Happy People

Available for the first time, Vivian Chu’s unpublished manuscript investigating the Happy People organization for the Austin Sentinel is reproduced here in full.

On entering the Happy People compound, you find yourself surrounded by unimaginative luxury, familiar from the countless other spiritual fitness retreats that have appeared in recent years. To your right is a perfectly maintained lawn sporting a crop of perfectly maintained yogis. To your left are squads of volleyball players, slightly more unkempt and sweaty, but impeccably dressed, nonetheless.

In fact, everyone is clothed entirely in Happy People branded garments – either lilac or cream, yogi’s choice. This may strike you as a little cultish, but that is par for the course in this type of organization. Also cultish is the implausible level of enthusiasm being expressed for the tarragon-infused mineral water on offer; you hear this performatively joyful conversation floating over the rosebush hedges that section off the poolside rest area.

Things may seem less apropos when you recall that the compound is located not in one of the wealthy enclaves of the Southwest, but the deserted former commuter zone of Connecticut, permanently abandoned by the rich after the financial industry fled New York City for revolution-free Orlando. The archipelago of mansions that make up the compound’s living quarters take on the feel of haunted relics when you consider this recent history.

Such foreboding proves warranted when you round the hedgerow and see the line of cubicles. Here, residents sit in booths of mirrored walls, nude, examining themselves intently while eating. They hold their faces close to the glass and chew with their mouths open, pausing to pull back their lips, staring at the chunks of food between their teeth and on the backs of their tongues, squeezing and pushing at their newly filled bellies, or in one case, using the multi-mirror setup to its full potential, taking a long hard look at their anus.

At this point you find yourself asking: what exactly are the Happy People happy about?

~

No one has been more persistently concerned with this inquiry than third-generation Connecticut politician Iain Doran. After learning I was investigating Happy People for the Austin Sentinel, Councilor Doran insisted on meeting, so he could “fill me in”. He had been sounding the alarm about the organization for years, back when it was a topic for esoteric discussion forums, rather than mainstream news. In late spring, I drove through post-suburban Stamford streets, to hear what he had to say.

As I arrived at his once grand townhouse, Doran rolled out of the front door towards me, shouting greetings while I was still getting out of my car. He ushered me through his cluttered hallway, brushing aside an entire litter of bedraggled terriers en route. When we reached his study, he deliberated for a second, before grabbing a small wooden stool and tipping off the papers piled on top of it. He gestured for me to take the seat, almost apologetically, before flopping into a battered suede armchair.

Comfortable at last, he launched into his grievances.

“It’s just creepy right – I mean why do you need to have people living there full time, if it’s just about health. You know I have nothing against working out even if I’m not a workout guy myself.” He grabbed and shook a handful of gut in emphasis.

“So maybe you think it’s the same old story: just some hustlers milking people with more money than sense. But when you start digging, it keeps getting weirder: all the professors, the deaths, the whole eating thing – I mean, you know, the anorexia thing. There’s something bad going on I’m telling you.”

I knew that several residents had recently died at the compound, but as I was trying to ask him more about this flurry of allegations he stood up and left the room. Alone, if you didn’t count the mournful dog pressing its nose up to the window, I tried to piece together his suspicions. Threads of intrigue had snagged loose over the years, providing perfect fodder for the conspiratorially minded. An aristocratic English founder, Dr. Henry Burroughs, who published a series of obscure articles, outlining his Freudian Buddhist theory of enlightenment before disappearing from public view. An organizational hierarchy of “students”, “subjects” and “practitioners”, but no details on what these roles entailed. Exacting but obscure admissions procedures. Organization members cutting off all contact with family and friends. Doran endeavored to draw wider interest to these ominous snippets, but without concrete information, there was no uptake. After the deaths, though, there had been a flurry of media interest, and Doran had taken a scruffy victory lap.

He returned to the study clutching a beer and a stick of jerky.

“Want one?” he asked, as he was lowering himself down.

