HORSEPOWER

Since that collision we call “conception”, I have always been a body inside a body. I was 14 the first time I had control of my carrier, the same age I discovered speed and direction. From inside the body, I controlled velocity. All that is to say, I learned how to drive.

Before the engine: the horse, who, like many marginalized and enslaved beings, helped build the railways, subways, military weapons of mass destruction, and automobiles. Unknowingly, horses provided both fuel and transport to the factories manufacturing the engines that would gradually replace them. Given their tendency to drop dead in city streets, I agree with Timothy Weinbach’s assessment that “for the often overworked and abused horses [this] was a blessing in disguise.”

With the engine came an acknowledgement of the labors that bore down on horses. In 1769, Scottish inventor James Watt patented the steam engine and with it derived a new unit of measurement: horsepower. As its name suggests, it measures the output of an engine or motor. In other words, Watt mythologized the horse’s body with new language about the power of a heart.

My first car was a 2008 seafoam green Ford Fusion. It came to our family lightly used, only meant to be temporary after my mom’s car was stolen. By the time I sent it to be scrapped near the end of 2022, it had 250,000 miles on its engine. Both mirrors had been replaced; it was scraped badly, a long silver scar on its left side that matched the replaced car hood that never fully closed. The air conditioning hadn’t worked in 5 years; mysterious stains were splattered across the once-tan seats, and my sister had plastered “Bob’s Burgers” themed stickers in various places after borrowing it for the weekend. It veered left when you lifted your hands from the wheel and groaned with every turn. We had named it “Frankie” (short for Frankenstein, though we now know the truth about the creature) because once she came to us, she was always being put together again. (We’re hard on all bodies in my family line.) Frankly (ha!) that car was a piece of shit. It’s a miracle it survived drives from Detroit to Boston to Canada and back again. Frankie clung to life harder than any roach I ever killed. And for that, I loved her more than anything.

I came of age in that car, it having seen me through several iterations of myself, all of which barrel into me on certain roads. If I wanted, I could build a timeline just through landmarks. When I drive in Detroit, my mind is elsewhere, hands expertly guiding the car around potholes that deepen every winter and my feet easing through stop signs. Nothing needs a name—in my mind’s eye, I see it all so clearly. And each time I visit, for the most part, hardly anything has changed.

Not unlike Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, I am stirred by place:

“It’s hard for me to believe in [time]. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Some things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” (Morrison, p. 43)

During my most recent visit, my mother asked after noticing my silence: Does being here trigger you?

I don’t feel like myself here, I answered.

In reality (or perhaps out of reality), I feel too much of myself in Detroit. I see too much in Detroit, am jostled from one age to another across highways until I have to fight to remember when I am. I’ve mentioned before that time moves laterally when I’m in Detroit. There is a pulse in the air, a slow turning as though we exist in a carousel. Or a wheel.

Detroit’s nickname “The Motor City” is nearly self-explanatory. In just over a decade, Henry Ford revolutionized the auto industry—by 1920, Ford cranked out 20 million cars a year, an increase of over 1500% in production from 1910. So, it makes sense why city planners decided to model the Motor City after a wheel.

Consequently, for the mass production of cheap, affordable vehicles, former horse trails were expanded into roads, and there began the endless construction of highways that would soon span the entire state. According to the Michigan Department of Transportation, the state has a total of 120,256 miles of paved roadways and it’s estimated that 95 billion miles are driven on these roadways. Michigan has enough pavement to build a one-lane road from Earth to the moon. Naturally, stretches of road are under construction at any given time, though it takes just a winter to make them resemble a gravel driveway.

When I learned to drive, my mother imprinted a sense of urgency of moving with the flow of traffic. So, I was fourteen, not yet out of braces, at the helm of gleaming metal bulleting eighty miles an hour down I-75, a highway I could drive south to Miami if I didn’t want to stop. It is a city made for driving, all roads built to carry, thick concrete made to deliver, holding each one of us like an orchestra pit funneling a heartbeat to the sky. I am both the least of and most of myself when I can fling myself across the city like an arrow, bass so loud my teeth roll against one another, filling me until I don’t even need to sing. I miss every minute of it.

My favorite time to drive, though, is late at night. If it’s late enough, the hour closer to kissing dawn than dusk, some stretches are completely empty. But somehow, you can still hear every body in the city, all of them singing.

But I am not there, not relinquishing myself to the control of a two-ton body that, with a slight grind of the gears, could flatten me to be discovered as pressed powder in a compact mirror. And no one ever sings. Most of my days are quiet ones, hundreds of miles between me and my family turning about the wheel of the City. Away from all my family turning about the roulette wheel in the Greektown Casino. The chasm between us is my doing, me having fled from them just to return, over and over again, finding them older and different from the versions I last remember of them. With each visit, my mind is consistently buffering, trying to marry their current selves to the ones they were when I left the City.

