“Why?”
After they hatch in the moonlit sea, the crabs spend a month in the water, growing. Most years, almost none survive this period. Once or twice a decade, however, a great population of baby crabs emerges from the sea uneaten. For nine days, they journey across the island to the forest where their parents live, braving new threats, including, but not limited to, the yellow crazy ant. Moses will never discover what conditions encourage this abundance of life, or what kind of reception the offspring experience upon their arrival, or how they know where to go. But the crabs do survive, sometimes, despite the odds.
Father Tim is quiet for a long time. “Hey,” he finally says. “Your mother didn’t happen to play Susie Evans on that old show, did she?”
A List of Hildegard Quotes, Written in a Notebook on Blandine’s Nightstand, Which Jack Reads on Wednesday Morning, Tracing the Word Nothing on His Skin with a Fingernail
But God watered some human beings so that humanity would not become a complete mockery.
Paradise is a pleasant place, flourishing in the fresh greenness of flowers and herbs and the delights of all spices, filled with exquisite perfumes, adorned with the joys of the blessed.
The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!
The horror buffeted the dark membrane with a massive impact of sounds and storms and sharp stones great and small.
The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.
Drink beer for health!
Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.
Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you have heaven and earth, and all of creation. You are a world—everything is hidden in you.
The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.
The living light says: the paths of the scriptures lead directly to the high mountain, where the flowers grow and the costly aromatic herbs, where a pleasant wind blows, bringing forth their powerful fragrance; where the roses and lilies reveal their shining faces.
Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly.
I will utterly destroy you, death, for I will take from you those by whom you think you can live, so that you will be called a useless corpse!
The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.
For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans.
But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.
I am Hildegard. I know the cost of keeping silent and I know the cost of speaking out.
But because Lucifer, 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.
Purebreds
About six and a half hours before Blandine Watkins exits her body, she stands with her roommate Jack in the loft of local real estate developer Maxwell Pinky. Two purebred Samoyeds pant at the door. The air-conditioning relieves all of them from the afternoon’s humidity. Pinky leaves the air on for his dogs, Jack explains incredulously.
There’s no air-conditioning at the Rabbit Hutch. Only half the tenants have window units, and the residents of Apartment C4—Blandine and her roommates—are not among them.
“I don’t know, Blandine. He told me not to touch anything. I think he’s got cameras and stuff. I can’t lose this job. I keep getting fired from shit and I just—”
“Don’t worry,” she says, glancing back at him. “I just love architecture.”
Blandine is familiarizing herself with the loft to prepare for Phase Two of her sabotage plan, which she refers to as the Undevelopment in the privacy of her mind. Jack knows nothing of her scheme, but he senses something felonious in her as she creeps from room to room.
They’ve been in the loft for ten minutes, and she hasn’t touched the dogs.
“I guess it’s a nice place, huh?” Jack is nervous, pocketing and unpocketing his hands, fiddling with the leashes.
“I wonder how much it costs.”
“I think some are for rent and some are for purchase.”
“I bet it’s over two thousand a month,” says Blandine.
“Two thousand!”
“I don’t know.”
Jack notices with a blend of disappointment and relief that, outside of Apartment C4, Blandine is only a bit prettier than the average girl. He assesses her sallow complexion and knobby limbs, her prepubescent body, her starched white hair, dark at the roots, her lack of ass. Still, there is something hypnotic about her. She emanates the same force he associates with ghosts, extraterrestrials, magic, miracles. He sees her flaws, feels a little repulsed, and yet he can’t kick the enchantment out of his body. It occurs to him that he might actually like her personality.
“Who would pay that much to live in Vacca Vale?” he asks.
“Someone who wants to own Vacca Vale.”
It’s a renovated automobile factory, one of Pinky’s luxury constructions, located downtown, on the banks of the polluted river, just a ten-minute walk from the Rabbit Hutch. The building is unoccupied now, with the air of a television set, but when the tech talent relocates in Vacca Vale, Pinky is confident that the condominiums will sell right away. He wants coastal urban people to feel at home in this complex. Sixteen-foot ceilings, cement floors washed in a hue of jade, large windows. Light pours in from all sides, despite Vacca Vale’s permacloud. Perfect temperature, new appliances, showers with too many settings. Climate, safety, and music controlled on one’s phone. A sauna and a gym in the basement, grills and sofas on the roof. The sun casts Blandine’s hair into an aura around her skull. Jack fixes his attention on the bruises that cloud her legs.
Blandine studies the wooden beams on the ceiling, sucking in her cheeks, tipping her head back. There are too many lemons in this apartment—lemons on the kitchen counter, lemons in the ceramic bowl on the dining table, lemons in a glass jar on the bookshelf. She didn’t think it was possible to hate Maxwell Pinky more than she already did, but the profusion of lemons does something to her. Blandine already knows where Jack keeps the key to this loft. Phase Two will be so much easier than Phase One, and the thought of it drugs her. Admittedly, it will be difficult to find a time when no one is home. She’ll need at least seven minutes to hang the life-sized, white-suited voodoo doll from a rafter in Pinky’s bedroom. She plans to stuff the doll with mud, leaves, and animal bones from the Valley, which will make it heavy.
“You say there are cameras?” Blandine asks.
“Yeah, he told me so on the first day. He thought I was gonna steal something, I guess. I didn’t even tell him I was in the system before this because he already had all these, like, notions about me, you know? Just from looking at me. I can’t describe what he did or said exactly, but I got this feeling that he expected me to be some kind of bad guy, and that really pissed me off, but I had to take the job, since I got fired from the hardware store, and . . . did I tell you about that? Oh, yeah, they fired me for being high too many times. So but what’s nice about dog walking is you can be high whenever you want. The stakes are really low. And I guess it makes sense for Pinky to have cameras, though, since he’s got a lot of people coming in and out of here—cleaning lady, me, his assistant, people dropping off groceries and shit. I guess he has to be suspicious of people, since he’s so rich. Rich people are never alone, is what I’ve learned. There’s an older lady who comes by all the time to clean the bathtubs and vacuum the curtains and stuff. Maybe he’s fucking her, too. Maybe she’s his mother. I don’t know. He’s always with this entourage of women who are about twenty years older than him? I don’t really get it. But anyway, he’s gotta have surveillance, with all the people coming in and out. Plus, that fucked-up thing that happened at the dinner. He’s, like, tightened security since then, I think. That security guard in the lobby didn’t use to be there.” Chin-deep in his own babble, Jack gropes for some kind of ladder, hauls himself out of it. “Did you hear about that?”
“But where.”
“Where what?”
“Where are the cameras?”
Jack eyes her. Sensing his distrust, she spins around, does a little twirl, tosses a flirtatious laugh his way. “I just love technology.” She smiles. “We’ve never lived anywhere so futuristic. I mean, I haven’t. Have you?”
“Of course not.”
“And I didn’t hear about the dinner. What dinner?”
“You don’t know? It was all over the news.”
“I can’t keep up.”
“It was all over social media, too.”
“I don’t have social media.”