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 Chronology of Water (2011)

  Sometimes I’d just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her, and I’d lift my foot up to take a step and immediately feel VERTIGO, and then with a little wistful sigh and my throat knotting up I’d give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I’d start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I’d hold the railing for dear life and say her name into space. Hoping she would come retrieve me. If I made it down the stairs alone to the beginning of the horror hallway - a hallway with NO LIGHTS - the only way I could get to her was to close my eyes as tight as my fists, hold my breath, and sprint . . . always arriving at the light of her door letting out this sad little breathy MAAAARRRR sound. How I managed not to hit a wall I don’t know. But in her room. Being in her room was like being inside a painting. Our grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts with the colors of the seasons spread out across her bed. Music and books and candles and wooden boxes with jewelry or shells or feathers in them. Incense and brushes and combs and dried flowers. Paint brushes and big squares of paper and drawing pencils. Velvet dresses and leather moccasins and jeans with legs shaped like big As. A guitar. A recorder. A record player. With speakers. In her room you would never know the torture pit of the laundry room was three feet away. She’d let me get in bed with her, and we’d move around under the covers, our body heat remaking a womb. “ Watercolor covers,” she’d say, and I’d nearly hippoventate with pleasure. Sometimes I held my breath or made little repetitive circles between my fingers and thumbs. Smiling like a giddy little troll. Girl skin smell making me high. Getting back upstairs was nothing, because she’d escort me, and I’d be back in the upperworld of things. What an imaginative leap she made to leave us and live down there that year. How much I didn’t understand where the danger lived. When my sister was in high school we got a phone call. My sister was underneath a table in the Art Lab, telling her art teacher Baudette very calmly but with complete certainty that she was not going home. Ever. My parents had to go see the officials at the school, and the art teacher, Baudette, who my sister had made into her better family, explained to my ding headed mother that my sister couldn’t be around my father. That mandatory counseling sessions would happen. I thought her teacher’s names were magical. Mr. Foubert. Mr. Saari. Baudette. I sat in the corner of the school office eating a little piece of paper trying not to cry.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Wouldn’t it be great if that’s all there was to it? A mother’s voice soothing the way for her daughter to leave. Blonde swimmer girl gets on a plane, bye bye y’all. A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox-I almost loved her. All the rest of July he raged. And August. Every day when he came home from work he’d find another way to fill the house with rage, shake the walls with shame, while the little women took it and took it. Sometimes I thought he might kill one of us. But I was not afraid. In the palm of my bedroom I could feel the walls pulse. Once that summer during a rage run my father threw a plate at the sliding glass door. I waited for the shatter but nothing happened. Another night he ripped my swim bag to shit, my suit and goggles flying into the air. Once he followed me all the way to my bedroom door. I could feel his words at my smoldering shoulders. He stopped in the doorframe. When I turned to face him, he was shaking with anger. Then he said, “This is control. I’m controlling myself. You don’t know how far I can go.” We stared at each other. I thought: this is your daughter leaving, motherfucker. But other nights he’d become the man whose desire had twisted up inside him. The closer we got to my exit. On an August night with rain as hard as drums he sat me down on our living room couch. He put his arm around my shoulders. He rubbed my far arm with his big thumb in creepy circles. His voice was more calm than is possible to make a voice. Then he narrated what boys would want to do to me, how they would put their dirty hands up my skirt and part my legs and finger fuck me. How they would reach inside my shirt and fondle my tits and grab my breasts. Suck them. How disgusting boys would be, their hands, their hot hips and breath, their wanting in and up. And what they would do with their dicks, me sitting there next to him on the couch feeling the heat of him touching his dick even without looking, my skin making pins, clenching my teeth inside my mouth, and him saying how I should say no, and how I could find the strength to say no by remembering I was his daughter, that he was the only man for me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Hanna sighed. “She told Lara that all those years she had been trying to help her, ‘to scream her scream’ she called it. But that no one listened to her. She told her that she should never be alone with Ethan.” Jed nodded. “From then on, Lara didn’t want to go to school anymore. We thought she had become afraid of people and that’s why we decided to bring her to therapy.” The first session ended and my head was spinning. I felt nauseous and realized that those were exactly the symptoms Lara’s parents described Lara as having. I was curious to meet her. The next day Lara arrived at her first session accompanied by Jed. She held her father’s hand, her long black hair tied in a ponytail, and didn’t look at me. “I like your office,” she said quietly, looking around, a shy smile on her face. I liked Lara from the first moment. In that initial session, Lara told me about her family and described nonchalantly how Ethan was accused of touching her inappropriately. “My grandmother doesn’t like my brother,” she said. “Maybe she even hates him and she wants him to