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

  “About nothing. They’d get into heated debates about some strange point in art or maybe politics. The topic didn’t matter to either of them. They’d get so involved by the end of their second or third martini that Mom would forget all about dinner. My brother and sister and I would take turns being the one to remind them that we hadn’t eaten, but only if the argument they were having was not dangerous. Because I’m the oldest girl, I’d often help Mom put dinner on the table. It makes me cringe to remember how she’d stumble around the kitchen, banging pans and dropping things. Once we sat down, Dad would sober up and drill us on our understanding of a political situation and he’d taunt us when we didn’t know enough. He really picked on my brother, although he could turn his sarcasm just as easily on my little sister or me. Sometimes Steve would be driven to tears. If he tried to leave the table or argue back, Dad would lose his temper and roar at him—‘You are not excused!’” Carol sighed. “Those were the good days. That happened about half the time.” “Those were the good days?” “You haven’t heard anything yet. My brother and sister and I knew it was going to be bad if they started in on each other during the second drink. My parents would begin to taunt each other with hurtful names like stupid and worm. Dad usually took the lead but Mom could rise to the occasion. She’d whisper insults and end up screaming at Dad. He’d wait and goad her on. Mom was usually the first one to get violent. She’d throw a glass at him or kick him. He’d get this horrible grin on his face and say something like ‘Now you’ve got it coming.’ Mom would back away and he’d grab her and slap her and she’d scream. On the better nights she’d cry and it would end there. He’d back off and tell her to get dinner. I’d help her in the kitchen and then we’d all sit there and pretend nothing had happened. Mom would act very aloof and distant. Daddy’d ignore her but he’d be nicer than usual.” Carol shook her head. “But some nights they’d really go at it. There’d be a lot of screaming and yelling and hitting. That was a sort of once-a-month routine. It would end with them disappearing into their bedroom or with Daddy storming out of the house and staying away for the rest of the night. We hated it when they went to their room because then their yelling would change into sounds of them having sex. We could hear them. Later, Dad would come out and tell us to get our own dinner. He’d take something to eat and disappear into his study for the rest of the night. We’d put ourselves to bed. It was so lonely and awful.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And now he sounded like a little whining three-year-old, he sounded like a little baby, he was just like a little frightened baby. “Are you gonna cry?” screamed the sergeant. “Is that what’s gonna happen? Everybody, I want you to look at this, look over here, people, I want you to see the baby cry!” Everyone looked over to where the fat kid was. “Are those tears?” screamed the sergeant. They were all laughing now, laughing, rocking back and forth on their heels, their hands on their hips. “Cry!” screamed the sergeant. “Cry Cry Cry you little baby! That’s what we want, we want you people to cry like little babies because that’s all you maggots are. You are nothing!” The fat kid was now kneeling on the floor. His whole body was shaking; he had his hands against his face like he was praying. “I don’t want this,” he was saying. “I . . . I want . . . to go home. I want to go home.” He was saying it over and over again now, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.” He hadn’t even gotten there, it was the first day and he wanted to go home. And as he watched, the drill instructors, having had all the fun they could, slowly stepped back from where the fat boy was kneeling, laughing and scorning him, pitying him and cursing him, running back and forth screaming in the ears of the other young boys, cursing them and jabbing them again and again, until the whole maddening thunderous echo of cursing sounds and raging angry voices began to deafen his ears and turn his head around and around till he wondered who he was and what was happening and what was this place. “He’s not gonna make it, he’s not gonna make it!” screamed the short sergeant, almost dancing in front of them. “He’s not gonna hack it. He’s a baby. He’s nothing but a baby, ladies!” “He can’t even fit into his pants!” screamed the tall sergeant, laughing. “Yeah,” said the southern sergeant. “He’s nothin’ but a goddamned little baby and you know what we do with babies,” he said. “We kick ’em in their fucking asses and send ’em home. You people, you better listen up!” said the southern sergeant. “You are in Parris Island. You are now in Platoon One Hundred Eighty-one. You are in my platoon and if you people wanna be marines, y’all gonna hafta work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives and you are gonna listen to me and you are gonna do everything I tell you to do if you want to get your asses off this island alive and become marines you better listen to me.” It was beginning to get dark on the island. It had been a long day for him. It had seemed like a hundred days, a thousand days! The day had been endless.

