Guilt

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 Going Clear (2013)

  As far as Rathbun was concerned, it didn’t help that Miscavige scarcely acknowledged him in the speech that night. Immediately after the event, reporters from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were calling Rathbun to ask about Miscavige’s salary, which had been disclosed in the IRS documents. Miscavige and his wife together were making more than $100,000 a year—not an extraordinary figure by the standards of world religious leaders, but quite a contrast to the $30 a week most of the Sea Org members were earning. Miscavige was outraged by the impertinence of the reporters, and Rathbun felt that he was taking it out on him. This was all coming at a time when he had been postponing a final visit to see his father, who was dying of cancer. The St. Petersburg Times published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to Florida to turn around the Times editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that Rathbun failed to handle the situation. One evening, Shelly Miscavige called everyone in Rathbun’s office together, and in front of his subordinates she stripped the captain’s bars off his uniform. The next day, Rathbun took four gold Krugerrands that he had stored in a safe, got on his motorcycle, and drove to Yuma, Arizona. He called his father in Los Angeles from a bar, but a church official answered. He was waiting there with Rathbun’s wife, Anne, who begged him to come back. Rathbun felt guilty and conflicted. Drinking steadily, he somehow made it to San Antonio, although he was in frequent communication with church leaders. He finally agreed to call Miscavige, who apologized for his treatment. “You know the kind of pressure I was under. Please just see me,” the church leader said, adding that he could be in San Antonio in a matter of hours. “No, I want to see the Alamo,” Rathbun told him. They agreed to meet for dinner at the Marriott in New Orleans two days later. That evening, Miscavige showed a chastened, vulnerable side of himself that Rathbun had never seen before. According to Rathbun, Miscavige promised to “cease acting like a madman.” He praised Rathbun for his part in gaining the IRS exemption. “Because you did this,” he declared, “you’re Kha-Khan.” It was a title that Hubbard had come up with in one of his policy letters for a highly productive staff member, but in the culture it was understood that such a person would be forgiven for misdeeds in future lifetimes. Hubbard had awarded it to Yvonne Gillham after she died. Rathbun knew that Miscavige was manipulating him, but he was touched nonetheless.

• From Educated (2018)

