The Wrong Heaven

by Amy Bonnafons

  By the time I approached my own neighborhood, I’d slowed to a trot, but I felt elated: my very nature was changing. I was becoming wild. The man’s touch had been a bridle, and I had kicked it away.

  Q: What symptoms might I experience during my transformation?

  A: The same symptoms you would experience during any transformation: mood swings, growing pains, strained relationships. Also, possibly, the occasional blinding toothache. To find a Centauride support group near you, consult our website.

  Q: Am I required to go to the ranch? Or can I make an arrangement in advance, in which a friend or relative agrees to take care of my horse-self on his or her own property?

  A: This is permissible, albeit at a slightly higher cost (the cost of preparing the more complex legal paperwork that such an arrangement requires).

  Accept this caveat, though: your friend or relative must be aware of your wildness—of the fact that you most likely will not submit to their attempts at friendship, and if they persist, they may incur violence. If you are willing in advance to be domesticated by your friend/relative—to be “broken” by someone you love—you must sign paperwork to that effect before completing your transformation.

  Over the next few months, the change slowly inched upward. My human ankles became horse-ankles, I grew coarse caramel-colored hair on my legs, my femurs stretched and thickened. Occasionally I felt sharp pains in my bones—growing pains—but other than that, the physical transition felt invigorating.

  My rage, however, only grew. I was energized by aimless, volcanic fury, 100 percent of the time. Perhaps I wasn’t changing my nature but recognizing something that had always been there. My boredom had never really been boredom, but rather a deep, deep anger: the molten lava at the earth’s core, unseen until it disrupts the placid surface.

  Where had this come from? Did everyone have it? Or had I done too good a job of submitting to myriad invisible harnesses? Either way, it was obvious, now, to everyone I met. I responded to routine rudenesses—catcalling, crowding on the subway, an unsolicited hand on the shoulder—by snarling, flashing my eyes, baring my teeth. People’s eyes grew wide; they stepped back; they treated me like the dangerous animal I was. I loved it.

  Serena too was changing. Her first three months she’d looked sickly and drawn, she’d thrown up all the time, but finally the pregnancy had rooted in her body, and she blossomed. The first sonogram showed not one but two fetuses in her belly. Now her face looked inflated but ruddy, glowing with health. Every moment she wasn’t teaching, she was at the computer, researching the development of the strange creatures inside of her.

  I, on the other hand, found myself unable to sit still. I’d sit down, get through one paragraph, then feel it kick through me: the wildness, the aimless rage. I’d leave the house, drive to the river, canter up and down the path beside the Charles, kicking sod fiercely into the water until I got it out of my system. My white-hot anger was surrounded by a bright corona of joy: every act of violence rang in all my pleasure centers, sent a thrill of aliveness down my spine. This was what I’d been missing.

  Then, one evening, I got so frustrated with my work that I stood up and kicked a hole right through the kitchen cabinet. This time, the joy was quickly eclipsed by horror: the splintered wood, the ugliness, the cost.

  Serena appeared in the doorway, pale, one hand on the swell of her belly. We stared at each other, gripped by the same mute question: how much longer could we go on like this, sharing the same space—my destruction, her attempt to create?

  That night, lying in bed, I heard the unmistakable sound of muffled weeping. I got up, knocked lightly on Serena’s door, then cracked it open. At first she didn’t notice me, because she was turned toward the wall. This gave me a moment to just look at her and feel my feelings.

  I had two feelings, simultaneous but contradictory: a rustling annoyance, the pitying contempt I’d come to feel for humans still trapped in their weak hairless bodies—but, also, compassion. Serena was the person who most reliably aroused my remaining human tenderness, and she was suffering. I walked in, sat on the edge of her bed, lightly stroked her hair. This only made her cry harder.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she choked out. “Just hormones.” But before I could respond, she corrected herself. “I’m fucking terrified. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done. And I’m doing it totally alone.”

  “You won’t be alone, you have your family. You have your friends.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Except for you.”

  My brain flashed back on our ritual with the shots. That seemed like such a long time ago; the needles had done their work, we’d launched ourselves onto opposing trajectories. Did we still need each other? If not, did this mean we had failed to love each other, or that we had loved each other well?

  With effort, Serena sat up in bed, wiped her eyes, looked at me. She was still waiting for me to respond.

  I just stared at her. In the greenish light coming through the window, she seemed distinct and alien, like someone I had never seen, really seen, before. The protrusion of her belly was impossible to ignore: it crested just below her breasts, then stretched toward me, an insistent convexity with an agenda of its own. There were two whole people in there: for the first time, the terrifying marvel of this fact hit me full force. Perhaps her transformation was even stranger, even wilder, than mine.

  “You can come visit me,” I said. “Bring your kids to the ranch. It’s so pretty there.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “This is your aunt Cassie. She was restless, and she turned herself into an animal.”

  She snorted. “And what? That’s supposed to be an example of some sort? Things get hard and you just leave? Just peace out of human life entirely?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it’s a cautionary tale. This is what happens when you ignore your own wildness for too long. Your unhappiness becomes a second skin. You have to get an entirely different skin, in order to survive.”

