Herculine, p.11
Herculine, page 11
* * *
My mother told me I held coffee cups wrong. “I wish I’d had at least one daughter.”
“Me too.”
The waiter refilled my coffee and I tried to hold the cup like a man.
* * *
Toward the end of the first year, Bill told me he wanted to try something.
“Okay,” I said.
He moved toward me with the sleek speed of a viper. I wanted to watch his blood being lapped up by stray cats.
He started to jerk me off. He didn’t take off a single article of clothing. I watched myself cry from across the room.
“Weakness is solved by repetition,” he said. “One day you’ll stop me.”
* * *
We switched locations, started meeting in a church basement. Bill was a peer mentor for a purity group. Men gathered together and discussed their failures, sometimes describing porn videos with trembling detail. Their grins tore holes in the wall. Their laughs ejected spit and thorns. I tried to put my guard up.
My mother started taking me to the church Bill ministered at. The hall was filled with votives. The sermons were long. The pastors frequently parsed out Hebraic spells, explicating the mystics and their wickedness. I didn’t understand why the pastors talked about witchcraft with such reverence. They never had us sing Psalms. They mentioned demons with whispered glee. God was a minor character in their lexicon. And yet He was the one we sang to. He was the one who was always watching. He was the shepherd and we were his flock.
Bill had me whip myself during a session. He stared at me, soaking everything in. His hands trembled above his crotch. By the time I rang my grandma’s doorbell an hour later I was wet with shame.
My grandma didn’t ask what happened, but she taught me a prayer. She made coffee and handed me one of her Amish romance novels.
“This one is set during Christmastime. I think you’ll like it.”
“Thank you, Grandma.”
“Are you okay?”
“Of course. Just had a hard day.”
“Let me teach you a prayer I know…” She bowed her head and took my hands in her hers. “Lord, lead me through the mystery.”
* * *
When I was seventeen and a half, I hooked up with a guy in the woods. He was kind. He was patient as we walked around and talked about the worst books we’d ever read for school. I said The Old Man and the Sea. He said The Grapes of Wrath. Taste. After we hooked up, I drove to church in tears. I told Bill at our next session.
“It’s harder to go straight once you’ve had an experience,” he chided me.
“Sit down,” Bill said, “I have something else I want to try.”
He pulled out a knife.
“An exorcism,” he said. He was smiling. “You’ve been possessed.”
“Oh,” I said.
I watched the candles. Mood lighting. I saw men without faces moving in the walls. I tried to memorize the classifications of demons from the sermons at church but it was impossible. The things I saw were like tulpas, manifesting whatever childish fear I harbored. I blinked and they evaporated but the ceremony wasn’t over. Bill cut my arm and let it bleed into a little coffee mug before setting it down in the middle of the floor. He was speaking backward in a mishmash of Latin and Hebrew, swiftly moving from one murderous poem to another.
“Good night,” he said as he drank my blood from the coffee mug.
There are many ways hairpulling can be fun. None of them involve demons.
I don’t remember hitting the floor, or what ghouls may have swarmed around me while I was out, but when I woke, Bill said the exorcism had failed. I bit my lip and turned toward the window, hoping our hour and a half was up. He asked me how I was feeling and I lied.
“Clean.”
“Good,” he said. “Very good.”
* * *
After the pseudo-exorcism failed, the church closed ranks. I was invited to go on a hike in the San Juan Mountains with the youth group. Bill encouraged me to attend. We hiked up stiff whipped-cream peaks and told one another stories about opioid overdoses and shotgun weddings. The stories of our lives, the tales of Midwestern midwives and coming back to Jesus. We hiked for eight days. Every time we stopped, a new hiker told their origin story. I knew what was expected of me—a conversion narrative—but I decided to be honest anyway. I told them I didn’t believe in hell. I said I didn’t think being gay was a sin. I did not try to sell them on a fantasy about a sinful, dirty freak becoming a good Christian boy. One guy found this touching. As we lay down to sleep, another told me I was a sinner and going to hell. Cramped quarters. I was trying to convince myself of something. Mostly, they ignored me, then agreed that I would grow up to be a worship leader or a teacher.
I was trying to convince myself of something.
On the last night, we slept alone under the starless night. We were supposed to be praying but there were three demons staring at me, I was sure of it. They started pulling my hair with prickly fingers that cracked with each tug. I was ruining my chance at communion with the divine. I was inviting evil.
“When I came out in college, my mother messaged Bill. He told her I should prepare for hell. Pack your bags, kids, we’re headed to Sheol,” I said. Elle didn’t laugh. “A year later I moved to New York.”
She looked at me like a therapist looks at a wounded child. I blushed and looked away. I did not want her to see me like this.
“I’m sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want to cry,” I said. “Can I skip the rest?”
I was choking on grief. I could not name everything, drowning in a sea of velvet waves. She helped me down onto a smooth rock and wrapped her hands around me. She mumbled something about demons that I didn’t make out. Probably her disbelief, I decided. I wanted to make her promise not to tell anyone but there was nothing to promise. Everyone knew. I was not special in my grief. And strangely, I was not alone.
