Canopy Literary Review

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Category: Canopy Two

God Forgot to Hide

Brick was almost asleep, his cheek against the warm glass, when the road in front of them stood up into the sky and came back down as dirt.

Fiction

God Forgot to Hide

Ashley Mangtani

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann

Brick was almost asleep, his cheek against the warm glass, when the road in front of them stood up into the sky and came back down as dirt.

For a moment the world went silent. Then the sound rushed back. The engine, the men, the ringing inside his skull. Reyes had both hands locked on the wheel, saying something again and again that Brick could not turn into a word he knew.

The lead truck sat crossways, smoke pouring from it, one wheel gone. In the palms to the left, small glares flickered between the trunks, white and brief and almost pretty. Rifles. Brick was already low in his seat, shouting the men down behind him, his body a step ahead of him, the way it had learned to be.

Above them the heavy gun opened up, each round a hammer-blow through the cab. Mouse swung it toward the trees and worked it back and forth, and brass came raining hot through the hatch, ticking against the metal at their feet.

The fight ran on. The tree line kept lighting up, flash after flash between the trunks, and the boys fired back into it, barrels smoking, until a shadow crossed the road and a sound came down over everything, so vast it swallowed the rest.

The helicopter came down over the line, and where its guns walked through the trees the hiding places gave up their men. The shooting stopped, one place, then another and then everywhere. It tilted up and away, small already against the white sky. Then only smoke, and the smell of cooked sap.

Doc crossed to the burning truck, checked the boys, and came back at a walk. No one had to ask. They’d lived, and the blood on him belonged to none of them. Reyes laughed, his hands not yet off the wheel. Mouse stayed in the turret behind his gun and would not come down. And Pruitt, who had spent the whole patrol trying to trade off the parts of his lunch he didn’t want, sat still now, the open packets untouched between his knees.

They hooked a chain to the wrecked truck and dragged it back, and behind them the grove stood broken. Killing was the one thing the country had taught them, and it had taught them well.

 

~

 

Three days later, they were pulled off the rotation and taken to a room no one used, with plywood walls, an air conditioner shuddering in its mount, and a single long table. A man sat at it in clean civilian clothes, no name tape, no rank, nothing to say who he was.

The photographs lay face down in a stack in front of him. He turned them over one at a time as he spoke, sliding each toward the men.

The first was taken from straight above, a narrow green valley curving through open desert where the maps showed nothing. The next was the same location from lower down, the green deeper now, and a silver line of water. Then the photographs came faster. A trench cut into the earth. Guys in white suits kneeling in it. Something small and dark under glass with a ruler laid for scale, and last, a shard of pottery, the writing scratched into it running right to left.

“Two labs dated the wood. Same result.” He let it sit. “A recon team pulled the sample two weeks back. My people think it’s the tree of life. Now we go in for the rest, and you’re taking us.” He said it like a man reading the lunch menu.

No one moved. Moisture ticked from the air conditioner onto the floor, and into that sound Doc said, “What happens to it. After.”

“After, we close down the site.” He gathered the photographs. “That’s need-to-know. You don’t.”

Pruitt shifted in his chair as if to ask something, and Brick caught his eye, but he didn’t ask.

“Not a cutting, not a seed, not a photograph. Understood?” He stood. “Then you bring my people home. You leave before first light.”

Outside, the day was cooling. Far to the south, beyond the wire and the marshes and a night’s drive of bad ground, the valley lay in the dark with the stream running through it. And the tree stood at the centre, older than the god who was supposed to have planted it, alive out there while they sat in the room and made their plans.

 

~

 

They drove out before dawn, three trucks and two more behind for the man and his scientists. Reyes, who talked through everything, drove with both hands and said nothing. On other mornings there was talk, or gum going round, or Reyes singing under his breath. Not this one. Within the hour the road gave out, the earth went soft under the wheels, and every mile carried them closer to the thing none of them would say aloud.

At the edge of the marsh the trucks stopped, and Brick went down the line checking his men one at a time, the way he did before every job. He found Pruitt’s chin strap loose and tightened it. He checked their water bottles, the tape holding Mouse’s gun together, the dressings folded in Doc’s bag, and said something small to each man, nothing that mattered, just so they heard his voice.

