The Rabbit Hutch

This chapter presents a snapshot of activity in the different apartments. The jaded older man in C12, the teenager in C10, and the young mother in C8 all go online to find connections and distractions from real life. The mother, Hope, who is struggling with post-natal depression “has developed a phobia of her baby’s eyes” (12). She considers that they look too round and outraged, and they remind her of unpleasant things, such as the man who used a shovel to hit her window. She has had bouts of depression in the past and finds that motherhood is nothing like the miracle they promised it would be in Catholic school. She is lonely as her husband works at a construction site all day and does not understand what she is going through, although he says he wishes he could take her pain.

When he comes home, her husband is gracious about his dinner of fish sticks and delivers the bad news that Elsie Blitz, the star of Hope’s favorite show Meet the Neighbors, has died. The show is part of a matrilineal tradition in Hope’s family, beginning from the time when her mother watched it with her grandmother. Now Hope watches it when she cannot sleep. Elsie Blitz, who played Suzie Evans, was the perfect, perky, tap-dancing child. While Elsie Blitz was in her eighties, Hope perennially saw her as an 11-year-old. Hope knows she should be sad but cannot access the feeling. She thinks about telling her husband of her phobia of their baby’s eyes and then breaks down crying.

Below in C6, an elderly couple, Reggie and Ida, are watching television, and Ida complains that Hope and her husband have been dropping their dead mice out the window. She complains that “these kids […] don’t care about community” and that they make too much noise, either by having loud, Hollywood-style sex or because of the “wailing baby” (24). Ida determines that she and Reggie should drop the mouse back on their doormat. Reggie dissents, thinking that they will start a war.

The chapter ends in apartment C2, showing a jar of maraschino cherries on a lonely woman’s nightstand.

On July 15, two days before she exits her body, Blandine goes to the laundromat. She thinks about the latest urban revitalization project, which, in her opinion, will destroy Vacca Vale by getting rid of the lush park in Chastity Valley. At the laundromat, she spots a meek-looking woman in her forties and asks her if she lives in the Rabbit Hutch. This is the lonely woman from C2, who was described as having a jar of maraschino cherries on her nightstand in the previous chapter. Blandine, who lives in C4 posits that “it’s weird […] living so close to people you know nothing about” (30). Then she asks the woman, whose name is Joan Kowalski, if she believes in an afterlife. Joan says that she does as she is Catholic. Blandine advocates that Joan should read Dante’s Divine Comedy as Purgatorio is similar to Vacca Vale.

Blandine reads the cues that Joan wishes to be left alone, but she worries that she will drown in her own frightening energy if she stops talking. So she goes on about a range of female Catholic mystics who loved suffering, chastised their flesh, and became engaged to Jesus. Blandine feels opposed to the “fundamental selfishness” involved in the mystics’ lives and likens their secluded vocation to “an elevated form of masturbation (35). She thinks that no life can be truly ethical unless one can challenge systemic injustice. However, she does not know how to live such a life herself.

Joan is surprised to hear that Blandine is only 18 and that she is not in college. Blandine tells Joan that she is going to try mysticism as she wants to exit her body. She and Joan finally connect over the fact that they live amongst other people but do not quite believe they are real. Joan makes an excuse and leaves the laundromat.

After, Blandine feels as though she has “some kind of social impairment,” as she always seems to be feeling or interacting too much or too little, “never the proper amount” (38). She is aware that others find her disconcerting. She then takes her fake blood bottles, voodoo dolls, and animal skeletons to the Vacca Vale Country Club.

This article, written by Araceli Gonzalez on July 16, explains how the urban developers who were meeting at the Vacca Vale Country Club had their plans derailed by the animal bones, fake blood, and voodoo dolls that Blandine sent flying through the ceiling vents. All the objects fell onto the developers while they were eating dinner. A private detective, Ruby Grubb, has been assigned to look for the culprit. They suspect an ecoterrorist is behind the stunt since a lot of trees will need to be cut down to facilitate the developers’ plan. They suspect an experienced criminal but also someone small enough to fit inside the air vent.