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

  After years of prohibition and delay, executions were again taking place in the Deep South, and most of the people crowded on death row had no lawyers and no right to counsel. There was a growing fear that people would soon be killed without ever having their cases reviewed by skilled counsel. We were getting frantic calls every day from people who had no legal assistance but whose dates of execution were on the calendar and approaching fast. I’d never heard voices so desperate. When I started my internship, everyone was extremely kind to me, and I felt immediately at home. The SPDC was located in downtown Atlanta in the Healey Building, a sixteen-story Gothic Revival structure built in the early 1900s that was in considerable decline and losing tenants. I worked in a cramped circle of desks with two lawyers and did clerical work, answering phones and researching legal questions for staff. I was just getting settled into my office routine when Steve asked me to go to death row to meet with a condemned man whom no one else had time to visit. He explained that the man had been on the row for over two years and that they didn’t yet have a lawyer to take his case; my job was to convey to this man one simple message: You will not be killed in the next year. — I drove through farmland and wooded areas of rural Georgia, rehearsing what I would say when I met this man. I practiced my introduction over and over. “Hello, my name is Bryan. I’m a student with the…” No. “I’m a law student with…” No. “My name is Bryan Stevenson. I’m a legal intern with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that you will not be executed soon.” “You can’t be executed soon.” “You are not at risk of execution anytime soon.” No. I continued practicing my presentation until I pulled up to the intimidating barbed-wire fence and white guard tower of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Around the office we just called it “Jackson,” so seeing the facility’s actual name on a sign was jarring—it sounded clinical, even therapeutic. I parked and found my way to the prison entrance and walked inside the main building with its dark corridors and gated hallways, where metal bars barricaded every access point. The interior eliminated any doubt that this was a hard place. I walked down a tunneled corridor to the legal visitation area, each step echoing ominously across the spotless tiled floor. When I told the visitation officer that I was a paralegal sent to meet with a death row prisoner, he looked at me suspiciously. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and we could both see that it had seen better days. The officer’s eyes seemed to linger long and hard over my driver’s license before he tilted his head toward me to speak. “You’re not local.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  Mireille Miller-Young, the historian and porn scholar, has a nuanced take on the figure of the Mandingo and what she calls “cuckold sociality.” She and her co-author Xavier Livermon emphasize the importance of acknowledging that there are “mobile desires at play” in the racial fetishism of Mandingo cuckolding, which they say is on the one hand full of “productive possibilities and queer potential” for all the actors in the triad. At the same time, it demands the sexual labor of black men, turning them into stereotypically menacing beasts of burden. Miller-Young and Livermon suggest that pornography in general and Mandingo cucking in particular “are among the few places where our most privately held societal views about race are most revealed.” In “eroticiz[ing] the sexual powerlessness” and humiliation of the (usually) white head of household and performing the threat that the black man, with his sexual prowess, will displace the white husband, this genre of cuckolding also allows for the possibility of white men being sexual with black men by proxy, reframing anxiety and threat as thrill. Meanwhile, the white wife’s body acts “as a conduit of white male desires for racial purity and also for the black man’s body.” In this sense, she is less a woman coloring outside the lines and more an actress in her husband’s complex, racialized, and heteronormativity-bending passion play. If being a hotwife sounds enlightened and perhaps even empowering, it might not be. Some men into the cuckold/hotwife lifestyle give the impression that when it comes down to it, they are a whole lot less interested in their wives’ sexual freedom and much more into rigidly choreographing their own pleasure. In some instances, a wife may not enjoy being a character in her husband’s scripts. Or the partners may find they have agendas that are no longer in alignment. “You sometimes get these situations where the guy is very upset that his wife is doing it wrong,” David Ley told me wryly. “They’ll say, ‘No, no, no, this is the way you need to do it, this is the kind of man I fantasize about you being with!’” Ley seemed flat-out amused, gunning for the girls, when he further observed, “What I saw was a number of women who, as they start initially to engage in this to fulfill their husband’s fantasies and needs, gradually they themselves begin to develop more sexual autonomy and independence. These women will say, ‘I’m interested in doing this, in developing relationships’ or just in doing it their own way, without the men’s controls placed on it.” To paraphrase a saying among swingers, be careful what you wish for when you yourself are a guy who can have perhaps several orgasms per day but are married to a woman who can have many times that per hour. The fear and the fantasy is that one’s wife will be “set loose.” As Alexis McCall puts it, “Once your genie is out of the bottle, she’s not going back in.”

