effect”—she “felt more alive and happier than [she could] remember.” Restoration of Active Defense Responses [image file=image_rsrc2N4.jpg] Figure 2.1b I was able to lead Nancy out of her immobility/fear and hyperarousal by allowing her to re-create the experience of running and successfully escaping from her would-be attackers. It is essential for the client to feel the sensation of running. Running without inner sensing has only limited value. The Innate Capacity for RecoveryWhat allowed Nancy to emerge from her frozen symptomatic shell and reengage in life was the same mechanism that prevented me from becoming traumatized after I was hit by the automobile. The shaking and trembling, occurring in the warm and reassuring presence of a reliable other person, and allowed to continue to completion, helped both of us to restore equilibrium and wholeness, and to be freed from trauma’s grip. Through focused awareness and micro-movements to reenact and complete our unfinished, instinctually rooted protective actions, both Nancy and I were able to discharge the residual nervous system “energy” that had been activated for survival. Nancy experienced the long-delayed escape that her body wanted to make while she was being tied down and overpowered as a defenseless little girl. In short, we both experienced and embodied the innate and powerful wisdom of our instinctual responses as they mobilized to ward off mortal danger. The mindful sensing of this protective primal force stood in stark contrast to the overwhelming helplessness that had engulfed each of us. The major difference between Nancy’s experience and mine was that I had the luck of receiving self-administered first aid, and the fortunate presence of the pediatrician, to nip the potential PTSD symptoms in the bud. Nancy, like millions of others, unfortunately did not. She had suffered years of needless distress until we briefly revisited and “renegotiated” her childhood surgery in my office, some twenty years afterward.*

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings. —Rumi (1207–1273) All God’s children got rhythm, who could ask for anything more? —Porgy and Bess While trauma is about being frozen or stuck, pendulation is about the innate organismic rhythm of contraction and expansion. It is, in other words, about getting unstuck by knowing (sensing from the inside), perhaps for the first time, that no matter how horrible one is feeling, those feelings can and will change. Without this (experienced) knowledge, a person in a state of “stuckness” does not want to inhabit his or her body. In order to counter the seemingly intractable human tendency to avoid horrible and unpleasant sensations, effective therapy (and the promotion of resilience in general) must offer a way to face the dragons of fear, rage, helplessness and paralysis. The therapist must inspire trust that their clients will not be trapped and devoured by first giving them a little “taste treat” of a pleasant internal experience. This is how our clients move toward self-empowerment. Confidence builds with the skill of pendulation. One surprisingly effective strategy in dealing with difficult sensations involves helping a person find an “opposite” sensation: one located in a particular area of the body, in a particular posture, or in a small movement; or one that is associated with the person’s feeling less frozen, less helpless, more powerful and/or more fluid. If the person’s discomfort shifts even momentarily, the therapist can encourage him to focus on that fleeting physical sensation and so bring about a new perception; one where he’s discovered and settling on an “island of safety” that feels, at the very least, OK. Discovering this island contradicts the overarching feelings of badness, informing the person that somehow the body may not be the enemy after all. It might actually be grasped as an ally in the recovery process. When enough of these little islands are found and felt, they can be linked into a growing landmass, capable of withstanding the raging storms of trauma. Choice and even pleasure become a possibility with this growing stability as new synaptic connections are formed and strengthened. One gradually learns to shift one’s awareness between regions of relative ease and those of discomfort and distress.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Memory You spend the month after the breakup doing unofficial CrossFit with your friend Christa, who is brilliant and kind and pushes you. “You’re a natural athlete!” she says admiringly over and over again, and it is hilarious because you are so fat and the furthest possible thing from a natural athlete, but the year’s events have given you uncanny focus, and it’s true that you have been improving: you can now lightly jog a mile without stopping and deadlift two hundred pounds. One day, as you drag your aching body to the locker room, you see that you have nine missed calls. They are all from her, the woman from the Dream House, and there are voicemails to match. Suddenly the phone goes off again, vibrating like a maniacal insect, and you almost drop it on the floor. You sprint out to the parking lot. The whole drive home the phone is ringing, ringing. You run into the house where John is reading, and show him the phone. He leaps into action, attaches his computer to the elaborate speaker system he’s set up in your house, and begins to play some sort of chaotic noise metal. He runs around like Mickey from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” adding his own energy to the noise. “Resist, Carmen, resist!” he cries, slapping the counter with his hands and hitting pans with wooden spoons and amping up the music as loud as it will go. (In Angel Street, when the police sergeant finally makes contact with the tormented, gaslit wife, he tells her firmly, “You are up against the most awful moment in your life, and your whole future depends on what you are going to do in the next hour. Nothing less. You have got to strike for your freedom, and strike now, for the moment may not come again.”) You feel suddenly infused with the discordance, and yell “fuck you” at the phone (which has done nothing but its precise function!) before attempting to figure out how to block her number. You end up googling it, and once it’s done, the phone goes silent. But the voicemails are there, and you ask John to turn down the music. Each one is a little different. Some are steeped in sorrow: I love you, I miss you. Others are threatening. You fucking cunt, pick up this phone right now. (As if she has forgotten you own a cell phone and not a landline, and you are not standing still in the kitchen listening to her voice on an answering machine while she’s leaving her message.) You are so deeply freaked out by this seemingly unhinged sequence, like a bad and offensive movie about a woman with multiple personality disorder, that you try to imagine her leaving the messages—where she might be in the Dream House. You imagine her threatening you in the bedroom, weeping for you in the living room, pledging her undying love in the office. You think it will make you feel better, but it makes you feel worse. You save the voicemails, in case you need to get a restraining order. When you upgrade your phone a few months later, they are lost.

