Herculine, p.1
Herculine, page 1
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To Dana, with all my love
My kinky roleplay: I am an honest person. I am not ashamed of myself.
—LAUREN COOK
PART 1
FEMALE SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
I no longer believe in salvation. But for years I tried to escape the magnetic pull of the demonic. I repented for as long as I could, then moved to New York. Unfortunately, I did not arrive in the city alone.
Most days I woke up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, face-to-face with a sleep paralysis demon. Sometimes I would cower in fear. Sometimes I would ask it what Satan thought about #MeToo. The demons never laughed. I’d seen evil spirits since long before I moved to New York, but I had hoped that moving away from Indiana would help. All God’s children enter the world innocent, naive, and prone to poor life choices.
* * *
One bitter autumn, I woke up to a man in a crooked hat standing in the corner of my room. The wind howled like a banshee against the window.
“Does Satan enforce a dress code?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said.
He wore a sharp black suit. The closer I looked at his face, the stranger it seemed, warped green clay squelched into a single red orb.
By then I knew I wasn’t the only one who experienced such phenomena. I’d read about other people’s nightmares: clowns, glazy-eyed twinks, bimbos with fangs, cops, a bunch of pigs in a trench coat.
“You never told me your name,” I said. The entity was silent. “Why are you here?”
“I am but one of many.”
“I’ve never met a girl demon,” I said. “Are there any?”
He didn’t respond, still as a sentinel in the corner. Usually after a few hours the demons just vanished. For a while the impermanence gave me a false sense of security—like maybe it was all a dream. But they always came back, as graceless and stoic as before. The harm they caused had been, so far, purely psychological.
When I was a child, I used to see things during the day. I drew oil crosses on the window. That mostly kept them away, but it also made me nauseous. Like I was wicked myself. As I got older they only ever came to me during those twilight hours when I was half asleep. Plausible deniability.
Since I almost always slept alone, no one ever heard me scream. Not that I screamed a lot. Sometimes the demons were just scarier. Occasionally one of the trans boys I slept with would let me stay over. The demons never came then. They wanted me alone.
“He is coming,” the demon said.
“Who?”
He stood wordlessly as I turned over, fed up with the stonewalling.
Eventually, the spirit turned to mist and receded into the wall. I got up and checked my phone to see if Max, my trans boy of the hour, had messaged me. I had his shot day memorized so I could tell when he would be ready for a testosterone-fueled bender. There was nothing.
I didn’t have an alarm clock, but I did have a half-empty bag of ketamine, an old mug of coffee, and two stolen vials of perfume. Enough to start my day.
After a bump, I hopped into the shower to try and shake the nightmare from my body. My landlord texted me asking for my rent to be deposited online instead of mailed. He wasn’t a very nice man, but then again, God, our heavenly landlord, isn’t the nicest man either. I know this because I used to pray the way my mother taught me—begging for rent money. So far I’ve never received a check.
* * *
In the kitchen, my roommate was making herself bacon, eggs, and coffee since she worked from home. We performed our cohabitation pleasantries.
I smiled at her. “Smells good.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She never offered me any. The bacon smelled kind of burnt anyway. I ran downstairs and went to the bodega where I filled a large coffee and grabbed a banana. A man standing in front of the ice cream section yelled something obscene about cutting me open and feeding me to the pigeons.
“Sounds good,” I muttered, fumbling in my bag for cash.
I thought about my grandma, who told me everyone deserves our compassion. Still, if she had actually made it to heaven I would’ve expected her to brag about her fate by sending me a rainbow or something.
* * *
Thinking about God on my morning commute proved unpleasant, so I tried to listen to the news instead, the familiar drone of Midwestern voices talking about climate change and foreign affairs. By the time I got off at my stop I’d learned something about Canada’s oil supply, but I couldn’t remember what. I flipped past a text from my mom asking to talk on the phone sometime soon. After the nightmare I wanted some peace—or at least free dissociation time.
I walked into my office. I worked at a kids’ clothing store in Tribeca, so the office was a back room full of pests. At night I heard rats chewing through the copper wiring.
Little denim overalls and floral dresses hung in neat rows. Technicolor toys, gadgets, and gizmos glistened on white tables. My boss was stirring a spider into her coffee, watching its legs dissolve like pepper. She wore a shirt that said FEMALE SMALL BUSINESS OWNER in red Arial font. I think pink would’ve been offensive.
Pink was out. Girls like STEM now. Girls are small business owners. Girls run cults. Girls write true crime. Girls are vice presidents in pantsuits. Just not pink ones. I like wearing pink. And purple. There’s a certain shade of purple I’m desperately looking for. I want it so bad it’s almost a craving. There’s joy in seeking out a certain pleasure and finding that it does indeed taste just like you imagined it would. Crafting an outfit you spend weeks putting together, tripping for the first time on good acid, sending a punishing text to someone who’s hurt you, finding the book you’ve been looking for on a dusty shelf at East Village Books. New joy isn’t static, it expands like lilac-colored slime. Almost lilac, but not quite. It’s not exactly that pale Easter egg shade of purple girls wear to their yearly Episcopal outings. The problem is that it’s not a color, it’s a feeling.