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  First Table: Piety toward GodSecond Table: Justice toward Others1. Worship no other gods6. No murder2. No graven images (idols)7. No adultery3. No abuse of God’s name8. No theft4. Keep the Sabbath9. No lying5. Honor parents10. No covetingAccording to Josephus, then, the Baptizer’s call to repentance—tshuvah, in the Hebrew of later rabbinic idiom: “turn”—thus meant, precisely, returning to God’s commandments as revealed in the Torah. How radically new was this message? In the Jewish context presupposed by both Josephus and by the evangelists, it wasn’t. And the Baptizer’s emphasis on attending to the inner dimension of repentance (“cleansing the soul through right conduct” in Josephus’ phrasing) before the external protocols of atonement (“purification of the flesh” through immersion) is a stock theme in Jewish penitential tradition of all periods. However, John coupled his call to recommit to the Torah both to bodily purification and to apocalyptic warnings. Those who failed to heed his warning to repent, says the John of Matthew and Luke, will “burn with unquenchable fire”: “Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit”—that is, the fruit of repentance in Matthew 3.8—“is cut down and thrown into the [apocalyptic] fire” (Mt 3.10).9 John’s message apparently had a major impact on Jesus. In all gospel traditions, Jesus begins his own public mission only after his immersion by John. And Jesus too, say the synoptic gospels, oriented his moral teaching by appeal to the Two Tables of the Law. Asked what were the greatest of the commandments, Jesus responds by quoting from the Torah, citing Deuteronomy 6.4 (the first line of the Jewish prayer the Sh’ma) and Leviticus 19.18. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”—eusebeia, piety toward God (Dt 6.4); and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—dikaiosune, justice toward others (Lv 19.18; Mk 12.29–31 and parallels). In Mark’s gospel, Jesus answers a question about inheriting eternal life by responding, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and your mother’ ” (Mk 10.19). Finally, like pious Jewish males then and since, Jesus wore ritual fringes—tzitziot in Hebrew; kraspeda in Greek—whose function was to remind the wearer of God’s commandments (Mk 6.56; cf. Nm 15.37–40, lines also incorporated into the Sh’ma). We can infer from all this that Jesus defined living rightly as living according to the Torah, as summed up in and by the Ten Commandments; that he defined sin as breaking God’s commandments; and that he defined “repentance” as (re)turning to this covenant.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Cherie’s at work, her boss wouldn’t let her talk.” The man at the cinema ticket counter has fat fingers and a slow pace. My eyes dart around the theater’s lobby as he paws our change out of his register. “Mister, can you hurry it up a little?” I tell him. He stares at me. “We’re going to be late for the show.” Finally, we sail past the popcorn concession and straight into the theater, in the far left corner. We sit through two viewings of Pretty in Pink , and I’m ready to sit through a third when Rosie stands. “Sit down!” I hiss. “What are you doing?” “Let’s get out of here.” “We can’t— Why?” “Let’s at least see another movie or something.” I glance around. “Well, hurry, so we can walk out with everybody else. Put up your hood and put down your head.” We link arms to hustle through the theater’s lobby, but the instant we turn the corner into the mall corridor, I see the worst possible thing: Nick comes running at us, accompanied by two mall security guards. As I yank Rosie into a semicircle spin, I spot Cherie a few steps behind them. Rosie and I race back into the cinema, down the aisle of an empty theater, and out the emergency exit. I push Rosie to scramble under a big metal garbage bin and then shimmy under next to her. “They’ll think we’re hiding behind something—not under something,” I whisper. “How do you know?” “Because I’ve done this before!” We lie there. It will be a miracle if the pounding of my heart doesn’t lead Nick right to us. Rosie rests her cheek on the cold pavement. “We have no control, Gi,” she says. Her return to using my nickname strikes me; softens me. “That’s why we have to get control, sweetie. We can’t let you go back with her. You’ll be fourteen in October, that’s only seven months from now. We have to get you emancipated, too.” “Where will I hide?” “With me up in New Paltz. I can rent a room in an apartment and we can live off campus.” Suddenly Cherie’s voice rings from the darkness. “Regina! Rosie!” “Close your eyes,” I whisper, near silence. “She’s with Nick.” It’s just like when I was four years old living in the Glue Factory apartment. I ran away, and Susan called out for me. “Regina! Regina!” I rose from my hiding place and ran into her arms, then she carried me out of the woods and toward the street, right back to Cookie. We ignore Cherie’s calls. We stay silent and still. Minutes pass. Cars pass. Rosie passes her hand to me, and I lace my fingers through hers. After quiet falls around us, we shimmy out into the night. We walk through unlit parking lots on Sunrise Highway until I find a phone booth on a dark corner. Camille picks up on the first ring. “Regina.” She’s crying.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I accepted war as a means toward peace where negotiations proved useless, in the manner of a physician who decides to cauterize only after having tried simples. Everything is so complicated in human affairs that my rule, even if pacific, would have also its periods of war, just as the life of a great captain has, whether he likes it or not, its interludes of peace. Before heading north for the final settlement of the Sarmatian conflict, I saw Quietus once more. The butcher of Gyrene remained formidable. My first move had been to disband his columns of Numidian scouts, but he still had his place in the Senate, his post in the regular army, and that immense domain of western sands which he could convert at will either into a springboard or a hiding-place. He invited me to a hunt in Mysia, deep in the forests, and skilfully engineered an accident in which with a little less luck or less bodily agility I should certainly have lost my life. It seemed best to appear unsuspecting, to be patient and to wait. Shortly thereafter, in Lower Moesia, at a time when the capitulation of the Sarmatian princes allowed me to think of an early return to Italy, an exchange of dispatches in code with my former guardian warned me that Quietus had come back abruptly to Rome and had just conferred there with Palma. Our enemies were strengthening their positions and realigning their troops. No security was possible so long as we should have these two men against us. I wrote to Attianus to act quickly. The old man struck like lightning. He overstepped his orders and with a single stroke freed me of the last of my avowed foes: on the same day, a few hours apart, Celsus was killed at Baiae, Palma in his villa at Terracina, and Nigrinus at Faventia on the threshold of his summer house. Quietus met his end on the road, on departing from a conference with his fellow conspirators, struck down on the step of the carriage which was bringing him back to the City. A wave of terror broke over Rome. Servianus, my aged brother-in-law, who had seemed resigned to my success but who was avidly anticipating my errors to come, must have felt an impulse of joy more nearly akin to ecstasy than any experience of his whole life. All the sinister rumors which circulated about me found credence anew. I received this news aboard the ship which was bringing me back to Italy. I was appalled. One is always content to be relieved of one's adversaries, but my guardian had proceeded with the indifference of age for the far-reaching consequences of his act: he had forgotten that I should have to live with the after effects of these murders for more than twenty years.

