This evening, the streets are cast in shades of inoffensive beige, and there is something morally puny about the sun, something like the person who throws up her hands in the middle of a debate and cries, I don’t take sides! Like apoliticism is possible. Like it’s virtuous! Blandine tries to find something divine in the sun—Hildegard von Bingen portrays God as the Living Light, a blazing fireball, a glowing man—but she can’t. To butter up a certain abbot, Hildegard told him: You are the eagle staring at the sun! Blandine hopes to use this compliment on someone soon, but no one comes to mind.
Cottontail rabbits scavenge for clovers between planks of sidewalk. They evaluate Blandine as she passes. They look tough, like they know how to break your legs but won’t do it unless you’ve wronged them. Blandine was once told that when Zorn Automobiles reigned in Vacca Vale, this neighborhood—where La Lapinière is now located—had a pulse you could feel from Chicago. Today, only four buildings aside from the Rabbit Hutch survive on the street: a Christian church, a Christian women’s shelter, a Christian laundromat, and a convenience store with bullet holes through its signage. Most days, a woman with a shopping cart of Beanie Babies rests against that store.
The sidewalk ends, and Blandine’s neighborhood fans out into a series of strip malls, thrift stores, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations. Vacca Vale is a city designed for cars, not for people, but Blandine hopes that she can force it to become walkable by inventing and asserting her pedestrian rights on a regular basis. The architecture is cheap, strictly utilitarian, and built to be temporary. Because she has never left Vacca Vale, Blandine assumes that most of America is constructed this way—that is, disposably. This particular strip mall always evokes Hildegard’s “Parable of the House Builders” in Blandine’s mind. It’s a metaphor involving “foolish workmen” without talent or training “who erect a large tall building,” placing their “vain and foolish trust in themselves” rather than in experts.
The sensation that disturbs Blandine most profoundly as she walks across her small city is that of absence. On the pavement she spots a condom full of bark and mud, as though two trees had copulated the night before. She passes fenced lots exhibiting grim, lonely objects—shattered glass, balloon skins, one sneaker, a door. Three empty cans of peach juice. There is junk everywhere she looks, but all of these items amount to nothing, create an atmosphere of nothing. Empty factories, empty neighborhoods, empty promises, empty faces. Contagious emptiness that infects every inhabitant. Vacca Vale, to Blandine, is a void, not a city. Every square foot of it. Except the Valley.
As she crosses an intersection, a gleaming SUV nearly plows into her, the driver braking inches from her body. He rolls down his window.
“Hey!” he yells. “You almost made me run into you!”
Once she catches her breath, Blandine instinctively checks the signal at the end of the crosswalk. The sign tells her she has thirteen seconds left. She is firmly planted within pedestrian boundaries.
“I have the right of way,” she snaps.
“You look too much like the street!” he bellows.
Suddenly, she understands why people kill each other. Blinded by the worst neurotransmitter chemicals, anger pitching through her body, she approaches the driver’s door without a plan. To her surprise, a toddler dozes in the backseat.
“You look exactly like the street,” the driver repeats. “That’s not my problem.”
“Really?” she retorts. “You’re going to dig your heels into an argument that’s as obscene as it is idiotic?”
“Bitch,” he says, then rolls up his window.
“You were not adequately loved,” she says, then runs across the street to the gas station.
Inside the gas station, she aggressively turns the lever of the slushee machine and fills a cup with frozen, spectacular blue, breathing hard. She pays and stands on the curb for a moment, examining gas pumps and considering environmental doom as she sips from a straw that will probably end up in a whale. A woman in her sixties stands a few feet away, chewing a cigarette and glaring at her phone. A man of the same age emerges from the smudged glass doors and approaches the woman, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a chilled plastic bottle of seltzer. The woman’s hair is gray at the roots and piled high; the man’s clothes are speckled with white paint; they both appear exhausted. It’s clear to Blandine from the synchronicity of their movements—the corresponding shuffles of feet, head tilts, and eye squints—that they have been trying to love each other for years.
The man offers the woman the seltzer.
“I wanted a Coke,” she says.
“They didn’t have any.”
“It’s the only thing I wanted.”
