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 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.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He makes a sound of excruciating pain. Even then, his hands will not release my foot, crushing it into his groin with more pressure. “Harder!” he begs. “Please! Do It Harder!!!” Rocked by currents inside me which sealed off this experience from anything that had ever happened previously to me—aware all the time that it was I who was being seduced by him —seduced into violence: that using the sensed narcissism in me—and purposely germinating that hatred toward him—he had played with all my hungry needs (magnified by the hint of the withdrawing of attention), had twisted them in order to use them for his purposes, by unfettering the submerged cravings, carried to that inevitable extreme—and disassociating myself from all feelings of pity and compassion, to which—despite the compulsive determination to stamp out all innocence within me and thereby to meet the world in its own savage terms; to leave behind that lulling, esoteric, life-shuttering childhood, that once-cherished place by the window—to which, despite all those things, I had, I know, still clung: to compassion, to pity—and knowing only that this was the moment when I could crush symbolically (as in a dream once in which I had stamped out all the hatred in the world) whatever of innocence still remained in me (crush that and something else—something else surely lurking—but what?— what!!) —that at this moment I could prove irrevocably to the hatefully initiating world that I could join its rot, its cruelty—I saw my foot rise over him, then grind violently down as if of its own kinetic volition into that now pleading, most vulnerable part of that man’s body.... He let out a howl. A dreadful sound hurled inhumanly like a bolt out of his throat—a plunging bolt which buried itself instantly within my mind. His face turned to one side as if he would bite the floor in pain. Tears came from his eyes in a sudden deluge which joined the perspiration and turned his face into a gleaming mask of pain. And he sobbed: “Why... hurt?... Why... do you...? I... did... for you—... did everything!... Wanted—... want—... Why?... hurt... why?... Wanted lo—...” Clenched teeth choked the word he had been about to utter. The scene exploded in my mind.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And we used to go out to Laguna Beach that summer. Well, man, someone told him something about this Esmeralda Drake—this old auntie whod kept him. Someone told him Esmeralda Drake had just had a heart attack or some other fuckin thing; got taken to the hospital. Well, hell, Lance never gave a damn about that poor old bastard—he took that auntie for every cent, then he threw him out of the house he’d given him. Well, we were on the beach with Chick and them, and Lance had a great tan—always in the sun—but when he hears about how Esmeralda Drake just had a stroke, he turned yellow, like he was painted or something, and he says, ‘Ive got to go to him right away.’ I said what the fuck’s the matter with you? that poor old sonofabitch doesnt want to see you, after what you did to him. Man, Lance locked that bastard out, called the cops that he was breaking in. Anyway, Lance says: ‘Youre right, he wouldnt want to see me.’ And thats when it started—like suddenly it wasnt Lance any more. He began cruising up and down the beach like some hung-up fairy that hasnt had any dick in months. He went in swimming, splashing around, showing off. He’d never done that—he didnt have to show off. He was so greatlooking, man, everyone came to him; he didnt have to say a word. He could be in a bar, alone—not talk to anyone, just glance at who he wanted and sit there and wait, and you couldnt take a bet in that bar that in five minutes he wouldnt have the cat he was after. But, Christ, that day, at Laguna, hes talking to everyone, rushing into the bar by the beach, drinking. And Lance didnt drink, man—thats the truth. I said, ‘What the hell’s wrong, you wanna get drunk?’ He says, ‘Yes, I wanna get drunk.’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘To celebrate,’ he says—he actually said that: To celebrate! And, man, all this cruising is bugging me. Like I say, I hadnt been strictly gay then, but Lance is a charmer—he was bringing me out fast—wowee!... Now there I was with him, and that motherfucker is cruising up a steaming storm. Well, it got real late, the sun was going down, and it got cold, and we went into the bar—that queer bar on the beach. And Lance is still drinking. I tried to get him to come back to the hotel. But he wouldnt, he kept saying, ‘The celebration isn’t over!’—and, yeah, he keeps saying something about his new life is starting.... Then these two wise-ass marines walk into the bar—they werent queer, they were straight; just pinning the queer scene for kicks. And Lance says, ‘I want those two.