The Wrong Heaven Read online

  But single life didn’t offer the kind of freedom I wanted, either, with its stale routines, its clumsy infrequent sex. What I wanted was something not offered by human existence at all: the wild, unfettered life of the body. As I neared my fortieth birthday, I felt increasingly constricted by daily postures—sitting in a chair at my desk; hunched over the steering wheel in my car; cocking my head with feigned interest at a party; stirring spaghetti sauce over the stove. I started taking expensive vacations to engage in extreme physical challenges: mountain climbing, skydiving, snowboarding. These pursuits all induced a feeling of mastery and freedom, but only after learning a complex set of rules regarding harnesses, buckles, and straps. I wanted to do away with constraints entirely.

  Then I learned about the ranch.

  Q: Does the process always work?

  A: Unfortunately, no.

  Q: What are the potential side effects?

  A: Sterility, seizures, Centaurism.

  Q: Why does it only work on women?

  A: We’re not sure, but we think it’s because they want it to.

  Q: Is that how science works?

  A: No one understands how science works, not even the most scientific scientists. Dr. Beláček himself has been given to grand pronouncements of the following nature: “It’s desire, not gravity, that holds the universe together—and desire, not dark energy, that pulls it apart. Outcomes do not respond to our efforts in a linear way; rather, outcomes retroactively reveal the depth and mystery of our desires. My process is nothing more, or less, than a patented conundrum.”

  Q: What does that mean?

  A: It’s hard to say without a working knowledge of Hungarian idiomatic expressions. In the obscure dialect region from which Dr. Beláček comes, the same word is used for “conundrum,” “miracle,” and “mistake”; it has also been used to refer to the feathers of a chicken (but only in circumstances when they are no longer attached to the chicken).

  Of course, I went to visit. Otherwise, how could I be certain it wasn’t a scam? Serena had been skeptical from the beginning: “I don’t know, Cass,” she said. “What if there is no ranch, and it’s all some plot to turn gullible women into pack animals? What if it’s some awful military-industrial-complex type of thing?”

  But the ranch was just as they’d described. The horses looked healthy and vibrant. Conspiracy theories like Serena’s had been debunked by that point anyway—journalists from all the major news organs had thrown up their hands, finding no evidence of a sinister agenda—but there was nothing like seeing it for myself. Their hooves pounding across the plains, making a sound like rainfall; their coarse hair rippling in the wind; their quiet gaze of recognition as they watched us approach.

  “Do you think this is some kind of modern version of the lesbian separatist utopia?” I mused that night to Cathy, one of the other women on the tour, over gin and tonics at the island’s guesthouse. “Except not just for lesbians.”

  She laughed. “Old fantasies die hard.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Can I ask something? What’s your reason?”

  “Boredom,” I said, without hesitation.

  She nodded; my answer seemed to make sense to her. “What about you?” I said. “What are you escaping?”

  She replied with a long story about her body, which had endured nearly every tried-and-true form of female trauma: abuse, rape, abortion, endometriosis, hysterectomy. “I guess,” she said, “I want a different body, with a clean slate.”

  They kept refilling our drinks, without our asking, and soon we were very drunk. Somehow we found ourselves in my room, stripping off our clothes, hungrily tonguing and sucking each other’s bodies as if, by taking in the other’s flesh, we could achieve the kind of transcendence we were hoping for, while still remaining human. This sex was like a competition: who could manage to escape her body, using the other’s body, first? We pushed against each other with such violence that orgasm became inevitable. But the noise she emitted as she came—a helpless whimper, like a child’s—brought me back into the room. Embarrassed by what her cry had introduced, we turned away from each other. Just then, I sensed movement behind the window; boldly I got up, stark naked, and pulled aside the curtain. One of the horses was standing right outside, staring in with her dark liquid eyes. I felt the bed creak behind me, then heard Cathy gasp: so she saw it too. The horse gave a deep, slow nod, as if to demonstrate that we had understood each other; then she turned and disappeared into the night.