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

  Chapter 4 is focused on one of the central preoccupations of ancient fiction, female chastity. Feminine purity was a transcendent symbol, capable of bearing the most consequential meanings. The authors of the imperial romances invested no small part of their talents in contriving elaborate threats to the chastity of their heroines. These scenes, looked at across the genre, provide direct access to the ideological code of romance. The romances are stories in which essence precedes existence. What is most remarkable about the imperial romances is the extent to which they are explicitly built on an acute awareness that forces beyond the individual’s control shape his or her life. Fate furnishes us with moral ends, and more instrumentally, society constitutes us as selves. The romances make their most daring approaches to the inscrutable mysteries of fate in the image of the heroine’s endangered chastity. The romances flirt with the possibility of her violation, because the transgression of her body would mark a visceral contravention of the social and cosmic order. These typological scenes are very near the deep theology of the romance. In the end, she is always rescued, and the deeper order of the cosmos prevails against the flux and frustration that is experienced in human time. The heroine is reserved, by the will of the gods, for marriage. There is salvation in the cycle of nature, which imparts to us the gift of eros within its mysterious order. Christians and Jews would rework these very scenes of feminine imperilment to express their deepest reservations about the world and the place of eros in the constitution of the self. Already in the primitive phases of the religion, Christian authors were adept at reformulating the fictional tropes of Greco-Roman literature. A whole body of legend grew up around the heroes of Christianity, the apostles. In the apocryphal acts, we find the sexual mechanics of the romance deliberately inverted. The ruling Roman order provides the villains, while the apostles, intermediaries of a higher power, furnish the heroes. In these legends, sexual rejection functions as an expression of dissent from the dominant order. By reading the parallel scenes of female endangerment, we glimpse the theological imagination of a movement set apart from mainstream society and convinced in its belief in a separate, spiritual order.17

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The other day I was in the oasis of Ammon, on the afternoon of the lion hunt. I was in high spirits; everything went as in the time of my former vigor: the wounded lion collapsed to the ground, then rose again; I pressed forward to strike the final blow. But this time my rearing horse threw me; the horrible, bleeding mass of the beast rolled over me, and claws tore at my chest; I came to myself in my room in Tibur, crying out for aid. More recently still I have seen my father, though I think of him rather seldom. He was lying on his sick bed in a room of our house in Italica, where I ceased to dwell soon after his death. On his table he had a phial full of a sedative potion which I begged him to give me. I awoke before he had time to reply. It surprises me that most men are so fearful of ghosts when they are so ready to speak to the dead in their dreams. Presages are also increasing: from now on everything seems like an intimation and a sign. I have just dropped and broken a precious stone set in a ring; my profile had been carved thereon by a Greek artist. The augurs shake their heads gravely, but my regret is for that pure masterpiece. I have come to speak of myself, at times, in the past tense: in the Senate, while discussing certain events which had taken place after the death of Lucius, I have caught myself more than once mentioning those circumstances, by a slip of the tongue, as if they had occurred after my own death. A few months ago, on my birthday, as I was mounting the steps of the Capitol by litter, I found myself face to face with a man in mourning; furthermore, he was weeping, and I saw my good Chabrias turn pale. At that period I still went about and was able to continue performing in person my duties as high pontiff and as Arval Brother, and to celebrate myself the ancient rites of this Roman religion which, in the end, I prefer to most of the foreign cults. I was standing one day before the altar, ready to light the flame; I was offering the gods a sacrifice for Antoninus. Suddenly the fold of my toga covering my brow slipped and fell to my shoulder, leaving me bare-headed; thus I passed from the rank of sacrificer to that of victim.