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  Throughout the night there are sounds of rapid footsteps running down the stairs. In the morning, if you stay, you walk out into the harsh daylight. The sun bursts cruelly in your eyes. For one blinding instant you see yourself clearly. The day begins again.... The same. Today! Part Three “He’s got the wind and the rain in His hands, He’s got both you and me in His hands, He’s got the whole world in His hands.” — He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands CITY OF NIGHT AFTER ALL, THERES THIS TO CONSIDER: The world’s no fucking good. “Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont — or you go under .” I needed hungrily to feel wanted—but when someone tried to get too close—someone met in that daily excursion through moviehouse balconies, bars, the park—I immediately moved away from him. I seldom saw the same person more than a few times during those months. Recurrently, around the others hustling those places, I felt a peculiar overpowering guilt because I was convinced I was not trapped by that world, as I was certain they were. Yet there were those other times when I felt even more hopelessly a part of it for having searched it out. It was a quandary so strangely disturbing—so difficult to understand—that I tried to force myself not to think about it—perhaps because I sensed even then that the answer to the riddle would entail something much too harsh to face. Increasingly now there were moments of craving for a form of revenge on life—to get even with it. And for what reason specifically? I didnt really know. More and more, revenge became a conscious craving. There is a bar in Los Angeles a block from Pershing Square, on Sixth Street. It’s called the Hodge Podge. At that time it wasnt exclusively a hustling bar—many went there to make out mutually with each other. But often you can score much better in such a bar. From the street, you descend into it, as if into a cellar. It is dark and like a cave: partitions separating it into small ghettos, where groups huddle in the semidarkness. As you walk in, a youngman who looks like a hood may check your I.D. Because he hadnt seen me there before, he asked me for mine. Before I could pull it out of my wallet, a Negro queen I had seen briefly, at the most twice at the 1-2-3—Miss Billie—comes rushing over to me and the youngman checking I.D. “Oh, baby,” she says to him indignantly, “hes All Right—why, Ive known him for years! You just go ahead and let him in like your sister says, hear?” She turned to me: “Im working here now, baby—to attract a new crowd—and you just rely on Miss Billie whenever you need help to get in this bar.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  He had made much the same protest against the unfairness of the labels thrust at that world—a protest echoed over and over in that life.... But this woman? Was her resentment of those labels bred by a consuming guilt for catering in her bar to a world in which, I suspected, she didnt really belong? While we had been talking, a queen had entered surreptitiously through the side door. She seemed to be hesitating in approaching Sylvia. Suddenly she was there—standing before us. “Lily, I been looking for you,” Sylvia said harshly. “I know, honey,” the queen named Lily said querulously. “And—You Believe It Or Not—that is exactly why I have come over looking for you—to clarify certain points of a vicious, untrue, unfounded, utterly fabricated, bitchy story someone has been spreading About Me.... I aint been hidin from you or nothing—honestly, honey,” she said, oddly prematurely conciliatory. “I want you to know that. You must know that,” she said like Bette Davis. “It’s just that I been—Really and Truly—I have been Very Busy, what with Mardi Gras coming up.” “I know,” Sylvia said cuttingly. “Why, Sylvia, honey—it aint at all how you heard it, baby,” Lily protested, playing nervously with a long strand of beads about her neck. “Now how the hell do you know what I heard?” “Because I been told! —by mutual friends.” She avoids looking directly at Sylvia; guiltily studying the strung beads. “I did not clip that drunk sailor,” she says, plunging into the immediate matter. “And I know it was that old queen Whorina who told you I did. Honey, you know me well enough to know that-I-simply-do-not-clip-no-one-that-aint-lookin-to-be-clipped.” She strung out the words, obviously memorized, as if they constituted what she knew is a ready, forceful defense. “And that sailor was not! It just so happened I dug him, see, honey?—and ole Whorina was digging him too (oh, she was twisted out of her gay mind for him!—she even offered him money to make it, but he was digging Me)—and, well, Whorina, like the bitchy nelly queen she is, well, she was Bugged—fit to be tied, I wanna let you know.”

