[blog] faster than light

I think a lot about dead horses. In the last year they’ve become a fixation of mine. My favorites are long-dead Japanese thoroughbreds with estates held by millionaires, because it’s easy to be parasocial with them. They’ll never know I exist (they’re dead) (and horses) (there’s a lot horses don’t know). I used to be a horse girl, so my inner child has been going ape with her formerly encyclopedic knowledge of all things equine. Lately, for instance, I’m relearning horse colors. Blue roan, palomino, dapple gray. Most of them are brown, but you wouldn’t believe how many kinds of brown a horse can be.

When I was a kid, my dad read me Seabiscuit, a biography following the American racehorse and his team, over and over again. (He did voices, and skipped the “fuck” words.) So I’ve always had a soft spot for horse stories. There’s a lot of poetry in the lives of racehorses. They’re very powerful and very, very fragile. Horses aren’t actually very well-built, and we aren’t always careful with them — animal abuse in horse racing is its own topic — but also, sometimes, bad things happen without explanation. The unexplained will grow into us and become a haunting. Then it becomes a story we tell each other.

One of my favorite dead Japanese horses was named Agnes Tachyon. He debuted as a racer the year I was born. Reportedly he was very noisy and fussy at mealtimes, and would cry for company if he was left alone. He was a beautiful red-brown color (“chestnut”) with white fetlocks on his back legs, which made it look like he was wearing a demure little pair of socks.

Tachyon never lost. He ran four races and in his second ever, a grade-three race, he set a record. After that he went to the Yayoi Sho, an even more prolific grade-two race that ramps up to Japan’s Triple Crown, where track conditions were abysmal. Horses are as heavy as they are fast. They were struggling to free up their hooves from the cloying weight of mud and grass. Tachyon took the lead early, and defeated his peers by five lengths. Imagine a horse running its heart out (and remember that horses are always bigger than you think), and then another just behind him, and another, another, another, another, end-to-end. That was how far ahead Tachyon was when he flew past the post.

Here is where I imagine being in the stands, cheeks pinking in the bitter spring air, and forgetting that cars and planes and bullet trains can go hundreds of miles per hour — certain to your core that you’d just witnessed the fastest thing to ever exist.

That was at Nakayama Racecourse in Chiba Prefecture. One month later, Tachyon was back for the Satsuki Sho, which is the first race in the Triple Crown. In the last meters of the race, he rocketed ahead from fourth place and won by one-and-a-half lengths. Recall, again, that horses are bigger than you think. Horses also tend to prefer running a certain way, and their jockeys will adopt certain strategies to accommodate or to level the playing field. Tachyon was a sprinter in his second race, a runaway in his third, then a surger. I’d like to think that he was never bored.

Anyway, after the Satsuki Sho, he developed a bowed tendon (tendonitis, in layman’s terms). It’s pretty common in horses. It’s not fatal, but running on it can be, and Tachyon had people who loved him. They retired him at three years old — too young for that sort of thing to happen, really.

Incidentally, racehorses have amazing names. Go look up thoroughbred names if you’re in the mood for a smile. Agnes was a clan name, and I like it because it’s sort of soft and proper-sounding for a family of powerhouse horses. Tachyon came from the hypothetical tachyonic particle, which, if it exists, would travel faster than light.

Following his retirement, Tachyon became known as a “phantom” Triple Crown winner. (The other two Crowns, the Japanese Derby and Kikuka Sho, went on without him.) People had to speculate about how he might have run; he was one of the strongest in his generation, or would have been. Everyone seemed to think that if not for the bad, inexplicable thing, he would’ve won it all.

Instead he went on to sire many successful horses as a stud, becoming known as a leading sire in Japan like his father, Sunday Silence. The sons and daughters of Agnes Tachyon were really, really fast. And bad things tended to happen to them young, career-ending injuries after massive wins, so they retired because retired is, of course, better than dead. It can be hard to say why horses die: stress, strain, accidents, lapses in care. Sometimes the chips just fall out of their favor.

Tachyon lived to 11 years old, and died suddenly of heart failure in 2009. He was retired on a breeding farm in Hokkaido and apparently, he loved to run. I’d hope that most thoroughbreds enjoy running. We bred it into their blood, but also horses were frolicking around on turf before humans had money to bet on them, right? So I’d like to think they’re happy. They run on track for a few years and then they get to run somewhere new, and beautiful, forever.

There’s this sense that Tachyon’s story was a tragedy. We’ll never know how good he really was. His row went missing from those tiny printed tables of starts and odds, throwing equations off-balance, rattling projected earnings, putting pinpricks in a race schedule someone held up to the sun. Undefeated in four starts. That’s how they’d mythologize him. Gone too soon, a perfect victim of biological entropy.

Maybe he wanted to run in more proper races, but tracks are loud and crowded, right? Thoroughbreds are already high-strung as it is. Horses run close and hard and brutal, and jockeys still use switches. Maybe retirement was everything Tachyon wanted in his little pea brain. Maybe it was strange and frightening. Maybe it’s better to burn bright and flame out, but that wasn’t what happened — instead, people got to love him for another eight years.

I wish horses could talk so I could be a magical girl with a sassy, fabulous steed, but also because I can’t stop thinking about Agnes Tachyon. I can’t not wonder whether he knew that something ended. I want to know whether he missed the sweat and adrenaline, if he was ever angry, or hated it all and still missed it for some reason. Or if life was just good and then good in a different way, without explanation.

Some questions don’t have answers. We’ve never seen anything faster than light.

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