go to jail.” Lara talked about these facts without emotion, as if none of this was about her. She turned to look at the dolls in the corner of the room and asked if she could play with them. For a year, during every session we played while we talked. I observed the play and tried to listen to what she was teaching me about her world, her emotional experience, and her vulnerabilities. Since it was not clear whether Lara had in fact been sexually abused, I decided not to include her in my research. It was surprising then when she suggested that we play Little Red Riding Hood. “It’s my favorite fairy tale.” She smiled. “Except there are no wolves in our story, remember?” YEARS BEFORE IT was adapted by the Grimm Brothers, “Little Red Riding Hood” made its debut in a version written by Charles Perrault in 1697. Perrault’s story was adapted from the folktale, and in it he described the moment the child met the wolf, referred to as “Mister Wolf,” implying that the wolf stood for a human being. In Perrault’s version, when Little Red Riding Hood arrives at her grandmother’s house, the wolf is lying in bed and asks her to undress and join him. Little Red Riding Hood is alarmed to see his disrobed body and says, “Grandmother, what long arms you have,” to which the wolf replies, “The better to hug you with.” Perrault’s version ends with the wolf devouring Little Red Riding Hood, followed by a short poem that teaches the moral of the story: that good girls should be cautious when approached by men.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Guy stops and glances at his watch. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he says. “What’s the point of talking about it now? We can’t change the past.” He starts gathering his things from the side table. Holding his keys, he looks at me and says, “Galit, at the end, I did save my life. I’m here in New York almost twenty years now. I was able to run away.” I know that it will take time to process all the feelings that are brought up to the surface. Guy moved to New York in an attempt to survive, but his past chased him—as it always does. He puts his keys back on the table. “We still have five more minutes,” he says. “I have to go to jury duty again tomorrow. I wish you could come with me.” He starts laughing. “I’m just joking. I wouldn’t want you to have to hear that girl describing her childhood. It’s brutal.” “I know our session today was brutal,” I say, “and I assume you always wished for a mother who could come with you and protect you, make you feel safe, and help you to be brave.” He glances at his watch again. “Our time is up. Maybe I should come another time this week,” he says, taking another step toward rather than away from his pain. He is brave, I think. We plan to meet again on Thursday. That night I have a dream. Guy and I are in a big castle. We are both wearing miners’ helmets and each of us is holding a flashlight as we go down the stairs to the basement. We are clearly looking for something. “I brought you here to save my brother,” Guy says. “He is in captivity.” The castle is dark and I’m worried that we have gotten lost. Guy says he is frightened. “Let’s run away; it’s filled with ghosts here,” he says. “We have to be courageous,” I hear myself saying, either to him or to myself. The ghosts of the past control Guy’s life. I am aware that he and I are on a journey to revisit his trauma and listen to the little boy he used to be, the boy he left behind when he ran away in order to save his life. Now we need our flashlights to illuminate everything that he left down in the basement of his life, everything that prevents him from moving forward, living, and truly loving. Thursday is a warm day and Guy walks in smiling.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  What safety behavior did Jia use? How is he trying to keep the guard from thinking he’s a total nut job? In this case, it’s speed. Jia moves in quickly, chatters his words, and gets out, as he put it, “like some sort of small animal running away from a predator.” As for the rest of us, we might avoid eye contact, speak in a low, mumbling voice, or hover a few steps away. This all makes sense—we’re trying to keep ourselves safe. But later, when Jia was editing the video of the encounter, he saw what he had missed. The security guard wasn’t hostile in the slightest; he was just perplexed. Jia also realized the guard’s “Why?” was an offer to extend the conversation. Jia could have been honest and said, “I’m trying to overcome my fear of rejection, so I am forcing myself to make absurd requests.” Or he could have offered to leave his driver’s license as collateral and promised to repay him. But Jia let his safety behaviors get the best of him and skedaddled. Jia vowed to do better the next day. On Day Two, he went to a burger joint for lunch. As he was filling his cup with soda at the dispenser, he saw a sign that said: “Free Refills.” Jia’s eyes lit up. After finishing his bacon cheeseburger, Jia approached the counter. In his phone video, a young guy with glasses, a red apron, and an armload of tattoos strides up to help him. “What can I do for you?” he asks. This time, Jia looks the guy in the eye, smiles broadly, and stands up a little straighter. “Yeah, your burger is really good. Can I get a burger refill?” “A what?” says the cashier. “A burger refill.” “A burger refill,” the cashier repeats, trying to wrap his head around the question. “What do you mean?” He’s not unfriendly. Like the security guard, he is merely perplexed and curious. “Like a free refill. Do you have free refills for burgers?” The cashier gets it. “Uh, no free refills for burgers,” he says. “How come you have it for drinks but not for burgers?” asks Jia. He asks this with a steady confidence, as if his request were totally reasonable. The cashier chuckles. “That’s the way it is, man,” he says with a shrug. Jia smiles, thanks him, says he’d like the place even more if they offered burger refills, and saunters off.