  “You’ve really been that unhappy?”

  “It hasn’t been obvious?”

  “I always thought you had so much more fun than me. You were constantly trying new things. You had none of my hang-ups about sex. You slept with men, you slept with women, you never seemed to care.”

  “Hm.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Were you ever attracted to me?”

  “To you?”

  “Yes. Never mind. It’s a stupid question.”

  “Were you attracted to me?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But there were times when I wished I was. That we could actually, like, fuse with each other. Like we could break into each other and both become something different.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But maybe we did do that. Just not with sex. We’re different now, aren’t we?”

  She considered this. “Then why am I so afraid?”

  “I’m afraid too,” I said. I’d spoken automatically, to comfort her, but as soon as I said it, I realized it was true.

  We looked away from each other, toward the window—embarrassed as Cathy and I had been at the ranch, but for different reasons. This time, of course, no horse appeared: just a faint mist, illuminated by streetlights. What had been illuminated? Perhaps the wild thing in the room was not in fact my kicking legs, or the strange life inside of her, but what lay between us: the animal tide that can arise between two women, more mysterious than sex, hardly touched by the simple word “friendship.” It rose and crested, it rocked the small bed like a lifeboat.

  Q: Is the change reversible?

  A: No change is ever reversible.

  Q: What happens if the process doesn’t work on me?

  A: You’ll get your money back. We may ask you to participate in an ongoing scientific study of long-term Centauride health outcomes, for compensation—but you may decline.

  Q: That’s it?

  A: It
’s not possible for us to do more. There are support groups; we can refer you to one in your area. However, your human or half-human life is out of our purview.

  Our legal agreement requires you to assume responsibility for the risk of the procedure’s failure, before it begins; we try to make these risks clear. We ask this not only to protect ourselves from litigation, but to encourage each person considering the procedure to take responsibility for her own life in a way that should hopefully prove transformative, even if something goes wrong along the way.

  This requires bravery. Our hope is that the Centaurides living among us will be viewed not as freaks or as failures, but as emblems of courage: female animals who gathered up all the uncertainties of their existence into one single, massive risk.

  I went for a checkup with the Atalanta doctor. The visit was routine, had been scheduled for months, but I was nervous: my progress since the last visit seemed to have stalled. She examined me all over and said “Hmmm” a lot. I grew increasingly worried.

  “When did you say the fur reached your belly button?” she asked.

  “A month ago.”

  “And no change since then?”

  “No.”

  “Hm.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that ‘hm.’”

  “Well,” she said, “the good news is that you’re showing none of the other markers that usually accompany the procedure’s failure. The bad news is, that means I have nothing to tell you about why this is happening, or whether it’ll pick up again.”

  “So you think it’s possible the procedure is failing?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’m sorry. I know this is stressful.”

  “Have you encountered this before? A case like mine?”

  “Frankly, no.” She smiled. “You’re special.”

  “That’s what my mom always said.”

  “We’ll keep checking up on you. Don’t lose heart. But in the meantime, you might want to make some arrangements for the next few months, in case you can’t leave for the ranch as planned. Will that be a problem, do you think?”

  It would be. The situation in our apartment was growing tense, nearly untenable: Serena was huge, growing huger by the day, while I stayed the same. I’d moved out of my bedroom—she needed it for a nursery—and given most of my possessions away. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room, unsure of how long I could stay.

  The joy had gone out of my violence; it had become a compulsion, an irritating itch. I battled to restrain myself from destroying everything in the house. All day I ran along the river, roamed through town, pummeled punching bags at the gym, then arrived home at night to find Serena sulking like an abandoned cat. I’d stopped trying to explain why it was better for me to stay away.

  But I wasn’t avoiding her only out of concern for her, or her possessions: it was painful to witness the obviousness of her transformation, with my own now so uncertain.

  When I got home from the doctor’s, I saw that yet another delivery of baby stuff—hand-me-downs from friends, large Amazon boxes full of equipment—had arrived at the apartment, and completely taken over the living room. In other words, my room. To reach the couch, I had to pick my way over and between the boxes, stepping as delicately as possible with my horse-legs, legs that were not made to do anything delicately. Even when I got there, I couldn’t sit down: it was piled high with baby clothes.

  I lost it. I whirled around and began kicking with an aimless violence that, even after my run of rage-soaked months, startled me with its force. I had not intended this; I was beyond intention; I was fighting for my literal life, like if I stopped kicking and hurling things, I would implode into nothing, less than nothing, I would cease to exist.

  By the time I’d managed to stop, I had wrecked not only most of the new baby equipment, but also the large flat-screen television and the coffee table; I had seriously damaged the couch. I looked around, at the torn baby blankets strewn with broken glass, the mutilated breast pump, the mangled stroller, the tiny books with their torn pages.

  Just then, a key turned in the lock, and Serena stood in the doorway.