The marsh opened out on both sides. The reed beds stood taller than the men; the pools between them held the pink of the sky. Birds lifted off it in their thousands as the trucks passed, a soft roar of wings, which dropped out behind them. This was the desert they had bled in for a year, and here it was, alive. None of them had a word for it.

Doc rode beside Brick with his aid bag in his lap, his face to the window. “They flew us all the way out here for a tree.”

“Doesn’t matter what it is,” Brick said. “We take them in, we bring them out. Same as always.”

Doc looked at him then. “Nothing about this is same as always.”

Brick didn’t answer that, because there was nothing to say that wasn’t a lie.

Mouse spoke up from the gun. “Hope it’s worth it. Whatever’s out there.”

Nobody told him it would be.

Sami rode in the lead truck, watching the ground go by. He was their interpreter, and he had been with them the better part of a year. He caught things in a voice the rest of them couldn’t. Once, at a checkpoint, a man walked up to the truck with his arms open and a smile on his face, and Sami went still, and pushed Brick back into the seat by the chest, and a second later the smiling man reached under his shirt for a gun. That was Sami. Always a beat ahead of the rest.

At the foot of the ridge Sami asked them to stop. “I’m only going this far,” he said.

“I need you in there,” Brick said.

“You don’t want me in there.” He got out and nodded at the high ground. “Where I’m from, you grow up knowing not to go up there.” He looked at Brick. “Its name tells you everything.”

“What’s the name?” Brick said.

“God forgot to hide.” Sami shifted the bag on his shoulder and looked at the ridge like it might have moved closer. “You hide what you’re afraid to lose. Allah wasn’t afraid of anyone. So he left it out here, where no one would think to look, and let the desert keep it.” He turned back to Brick. “And now here you are.”

“I can’t leave you out here alone,” Brick said.

“I’m safer here than you’ll be in there.” Sami stepped back off the road. “I’ll wait by the water. Come back, and you’ll find me.”

He turned and went down into the reeds, and the marsh took him, and the trucks climbed the ridge alone. They came up over it mid-morning. The valley opened below them, and the trucks slowed and stopped, no one giving the word.

It was green past all sense, moss and flooded hollows and the underside of leaves. Grass ran down both slopes to a stream, and at the near end a village stood among small fields. Houses of mud the colour of the land beneath them. A low tower. Animal pens. Smoke rose straight into the air and did not stir. People had lived here before there was a country called Iraq, and from the ridge it was the last quiet place left in the world.

They had only a moment to look at it. The first rocket came up out of the village before the trucks had finished stopping. It passed over them and burst against the slope, throwing a fan of earth into the air. The second struck one of the trucks carrying the scientists, and it folded around the blast and caught fire. Men fell out of the smoke into the grass, dragging a shape between them that had stopped being a man.

After that there was only noise, and staying alive. The guns fired from a window, from the tower, from the wall of a pen, and the rounds came through the reeds, cutting them down. Mouse opened up from the turret. Brick put his men behind the trucks or whatever cover the land gave them. For an hour neither side moved.

The gun in the tower found Reyes as he crossed the open stretch and stayed on him after he fell. Mouse turned the roof gun on the tower and took the top of it clean off, and the firing stopped. Reyes lay out in the grass with the sky in his open eyes, the stream running a hand’s reach from his fingers.

Brick sent Pruitt and two others up a dry ditch toward the pens, because the ground there would hide them, and for a while it did. A grenade came down on a short bounce. When the dirt had finished falling, Pruitt sat against the side of it with his rifle across his knees, his palms open in his lap, the front of him gone. He had spent the day before trying to give the brown sweets from his ration away, and no one had wanted them, and now he held nothing at all.

There was no taking the position, so Brick called it in.

They pulled back to the trucks and got down and waited. It did not take long. The missile came in from somewhere they couldn’t see, a sound in the air that kept rising, and then the village came apart, wall by wall, in white flashes. When it stopped, it had gone back into the dirt it was built from, the mud walls and the tower and the pens all one colour now.

A village older than the Bible, older than the Qur’an, gone in a breath. Dust lifted off the wreckage and drifted a long time in the still air, and came down over the impossible green.

Brick’s men stood in the silence and would not look at each other. Two of the scientists had lived through their first fight, cases clutched to their chests, white at the knuckle.