“We need an extra pair of keys,” my boss said without looking up from her laptop. It had a neon-green SHOP LOCAL sticker on the back.
One night a sleep paralysis demon had assumed the form of my boss. But she was just as scary in real life, considering she was an incompetent person who handled payroll. Sometimes she forgot to pay me. Other times she made me repeat my deadname over the phone, crowing like a vulture.
“Who are the keys for?”
“The repair man. Did you hear about the oil supply in Canada?”
“I was just listening to something about that on my subway ride,” I said.
“Oh god, was the commute awful?” she asked.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said, dull-eyed and bleary from the ketamine.
I set out for the farther hardware store with the cute cashier.
The streets of Tribeca are trashier than you would expect. It’s just the stores that are nice, and the neat little cafés with minimalist logos.
A man yelled something and laughed as he walked by me, but I didn’t hear him. My headphones were maxed out. Some woman was screaming about shadowboxing her ex-lover, rolling around in the dirt and facing her inner demons. I loved women who could wrestle their darkness into words.
I couldn’t find the right words. My dream had been to be a journalist like all the other Hot Freelance Girls, but then I gave up. I did not want to think a single thought ever again. For a while I pursued a pure holy feeling—like doing K in the bathroom while wearing a leopard-print tube top. After a year of Bimboism, I got rid of my chokers and bought turtlenecks. I wore all black and monochrome baby doll outfits in an attempt to mimic the Trans-Girl Actress. God willing. I stopped reading anything contemporary. I wanted to become a premenopausal spinster. I spent hours reading classics in my shitty armchair and petting a foster cat. Anything long and tedious where women get punished. I didn’t dare post about it. Pretentious, I heard the reply guys in my head. I read sweet poems to try to feel better. I tried so hard to forget the Bible verses my mom had taught me. The silly, comforting verses and hymnals I used to erase queer feelings. Now they mocked me. Exodus had that thing about men in dresses. I lost the soothing power of poetry. I wanted a little answer to life’s wartime mystery. Instead my mind was cluttered by scraps of theology mixed with political social media maxims.
5 Ways to Abolish the Cop in Your Head!
I’d love to. But He’s very big and almighty and sometimes He wears a shepherd’s costume when He appears in my room. The worst sleep paralysis demon was the biblically accurate angel. Millions of eyes orbiting around a single sphere blazing with frightful glory.
As I trudged around Tribeca, past trophy wives walking their children like dogs and auteurs sipping lattes, I tried not to think about my own mom. I was ignoring her texts just like my landlord’s. The only texts I wanted to read were from men who called me their beautiful little slut. My phone beeped when I got to the crosswalk, and I checked to see who it was. By the time I looked up I was almost a pancake. I flipped off the BMW, but it had already charged ahead, swerving to avoid two kids with Gucci backpacks.
“I’l
Tribeca is a strange Charlie Brown cartoon. The kids really can sue you—or at least their celebrity-lawyer parents can.
Despite the daily recklessness I encountered, I had yet to see a car crash in New York. I’d crashed a car once. When I was sixteen, I walked out of conversion therapy and wrapped my mom’s car around a telephone pole. My therapist had said it was harder to go straight once you’d tasted the forbidden fruit. Imagine it, the fuck worth eternal damnation.
* * *
The hardware man yelled across the store about drywall while he copied the keys. He didn’t smile at me. The store smelled like mildew and steel, thousands of tools in plastic boxes and lots and lots of Spackle. When he waved me back to the counter, I saw him check out my tits. My boss got mad when I didn’t wear a bra, but she never said anything, she just glared at them. It was too dangerous for her to verbalize. I knew I was supposed to butch it up just the right amount for her—if I looked too made-up she’d call me a gender traitor, but I’d be in equally hot water if I looked too manly. Balance is the key to everything, especially when you’re trying not to get fired. That morning, it wasn’t a choice, I just didn’t have the energy to look through my laundry.
My friends warned me to turn the other cheek to misogyny, especially from other women. But whenever I got clocked by a joke I felt like I was being watched. How chill was I? How big was my claim on womanhood? When people said they hated women “as a joke,” I looked nervous and shifted the conversation. When people said women were weak, I metabolized it, eroticized it, and kept moving. I think that made people believe I was kind.
My phone pinged again reminding me I hadn’t read that text. It wasn’t my landlord or my mom. It was my ex-girlfriend Ash. She was still one of my best friends, even if she lived in Indiana.
girl i’m literally begging you to join the cause
i just watched three girls go down on each other
this could all be yours for the low, low cost of a plane ticket
Ash had started one of those all-trans rural communes. In college we had an on-again, off-again thing and I hadn’t dated another trans girl since. My friend Hazel always said I was a repressed lesbian. None of my friends could understand what I saw in men.