• From Wild (2012)

  Until, that is, a tree stopped me in my path. It had fallen across the trail, its thick trunk held aloft by branches just low enough that I couldn’t pass beneath, yet so high that climbing over it was impossible, especially given the weight of my pack. Walking around it was also out of the question: the trail dropped off too steeply on one side and the brush was too dense on the other. I stood for a long while, trying to map out a way past the tree. I had to do it, no matter how impossible it seemed. It was either that or turn around and go back to the motel in Mojave. I thought of my little eighteen-dollar room with a deep swooning desire, the yearning to return to it flooding my body. I backed up to the tree, unbuckled my pack, and pushed it up and over its rough trunk, doing my best to drop it over the other side without letting it fall so hard on the ground that my dromedary bag would pop from the impact. Then I climbed over the tree after it, scraping my hands that were already tender from my fall. In the next mile I encountered three other blown-down trees. By the time I made it past them all, the scab on my shin had torn open and was bleeding anew. On the afternoon of the fifth day, as I made my way along a narrow and steep stretch of trail, I looked up to see an enormous brown horned animal charging at me. “Moose!” I hollered, though I knew that it wasn’t a moose. In the panic of the moment, my mind couldn’t wrap around what I was seeing and a moose was the closest thing to it. “Moose!” I hollered more desperately as it neared. I scrambled into the manzanitas and scrub oaks that bordered the trail, pulling myself into their sharp branches as best I could, stymied by the weight of my pack. As I did this, the species of the beast came to me and I understood that I was about to be mauled by a Texas longhorn bull. “Mooooose!” I shouted louder as I grabbed for the yellow cord tied to the frame of my pack that held the world’s loudest whistle. I found it, brought it to my lips, closed my eyes, and blew with all my might, until I had to stop to get a breath of air. When I opened my eyes, the bull was gone. So was all the skin on the top of my right index finger, scraped off on the manzanitas’ jagged branches in my frenzy.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I remember the day my band was sent to perform on the base of that unit. Nothing about it felt unusual or dramatic, except that I was in love with the drummer of the band and was happy that it was too dangerous for us to drive back home that night, and that we had to stay and sleep there, in Khan Yunis, Gaza. It was 1989 and I remember that we were given guns and told they were in case of emergency. I didn’t remember how to use the gun although I had been in basic training just a few months earlier. My best friend and I had agreed that killing someone was bad karma, so during training we just made believe we had listened but ended up having little idea how to use the gun. On our way to Khan Yunis, it didn’t feel like a big deal. In case of emergency, we thought, we would manage. The special-unit soldiers sent us an armored bus, and a motorcade accompanied us as we drove into Gaza. The roads were bumpy and at some point the musical producer of the band, an older man in his thirties who was a musician and served in the unit as a reserve soldier, decided to sit on the floor of the bus. We looked at him, amused, and asked, “Hey, what’s going on? Is everything okay?” To our surprise, he started to cry. “My wife is pregnant. They didn’t tell me we were going into Gaza. I didn’t sign up for that. This is crazy.” We all looked at one another and didn’t know what to do. We didn’t understand why he thought it was so crazy. We had traveled to every war zone and never thought any of it was especially intense. This was the world we were raised in. In some ways, the unstable national security and our mandatory army service felt like an irrelevant disruption, and life was about the future, not the present moment or the past. It was made up of hopes and big dreams, pushing against our external reality with deep friendships, with love, and with music. I turned around and smiled at the drummer, and he smiled back. We had our little secret and the war around us seemed like background noise. That day, we performed in a small room, surrounded by a group of soldiers who were our age but looked older and who we believed were much braver than we were. We knew that at the end of the concert we couldn’t ask them about the details of their activity or their special operations, but the truth was that we were not so curious anyway. We were more interested to hear about their high school experiences, to learn about their girlfriends at home and count the days until our army service would be over.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  We worked to build the Swami's mission headquarters, the Church of the International Society of Divine Love, Inc. (ISDL), and we spent from two to eight hours a day in meditation, depending on the whims of the Swami. There was potency in the Swami's mix of myth (we were worshipers of Krishna), meditation technique, and strict environmental control. The longer I was with the Swami, the more I began to reevaluate my time in TM. Like other former TMers, I felt that I had been misled. A number of us requested refunds for the Sidhi levitation courses. TM challenged us to sue, so we did. As I prepared for the suit, I met an attorney familiar with the negative effects of cultic groups and I began reading material on thought reform. I even attended a cult awareness conference. The stories of former members of various thought-reform systems (Hare Krishnas, Moonies, etc.) were strikingly similar to my own, yet I was unable to examine my current involvement with the Swami and ISDL. It was easy to see how Maharishi, Swami Prabhupada, and Reverend Moon had duped and controlled theirfollowers, but I convinced myself that my Swami was different. Nevertheless, I left the conference shaken. Resolved to continue my involvement, I told myself that we were a legitimate alternative religion. I decided that the cult-awareness people just didn't understand new religions, and that the yardstick used to evaluate cults didn't apply to ISDL. My rationalizations