The Rabbit Hutch, page 15
She was mystifying. She was invincible. She was fifteen years old.
After a week or so of failed attempts, her executioners resorted to a minimalist approach and stabbed her with a dagger. She finally died.
Infatuated by the idea of such a faith, starstruck by a person who existed nearly two thousand years before she did, a young woman formerly known as Tiffany Jean Watkins chose Blandine as her namesake in an effort to transcend the troublesome corporeality into which she was born and achieve untouchability. Blandine of Lyon: patron saint of servant girls, torture victims, and those falsely accused of cannibalism. Tiffany/Blandine found an account of the martyr online in Papyrus font, printed it out at the library, and taped it above her bed.
Six months after Tiffany/Blandine had submitted her court papers, proof of birth, and $210, she discovered that the name Blandine is Latin for “mild,” while Tiffany is Greek for “manifestation of God.”
Pearl
On the morning of Wednesday, July seventeenth, fifteen hours before she exits her body, Blandine walks from La Lapinière to the Valley. She couldn’t sleep last night. Now it’s dawn, the city stirring to life around her, and as she walks, Blandine remembers an article she recently read about a woman named Pearl. Pearl’s abdominal organs were inverted from normal human anatomy, but her heart was in the right place. Situs inversus with levocardia—a diagnosis that Pearl never received. No one discovered this peculiar fact of her body until a group of medical students opened Pearl’s corpse to study her cardiovascular cavity. After struggling to find a major vessel, they traced the mystery through her biological design until it revealed its cause.
One in every 22,000 babies is born with the condition. Of those, one in 50 million survives to adulthood. After living a relatively healthy life, Pearl died at the age of ninety-nine. Natural causes, according to the article. She owned a pet store. She had three adult children and five grandchildren. In a portrait of Pearl from the fifties, her face was symmetrical, her cheeks rosy, her auburn hair curled into a cloud around her face, her smile demure, a botanic emerald broach pinned to her collar. Everything about her appearance belied the truth of her body, a body who kept the spectacle, hindrance, and impossibility of itself a secret from everyone. Even from its tenant.
To get to the entrance of the Valley, Blandine walks through the southern part of downtown Vacca Vale, passing rows of foreclosed shops and boarded-up houses. The establishments in operation include a sports bar, a fast-food chain, a tanning salon, a thrift store, a liquor store, a ramshackle church, and a vape store. She passes a tin-paneled shop with vacant lots on either side of it and plywood nailed to its windows. A rusty door. Vines reclaiming the brick foundation. lil daddy’s fashions & accessories, says its sign. Hand-painted with delicate lettering and roses. Down the street, another solitary shop of butter-yellow siding slouches toward the street. No windows, no visible entrance. Behind it, a small parking lot is empty except for a stroller. for a bed call———anytime, says a board fastened to the shop front, but a block of yellow obscures the phone number. At the intersection menaces a large message board with replaceable black letters hanging from it as people might cling to a cliff. Many letters are missing from its original sentence. Now it reads: S. T A A E O P R N @ ALL C S T. Across the intersection, Blandine passes St. Jadwiga’s Catholic Church. A gothic wonder built of brick and stone by fifty families from Poland and Germany in the 1800s. Modeled on a French basilica, two towers flank a rose window. Gold crosses rise from each peak of the church, and the baroque windows are frosted in white trim. Overall, the church looks like an impressive construction of gingerbread. Above the window stands a statue of St. Jadwiga, the first female monarch of Poland, with her hands outstretched. On its door hangs a sheet of computer paper with a message in Papyrus: Welcome refugees, prisoners, prostitutes, and outcasts. Welcome to the sick, the disabled, the homeless. Fresh tomatoes. Cool beds. Bread bread bread this week.
Birds chirp rebelliously in their metallic habitat. A few early-morning commuters drive sleepily on the roads. It’s too early for the odor of cars, so Blandine thanks the air for its unpolluted splendor, inhaling the perfume of summer grass and recent rain. A lavender sky lights up, gestures wearily toward the future. As she walks through the warm morning breeze, Blandine fantasizes about someone emailing her the article about Pearl. The person would say: Reminded me of you. In the fantasy, the person knows Blandine better than she knows herself, and their message sinks through her skin like a poem, asserting its truth before revealing its meaning. It is not a normal fantasy, she understands. But who could call “normal” good, anymore? Who could call it anything?