  Q: When I become a horse, will I still have human consciousness?

  A: We believe this question is best answered by iconoclastic seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who tragically died from the effects of inhaling glass dust. Spinoza defines God in the following way: “By God I mean an absolutely infinite being, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” In other words, a horse and a woman and a stone are not different things, but rather all attributes of the same thing, which is God. “Every substance is necessarily infinite,” Spinoza writes, but has its own “essence.” In a similar manner, you will simultaneously be your human self and not be your human self when you become a horse. You will think the same thoughts, but in a horsey manner; your personality will have the same attributes, but horsily expressed; your thoughts will take on a horsey cadence, your feelings will pulse and throb with thick horsey blood. We cannot guarantee that you will continue to inhabit your human identity in any recognizable way. But much as Spinoza accepted that not only his human lungs but also the glass that subtly punctured them and the air that suspended and delivered the glass to his pulmonary tissues were all made of the same substance—God—and that therefore his death was only a matter of taking God into God, of God puncturing God and delivering God into another form of God, we hope that you will accept any change in your nature as both natural and sacred, however artificially induced.

  Q: Do you believe in God?

  A: No.

  Serena went to the doctor, reported that the second attempt had failed. “We don’t say ‘failed,’” said the doctor, kindly. “We say ‘unsuccessful.’”

  “That’s almost as bad,” said Serena.

  The doctor shrugged. “You want to have a baby,” she said. “You should probably get used to feeling unsuccessful. It’s not possible to ‘succeed’ at parenthood the way you’ve ‘succeeded’ in your career. Treating parenthood like a career can cause anxiety, wrinkles, and helicopterism, especially in older mothers like yourself. Sometimes I give my patients a mantra to repeat. I will not succeed. I will not succeed.”

  “Oh,” said Serena. Then, after a pause: “I wouldn’t say I’ve succeeded in my career.”

  “I don’t know anything about your career,” said the doctor. “I was just using that as an example.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Serena is naturally self-deprecating; I, at least, consider her successful. We became friends in a Ph.D. program that she actually finished. I dropped out after our third year, when I realized that the most pleasurable part of my life was my summer waitressing job. At that job I felt competent, dexterous, sexy, a person who could face the world with an air of cockeyed challenge. I strutted between the kitchen and the dining room with plates expertly balanced on my forearms; I joked and flirted with the customers; I swore good-naturedly at the line cooks; I finished each shift pleasantly exhausted, my ponytail loosened by exertion and my body aching for earned indulgence. My nights often ended on the incense-scented mattress of another server, a drummer named Matty, where we fucked and smoked and fell asleep after four in the morning. When I had a day off, I spent it walking through the city, or going swimming or rock climbing, or reading books I actually wanted to read. It was an absorbing existence, and I didn’t care that I might be atrophying the higher parts of my brain; for once, it seemed I had discovered something actually true about myself, not something that was just supposed to be true.

  But it got old. Eventual
ly I became annoyed at Matty—his generic compliments, his bad toenails, his constant quotation of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and we got a meaner boss, and I started to get a persistent pain in my hip that turned out to be sciatica. I tried a few other restaurant jobs, then finally settled for freelance copyediting, for which my half-degree apparently qualified me. I had no desire to go back to school—I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that the world would ever care what I had to say about Virginia Woolf or Deleuze or anything, really, and anyhow I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to say it.