  No one had believed us after all. If we asked Dad for help, she was sure he’d call us both liars. I told her our parents had changed and we should trust them. Then I boarded a plane and took myself five thousand miles away. If I felt guilty to be documenting my sister’s fears from such a safe distance, surrounded by grand libraries and ancient chapels, I gave only one indication of it, in the entry’s last line: Cambridge is less beautiful tonight . —DREW HAD COME WITH me to Cambridge, having been admitted to a master’s program in Middle Eastern studies. I told him about my conversation with Audrey. He was the first boyfriend in whom I confided about my family—really confided, the truth and not just amusing anecdotes. Of course all that is in the past, I said. My family is different now. But you should know. So you can watch me. In case I do something crazy. The first term passed in a flurry of dinners and late-night parties, punctuated by even later nights in the library. To qualify for a PhD, I had to produce a piece of original academic research. In other words, having spent five years reading history, I was now being asked to write it. But to write what? While reading for my master’s thesis, I’d been surprised to discover echoes of Mormon theology in the great philosophers of the nineteenth century. I mentioned this to David Runciman, my supervisor. “That’s your project,” he said. “You can do something no one has done: you can examine Mormonism not just as a religious movement, but as an intellectual one.” I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with different eyes, not the eyes of a critic, but also not the eyes of a disciple. I examined polygamy, not as a doctrine but as a social policy. I measured it against its own aims, as well as against other movements and theories from the same period. It felt like a radical act. My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on Buck’s Peak. Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. No natural sister should love a stranger more than a brother, I thought, and what sort of daughter prefers a teacher to her own father? But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak. That feeling became a physical part of me, something I could taste on my tongue or smell on my own breath. I bought a ticket to Idaho for Christmas.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  What difference would a few more hours make? My fatherhood style, my management style. I was forever questioning, Is it good—or merely good enough? Time and again I’d vow to change. Time and again I’d tell myself: I will spend more time with the boys. Time and again I’d keep that promise—for a while. Then I’d fall back to my former routine, the only way I knew. Not hands-off. But not hands-on. This might have been the one problem I couldn’t solve by brainstorming with my fellow Buttfaces. Vastly trickier than how to get midsoles from Point A to Point B was the question of Son A and Son B, how to keep them happy, while keeping Son C, Nike, afloat.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Thank you, Audrey, but just dark and quiet, that’s fine. Dark. Quiet. Thank you. Come check on me again, Audrey, in a little while.” Mother didn’t come out of the basement for a week. Every day the swelling worsened, the black bruises turned blacker. Every night I was sure her face was as marked and deformed as it was possible for a face to be, but every morning it was somehow darker, more tumid. After a week, when the sun went down, we turned off the lights and Mother came upstairs. She looked as if she had two objects strapped to her forehead, large as apples, black as olives. There was never any more talk of a hospital. The moment for such a decision had passed, and to return to it would be to return to all the fury and fear of the accident itself. Dad said doctors couldn’t do anything for her anyhow. She was in God’s hands. In the coming months, Mother called me by many names. When she called me Audrey I didn’t worry, but it was troubling when we had conversations in which she referred to me as Luke or Tony, and in the family it has always been agreed, even by Mother herself, that she’s never been quite the same since the accident. We kids called her Raccoon Eyes. We thought it was a great joke, once the black rings had been around for a few weeks, long enough for us to get used to them and make them the subject of jokes. We had no idea it was a medical term. Raccoon eyes. A sign of serious brain injury. Tyler’s guilt was all-consuming. He blamed himself for the accident, then kept on blaming himself for every decision that was made thereafter, every repercussion, every reverberation that clanged down through the years. He laid claim to that moment and all its consequences, as if time itself had commenced the instant our station wagon left the road, and there was no history, no context, no agency of any kind until he began it, at the age of seventeen, by falling asleep at the wheel. Even now, when Mother forgets any detail, however trivial, that look comes into his eyes—the one he had in the moments after the collision, when blood poured from his own mouth as he took in the scene, raking his eyes over what he imagined to be the work of his hands and his hands only. Me, I never blamed anyone for the accident, least of all Tyler. It was just one of those things. A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He took a folder from his briefcase, flipped it open, read it, snapped it shut. He repeated that he didn’t like our numbers, that he didn’t think we were doing enough. He opened the folder again, shut it again, shoved it back into his briefcase. I tried to defend myself, but he waved his hand in disgust. Back and forth we went, for quite a while, civil but tense. After nearly an hour of this he stood and asked to use the men’s room. Down the hall, I said. The moment he was out of sight I jumped from behind my desk. I opened his briefcase and rummaged through and took out what looked like the folder he’d been referring to. I slid it under my desk blotter, then jumped behind my desk and put my elbows on the blotter. Waiting for Kitami to return, I had the strangest thought. I recalled all the times I’d volunteered with the Boy Scouts, all the times I’d sat on Eagle Scout review boards, handing out merit badges for honor and integrity. Two or three weekends a year I’d question pink-cheeked boys about their probity, their honesty, and now I was stealing documents from another man’s briefcase? I was headed down a dark path. No telling where it might lead. Wherever, there was no getting around one immediate consequence of my actions. I’d have to recuse myself from the next review board. How I longed to study the contents of that folder, and photocopy every scrap of paper in it, and go over it all with Woodell. But Kitami was soon back. I let him resume scolding me about sluggish numbers, let him talk himself out, and when he stopped I summed up my position. Calmly I said that Blue Ribbon might increase its sales if we could order more shoes, and we might order more shoes if we had more financing, and our bank might give us more financing if we had more security, meaning a longer contract with Onitsuka. Again he waved his hand. “Excuses,” he said. I raised the idea of funding our orders through a Japanese trading company, like Nissho Iwai, as I’d mentioned in my wire months before. “Baah,” he said, “trading companies. They send money first—men later. Take over! Work way into your company, then take over.” Translation: Onitsuka was only manufacturing a quarter of its own shoes, subcontracting the other three-quarters. Kitami was afraid that Nissho would find Onitsuka’s network of factories, then go right around Onitsuka and become a manufacturer and put Onitsuka out of business. Kitami stood. He needed to go back to his hotel, he said, have a rest. I said I’d have someone drive him, and I’d meet him for a cocktail later at his hotel bar.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me. At the end of a Buttface weekend, consumed with these and other thoughts, I’d drive back to Portland in a trance. Halfway there I’d come out of the trance and start thinking about Penny and the boys. The Buttfaces were like family, but every minute I spent with them was at the cost of my other family, my real family. The guilt was palpable. Often I’d walk into my house and Matthew and Travis would meet me at the door. “Where have you been?” they’d ask. “Daddy was with his friends,” I’d say, picking them up. They’d stare, confused. “But Mommy told us you were working.” It was around this time, as Nike rolled out its first children’s shoes, Wally Waffle and Robbie Road Racer, that Matthew announced he would never wear Nikes so long as he lived. His way of expressing anger about my absences, as well as other frustrations. Penny tried to make him understand that Daddy wasn’t absent by choice. Daddy was trying to build something. Daddy was trying to ensure that he and Travis would one day be able to attend college. I didn’t even bother to explain. I told myself it didn’t matter what I said. Matthew never understood, and Travis always understood—they seemed born with these unvarying default positions. Matthew seemed to harbor some innate resentment toward me, while Travis seemed congenitally devoted. What difference would a few more words make? What difference would a few more hours make? My fatherhood style, my management style. I was forever questioning, Is it good—or merely good enough? Time and again I’d vow to change. Time and again I’d tell myself: I will spend more time with the boys. Time and again I’d keep that promise—for a while. Then I’d fall back to my former routine, the only way I knew. Not hands-off. But not hands-on. This might have been the one problem I couldn’t solve by brainstorming with my fellow Buttfaces. Vastly trickier than how to get midsoles from Point A to Point B was the question of Son A and Son B, how to keep them happy, while keeping Son C, Nike, afloat.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And he tried to go on, trying to tell me—... And he was crying... crying. And I said, ‘Dont you dare go on!’ I shouted, ‘ What youre trying to tell me isnt true! ’” She put her hands to her ears, drowning out the sounds from the bar, the courtyard; trying unsuccessfully to drown other louder, more insistent sounds from the ravenous past. When she removed her hands, tiredly, from her ears as if surrendering to this courtyard, we heard, shatteringly clearly, the high-pitched shrieking voice of a queen saying to another: “Sweetie, I dont give a damn what nelly queen Lily says about me. After all!—she dont pay my gay rent!” Sylvia laughed, hearing that: laughed in pain. And then, waving her hand in a sweeping gesture that included this courtyard and the bar, she sighed: “All—all, all... all... my... saintly... children. All flung out by something—or someone!—to a city like New Orleans—to a bar—like mine. Flung out guiltily. Guiltily,” she echoed herself.... Then entreatingly, to explain, to confess: “And, that day, when he wouldnt stop, I shouted to him, ‘Get out! Dont come back!’...” She covered her eyes. “And the memory of his face, that last time—his face smeared with tears as I yelled after him: ‘Youre a man, God damn it! Youre a... man.’ This time she whispered the last word as if it had lost all its meaning. “And you know why? You know why I couldnt face what he was trying to tell me?” she asked Kathy. “Because—...” She stopped. Then she finished harshly: “Because I felt—... guilty! Crushingly, crushingly guilty—as if—as if he were accusing me in making this confession to me.... And I—didnt—understand—...” “But you understand now,” Kathy said. Sylvia looked up at her, studying the beautiful woman’s face. “Understand?” she said, as if perplexed by the word itself. She shook her head. “No. Ive tried.... But I’ll never... understand.” She seemed suddenly to be searching the courtyard, her eyes wide—wide with the hatred which in some strange way, through pain, had been forced to turn into something else—at least the attempt to understand. Kathy bent down and kissed Sylvia on the forehead, like a child kissing her mother at bedtime, forgiving her. And Sylvia raised her glazed unmasked face to the dark sky, and she said: “God damn it—I dont give a damn! Either in makeup, either like a queen—in the highest, brightest screaming drag—with sequins and beads—... Either like that—or hustling a score, trying to prove with another man, because of my... words still ringing in his ears—trying that way to prove that I was right, that he is a man.... Even—... even if he has to prove it by finding another man who will pay him for his... masculinity—... Even with a bloody gash on his head, proving it with violence. That way... or with another youngman, his—... lover—... Any way! Any shape! I dont give a damn!...