After a while Elle said she was going to head back. I told her I needed a little more time. She just smiled, walked away, and told me to check in with her soon. It took me a few hours alone after talking to Elle to self-soothe, reciting a Mary Oliver poem and thinking through escape plans, each with its own faults. I made my way down a hill and ended up in front of the dying fire. The piglet’s carcass sat in the charred ashes. Poor Applesauce.
SATISFACTION
I woke up in a cold sweat, feeling a crimson presence pressing against the perimeter of camp. Dusk swam in inky circles, forcing me to wait until the shadows took shape. Ash snored next to me, unaware of my nightly ritual of waking up alone and listening to the silence until morning broke. If I was a bitch, I was a good one. Our dynamic still felt uneasy. I wanted to give in, but I struggled to feel wholly safe in her arms. She liked to hold me as we fell asleep. When we had sex, I no longer came. Ash pretended not to notice. Still, I didn’t feel like I could push her away even if songs of ambivalence were keeping me alive.
Sunday morning was quiet. When Ash eventually woke up, we cracked the window and had coffee in bed. We both knew in a few weeks it would be too cold to leave the windows open; we would have to cuddle for warmth. I struggled to look her in the eyes.
“I missed this,” she whispered, nibbling on my ear.
This is what Ash offered—the ability to undo years of trauma with a kiss. Hazel always needled me that love was not a cure-all, but the way Ash tasted on my lips was an amnestic agent. I didn’t want her to be the woman who was more or less holding me captive. I wanted to believe that everything was just a coincidence. The autumn wind blowing in with a few final pranks. But the aura of the camp felt hostile. The landscape of my nightmares easily mapped onto the eerie woods. Birches boxed us in like a ruptured womb.
I felt a Freudian attachment to the sacrificial pig. How long would it before that was me on the spit? I wanted Ash and me to be on the same page. I wanted to reach in and find the part of her that loved me in a sweet way. Not as a possession or achievement. It was jarring to remember us singing pop songs together in her car. The way she had held back my hair during so many puke-filled nights. When I realized I was going to transition, actually do it, she was one of the first people I called. I cried wads of snot to her as she told me how excited she was for me.
“The next time we fuck maybe we’ll both have pussies.” She’d laughed. That was a long time ago. She’d made the switch but I’d fumbled my chances. My insurance was shit and I could never save up enough for a consult.
Under our blanket fort, Ash tried to soothe me. I was feeling panicked. It felt hard to pin things down when I actually brought them up to her.
“I promise you we’ll get a mechanic to fix the car. We’re just… a little low on money right now. Food’s been costing more than it should. Inflation sucks.”
I nodded, trying not to feel slighted at being reminded that I was now part of a whole. She had many children. She couldn’t show favoritism.
“The animal thing was weird,” she said, making it sound like I was just a little paranoid. “I’ll talk to them.”
It was the first time Ash had tried to actively distance herself from the charge of organized religion. She told me that she knew I was sensitive to that kind of thing.
“I won’t tell them it came from you. I’ll just nudge them a bit. Ya know?”
I nodded again, tamed and chagrined. I felt like I had no choice but to agree with everything she said. It wasn’t just what she said, it was the sweet tone she used, like back when we shared PB&Js because we were so broke.
“And I know the nightmares have been bad. I remember how they were in college.”
Did she? I couldn’t remember telling her about them, but I must have. She told me that I would come into my own at Herculine, that I would find my purpose.
“It’s good to have a break,” she said. “You can find yourself. Not in, like, a corny way or whatever but in a real way. You have time to focus. You could write. Maybe be our little scribe in paradise. A newsletter or a short film or… I don’t know. I’m not creative. Not like you.”
I’d thought about treating my time at Herculine like a writing retreat when I’d first decided to come. I was always too scared to apply to a real one, afraid it would prove I was a failure. It was like Ash knew I needed to hear that I could still make something of my life.
I reached between my toes and found a weed squashed against them. The day before, Elle had painted my toenails pink.
“Trans women regain their agency here.” She kept using the word trans like a rallying cry. Sometimes it seemed like we all used the word girls instead of women because we were afraid to grow up. Maybe I was projecting but it felt like we were worried of claiming the mantle of womanhood, like girlhood was the best we could shoot for. Easier, somehow. When I finally heard her say women I realized how uneasy it made me. How girls felt less terrifying. Like a transitional pacifier.
She took my face in her hand and turned my gaze toward her. Sunlight crossed her chest in gauzy knives. I stared at her breasts, lit up like half crescents. “I do what I have to do so I can get what I want—what we all want…”
“What do you want?”
“I wanted the one thing you and I grew up without.”
Chickens squawked as the day sped into being. A girl’s voice floated near the window.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Love.”
* * *
Ash left after she’d finished toying with me. I was a wet mop puddle splashing in her sheets. She seemed to think that if I was satisfied sexually then I would be okay and was clearly frustrated that I wasn’t enjoying myself. Joy was going to be my inheritance whether I wanted it or not.