Blandine suspects that if medical students sliced open her body, they would find a miniature Vacca Vale nestled inside it. No organs at all. A network of highways, disposable attempts at human ascendency, a plundered place existing despite its posture of nonexistence.
Splitting the center of her would be the Vacca Vale River, curving up and over and eventually pouring out of her head, into Lake Michigan. It’s 210 miles long. Flooding more every year. In Vacca Vale, many bridges arch across the river, stitching the urban fabric of their city together, offering one equalizer: no matter who you are, how much money you have, or where you live, you’re close to the river. Improbably—phenomenally—local fish activists installed a salmon ladder in this river, near the courthouse. The activists count and identify the fish that pass through it every year, chronicling the numbers as they dwindle. They publish their findings in the Vacca Vale Gazette every autumn.
Along the river, to the north of downtown, stands a neighborhood of historic houses. Mansions perched on sloping minty lawns in various states of majesty or decay, built by Zorn money in the early twentieth century. A few are now museums. One is a bed-and-breakfast. One belongs to—or at least, once belonged to—Blandine’s high school theater director, a man whom she tries not to think about. He was everyone for a while. When she fails to avoid thinking about him, she pinches her thigh until her nails leave parentheses of red in her skin.
To the west of those houses scatter a few gloomy businesses: the Vacca Vale cinema, a strip mall, the Wooden Lady Motel, and the Zorn Museum. At the city’s center, downtown is built in a ring, anchored by a collection of municipal buildings that now crumble like cakes. Across from the courthouse stands Ampersand, where Blandine has worked as a waitress for two years. Down the street from the women’s shelter looms a compound of brick buildings erected in 1919 to house underpaid factory workers. Some were transitory and lived alone. Some shared apartments with other employees. Others lived there with their families. The apartments feature a dearth of windows and closets, small rooms, poor plumbing, retrofitted electrical and heating systems. A third of the compound was converted into La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, so Blandine knows the building well.
To the north of the historic houses sprawls industrial farmland, west to east, on both sides of the Vacca Vale River. Corn and soybean crops, freaky and inconceivable in scale. In the summer, they become an assault of chemical green, expanding like cultish odes to geometry for acres and acres. A patina of health desperately concealing and sealing a future of dust. Of drought. Of lifeless dirt that no machine, chemical, company, or person can defibrillate. This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia. Developers pounced on the opportunity, promising safety, man-made retention ponds, gated communities. A glut of beige. Two competing megachurches. Suburbanites can now buy their clothes at an enclosed shopping mall, buy their groceries at a supermarket that smells of imported turmeric and new paint. Deer keep stumbling into yards, confused and hungry. Drinking from the sprinklers.
Spared from such a brutal fate for a hundred years, Chastity Valley, the best part of Vacca Vale, lives southeast of downtown. Over five hundred acres, the Valley is shaped like an arrow pointing east. Constructed during the 1918 flu, it was Vacca Vale’s effort to provide safe recreational space for a prosperous city during a pandemic. Framed in lush plants, the Valley meanders between manicured public fields and thickets of undisturbed nature. On the western edge, there is a small lake, now suffocated with algae blooms. A boathouse greets its edge, uniting the wanderer with a path that will take her through the parade grounds, past the barbecue area, past the memorial lilac grove, beyond overgrown soccer and baseball fields, through a small, serene paddock with an oval fountain at its center, past a sinister carousel, until, finally, the path deposits its wanderer into the park’s largest meadow—the Valley itself. Of course, it’s not a valley at all because no mountains flank it, but the designer of the park believed that the best nature words should belong to every person of every region. The Midwest, he believed, need not be as flat as its topography. In the large meadow, the wanderer will encounter picnics and babies, Frisbees and quarrels, wine and laughter. Increasingly: drones. Increasingly: her own homicidal fury at them.