The article reveals that the Vacca Vale Revitalization Plan aims to place luxury condominiums in Chastity Valley, transforming the town from “a dying postindustrial city into a startup hub, attracting talent from around the world” (40). It also states that unemployment is at 11.7% and that there are 30,000 more rats than people in Vacca Vale. Other disasters such as a spike in crime and floods have contributed to its ranking first on Newsweek’s list of “Top Ten Dying American Cities” (40). Construction is due to begin in August, overseen by Benjamin Ritter, a superstar developer. The intention is to move the city away from the shell of its dying automobile industry and rebrand it as a new tech hub.

The article ends by soliciting the townspeople’s collaboration in finding the criminal.

Joan Kowalski of C2 is forty and believes that her most defining characteristic is the freckles on her eyelids. She works at Restinpeace.com screening obituary comments for offensive content. She has lived in Vacca Vale her entire life and is now in the La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, which was built by a Christian philanthropist. He chose a French word to project charm and chic over the falling-apart building. In the early 20th century, the building housed factory workers, and its walls were adorned with rabbit wallpaper and brass rabbit lamps. On Tuesday, July 16, she spots the news story about the attack on the development project dinner and is especially unnerved by the voodoo dolls. Joan, who fears the supernatural, remembers her encounter with Blandine at the laundromat, whom she views as “elven” and “phantomized” as though she is the Ghost of Christmas Past from her favorite novel, A Christmas Carol. Joan is suddenly paranoid and wonders if anyone else can see Blandine.

Joan’s boss, Anne Shropshire, reprimands her oversight in missing an offensive comment on Elsie Blitz’s obituary. Joan tells Anne that the comment was emailed in by Elsie Blitz’s son, who found her censorship of his remark inappropriate as his relationship with the deceased meant that he could provide a frank evaluation of her life. As thousands of new tributes flooded in, Joan considered that the son’s remark could be buried. Anne, however, does not share her point of view, emphasizing that the man was “some completely unknown user” and that mean-spirited remarks are unacceptable regardless of who the commenter is (49). She urges Joan to remember that she could be “a guardian angel” for grievers or a “knife-twister” and that she must choose between the two (51).

This chapter comprises Elsie Blitz’s obituary and is dated Tuesday, July 16. Elsie Blitz has written a form of auto-obituary. She reminds her readers that “we are interconnected and interdependent, no matter how fiercely narcissism reigns” (52). After relating that a quarter of her ashes will go to the highest bidder on eBay, she shares a list of life lessons, including “marry at least twice” and “believe in ghosts but not God, unless your conception of God is much like a ghost” (55).

She shares that prior to getting terminally ill, she believed that she would live forever and advises readers against harboring this delusion. When Elsie had a poolside visitation by a personified death, her impulse was to call her son. She negotiated a three-month extension to her life with Death but reached the end of her life hearing nothing from her son. She visited the beloved, pygmy-toed sloths she was obsessed with for the last time. She feels guilty about being a bad mother and concludes that both fame and death are “lonely and boring” (62).

This chapter is written from the first-person perspective of Jack, one of Blandine’s three male roommates. The four found an apartment together at The Rabbit Hutch after aging out of their childhood foster homes. After participating in an Independence Workshop, they received subsidies toward housing and healthcare.

At first, Jack and his other two male housemates, handsome Malik and awkward Todd, were indifferent to Blandine, judging her as weird and hating her “phony name” (63). All three guys fell in love with Blandine at the same time, although the narrator suspects that Todd loves Malik more and is too shy to say it. Jack is jealous of Malik’s perfect skin, handsomeness, and talent in the kitchen—he is always cooking for Blandine. Although Todd and Jack went to the same high school, he knows little about him, only that he won a prize for his drawings. However, Todd has mystery, and the narrator is envious of him because he is “probably the one Blandine would’ve liked best” (69).