• From Escape (2007)

  What could I do when everyone insisted there was no problem? Nothing. I went back to the office. When Merril came back that night he told Ruth to make an appointment with the dermatologist, even though part of her nose was breaking away from the burned area. When she finally returned home she was extremely upset. The dermatologist said she’d burned her nose off with the chemicals, which would continue burning until she neutralized them with vinegar. The doctor had demanded that Ruth tell him who had given her the chemicals. But she refused. The doctor said they could only be obtained illegally, and he’d seen several other cases of severe burns in people who tried to treat their own skin cancer. But the dermatologist also told Ruth that she did burn off the cancer along with everything else. He made an emergency appointment for her to see a plastic surgeon in Salt Lake City to begin to reconstruct her nose. It was a cheap job and looked terrible. The side that was burned so badly was very misshapen. I felt bad for her. Ruth’s nose was bizarre. But I knew I never would do something so mindless. I’d also continue to take my children to the doctor at the first sign of serious illness, Merril be damned. I felt that in this area, I was immune from Warren’s extremism. But it frightened me when I realized how pervasive extremism was becoming in ways I could not have anticipated. I was in the kitchen one night making dinner and I overheard Merril’s daughter Merrilyn say, “When Dee took that pig’s heart out it squealed so loud you could hear it for blocks.” I shuddered, then left the kitchen to find out what Merrilyn meant. Information was power to me. If I knew what was happening, I felt reasonably confident I could figure out a survival strategy. Merrilyn was talking about the survival classes Warren was holding at his private school in Salt Lake City. Dee Jessop was Ruth and Barbara’s nephew and just a few years older than I was. He’d been making regular trips to Salt Lake from Colorado City and killing animals in front of students. He did this to show students how many different ways an animal could be killed. Very few people talked about what they had seen. I think the children were too traumatized. The parents who knew what was going on also knew to keep their mouths shut. No one stood up to Warren, even then. This was happening under Warren’s orders. I knew him well enough to know that there was always a reason behind his actions. He never did things on a whim. But I couldn’t fathom how torturing animals fit into the picture.