No one spoke. They walked past the decimated village into the reeds, because they had not come for the village. It had only been in the way.

 

~

 

They walked the last stretch, through knee-high stalks that soaked them cold, and the noise of the morning drained away behind them until there was nothing left but the water.

The stream ran clear over pale stones, and it was the only thing that moved. Birds called from the far slope, and others answered from the near one, a question and a reply, over and over, in a language none of them could ever learn. Brick breathed in, and the air was sweet, and under the sweetness the smell of earth no one had ever turned.

The tree stood by the stream at the heart of the valley.

It was not tall. For all its years, it had grown out instead of up. The trunk ran wider than a car, the bark worn smooth by weather, and the great lower limbs spread across the grass and laid their elbows on the ground. On the upper branches hung the fruit, dark, round, heavy, and not one had fallen, not one bruised or taken.

It did not shine. It threw no light and asked for none in return. It stood in the plain morning sun and was, in every leaf and every limb, the exact thing the man had named back at the camp, and that was harder to stand under than any miracle would have been.

Brick took off his helmet. He had not told his hand to do it, and stood with it hanging from his fingers, the sun on his bare head. Beside him, Doc made the sign of the cross, the way his mother had taught him before he was old enough to know what it meant, his lips moving on a prayer he did not say aloud. Mouse came down last, still holding the spare barrel of his gun to his chest because his hands would not let go of it, and he looked up into the branches, and what was left in him came out in a whisper.

“Jesus,” Mouse said.

No one misunderstood.

It had been holding its fruit to the light since before the first man knelt to the first god, and it paid them no mind now.

The scientists did not wait to be told. They knelt at the foot of the trunk, opened their cases and went to work with blades and a small saw. A core of wood from the trunk. A length of root. Three of the fruit, brought down on a long pole and placed in grey foam. They worked fast and did not look up. Brick let them, because it was the mission, and the mission was the only thing he still had a hold on.

When the cases were full, Brick got on the radio.

His voice climbed the ridge and from there to someone further back.

“You have the samples,” the voice said.

“We have them,” said Brick.

“Good. Close it out.”

Brick did not follow. He stood there beneath the spreading limbs, the cases at his feet, and the order made no sense.

“Say again.”

“Take it down. All of it. The tree, the roots, the ground under it. Confirm.”

“Sir. Are you sure?”

“Take it down, Sergeant. The order comes from way over both of us. You’re not being asked whether you agree. You’re being told to carry it out.”

There it was. The man had said it three days ago in the plywood room, and Brick had taken it to mean secure the place, lock it down. It had never meant that. It had meant this, and some part of Brick had known, and he kept his eyes down.

The water ran behind him. The birds had not stopped. Brick looked up once at the fruit the scientists had left hanging, dark against the sky. Then he looked at his men. Mouse would not turn around. Doc stood on the bank with his head bowed, and neither of them would be any help to him now.

Brick keyed the radio. He meant to say something into it, and found he had nothing and let it go.

“Roger,” he said. “Out.”

He clipped the handset back to his chest, and the voice was gone. It was just the valley now.

“Mouse.”

It took him a moment to come back from wherever his reverie had taken him. Then he went up the slope, and came back with the charges against his chest, both arms locked around them, holding them the way you hold something you’d rather drop.

 

~

 

Brick sent the scientists back over the ridge with their cases and told them not to look back. They didn’t. Then it was Brick, Doc, Mouse, and the tree.

“Give them here,” Brick said. “This one’s mine.”

Mouse handed the charges over and went to stand with Doc. Brick set them himself, into the roots and the folds of the bark, and his palm came away each time damp from the living wood. He ran the wire between them, and it was done.

Doc paid out the wire behind him and kept his eyes down. Mouse stood by working his jaw. There was something he needed to say, and no way left to say it, and then Brick reached for the wire, and it did not matter anymore.

Brick knelt and took the handle in both hands. He held it a moment. Then he closed his eyes and pressed.

The tree came apart in a single breath. It went up white at the root and opened outward, every limb thrown wide at once, and for a moment it hung in the air unmade. Then it fell. The limbs came down and slid into the stream, out of the light they had held their fruit up to, into the dark of the water. The ash came down after them, over the wreck and the bare heads of the men, like snow that would not melt.

