The Rabbit Hutch

Blandine of Leon, the second-century martyr, was savagely tortured by Romans at the age of 15. However, she only died when her executioners “resorted to a minimalist approach and stabbed her with a dagger” (167). Tiffany Watkins chose Blandine as her namesake as a means of transcending her corporeality. Six months after the name change was made legal, she discovered that Blandine was Latin for “mild,” whereas her given name, Tiffany, meant “manifestation of God” in Greek (167).

Fifteen hours before her bodily ecstasy, Blandine is walking to Chastity Valley, thinking of an article she read about a woman called Pearl. Pearl was born with her abdominal organs in inverted positions; however, unusually for such a baby, she survived to be 99. Blandine imagines someone sending her an email with the article about Pearl and captioning it with “reminded me of you” (170). However, she thinks that if medical students ever cut her open, they would find Vacca Vale inside. Chastity Valley provides respite from the city’s urban decline. It was constructed during the 1918 flu to provide recreational space for the city during the pandemic.

The Zorn family made its first automobile in Vacca Vale in 1904, and the family soon became famous for its original and luxurious car designs. For decades, the factory thrived; however, in 1943, Claude Zorn took over the business and drove it into decline. The factory declared bankruptcy, and the factories closed. The Zorn factory caused environmental damage because thousands of gallons of benzene leaked into the local sewage system and polluted the groundwater. This hurt Vacca Vale’s human population, and the Zorn family had to pay compensation for diseases such as lymphoma and leukemia. After 1963, Zorn became the scapegoat for everything that went wrong in Vacca Vale.

As she approaches the valley, Blandine feels as though she can still sense the closed-down factories, which “pollute the air with their history, just as they once polluted it with dark chemical smoke” (178). She imagines how the town will be overrun with startups and development projects.

On the morning of July 17th, Moses Blitz is at St. Jadwiga’s Catholic Church instead of his mother’s funeral. He seeks to get away from his mother, even though she took him for his baptism, first communion, and confirmation in a Catholic church after her overdose.

Father Tim, the priest, interrupts his reverie to tell him that the church has had a visit from a peregrine falcon, a species that is on the verge of extinction. Moses accepts going to confession and at the same time, imagines the progression of his mother’s funeral, which will feature many “blank grievers,” strangers who believed they knew Elsie. Elsie used to think that relationships were imaginary, and only when approaching her death did she begin to think of them as necessary and acknowledged that people existed outside her head. She thought she had ruined everything for her son. Elsie was an actress first and foremost and had little bandwidth to properly mother Moses. Elsie found the changes pregnancy wrought in her body troubling, and after the birth, she told her nannies to keep the baby away from her in a sunless room.

Moses confesses that he is glad to be missing his mother’s funeral, denouncing her as “a narcissistic opioid addict who never should have had a child” (193). He confesses that he likes to paint his body in glow paint and go around spooking people as a punishment for either bullying him or having sex with his mother. He says that he wanted to punish his ex-girlfriend Jamie for cheating on him but refrained because she was smart and likely to know what had happened. Father Tim asks to hear more about Moses’s mother.

When Father Tim learns Moses’s name, he tells him the biblical story of Moses. He says Moses’s mother “abandoned him to protect him” when she put him inside a basket in the river to comply with the pharaoh’s commands that all baby boys be fed to the Nile (198). Moses is irate, thinking that his mother was not trying to protect him at all and was just selfish. Father Tim offers that Moses’s mother abandoned him to protect him from herself. Toward the end of her life, when she had lupus, she requested more morphine to help stave off the pain and got addicted. Father Tim posits that Elsie was trying to escape the same thing she was trying to protect her son from. Father Tim confesses that it might be his last day in the priesthood as “there’s a rot at the center of the Catholic Church,” and God does not answer him (208).

While Moses avoided Elsie toward the end of her life, her obsessive assistant Clare wore him down with calls and emails before finally turning up at his house to insist that he visit his dying mother. On her deathbed, Elsie was frail but self-absorbed, unable to resist making digs at her son for his skin-scratching or being unpopular. However, she protested when he said he would leave. He reminded her that she was never around when he was in agony. She had five requests before she dies, including that Moses should check in on her pygmy-toed sloths. Then, she requested that he never forgive her for her misdemeanors as a mother, and he should avenge himself against her maternity. At the end of the confession, Father Tim asks Moses whether his mother happened to “play Susie Evans on that old show” (215).