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Lastly we called Woodell. I watched him wheel his chair slowly to the stand. It was the first time I’d ever seen him in a coat and tie. He’d recently met a woman, and gotten married, and now, when he told me that he was happy, I believed him. I took a moment to enjoy how far he’d come since we’d first met at that Beaverton sandwich shop. Then I immediately felt awful, because I was the cause of his being dragged through this muck. He looked more nervous up there than I’d been, more intimidated than Bowerman. James the Just asked him to spell his name and Woodell paused as if he couldn’t remember. “Um… W, double o, double d,…” Suddenly, he started to giggle. His name didn’t have a double d. But some ladies had double Ds. Oh boy. Now he was really laughing. Nerves, of course. But James the Just thought Woodell was mocking the proceedings. He reminded Woodell that he was in the courtroom of James the Just. Which only made Woodell giggle more. I put a hand over my eyes. WHEN ONITSUKA PRESENTED their case, they called as their first witness Mr. Onitsuka. He didn’t testify long. He said that he’d known nothing about my conflict with Kitami, nor about Kitami’s plans to stab us in the back. Kitami interviewing other distributors? “I never informed,” Mr. Onitsuka said. Kitami planning to cut us out? “I not know.” Next up was Kitami. As he walked to the stand the Onitsuka lawyers rose and told the judge they would need a translator. I cupped my ear. A what? Kitami spoke perfect English. I recalled him boasting about learning his English from a record. I turned to Cousin Houser, my eyes bulging, but he only extended his hands, palms facing the floor. Easy. In two days on the stand Kitami lied, again and again, through his translator, through his teeth. He insisted that he’d never planned to break our contract. He’d only decided to do so when he discovered we’d done so by making Nikes. Yes, he said, he’d been in touch with other distributors before we manufactured the first Nike, but he was just doing market research. Yes, he said, there was some discussion of Onitsuka’s buying Blue Ribbon, but the idea was initiated by Phil Knight. After Hilliard and Cousin Houser had given their closing arguments, I turned and thanked many of the spectators for coming. Then Cousin Houser and Strasser and I went to a bar around the corner and loosened our neckties and drank several ice-cold beers. And several more. We discussed different ways it might have gone, different things we might have done. Oh, the things we might have done, we said. And then we all went back to work. IT WAS WEEKS later. Early morning. Cousin Houser phoned me at the office. “James the Just is going to rule at eleven o’clock,” he said.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It wasn’t conscious. None of it was conscious. But the disaster was inevitable. White saw that the hawk was himself, a bird that was a ‘youth who had been maddened by every kind of clumsiness, privation, and persecution’. And he understood, finally, terribly, that what he had done was become the persecutor, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. The hawk was the child in front of the play-castle. He was his father. He was his father. He was the dictator, not the hawk. And so the great tragedy rolled to its conclusion, and the final blow, of course, fell from simple sentiment. Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air. White goes out to the barn where Gos is tied to his perch in shadow. Guilt uncoils in his heart. The hawk has no choice but to sit where he is told. He has no freedom at all. So White puts a bow-perch in the ground just outside the door, ties six yards of twine – the tarred twine with no breaking strain, the twine that has already snapped twice, the dangerous, poor quality twine – to Gos’s swivel, then ties the other end to the perch in the barn. This way, he tells himself, his hawk can fly outside and then fly back inside when he wants. Pleased that he’s given Gos more freedom, he returns to the house. The rain is relentless. It is not a day to try to trap the hawks. It is a day for comfort. He will make it up to Gos. He will pace up and down the kitchen with him, feed him tidbits, make him love him again. Gos likes music: he will play him songs on the wireless. But he finds the wireless has died. He bicycles to Tom’s, borrows his telephone to order a new battery. Then he pedals back. Rain and rooks. A man on a bicycle in a high wind who decides he must concentrate on small things today. Big things are too difficult. What he will do is repaint the woodwork in the passageway, and then perhaps the kitchen door. When the passageway is done he examines his handiwork with a critical eye. It looks well. Now for the kitchen door. Blue paint, he thinks. His father used to like painting things in bright and clashing colours. He knows he has inherited the vice. So he goes into the barn to fetch it. Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door. When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground. PART II 18 Flying free

