Look at me, everyone says when no one’s looking.
Downtown, as she nears the Valley’s entrance, Blandine passes an alley of garbage cans, against which a large blue sign leans. WELCOME TO VACCAVALE, INDIANA: THE CROSSROADS OF AMERICA. The city speaks to her. Won’t stop speaking to her. As she walks, she can hear the dead Zorn factories, even though she can’t see them. She can always hear them. A hum, chilled and wet and dissonant. In 1967, a group of men tried to burn down the factory where they once worked, but its interior was too damp to catch fire. The factory’s voices are loudest at night, in February, and after a week of insomnia. The factories pollute the air with their history, just as they once polluted it with dark chemical smoke. The price of overabundance.
Relics, ruins, ghosts—the Zorn factories insist on themselves. Listening to them now, Blandine realizes that they have no idea that they are about to be gutted and transformed into a bad imitation of Silicon Valley. One form of spookiness supplanted by another. Open concept, white walls, ping-pong tables, IPAs in the office fridge. Millennial pink. Fiddle-leaf figs. A corporate gymnasium and cafeteria, a home away from home so that workers would never leave work. Leather sofas, artisanal throw pillows, numerous ways to make coffee. Soon, these factories would resemble Instagram. Oblivious to the plan, the factories loom and groan. Rusty and trapped in their expired power, they march to the east until they vanish into the hallowed glimmer of the Valley.
Blandine doesn’t need medical students to open her body to know that her city lives inside it. She doesn’t need someone to send her the article about Pearl to know that she and Pearl are related. She doesn’t need anyone else to hear the factories to know that the factories are addressing her, addressing everyone.
We will invade you with all of our nothing, the factories say, because it’s all we have left.
Blandine pauses outside a frayed white shop front. She passes it every day but has yet to determine what it sells or whether it’s open. Broken blinds and a shadowy interior. She peers through the cloudy glass to observe overturned chairs, stacks of paper, guts of sinks, apple cores. An upright piano, missing its teeth. A sign pressed against the window, facing the sidewalk.
NOW OFFERINGLIGHT, it says.
The Rotten Truth
Moses Robert Blitz does not attend his mother’s funeral on the morning of Wednesday, July seventeenth, but he finds himself in a church nonetheless. He can’t check into his motel until ten in the morning, and it was nine when he arrived in Vacca Vale, so he’s been driving around the city without a destination, looking for a site to see. Vacca Vale reminds Moses of the afterlife. He considered visiting the Zorn Museum, but it’s closed—only open two days a week. So when he saw St. Jadwiga’s Catholic Church, its Gothic Revival elegance out of place, Moses parked his rental car, leaving his bags in the trunk.
The sun blasts like a medical fluorescent light trying to expose the fungi. He is the fungi. Vacca Vale, Indiana, is intolerably hot and humid, and he did not pack the right clothes. St. Jadwiga stands across the street from his motel, at an intersection two thousand miles from his mother’s ashes, and the force that drew him inside it was the same that drew him to a fast-food breakfast at the airport in Chicago this morning. He wants relief. He wants to get away from her. He wants America to dismantle the problem because America constructed it. Physical distance lost its impact on Moses around the time the internet was born, and although he recognizes this, he is still unsettled when he faces the altar, so far from Los Angeles, and sees only Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz. He sees her in the Grim Reaper costume she wore one Halloween, fifty years ago—the only Halloween she spent with him. There was—still is, he suspects—a photo of it, fraudulently framed in her mansion, as though parenthood defined her history.
On the doors of the church, a sign on printer paper blasts a message of radical Christian welcome that Moses feels too cynical and sweaty to read. Inside, a baptismal font gurgles and tall windows of stained glass fill the church with color. A banner in affable font celebrates St. Jadwiga’s 170th anniversary. He sees no ventilation for air-conditioning, but the structure is chilly—either from strong insulation or supernatural forces, Moses concludes. He blesses himself with holy water, relieved when nothing happens, trying to clear his mother from the windshield of his psychology, thinking in social media posts. He is fifty-three years old.