“Not while I’m working,” I said, not caring to ask which ‘one’ he was offering. Before I could follow up on his previous comments, he was onto his next complaint.

“I just wanted someone in charge to talk to me – they’re the third biggest landowner in my district. Did you know that?”

He paused to slam shut the screen-door that the dog had nosed open.

“After they’d ignored countless emails, phone calls, letters from my girl—sorry I mean my secretary—I decided enough was enough and drove up to their estate to get to the bottom of the matter. I’ve got it all in writing, but no one wants to touch these guys.”

I’d already seen the free-associating account of his visit that he’d posted on his feed, but he insisted on pressing a dog-eared printout into my hands.

“I get there and it’s all smiles and welcomes the way it always is at first with these cults. They send me a ‘representative’ to answer my questions and show me around, but he’s clearly a flunky—couldn’t have weighed more than a buck forty soaking wet. He shows me the nicey-nice stuff: the Tai Chi, the pool, the sauna. But he won’t let me inside, says it would harm the residents’ privacy, and won’t let me speak to the boss, says he’s indisposed.”

I found myself recalling the same vague insinuations of malignance I’d heard when I started seeking medical advice from authorities other than my family’s doctor. In the interests of journalistic neutrality, I suppressed these memories. Over the remainder of our conversation, Doran treated me to an impressive repertoire of vitriol, but no instances of provable wrongdoing by the organization.

~

I was driving to the Happy People compound a few weeks later when Doran called me again. It seemed he answered the phone mid-monologue, even hotter under his long-suffering collar than the last time.

“And since you didn’t seem to have done your research on it, I went ahead and got some documents on the scientists for you—I always thought it was the journalist’s job to do the investigating, and the interviews are just for some, you know, local color, but these days if someone hasn’t sent you it all on your social media then it doesn’t go in the article.”

“Rest assured, I’m driving to the compound as we speak and fully intended to investigate the matter firsthand,” I said, though I withheld my thoughts on current journalistic standards either for myself or the field at large.

“Anyway, my girl emailed you the stuff,” Doran continued, unfazed. “You’ll see payments to all kinds of professors and doctors—you know brain guys, blood guys, stomach guys, some specializing in body parts I don’t want to say to a polite young lady like you.”

This was not the first time certain biological topics had been judged unsuitable for a young lady like me. I clenched my jaw and pressed down on the gas. The once commuter jammed roads were deserted and so, keeping half an eye out for potholes and roadkill, I chanced checking my messages while I drove. The documents did indeed show that substantial payments had been made to academics in a range of biological and medical sciences, along with mental health specialists and teachers of Theravada Buddhism.

A dead dog in the lane interrupted my reading. Doran was still talking.

“Like I said before, it’s fishy. They go there, take their money, but say nothing. If they were doing something normal, they’d want to tell the world right? All these genius professors in the same room, we’d all be interested in the theories they come up with. Unless there’s something to hide. I’m not saying it’s sex stuff, but people are going to wonder.”

If he wasn’t saying it was sexual in nature, what did Doran think was going on? In contrast to his earlier willingness to do my job for me, he now demurred, “I’m not the journalist, you figure it out.”

“OK, I’m going to give journalism a go now,” I said and hung up.

I passed a sign informing me I was entering the private property of the Happy People organization. After miles of decay, its unfaded colors were jarring. I passed through security without incident, but the guards gave me no indication of where to go, just waved me on with bland menace. It was a humid June morning, and I found myself sweating the minute I got out of the car. Worried about looking suspicious, I hurried away.

I was standing transfixed by the mirrored cubicles when Mikhail found me. He shuffled over, fragile looking but carrying himself with a swagger. His outfit might have been lilac originally but was long faded to a patchy grey.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Don’t worry we’ll let you eat with clothes on.” He laughed percussively, nodding toward the cubicles. “It’s strange, yes, but necessary.”

“I’m good, but thank you,” I said, laughing with him.