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

  THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCEOur most complete version of the diffuse lore that attached to the Christian apostle Andrew survives as a Latin epitome composed by the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. In the preface to his summary of Andrew’s legend, Gregory concedes that some critics considered the stories of Andrew apocryphal, “on account of their excessive prolixity.” His avowed purpose in writing was to extract the miraculous pulp and to discard the unnecessary husk of the narrative. The story is none the better for Gregory’s literary surgery. But we can be grateful to have, in however brusque and artless an outline, the shape of this ancient apostolic legend in full profile. From Gregory’s bare summary we can reconstruct a rather elaborate episode built around a narrative trope that must have seemed deeply familiar to the original audience of the Acts. The apostle, shortly after arriving in the Roman province of Achaea, converts the proconsul Lesbius to the Christian faith. Then a slave, Trophima, the former concubine of the proconsul, turned to the apostle’s teaching and the sexual rigors that accompanied it. Her current lover, discomfited by the loss of his sexual companion, designed a plot to undo her. He went to the slave’s mistress, the proconsul’s wife, reporting, “Trophima has returned to harlotry, which she used to practice with my lord the proconsul, to whom she has again joined herself.” It was a well-laid trap, because to the proconsul’s wife this news seemed like a revelation: “No wonder my husband has left me behind and for six months now refused our marital rites, for he loves his slave!” So the wife did what any archvillain in a romance would have done: she had Trophima, newly converted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel.27 Trophima—slave, concubine—was no romantic heroine of the ordinary build, but she nevertheless found herself in the archetypal testing grounds of feminine respectability. In the brothel, she prayed continuously, and when eager customers came to her, she clutched a copy of the gospel to her chest. One day an unusually insistent client entered, and, while resisting, Trophima dropped the gospel. She cried out to heaven, “Keep me from suffering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel appeared and struck the youth dead. Then Trophima, for what reason Gregory has omitted to relate, resurrected the dead young man, a sight “the whole city” rushed to see. The proconsul’s wife was killed by a demon in the public bath, a penalty for her persecution of Trophima. Nevertheless, a distraught nurse prevailed upon Andrew to resurrect the proconsul’s wife, which, in the very public atmosphere of the governor’s headquarters, he did. All were reconciled, miracles reported far and wide, newfound chastity saved.28

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’m going to start you with the junior varsity team.” Instantly, I begin to structure my days around a full day of school followed by gymnastics practice until six thirty, then babysitting and housecleaning jobs. In study hall, while the other kids sketch the logos of Van Halen and AC/DC on their notebooks, I doodle Rosie and Norman in hearts and bubbles with mia bambina amore and je t’aime scribed around them. Any homework I don’t get done at school is a good excuse for me to maintain my privacy when I get home in the evenings. One night in early October, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “You have a visitor,” she says. Cherie appears behind her in the doorway, and Camille pops her head out of her bedroom. “What are you doing here?” Camille says. “You never stop over without calling first.” Cherie looks at the ceiling as if she’s praying to save her last nerve. “Cookie was driving drunk and she got into an accident,” she says. “She left the scene, and the police were looking for her . . . and . . . she skipped town with the kids.” Camille asks, “Wait, I didn’t hear this part. What do you mean ‘skipped town’?” Cherie says, “I got a call from Cookie’s friend Jackie Sones. You remember her? She lived near us in Saint James.” “Jackie Sones—the one who moved to Idaho?” “Yeah,” Cherie says, clearly dreading what she has to reveal next. “She told me Cookie is heading out there so she can live in Jackie’s trailer and work with animals on a farm. So, with the kids, off she drove.” We walk out to the kitchen, where Addie gives us permission to call Ms. Harvey at home. “Girls, there’s nothing anybody here can do if your mother left the state.” “Oh, big shock,” I say, “considering how much you did to protect them while they were here.” It’s close to Halloween when Jackie Sones calls Cherie to tell her Cookie and the kids have arrived. “They stayed with Jackie a few weeks until Cookie found a bowlegged old man named Clyde who lives on a farm in some town called Oakview,” Camille tells me. “Let me guess, so she used her ways to convince him that he would be better off if her brood moves in.” We learn that, to maintain her part of the bargain, Cookie volunteered the kids to work as farmhands. They rise every morning to milk the cows, shovel horse manure, bale hay, and tend the crops. “I know how this works,” I tell Camille. “If they don’t step up, they’ll get beaten.” “Yeah,” she sighs. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” “Well, at least they’re in a small town. When we figure out how to fix this, hopefully it will be easy to find them.” She gives me Clyde’s phone number, which Jackie shared with her. I pop more quarters in the pay phone. A gruff, bothered male voice answers.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Epilogue IN LATE OCTOBER, the National Weather Service forecasts a “Superstorm”—a hurricane they’re referring to as Sandy. For the first time ever, the NWS sends a representative out to Long Island to prepare us county leaders and our first responders for how serious this storm will be. “Death and devastation,” they tell us repeatedly. “Your residents have got to take this storm seriously. The devastation won’t be because of the wind or the rains, but because of the storm surge. The topography of Long Island and most likely all of greater New York City will be changed forever.” “Do not let any of the kids leave your house,” I tell Camille. “There will be power outages and fallen trees and worse—in fact you all need to sleep in a part of the house that’s far away from trees.” The thousands of homes along Long Island’s coastline are extremely vulnerable . . . including mine. I lock it up and say a prayer, spending the next few nights at the county’s emergency management unit in Yaphank. The center is filled with the U.S. Coast Guard, New York Army National Guard, social services, police, fire chiefs, Red Cross, and swarms of other emergency response units. With them I stay up through the night as they work to protect as many Suffolk County residents as possible. We also figure out ways to keep communication lines open to the people who are in flood zones and refused to evacuate before it was too late. It’s a night of heavyheartedness that I’m certain will stay with me forever— we’re witness to the flooding that causes complete neighborhoods to be destroyed. It’s a harsh reality check as I hope that these citizens’ homes will be the worst thing that they lose. In the light of day, I join the team of emergency responders and leaders whose job it is to find emergency shelter, food, and supplies for the hundreds in the county who are suddenly homeless or without power. Now I’m working to put the lights back on for the very same community that, decades ago, did the best it could to keep mine from dimming. The National Weather Service’s dire warnings to our emergency responders