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  My father liked sports, too. Sports were always respectable. For these and a dozen other reasons I expected my father to greet my pitch in the TV nook with a furrowed brow and a quick put-down. “Haha, Crazy Idea. Fat chance, Buck.” (My given name was Philip, but my father always called me Buck. In fact he’d been calling me Buck since before I was born. My mother told me he’d been in the habit of patting her stomach and asking, “How’s little Buck today?”) As I stopped talking, however, as I stopped pitching, my father rocked forward in his vinyl recliner and shot me a funny look. He said that he always regretted not traveling more when he was young. He said a trip might be just the finishing touch to my education. He said a lot of things, all of them focused more on the trip than the Crazy Idea, but I wasn’t about to correct him. I wasn’t about to complain, because in sum he was giving his blessing. And his cash. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Buck. Okay.” I thanked my father and fled the nook before he had a chance to change his mind. Only later did I realize with a spasm of guilt that my father’s lack of travel was an ulterior reason, perhaps the main reason, that I wanted to go. This trip, this Crazy Idea, would be one sure way of becoming someone other than him. Someone less respectable. Or maybe not less respectable. Maybe just less obsessed with respectability. The rest of the family wasn’t quite so supportive. When my grandmother got wind of my itinerary, one item in particular appalled her. “Japan!” she cried. “Why, Buck, it was only a few years ago the Japs were out to kill us! Don’t you remember? Pearl Harbor! The Japs tried to conquer the world! Some of them still don’t know they lost! They’re in hiding! They might take you prisoner, Buck. Gouge out your eyeballs. They’re known for that—your eyeballs.” I loved my mother’s mother, whom we all called Mom Hatfield. And I understood her fear. Japan was about as far as you could get from Roseburg, Oregon, the farm town where she was born and where she’d lived all her life. I’d spent many summers down there with her and Pop Hatfield. Almost every night we’d sat out on the porch, listening to the croaking bullfrogs compete with the console radio, which in the early 1940s was always tuned to news of the war. Which was always bad.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The typical Johnson letter would invariably close with a lament, either sarcastic or pointedly earnest, about my failure to respond to his previous letter. And the one before that, etc. Then there would be a PS, and usually another PS, and sometimes a pagoda of PS’s. Then one last plea for encouraging words, which I never sent. I didn’t have time for encouraging words. Besides, it wasn’t my style. I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself, or if I was emulating Bowerman, or my father, or both. Was I adopting their man-of-few-words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired? At the time I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes—Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership, or lack thereof, under extreme conditions. War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. I wasn’t that unique. Throughout history men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway’s cardinal virtue, pressurized grace. (Hemingway himself wrote most of A Moveable Feast while gazing at a statue of Marshal Ney, Napoléon’s favorite commander.) One lesson I took from all my home-schooling about heroes was that they didn’t say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. So I didn’t answer Johnson, and I didn’t pester him. Having told him what to do, I hoped that he would surprise me. Maybe with silence. To Johnson’s credit, though he craved more communication, he never let the lack of it discourage him. On the contrary, it motivated him. He was anal, he recognized that I was not, and though he enjoyed complaining (to me, to my sister, to mutual friends), he saw that my managerial style gave him freedom. Left to do as he pleased, he responded with boundless creativity and energy. He worked seven days a week, selling and promoting Blue Ribbon, and when he wasn’t selling, he was beaverishly building up his customer data files.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  My second mutiny. This one, however, was more complicated than Johnson’s. I spent several days drafting my reply. I agreed to raise his salary, slightly, and then I pulled rank. I reminded Bork that in any company there could only be one boss, and sadly for him the boss of Blue Ribbon was Buck Knight. I told him if he wasn’t happy with me or my management style, he should know that quitting and being fired were both viable options. As with my “spy memo,” I suffered instant writer’s remorse. The moment I dropped it in the mail I realized that Bork was a valuable part of the team, that I didn’t want to lose him, that I couldn’t afford to lose him. I dispatched our new operations manager, Woodell, to Los Angeles, to patch things up. Woodell took Bork to lunch and tried to explain that I wasn’t sleeping much, with a new baby and all. Also, Woodell told him, I was feeling tremendous stress after the visit from Kitami and Mr. Onitsuka. Woodell joked about my unique management style, telling Bork that everyone bitched about it, everyone pulled their hair out about my nonresponses to their memos and letters. In all Woodell spent a few days with Bork, smoothing his feathers, going over the operation. He discovered that Bork was stressed, too. Though the retail store was thriving, the back room, which had basically become our national warehouse, was in shambles. Boxes everywhere, invoices and papers stacked to the ceiling. Bork couldn’t keep pace. When Woodell returned he gave me the picture. “I think Bork’s back in the fold,” he said, “but we need to relieve him of that warehouse. We need to transfer all warehouse operations up here.” Moreover, he added, we needed to hire Woodell’s mother to run it. She’d worked for years in the warehouse at Jantzen, the legendary Oregon outfitter, so it wasn’t nepotism, he said. Ma Woodell was perfect for the job. I wasn’t sure I cared. If Woodell was good with it, I was good with it. Plus, the way I saw it: The more Woodells the better. 1970I had to fly to Japan again, and this time two weeks before Christmas. I didn’t like leaving Penny alone with Matthew, especially around the holidays, but it couldn’t be avoided. I needed to sign a new deal with Onitsuka. Or not. Kitami was keeping me in suspense. He wouldn’t tell me his thoughts about renewing me until I arrived. YET AGAIN I found myself at a conference table surrounded by Onitsuka executives. This time, Mr. Onitsuka didn’t make his trademark late entrance, nor did he absent himself pointedly. He was there from the start, presiding.

