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 ABED 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.