Brick stayed on his knees. After a while he stood and keyed the radio.

“It’s done,” he said.

“Copy that,” said the voice, and the line clicked dead.

The three men walked past where the village had been. None of them looked back. Behind them, the water ran grey with the tree. It would not run clear again.

 

~

 

In the years after, the war found its reasons.

It was the oil, the borders drawn by men who had never seen the place, the money, the contracts. It was the regime toppled and the men installed to replace it. It was the weapons they swore were there and never were. It was a tower on the far side of the world, and a country too frightened to ask whether this was the answer to it. It was the dead they counted, and the dead they did not.

None of that was the real reason. The truth was simpler, and worse. The tree belonged to no one. It answered to no one. It had stood there before the first god was named, before the first border was drawn, before anyone decided what the world was allowed to contain. That was what could not be allowed. Not the threat of it, because it was no threat to anyone. Only that it was free, in a world that permitted no such thing.

The men who did it went home that night and slept.

 

ASHLEY MANGTANI is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. His work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Expat Press, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at ashleymangtani.com

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Three Images

Vantage July 20, 2026

VANTAGE is an explorer, photographer, artist and writer. Instagram – @_vantage1_ Link Instagram

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Solstice

  • Poetry

Solstice

Juliette Alfier

Shore

Some women’s voices

are heavy with stories

of men who never make it home.

Their oaths unbraid

in unguessed fellowships,

regions where fists

circle shot glasses

like shipwrecked souls

reaching for shore.

*

In a diner window booth,

a child bored with the adult-speak

of her father and his friends,

presses her face to the pane.

She watches shadows pass.

Like the stripclub dancer

yet to be embellished

in fishnets and slit-gown,

who will, in some small hour, whisper

in a man’s ear,

I am everything

you cannot touch.

Photo by 良太郎 空

One Way to Deflect the Perfection of Allegory

after Brigit Pegeen Kelly

When she’d ask for candy,

she’d get a rusty tin of marbles.

For test scores good enough to skip a grade,

her father’s wartime fear of falling.

For insight into the future, a ghostship

leaving a harbor seen only in a dream;

a red scarf blowing past her window.

For a clear autumn day, cool and windy,

a greenhouse trapped in steam.

When she sought intercessory prayer for a dying brother,

she got a requiem for sparrows.

For a way to leave town forever,

her face staring back from a china plate,

her mother licking honey off a carving knife.

Solstice

Come this overdue season, I’ll breathe Yes

when it arrives steeped in sunheat.

I’ll breathe yes to the warming rains,

rivulets turning to steam on the asphalt

lot of the dead box store where lovers

and dopers shield themselves in shadow.

I’ll acquiesce to the crows,

their dull wings invading my street,

dim beaks craving the shiny coins

that fill no one’s pockets now.

I’ll even give a nod to the sundress that mom

could at least have washed after filching it

from the Good Will bin. Afterwards,

I’ll say yes to trespass a private beach,

slink through sand threaded with lost sandals

and seawrack, a handbag snug beneath my arm

to slip gin beyond the No Alcohol sign.

Yet I’ll fail to answer the herring gulls

leveling in wind to drop clams that’ll burst

on the anvil of stone walkways to feed hatchlings

recessed on the roof of a seaside motel,

their mouths tangled in hunger far beyond my sight.

JULIETTE ALFIER’s (she/her) most recent book of poetry is The Shadow Field. Journal credits include Copper Nickel, Faultline, Fugue, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. They are also a collage artist after the styles of Francesca Woodman, and Katrien De Blauwer.

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Personne

Alex Jennings March 30, 2026

Odile stood in the darkest part of the yard, waiting, waiting, and Boy was nowhere in sight.

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Cherubim

Wyrd Lea March 30, 2026

Photo by Tim Mossholder Promises tugged. Skin awaiting to be sawed. Free from the loose strangle of

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The forest files a missing persons report

species: human
last seen: believing ownership was another word for love
distinguishing marks: pockets full of plastic weather

  • Poetry

The forest files a missing persons report

Collins C. Oparaocha

Photo by Luis Del Río Camacho
The forest files a missing persons report

```
species:                              human
last seen:                         believing ownership was another word for love
distinguishing marks: pockets full of plastic weather
```
The cedar says:

They stopped calling me by my name. They stopped saying my names.
Before we ceased to say theirs.

