You can’t argue with either of them. Blandine inhales the perfume of grass, tree, pollen, and wild lilac—this is how Hildegard describes Paradise. Flicking an ant off her arm, Blandine continues reading where she left off.
In your foolishness, you want to grasp me with threats such as this: “If God wants me to be just and good, why does he not make me that way?” You want to catch me like the presumptuous young goat that attacks the stag. He is caught and pinned down by the mighty antlers. If you try your foolhardy strength against me, you will be brought down in the course of justice by the precepts of my law like the horns of the stag. The horns are trumpets ringing in your ears, yet you do not heed them, but run after the wolf, thinking you have tamed him so that he will not hurt you. But the wolf swallows you up saying: “This sheep has wandered from the path; it refused to follow its shepherd and ran after me. So I will keep it, because it chose me and deserted its shepherd.” Human being! God is just, and therefore he has ordained all he has made, in heaven and earth, with justice and order.
This passage troubles Blandine. There’s no winning if you’re a sheep or a goat, and there’s no losing if you’re a wolf. Hildegard drops the stag plotline halfway through. Also, God—who allegedly invented sheep and goats—mixes them up.
A bleat from the foliage alarms Blandine, and she drops her book in the grass. The sound is almost human. She turns, body alert, expecting to see the turtlenecked man standing behind her. Instead, she sees nothing. Another bleat, desperate and small. Blandine stands and follows the sound many yards from her book, deeper into thick and thorny vegetation. Finally, she spots a small goat in a tangle of green. It has white fur with tan splotches. Frantic eyes. A kid.
Blandine looks at the goat, then looks at the sky, then back at her book in the clearing. Then pinches her thigh. Has Hildegard summoned the goat into reality?
That’s when Blandine remembers the signs all over the Valley. GOAT RESTORATION IN PROGRESS.
“What happened to your tribe?” Blandine asks. The goat thrashes at the sound of her voice, its eyes wide open and wild, struggling to stand. Blandine moves closer. A chain-link fence is intended to separate the goats from the public, but this one must have escaped. There is fear in its eyes, panic in its voice, and operatic thunder above. When she’s inches from the animal, Blandine notices the front right leg, which is bent at a wrong angle, clearly injured.
She scans the trees as though a veterinarian might helpfully leap down from the branches.
The goat is so cute and pathetic, it almost looks fake. Blandine has no phone to call Vacca Vale’s animal hospital, no knowledge of goat care. She guesses that the animal weighs about twenty pounds. She could leave it there, of course—she knows that normal people would leave it there. Calmly, she walks to the clearing and packs her book. Then she returns to the goat and scoops her up, resolved to carry her to a place where she is less exposed to abuse and dehydration. At first the goat kicks and cries, but soon—too soon—it relaxes, gives up, and sinks into Blandine’s arms. “Hildegard,” Blandine christens the animal. “Hildegard von Vacca Vale.” She counts seven spots on the goat’s fur. She has icy blue eyes and milk teeth, both humanoid. “Did you know that your namesake is widely considered to be the founder of natural history in Germany? She invented her own alphabet, too.”
For the first few minutes, it is challenging to carry the goat, who smells of urine, through the foliage and up the forest path, but Hildegard’s weight begins to comfort Blandine, who is not used to carrying anything other than books. Blandine starts to walk more energetically, invigorated with newfound purpose. The simplicity of the task enraptures her: keep this animal alive. Nothing morbid in it, no starvation or stigmata. Not even much capitalism. Clouds glow all over the evening, cuddling together above, while breezes heave through the trees.