were endless. But down deep I was scared. The following year, I attended my second cult-awareness conference. As I learned more about thought reform from various people, it became increasingly difficult for me to make excuses and ignore the Swami's manipulations. My conviction that he was omniscient and omnipotent was being shaken: his lies were so commonplace. I found myself less willingto "just surrender." I asked myself, "Is this looking like other cults?" Toward the end of the following summer, I faced extraordinary pressure. Swami wanted me to go to India for advanced training as an ISDL preacher. No longer would outside relationships be tolerated. I was afraid. I had seen the personality changes in people he had sent to India. One evening, I sat with Swamiji, as we fondly called him, and told him of my financial difficulties. My business was on the verge of bankruptcy. He listened, and then asked me for another $2,000 donation. I had already given more than $30,000. I was broke and brokenhearted at his request. I knew this must be a test. I must get the money to pass. I still wanted God. As the days passed, I could no longer suppress the information I had on cults, thought reform, and hypnosis. It confronted me day and night. I felt I was going insane. I prayed to the only one who I knew could help: the Swami. No answers came. I was alone, scared, with my world crashing in on me.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I’ve got a little something for us,” he said, reaching into the glove compartment to remove the flask of whiskey. “It’s my reward for a hard day’s work.” He unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. “Ladies first.” I took it from him and held it to my lips and let the whiskey wash into my mouth. “Yep. That’s the kind of woman you are. That’s what I’m going to call you: Jane.” He took the flask from me and had a long drink. “You know I’m not actually out here completely alone,” I blurted, making up the lie as I spoke. “My husband—his name is Paul—he’s also hiking. He started at Kennedy Meadows. Do you know where that is? We each wanted the experience of hiking alone, so he’s hiking south and I’m hiking north and we’re meeting in the middle, and then we’ll go the rest of the summer together.” Frank nodded and took another sip from the flask. “Well, then he’s crazier than you,” he said, after thinking about it for a while. “It’s one thing to be a woman crazy enough to do what you’re doing. Another thing to be a man letting his own wife go off and do this.” “Yeah,” I said, as if I agreed with him. “So anyway. We’ll be reunited in a few days.” I said it with such conviction that I felt convinced of it myself—that Paul that very minute was making his way toward me. That in fact we hadn’t filed for divorce two months before, on a snowy day in April. That he was coming for me. Or that he would know if I didn’t make it any further down the trail. That my disappearance would be noted in a matter of days. But the opposite was true. The people in my life were like the Band-Aids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone. No one expected me to even so much as call when I reached my first stop. Or the second or third. Frank leaned back against his seat and adjusted his big metal belt buckle. “There’s something else I like to reward myself with after a hard day’s work,” he said. “What’s that?” I asked, with a tentative smile, my heart hammering in my chest. My hands on my lap felt tingly. I was acutely aware of my backpack, too far away in the bed of the truck. In a flash, I decided I’d leave it behind if I had to push the truck door open and run. Frank reached under the seat, where the gun resided in its little black case. He came up with a clear plastic bag. Inside, there were long thin ropes of red licorice, each bunch wound like a lasso. He held the bag out to me and asked, “You want some, Miss Jane?”

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I lived variously in a tent, several half-finished houses, and a makeshift cabin in the rainforest without electricity or running water while my parents sought truth and meaning in their lives. During the week, I attended private school where dogma was infused into my mind like the air I breathed into my lungs. On Saturdays I went to church with my schoolmates and teachers. There was no contact with the outside world, no friends from public school, no movies, no music (except that approved by the church), no television, no radio, and no novels. At one point, my mother became convinced that even the church schools were too liberal, so I was home-schooled in ninth grade. My mother was a true believer in a total mind-body connection. As a result, we were vegetarians and did not go to medical doctors unless we broke a limb or needed stitches. Prayer, hydrotherapy, vitamins, and raw foods were our medicines. All normal childish thoughts and behaviors were ridiculed into silence, and I, burdened by a finely tuned sense of guilt, became determined to live up to the expectations and strictures placed on me at every turn. I obeyed all the rules without question, studied well in school, went to church whenever I was told, read my Bible, and did all in my power to become a good member of the church. When I was fourteen, while in the care of my older, rebellious sister, I saw my first movie, Back to the Future 111. I was literally sick to my stomach throughout most of the movie because I was convinced that the world would end while I was at the cinema. I believed that Jesus Christ would return while I was in the movie theater, and I would go to hell because I was committing a sin by being at the movies. We moved to the United States when I was fifteen. My parents were sponsored by a fundamentalist bible college in Virginia, and I began there as a freshman a few days after I turned sixteen. My parents made friends with another campus employee, "Bob," who was a thirty-four-year-old divorced accountant eighteen years my senior. My parents asked him to move in with us after his home burned down, and he began to pursue me as a potential mate. I had been raised to think that dating was wrong, sex outside of marriage was evil, and that God (through my parents) would pick out my husband. When Bob began to seriously pursue me, I was quite afraid. First, he was eighteen years older than I was. Second, I was rather young and innocent, having been overly protected and isolated all my life. Third, I thought of him as a family member. And finally, I did not find him attractive in any way.