Mikhail was to be my guide to the compound, and arbiter of what activities would be revealed to me. He came, in his words, from a town that “could be anywhere in Eastern Europe,” adding “and that’s how I look, no?” He emigrated to the US after reading an old article by Dr. Burroughs, on ascetic practice as a tool to overcome Oedipal urges. By this time, Burroughs had retreated from public communication completely, but Mikhail was determined to meet the doctor.

“This was a much bigger commitment than I had bet on,” he told me.

The Happy People residency program was already underway. Mikhail traveled straight to the compound from the airport and never left. It was ten years before he met Burroughs, though he assured me it was worth the wait. I told him I admired his persistence.

We traversed the grounds, weaving through an endless variety of lawn sports. Mikhail didn’t seem concerned with the specifics of what we were seeing. I asked if I could speak to some of the residents we passed.

He snorted, “These are new recruits, they know nothing. You might as well speak to the spoiled women you meet in the boutiques of Austin.”

I insisted, nonetheless, and approached a group of pristine women, displaying just a hint of middle age, watching a tennis match from the shade. I asked what drew them to this organization. They gave the platitudes Mikhail had promised—becoming their realest selves, learning to be present— but there were also some comments with teeth.

“You have to face conflict here,” one woman said. “They don’t tell you to just take some deep breaths and move on, you have to cut your problems out of your body.” Another added, “We’ve seen each other’s ugliness, so even when we’re all cleaned up and just chatting, it’s something real.” A whistle blew signaling it was their turn on the court, and they jumped up and jogged away, jittering with anticipation.

Mikhail was smirking as I returned to him. “Learn any deep new philosophies?”

“There were some useful quotes for my story,” I said.

Looking a little disappointed, he resumed the tour. The women’s mention of group therapizing brought to mind summers at Christian wellness camps: youth leaders who promised to fix deviant bodies through wholesome living. They never discussed the ugliness of our flesh directly though: only through sinister euphemism. As we neared the main building, Mikhail paused to gesture derisively.

“Monstrous, yes. What you get when a banker plays architect.”

Classical pillars propped up Tudor beams, English brick surrounded French windows, and a brutalist balcony jutted out on the side like a concrete tumor.

“I think the rich assholes who lived here are glad to be in Florida,” Mikhail said. “They don’t have to pretend to like the theater anymore. They can spend their days off at Disney World.”

This building housed all the upper levels of the organization–those who had attained the rank of student and above. More junior residents slept in dorms in the other mansions scattered across the compound. Peeking out to the side, underneath the balcony, was the main building’s huge annex, built by Happy People after their purchase, for their own unknown purposes.

I asked Mikhail if he had also shown Doran around, and why the councilor had not been granted more access.

“The grubby mayor? No, I was recovering from my procedure then. Not my decision.”

Before I could ask about this procedure, Mikhail bustled me through the doorway, into the headquarters.

~

The week before my visit, I spoke to Kaitlyn Feeney, US under-17 800-meters champion and one of the few former Happy People residents willing to talk to me. We met on a high school track in the Florida panhandle where she now coached her hometown running club. As she stood clenching her stopwatch, dressed in the same track uniform as her charges, she let me know she was glad to be out of the organization.

“This job is a dream come true for me. They did me a favor not letting me advance, but it makes no sense.”

She punctuated our conversation by shouting times at impossibly wiry 15-year-old girls as they flew past us. Feeney explained she had been a resident for six months and threw herself into the program requirements with the “same ferocity I’ve always given to my workouts” but never rose up the ranks. When a number of “losers” who joined at the same time as her were promoted to the rank of student, she felt compelled to quit.

“I was the fittest one there, I frankly should have been first in line, fast-tracked to the top–no pun intended. Look at this, I’m a goddamn superstar.”

She pulled out her phone to show me her workout times. The results were indeed impressive for a high school teacher but fell well short of professional athletes.