• From Educated (2018)

  Shawn was tossing and turning like a child with a fever. I sat with him for an hour. A few times his eyes opened, but if he was conscious, he didn’t recognize me. When I came the next day, he was awake. I walked into the room and he blinked and looked at Mother, as if to check that she was seeing me, too. “You came,” he said. “I didn’t think you would.” He took my hand and then fell asleep. I stared at his face, at the bandages wrapped around his forehead and over his ears, and was bled of my bitterness. Then I understood why I hadn’t come sooner. I’d been afraid of how I would feel, afraid that if he died, I might be glad. I’m sure the doctors wanted to keep him in the hospital, but we didn’t have insurance, and the bill was already so large that Shawn would be making payments a decade later. The moment he was stable enough to travel, we took him home. He lived on the sofa in the front room for two months. He was physically weak—it was all he had in him to make it to the bathroom and back. He’d lost his hearing completely in one ear and had trouble hearing with the other, so he often turned his head when people spoke to him, orienting his better ear toward them, rather than his eyes. Except for this strange movement and the bandages from the surgery, he looked normal, no swelling, no bruises. According to the doctors, this was because the damage was very serious: a lack of external injuries meant the damage was all internal. It took some time for me to realize that although Shawn looked the same, he wasn’t. He seemed lucid, but if you listened carefully his stories didn’t make sense. They weren’t really stories at all, just one tangent after another. I felt guilty that I hadn’t visited him immediately in the hospital, so to make it up to him I quit my job and tended him day and night. When he wanted water, I fetched it; if he was hungry, I cooked. Sadie started coming around, and Shawn welcomed her. I looked forward to her visits because they gave me time to study. Mother thought it was important that I stay with Shawn, so no one interrupted me. For the first time in my life I had long stretches in which to learn—without having to scrap, or strain tinctures, or check inventory for Randy. I examined Tyler’s notes, read and reread his careful explanations. After a few weeks of this, by magic or miracle, the concepts took hold. I retook the practice test. The advanced algebra was still indecipherable—it came from a world beyond my ability to perceive—but the trigonometry had become intelligible, messages written in a language I could understand, from a world of logic and order that only existed in black ink and on white paper.

