“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What was it, then?”
“The benzene contamination,” said Malik, “was an act of alien warfare.”
Todd stopped messing with the vodka, stared at Malik. “What?”
Then Malik exploded in laughter, his perfect teeth all over the place.
Todd nervously copied.
“What I really want,” I said, “is to guillotine the whole internet. Before it guillotines me.”
“Jack,” said Todd. “Get off my bed.”
I obeyed without thinking. Stood up, fell a little. “Why?”
“You’re sweating all over it. Look.”
The front door opened. Malik shot up and took off his shirt instinctively, the way everyone in a crowded space checks their phone when the default ringtone goes off. Seriously. Blandine enters the apartment, and Malik takes off his shirt. I wish I could call his behavior unbelievable, but of course I believed it. We heard Blandine’s rushed footsteps, a faucet running, the fridge opening, a clank of plastic and metal, her low voice. Then the front door shut.
On Todd’s blue quilt I saw a damp blob, not shaped like me, but like a country bleeding into all the space around it.
“Dammit,” said Malik. “Tonight was the night.”
“The night,” I scoffed. “What were you going to do, pop the ques—”
“Shh,” said Todd. “Listen.”
That’s when we heard the goat for the first time. It was crying.
“The hell?” muttered Malik.
It bleated again.
Nothing was real. Immediately, we got up and hunted down the noise. We never considered doing anything else.
I Leave It Up to You
At 7:51 p.m., 112 minutes before Blandine Watkins exits her body, she carries Hildegard the goat upstairs to her apartment. James Yager idles in his economy hybrid outside the Rabbit Hutch. Blandine used his phone to call the only veterinarian in town, but the office was closed. Aside from goat logistics, they’ve exchanged few words. Since she saw him, she’s been shaking so hard that she has to keep her jaw parted so her teeth won’t chatter. She detects no change in his countenance; he reacts to her as he would to a student, any other student.
In her bedroom, Blandine leaves Hildegard with five plastic bowls of water. She dumps spinach on the floor, along with pears, celery sticks, and carrots. Some of the vegetables belong to Todd, but she’ll pay him back. She examines her bedroom and feels—briefly—rich. With her quilt and pillows, she fixes a bed for the goat on the floorboards and gently tucks her into it. Hildegard regards Blandine plaintively. “Try to be quiet,” she whispers to the animal. It doesn’t seem like the boys are home, which relieves her. Still, Todd’s door is closed—he might be in his room. But Todd wouldn’t harm Hildegard; of the three boys, he’s the least brutish. Gentle and sensitive. Sometimes, when nobody is home, she sneaks into his room and admires his drawings, which she finds exquisite and bizarre. “If they come back, don’t let them know you’re here,” Blandine whispers to Hildegard. Quickly, Blandine writes on a Post-it: DO NOT OPEN, then adds another note saying: Please, and slaps them to her bedroom door. Pulse wound fast, she runs out of the apartment, forgetting to lock the front door behind her.
They sit in James’s car, parked in the lot of an abandoned church a few blocks from the Rabbit Hutch, avoiding eye contact. The windows of the car are open, and a pre-storm wind flirts with them. In the backseat sit four bags from a local farm supplies store: white salt, trace mineral salt, goat fly spray, sheep and goat feed, three packages of hay, sheep and goat protein block, goat Nutri-Drench, a small trough, a five-gallon bucket, and a package of human candy. It cost over a hundred dollars, and as she scanned their items, the cashier eyed the pair as though detecting something illicit and sordid between them. James paid for it.
“I may not be oppressed, per se,” continues Blandine, chewing the candy to keep her teeth from clicking. “But I’m certainly the proletariat in this situation, and you’re obviously the bourgeoisie, and capitalism makes it impossible for anything to transpire between us besides a fucked-up transaction predicated upon the assumption that you own whatever I produce. And of course we meet in the Valley; of course you would pollute it like that. And the goat, our only witness, removed. Fuck. Let’s be high for this conversation.” She removes a vaporizer from the pocket of her dress, using it quickly so he can’t see the tremor of her hands. Every voice inside her wants to serenade him. It is impossible to believe that she found Jack attractive earlier today. Now she realizes that whatever she felt then was just a diluted version of the storm currently wreaking havoc inside her.
After a long pause, James objects. “How am I the bourgeoisie? If you’re going to give a Marxist reading of our relationship, at least acknowledge the fact that I married into money. My parents were small-scale farmers. We were poor throughout my life. My brother took an IED in Afghanistan, and now he can’t walk because he was trying to pay for college. Fireworks give him panic attacks. My parents died of preventable diseases because their diets failed them first, and their health insurance failed them second. I will never make more than forty thousand a year. I was always inferior to my wife, subordinate to her decisions, her parents’ decisions. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I’m sorry; since you married into the aristocracy, then you’re not really a participant or benefactor,” Blandine says. It is so easy to express her rage toward him—far easier than it is to express anything else. “Since you married into it, you obviously lack all of its protection and materials, like a mansion and financial indemnity when a crisis befalls you. It’s like you’ve never read a nineteenth-century novel. Jesus.”
“I’m a high school music teacher, Tiffany.”
“And your wife? What is she, other than a Midwestern princess, an inheritor of the wealth generated by people like your parents, a member of the class that owns people like me? What is she other than basically monarchical? Marrying into elitism does not exempt you from its terms and conditions. She may own the majority of you, but you have, like—” She searches for a term. “Shared custody.”
“We got divorced.”
Blandine inhales from the metal mouth of the vaporizer, tries not to react. “I hope your prenup was cynical.”
She places it in the consul. James takes it without asking, his hand brushing her electrically. She feels angry, and sweaty, and delighted that he’s putting his mouth where she put her mouth. She feels like she’s about to throw up, undress, sprout wings.
“Look, Tiffany.” James sighs. “None of this is going the way I . . . hoped it would. I wanted to apologize to you. I want to acknowledge how manipulative and sick and—yes, sure, fine—how bourgeois my behavior was. But the conversation got away from me, and everything just went . . . I don’t know; everything went haywire.” He gestures toward the sky, where storm clouds have gathered like an audience.
“Hildegard von Bingen—this mystic—says that God whips up thunderstorms to punish wickedness,” Blandine says as she observes the sky. “Or foretell dangers.”
“That is not an original position.”
“She says, ‘The reason is that all our actions affect the elements and are in turn disturbed and influenced by the elements.’ ”
Drops of rain plink on the windshield.
“I forgot about your memory,” says James. “Your incredible memory.”
“I am so sick,” Blandine says, “of violence against women disguised as validation.”
“Sorry,” James murmurs automatically, but he has the look of a scolded pet who doesn’t know what he’s done wrong.
“Anyway,” says Blandine. “The trouble is that if you’re a young woman, you can’t opt out of the systems of economic production. Nobody can, not really, but at least a white man like you can approximate opting out. A woman can’t even sort of opt out, no matter how hard she tries, because her body contains goods and services, and people will try to extract those goods and services with or without her permission. How could you understand? We’re finally starting to talk about sexual misconduct, at least there’s that. Obviously, there’s a little bit of horizontal justice going on at the moment, and it’s not exactly ideal, but at least it’s something.”