“And it wasn’t just the athletics I was winning, even the bullshit stuff I was the best at. The weird naked eating, I was a pro. Meanwhile the fatties who got promoted instead of me couldn’t go more than two minutes without breaking down crying. None of them knew the first thing about fitness. As well as the big ones, it was the pukers and the starvers who got in – I know you journalist types don’t like those kinds of terms, but athletes can’t sugar their words–the clock never lies, that’s what I tell my girls.”

The attitude was all too familiar from high school phys ed teachers who insisted my chronic pain was a character defect and would go away if I ignored the signals from my body and just “got on with it.”

“How were the residents who got promoted mistreated, do you think?” I asked Feeney.

She dug her toe into the track, worrying a patch of sun-melted rubber.

“I couldn’t get a look in; that’s the whole point. They’re so damn secretive. But think about it, what’s the difference between me and them? I’m tough, they’re vulnerable. I know my own mind, they can be manipulated. Put it together: they’re clearly messing those losers up.”

~

Almost as opaque as who Happy People chose to promote was who they granted access to their organization. I was writing an overview of how bodily perfection had become the latest obsession of the wealthy, after various technologies—from AI to space exploration to “entropy reversal”—had repeatedly and spectacularly failed to deliver on their promises of utopia. At the urging of my editor, given the organization’s recent notoriety, I reached out to Happy People with a request to interview a representative. Given their record of blanket refusal to engage with the press, I expected a boilerplate response at best. Instead, they invited me to visit for a personal tour of the compound.

Inside the main building, Mikhail led me to the reading room. Affecting the style of a Victorian private library, it was hardwood and leather, flames lashing a wrought iron fireplace. Even for the Connecticut nouveau riche, this was laying it on thick. The only items clashing with the 19^th century theme were the chairs placed between the bookcases, which resembled medieval torture devices. Students were strapped onto thick wooden frames, attached to which were arms tipped with various spikes, clamps and hypodermic needles.

These chairs concealed modern technology somewhere, as the arms moved around of their own volition, poking, squeezing, and pricking their guests with unrelenting industriousness. The guests did their best to ignore this harassment and remained implausibly focused on the books on their laps.

“We follow the old president,” Mikhail offered by way of explanation. “Enhanced interrogation is all good, no? We provide enhanced reading.”

He elaborated that the students were reading meditations on the body and mind, focusing on latent discomforts the in-house psychiatrists had found them to be repressing. The various implements drew attention where it was needed, either stimulating the body part directly or injecting substances to elicit an appropriate emotional response. Now and then, a student gasped or cried out, before hurriedly regaining their composure.

Mikhail claimed this provided necessary preparation for the students. “We need them to be ready before they become practitioners, and they need to be sure that they want the happiness this process brings.”

Instead of telling me more about these practitioners, he changed the subject, asking me for my thoughts on anal retention, while escorting me to a discreet corner with a pair of spike-free leather armchairs.

As I was stuttering a non-answer, he continued, “and all the nasty sex stuff – stinky feet, piss, you know. But really the sex is just an excuse to rub our noses in bodily nastiness—this is not me saying this, it’s your Dr. Freud.”

By “my doctor,” I presumed he had in mind that I’d written my master’s thesis on a Freudian interpretation of endometriosis.

I asked him and he bluntly agreed—“why else would we invite you in? Not all your top tens of sexy men in ugly sweaters. We need someone who has the right mindset to tell our story.”

At his urging, I explained my theory that the disease was a material manifestation of a woman’s repressed shame of her sexuality. He asked why I had abandoned the project, looking disappointed in me.

“My thesis advisor, who just so happened to be a man, deemed the topic of too narrow interest to warrant a doctoral dissertation,” I said. “And sadly, that foreclosed my pursuit of an academic career.”

I left out that my therapist had eventually convinced me I was using academic theory as a defense against confronting the trauma of my adolescence. I’d taken my parents’ insinuation that “my condition” was a sin of the flesh, tainted by association with menstruation, and recast it in a godless form. This gave me the illusion of control but failed to tackle my relationship with my body or my family head-on.