• From Escape (2007)

  Six weeks after the surgery he started turning blue. I called his doctor and rushed him in. She did an X-ray and then admitted him immediately to the hospital. It had seemed to me he’d been getting worse, not better, since his surgery. Now we knew why. His entire chest was filling up with lymphatic fluid. Every lobe of his lungs had collapsed except one, and that wasn’t providing him with enough oxygen. A surgeon was called in to drain some of the fluid from his lungs. Once the fluid was drained we were medivaced back to Phoenix. Harrison was admitted to the ICU for pediatric cardiac care. He was sedated and slept for a long time. I was so terrified that he might die, I rarely left his side. I felt anguished at the level of suffering he must have endured during the past three weeks. Harrison had an X-ray every day for the next two weeks to make sure the fluid was not filling up again in his lungs. Also, amazingly, we saw that the rib the surgeon had removed was beginning to regenerate. I could see the progression on the X-rays as it grew back into a rib. I asked the doctor if he’d ever seen anything like this before and he said that he hadn’t. But he added that he had seen some amazing things happen when it came to healing in children. Two weeks later, Harrison and I went home again. He had made remarkable progress. When we’d first arrived I was told we might be there for six weeks, certainly at least three. But he was doing better than anyone had ever expected. The gladness I felt knew no bounds. Cathleen Comes Home Coming home with Harrison from Phoenix Children’s Hospital the second time was a relief at one level, but at another it was the beginning of an even more intense ordeal. Harrison had survived a complicated surgery, but his regime of pain medication was not working. Harrison screamed almost nonstop. When he went into one of his spasms, he would bite his arms and hands. It was almost a constant effort to keep him from hurting himself. His doctor prescribed a higher dose of Versed, a potent relaxant and anticonvulsant used to treat seizures and as premedication in some surgical procedures. It’s fast-acting and has a short half life in the body. I could give Harrison three doses of Versed within an hour, but then I would have to wait for two hours until I could medicate him again. He usually calmed down after the second dose, but not always. Sometimes it took three. The IV therapy was finally stopped because the doctors felt it wasn’t helping Harrison enough, and his Port-a-Cath—the direct line into his body that was used for his IV therapy—was removed. I was relieved to see that go because it meant one less risk of infection.

• From Escape (2007)

  But no one intervened. Most of us in the community felt that Ruth could not have picked a better person to brutalize. When Dee managed to break free, he got into his truck and drove home. The rest of us felt that justice had been served. But Ruth continued on her downward spiral. Word reached Uncle Rulon that she was out of control, and he sent Merrilyn to help take care of her. But Merrilyn hated being in charge of her mother. One morning Tammy came down for breakfast and heard Ruth screaming like a child. She walked into Merril’s office and saw Merrilyn beating her mother. Ruth finally sank into the corner of the office, sobbing and hugging herself. Tammy was shocked. “Why are you slapping your mother like that?” Merrilyn shrugged. “That’s the way Father handled her ever since I was a little girl. When she gets out of control, he beats the hell out of her until she comes to her senses.” Ruth was finally hospitalized for two weeks. Patrick’s Abuse One of the moments I’d do over in my life if I could is this: Patrick, my four-year-old son, was trying to wake me up at ten-thirty one weekend night. Merril had called family prayers and we were all to assemble upstairs in the living room. One of his older children had tried to rouse me from sleep. When that failed, he sent Patrick. “Mother, Father wants you to come pray,” Patrick said. I rolled over and said that I was too tired. Merrilee was only a few weeks old and I still had not recovered from her birth. I was so depleted and wiped out that I’d fallen into bed after tucking in my children. But apparently Merril had called for prayers, and all my sleeping children were dragged from their beds. I was sick from exhaustion and told Patrick I could not get out of bed to pray. There had been a period of relative stability in our home after Merril’s heart attack. Barbara continued to cause problems for the five other wives, but we were making a determined effort not to engage with her in hopes of minimizing stress at home while Merril recuperated. After a few weeks this strategy seemed to set Barbara off. She thrived on tension and on reporting on our shortcomings to Merril. To stir up trouble, Barbara encouraged the children to act up to get us to respond abusively. One day I lost it with several of Merril’s daughters. They’d been making my life miserable by being argumentative and resistant. When I overheard them acting shocked about a girl who was being bullied and sent dog food as a symbol of her worth, I lit into them.