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Dumpster and the building’s back wall to create a bed. It’s probably been an hour when I open my eyes at the sound of her jalopy rolling down the street. I peek out around the corner and see the car turning in the direction of the bars. I wish these feelings were new to me—the hurt, anger, rejection from the emotional abuse, and the searing physical pain—but for all of the near-fourteen years of my life, this is the only consistent, predictable part of my relationship with Cookie. To me, feeling secure means the opposite of what it means to most kids. Children are supposed to find their greatest safety and comfort in the arms of their mothers. Instead, Cookie’s homecoming is our darkest danger, like the worst storm anyone can imagine. I brace myself and lock down my wits as she enters with a stir. We have no control over what comes next as the tension builds, then it’s as though the skies open up when she comes down on me in a rage. When she’s finished, she goes suddenly . . . leaving the devastation in her wake as the only evidence she’s ever been here at all. We’re always comforted to know she’ll be gone for a while—safe and content, as though it’s safe to step out into the sun after a torrid rain. And we recover fast, using our wits and will to stay together and rebuild our home. I walk into a quiet house. One of the kids has cleaned up the glass, and they’re both sleeping toe-to-toe on the couch. My heart swells as I kiss their cheeks good night, and whisper in Norman’s ear: “You’re a good big brother.” I rise and stand there watching them . . . then the tears stream down my face. Not for myself but for how powerless we are over what will happen next. After a minute I secure the front and back doors then head to the bathroom to try and soak away my pain.

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

  While his hopes were still high, Th ersander remained “wholly CHAPTER ONE Th e Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire  FROM SHAME TO SIN enthralled” by Leucippe, but the disappointment of rebuff lets loose his fury. He resorts to physical and psychological violence, striking Leucippe across the face and calling her a “miserable slaveling.” “You should be grate- ful that I speak to you, and count your lucky stars that you seem worthy of my kisses. . . . I know that you’re just a little whore, and the man you love is an adulterer. Since you don’t want to accept me as your lover, you will expe- rience me as your master.” In the slave society of the Roman Empire, where the routine sexual exploitation of slaves was an integral part of the sexual economy, the narration of such pedestrian violence was highly unusual, and surely jarring. But the author builds up the uncomfortable potential of the scene, only to let it dissipate in arch melodrama.  We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and— what makes the scene so revealing— neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Th ersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fi re, bring the sword. . . . For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [eleutheria], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confi dent her objective status will some- how ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. Th e eleuthera was the sexu- ally honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. Th e opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order.  At the same time, Leucippe’s grand speech positions this novel within a matrix of cultural refl ection on the perennial problem of free will and fate.

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

  Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave owners and other ruffians, recur throughout the entire genre. The most direct parallel, and the only rival to the Ephesian Tale in the transparency of its conventionality, survives in the popular History of Apollonius, King of Tyre. The History of Apollonius is a family romance rather than an erotic romance, but the pattern of separation, endurance, and reunion is structurally parallel. In this story, which survives in Latin, it is the protagonist’s daughter, Tarsia, who has been cast on the cruel winds of fate and endures lurid threats to her virginal purity. In the climactic scene of the History, Tarsia, like Anthia, is placed for sale in a slave market. The prince of the city and the town’s most notorious procurer enter a bidding war for the beautiful girl, with equally prurient interests. As the price escalates, the prince reckons that the purchase of this one creature would force him to sell off a number of his other slaves. With the dispassionate logic of a cost-cutting accountant, he reasons that he can let the pimp buy her, then pay to be the first customer for just a fraction of the girl’s sale price. “I’ll go in first and snatch the knot of her virginity at a low price and it will be the same as if I had bought her.” The deep material and ideological connection between the flesh trade and the sex trade was rarely exposed to such direct view. The demand for sex was a major impetus behind the circulation of human chattel in the Roman world.6 The pimp in this story, a monochromatic villain, ignores Tarsia’s pleas for compassion. “Don’t you know that supplications and tears have no force with pimps and executioners?” Like the executioner, the pimp is an agent of death. He sends her to the brothel. The prince, with his face covered, entered first. Tarsia prostrated herself at his feet and in the most desperate terms begged for his pity. “Listen to the misfortune that brought me to this unhappy state, weigh the fact of my respectable ancestry.” The prince was startled into compassion. He, too, had a virgin daughter, for whom he might fear a similar fate. He abandoned his lustful intentions and told Tarsia to implore future customers with the same sad recital, until she had earned enough to buy her own freedom. A train of suitors follows, and all are so moved by Tarsia’s story that they refrained from impairing her chastity. She endured, inviolate, until she was reunited with her father, who promised Tarsia to the noble prince as a bride (and incited the people of Mytilene to burn the merciless pimp alive). Tarsia’s preservation of her chastity was less elaborately contrived than Anthia’s. She relied on the bare compassion of strangers. But the underlying assumptions about the order of the universe were the same.7