  Serena graduated with honors, and won an award for her thesis on eighteenth-century women’s novels. For her, intellectual labor felt like labor, in a good way, the way waitressing had for me: honest and exhausting and satisfying. But after graduation, despite her accolades, she couldn’t find a job. She had dozens of interviews, almost got several tenure-track positions, but in the end they always went with someone else. I encouraged her, but privately ascribed her failure to her meekness with strangers; with friends she was self-possessed, often cuttingly funny, but she was a cipher in interviews. She seemed to equate “professionalism” with a total erasure of her personality. In the end, after a few miserable years of adjuncting, she got a job teaching English at an all-girls high school. To her surprise, the girls recognized her quiet power and obeyed her, surrounded her with a mute halo of reverence. She became one of the school’s most beloved teachers, supervising the literary club and an adorable baby-feminist zine, matter-of-factly explaining the mechanisms of birth control and orgasm to anyone too shy to ask the health teacher. Yet, no matter how deeply the work absorbed her, she always felt like a failure because she wasn’t leading obscure seminars on object theory, or giving papers at the MLA conference, or being addressed as Professor Lowry. She suffered from crippling spasms of envy every time one of our former classmates got a job or published a paper. Eventually, after we became roommates, I forbade her from complaining; it seemed she was being ungrateful toward the gifts of her life. I was much worse off, bored and restless in a deeper, more fundamental way.

  Yes, I was bored, I was deeply bored, I was rapidly approaching a crisis of boredom. It seemed more and more like boredom was the fundamental condition of my existence, a monolithic truth I ignored with less and less success as the years passed. I was bored with my job, bored with Boston, bored with my periodic escapes, bored with my attempts at relationships; by womanhood, personhood, life. I wondered whether I was particularly bored, or whether everyone secretly felt as I did and found ways to distract themselves. Either way, it was becoming intolerable.

  Q: Isn’t this really a glorified form of suicide?

  A: We prefer to think of it in the opposite way, as a kind of birth: deliverance into a denser, quicker, more urgent form of life. But your friends, lovers, and relatives may not see it this way. You may have to prepare them for your transformation as you might for your death. Some choose to attend support groups with their friends and partners. Others complete their transformations in secret, leaving only a note behind.

  Q: Will I need to make out a will, then?

  A: Yes. You may not bring anything with you to Atalanta Ranch, besides your body.

  Q: Can my loved ones visit?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Will they recognize me?

  A: Most of them claim to, but it is impossible to determine how much this recognition depends upon wishful thinking.

  Q: Can they ride me?

  A: We don’t recommend it. So far, every attempt has ended in tragedy.

  It started happening right after my fortieth birthday, in June: I woke up in the middle of the night with a strange feeling in my feet—not pain, exactly, but pressure so intense it absorbed my whole attention. I cried out in surprise, and Serena rushed into my room, and then we pulled back the covers to see that my feet had been replaced by perfect horse hooves, black and stonelike.

  As predicted by the pamphlets, I felt disgust, then wonder: The transformation of your own body will be a spectacle arousing both revulsion and awe.

  I got up and tried to walk around. Serena and I both giggled, manically, the way terrified people do. My hooves were tender, and it hurt to walk on them, like when my feet used to ache at the end of a night on high heels. I felt lopsided and clumsy; these hooves weren’t made to carry a bipedal organism. But hearing their clop-clop-clop around the floors of the apartment, I grew excited: it was really happening!

  We couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. We stayed up, rereading the informational pamphlets, speculating on how quickly the rest of me would start to turn. We had six months, we imagined, until the change spread up to my torso and I’d have to head down to the ranch to complete the rest of my transformation.

  As if by magic, by some prearranged signal of the gods, Serena peed on another stick the next morning and discovered she was pregnant.

  Q: Are the horses tame, or wild?

  A: The horses at the ranch are wild. We provide nothing but acreage for running and grazing. We do nothing to “break” them. There are no harnesses, no bridles, no whips.

  Q: What does it mean to break a horse?

  A: A broken horse is an obedient horse. This obedience follows from trust, and from a system of rewards. The horse is habituated to its bridle, causing it to associate restraint with comfort. If done properly, restraint need not be a form of violence; rather, it is a language, a grammar of leather and human touch that the animal body comes to understand and to welcome. Yet we at Atalanta Ranch eschew human-imposed languages of any and all kinds. Among other purposes, the ranch exists in order to cultivate wildness.