Mikhail perched on the arm of my chair as I talked. He raised his arm, seeming to consider comforting me with a hug before thinking better of it. Instead, he stood up and indicated it was time to move on, leading me out of the reading room and from the main building into the annex. Passing through a single awning, all pretensions of old-world sophistication fell away. The walls were a clinical white, the linoleum floor pale pink. The harshly conditioned air smelled like an expensive hospital. The only ornamentation was rows of framed x-rays that Mikhail informed me displayed the interiors of residents.

We reached a windowless lounge, and Mikhail invited me to sit on a lean sofa. He instructed me to stay put while he saw to “an upset on the lawn.” I half expected to find a pile of outdated celebrity magazines on the side table, but the room was pure of distractions, and my phone was long confiscated as a condition of being granted a tour. I thus spent an uncomfortable half hour with only my thoughts for company. I imagined myself strapped to one of those barbaric chairs, squirming as I pictured a particularly tender body part being violated. Despite the frigid ambience, I was flushed and sweating. My heart was racing with, I must admit, not just discomfort but a little excitement.

At last, Mikhail returned. His unhealthy pallor and halting gait were even more apparent in the stark medical light. As if reading my thoughts, he gestured ironically at his body.

“Not exactly an athlete, yes? And people think we are one of your fitness clubs.” The staccato laugh again. “I used to be fit though. Not a LeBron James, but a guy you would want to date.” He paused, momentarily shy. “I mean, not you, but the type a nice girl in general would like.”

I smiled and encouraged him to continue.

“Well, like I said, I was much more fit until the procedure—not that I’m, as you say, salty. The procedure is a great blessing, and if I am deemed ready to be a practitioner, that will be the greatest blessing of all. But now it is time to show you, if it is OK?”

He mimed removing his T-shirt. I found myself desperate to know and nodded.

“As you wish,” he said, and revealed his naked torso.

What I saw was obscene. Mikhail’s abdomen contained a window. A pane through which his internal organs could be viewed in their visceral natural habitat. Liver squashed against stomach. Stomach pressing down upon sagging intestines. Countless other alien bodies crammed in on all sides, wetly pulsing, glistening with goo and ichor.

Upon peering closer, I saw that slats had been inserted horizontally, prying his abdominal muscles open so that the entities behind could be observed. That explained Mikhail’s awkward motion, and frankly it was impressive he could walk at all. The window was made from skin somehow rendered transparent, melding with the rest along a puckered pink border.

After giving me a moment to take it all in and compose myself somewhat, Mikhail explained. He was required, after recovering from the operation, to gaze upon these organs every hour of the day he did not have duties to attend to. The idea was to truly understand and reconcile himself with his own contents.

“It’s harder than you think,” he said. “We don’t like to think about being a digestive machine. That’s why we make all the shit jokes, to release the pressure of denial.”

I had to admit that, in Mikhail’s condition, denial was no longer an option.

“Now, it’s your test,” he said. “You must feel it.”

I allowed him to guide my hand onto the diaphanous film covering his organs. Pressing there, I could feel the flow of fluids, the relentless beat of peristalsis, the pops and fizzes of chemical reaction. My fingertips traced the masticated food sliding into the stomach, churning with mucus and gastric acid, the hot liver pumping bile, the chyme sluicing through the intestines on its way to the colon–this final organ being mercifully outside the frame of the window.

After what was probably no more than thirty seconds, Mikhail gently removed my hand. He remained standing in front of me, motionless and silent, for a few minutes more in inscrutable reverie.

~

The day before visiting the compound, I had to rush to the city to chase a lead. Finding any senior ex-member of Happy People willing to speak to me had proved a great challenge, and I had resigned myself to going in blind. However, after long negotiations over my intentions, one former student agreed to meet. She suggested I call her Dora.

We met in a Brooklyn coffee shop whose décor retained traces of high gentrification excess. Dora insisted that she wasn’t here to give me dirt or indulge in any vindictiveness. She just thought there was an important story to be told.

