The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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.

When he picked up the paper, his face broke into sadness, which canceled my anger. In Todd’s psychotically clean bedroom, facing a plastic fan that churned summer through the window, I wanted all the extremes at once: I wanted to die, kill, fuck, find my parents and bring them back to life and then kill them, then bury them and yell and yell. For the first and probably last time in my life, I envied women for being able to give birth. I wanted to fuse myself to somebody else. I wanted to know what it would take for me to give a damn.

“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.

“I mean if we can’t take down American machismo via the commander in chief, then maybe we can take down the producer, the CEO, the news anchors, the actors, etcetera. It’ll feel good, it’ll do some good, but at the end of the day, our nuclear and democratic safety is being determined by an international pissing contest, and when you’ve been in foster care, you just…whatever. We think we want to kill each other, but what we really want to kill is the cage. I don’t even know what I’m saying. No, I do. What I’m saying is that we need to make room in our discourse for power abuses to which each party allegedly consented. For anyone to look at the megalomaniacs running our world and call it important, then listen to a fucked-up affair and call it silly because each said, Yes, okay, at the start—I can’t abide that. I mean we don’t want to infantilize ourselves, but what is consent?

“And why are respecting a woman and fucking her mutually exclusive, to you?”

“I consider myself a criminal, do you understand?” “Well.” She bites her cuticle, releases a tear. “You are one.”

And who hasn’t fallen for capitalism? Of course it seduces you before it mauls you. Of course it intoxicates you out of your senses before it leads you to the arena. Like how ancient societies used to give children cocaine before sacrificing them. And of course your mansion beguiled me, of course I became stupid when I saw all the knowledge you had, of course I surrendered to a fantasy of control, of course I wanted to fuck your piano. Of course you and your body made me feel safe, like I was surrounded by—I don’t know, soldiers, or something gross like that—and of course that response was icky and boring and American, ad nauseam. I seduced you, I’m pretty sure. But—” “No, I’m responsible for—”

I even excused your silence because I was so enchanted by you, and by all your fucking—your brain, or whatever—and at the time, I was spiraling into this, like, crisis of education, you know, realizing that I couldn’t just read my way out of my bad luck, that I couldn’t just climb up some books and across diplomas and into freedom.

So, as you can see, at the time, I was too distracted by all my other collapsing illusions to properly demonize you.

We were stuck in a web of material relations. I think, actually, at the end of the day, we were the answer to the question: Who are grand pianos for?

Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It had resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore. “You’re very young,” observes James. “Am I?” she snaps. “How young am I, James?” He looks away. “But you don’t seem eighteen,” he mumbles.

This is the part that has made her cry the hardest. She’s too upset to be embarrassed, too upset to hate him as he touches her arm.

“I hate it when the superior party pretends to be inferior. That’s just a more pernicious abuse of power. Up to me. Bullshit.”

“You deplete everyone in your orbit, you get them to serve you and save you and give and give and give, and—worse—you get them to do it without forcing them to. You get people to choose to indenture themselves to you. You treat young women like intravenous nutrients until they believe that’s what they are—until they believe you’re what they’re for. Like Jim fucking Jones.”

He reaches for her hand. She recoils. “Don’t fucking touch me,” Blandine says, her voice low. “You will never touch any version of me again.”

The night that settles around him is the kind of Midwestern night he loves—hot and humid, fireflies blinking, a purple sky, storming off and on.

Why am I visible? he wondered every day. But Ida liked being visible, and that was obvious as soon as he saw her. She returned his gaze as though consenting to a duel, her neck long, her chin tilted upward, her skin tight and shiny with a summer tan.

But she can’t stop thinking about the video—the goat bound in ropes, the girl on the floor, the blood on her stomach. White hair in the dark. So realistic. Either they had a very low budget or a very high budget, high enough to make it look low—Sapphire can’t tell. After deliberating for an hour, Sapphire reaches a decision. By then, the video boasts nearly 2,000 views, 272 dislikes, and 83 likes. Malik always loved attention; she believes that he is capable of hurting someone for it. She believes everyone is. Sapphire gives the video a thumbs-down, then clicks Report.

Hours ago, her blood and organs seemed so reliably encased in her skin. How unfair that the materials of such an immaterial person would prove as essential for her as they are for everyone else. He injured her, he knows that, he always knew that, but still he believed that she was untouchable.

If Joan finds the right moment, she will offer to read to Blandine. She will offer to visit every day. She will be neighborly.

Joan wants to say: I don’t have an emergency contact, either. She wants to say: I’m glad they didn’t kill you. She wants to say: I am sorry for every instance I took when I could have given.

“You’re awake,” Joan says instead, incongruously. A peculiar flash of light shivers across the room. “I am,” Blandine replies. “Are you?”