• From City of Night (1963)

  We move along the maze of... lost... rooms, until we reach ours. Inside, the room is almost bare. For an ashtray theres a tin can. No towels. The walls are greasy, sweaty plaster peeling in horrendous childhood-nightmare lepershapes snapping at you—no window-screens. Paper curtains with ripped edges like saws hang dismally over the window: a room crushed in by the brief recurring lonesomeness that inhabits it throughout the days, the nights. The bed is slightly rumpled—as if only a hurried attempt had been made to straighten it after its previous occupancy. The man almost reels. “Heres money,” he says, again opening his wallet, some bills flutter carelessly on the rumpled bed. I take them. He stuffs the other bills clumsily back into the wallet. “You gonna rob me, boy?” he asks me suddenly. Then he grins drunkenly. “Hell,” he says, “Idon-givfuck—happens—happened—manytime.... Don-givfuck.” His look sobered momentarily. His eyes, which are incredibly deep, incredibly sad, look at me pleadingly. “Gonna rob me?” Im thinking: He wants to be robbed, thats why he came up here with me, hes asking me to rob him.... I feel a sudden surge of excitement—as if Im being tested. He pushes the wallet loosely into his back pocket. After a few frantic moments during which I didnt even take off my clothes but merely lay in bed with him touching me, he sighed: “Whew!”—closed his eyes. He turned over on his stomach and seemed to pass out. His wallet is almost sliding out. With an excitement that was almost Sexual, I reach for it. It slips out easily. He didnt move.... I stand over the bed looking steadily at him, very long, fixing the scene in my mind, experiencing the same exploding fusion of guilt and liberation I had felt that first time, with Mr King. I hear the man almost-sob: “Gonna rob me?” The monotonous beat from the jukebox outside invades the room persistently. I replace the money I had just removed from his wallet. I lay the wallet—intact—beside him. And I walk out, past the unconcerned glance of the man at the desk. Outside, in the rancid air, I stand looking at the carnival street. Through the grayish haze of the smoggy afternoon, the sun shines warmly but feebly—the great myopic eye of Heaven.... Somehow—I knew—in that room just now—I had failed the world I had sought.

• From Educated (2018)

  Tyler paid a price for that letter, though the price is hard to define. He was not disowned, or at least his disownment was not permanent. Eventually he worked out a truce with my father, but their relationship may never be the same. I’ve apologized to Tyler more times than I can count for what I’ve cost him, but the words are awkwardly placed and I stumble over them. What is the proper arrangement of words? How do you craft an apology for weakening someone’s ties to his father, to his family? Perhaps there aren’t words for that. How do you thank a brother who refused to let you go, who seized your hand and wrenched you upward, just as you had decided to stop kicking and sink? There aren’t words for that, either. —WINTER WAS LONG THAT YEAR, the dreariness punctuated only by my weekly counseling sessions and the odd sense of loss, almost bereavement, I felt whenever I finished one TV series and had to find another. Then it was spring, then summer, and finally as summer turned to fall, I found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to society, to themselves? I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it academic, specific. In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation. One of the movements I chose was nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.” The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday school, I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for Mormonism: that every event since the death of Christ had been fashioned by God to make possible the moment when Joseph Smith would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God would restore the one true church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these were mere preludes to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether. My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It didn’t treat Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount the contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the age. Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human story.

• From City of Night (1963)