If she wanders off the path through the forest to a southern pocket, she’ll reach Lover’s Hollow, a dipping overgrown sanctuary obscured by forest. From the sixties through the eighties, people escaped to Lover’s Hollow at night for socially condemned sex, pleasure they couldn’t safely enjoy anywhere else. That a place called Lover’s Hollow existed within a place called Chastity Valley gave Blandine some hope about human resilience in the face of human brutality. Despite her research, she never figured out why people stopped meeting in Lover’s Hollow in the eighties. Did others find out? Did police show up? Was the AIDS crisis responsible? Were the men attacked? Patterns of history force Blandine to admit: yes, yes, yes, and probably yes. Now Lover’s Hollow is roped off due to damage from last year’s flood. Half the park is. The city promises to repair the destruction, attaching their promises to the revitalization plan. Toward the eastern edge of the park, a grove of pine trees spells ZORN from above.
Finally, southwest of downtown, in a far corner of Blandine’s body, medical students would find a campus of hollowed factories. In Vacca Vale, they haunt the sky and the birds with their remembrance of a supposedly better time, reliving their history over and over like a sad, drunk father who was once the high school quarterback.
Once the largest car manufacturing facility in America, Zorn Automobiles began as a humble wagon in 1852, born from the rough and wind-chapped hands of Woodrow Huxley Zorn III. At the age of twenty-four, he built the wagon to transport his family from Pennsylvania to Indiana. There, they would join his brother Cecil on a farm. The wagon traveled through the chill of November, surviving miles of mud and rain and the first snow of the season. When Woodrow, his wife, his three children, and their horse arrived in Vacca Vale, people stopped to admire their wagon. It was attractive, aerodynamic, sturdy. A design they’d never seen before. Impressed, townspeople began to commission Woodrow to make more. He needed the money, so he accepted.
Using his brother’s barn as a workshop, Woodrow accumulated tools and labored alone. Plagued by self-criticism, shyness, bouts of depression, and a religious conviction that self-confidence was hubris, Woodrow fulfilled the orders mechanically, improving the design with each wagon he built, shrugging off the praise when he received it. When he finally accepted that he was not only competent but in fact brilliant at a hard and necessary job, Zorn Automobiles was born again. It was born a third and final time when Cecil—a garrulous, genial businessman at heart—said, “Together, we could make something great. Something that could last.”
Over the decades, the wagons became buggies, then carriages. In 1904, Zorn made its first automobile. The original design was electric, but observing a trend in the market, Cecil pressured Woodrow to design a gasoline model instead. In 1920, Zorn made its last wagon, calling it: the Last Wagon. Zorn, a metallic family of winners, entered every endurance race, won most. In 1922, a Zorn automobile drove for seventy-nine hours and fifty-five minutes, from New York to San Francisco, winning first place. Zorns were known for their breathtaking and original designs, prettier and stronger than most houses that Blandine saw in Vacca Vale decades later. The 1926 Duplex Phaeton, red and glossy as wealth. The 1929 Vacca Vale Fire Truck, black leather seat in the front, no roof, gold embossment. Luxury saviors. The 1931 Roadster, the 1947 VD Pickup. The Zorns were not just cars—they were sculptures. Even presidents loved them. Ulysses S. Grant owned a Brewster Landau. Harrison owned seven Zorns, but his favorite was his Brougham. A Phaeton for McKinley. A black Zorn Barouche drove Lincoln to the theater where he was assassinated. The yellow Peg of 1909 shuttled congresspeople around the Capitol. Yellow, blocky, wacky. Futuristic. Those horse-drawn models were often roofless, and for good reason. Zorn was limitless.
Blandine recalls an elementary school trip to the Zorn Museum, where she was automatically transfixed by a peculiar 1922 model: marshmallow exterior, white tire rims, stained glass, a red velvet interior, and an actual lamp clinging to the panel between the windows, the design arresting her with its pointless beauty. It wasn’t until she peered inside and saw a wreath of paper flowers over a small coffin that she realized it was a children’s hearse.
For decades, Zorn Automobiles was a miracle, a heartbeat, an empire. Cecil Zorn believed that they had dominion because God wanted them to have it. Woodrow disagreed. The success of his company troubled him, and as his fame and fortune accrued, he became increasingly irascible. Minor flaws in manufacturing would send him into a rage, and he became so obsessed with the perfection of his models, he set up a bed in one of the factories, slept there all week in order to oversee every moment of production. His wife and children learned to predict his rages and sidestep them, which was easy to do in a many-roomed mansion overlooking the river, especially when Woodrow was gone.