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  They met, where I had first seen her, in the gaunt vestibule of the Cecil, in a mirror. ‘In the vestibule of this moribund hotel the palms splinter and refract their motionless fronds in the gilt-edged mirrors. Only the rich can afford to stay permanently — those who live on in the guilt-edged security of a pensionable old age. I am looking for cheaper lodgings. In the lobby tonight a small circle of Syrians, heavy in their dark suits, and yellow in their scarlet tarbushes, solemnly sit. Their hippopotamus-like womenfolk, lightly moustached, have jingled off to bed in their jewellery. The men’s curious soft oval faces and effeminate voices are busy upon jewel-boxes — for each of these brokers carries his choicest jewels with him in a casket; and after dinner the talk has turned to male jewellery. It is all the Mediterranean world has left to talk about; a self-interest, a narcissism which comes from sexual exhaustion expressing itself in the possessive symbol: so that meeting a man you are at once informed what he is worth, and meeting his wife you are told in the same breathless whisper what her dowry was. They croon like eunuchs over the jewels, turning them this way and that in the light to appraise them. They flash their sweet white teeth in little feminine smiles. They sigh. A white-robed waiter with a polished ebony face brings coffee. A silver hinge flies open upon heavy white (like the thighs of Egyptian women) cigarettes each with its few flecks of hashish. A few grains of drunkenness before bedtime. I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one’s glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. She pretends to be a Greek, but she must be Jewish. It takes a Jew to smell out a Jew; and neither of us has the courage to confess our true race. I have told her I am French. Sooner or later we shall find one another out.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Frankly, part of me is relieved. I recognize that since our session I’ve been a bit restless and I try to understand why. I find myself thinking of Guy when I am out walking, and I look around to make sure no one suspicious is following me. When I am on my phone, I have the fleeting thought that he might be listening. And I have the urge to google his name and learn more about him. Maybe he is a criminal or some secret agent, I think. “And besides,” I hear myself repeating his words, “these days, who knows, strange people are everywhere.” I’m able to make sense of my thoughts and remind myself that paranoid thinking by nature is contagious. People can evoke fear in each other in unpredictable and powerful ways and without awareness. That unconscious force is one of the reasons conspiracy theories and fear are so easy to spread. It is why leaders can easily frighten people by pointing to the enemy and promising them they will be protected and saved. Guy was right, I think. In that one session I really learned something profound about his internal world and especially about how threatened he feels. As the days pass, I become more and more curious about the feelings I’m left with. When Guy reaches out again, I offer to meet him for one more session and only then decide if we would like to start working together. It is a cold day in March when Guy comes to my office for the second time. He greets me and asks to keep his coat on. “It’s crazy outside,” he says, and points at the window. “What the hell? I’m telling you, climate change is going to kill us soon.” “Yes, it’s scary,” I say. “It’s more than scary,” he replies. “It’s a catastrophe. It’s out of control and we will find ourselves dead very soon.” Many of my patients speak about climate change, but Guy sounds a little different. His fear seems immediate, as if he is currently struggling to stay alive. He sits down. “We did it to ourselves. We destroyed ourselves,” he concludes. “Actually,” he then says angrily, “it’s them. They fucking did it to us.” “They?” I ask. Guy looks right into my eyes. “It’s their fault,” he says. “Generations of people who didn’t take care of the planet. Our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. They created this disaster with their own hands and now we have to deal with it. What a mess. There is no way we’ll be able to fix it; that’s the problem.” Like Guy, I find the situation disturbing and worrisome. But I’m aware that even as we agree, the words one chooses always have their roots in one’s personal history. The political intermingles with the personal.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said: ‘That, that’s very kind of you, madam’ - I sounded like a mincing shop-boy refusing a tip - ‘but I’m not five minutes from home, and I shall get there all the quicker if you’ll let me say good-night, and pass on my way.’ I tilted my cap towards the dark place where the voice had come from, and, with a tight little smile, I made to move on. But the lady spoke again. ‘It’s rather late,’ she said, ‘to be out on one’s own, in streets like these.’ She drew on her cigarette, and the tip glowed bright again in the shadows. ‘Won’t you let me drop you somewhere ? I have a very capable driver.’ I thought, I am sure you do: her man was still hunched forward in his seat, his back to me, his thoughts his own. I felt suddenly weary. I had heard stories in Soho about ladies like this — ladies who rode the darkened streets with well-paid servants, on the lookout for idle men or boys like me who’d give them a thrill for the price of a supper. Rich ladies with no husbands, or absent husbands, or even (so Sweet Alice claimed) husbands at home, warming the bed, with whom they shared their startled catches. I had never known quite whether to believe in such ladies; here, however, was one before me, haughty and scented and hot for a lark. What a mistake she had made this time! I put my hand on the carriage-door and made to swing it to. But again she spoke. ‘If you won’t,’ she said, ‘let me drive you home, then won’t you, as a favour, ride with me a while? As you see, I am quite alone; and I’ve rather a yearning for company, tonight.’ Her voice seemed to tremble - though whether with melancholy, or anticipation, or even laughter, I could not tell. ‘Look missis,’ I said then, into the gloom, ‘you’re on the wrong track. Let me pass, and get your driver to take you another turn around Piccadilly.’ Now I laughed: ‘Believe me, I haven’t got what you’re after.’ The carriage creaked; the red end of the cigarette bobbed and brightened and illuminated, once again, a cheek, a brow, a lip. The lip curled. ‘On the contrary, my dear. You have exactly what I’m after.’ Still I did not guess, but only thought, Blimey, she’s keen! I glanced about me. A few carriages bowled along the Gray’s Inn Road, and two or three late pedestrians passed quickly from sight, behind them. A hansom had pulled up at the end of the mews, quite near us, and was letting its passengers dismount ; they disappeared into a doorway, and the hansom rolled by and away, and all was still again.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I can’t believe a girl like you would be all alone up here. You’re way too pretty to be out here alone, if you ask me. How long of a trip are you on?” he asked. “A longish one,” I answered. “I don’t believe that a young thing like her could be out here by herself, do you?” he said to his red-haired friend, as if I weren’t even there. “No,” I said before the red-haired man could answer him. “Anyone can do it. I mean, it’s just—” “I wouldn’t let you come out here if you were my girlfriend, that’s for shit shock sure,” the red-headed man said. “She’s got a really nice figure, don’t she?” the sandy-haired man said. “Healthy, with some soft curves. Just the kind I like.” I made a complacent little sound, a sort of half laugh, though my throat was clotted suddenly with fear. “Well, nice to meet you guys,” I said, moving toward Monster. “I’m hiking on a bit farther,” I lied, “so I’d better get going.” “We’re heading out too. We don’t want to run out of light,” said the red-haired man, pulling on his pack, and the sandy-haired man did too. I watched them in a fake posture of readying myself to leave, though I didn’t want to have to leave. I was tired and thirsty, hungry and chilled. It was heading toward dark and I’d chosen to camp on this pond because my guidebook—which only loosely described this section of the trail because it was not in fact the PCT—implied that this was the last place for a stretch where it was possible to pitch a tent. When they left, I stood for a while, letting the knot in my throat unclench. I was fine. I was in the clear. I was being a little bit silly. They’d been obnoxious and sexist and they’d ruined my water purifier, but they hadn’t done anything to me. They hadn’t meant harm. Some guys just didn’t know any better. I dumped the things out of my pack, filled my cooking pot with pond water, lit my stove, and set the water to boil. I peeled off my sweaty clothes, pulled out my red fleece leggings and long-sleeved shirt, and dressed in them. I laid out my tarp and was shaking my tent out of its bag when the sandy-haired man reappeared. At the sight of him I knew that everything I’d felt before was correct. That I’d had a reason to be afraid. That he’d come back for me. “What’s going on?” I asked in a falsely relaxed tone, though the sight of him there without his friend terrified me. It was as if I’d finally come across a mountain lion and I’d remembered, against all instinct, not to run. Not to incite him with my fast motions or antagonize him with my anger or arouse him with my fear. “I thought you were heading on,” he said.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I follow the connections Alice makes between being an outsider and being a father. She said that she and her mother were the inner circle. Her father was an outsider. I recognize that her current conflict is related to the historical fact that, for her, the only way to love is to be a mother, not a father. She struggles with the fear that not being able to give birth to or breastfeed her child implies that she is a father rather than a mother. The problem of gender binary doesn’t allow fluidity in her perception of herself. It activates the shame of not being a “real woman” and, hence, the fear of becoming her father instead, whose love she couldn’t trust. “Are you worried that you won’t be able to love your baby?” I ask, making the explicit link between gender and love. “Absolutely.” Alice nods. “How do I know that I will be able to love her if I don’t give birth to her and breastfeed her? I’m not so sure a parent can love a baby without those love hormones. I mean, nature has arranged it so that women immediately produce oxytocin.” “It’s as if you believe that love hormones are what make a parent love their child,” I say. “How upsetting,” Alice whispers. “I thought I got over that. What’s wrong with me? Like my mother, I’m stuck being a little girl, still thinking that her father didn’t love her, even though I know it’s more complicated than that.” Alice sighs. “I see what you are saying: that underneath my wish to breastfeed my baby, I worry that I won’t love her the way ‘real’ mothers do, which was the only love I trusted.” “Exactly.” I hear myself using her words. Alice looks at me and I notice her holding back tears. “My father left me and he never came back. The angrier I was, the more he withdrew, until he gave up on me. He didn’t call anymore. He just sent me a birthday gift once a year with a card that read, ‘Happy Birthday, my girl. I love you forever.’ I thought he wrote that because he had to, and that deep inside he didn’t really care. He had a new life with the woman he left us for, new children, and a new house. I’m not sure why I’m crying. I didn’t care about him anyway.” Alice is sobbing. She cries for the father she lost years ago, for the little girl who believed that her sad mother was the only one who could love her. She mourns her inability to carry and give birth to her baby. Alice is filled with fear that she won’t be able to love her newborn, and we realize that she feels like an unlovable girl herself. “What if she doesn’t know that I’m her mother?” She wipes her tears. “What if she doesn’t love me?”