  As my now-editor, Don came to Los Angeles with a contract and an advance for the book I had begun to call “Storm Heaven and Protest.” But I still didn’t write it. I plunged back into my “streetworld.” Hitchhiking I met a man who would become instrumental in my finishing this book. I saw him regularly, but I kept my “literary” identity secret; I had learned early—but not entirely correctly—that being smart on the streets included pretending not to be. Not knowing that I had graduated from college and had already published sections from a novel I had a contract for—but concerned that I might be trapped in one of the many possible deadends of the streets—he offered (we were having breakfast in Malibu, the ocean was azure) to send me to school. I was touched by his unique concern, and when he drove me back to my rented room on Hope Street, I asked him to wait. I went inside and autographed a copy of “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny” and gave it to him. He looked at it, and then at me, a stranger. Then I needed to flee the closeness increased, perhaps, by the fusion of my two “identities.” Consistent with another pattern, a letter arrived from a man who had read my writing: he would be happy to have me visit him on an island near Chicago. A plane ticket followed. Painfully trying to explain to my good friend who had picked me up hitchhiking that I had to leave Los Angeles, I left and spent the summer on a private island. When summer was ending, I migrated to Chicago, quickly finding its own Times Square. But I was pulled back to Los Angeles. Extending the understanding that makes him, always, deeply cherished and special in my life, my friend who had wanted to put me through school—and whose “voice” is heard in part in the character of Jeremy in this book—now offered to help me out while I went to El Paso to finish—where it had begun—the book I again longed to write. I returned to my mother’s small house and wrote every day on a rented Underwood typewriter. My mother kept the house quiet while I worked. After dinner, I would translate into Spanish and read to her (she never learned English) certain passages I considered appropriate. “You’re writing a beautiful book, my son.” she told me. It was difficult to write that book. Guilt recurred as I evoked those haunting lives. Oh, was I betraying that anarchic world by writing about it—or even more deeply so if I kept to myself those exiled lives? I increasingly found “meaning” in structure: In “Between Two Lions,” I wanted to create out of the reality of Times Square a modern jungle in which two of its powerful denizens connect momentarily, but because of their very natures inevitably wound each other. The story of Miss Destiny found fuller meaning in the childhood game of “statues.”

• From Educated (2018)

  The real world, meanwhile, plunged into chaos. The doctors told Mother that Shawn’s injury might have altered his personality—that in the hospital, he had shown tendencies toward volatility, even violence, and that such changes might be permanent. He did succumb to rages, moments of blind anger when all he wanted was to hurt someone. He had an intuition for nastiness, for saying the single most devastating thing, that left Mother in tears more nights than not. These rages changed, and worsened, as his physical strength improved, and I found myself cleaning the toilet every morning, knowing my head might be inside it before lunch. Mother said I was the only one who could calm him, and I persuaded myself that that was true. Who better? I thought. He doesn’t affect me. Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all. * My account of Shawn’s fall is based on the story as it was told to me at the time. Tyler was told the same story; in fact, many of the details in this account come from his memory. Asked fifteen years later, others remember it differently. Mother says Shawn was not standing on a pallet, only on forklift tines. Luke remembers the pallet, but substitutes a metal drain, with the grating removed, in place of the rebar. He says the fall was twelve feet, and that Shawn began acting strangely as soon as he regained consciousness. Luke has no memory of who dialed 911, but says there were men working in a nearby mill, and he suspects that one of them called immediately after Shawn fell. [image "Chapter 15 No More a Child" file=Image00017.jpg] There was a moment that winter. I was kneeling on the carpet, listening to Dad testify of Mother’s calling as a healer, when my breath caught in my chest and I felt taken out of myself. I no longer saw my parents or our living room. What I saw was a woman grown, with her own mind, her own prayers, who no longer sat, childlike, at her father’s feet. I saw the woman’s swollen belly and it was my belly. Next to her sat her mother, the midwife. She took her mother’s hand and said she wanted the baby delivered in a hospital, by a doctor. I’ll drive you, her mother said. The women moved toward the door, but the door was blocked—by loyalty, by obedience. By her father. He stood, immovable.

• From Educated (2018)