• From Educated (2018)

  I’d never seen anyone use a knife on a dog. We shot them, in the head or the heart, so it was quick. But Shawn chose a knife, and a knife whose blade was barely bigger than his thumb. It was the knife you’d choose to experience a slaughter, to feel the blood running down your hand the moment the heart stopped beating. It wasn’t the knife of a farmer, or even of a butcher. It was a knife of rage. —I DON’T KNOW WHAT happened in the days that followed. Even now, as I scrutinize the components of the confrontation—the threat, the denial, the lecture, the apology—it is difficult to relate them. When I considered it weeks later, it seemed I had made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family. Only later did it occur to me that whatever damage was done that night might not have been done solely by me. And it was more than a year before I understood what should have been immediately apparent: that my mother had not confronted my father, and my father had not confronted Shawn. Dad had never promised to help me and Audrey. Mother had lied. Now, when I reflect on my mother’s words, remembering the way they appeared as if by magic on the screen, one detail stands above the rest: that Mother described my father as bipolar. It was the exact disorder that I myself suspected. It was my word, not hers. Then I wonder if perhaps my mother, who had always reflected so perfectly the will of my father, had that night merely been reflecting mine. No, I tell myself. They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so healed me, were hollow. I do not believe that they were faithless, but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away by other, stronger currents. [image "Chapter 35 West of the Sun" file=Image00037.jpg] I fled the mountain with my bags half packed and did not retrieve anything that was left behind. I went to Salt Lake and spent the rest of the holidays with Drew. I tried to forget that night. For the first time in fifteen years, I closed my journal and put it away. Journaling is contemplative, and I didn’t want to contemplate anything. After the New Year I returned to Cambridge, but I withdrew from my friends. I had seen the earth tremble, felt the preliminary shock; now I waited for the seismic event that would transform the landscape. I knew how it would begin. Shawn would think about what Dad had told him on the phone, and sooner or later he would realize that my denial—my claim that Dad had misunderstood me—was a lie. When he realized the truth, he would despise himself for perhaps an hour. Then he would transfer his loathing to me. It was early March when it happened. Shawn sent me an email.

• 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 Educated (2018)

  She would not, she would never, unless I would see my father. To see me without him, she said, would be to disrespect her husband. For a moment it seemed pointless, this annual pilgrimage to a home that continued to reject me, and I wondered if I should go. Then I received another message, this one from Aunt Angie. She said Grandpa had canceled his plans for the next day, and was refusing even to go to the temple, as he usually did on Wednesdays, because he wanted to be at home in case I came by. To this Angie added: I get to see you in about twelve hours! But who’s counting? * The italicized language in the description of the referenced exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved. [image "Chapter 40 Educated" file=Image00042.jpg] When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape. As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents in years, since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler, Richard and Tony, and from them, as well as from other family, I hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain—the injuries, violence and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay, which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is permanent, if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace. That peace did not come easily. I spent years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them . Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. The relief came when I turned inward. When I discovered, finally, that the decision could be upheld for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Scrutinizing that stranger’s face, of Myself in the Mirror, I hear the voice of the man Im with, saving: “Dont stare so hard; youre still a boy”—as if understanding from the searching looks that Im hunting Someone, urgently—that someone unfound in the dim past, in the parks, the moviebalconies, the bars, the streets, the sexrooms; that someone perhaps lost or evaded somewhere in the labyrinthine memories leading back to a serene window.... But despite that man’s words, of course I know—and the face knows—that I am no longer a “boy.” I appear Young, yes—but, inside, it’s as if miles of years have stretched since I left that window in El Paso. Turning away from the Mirror, I feel stabbingly guilty. But guilty of what? Perhaps my guilt is a wayward apology for living in a world for which I dont feel responsible. I walk out of that room, and the sun claws savagely at my eyes. It means a day has gone by. But what good is a day going by so easily when, suddenly, there is the devouring sun and another day, another empty stretch of time before you can hide again?—another day standing before me at attention like a private waiting to be told what to do, sir.... It’s better to wake up nights so you dont have to screw your eyes up and your Dark self adjusting to the sun. Reluctantly I join the hordes of other nightpeople, stark in the reality of Morning, their features as if erased by the sun from the bloodless faces, more stark in juxtaposition with the sleepfed faces of the others, the morningpeople: the many, infinitely many, varieties of “tourists.” And in that sun, it will begin again, trying to fill the nothing with something— with anything! —which this time is God Damn It this: Sonny said: “See, you go and tell him—over there, see (and, man, I seen his wallet and that score is loaded!)—and tell him Sandy-Vee wants to see him, and when he comes outside, you come with him and shove him toward the stairs and me and my buddy’ll grab his ass, and if he dont come across nice, we’ll take it and break the bread in three.”

• From Educated (2018)

