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 endur-ance 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 presi-dents 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 mod-els 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: marsh-mallow 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 iras-cible. 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 stom-ach 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 FUCKYOUR UMBRELLA. FJP SOUTHSIDE. MAYOR BARRINGTON IS AFASCIST. MARRY ME, JESSIE. @BAXTER_BILLIONAIRE: BOSS DJ. LOCKUP THE SOCIALISTS!!! Someone painted over BLACKLIVES 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 AJOB, 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.
Taken in sum, the graffiti on the Zorn factories looks just like the internet.