As a child, Blandine planted several coffee beans in the Valley, hoping one might sprout into the sky. She followed every rabbit she saw, determined to find the warren and plunge into it. Tornado sirens thrilled her, and she was often punished for wandering off from the group at school. She was a fool for portals, willing to sign the thorniest contract—giants, poison, isolation, tricksters, hunters, con-artist wolves, cannibalistic witches, anything—if it promised to transport her. There was no place like home because there was no home. Now an adult in the eyes of the state, she walks over grass and roots and trash, her feet browning with dirt, and dreams of a little housebroken goat, an east-facing bedroom window, an edible garden, a ladder on a book wall, no electricity, a fireplace. She dreams of total self-sufficiency and freedom from the market. She starts to dream of an American political revolution, but trips over the logistics and tables the matter. She is disappointed by the domesticity of her adult fantasies but also cheered by it. Domesticity, at least, is achievable.
Blandine loves the mystics because they, unlike her, never stopped searching for portals. They treated prayer as a getaway car, cathedral as rabbit hole, suffering as wonderland, divine ecstasy as the cyclone that delivered a woman to color. The mystics never gave up on the Beyond, and they refused to leave the Green World.
Blandine enters a wide path near the street and gasps at the figure in front of her.
Her reptilian brain reacts to him at once: her breathing snags, her pulse speeds, her palms sweat, she loses her balance. She knows even before they speak that this interaction will be the series finale of their relationship, the scene automatically charged with drama commensurate with their history. Studying his good tan and powerful posture, she is reminded of a certain dictator whose name she cannot recall. He is dressed in monochrome—white athleisure, something bloodthirsty in the casual glamour of it. He stands in some leafy shadows, his gaze cutting into her like laser surgery. When Blandine sees James Yager, she sees a harpoon, a casket, a coyote, a band saw. He is composed of angles that she once wanted to use on her geometry exams. Somewhere in the Valley, someone is grilling; Blandine loves the scent of burning charcoal despite the euthanasia that such an activity administers to Earth. She feels light-headed but tries to keep her grip on consciousness. She doesn’t have health insurance.
“Tiffany,” James says. “What a surprise.”
The goat bleats in alarm. The accuracy of Hildegard’s intuition impresses Blandine.
“I was just going for a walk,” says James. “But I have my car. Do you . . .?”
“What?” Blandine snaps.
He hesitates. “Do you need some help with that?”
Major American Fires
I could tell you the facts, or I could tell you how it felt, but I doubt any of it will give you the explanation you want. Yes, we were under the influence. Two or three influences. Me, Todd, and Malik were getting drunk on a handle of vodka that somebody left in the lobby, and high on some of Todd’s powerful stuff from a girl named Stephen. In order to qualify for the Independence Workshop stipends, you have to pass a drug test at the end of every month, but they only test for opioids and narcotics, which we consider a little slice of bureaucratic compassion. The vodka was the kind of alcohol that doesn’t let you forget that you’re poisoning yourself as you drink it, which is to say it was cheap, and we didn’t feel bad about stealing it.
We were in Todd’s room because it was the cleanest. A ferociously made mattress on the ground, absolutely no grime, scent of chemical lemon, nothing on the shelves but alphabetized comic books. Todd wanted to be a cartoonist. Wants, I mean. As we talked, he kept picking up the vodka and placing it on the center of a paper towel, then adjusting it to the center of his floor. On his walls, he had taped some of his drawings in a perfect line. He rarely drew in front of us, and his work didn’t resemble any comic I had ever seen. The drawings were chaotic sketches in black marker or pencil, mostly people without faces, some animals that didn’t exist, everyone in motion. I found them unsettling, but I couldn’t look away.
Malik deemed the evening a national holiday because he just got a new job. A real one, he told us. “Teaching robots emotions,” he announced, beaming. Todd studied him. “The pay is royal. And casting directors are gonna love it. They want you to have a diverse portfolio.” Malik thinks he’s going to be an actor—he’s saving up for a move to Los Angeles. All summer, he’s been recording on his phone, uploading videos of nothing to all of his pathetic profiles because he believes he has the Fame Gene. We don’t disagree. He’s got the looks, the charm, the vanity. Whatever. But we still want to murder him a little when he talks like this. I have a feeling he’s going to be a real estate agent. “You have to build a following,” he told us. “Then the representation comes crawling through the chimney.”
“Teaching robots emotions?” asked Todd.