The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

“Have you read Dante’s Divine Comedy?” asks Blandine. Joan reacts like she’s being ridiculed. “No.” “Read Purgatorio, if nothing else. It’s just like Vacca Vale. Like a travel guide. Honestly.”

“I’ve been reading about Catholic female mystics lately,” Blandine says. “Oh?” “Do you know much about them?” “No.” “They loved suffering,” says Blandine. “Mad for it.”

“According to accounts. But who’s to say, really? Most of the female mystics starved themselves in favor of ‘purer nourishment.’ They were always very sick. A lot of them died young. Skeptics say that their visions were really just migraines. I think that we see whatever we fear, whatever we want. We look at the world, absorb thirty percent of its data, and our subconscious fills in the rest.” Blandine cracks her knuckles. “I’m not sure I believe in God.”

One advantage of dying slowly is that you get to write your own obituary. I could have left the task to the kid of a friend with the poetry MFA, or the journalist with the serious hair, but instead I propose a new genre: the auto-obituary. Eighty-six years on Earth, condensed by the one who lived them. In an era of confessional status updates, factory-farmed memoir, and federal tweeting, it seems appropriate to deliver my own farewell address.

A Selection of Life Lessons, in No Particular Order: Supplement therapy with boxing lessons. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Take a pottery class in the fall; you will never be short of Christmas presents.

Addicted to learning because it distracts her from the hostility of her consciousness; she has one of those brains that attacks itself unless it’s completing a difficult task.

Orgasm, she discovered, simultaneously possessed and exorcised you of yourself. As the chemicals lifted her from one realm into another—due to increased stimulation of the right angular gyrus, she later learned, a region of the brain associated with spatiovisual awareness, memory retrieval, reading, and out-of-body experiences—Tiffany felt like a mystic. James took his time.

“I don’t have social media.” “Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “Too good for all that.” She shakes her head. “Not at all. On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved.

Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know?