  wallet, opened it and extracted a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “You won’t waste this like I will.” — I BELIEVED THAT HUNDRED dollars was a sign from God. I was supposed to stay in school. I drove back to BYU and paid my rent. Then, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay it in February, I took a second job as a domestic cleaner, driving twenty minutes north three days a week to scrub expensive toilets in Draper. The bishop and I were still meeting every Sunday. Robin had told him that I hadn’t bought my textbooks for the semester. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Apply for the grant! You’re poor! That’s why these grants exist!” My opposition was beyond rational, it was visceral. “I make a lot of money,” the bishop said. “I pay a lot of taxes. Just think of it as my money.” He had printed out the application forms, which he gave to me. “Think about it. You need to learn to accept help, even from the Government.” I took the forms. Robin filled them out. I refused to send them. “Just get the paperwork together,” she said. “See how it feels.” I needed my parents’ tax returns. I wasn’t even sure my parents filed taxes, but if they did, I knew Dad wouldn’t give them to me if he knew why I wanted them. I thought up a dozen fake reasons for why I might need them, but none were believable. I pictured the returns sitting in the large gray filing cabinet in the kitchen. Then I decided to steal them. I left for Idaho just before midnight, hoping I would arrive at around three in the morning and the house would be quiet. When I reached the peak, I crept up the driveway, wincing each time a bit of gravel snapped beneath my tires. I eased the car door open noiselessly, then padded across the grass and slipped through the back door, moving silently through the house, reaching my hand out to feel my way to the filing cabinet. I had only made it a few steps when I heard a familiar clink. “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “It’s me!” “Who?”

• From Educated (2018)

  thumb. It was the knife you’d choose to experience a slaughter, to feel the blood running down your hand the moment the heart stopped beating. It wasn’t the knife of a farmer, or even of a butcher. It was a knife of rage. — I DON’T KNOW WHAT happened in the days that followed. Even now, as I scrutinize the components of the confrontation—the threat, the denial, the lecture, the apology—it is difficult to relate them. When I considered it weeks later, it seemed I had made a thousand mistakes, driven a thousand knives into the heart of my own family. Only later did it occur to me that whatever damage was done that night might not have been done solely by me. And it was more than a year before I understood what should have been immediately apparent: that my mother had not confronted my father, and my father had not confronted Shawn. Dad had never promised to help me and Audrey. Mother had lied. Now, when I reflect on my mother’s words, remembering the way they appeared as if by magic on the screen, one detail stands above the rest: that Mother described my father as bipolar. It was the exact disorder that I myself suspected. It was my word, not hers. Then I wonder if perhaps my mother, who had always reflected so perfectly the will of my father, had that night merely been reflecting mine. No, I tell myself. They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so healed me, were hollow. I do not believe that they were faithless, but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away by other, stronger currents.

• From Educated (2018)

  thought of Mother, and of the many times she’d told me that antibiotics poison the body, that they cause infertility and birth defects. That the spirit of the Lord cannot dwell in an unclean vessel, and that no vessel is clean when it forsakes God and relies on man. Or maybe Dad had said that last part. I swallowed the pills. Perhaps it was desperation because I felt so poorly, but I think the reason was more mundane: curiosity. There I was, in the heart of the Medical Establishment, and I wanted to see, at long last, what it was I had always been afraid of. Would my eyes bleed? My tongue fall out? Surely something awful would happen. I needed to know what. I returned to my apartment and called Mother. I thought confessing would alleviate my guilt. I told her I’d seen a doctor, and that I had strep and mono. “I’m taking penicillin,” I said. “I just wanted you to know.” She began talking rapidly but I didn’t hear much of it, I was so tired. When she seemed to be winding down, I said “I love you” and hung up. Two days later a package arrived, express from Idaho. Inside were six bottles of tincture, two vials of essential oil, and a bag of white clay. I recognized the formulas—the oils and tinctures were to fortify the liver and kidneys, and the clay was a foot soak to draw toxins. There was a note from Mother: These herbs will flush the antibiotics from your system. Please use them for as long as you insist on taking the drugs. Love you. I leaned back into my pillow and fell asleep almost instantly, but before I did I laughed out loud. She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin. — I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING to my phone ringing. It was Audrey. “There’s been an accident,” she said. Her words transported me to another moment, to the last time I’d answered a phone and heard those words instead of a greeting. I thought of that day, and of what Mother had said next. I hoped Audrey was reading from a different script. “It’s Dad,” she said. “If you hurry—leave right now—you can say goodbye.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I can see how that powerless child in front of the play- castle never quite stopped believing that he was going to be shot. For it was not just his fear of success that made White sabotage the training of his hawk. Underlying the whole long affair was a deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them. But with the hawk the re-enactment was the tragedy. ‘He has been frightened into insanity, being, like all predatory people, by nature terrified at heart,’ he wrote of Gos. What had he done? He had taken something wild and free, something innocent and full of life, and fought with it. The cost of his mastery would be to reduce it to a biddable, broken- feathered, dull-eyed shadow of the bird it was meant to be. Gos had been meant to fly slantwise across dark valleys of German pines, to slay and ravine and be his own wildest self. White had thought he could tame the hawk without breaking its natural spirit. But all he has done is try to break it, over and over again. He thinks of Gos tangled in the tree, hanging there in the branches, trapped, powerless, entirely unable to move. 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.