The news anchor laughs again, turns to the camera. “Well, you heard it here first, folks!”
Cut to leafy monocrop in California. Doleful scientist in a white coat. Kale could be poisonous.
“Reggie,” Ida says. “Reggie.”
“What?”
“Turn it down. Something else I forgot.”
He sighs but obeys. “Well?”
“I found another dead mouse on the balcony.”
He blinks. “So?”
“It was killed in a trap.”
“You set a trap out there?”
“No,” Ida says significantly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I didn’t put a trap out there.”
He waits. “Okay?”
“Did you?” she asks.
“No.”
“Then it’s what I thought!”
“Thought what?”
“It’s those kids upstairs!” cries Ida like a detective in an old, bad movie. “Those newlyweds with the baby!”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Reginald. Listen. You’re not listening.”
“I am listening!”
“Those newlyweds are dropping their dead mice out the window.”
Reggie dabs his cigarette on the steel ashtray and considers. “Well, what would they do that for?” he asks reasonably.
“Who am I to say? Laziness. Selfishness. Socialism. I’m telling you: they trap the mice at their place, and they don’t want to deal with the bodies themselves, so they just—poof. Drop them out the window. Trap and all.” Ida smooths her thin white hair.
“You sure it’s them?” asks Reggie.
“All but positive.”
“How?”
“Saw it, once.”
“When?” demands Reggie.
“Last week. I was standing in the kitchen, making beets. What do I see? Dead body, falling from the sky.”
“You don’t think it’s somebody else?”
“Who’d it be? Alan? Sweet Alan? No—these kids, they don’t care about community. They have no concept of respect. First the sex, sex all the time, phony Hollywood sex—”
“We were all there,” mutters Reggie.
“And then the wailing baby. And now this! I’m telling you, Reggie.”
“Okay.” He angles the remote at the screen.
“I’m not finished.”
“What?”
“You need to drop it on their doormat.”
“Drop what?”
“That dead mouse. Trap and all.”
“Ida.”
“You have to do it. They need to learn their lesson.”
Reggie thinks, then smashes his fist on the armrest. “This is how wars start!”
“Oh, please.” Ida rolls her eyes.
“I mean it!”
“You’re so quick to call me dramatic, but the minute I ask you to do something you don’t want to do, you go and say a thing like—”
“Why can’t you let it go?” asks Reggie. There are some questions spouses ask each other over and over for decades, starring a fatal flaw that one has perceived in the other. Between Reggie and Ida, this is one such question. “Why can’t you let anything go?”
“I live here!” Ida yells. “And I think a person who’s lived here for over thirty years has a right to a peaceful home! A right to a balcony without any corpses on it!”
Reggie studies his wife. “And why can’t you do it?” he asks slowly.
Indignation twists Ida’s wrinkled face. “What?”
“Put the trap on their doorstep. Why can’t you do it? If you’re so bent on teaching a lesson?”
She gestures to her ankles and wrists, invoking her arthritis with a look of disbelief. “Often, I think you want me to die first!”
There is a dirge of an ambulance on the street below. They listen until it fades.
“So will you?” Ida prompts.
Reggie lights another cigarette. “It’s late.”
“Reggie.”
He says nothing.
“Do this for me. Just this one thing. For your wife.”
“After the news,” Reggie concedes.
C4: Three teenage boys. One teenage girl. A stranger. A goat. A neighbor. Curdled plans. Punishment. Punishing who. Each confused. Each frightened. Laughter perched. A room of kicking hearts, kicking faster. Scent of roses. Pocketful of clovers. Good intentions. Tears on her face. A knife in his hands. No. Please. No. Stop. No. Don’t. One of the boys films on his phone, grinning. This will get so many views.
C2: A jar of maraschino cherries waits on a lonely woman’s nightstand, a small fork beside it.