The men I saw were carpenters, gamers, married, straight, bi, kinky, kind, cruel. I tried to stop asking questions after a while. They were all going to go home to beautiful women. Women with jobs and smooth arms and smooth thoughts. One of my exes was a freegan who taught me how to dumpster dive. Or tried to anyway. Mostly I picked at stale bagels for a week before realizing he never texted me first. Each failed lover spurred me to reexamine my skin-care routine. I walked through wind tunnels formed by huge towers hunting for high-end moisturizers. Every time I tried out a new mud mask, the Tribeca moms complimented me on my glow.
Ash sent a picture of two trans girls in latex bondage gear feeling each other up against a giant oak tree.
this is the future trans anarchists want
I didn’t realize her commune had any political affiliation. I looked closer and realized there was a deer strung up behind them.
Miss u babe
Her life took place on a different shore than mine. Everything and everyone moved for her like Moses parting the Red Sea. When people stared at her on the street she turned to them and said, “Hello!” with sunny Midwestern aggression. Meanwhile I spent hours scrolling past the Hot Freelance Girls, wishing I had their bodies and copying their diets: black coffee, apple, banana, oatmeal. A stolen salad from Whole Foods. As I bit into my banana, I scrolled my phone to see if I’d updated my grocery list. I made and deleted lists. Lists of faults, accomplishments, things to do, books read, books to read, the worst fruits, cosmetics to try. I checked them to soothe myself. Once I listed everyone who had cum inside me. It was a short list: my rapist.
I thought it was funny. My ex Ryan hated it. He was the kind of Brooklyn white guy to react if you critiqued the micro-identity he’d carefully formed through years of scrolling. He downplayed his Supreme addiction in favor of Male Feminist discourse, David Lynch’s coffee line, and Roberto Bolaño’s “complicated engagement with femicide and surrealism.” He asked me to go to Film Forum a few times a month and as much as I enjoyed a seven-hour movie, I usually tried to find an excuse not to.
“We should go camping sometime,” he said once.
“What will you do when we run out of IPA?” I replied.
He didn’t talk to me for an hour after that. Then I went down on him and ignored the tranny porn he put on in the background. He was kind of ugly in a way that made cis girls afraid of him, but I didn’t have anything better going on. I was a good fixer though, so we carried on for a while. Eventually Ryan called me a misandrist after I told him the porn he watched was kinda fucked-up. If I was a misandrist, why did I want a husband so badly? We broke up when he moved to San Diego to work for a tech firm. After he left, I karaoked Joni Mitchell songs and my friend Xiomara held my hair back in the bathroom. Then I dated the freegan, then a boring NYU twink who took me to terrible plays about climate change. We ate ramen in silence, and he walked too far ahead of me. Afterward, I started hooking up with trans guys. Sometimes when they texted me to hook up, they asked how I was feeling first.
As I walked the rest of the way back to the store, I thought about the time Ash fingered me in a gas station bathroom off the I-5.
I realized too late how long I had been wandering around Tribeca staring at stray cats. When I walked back in the store my boss gave me a disgruntled sigh. I played with a tiny toy drum and gave her a half-hearted smile.
“Got the keys,” I said.
“I’m going to the bank,” she said. “And I’m getting a salad. I think I’m just gonna take a long lunch.”
As soon as she was out the door, her strappy sandals clicking on the sidewalk, I opened the store computer, signed into my email, and tried to write. It was my favorite thing, journaling about the depression walks I took in search of hazelnut coffee. My friends did not tell me the things I wrote were good, but they did say congratulations with the strained voices of people bored at a party. I thought I understood the college graduates who cynically moved in and out of the city, kissed one another on rooftops, never invited me out, and fought for the same three entry-level media jobs. I looked down on them. It was easy to be principled when no one was offering me anything.
I was debating whether or not to take a babysitting gig when my boss came back in with a soy matcha latte. The foam was full of shredded psychoactive mushroom bits swimming around like ancient ocean bacteria. Almost no one had come in all day. I spent most of my time reading about the Famous Trans-Girl Actress’s affair with a married cis man.
“Well. How’d we do?” she asked, tapping her nails on the plastic lid of her drink. I could tell by the way she grasped the cup that something was off.
“Fine. Not too many people came in.”
“How many?”
“I didn’t count,” I lied. She wouldn’t like the answer.
She sighed and sat down on a pink metal chair. “I think we’re going to have to close.”
“What?” I jerked.
“We haven’t had that many sales. The pipes in the basement burst. I can’t afford it.”
There had been no warning, no indication. Every so often my paycheck was a few days late, but that was beyond normal. Just how things went in bureaucratic America.
“How much do you have in the bank?”
“I don’t have enough for payroll.” My boss looked over at me with a single tear in her eye. Her icy demeanor melted into a heroic display of grief. She started apologizing, hysterically fighting back sobs. “It’s just such a bad time—and I know this is awful. I have to think of my kid, I have to make sure everything goes well for her.”
“For her,” I said.
I thought about flashing my tits but merely flipped her off instead. She wasn’t worth it. I stormed out and called Hazel, furious at the indecency of my boss. I was the aggrieved party, I was the one who would struggle.