• From Escape (2007)

  The G-button would go directly into Harrison’s stomach, instead of the temporary nasogastric tube that went through his nose. A fundoplication prevents vomiting because the upper part of the stomach is wrapped around the esophagus and secured in such a way that it works like a valve to prevent the stomach contents from coming up through the esophagus. This was a huge help to Harrison because he stopped getting pneumonia from all the vomiting and he no longer needed to have the nasogastric tube inserted every day. The doctors at Phoenix Children’s had seen only one other patient like Harrison. That child was still having spasms after three years. Some kids with spinal neuroblastoma stopped having spasms immediately after the tumor was removed. For others, the spasms lasted for years until they finally subsided. I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to him. I hated that he needed more surgery, but he had to have relief from the constant vomiting. He was always on the brink of starvation because he couldn’t get enough nutrition to grow. The emergency trips to St. George were becoming more frequent. Harrison had almost died several times and I couldn’t keep pressing our luck. He had to eat, he had to stop vomiting, and he had to be able to breathe. It was hard to imagine his condition getting any worse. Surgery was our only option. I began making arrangements for his surgery in the spring of 2001. Harrison was almost two and had been having spasms for nearly a year. When I started vomiting that April, I thought it might be the flu. But I didn’t have any other symptoms and after a few days I bought a pregnancy kit. I knew what the result would be. I’d missed my last Depo-Provera shot because I was so consumed with Harrison’s care. The test was positive. I was pregnant for the eighth time. If this became another life-threatening pregnancy, it could kill Harrison. No one in Merril’s family would help with Harrison’s care. We could all die: me, my unborn baby, and my sick son. Merril’s daughter Audrey had moved back to our FLDS community a year before. Dear, sweet Audrey, who had taken me on those long bike rides out to the reservoir when I first married Merril and tried to teach me about the family’s dynamics, now became a real ally. Audrey had worked in the ER at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. She was well trained in critical care and knew that Harrison’s condition was a medical problem, not a punishment for my sins. Audrey herself had fallen ill when she was living in Salt Lake City. As soon as she was diagnosed and treated, she stabilized. Audrey did well.

• From Escape (2007)

  But as I was so often forced to learn, happiness was not something I could hold on to. I had to leave the private high school with my friends after only a year. Uncle Roy started a small public high school for his followers, and I was forced to go. Once more I had to say goodbye to my friends and sever myself from what mattered to me most. My life felt like it was moving in the wrong direction, but I felt powerless to stop it. But my sister Linda’s life had become desperate. Linda’s Flight to Freedom Linda had a sense that someone was watching her. He was an old man in the community who was about three times older than she was at seventeen. My father would come home and start asking Linda questions. Why was she wearing a skirt that was too short? Why was she walking down the street in heels that were too high? Why had she combed her hair a certain way before? Dad told Linda who had seen her doing these things. Linda realized that this man was spying on her and reporting back to my father. When my mother got wind of this she was very upset and told my father that she didn’t trust this man. This was highly out of order, and my father ignored her. A woman had no right to speak out like this, even if the goal was protecting her daughter. Linda and I both could see that even when Mother wanted to protect us she had no power to do so. Mother’s fear was that he was angling to marry Linda. Linda feared the same thing. She knew he was a man of power and influence within the community who, if he went to the prophet, could have nearly any woman he wanted. Once he locked onto Linda, there would be no escape. Linda also knew that Mother would drop her concerns about the marriage if the prophet decreed that she should become this man’s fifth wife. These marriages were like live-animal traps. Linda knew her only hope was to flee before the trap snapped shut and there was no escape. She would be eighteen in the fall, which would give her a measure of legal protection. Linda had a childhood friend in the community who was also desperate to escape. Claudel was terrified that she was going to be forced to marry her stepfather. Claudel had been living with her mother in Salt Lake City for several years. Her mother, who was no longer married to Claudel’s biological father, treated her like an indentured servant, forcing her to do all the cooking, cleaning, and babysitting. Claudel feared that if she was forced to marry her stepfather, she would become her mother’s slave for life and resigned to a life of bitterness—a living death.