“Before Happy People, I was a philosophy professor. I’d started out in grad school wanting to understand consciousness—‘the mind body problem’ as they call it. By the time I’d finished my doctorate, though, I was bored of the traditional questions my peers wanted to endlessly tinker with. I mean Des-can’t expect me to keep writing about this shit.”

I paused before responding. “Even in the interests of ingratiating myself with an interviewee, I can’t let a joke that awful slide,” I said.

She agreed, sucking on her iced coffee contritely, then continued.

“I got interested instead in consciousness of the body and how weirdly incomplete it is. Our conscious awareness extends throughout the muscles and skin. We can feel the precise contours of our bicep as we flex and relax it, or the tingle of contact on the back of our arm, and so we feel connected to them. Nerves monitoring the internal organs – if nerves get in there at all – are relegated to the unconscious realm. We only identify with our body’s surface.”

She paused, meeting my eyes to see if I was following her—a courtesy I’d never known a male academic to indulge in.

“This just seems crazy and like it has something to say about the human condition or whatever. I thought maybe understanding it could help me come to terms with my own body, you know the internalized misogyny and all.”

Before I could stop myself, I was recounting my own experiences as to how my body was hidden from me. My parents refused to even use words like uterus or ovary, so what happened beneath the skin was a mystery. The doctor, who seemed to resent gynecological duties as beneath him, prodded at me in silence except to sigh impatiently any time I flinched or cried out. When he was done, he left the room to discuss my condition with my parents in hushed tones I couldn’t decipher. I was prescribed punishing diets and exercise regimes without explanation and when my pain persisted, I was made to feel the failure was mine.

“It was so dissonant feeling like my body was a reflection of my character but also to be kept hidden from me…wait sorry why are we talking about this?” I stuttered to a halt, remembering at last my duties as a journalist; that Dora was a source, not a confidant.

“Don’t be silly,” Dora said, waving away my apology. “It’s always more fun hearing from someone else than talking about your own issues.”

I allowed my adrenaline to subside, then asked her why she had left academia.

She delicately furrowed her brow, reacquiring her place in the narrative, then continued. “My department chair let me know this line of research was not a recipe for tenure. He called it ‘merely empirical’, which in philosophy speak is an easy way to dismiss a question—it’s something the rubes incapable of intellectual subtlety can run an experiment to settle.”

When she heard about the Happy People program, its deep fascination with the human body and our awareness of it, she decided to “jump ship from the world’s most annoying cult to one that at least came with cute outfits.”

So why did she quit? Here Dora turned serious, resting her hands on her thighs.

“Like I said, I don’t want to bad mouth Happy People. What they’re doing seems to help a lot of people, and Dr. Burroughs is a beautiful genius. It wasn’t quite for me, though. I realized that despite it all, I am at heart a life of the mind girlie. Reaching some kind of peace is going to be about setting things straight inside my head.”

The barista announced that tequila hour was underway and turned the music up. As one of the few neighborhood establishments still in business, it doubled as a bar in the evenings. Dora admitted she didn’t have the stomach for hard liquor anymore, and we agreed to leave the interview there.

~

After putting on his shirt, Mikhail snapped back to his former liveliness. “Right, they say you’ve passed so now you meet the Doctor.”

“Who are they?” I said, jerking my head back to look over my shoulder.

Mikhail brushed aside his lank but deceptively thick hair to reveal an earpiece hidden beneath and gestured apologetically at a camera hidden in the ceiling. I asked what I’d done to “pass,” whether it was my willingness to touch his stomach. He said that was only part of it: I also had to be ambivalent about doing so.

“You must want and not want at the same time, like Freud with the stinky feet.”

Apparently, how I behaved while left alone was part of the test: my squirming and physiological markers of distress were points in my favor, as was my reluctance to touch Mikhail’s organs. If I’d been willing to do so without hesitancy, I would have failed and been ejected.

“If you are already happy like a dog, we cannot make you happy as a human,” Mikhail said.