Jack guesses that Blandine’s life events were “fucking bad” owing to the traumatized way she scrubs her hands with steel wool and her collection of animal bones. When she is out, the narrator snoops in her room, which is full of spooky things like Venus flytraps and taped-up internet biographies of obscure people. While Blandine is a deep thinker, she is the only one of the foster kids who did not graduate from high school. She refused to apply to an Ivy League college, despite her guidance counselor’s recommendations.

The group begins their animal sacrifices when Jack challenges Malik to start killing for Blandine. He accepts as a way to prove his love.

This chapter comprises the online responses to Elsie Blitz’s Memorial, dated July 16. Many of the tributes are reverential, gushing, or curious about the self-authored obituary. However, a contributor who goes by the pseudonym “Abominable Glow Man” writes diatribes about how she is a “COLDSLUT […] NARCISSIST” and “OPIOID ADDICT” and how she ruined many lives including his own (77).

Elsie’s son, Moses Robert Blitz, writes a mental health blog and attends a cocktail party on July 16th in Los Angeles following his mother’s death. The party is meant to celebrate an album release, but the host is more interested in retreating to his room with two young women and a cocker spaniel. A pregnant woman asks him about his mental health blog and whether he is a psychologist or otherwise qualified to discuss the topic. He feels awkward and thinks about the skin condition that makes him fantasize “about taking a fork to his skin” (80). He says that he only chronicles his own mental health, and the woman says that his blog “sounds just as navel-gazing and bereft of meaningful content as everybody else’s blog” (80). He protests that understanding one’s self makes you better qualified to understand others. When the woman leaves, making the excuse that she will throw up, Moses is relieved. He looks at his phone, which is full of messages of consolation for his bereavement. He intends to fly to Chicago that night and head to Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Blandine works at Ampersand, a diner filled with hipster freelancers, four times a week. The types who frequent the café seem mysteriously absent from day-to-day life in Vacca Vale in general. This morning, she watches people read the article about her attack on the country club meeting.

She watches a mother and a college student come to a lengthy but polite negotiation about a chair. The mother seems to be expecting a big man, her daughter’s father. However, the man who arrives is short and not as big as she expected. The young daughter wants little to do with the father, and he starts to feel defeated. The woman talks about herself while the father stares at Blandine’s breasts.

Blandine’s presence elicits confessions from the people she serves. Blandine, who “wants to crawl out of the grotesque receptacle of her body” resents these strangers who use it “as a storage unit for their heaviest information” (87).

Joan has been finding the noise from Blandine’s flat unbearable, just as she finds all background noise unbearable. She rides the tram where she is assailed by all sorts of noise pollution by the other passengers. However, at the end of the ride, she annoys a woman by asking to pet a dog whose vest reads “Don’t pet me” (92).

This chapter returns to Jack’s first-person perspective. Jack details the start of the animal sacrifices in Apartment C4. He starts by poaching a half-dead fish by the river. He feels guilty for killing the fish and feels that it is teaching him his “soul was faulty” (95). The fish tells him that although he was trapped in the foster care system, he was lucky that no one hurt him. He lived with his grandmother before he was 11 and has few memories from that time. Psychologists suggest he is repressing trauma, but Jack feels that everything seems fake, and he longs to hurt someone just to test if he and they are real.

When he gets home with the dead fish, Malik and Todd are unimpressed, telling him anyone could kill a fish. Meanwhile, Malik offers Blandine the elaborate meal he has prepared, but she insists that she is “not hungry” (99). Blandine emerges, and Jack presents her with the dead fish. She laughs, puts her hand on Jack’s chest, and calls him a clown. Jack experiences it as a miracle. In his triumph, he slops the fish on the plate Malik prepared for Blandine.

Moses Blitz dips his entire body in the liquid from broken glow sticks in order to “fiddle with people” (103). The solution in the glow sticks is chemical dibutyl phthalate—DBP—which is banned in the European Union as it can enhance genetic mutations and be toxic to ecosystems. Blitz is indifferent to all these harms as they do not directly affect him.