• From Escape (2007)

  The changes Warren Jeffs mandated were obeyed because it was believed he was the voice of the prophet, Uncle Rulon. People did not resist the more oppressive policies he advocated. Instead, it was widely believed that we were being called to a higher way of living the gospel. This wasn’t oppression, this was grace. God was giving us a new and better way of being more faithful to him via the prophet and his mouthpiece, Warren Jeffs. People who feared these changes and sensed danger, like me, kept quiet. It wasn’t safe anymore to talk about what you were feeling. Women now were not even supposed to go into town without the company of a man. Our husband was our lord and supreme master, holding exclusive power over our lives. It was seen as no longer acceptable for a woman to enter the same room as her husband without first saying a personal prayer asking God to put the same spirit on her as on her husband. I saw this as a real dilemma because most of the time when I entered the same room as Merril he was in a very bad mood. If I had the same spirit that he had, one of us might get hurt. This doctrine was one I decided to ignore. Charter School There was no aspect of our lives that Warren Jeffs left untouched. Education was one of the first areas where his imprint was punitive and spiteful. Warren’s father had put a stop to higher education after he became the prophet. The only exceptions were those of us who had been given permission to attend college by his predecessor, Uncle Roy, before he died. So a few of us were allowed to go on to college, but most could not. This created a population that was even more isolated by its lack of exposure to reading, critical thinking, and the arts. It also meant there was a real shortage of trained teachers. We couldn’t hire teachers from out of town because no one was willing to work for such low salaries. Teachers made, at most, twenty thousand dollars a year. Some families were home-schooling their children because they felt public schools were too contaminated with worldly influence. The education the home-schooled got was abysmal. But the number of kids being taught at home did not have any impact on the teacher shortage. Classrooms were overcrowded, teachers overwhelmed. Several of the second-grade teachers talked about this problem at our monthly meeting. We knew families were getting bigger, not smaller. Our brainstorming produced no answers. But the next week I heard about charter schools that were starting in Arizona. The state was accepting proposals for additional schools that would open in the following years. I started doing research to see what a charter school might mean for us, and it was breathtaking.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  And now they hear the loud speaker—either from squad cars or the hovering helicopter: “THIS IS THE POLICE DEPARTMENT. MOVE TO THE MAIN ROAD. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE MAIN ROAD!” The incredible reality assaults them. The cops are actually invading the park! “They can't bust everybody for just being here,” the youngman says. But the sounds of battle along the roads beyond are unequivocal. “We can't go back to the road now,” Jim says. “We could go around the hill and into the straight section—it's safe there for sure.” “What about our cars?” “Get them later.” “It's a long way around—…” They both know that to get to the straight side of the park without returning to the main road they will have to walk very far along clawing brush, down a steep slippery hill, around, then over another high hill, and down again and across the road. The helicopter whirs directly over them. They throw themselves on the matted leaves. Hooves— still distant. “They're using horses—…” the other starts. “I don't believe it,” Jim laughs, to obviate the fact that they are actually in danger for being in the gay section of the park. The mechanical rumble grows. 1:28 P.M. Griffith Park. The Invasion. “MOVE TO THE MAIN ROAD. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE MAIN ROAD!” “They've seen us,” the youngman blurts. “No,” Jim says. “The fuckers are just covering the whole park.” “Shit bastards!” the other says. He turns to face Jim lying beside him on the leaves. Jim faces him. “Fuck them,” Jim says. The youngman touches Jim's bare shoulder. Their bodies connect tightly. Listening to the distant clap of horses, they lie chest to chest. “They must be busting everybody,” the brown-haired youngman says. “Everybody they can find,” Jim says. Hands nestle in each other's groins. The dipping helicopter scatters the leaves. Bodies charged by the atmosphere of danger, they kiss. The amplified voice demands again: THIS IS THE POLICE! PROCEED TO THE MAIN ROAD! THIS IS-THE POLICE!” The brown-haired youngman is opening Jim's pants, Jim opens the other's. They're almost naked on the leaves. Jim's body mounts the other, mouths and cocks kissing. Whrmrhmrrrr! Whrrrrrrrrmrrrr! The sound recurs vengefully. This time they feel the blade-stirred breeze hot on their bare bodies. Quickly aroused, each takes the other's cock in his mouth. “EVERYONE PROCEED TO THE MAIN ROAD!” Hands sliding over beautiful flesh, tongues touching in moist tips, muscle-straining thighs pressed hard together, cocks aroused sliding up and down on sweat-moistened pubic hair … they come, their liquid cream smearing each other's stomach, cock, balls. “Oh, God!” And they continue pressing against each other as if to extend the orgasm. Now they lie quietly side by side in the cove, listening to the sounds of the invasion beyond.