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

  Sheriff Tate drove Walter to Holman Correctional Facility, a short ride away in Atmore, Alabama. Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer. The transfer of Myers and McMillian from the county jail to death row took place on August 1, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Wayne Ritter. — When Walter McMillian arrived on Alabama’s death row—just ten years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted—an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white. Everyone was poor, and everyone asked him why he was there. Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five-by-eight-foot cell with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges. Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it “Yellow Mama.” The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman’s execution chamber. Russ Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans filmed what became an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with schoolchildren and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appeals, Canan went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans’s request. It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process:

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And when he was finished the lights went out and they slowly closed their eyes. And the first day had ended. * * * (Lights flash, flash, flash standing by my rack now) sir! the private requests to make an emergency sitting head call WHAT DO YOU WANT KOVIC? sir! o god o jesus yessir aye aye sir one two aye aye sir If I die in a combat zone pack me up and ship me home COUNTDOWN—READY—SEATS! GET IN THE PASSAGEWAY SWEETPEA AND GIVE ME FIVE HUNDRED BENDS AND THRUSTS—DO IT! BY THE LEFT FLANK—one two three four I love the Marine Corps THIS IS YOUR RIFLE LADIES I WANT YOU TO KNOW IT ALL OF IT EVERY PART OF IT! CAN’T YOU READ SWEETPEA? this is my rifle this is my gun this is for fighting this is for fun, Ask not what your country (the formation now) remember i can talk no i can’t talk no i can’t bring back by the river—with the rifle—America. America. God shed His grace on thee, Eenie meenie mynie moe catch a nigger by the toe EYES RIGHT! I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE THIS AFTERNOON THAT THIS THING OUT THERE IS A COMMIE SONOFABITCH and wops and spics and chinks and japs and GET IN FRONT OF YOUR RACKS!! THAT’S NOT QUICK ENOUGH! (never quick enough, eighteen i’m eighteen now) UP! DOWN! GET IT! OUT! GET IT! o mom o please o someone someone help now somebody BY THE RIGHT FLANK! GET DOWN! GET UP! (hot deck parades faces mirror face still pimples now boots and socks) o lights flashes GET THE FUCK UP! We will bear any burden by your leave sir excuse me sir pardon me sir suffer any hardships i’m sorry sir o yessir no sir aye aye sir, sir! (push-ups push-ups clanking sounds steel) READY—SEATS! (plates forks and) EAT AND HURRY UP AND RUN AND HURRY UP AND EAT AND HURRY UP AND RUN AND HURRY UP HURRY UP! There is something I believe—we’ll be home by Christmas Eve sir my service number is two-oh-three-oh-two-six-one sir the president of the united states is the honorable lyndon baines johnson sir the vice president is Our Father, Who art in heaven PREPARE TO MOUNT aye aye sir hallowed be Thy name MOUNT! Thy kingdom come, if I die on the Russian front bury me with a Russian cunt DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! Thy will be done DO IT! DO IT! DO IT IN YOUR SLEEP ON THE FLOOR ON YOUR HEAD DO IT NOW WANT TO BECOME MEN WANT TO BECOME MEN WANT TO BECOME MEN oh, become, marines oh god bless the marine corps god bless america TIGHTEN UP! TIGHTEN UP! god bless my senior drill instructor god bless the president PLATOON HALT!