“Touching you was certainly disturbing,” I conceded. “But it’s absurd to suggest I was also excited by it.”

He didn’t respond, remaining still and blank.

“I’m a journalist,” I said, compelled to fill the silence. “I had to investigate your condition thoroughly as a matter of professional duty.”

Mikhail winked but otherwise let the matter lie and turned to lead me deeper into the annex. I had no choice but to follow.

We paused to peer through the door of what appeared to be an infirmary. Inside, rows of beds contained silent patients. They were covered neck to toe by thick blankets, from which emerged dozens of thick wires, attached to various machines, fluid bags, and devices whose nature I could not guess at.

Despite the level of medical intervention, there was no sense of emergency. The room was still; the only sign of life, a lone staff member reading in the corner. Instead of the white glare of a hospital ward, the room was lit with a dim orange glow. These were, Mikhail informed me, the practitioners. Their current state was not a complication but the nature of their practice. They were awake, just indisposed.

Our pause here was only brief before I was urged deeper into the maze. As I was starting to feel hysterically disoriented, we arrived at the central chamber. Entering, Mikhail was suddenly serious. The irony that had suffused his every gesture up to now evaporated from his body.

“Ms. Chu, meet Dr. Burroughs.”

The doctor lay in an unpretentious recliner. He managed to appear austere despite the great quantity of pillows propping him in place. Like the other practitioners, a blanket covered him from the neck down; the dark fleece yawned like a chasm. Though his body was still, his eyes met mine with a spry intelligence. A little stubble pushed out of his stark jaw, suggesting a will to live remained.

As the silence between us escalated, I broke from his gaze and looked about the room. It was incongruously tasteful. Limewashed walls, a couple small oil paintings by contemporary Indian artists, natural light illuminating fragrant air. Unavoidably less aesthetic was the tower of medical equipment and skein of wires that disappeared under the blanket. I sensed his gaze methodically scanning me all the while.

Finally, he spoke. “You wish to know what we do here. And why.”

His voice was husky and weak, but conveyed determination. I agreed and asked specifically why he and the other practitioners had chosen to undergo this series of debilitating medical procedures.

“We think prehistoric man was happy because he was bound by no rules,” he said. “But he was happy because he encountered no alien.”

Speaking was difficult for him; he could offer only fragments of explanation. A volume of his writings – not available outside of the organization but handed to me reverentially by Mikhail – allowed me to fill in the gaps. Burroughs rejected the reactionary thesis that our prehistoric ancestors were proto-libertarians, living in paradise because they were free from taxation and political correctness. Instead, the key was their deep familiarity with their environment—they foraged and hunted what they ate, crafted the tools they used, worked with the seasons and the land, so that they were part of all they relied upon. They experienced no other, as an academic might put it.

Burroughs was not seeking a return to hunting and gathering, however. He had spent a decade living amongst a native Alaskan tribe, existing in a manner as unchanged by history as one might hope to find. However, he had not achieved the peace he sought there. The sense of other remained, as any academic could have told him it inevitably would. So, he had returned to modern society to look for a new approach. Thanks to an inexplicable stash of wealth, so common amongst the English, he spent the next few years dropping out of an impressive number of graduate programs–from biology to psychology to computer science, before finally completing a PhD in theology. Then he disappeared even more thoroughly than he had in the Arctic, until he emerged in New England as the deedholder of a fiefdom’s worth of land.

He spoke again: “The real alien is the alien inside.”

With great effort, he nodded his head down to indicate his own body. His fragile, tightly drawn skin creased up at the gesture and seemed in danger of tearing.

Burroughs believed, based on his interpretive splicing of Freud and the Buddha, that humans are afflicted with a deep horror at being embodied. We are terrified of the entities and processes contained under the skin but unknown to us, and we repress all thought of them. He claimed that all our most crushing mental disorders – whether they concern violence, death, or sex – originate from this fundamental anxiety.

“We remove the alien within,” Burroughs said. “We create happy people.”