The quotes in this chapter include Hildegard’s views on creation, bodies, and souls. They incorporate some environmentalist statements such as “the earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!” (217). There is also the message that the beauty of creation reveals itself in all beings equally. Jack’s tracing of the word “nothing” with his fingernail corresponds to the quote where Lucifer the devil “in his perverse will, wished to elevate himself to nothingness, all that he wished to create was indeed nothing, and he fell into it and could not stand, since he had no ground beneath him” (218).

Six-and-a-half hours before Blandine exits her body, she is with Jack in local real estate developer Maxwell Pinky’s loft, which is in a renovated automobile factory. Blandine has asked Jack to take her to the loft to prepare for the second part of her sabotage plan, which she privately thinks of as “the Undevelopment” (220). Jack is Pinky’s dog walker. She intends to hang a life-sized, white-suited voodoo doll from the ceiling rafters in Pinky’s bedroom. She will stuff the doll with mud and animal bones. Jack is wary as there are cameras everywhere.

Jack tells Blandine that the story of the dinner that Blandine sabotaged is all over social media; she hasn’t seen it because she does not use social media. Jack points to the Samoyed dogs and tells Blandine that they need their walk. Blandine considers 35-year-old Maxwell Pinky who is the only developer from Vacca Vale, the biggest traitor. She checks out Pinky’s bedroom and imagines where she will place her doll and how “she’ll throw dirt all over his freaky white everything” (226).

Jack challenges Blandine, telling her that she wants everyone to hate the development plan as much as she does. He points out how it will stimulate the economy and states that Pinky allegedly came from poverty and wants to “help Vacca Vale get out of the gutter” (227). Blandine flushes and tells Jack that it suits him to contradict people’s opinions. Jack is pleased and challenges Blandine further, asking why she does not leave if she hates Vacca Vale so much. He thinks she looks down on everyone there. She protests that she only looks down on those in positions of power, not everyone else. Then she angrily insists that she is never going to leave Vacca Vale.

Jack says that this is ridiculous and that he would get out of Vacca Vale if he could. However, he thinks it would be easier for Blandine to leave because of her academic record. He then imagines that she wanted to leave Vacca Vale but that something went wrong and prevented her from doing so. He demands to know why she dropped out of high school. She insists that they must stay in Vacca Vale and that they are the only ones who could save it. Then she finds herself seeing Jack as more manly and is compulsively attracted to him. She imagines a future for them together as the Samoyeds whine for their walk. Blandine approaches Jack, and he touches a scratch on her arm. Both register the moment of attraction. She imagines that she will be able to walk up to his door that night.

Prior to becoming a mother, Hope was a waitress and married to Anthony, a man who made her “happy for more than an hour at a time” and soothed her worry that she lacked the gene for happiness (233). She remembers a time 10 months earlier when she and Anthony were evacuated to the Wooden Lady motel to escape the flood that rendered the Rabbit Hutch uninhabitable. While Anthony went out to get a pizza, Hope watched the news and found that Mayor Barrington was denying that the flood was a result of climate change. She then watched an episode of Meet the Neighbors, a show about a family of city misfits moving to a farm town. Elsie Blitz, who began working at age six, starred as the youngest child, Susie. Hope panicked when Anthony did not return after a while, and a woman she met in the corridor told her that “this is what God does when He wants to start over” (242). Anthony returned, and Hope began to feel calm again. Anthony gave Hope a massage, and she was filled with desire. He asked her what she wanted, and she gave him oral sex. Then he went down on her, and after, they had sex. She had an ecstatic experience that made it seem as if they were one with the whole world.

The couple had been trying to conceive for 13 months, and, unable to afford fertility treatments, they avoided the doctor, as though “afraid they would receive bad news that they could do nothing to reverse” (246). Hope was worried as she knew she wanted a baby with extreme clarity. However, the motel sex worked, and she became pregnant.

