C4: Near her bed, Blandine has taped chapter 29 of The Book of Her Life, by St. Teresa of Avila, which she copied by hand onto scrap paper from the library. It describes what many mystics refer to as the Transverberation of the Heart, which some have reportedly experienced in the throes of divine rapture. Blandine learned that transverberation comes from the Latin transverbere, “to pierce.” In the visions, it is usually an angel who pierces the mystic’s heart, which is why the phenomenon is also known as the Seraph’s Assault. Teresa basically describes it as sex with God’s hottest angel; Blandine finds the imagery phallic and obvious and erotic. She rereads chapter 29 whenever she can’t fall asleep—which is often. Almost always. By the time she exits her body on a hot night in Apartment C4, she has the passage memorized.
The Lord wanted me while in this state to see sometimes the following vision: I saw close to me toward my left side an angel in bodily form. I don’t usually see angels in bodily form except on rare occa-sions; although many times angels appear to me, but without my see-ing them, as in the intellectual vision I spoke about before. This time, though, the Lord desired that I see the vision in the following way: the angel was not large but small; he was very beautiful, and his face was so aflame that he seemed to be one of those very sublime angels that appear to be all afire. They must belong to those they call the cherubim, for they didn’t tell me their names. But I see clearly that in heaven there is so much difference between some angels and others and between these latter and still others that I wouldn’t know how to explain it.
I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seemed to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan, and the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away; nor is the soul content with less than God. The pain is not bodily but spiritual, although the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal. The loving exchange that takes place between the soul and God is so sweet that I beg Him in His goodness to give a taste of this love to anyone who thinks I am lying.
On the days this lasted I went about as though stupefied. I desired neither to see nor to speak, but to clasp my suffering close to me, for to me it was greater glory than all creation.
She is only eighteen years old, but Blandine Watkins has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. Goat, boy, neighbor, stranger, rabbit, falcon, logger, tree, orphan, mother—as she exits herself, she is all of it.
C2: Joan Kowalski lies on top of her quilt, trying to ignore the noise from the apartment above hers. It’s the worst it’s ever been. She has already checked the locks on her door three times, troubled by Penny’s warning. Haunted by visions of a glacial man. An abominable snowman. She reaches for a bottle of melatonin on her nightstand and swallows a pill with tap water. She turns on the television and blasts the news, where local anchors excavate a politician’s tweet. The discussion is vapid enough to distract her.
She promised herself that she would conquer her misophonia and become a better person. A perfect idea arrives in her head: tonight, she’ll compose a thank-you message to her aunt. Joan’s problem, she realizes, is not ingratitude or insensitivity—her problem is extragratitude and oversensitivity. At this thought, one half of her rolls its eyes at the other. She always wants to write long thank-you letters in gorgeous cursive, on expensive stationery. Perfect sentences accompanied by every gesture that might extend one soul to another. The magnitude of her ambition is what prevents her from trying. But she can send a thank-you message electronically, relieving herself and her aunt. She will.
On the floor beside her bed whirrs a white noise machine marketed for infants, adjusted to the highest volume, and in her window growls an air conditioner, and each of the pundits takes several minutes to communicate one idea. Joan tries to give herself a shoulder massage as she watches the news, but it doesn’t work. The man with the perfect hair says permutations of the same sentence over and over, until another pundit cuts him off. Despite this, Joan can still hear the chaos above. There is something feral about the noise tonight. Screams, pounding, drums, even—is this possible?—hooves. She remembers the white-haired girl from the laundromat whom she met two days prior. Sweating blood. Jesus, proposing. Stigmata.
Then Joan hears something she’s never heard before from Apartment C4: A female scream. She turns off the news and freezes. Another scream. As Joan listens to a sound that is most likely coming from that girl’s throat, she bites the skin around her thumbnail until she bleeds. She licks the blood to prevent it from staining her sheets. She can’t move her legs.
Is Joan some kind of defector of the Sisterhood if she doesn’t inves-tigate? It’s late. She’s exhausted and afraid. She looks at the jar of maraschino cherries waiting on her nightstand. She hasn’t eaten one yet. The cherries were supposed to be delightful, but now they’re just accoutre-ments to phonic misery.
They are teenagers, Joan reminds herself. They must be horsing around. Horsing around, and how disrespectful, on a Wednesday night, to smash about like that, no matter your hormonal imbalance, when you share the building with so many other people, people parked so closely together, between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another.
When she digs through her thought-trash to the truth, Joan must admit that the scream does not sound like a consequence of horsing around. It is the first time Joan has found the term bloodcurdling appro-priate in real life.
But no—the girl knows what she’s doing. She knows what she got herself into. At the laundromat, she was nothing if not self-possessed. She probably enjoys the macabre game they’re playing up there, enjoys whatever attention those boys are giving her.
What kind of girl chooses to live with three teenage boys? The kind who needs to be admired. Attention is what the girl wants most of all—that much was obvious at the laundromat. Her bleached white hair. With great concentration, thought by thought, Joan replaces her guilt with anger, as her father once replaced his addiction to alcohol with an addiction to food.
Reporting the noise does not occur to Joan. Later, when she learns what happened, she will consider this revelatory information about her psychology and also about society at large.
Finally, the screaming stops. Joan hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.
Neither Joan’s phone nor her laptop is within reach. She will compose a thank-you email to her aunt tomorrow, after work. The night is deformed altogether now. She switches the television back on and changes the channel to a documentary about whale songs. Joan learns that although the females are capable of making sound, they rarely do. Only the males sing. Severe noise pollution can cause internal bleeding in whales, and even, in the worst cases, death.
“We always thought that the humpbacks sing to attract females—and that is true, no doubt—but more and more research suggests that the males also sing to intimidate and impress each other!” cries a zealous cetologist named Alfie. Joan doesn’t consider herself a curious person—she pretty much accepts the world as it presents itself to her—but she immediately loves this documentary for herding her thoughts away from the noise above, noise that has continued even though the screaming has stopped. The documentary transports Joan to different noise, deep-sea noise, far more agreeable noise. She takes ten more milligrams of melatonin and learns about whales until the chemicals lay siege to her body, marching her into a potent sleep.
Beside a tiny fork on her nightstand, the jar of maraschino cherries waits. She forgot to eat them.
Electrical Malfunction
By the time Reggie calls the police from his apartment some floors above, Todd is dropping the knife. Still standing on a chair in the living room, overlooking the scene, Malik uploads his video, promoting it on four social media accounts. This, he knows, is viral content. The content that will metamorphose him from Influenced into Influencer. Glowing and trembling, forgetting the Toll, Moses runs to the body and binds her open stomach with the wide belt of his trench coat. He applies pressure to the wound. He lifts the legs. Marianne’s voice has fossilized in his memory: Pressure, circulation, pressure. The goat, who suffered her only injury well before entering the apartment, pees on the floor. Jack watches everything, his eyes open wide.
Later, when questioned separately at the station, everyone present at the scene of the crime reports a peculiar flash of light. Each insists that the light came from inside the room. Malik attributes it to the glowing man. Todd attributes it to his psychological distress. Jack tells the police that it might have been lightning. It does not appear in the video.
“I d-d-d-don’t n-n-n-know,” Moses stammers. “An—an—elect—electrical mal—f-f-f-function?”
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