PART II
Afterlife
Around five in the evening on Monday, July fifteenth—two days before she exits her body—Blandine Watkins stops at the laundromat before heading northeast and wonders if the night’s impending activity will reveal her to be a moral or immoral person. Power is one translation of virtue, she knows, and she believes that there is no such thing as amoral activity. Blandine recalls a passage that Hildegard von Bingen wrote about nine hundred years ago: The will warms an action, the mind receives it, and thought bodies it forth. This understanding, however, discerns an action by the process of knowing good and evil. Blandine has plenty of will—the will is like a fire baking every action in an oven, according to Hildegard—and some thoughts, but does she lack moral understanding? After considering the question for a few minutes, she realizes she’s not very invested in it.
Sitting on the laundromat bench, Blandine tries to uncramp her muscles, clip herself from her body, and focus on the slobber of the machines. A dull financial angst pounds around her kidneys. She thinks of the urban revitalization plan that is about to destroy the last good thing in Vacca Vale: a lush expanse of park called Chastity Valley. Blandine is sick of cartoon villains. She prefers her villains complex and nuanced. Disguised as heroes.
Two heavy corduroy bags wait at her feet like a pair of guard dogs. The presence of free coffee at this underfunded laundromat always moves Blandine. She tries to focus on the smell of it, but a violent energy is brewing inside her. Her knees bounce uncontrollably.
The laundromat is usually vacant on Mondays, but this evening, another woman sits opposite Blandine, her eyes pinned to a forsaken sock on the linoleum. Unblinking, unseeing. The woman’s hair is the color of mouse fur, her bangs are cut short, and she is wearing woolly knitted clothes despite the heat. Forty-something. She has the posture of a question mark, a stock face, and a pair of nineteenth-century eyeglasses. Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck. You could be persuaded you’d never seen her before, even if you passed her daily. You could be persuaded you saw her every day, even if you’d never passed her before. You’d ask her for directions; you’d tag her with a name like Susan and with a job in accounting; you’d assume that she keeps a bird feeder. She could be your neighbor. She could be your relative. She could be anyone. Frightened by the energy building inside her, Blandine resolves to talk to this woman.
“Do you live in the Rabbit Hutch?” asks Blandine. “You look familiar.”
The woman twitches. “Yes.” Her voice is like a communion wafer—tasteless, light. Blandine was never baptized, but she sometimes attends Catholic Mass and receives communion anyway. It’s not like they check your ID.
“What floor?” asks Blandine.
“Second.”
“I’m third. What’s your door?”
The woman inspects Blandine as though X-raying her for sinister motives. “C2.”
“That’s directly below ours,” replies Blandine, smiling. “We’re C4.”
“Oh?”
“It’s weird, right? Living so close to people you know nothing about?”
“Indeed,” responds the woman politely. She attaches her gaze to the machines, obviously longing for a return to the standard script, which demands nothing of strangers in public spaces but the exchange of a few half-smiles, to indicate that you won’t knife each other. She caps and uncaps a bottle of detergent in her lap.
“What’s your name?” asks Blandine.
The woman clenches her jaw, her shoulders, her hands. “Joan.”
“Joan. Nice to meet you, Joan. I’m Blandine.”
Joan waves feebly.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” asks Blandine.
“Pardon?”
“Afterlife.”
“Afterlife?”
“Life after death?”
“I understand the term,” says Joan.
“Do you?”
“Understand the term?”
“Believe in an afterlife?”
Joan’s attention escapes to a clock. “I guess so. Yes. I’m Catholic.”
“It sounds like you’re on the fence.”
“I’m not on the fence. I just didn’t expect the question.”
“It sounds like maybe you’re on the fence.”
Joan crosses her arms. “I’m Catholic.”
“Maybe you’re holding out for evidence.”
“You don’t need evidence when you have faith,” answers Joan. Then she blushes.
“Right, right. Faith is predicated upon an absence of evidence.” Blandine pauses. “But I always found that a bit awful of God. To withhold evidence, if the Cosmic Egg is so important. That’s how Hildegard von Bingen puts it—the Cosmic Egg. But yeah, it’s suspiciously stingy to give us nothing but a couple of self-professed messiahs every three thousand years. Prophets whose stories don’t align. Mary on toast. Somebody’s cured muscular dystrophy. It’s a lot to ask of us without collateral, don’t you think? Especially when there are so many competing stories, and the stakes are so high. Inferno or paradise. Forever.”