  She looked from me to the mess, from the mess back to me. She didn’t seem surprised, exactly; her perfect, masklike features did not move at all, but seemed to grow harder and sharper, to register a sudden sedimentation of dark knowledge.

  It would be pointless to apologize. I could offer no defense or consolation. I only had one option.

  “I’m going to leave now,” I said. “I’ll find someplace else to stay.”

  She nodded, with no expression, then walked into her bedroom and shut the door behind her. I picked up my purse and left.

  I walked aimlessly, vaguely in the direction of the downtown hotels. My muscles grew leaden with shame. I felt like I was walking underwater.

  What pained me was not the notion that my wildness, my horsiness, had finally overtaken me. It was the suspicion—the reluctant conviction—that my violence had been entirely human.

  That night, under a scratchy hotel blanket, I contemplated my situation. While I was probably worse off now than I’d have been if I’d never attempted the transformation, in certain ways I had gotten exactly what I’d asked for. I’d received a revelation of my true nature. I had always been an awkward thing, stalled and half wild, willing to try anything but unable to commit, so suspicious of restraints that the suspicion itself became the biggest restraint of all.

  For the first time in nearly a year, I cried: sobbing into the lumpy pillow, mourning the grotesque monster that I was, howling at my failure: my loneliness, my inadequacy as woman and as animal. Eventually, from sheer exhaustion, I slept.

  When I woke in the morning, I saw that during my few hours of sleep the fur had finally reached upward. My breasts were gone, replaced by a fine equine torso. I raised my hands to touch it, then realized that they had been replaced by another set of hooves.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this development had happened because of the previous night’s revelations. Life is not like a self-help book, where you understand something about yourself and then the universe reaches out to physically manifest your new insight. We might long for change, work toward it with intention, but its arrival—if it ever arrives at all—always feels like an ambush.

  Still, I was relieved. Maybe my horse-life wouldn’t be better; but it would be different. I would accept that difference humbly, allow it to work itself through me. I would accept the logical outcomes of my choices, now woven into this transformed horse-body: its hard sinews, its vulnerable flesh.

  I went downstairs to the concierge, asked her to use her human fingers to make a phone call. Red-faced and excited, she rang Atalanta. They would send someone that afternoon, they said, to pick me up.

  I did not call Serena. Maybe when I got down there. Perhaps, with all those miles between us, I wouldn’t notice the bruise in her voice. By then, at any rate, I’d be easier to forgive: I would already be gone.

  Q: Who are you?

  A: Why does it matter?

  Q: If I’m going to hand my whole life over, I don’t want to give it to some faceless disembodied corporate entity, albeit one who quotes Spinoza. I want to know who’s behind this whole thing.

  A: But do you, really? If you could view the author(s) of these words as finite, defined by a particular gender and ethnicity and pattern of face and body hair, would you trust the process more? Or would you see your prejudices reflected, or not reflected, and feel disappointed? The word “corporate” is often used by liberals nowadays as a blanket put-down. With good reason: many corporate entities in this country are rapacious and amoral. But in this case we would like to remind you where the word “corporate” comes from. It shares a root with corpus, body. A corporate entity consists of many bodies, aggregated into one; it then paradoxically becomes bodiless, capable of much more than any single body might achieve. Our bodies themselves are corporate, made up of thous
ands upon thousands of individual beings—not only cells and atoms, but other living things, bacteria and other organisms too tiny for the naked eye to record. Any body, in other words, is simultaneously a tightly arranged symphony and a provisional, cacophonous jumble. Thus, any name I could give myself would be no more than a useful lie, a loosely hung banner, threadbare and flapping in the wind.

  Should you become a horse? I don’t know. That’s up to you. However, keep in mind the above: if you transform into another sort of animal, it will only be a steeper, more obvious transformation than the one you would undergo anyway, as a human female becoming a human female—always animal, always becoming.

  I have four horse-legs and a horse-torso and a horse-head. Outwardly, at least, I am all animal.

  I believe I still have a human brain, mostly—but every day, its language grows rougher around the edges. For minutes at a time, when I am running or eating in the pasture, I have no thoughts. My brain is not empty, exactly—it’s as though a hot wind blows certain textures through my mind, shifts its responses to the world around it, to itself, in dark pleasurable ways that I cannot quite describe. My rage has diminished, but I am neither contained nor calm. I feel many emotions now, but they don’t quite fit the words I know; I would describe them, mostly, as variations of active receptivity, of alert acceptance.

  Somewhere, soon, Serena will be teaching her children the words for things. This is a table. This is a chair. This is your mommy. This is a horse. This is the earth that ties you down, that holds you up. Meanwhile my language is slowly departing, the words replaced by syllable and breath, yes mm yes huh no hmmm brrrrrrrrr. Long after I’ve lost my words completely, her kids will begin to ask her why: why is the sky blue, why did I come out of your tummy, why don’t we have a daddy or another mommy, why did Aunt Cassie become a horse? She will struggle for answers; sometimes she will find them, and sometimes she won’t. Sometimes she will sputter and snort, wave them away.