Moses has chosen to stay at the Wooden Lady motel during his sojourn in Vacca Vale owing to its terrible reviews. He pretends to be a Frenchman called Pierre and even wears a black turtleneck. He is in Room 57, where Hope and Anthony’s baby was conceived 10 months earlier. He falls asleep and wakes up to “evidence of a wet dream” (251). He then proceeds to drink and smoke cinematically, his dirty martini being mainly olive brine. He opens up his laptop to his mental health blog, which caters to people who have the same condition of multicolored fibers as him and are therefore dermis-atypical as opposed to dermis-typical. With his blog, he seeks to create a community around the condition and boost readers’ self-esteem by likening them to artists, prophets, and other types of geniuses. Moses thinks he is pretty perfect, and he reflects on the punishment he will inflict on Joan Kowalski.

Moses receives an email from a man seeking advice called Mr. Boddy, who destroyed his life and his marriage following an encounter with a woman called Valentina at his wife’s party. Valentina is obsessed with Clue, a board game featuring a limited number of murder weapons. Mr. Boddy keeps dreaming that he is on the brink of murdering his wife, so he pretends that he is having an affair in order to have an excuse for living in a motel. There, he lives as a recluse who keeps checking whether Valentina is real. He began itching all the time.

Blandine’s three male roommates perform rabbit sacrifices when she is out. Although none of them are violent by nature, in the middle of a sacrifice, it is “like we were possessed” (271). The deaths are gruesome; the rabbits scream and the boys use knives, water, and their hands. Jack, who appears to be giving a police report, begs Officer Stevens to not make him describe it.

When Moses reads Mr. Boddy’s email, he is disturbed by the things they have in common—both staying in motels, paying in cash, and giving false names. He imagines him at the Wooden Lady. Feeling he cannot help Mr. Boddy, he deletes his email. He receives a call from Jamie, his ex-girlfriend, expressing her condolences. Moses wants to know if she is still with Kevin, the man she left him for. She is. He then moves to insult what he perceives as Jamie’s pseudo-intellectualism. He says that she was forever speaking about Peter Singer’s experiment called “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle” and demands that she explain the experiment, knowing “that if he can make her feel small enough, he can make her do anything […] except stay with him” (276).

In a more neutral voice than he expects, she relates that the experiment asks whether one would save a drowning child at a great distance as well as one nearby. She asks him what made him think of the experiment, and he begins to say that Singer is unrealistic for wanting people to save all the lives. Then a voice interrupts and tells Moses to leave Jamie alone or risk a restraining order. He thinks it is Kevin, but it’s her sister, Ruth. He threatens to send “compromising photos” of Jamie to an exaggerated number of followers, and Ruth hangs up.

After a while, he cannot bear his own company. Although he was going to ambush Joan at 2:00am, he decides he will leave at nine o’clock. He finds that he is afraid to touch his metal doorknob. He is so lonely that he resurrects Mr. Boddy’s message from the garbage.

Joan, on July 17, takes her boss’ advice seriously and deletes 81 obituary comments that she considers inappropriate. The comments range from diatribes on the deceased to irrelevant matters.

On Wednesday at about six-thirty in the evening, Blandine sits in her apartment contemplating her encounter with Jack in Pinky’s loft and the “ghost of Jack’s touch lingering on her skin” (286). She sits on the floor listening to Hildegard von Bingen’s “O eterne Deus” with the headphones Yager gave her, plucking out her leg hairs. She cannot concentrate, so she decides to watch television with Todd. Todd is annoyed when she interrupts his favorite TV show and asks him many questions. Blandine gets the hint but is transfixed by the Valley development advertisement, in which a famous actor describes home. The ad is so moving that Todd has tears in his eyes. When Blandine comments on this, Todd tells her to shut up.

When Blandine leaves, Todd watches the five Vacca Vale development commercials repeatedly and cries hard. He can sense a storm brewing and eats the last of his radishes.

Joan’s Aunt Tammy, a woman who adopts disabled pets and dyes her hair crimson, is her favorite relative. She sends Joan gifts on holidays and gushing cards that sing her praises. Joan means to write thank you notes to her aunt but always forgets. After this, Joan begins to resent the gifts, eventually marching them over to Penny, a hoarder who refers to Joan as “Mama Bangs” and hopes that her junk will grow in value over the years. Penny wonders if Joan is a virgin because of her demure clothes. This causes Joan to blush as she remembers Toby Hornby at Community College, with whom she almost had sex and then did three rosaries as penance. She then planned to lose her virginity at 35 to a man named JP Hidalgo after the Restinpeace.com Christmas Party. However, JP was too shy and avoided Joan thereafter.