  He screamed himself hoarse, then just when Dad thought he had calmed down, he gripped Dad around the waist and flung him like a sack of grain. Before Dad could scramble to his feet Shawn took off, leaping and howling and laughing, and Luke and Benjamin, now sure something was very wrong, chased after him. Luke reached him first but couldn’t hold him; then Benjamin added his weight and Shawn slowed a little. But it wasn’t until all three men tackled him—throwing his body to the ground, where, because he was resisting, his head hit hard—that he finally lay still. No one has ever described to me what happened when Shawn’s head struck that second time. Whether he had a seizure, or vomited, or lost consciousness, I’m not sure. But it was so chilling that someone—maybe Dad, probably Benjamin—dialed 911, which no member of my family had ever done before. They were told a helicopter would arrive in minutes. Later the doctors would speculate that when Dad, Luke and Benjamin had wrestled Shawn to the ground—and he’d sustained a concussion—he was already in critical condition. They said it was a miracle he hadn’t died the moment his head hit the ground. I struggle to imagine the scene while they waited for the chopper. Dad said that when the paramedics arrived, Shawn was sobbing, begging for Mother. By the time he reached the hospital, his state of mind had shifted. He stood naked on the gurney, eyes bulging, bloodshot, screaming that he would rip out the eyes of the next bastard who came near him. Then he collapsed into sobs and finally lost consciousness. —SHAWN LIVED THROUGH THE NIGHT. In the morning I drove to Buck’s Peak. I couldn’t explain why I wasn’t rushing to my brother’s bedside. I told Mother I had to work. “He’s asking for you,” she said. “You said he doesn’t recognize anyone.” “He doesn’t,” she said. “But the nurse just asked me if he knows someone named Tara. He said your name over and over this morning, when he was asleep and when he was awake. I told them Tara is his sister, and now they’re saying it would be good if you came. He might recognize you, and that would be something. Yours is the only name he’s said since he got to the hospital.” I was silent. “I’ll pay for the gas,” Mother said. She thought I wouldn’t come because of the thirty dollars it would cost in fuel. I was embarrassed that she thought that, but then, if it wasn’t the money, I had no reason at all. “I’m leaving now,” I said. I remember strangely little of the hospital, or of how my brother looked. I vaguely recall that his head was wrapped in gauze, and that when I asked why, Mother said the doctors had performed a surgery, cutting into his skull to relieve some pressure, or stop a bleed, or repair something—actually, I can’t remember what she said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I stop listening, concentrate on a romance sprouting in tatters nearby. (An old man has called to an old woman: “Hey, hon, cummon over—I got somethin forya.” She is sitting with him now, as he produces a bottle of cheap wine—and they invade Heaven together, momentarily before the harsh hangover....) As I move away, one harpy in an overcoat grits her teeth and says to no one: “Moody woulda killed him if he’dda kep screwing with me—I mean to tell you, he woulduv.” A youngman lies on a bench, asleep, the sun directly in his eyes. Vagrants bunched like birds over a worm: young vagrants playing “rummy”—which means dice or poker. Their eyes trained to remain on the dice while still watching out for the cops. Trying to defeat Time.... As the dice tumble to the walk, a woman, huddled over in a wined-up terror, whines from the wasteland of her memories: “My daddee was—... My daddee was—...” Seeing me stare at her, she sighs: “You believe me, dont you?” I nod yes. I begin to feel a hint of what, in expiation, I must find in this city. Through the night-sheltered park (as, in the breezy night, shadows grapple with each other on the gray walks), a queen completely painted like a woman, wearing a woman’s blouse and slacks, parades languidly but still unsurely—past the park-socialist shouting feverishly: “Jesus Christ—not Karl Marx—was the first socialist!”—and the tourist bus, full of middle-aged middle-classed ladies, roars away from the blasphemy as wellfed faces look back through the windows at the park in horrified Disbelief. Hunting eyes outline the ledges of the park. Malehustlers assume that necessary tough veneer of hoods. After two in the morning, cars still go around the block to choose a paid partner from the stagline. New in town (and in the waning summerdays, other faces have become familiar and stridently desperate), I splashed on the scene, going from morning to morning—in and out of the different cars that stopped after circling the block.... In and out of the different bars (Tommy’s where the bartender will pimp for you after hes made it with you; The Cavern, into a pit of malebodies crushed dancing).... Back and forth on the streets (Dearborn, Rush)—back to the park, the beach.... And these are some of the faces with which I’ll try to blot out the guilt-ridden memory of Neil: The pale face of a youngman who hands me a written note that says: “I’ll pay you $10.” I turn to answer him. He shakes his head, indicating hes a deafmute.... And about 20 minutes later Im back in the park again.... The bony face of the man driving a car around the block, stopping before me.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White was petrified. On his hawk’s tail were strange pale transverse stripes, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across the quills. He knew what they were: hunger-traces caused by lack of food as the feathers grew; weaknesses that made them liable to break. Guilt and blame. He worried that it was his fault the hawk was damaged. He wanted to stop these hunger-traces, make up for whatever early lack had scarred his hawk and made its feathers weak. So he fed it. He fed it as much as he possibly could. He didn’t know that because those feathers were now full-grown there was no danger of making the traces worse. He gave the hawk so much food that the hawk couldn’t eat it, bear the sight of it, and here is White, the terrified austringer, stroking the hawk’s breast-feathers with a split rabbit skull showing all the rabbit’s spilled brains in desperate attempts to get it to eat, when the hawk doesn’t want to eat because it is full. Love me, he is saying. Please. I can make it up to you, make it better. Fix you. Please eat. But a fat, stuffed goshawk doesn’t want anything other than to be left alone, to disappear into that half-world of no-humans, replete and contented, eyes half-closed, one foot tucked up into soft feathers, to digest its food and sleep. Over the coming days and weeks, White tries different food, better food, trying to tempt the hawk to eat more that it can bear. He is wheedling, desperate, certain that his patience will triumph. And of course at some point the hawk becomes half-hungry enough to eat, and White stuffs it with food, convinced that all will now be well. And then the hawk hates him, and the strange cycle begins again. ‘Days of attack and counter-attack,’ was how White described it; ‘a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields.’ There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him. And these twisted logics were met with the simple logic of a wild, fat goshawk that considers this man the most inimical thing on earth.