“They’re all out.”
“Of Coke?”
“Sorry, hon.”
She narrows her eyes. “How.”
“I thought you loved this stuff.”
“Get that crap away from me!”
“The heck’s gotten into you?”
She grabs the seltzer from his outstretched hands and hurls it across the lot, toward a diesel pump. It skids and bursts. “I can’t live like this!” she cries. “No taste! No color! I can’t!”
On the curb, she turns and he turns. He tries to cradle her head in his hands, but she bites his fingers. “Leave me alone!” she cries.
He does not. The woman stays in place. Summer heat and the odor of gasoline and something painful—Blandine imagines an eviction notice, or a bad diagnosis, or digital evidence of an affair, or a relapsing daughter—press both the man and the woman to the ground. The woman droops into him, limb by limb.
“It’s gonna be okay,” the man whispers. “We’ll be okay.”
The woman pushes her face against the man’s blue shirt.
“Here,” he says. “Let’s get you away from all this gasoline. Let’s get you somewhere you can smoke.”
Blandine presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Brain freeze.
By the time Blandine arrives at the south entrance of the Valley, the sun—neutral as ever—has colored the sky like rosé between the darkening clouds. At the entrance, a banner stretches across a chain-link fence, advertising the luxury condominiums and technology headquarters that will soon devour the Valley. The digital renderings are bad but obviously expensive, a combination that always depresses Blandine. She sneezes and tosses her cup into an overflowing trash can, bisecting a swarm of bees. She follows a dirt path to a meadow, woods thick and noisy around her, and she can feel her whole body relax as she descends into greenery, into a place that has not yet been fucked. Over a thousand sugar maple trees live in the Valley. Deciduous, the sugar maples are astonishing in the autumn, carpeting the woods in crimson, plum, and cadmium yellow. Birds chirp, squirrels leap from branch to branch, and Blandine rounds a corner, passing an abandoned merry-go-round. Vines coil up the poles, and saplings sprout between wooden horses. A chain-link fence lines the interior of the woods. Laminated signs along it say: GOAT RESTORATION IN PROGRESS. The city rented goats to weed the Valley before its reconstruction. PLEASE DO NOT FEED THEM. Blandine goes to the Valley almost every day, but she has never seen any goats, which she considers unfair. Valley goats rank among the few things she feels entitled to enjoy in this world.
A pair of men, both in their thirties, emerge from the opposite end of the path, walking toward Blandine. “But I hate the blue jays and the robins,” says the shorter of the two. “They bully the other birds.”
His companion—tall and bald and baby-faced—stares at Blandine. “Good morning,” he says, his eyes hunting her skin. “How are you today?”
“Jeff,” says his friend. “It’s evening.”
Blandine ignores them and keeps walking.
The man named Jeff stops and turns toward her, theatrically analyzing her body. “My God, you are gorgeous. What’s your name, angel?”
“Jeff,” says his friend.
“Can’t I get your name? Your number?”
“Come on, Jeff.”
“How about a smile, baby? Just one?”
Blandine feels his body behind hers.
“You’re not even gonna talk to me? You’re out here in public, and you’re not even gonna look at me?”
She grinds her teeth.
“You have an obligation, you know, when you’re outside. You’ve got to look around and interact with people; that’s what we all have to do. It’s rude to ignore somebody. Can’t you take a fucking compliment? Hey!”
When he puts his hand on her bare shoulder, Blandine snaps around, bares her canines, and hisses with conviction.
“Jesus!” cries Jeff.
Blandine curls her fingers into claws, swipes at his face, and hisses again.
Jeff jumps backward, stumbling into his friend. “She’s crazy.”
Blandine screeches and jumps erratically, hissing with gusto.
“Come on, Jeff,” says the friend. “Let’s go.”
Blandine recently learned that white barn owls reflect moonlight off their feathers to temporarily blind the voles they are hunting. Everybody does the best she can with the resources she has.
Jeff scurries to his friend, and the men walk quickly in the opposite direction, tossing incredulous glances and fear-smiles behind them as they move. They laugh loudly. Once they’re out of sight, Blandine relaxes her pose and walks on.