Going back (home?) feels like a visit to a land unknown to me except for my body, that somehow feels the pulse of “rememory.” There is always a stirring in me—spirit disquieted, soul unsettled—in Detroit. All of me converges, steeped in bitterness and longing, unbelieving that it will always hurt like a brand searing its way into my chest, a Mustang raring to go.

I won’t reveal all that’d happened during my teenage years—forgetting can be intentional, too. Here, I am just trying to make an offering to my siblings, my past selves, anyone I had been so eager to abandon. (Maybe it’s not fair to say eager—I really did think if I stayed, I was going to die.) I cannot say the full story of us, hence all the fragments, the peeks into my childhood. Again, forgetting can be intentional, too. I am not trying to explain myself here—all this is to say the still-deepening chasm between my family and I began with my severing. This is to say that I am trying to withstand the pulsing of places in my memory, that I am hoping I do not have to stay a stranger. (I will be clear here—I will forever remain a stranger to my father.)

I speak of myself with so much lessening language: “I’m only,” “I’m not,” “rarely.” I can’t name everything taken out of me, and I am limited. Finite. And still, I have been subjecting myself to their hurt. I have felt for years (and still do) that without my family, without my siblings, I’ve lost the core parts necessary to move on. The heart’s chambers don’t beat on their own. All their hurt whirls through me, wildfires consuming the brush. Some consider fire a purification, a place to build again. And while I leave, abandoning my home time and time again, I have an intense desire to abandon every instinct I have in order to crawl back into the burning.

There is always a moment of breaking, when I begin to look back home fondly and reach for it. Somehow, even with my body urging me away, I am pulled back, under the illusion that I could go home and remain intact. Each time I return, it is with the hope I may leave unbroken. Clearly, I haven’t learned.

When horses break a limb, recovery is nearly impossible. They do not know to stay off the limb and redistribute their weight so the body may heal. The ripping persists, tissue breaking apart until it is irreparable. Horses do not know how to heal the break. They will never be free from the pain. Often, the solution is euthanization, a bullet or steel bolt to the head. It is the humane option, obliterating. Trying to heal the rupture is worse than a solemn surrender.

Do they curse their bodies, all their power now unbearable weight. Is it a betrayal they feel. Do they hope for the healing, or for the pain to stop. Do horses ever see the gunshot coming, welcome the cool metal preceding the end. Would they lean into the barrel, eyes wide, dark, begging. I would prefer that, a quick and painless death. Do they feel empty at the end. Does it feel like this. I know if I am always asking why it being home feels like this, then I should stop turning back, trying to restore the irreparable. I keep hoping to be wrong, and never stop wondering: am I just digging my heels in, only to widen the wound?

From Animal Cognition, Vol. 24:

Mirror self-recognition (MSR), investigated in primates and recently in non-primate species, is considered a measure of self-awareness. Nowadays, the only reliable test for investigating MSR potential skills consists in the untrained response to a visual body mark detected using a reflective surface. Here, we report the first evidence of MSR at group level in horses, by facing the weaknesses of methodology present in a previous pilot study.

Fourteen horses were used in a 4-phases mirror test (covered mirror, open mirror, invisible mark, visible colored mark). After engaging in a series of contingency behaviors (looking behind the mirror, peek-a-boo, head and tongue movements), our horses used the mirror surface to guide their movements towards their colored cheeks, thus showing that they can recognize themselves in a mirror. The analysis at the group level…showed that horses spent a longer time in scratching their faces when marked with the visible mark compared to the non-visible mark. This finding indicates that horses did not see the non-visible mark and that they did not touch their own face guided by the tactile sensation, suggesting the presence of MSR in horses.

Our horses used the mirror surface to guide their movements towards their faces previously marked, thus showing that they are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. They followed a sequence of behavioral steps towards the mirror before being marked…These steps are indicative of the cognitive processes leading animals to understand that the image reflected in the mirror is the image of self (Plotnik et al. 2006).

Every wound has an origin. All behavior has a cause, and “down horses” only follow the body’s direction. It is unnatural for them to lie despondently. Some are down for a few minutes or hours and will rise after a bit of respite and an extra push. Others abdicate their will, close their eyes to drift away. Cross their legs as if mid-gallop. Even in the end, the horse cannot help holding on to their body’s engineering. The organs collapse into a mass of flesh. Blood and bone convince skin to burst, a new blooming wound. Horses are still prey animals—a slow breath, still legs, and closed eyes are a death sentence. All the world built on its back, only for there to be no way to outrun the body.

It is no surprise that I’m stiff-boned, my hips so tight they’re uneven. Teeth half-surfaced beneath my gums. It does all settle at once, leading me to shuffle home with inflamed joints, an illness stirring in me. I shed my clothes the moment I limp through my front door, leave them sprawled across my living room floor. I jump, pull my hair out strand by strand, throw shit to see if anything sticks. Break my nails between the floorboards. Let the mouth’s blood puddle in my cheek, feel the crack of my ribs spreading. The pressure condenses, eyes blurring, my leg up, sinking. Just about ready to lay down and die.