  Q: What is wildness? And may wildness be “cultivated,” or is that phrase not oxymoronic?

  A: That is what we’re trying to find out. All we can say is: either you personally resonate with this desire, or you don’t. Either you like the idea of shaking off your restraints, and are willing to give up everything you know in the attempt to do so, or you are like most people: comforted by language, by clothing, by laws.

  Maybe you are the kind of woman who experiences this comfort but feels deeply suspicious of it, suspicious of all male inventions. Maybe you have longed to strip away the grammar of patriarchy and reinvent everything from the bottom up. If so, we welcome you, but with one important caveat: when you become a horse, you will not care about sisterhood or equity, and if you did, you would have no way of working toward these goals. Instead, most likely, you will care only about the kinesis of your muscles, the yellow butter of the sun, the furry grass between your powerful teeth.

  Walking around town with my hooves, I gained a new kind of attention. Women regarded me with disgust or envy, men with disgust or desire. I’d heard, on my trip to the ranch, about people with Centauride fetishes, but I’d assumed it was a super-niche population—basically, people with a bestiality kink who’d discovered a new outlet. But it turned out to be a much wider spectrum.

  My first night out at a bar with some friends, I was the object of many stares, but I sensed a particular heat coming from one man at a corner table. He wore the distinct, recognizable look of a graduate student: floppy hair and a lanky frame and a too-large cotton hoodie. He was at least thirty, but looked like he’d only recently learned how to dress himself. I kept feeling his gaze on the back of my neck. Every time I looked over at him, he turned away, red-faced. Eventually, when he approached the bar to get another drink, I addressed him.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He blushed again, flicked his eyes down to my hooves, then back up, then blushed deeper. “Hey,” he said.

  “Am I the first you’ve seen?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I guess I was staring.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “I’d heard about—you. But I wasn’t sure it was real.”

  I shrugged. “Looks like it is.”

  “Is that—is that the only part of you that…?”

  “So far, yes.”

  He nodded,
swallowed, looked at me hungrily. I grabbed a pen from my purse, scribbled my number on a napkin. I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but I’d been hugely, aimlessly horny since my hooves had appeared.

  “Look,” I said, pushing the napkin toward him, “my friends and I are about to head to another bar—but if you want to meet up later, text me. I’ll be free by midnight.”

  Later that night, on the mattress in his spartan studio apartment, he stared at my half-clad body as if he’d never seen a woman before. (Of course, he’d never seen one like me.) I felt his gaze playing over me, lingering on the spot where the slope of my ankle gave way to the ashen density of the hoof. The feeling reminded me of being with a boy for the very first time, in high school. He’d reached out for my breast with undisguised wonder; his desire had been enough to inflame my own.

  Now, though, the hunger in the eyes of the floppy-haired grad student failed to make my general desire focus more specifically on him. Something was happening, though, a violent molten feeling welling up within me. As he reached out to touch me, to grasp me around the ankles, I recognized it as rage.

  But it was too late: it had already happened. I had kicked him.

  He jerked backwards, drawing his hands to his face. Blood seeped out between his fingers. He said something, or tried to, but all I heard was “unhh, unhhh.”

  The old me would have taken responsibility: would have gone and fetched him a towel, called a taxi, accompanied him to the hospital. But I was no longer human. The sight of his bloody face only increased my rage, tinged it with contempt for his weakness. I fought the urge to kick him again, harder; it was all I could do to get out of the house. I hurried down the stairs of his walk-up, pushed open the door, and ran through the streets of Somerville, awkward on my hooved limbs but propelled by the heat his near-touch had unleashed. It wasn’t rage at anyone, or anything: just a pure, propulsive red-hot urge. I ran past Harvard’s gates, over the bridge, through Boston at a full sprint. At some point I realized that my awkward gait had been replaced by something graceful and rhythmic and, well, horselike; I had stopped noticing the strangeness of my hooves, I was using them as they were meant to be used. I was cantering.