I grabbed a black T-shirt and a pair of Ash’s jeans that I found below her cheap IKEA lamp. A half second later, I felt a buzz in my pocket. Even though my phone no longer had service, I carried it on me like a talisman. Every day I checked it for missed calls or texts and occasionally tried to send a few of my own, but most of the time I got failure-to-send alerts. I tried to tell myself that was just what living in the woods was like. Another buzz. Someone was calling me. I hurried to a quiet corner, hoping not to lose the signal before I could answer. When I looked down, I saw that it was Ryan calling. I would’ve preferred to hear from Hazel, or anyone really, but was desperate to hear from someone on the outside.
“Hello,” I said.
“You finally fucking answer—”
“Listen, Ryan, I know you’re upset—”
“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. You think you have me pegged. I saw you walking with all those fucking trans girls acting like you were hot shit but you were the ugliest one. You still don’t have tits and your tattoos look like shit. Stick and pokes. You should’ve gone to my friend and gotten a real tattoo. You should’ve been there for me. I’ve been having a really hard time and I’m not a misogynist. I’m a good guy. You’re just in the same girl gang you always were and you’ll never get over the fact that you’re trans. Also it’s really fucked-up to judge someone based on the kind of porn they watch.”
He was out of breath and gathering steam at the same time.
“Ryan.”
“I’m not even the one who called it tranny porn.”
“You like rape porn, Ryan, not just fucking tranny porn.” My voice was an ice pick. If I could have performed a lobotomy on him I would have.
“I should’ve dumped you sooner. Fuck you.” I heard the millisecond of hesitation as he contemplated whether he should add what came next. “Cunt.”
Bisexuality was not all it was cracked up to be.
Of course his call was the only one to come through. The only other notification I received before the connection dropped was a text from my mom asking if I would be free to visit her sometime soon since I was living so close. I tried to send a response but only got another failure-to-send notification. Hazel still hadn’t responded to my last text. I typed out an innocuous message asking her to visit, then instantly regretted it and deleted the whole thing. I couldn’t bring her into this mess. Xiomara or Nora either. Besides, I was fine. Everything was great between me and Ash.
Ryan wasn’t always so mean, just thoughtless and possessive. Once, when I told him I was waiting for him at the airport with flowers, he responded that I “better not give them to anyone else lol.” I’d laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. We never saw each other in person again after our breakup, but sometimes he joked that we were meant to be. A lot of my exes sent me shit like that, Ash included. I was cosmically tied to a lot of love, just not the kind that set me free.
* * *
Lunch was some sort of a green mush served with slices of porous white bread. Apparently we were practicing austerity. Elle motioned me over to her table, where she was sitting next to a girl named Esther, one of the few non-white girls at Herculine. Her grandparents had immigrated from Taiwan and worked at the University of Chicago. They were both quite religious, apparently. I sat down and dragged my spoon through the slime. After my dismal phone call with Ryan, I craved the company of the girls around me. Cutting off cis people suddenly seemed entirely understandable. Maybe they were onto something I’d fundamentally misunderstood. Plus, some of them were even kind of sweet.
“Natalie really is an awful cook,” Esther said.
“Give her a break,” Elle said.
“I, for one, would love some protein,” Esther said.
“Maybe Natalie will get that shipment of hot dogs in, and we can have a barbecue,” Elle said.
“What even is this?” I asked sarcastically. “Another sacrificial lamb?”
My nervousness betrayed the core of my question. The girls looked at me vacantly. Maybe I was taking things too far. Eventually they offered me a perfunctory laugh before continuing to eat up their filthy gossip and undercooked slop.
“I think Martha was flirting with her again,” Esther said. “Which is annoying. I thought maybe she’d finally hit on me.”
“You need a new crush,” Elle said.
“And you don’t?”
Elle giggled like a schoolgirl and turned to me. “You okay?”
“I will be.”
Before I could say anything else, Natalie came over and asked Esther how she was feeling. “Any nausea?”
“I’m okay,” Esther said. I noticed that she looked green with seasickness. She seemed bloated too. “Do you have any mint tea?”
“I do,” she said. “But no hot dogs. And Martha’s not flirting with me.”
Natalie wasn’t as naive as I made her out to be.
“Fuck,” Esther said after she left. “She’s gonna give us so much shit now.”
“Martha was absolutely flirting with her,” Elle said soothingly.
“Well, she’ll fuck anything with a pulse.”
“Are any of you monogamous?” I asked.
They both went quiet.
“You and Ash, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me and Ash.”
CONSTANT CRAVING
A lake of fire bubbled below me. Shadowy snakes slithered and slipped over boulders and thorns. A lone juniper tree grew out of a small rock in the middle of the blazing flames. A child sat under the fruitless tree. He looked familiar, had scars all along his arms. He was covering his ears, trying to block something out. That was when I heard the voice. One I had heard for years—a savage force beyond comprehension.
“He is coming. He is coming. You will not expect it and you will bow down like a dog, humbled by the fire,” it whispered.
I opened my eyes to find Ash staring me straight in the face, flinching slightly as if preparing for me to scream. I was, I realized. Screaming.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. I’d sweat through the sheets.
“Nightmare?” she asked. I nodded. “You used to have a lot of nightmares, right? Have they been any better here?”