In 1907, as Woodrow accepted his approaching death from stomach cancer, he left the company to his eldest son, Vincent. At the time, Vincent was living as a painter in Paris. He wanted nothing to do with Zorn Automobiles, but after many desperate letters from his mother, he dutifully returned to Indiana, convincing Delphine, his Parisian wife, to accompany him. There, they threw opulent parties in the Zorn family mansion, neglecting the company but accepting its profits. It was Cecil’s youngest son, Edward, who kept the company afloat throughout the early twentieth century. Edward Zorn devoted himself to an American dream of self-determination, self-reliance, self-actualization. His father was half right: Zorn Automobiles was great. In 1943, Vincent’s son Claude took over the business and steadily drove it into the ground. Because they were American and because they were a dream, Zorn Automobiles could not last forever. Finally, Zorn Automobiles declared bankruptcy. They were wagons, buggies, carriages, automobiles, and then, after about a hundred years of supremacy, Zorn was nothing at all. Most of the remaining members of the Zorn family scattered across the globe.
Shortly after the factories closed, an anonymous report reached the Indiana Department of Health and Human Services: a storage tank at a Zorn plant had leaked thousands of gallons of benzene into the Vacca Vale sewage system, contaminating the groundwater. Benzene, the seventeenth most commonly produced chemical in America, is a volatile organic compound that quickly evaporates into air. A clear, flammable liquid with a sweet odor. In humans, benzene attacks the central nervous system and the immune system. Before the report even found the IDHH, the benzene had already ascended as a gas into the Vacca Vale air, polluting houses, workplaces, schools, churches. Unaware of the dangers, residents inhaled the vapor for months before state health officials finally tested. The symptoms were mild at first: headaches, eye irritation, fatigue, blurred vision, confusion, tremors, nausea. When the news finally broke, Zorn offered hotels and gift cards for residents forced to evacuate their homes. Lawsuit after lawsuit struck the company. But the real punishments wouldn’t surface until it was too late to prevent them: anemia, miscarriage, birth defects, infertility, bone marrow dysplasia. Lymphoma. Leukemia. Zorn made fat checks to the families they shattered, but a check couldn’t resurrect anybody. In total, Zorn paid a fraction of its yearly revenue.
After 1963, Zorn—a superhero in previous generations—became the Vacca Vale bogeyman. Zorn took away Christmas. Zorn was why parents drank themselves out of commission. Zorn was why you saw your dad cry. Zorn was why you didn’t have a dad. Why he overdosed or dealt. Why he was doing time. Why he shot himself in the head. Even though there were plenty of questions—when, who, how much, how to clean, what to pay—nobody questioned Zorn’s responsibility for the poisoning. By the time health officials conducted their investigation, the conclusion surprised exactly no one. Zorn Automobiles had abandoned the whole region, bankrupting the economy and slashing jobs, yanking pensions and insurance like tablecloths from elaborate sets of china. Then, as if the psychological and economic damage weren’t enough, Zorn mutated the people they were leaving behind—that’s how the residents saw it.
The story took root in the lore of the city. Teachers gave lessons on the benzene contamination in middle school. The residents were relieved to find a vessel for their anger. Even the children born well after Zorn closed needed someone to blame for their permanently overcast skies, the needles in the alleys, the robberies. Everyone wanted an enemy.
Graffiti now splashes across the exteriors of the factories. Once, Blandine bought a disposable camera to photograph the distressing pandemonium of expression she found there. go fuck your umbrella. fjp southside. mayor barrington is a fascist. marry me, jessie. @baxter_billionaire: boss dj. lock up the socialists!!! Someone painted over black lives matter to write blue lives matter. Another sprayed over both to write all lives matter. Another drew an arrow to the chaos of messages and graffitied a weeping Earth. A machine gun. Angel wings. A falcon wearing an American flag as a cape. A marijuana leaf, grinning. legalize happiness, says the leaf. get a job, someone wrote in response. A poster depicting a fetus between two burger buns. obama burger, it says. The pope with an anti-Semitic speech bubble. Many cocks. Many hearts. Many initials. Messages and symbols of manifold xenophobia. A peace sign. A red rabbit in a crown and a despotic glare, nine feet tall, holding a smaller white rabbit by the scruff of its neck.