Blitz was easily able to track down Joan, the woman who deleted his obituary comment, and seeks to punish her. He is heading to Vacca Vale and crafts a schedule for what he will do when he gets there. His planner entry for 2:00am reads “KAPOW!” (105). At the airport terminal, he is buzzing with the desire to punish Joan.

On the plane, he Googles Joan and Vacca Vale. He dismisses the place as a has-been town responsible for electing the kinds of demagogues that threaten the country’s future, but then he spots that there used to be a Zorn factory, the kind of cars his mother favored. He remembers how he took a joyride in her 1932 Presidential Coupe, and to punish him, Elsie enrolled him in an Old Norse intensive in Reykjavik. Moses is missing his mother’s funeral to punish Joan.

This chapter describes the meeting between James Yager, Vacca Vale’s high school music teacher, and Blandine, who was then 17, known as Tiffany Watkins, enrolled at St. Philomena’s, and “insecure, cerebral, and enraged” (110). Tiffany won a scholarship to attend St. Philomena’s private school and wrote essays that were so astonishing they elicited suspicions of plagiarism. Tiffany got sent to James’s music room because her English teacher said that she needed to act. She developed a crush on James, but he was wary of her. He told her to audition for a dystopian play about mannequin worship. Tiffany, who was a compelling actress, got the lead.

Her desire for James increased, and she sensed that he was the only living person she wanted to touch. When she told a joke that made him laugh breathlessly, the mutual attraction between them was established, especially as 42-year-old James’ marriage to a woman named Meg was on the rocks. At first, James became Tiffany’s mentor and began asking that she stay later. The first time he played a piece by Maurice Ravel for her on the piano and they touched, James backtracked and reestablished an appropriate distance between them. Tiffany felt “like a ghost with nothing to haunt” and was so overcome that later that night, she screamed into her pillow (118).

At the same time, James and his wife had sex for the first time in months. Although they both orgasmed, she turned away from him after, making him feel lonely. While he was still interested in Meg, the feeling was not mutual.

In February, James asked Tiffany to babysit his children in a desire to reframe their relationship as wholesome and proper. When James drove her to his home, Tiffany was astonished to find a mansion. He explained that it was from his wife’s side of the family; she is a Zorn Automobile heiress. When Tiffany met Meg, a successful vegan YouTuber and cookbook author, she discovered she was bookish and intelligent. Tiffany found the tastefully decorated house so moving that she nearly cried. She considered that he was showing her his life so she wouldn’t destroy it.

As he drove Tiffany back to her foster home, he wondered whether they had exorcised their desire. However, in March, James invited Tiffany to his home and picked her up in his car. She demanded that he play Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” on the piano in the beautiful music room. Tiffany and James then slept together, and she orgasmed. It felt like a mystical experience but also asserted that she was real. In the morning, James was cold and formal. He ghosted her, refusing her pleas to talk.

However, at the end of spring break, he apologized to her for his conduct on a walk in Chastity Valley. She realized that what she loved most about him was the fancy piano and all the things he represented. She came to think of their time together as “the Situation” and struggled to find meaning in it. She legally changed her name to Blandine after a teenage martyr who was publicly tortured by the Romans, and she picked up more shifts at her job. She immersed herself in the lives of medieval mystics, namely Hildegard von Bingen, a complete polymath. Like a typical mystic, Blandine was born sickly because her mother was high at the time of her birth, and Blandine experienced withdrawal symptoms.

In the aftermath of “the Situation,” Blandine enrolled in the “Independence Workshop,” which enabled her to transition into independent living. Still, she felt she lived in a “psychological fog” and that she was only partially real and generally unfit for human contact. She agreed to move into an apartment with three guys, forgoing thoughts of college despite her guidance counselor’s protestations and the principal’s email saying she had betrayed the generosity of their scholarship.

She still thinks often about James Yager and judges that the most unfair thing about the Situation is that it was “always going to mean infinitely more to me than it meant to you, and you fucking knew it from the start” (157). One day in the Vacca Vale Public Library, Blandine receives an email from Zoe Collins, a girl who was a senior while Blandine was a freshman. The email attests to the fact that Yager slept with Collins, too.