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  * * * * y When the time for the great yearly shoot on Lake Mareotis came round Nessim began to experience a magical sense of relief. He recognized at last that what had to be decided would be decided at this time and at no other. He had the air of a man who has fought a long illness successfully. Had his judgement indeed been so faulty even though it had not been conscious? During the years of his marriage he had repeated on every day the words, ‘I am so happy’— fatal as the striking of a grandfather-clock upon which silence is forever encroaching. Now he could say so no longer. Their common life was like some cable buried in the sand which, in some inexplicable way, at a point impossible to discover, had snapped, plunging them both into an unaccustomed and impenetrable darkness. The madness itself, of course, took no account of circumstances. It appeared to superimpose itself not upon personalities tortured beyond the bounds of endurance but purely upon a given situation. In a real sense we all shared it, though only Nessim acted it out, exemplified it in the flesh, as a person. The short period which preceded the great shoot on Mareotis lasted for perhaps a month — certainly for very little more. Here again to those who did not know him nothing was obvious. Yet the delusions multiplied themselves at such a rate that in his own records they give one the illusion of watching bacteria under a microscope — the pullulation of healthy cells, as in cancer, which have gone off their heads, renounced their power to repress themselves. The mysterious series of code messages transmitted by the street names he encountered showed definite irrefutable signs of a supernatural agency at work full of the threat of unseen punishment — though whether for himself or for others he could not tell. Balthazar’s treatise lying withering in the window of a bookshop and the same day coming upon his father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery — with those distinguishing names engraved upon the stone which echoed all the melancholy of European Jewry in exile. Then the question of noises in the room next door: a sort of heavy breathing and the sudden simultaneous playing of three pianos. These, he knew, were not delusions but links in an occult chain, logical and persuasive only to the mind which had passed beyond the frame of causality. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend to be sane by the standards of ordinary behaviour. He was going through the Devastatio described by Swedenborg. The coal fires had taken to burning into extraordinary shapes. This could be proved by relighting them over and over again to verify his findings — terrifying landscapes and faces. The mole on Justine’s wrist was also troubling. At meal times he fought against his desire to touch it so feverishly that he turned pale and almost fainted.

• From Wild (2012)

  “We’ve got the empty Pepsi cans,” said the red-haired man. “We can pump water into your bottle and then pour it into two of those.” The sandy-haired man squatted at the pond’s shore with my empty water bottle and my purifier, and the red-haired man took his pack off and dug through it to get a couple of empty Pepsi cans. I stood watching them with my arms wrapped around myself, growing more chilled by the minute. The wet backs of my shorts and T-shirt and bra were now icy cold against my skin. “It’s really hard to pump,” the sandy-haired man said after a while. “You have to give it some muscle,” I said. “That’s just how my filter is.” “I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing coming out.” I went to him and saw that the float was all the way up near the cartridge and the open end of the intake tube had sunk into the muck at the shallow bottom of the pond. I took the purifier from him, pulled the tube up into the clear water, and tried to pump. It was entirely locked, jammed solid with muck. “You weren’t supposed to let the tube go into the mud like that,” I said. “You were supposed to keep it up in the water.” “Shit,” he said without apology. “What are we going to do?” his friend asked. “I’ve got to get something to drink.” I went to my pack, took out my first aid kit, and pulled out the little bottle of iodine pills I carried. I hadn’t used them since I was at that frog-ridden reservoir on Hat Creek Rim and half out of my head with dehydration myself. “We can use these,” I said, grimly understanding that I’d be drinking iodine water until I managed to repair my purifier, if it was even repairable. “What are they?” asked the sandy-haired man. “Iodine. You put them in and wait thirty minutes and then the water is safe to drink.” I went to the lake and submerged my two bottles in the clearest-looking spot I could reach and put iodine pills in each of them, the men followed suit with their Pepsi cans, and I put a pill in each. “Okay,” I said, looking at my watch. “The water will be good to go at seven ten.” I hoped that with that they’d hike away, but they only sat down, settling in. “So what are you doing out here all by yourself?” asked the sandy-haired man. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t. I didn’t like the way he was looking me, openly appraising my body. “All by yourself?” “Yeah,” I said reluctantly, equal parts leery of telling the truth and afraid to concoct a lie that would only make me feel more jangled than I suddenly did.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Hey there,” I called amiably. I was holding the world’s loudest whistle, my hand having traveled to it unconsciously over the top of Monster and around to the nylon cord that dangled from my backpack’s frame. I hadn’t used the whistle since I’d seen that first bear on the trail, but ever since then, I had a constant and visceral awareness of where it was in relation to me, as if it weren’t only attached to my backpack by a cord, but another, invisible cord attached it to me. “Good morning,” the man said, and held his hand out to shake mine, his brown hair flopping over his eyes. He told me his name was Jimmy Carter, no relation, and that he couldn’t give me a ride because there was no room in his car. I looked and saw it was true. Every inch except the driver’s seat was crammed with newspapers, books, clothes, soda cans, and a jumble of other things that came up all the way to the windows. He wondered, instead, if he could talk to me. He said he was a reporter for a publication called the Hobo Times. He drove around the country interviewing “folks” who lived the hobo life. “I’m not a hobo,” I said, amused. “I’m a long-distance hiker.” I let go of the whistle and extended my arm toward the road, jabbing my upright thumb at a passing van. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I explained, glancing at him, wishing he’d get in his car and drive away. I needed to catch two rides on two different highways to get to Old Station and he wasn’t helping the cause. I was filthy and my clothes were even filthier, but I was still a woman alone. Jimmy Carter’s presence complicated things, altered the picture from the vantage point of the drivers passing by. I remembered how long I’d had to stand by the side of the road when I’d been trying to get to Sierra City with Greg. With Jimmy Carter beside me, no one was going to stop. “So how long have you been out on the road?” he asked, pulling a pen and a long, narrow reporter’s notebook from the back pocket of his thin corduroy pants. His hair was shaggy and unwashed. His bangs concealed then revealed his dark eyes, depending on how the wind blew. He struck me as someone who had a PhD in something airy and indescribable. The history of consciousness, perhaps, or comparative studies in discourse and society. “I told you. I’m not on the road,” I said, and laughed. Eager as I was to get a ride, I couldn’t help but feel a little delighted by Jimmy Carter’s company. “I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” I repeated, gesturing by way of elaboration to the woods that edged up near the road, though in fact the PCT was about nine miles west of where we stood.

• From Wild (2012)

  It had always been my mother at the center of me, but in that room with Vince I suddenly felt my father like a stake in my heart. I hate him, I’d said during my teens. I didn’t know what I felt for him now. He was like a home movie that played in my head, one whose narrative was broken and sketchy. There were big dramatic scenes and inexplicable moments floating free from time, perhaps because most of what I remember about him happened in the first six years of my life. There was my father smashing our dinner plates full of food against the wall in a rage. There was my father choking my mother while straddling her chest and banging her head against the wall. There was my father scooping my sister and me out of bed in the middle of the night when I was five to ask if we would leave forever with him, while my mother stood by, bloodied and clutching my sleeping baby brother to her chest, begging him to stop. When we cried instead of answered, he collapsed onto his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor and screamed so desperately I was sure we were all going to die right then and there. Once, in the midst of one of his tirades, he threatened to throw my mother and her children naked onto the street, as if we weren’t his children too. We lived in Minnesota then. It was winter when he made the threat. I was at an age when everything was literal. It seemed precisely like a thing that he would do. I had an image of the four of us, naked and shrieking, running through the icy snow. He shut Leif, Karen, and me out of our house a couple of times when we lived in Pennsylvania, when my mother was at work and he was left to care for us and he wanted a break. He ordered us into the back yard and locked the doors, my sister and me holding our barely walking baby brother by his gummy hands. We wandered through the grass weeping and then forgot about being upset and played house and rodeo queen. Later, enraged and bored, we approached the back door and pounded and hollered. I remember the door distinctly and also the three concrete stairs that led up to it, the way I had to stand on tiptoes to see through the window in the upper half.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Remembering and reenacting suffering is part of the Jewish tradition, and it is threaded through many rituals, such as the Passover seder, where the “memory” of slavery and liberation is relived through our senses and our actions. The reenactment of trauma links the past and the future, our history and our destiny. It turns passive victims into active agents, victims into victors. The identity of the Israeli state, founded only three years after the Holocaust, is based on the ongoing Jewish trauma of persecution and on the dream of creating a safe home for the Jews. It is that dynamic of turning passive into active, which I discuss at length in Chapter 7 , that aims to liberate victims from defeat and helplessness while denying their own aggression. The dilemma of memorializing of trauma on the one hand holds the need to honor the victims, to cherish an identity and a legacy, and to try to prevent crimes from happening again. On the other hand it binds together past, present, and future as one. The next generation is called to identify with the previous one, and it will be entangled with the trauma and losses of those who came before. When it comes to talking about trauma, we always walk the delicate line between too much and not enough, between what is too explicit and what is secretive, what is traumatizing and what is repressed and thus remains in its raw, wordless form. We are usually caught in that binary between the two extremes because when it comes to trauma, regulation is always a challenge. Rachel tells me that she wishes she knew more. Her family story was silenced and her unprocessed family trauma became a repressed secret with no words or symbolic thinking associated with it. Those kinds of secrets live as strangers within our minds, ones that we can’t identify, touch, or change, that are passed to the next generation as phantoms, felt but not recognized. “As a little girl, I used to be afraid of everything,” Rachel says. She pauses for a long while. “You know, when I was six years old I started sleeping with a knife under my pillow,” she says softly. “My parents didn’t know about it. It was my secret. I remember the first time I did this. It was midnight and everyone was already asleep. I went to the kitchen. I looked in the drawer, found an orange knife, and took it to my room.” “What were you afraid of?” I ask. “That night I’d woken up from a scary dream.