He glanced at Mikhail, who hesitated before reluctantly walking over and removing the blanket covering him.

The body underneath violated the skin’s covenant as a barrier. Though less gory than Mikhail’s torso, its implications were even more radical. The wires going in and out of it were not the drips and sensors modern medicine accustoms us to but vessels for bodily matter. Transparent tubing housed vein-like fibers that jutted out of incisions in the belly and spine. These fibers were artificially grown nerves, which burrowed into small plexiglass containers strapped to the doctor’s sides, inside of which were lumps of brain tissue and other partial organs. It was a switchboard rendered in flesh.

Rather than therapy or meditation, the doctor had decided upon a direct solution to bodily alienation. Over years of research and experimentation and at untold expense, his organization developed a series of medical procedures that extended conscious awareness to progressively more of the body’s organs. They discovered techniques for building networks of nerve connections between the submucosal ganglia and the central nervous system so the conscious mind could speak with the digestive organs.

Next, and more audaciously, they invented methods for growing new sensory receptors within corners of the body never before touched by the nervous system. Olfactory nerves grew inside the lungs, thousands of tiny tastebuds dangled inside the stomach and all along the intestines, while wholly new types of sensory material spread through the liver, heart and pancreas. Why should the only part of digestion we get to experience be the chewing and swallowing? Burroughs asked in one of his essays. If my stomach is mixing enzymes into my dinner in perfect proportions, don’t I have a right to experience this? Shouldn’t this taste good to me?

I slipped into a reverie, imagining what it would mean to feel my internal organs, to sense their every contour, rather than experiencing nothing but waves of pain emerging from inscrutable depths. To see, even, the endometriosis cells themselves, to walk among them and grasp their place inside of me. I tried to remind myself that seeing inside my uterus would be cold comfort when the pain was at its worst, but the image kept burrowing deeper into the back of my mind. It was a moment before I realized Burroughs was talking.

“I feel all that my body does,” he said. “Now, nothing is hidden.”

The burden of all this extra conscious input was considerable, depleting practitioners both mentally and physically. For some, this led to such an overload that their bodies shut down, as conscious thought muddled essential automatic functions. Those who survived were, with the exception of Burroughs, wholly occupied with their new sensations, able to do nothing but lie in ecstatic contemplation. Defying all medical explanation, the doctor alone remained alert and conversational. His stamina was beginning to decline, though, and he had wanted to personally explain his mission to the world while he still could.

I realized that I had been inching closer, in anticipation of further pronouncement, until I was leaning over the vivisected body. The body’s hand grabbed my wrist.

“You feel it too,” Burroughs said, his voice cracking. “You jolt awake at night, picturing in terror the motions of unknown creatures lurking inside of you.”

I stumbled backwards, tripping over one of the tubes, snapping the thread of nerves inside. The doctor screamed like an infant. Mikhail rushed over, first guiding me carefully away from the doctor, then slamming me against the wall. There was a wild look in his eyes. I thought he was going to hit me. I thought I deserved it.

He paused and glanced at the doctor, though, who had regained his composure.

“Don’t worry,” Burroughs managed to say. “Temporary agony. No long-term harm. Ms. Chu is still our dear friend.”

Mikhail exhaled and let go of me, his unneeded adrenaline dissipating.

Despite the lack of hard feelings, our conversation had run its course. Mikhail, now a little sheepish, escorted me to the door, but the doctor called out one last time. I turned, momentarily confused as he stared at me intently, focusing significant effort on some silent exertion.

Finally, I understood. He was smiling.

The Austin Sentinel Editor’s note: This essay was the initial draft of a piece commissioned by The Austin Sentinel. However, Ms. Chu never filed the piece and was reported missing by her family. A copy of the manuscript was found by a friend when clearing out her apartment. It now provides invaluable context, as Ms. Chu has emerged as a member and spokesperson for Happy People, an organization which appears poised to shape the bodies all of us will, in the future, have to live in.