Meanwhile—

a glacier misplaces
another century.

An owl edits
Close to the edge of night.

The river returns
every apology
unopened.

```
[please check one]
```
☐ extinct
☐ endangered
☐ remembering

The moss votes
for softness.

The wolves
abstain.

Every tree ring
contains the minutes
from meetings
We never got invited to.

At dawn,

the wind seals the book,

not because
the search is over—

because the missing

are still

walking.


When the Fungi Began Correcting Our Grammar 

First,

they objected
to the sentence:

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.

A long white thread
crossed it out.

Then another.

Soon

the forest floor

became

one enormous revision.

```
replace belongs
with breathes through

replace resource
with relative

delete
the word
forever
```

Beneath our boots,

mycelium
continued writing

without ink,

without witnesses,

without needing
our agreement.

One morning,

I placed my ear
against the ground.

The soil said,

not in language—

in recurrence.

Everything fallen

was already

becoming

its next

beautiful

sentence.

COLLINS C. OPARAOCHA is a writer and poet. He lives and writes in Turkey. His work has appeared or forthcoming in Empyrean literary magazine, Abstract Magazine, Dualiterary Magazine, Merion West magazine, Pink Ochre Literary Magazine, Still Point: Poetry & Culture, Homeplace Magazine, Blue Daisies Journal, The Quasar Review, Abundance Literary Magazine, and he is the author of the novel All Shadows are Black.

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A Green Year

James Sullivan March 30, 2026

This story was originally published in The Headlight Review. It was a finalist for the 2024 Anthony

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Inanition: Large Body Behind My Intricate Mind

My body laid against the pillows
damned,
yearning to get out of these years of motion interpolation
yet nothing is moving.

  • Poetry

Inanition: Large Body Behind My Intricate Mind

  • Anthony Brown
Photo by Heather Green

My body laid against the pillows
damned,
yearning to get out of these years of motion interpolation
yet nothing is moving.
I see the roof colored a pastel beige
memorizing cracks upon cracks
the crevices in my body swindling the air that hadn’t
existed in my bedroom beforehand.

The bags I hid in that thrifted cubby
years of suppression not ready to confront—only my eyes
saw the bright colors and volume of food
poison arrow shot from my
heart every time
guilt stepped into my eyes and
saw my frame.
Heart sank, yet stomach rang
needed to
fill up the repulsion all over again
to feel satisfied and barely happy.

Here I am, defined by state of mind
wilted like the roses by gravestones I’d seen—families, friends hadn’t visited for years—
chugging, chugging, chugging on honeyed carbonation,
aromantic in decision-making.

Things Rotting on the Sides of Highways

McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger   450 Calories

Red Bull Sea Blue   160 Calories

Pepsi   250 Calories

Takis Fuego   560 Calories

Lay’s Salt & Vinegar   450 Calories

Starbucks Caramel Macchiato   250 Calories

Water Bottles   0 Calories

Little Debbie Zebra Cake Roll’s   320 Calories

Maruchan Chicken Flavored Ramen.  380 Calories

Mountain Dew Code Red   280 Calories

= 3,100 Calories.

Who’s at the door?

Plump
Corpulent
Chubby
Fat
Round
Pudgy
Husky
Podgy

Ripe

Repletive
Repulsive
Flabby
Brawny
What I’ve always seen on the other side
I’ve never had the pleasure:

Lank.

Scrawny.

Muscular.

Slender.

Emaciated.

Pinched.

Willowy.

My wishes are defined in this multitude of ways.
Never learned how to balance many things happening at once
my weight just one issue of many during my teenage years.
Living paycheck to paycheck—the American dream—like society and corporate food-service steamy fast-food restaurants
coworkers I’d lost—hiring and firing—
for convenience.
One was found slumped over in the bathroom
another I took home where her brother lives just a few blocks from me
I haven’t seen her since.
I remember the time I snuck $32 worth of food home and ate it all in one sitting.

Got so caught up with my co-working kindreds—correspondence in a beehive—connected through the contents of our wallets—commensurate with our abilities—stuck like pieces played in a game of Tetris, never to move again.