When he was eleven, Moses was baptized, first-communioned, and confirmed, but it all happened in a rush, after Elsie nearly died of an overdose. In the spring following her accident, she clung to Catholicism—the religion of her parents and childhood—like the nearest flotation device in the deep end, initiating Moses as a kind of insurance. Moses did not object. He spent his childhood in a state of confusion, eager for organizing systems like math, science, and religion.
Against his will, he remembers Jamie, the last person he loved. Or sort of loved. Or at least tried to love. Jamie, with her crystals and tarot cards, essential oils and podcasts, astrology apps and sage. Dark angular hair chopped to her chin. Delicate face, theatrical cheekbones, soft skin. Flares of eczema behind her knees. Scent of cypress. Her youth was both a selling point and an embarrassment. “My ram,” she would call him. “My egocentric Aries ram.” Toward the end, she made many comments like: “I’m such an idiot! Aries and Libra are primal opposites in the zodiac—how could I expect you to respect my sexual boundaries?” Throughout their relationship, he found her devotion to the supernatural ridiculous, but now he can see that it was no different from his.
Walking deeper inside the church, he inhales as long as he can. He smells marriages, baptisms, funerals. Incense and bouquets. Beginnings and endings. He wants bacon. The architecture is gothic on a budget, with red carpet, a powder blue ceiling, dark wooden pews, stained glass, and a tabernacle that kindles Moses’s nostalgia for monarchies. An organ looms in the upper wing like a bouncer, and he feels the crawl of surveillance, as he often does; he scratches his skin.
He walks along the edges of the church, studying the stations of the cross, which are truly horrific—worse than a horror film. All the characters look Polish. It occurs to him that children see these images on a regular basis. He steps close to the sixth station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. It’s a mosaic of a woman holding a selfie of the messiah but marveling at the bleeding man. This one relaxes him. Veronica looks at Jesus like he is a shattering twist in the series finale of her favorite show. Moses finds her sexy—he finds all undivided attention sexy. Moses sits in a pew and retrieves his phone, investigating this church online to stave off an invasion of loneliness.
The search yields a website written entirely in future tense, a catalogue of St. Jadwiga parishioners over the decades. Kasper Wi?niewski will be born in 1843. He will emigrate from Poland to Vacca Vale, Indiana, at the age of seventeen. The website text is superimposed on a cartoon graveyard. Above it is a photo of Kasper, happy and young and training for war. In 1865, he will marry Magda Mazur in St. Jadwiga Church. Magda is the daughter of Filip Mazur, a successful peasant. There is no photo of Magda, and no definition of successful peasantry. They will have thirteen children, five of whom will perish before adulthood. Kasper will die of yellow fever in 1901, and Magda will die of stomach cancer in 1926. He will be remembered fondly for his pranks and his laugh, and she will be remembered as an avid reader, too solemn for her beauty. Mr. and Mrs. Wi?niewski will be buried in Immaculate Conception Cemetery, in locations known only to God.
The prophetic conjugation distresses Moses. Looking at the altar, he envisions Magda and Kasper linked in a chaste but enthusiastic wedding kiss. He wants to know more about Magda. He imagines her in a dirt yard, surrounded by a picket fence and a dozen yelping children, smoking a cigarette and glowering at a detective novel. He sees the youngest boy tugging at her skirt, saying, Mama, Mama, look at this, look what I can do, Mama, look at me. He sees her refusing to see him, reserving her beautiful, solemn attention for the fake paper world in her hands. He sees her in a Grim Reaper costume.
It is so natural for Moses to care about the people he finds online, and nearly impossible for him to care about the people he finds in so-called reality.
A bird cry jolts Moses from his screen. Three miniature cries follow. He looks around, bewildered.