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  This is poignantly illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. Bill and Alice have just returned from a lavish black-tie Christmas party that has sparked a conversation about sex. Bill has always assumed that Alice, like him, is essentially incapable of infidelity. “You’re my wife and my child’s mother and I’m sure of you. You’d never be unfaithful. I’m sure of you.” Alice, outraged at his presumption and emboldened by a joint they have just smoked, decides to enlighten him. She describes in agonizing detail just how powerful the presence of the other can be, even when it is nothing more than a mirage. She tells him of her febrile fantasy about a naval officer she desired from a distance. They never met; nonetheless, his instant hold on her was so strong she would have given up everything if he’d only asked. She also says that this happened on a day when she and Bill had just made love, and Bill had never been dearer to her. Bill is devastated by his wife’s revelation, and he spends the rest of the film trying to avenge the betrayal and restore order to his broken world. What struck me is that, for Bill, a fantasy could generate the same sense of violation as an actual affair. Bill is like many of the partners I meet. His security rests not only on what Alice does but also on what she thinks. Her fantasies are proof of her freedom and separateness, and that scares him. The third points to other possibilities, choices we didn’t make, and in this way it’s bound up with our freedom. Laura Kipnis says, “What is more anxiogenic than a partner’s freedom, which might mean the freedom not to love you, or to stop loving you, or to love someone else, or to become a different person than the one who once pledged to love you always and now…perhaps doesn’t?” If she can think about others, she might love others, and that is intolerable. Fortress Love The menace of the third is intrinsic to the experience of love, and even the most controlling marriage may not be able to allay our anxieties. Nevertheless, many of us do try. “You were with that guy for a while. What were you talking about?” “You spend a lot of time on the computer. Is it all work?” “Where have you been?” “Who was there?” “Did you miss me?” Many of our inquiries hover at the border between intimacy and intrusiveness. We want to know, but we don’t want to be too obvious. We say that we ask because we care, but often it’s because we’re afraid.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  When you arrive at the house party, your friends all stare at you and ask if you’re okay. “I need a drink,” you say. “And then I need to tell you a story.” Dream House as Schrödinger’s CatWas it the arc of the universe? The natural result of centuries, millennia of wrongheaded politics? Was she trained to find you, or were you trained to be found? Was it the fact that you’d already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other? The fact that your heart had been broken that one time and you desperately wanted to feel it unbreak? That you felt complete with someone loving you? That you just straight-up loved being desired, desiring someone, coming all the time? That you got addicted to her smell, her voice, her body? That you figured this was what you deserved? The superpredictable result of a religion that pathologized sex but never talked about relationships? Terrible sex ed? Bad timing? You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed the answer is all of these things, all at once. Dream House at Newton’s AppleEarly in the summer, this guy drops you a line. When you first got to Iowa, he had flown into town and the two of you spent a weekend in bed together and it was a nice culmination of a few years of light internet flirtation. It turns out he’s in town for a conference for work, and he asks if you want to get dinner. You agree, even though you don’t really want to see him. You even agree to pick him up from his hotel—his request—although you don’t want to do that, either. Even as you’re driving to his hotel, you’re thinking about how you’re just doing what he’s asking you, the same way you’d respond to the woman in the Dream House, even though he’s just this random guy. You think about that as you pull up under the awning, as you drive him to the restaurant. He is talking to you. Even as you’re responding to him, even as you’re ordering and making small talk, you’re marveling at the fact that his maleness—the generic fact of it—has as much pull as a carefully curated, long-term abusive relationship. It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different levels of effort. You refuse to get a drink, pick at your meal. He insists on paying. You drive him back to the hotel. You pull in front of the entrance, and he smiles at you. “Why don’t you park so we can say good-bye?” he asks.

• From Untrue (2018)

  It’s hard to ignore that one of the things that drew Robert to Sally was what he called her “independence.” She was married, and it didn’t stop her. And it was clear that sex was on the agenda. These factors also draw the utterly witting and willing Walter Neff into Phyllis Dietrichson’s orbit and are his ultimate undoing as she (barely) backseat drives him into killing her wealthy husband. “That’s a honey of an anklet,” Walter says to Phyllis at their first, sexually charged meeting rife with double entendre. At the time, anklets were known to connote that a woman was possibly “loose,” having long been associated with courtesans and prostitutes. Thus we know who has the power, and how it will end. Meanwhile, Robert ultimately heeded the cultural script that married women belong to their husbands. That script remained very much in place when Sally told Robert that she wanted to be his wife. She basically wanted to switch up the players. Robert’s fear made sense to me, and Sally’s husband’s rage is all too familiar, the endless repetition of the same old song. But I was surprised to learn, as I interviewed and read, that there are men utterly unlike Sally’s husband, men who want to be Robert and Sally’s husband at the same time. These men don’t merely tolerate their wives stepping out or look the other way when it happens. They want and frequently beg them to do so. These men have a particular and fascinating fetish: a deep need to watch their wives cheat. They are the antithesis of Peter the Great, who beheaded his wife’s supposed lover, then is rumored to have ordered that the unfortunate man’s head, preserved in alcohol in a jar, be displayed in the faithless woman’s bedroom, where she would be forced to contemplate it every night. No, these men are not possessive, and they are not driven to violence by their women straying. In fact, nothing excites them more than being married to an adulteress. They welcome, celebrate, and engineer female infidelity for their own sexual delectation. I first learned about such men and partnerships via social media, and it was an education.