Joan marvels at how two people have interrogated her in the past two days after managing “a sort of genetic predisposition toward invisibility for forty years” (300). Penny tells Joan that she has the feeling that something bad will happen to her and that she saw “a weird car” that has been parked for hours (301). She adds that she saw a blank-faced guy in his fifties (who corresponds to Moses’s description) looking at Joan’s building. As Joan’s car is not working, she has to walk herself home and to the grocery store. She feels happy and grateful for all she has in the world and hums a popular song.

At 6:57 p.m., exactly 166 minutes before she exits her body, Blandine heads to the Valley from the Rabbit Hutch. It takes her 20 minutes to walk there, and when she arrives, she spots a banner for the development. She relaxes in the greenery but is harassed by a man. She bares her teeth and hisses at him, and he goes away, stating that she is crazy.

When she finds her favorite reading spot, she encounters a sleeping man who matches Moses’s description. She is unnerved by him but tries to become immersed in her book about mystics. When he awakes, she tries to engage him in conversation about the clovers that she has been studying. The man examines her sadly and tells her she is beautiful. He leaves, and Blandine continues reading about the mystics. She considers Hildegard her best friend. She hears a bleat and considers that this is one of the Chastity Valley goats that she never sees, and she questions whether Hildegard “summoned the goat into reality” (319). She sees that the goat is injured. As she has no phone, she decides she will carry to goat to safety. She calls the goat Hildegard von Vacca Vale.

Then Blandine spots James Yager. She is overwhelmed, and he asks if she needs some help with the goat.

Around sunset on Wednesday, July 17, Blandine’s male roommates are in Todd’s room getting drunk and high. Malik is celebrating because he has got a new job teaching robots emotions and thinks it will help him on his way to becoming a Hollywood actor. Jack is tired of Malik’s bragging and begins to read a takeout menu on the floor beside Todd’s mattress, on which Todd has listed all the major American fires. Jack shouts at Todd, asking why he cannot be more normal. He replies that he is merely “keeping track” (327).

Jack thinks back to the moment with Blandine in the loft and wonders if she was just using him for something. He recalls that she overheard him stating that he had a job walking Pinky’s dogs.

Malik then comes out with the astonishing statement that the benzene contamination in the 1960s was not Zorn’s fault but was the result of alien warfare. He wants to plan something special with Blandine. They hear Blandine enter with the goat.

Blandine carries Hildegard the goat up to her apartment while James Yager lingers in his vehicle outside the Rabbit Hutch. While she has not been able to stop shaking, Yager reacts to her as though she is any other student. Then she sets up Hildegard in her bedroom and runs out of the apartment without locking the door behind her. She goes and sits in Yager’s car and, hands trembling, tells him about the structural inequalities in their relationship. He states that he also came from poverty and married for money, and he reveals that he is now divorced. He admits that he initially wanted to apologize to her and that he felt deeply remorseful about his actions; on learning that she dropped out of school, he asked every guidance counselor to reach out to her. She says that she hates him, even as she admits to herself that he is “unethically handsome, his jawline doing its boring but effective work on her body” (336).

James then points out that he can smell burning from downtown. An electric storm is brewing. Blandine wants some resolution to the situation and punches him in the stomach to express her anger. Then she notices how skinny and sick he looks. She ends up collapsing in a hysterical heap on his chest. She asks James whether anything like this has happened before, and he lies until she mentions Zoe Collins, the girl who contacted her after she dropped out. James’s initial reaction is that of “an animal purging its weight so it can run for its life” (346). He then tries to say that Zoe was obsessed with him and that he had to go out of his way to avoid her. Blandine is sick of his excuses and lets out a primal scream. She sees herself and Zoe as part of the same mold: outcasts that James could make feel special. James promises to show her evidence, not being able to stand the thought of her believing Zoe’s lie. However, Blandine recoils when he tries to take her hand, and she vows that he will never touch her again. She gets out of his car and runs home through the rain.

Clare Delacruz, Elsie Blitz’s underpaid assistant, tweets about the actress’ ashes being sold for $2.3 million, with the money going to the Pygmy Three-Toed Sloth Preservation. Clare, however, is in dire financial straits, having to choose between mending the broken glass on her windshield or paying rent.