Belle Epoque could’ve been me had I never ate all that cake and got complacent—damn, masculinity is such a bitch—so was I.
All of us feel something is wrong with us
we take that art and form it into emotion.
Food was an outlet—it let me out,
pushed me out, completely fucked me over—

physically
mentally
emotionally—

exhausted me
made me full
energized, at times.
Food can help, and can kill you in the long run—hypocritical juxtaposition—
perhaps
I’ll never get over it.
Food as art grows a better person—fed up with the drainage
the bad kinds, at least.

Artistic Development In all us fucked up people

Vincent van Gogh – The Potato Eaters

Celeste Roberge – The Weight of Grief
Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Untitled

Andy Warhol – Campbell’s Soup Cans

Francis Bacon – Figure with Meat

Giuseppe Arcimboldo – Vertumnus

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Peasant Wedding

Vincent van Gogh – Still Life with Apples

The bond between my bed and I grew my legs huge
my steps resounded in the doorway.
Forget trying to sneak out.
Wouldn’t be worth a damn.
It’s like the bond I could’ve had with a Golden Retriever or a Husky—a healthy bond that would’ve had me up and feeling loved
freed from confinement, shackles chewed through by canine incisors.
But.
No.
That never happened.

 

Conformed to comfort, I decided everything in my life
had been done and over with at this point
my bed my fetter and drug.
I hit the curb
hard
like a tooth chipped off from impact

circumscription of forgetting how to move

how to feel     how to cope

have

friends

have anything something

anything?

I was bound for the floor as I’d become to my bed
floor comfort
floor solace
yet my enemy in disguise built me into a person shamed
my extremities in quantity not quality
full but never filled
never myself.

Enigmatic in the way I quickly ran for comfort of home
of the multitude of excuses

I a mammoth

Tremendous

Staggering

Voluminous

frozen

in a lake

chalked up, nothing of significance

at least, that’s how the teenagers treated me.
I don’t blame them though

I don’t know how to feel about it

tossed away into the nethermost,

that planet earth had never seen.

Wrappers and plastic cups

riddling the earth of environmental damage—

they were my friends instead—

I saw them everyday.

Coping Mechanisms Through Song Titles: Stinging Resonance in Heart-Sinking Awareness

Lullaby For Liquid Pig

Hearts Are Open Graves

Feel So Numb

A Box Full of Sharp Objects

<maybe> it’s my fault

Eat You Alive

I Hate Everything About You

you should see me in a crown

Human Leech

Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)

Hurt

And Contentment

Arrested in shame and accountability
once I stepped out of the environment
the city that’d entrapped me for so long.
The smell in that room enraptured my soul
lead it towards a bewitching spell

of laughter
happiness
freedom—
could’ve all.
Craft of recognition drank in bottles of sugar—
sodas and lemonades made me allergic to water—
as it did to the word fat
when the racks of clothes shunned 3XL in a different light.
I called myself manic, versed in recommending
where to eat—quantity and cheapness was the thing,
not quality.
Over the years my bedsheets
had worn to the shape of my slumber,
pillow cases frayed,
holes in my clothes
from how often I wore them.
I am over,
the habits

were killed

as soon as awareness awoke.

ANTHONY BROWN is an English student at the University of Cincinnati. His goal as a writer is to encourage others to never be afraid and to showcase their ugliness, truths, and personality through their writing. He is a poet, drag queen, music enthusiast, writer, and human. Anthony has interned for Abode Press and The Cincinnati Review. His work has been published in Prism Undergraduate Journal, Short Vine Literary Journal, The Persimmon Review, and elsewhere. Find him at anthonycbrown.com and Instagram @antwritesalot.

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Canopy One

Heather Jones March 30, 2026

Welcome to Canopy Literary Review. This journal came about after a yearlong search for publications of its

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Solstice

Juliette Alfier August 24, 2026

Shore Some women’s voices are heavy with stories of men who never make it home. Their oaths

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Happy People

  • Fiction

Happy People

  • Jackie Marley

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 19th 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.

JACKIE MARLEY is a writer and researcher living in Brooklyn. Their work has appeared in Stopgap, Phenomenal World, and various academic journals. They grew up in the British Midlands and hold a PhD in philosophy.

Images courtesy of New York Public Library

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