The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

The coincidental nature of all social collision has always troubled the mother, even before she was a mother. To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor—the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life. After she rolled up her window, she approached the drive-through speaker and ordered. The man hit the glass of the next car with his beach shovel, his eyes wide open.

“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.”

But the mystics—the ones Blandine admires—they didn’t get out much. They viewed solitude as a precondition of divine receptivity. Most spent their lives essentially alone.

Blandine sighs. She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one. She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies. She’s spiraling down thoughts of the albedo effect and the positive correlation between climate change and most mass extinctions on the geologic record when Joan drops her detergent cap. It rolls beneath a machine. Blandine stands and retrieves it for her.

An Absolutely True Story

Mention this chapter to nadyja

Dearest Loved Ones, Enemies, Voyeurs, and Fans, 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.

He is not a barbaric captain—somebody has to do the dirty work. Nor is He a philosopher, thank God. The last thing you want to do at the end of your life is math. I am not His detainee, and He is not my boss, and I am not His client, and He is not my muse, but neither of us is free.

“Mind if I sit here?” the young man asks, touching the chair beside the woman. “Oh,” says the woman, flustered. “Um.” “Taken?” he asks. “Well—the thing is—see, we’re actually waiting for someone, actually.” “Oh okay, no problem!” With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love. He believes that the whole world ought to love him like that, Blandine assumes.

He takes a stool by the window, tossing glances of sympathy at the woman and her child as he unpacks his satchel. Blandine hates this undemanding caricature of sympathy, which so often manifests as pity. She believes it is native to the overly loved and the never-truly-criticized.

James begins to contact Tiffany outside of rehearsal. Emails her articles, clips, music, advice, misspellings. Gives her personalized assignments: Wong Kar-wai, Samira Makhmalbaf, Rungano Nyoni, Károly Makk, Bernardo Bertolucci, Denis Villeneuve, Jean-Luc Godard, Chetan Anand, Viêt Linh. He gives her his log-in information for streaming services and reimburses her for video rentals. An eager student, she watches every film he recommends with a speeding pulse and a surging body temperature.

“Gaspard de la Nuit,” says James, clearing his throat. “Took me seven years to learn.” “Gaspard?” “It means something like ‘treasurer.’ Treasurer of the night.” “That was long.” “What?” “The suite.” “Oh, yeah. Seven minutes.” “So you learned a minute a year.” “Well, that was just the first movement. There are two more, all based on the fantaisies of this French poet named Aloysius Bertrand. Published in the early eighteen hundreds, I think.” He cracks his knuckles. “You’d love the poetry. Surreal as hell. Never succeeded in its time. Never succeeded at all, actually.

*Yerkes-Dodson law of arousal

In the aftermath, Tiffany picks up more shifts at Ampersand. She legally changes her name to Blandine, after a teenaged martyr who stoically endured public torture at the hands of the Romans. Blandine persuades her foster parents that she needs some time off. She finds a book on female mystics in the library and reads it in one night while drinking Wayne’s Yukon Jack. She borrows two more books and requests a third from their partner branch. The mystics were sick and wonky geniuses, often hilarious, always alone. Hildegard is Blandine’s favorite mystic because she is about a hundred people in one body. Hildegard of Bingen: prophet, composer, botanist, abbess, theologian, doctor, preacher, philosopher, writer, saint. Doctor of the Church. A veritable polymath. She didn’t ask anyone’s permission to be these things, to be everything; she just did it. She was always writing letters to male members of the clergy, telling them to get their act together. They weren’t blowing the trumpet of God’s justice, was the problem. She wrote recipes. The tenth of ten children, she was born to a noble German family who donated her to the Church as a tithe, an alarmingly common practice of the time. Hildegard was born sickly, as the mystics always were, and experienced visions since she was a child but didn’t tell anyone about them until she was in her forties. In her writings, she adopts an annoyingly gendered humility, painting herself as some idiot savant, some silly little woman. This ini...

Now, studying a book of Hildegard’s chaotic and luminous writing, Blandine tries to remember if she ever had visions as a child. Slowly, images return to her: worlds of cotton candy and light, mothers and geometry, lilac triangles and little jumping goats. Voices telling her that she would be free, one day. That she would be held. She did have visions. Didn’t everyone?

As far as Blandine can tell, the worst thing that had ever happened to him was the alcoholism of his grandfather, who got sober well before Micah was born. Whenever students answer questions correctly, Micah distributes Smarties. “Smarties for a smarty!” He grins, and the whole class scowls. Despite herself, Blandine feels affection for this man. Maybe it’s pity. His optimism is embarrassing, yes, but she finds herself helplessly rooting for him.

Blandine forbids self-pity, but she permits rage.

her behavior was surely anti-feminist, although she hasn’t worked out the particulars of this, yet;

Moses checks the time, ignoring a screenful of vacuous sympathy messages. The fans will be crowding the pavement outside the funeral now—strangers who believe they know her, love her. They will flood blocks, these blank grievers, wielding their spectacularly fabricated relationships with Elsie Blitz, beloved American starlet, like tickets to the fair, trying to catch a glimpse of the corpse, even though she was cremated.

The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.

From hildegard quote chapter

Before meeting Anthony, Hope didn’t know that she was capable of feeling happy for more than an hour at a time. She believed that she lacked the gene. But by the time they checked into the motel, she had become intimately acquainted with the kind of feelings that she once ogled like jewels on other people’s necks. Security, fulfillment, euphoria. Love. These feelings, she discovered, could last until they became conditions.

“Hey, Siri,” he says. “Do you have feelings?” “I feel like doing a cartwheel sometimes.” This depresses Moses tremendously, filling his spirit with wet cement. “You don’t have a body,” he replies. “My darling.” The evening is doing that thing it does sometimes when he drinks, animating everything inside it, giving its contents heartbeats and desires and fur, charging all of its objects with unbearable significance. He’s on the verge of transcendence, can feel it building inside him like an orgasm. Or maybe it won’t be transcendence; maybe it will be a panic attack.

There was no place like home because there was no home.

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.

Sixty-two years later, Reggie squints at Ida’s white hair, flooded with affection, pity, fear. The blend, he supposes, amounts to love. He wishes he could prove it. “Where did you go, my darling?” he asks in a volume he knows his wife can’t hear. She watches the television, her head motionless before it.

He can smell the river when he opens the windows; the windows are always open; there is no air-conditioning; his life has degenerated. It takes so little time and effort to become accustomed to luxury, but years of labor to reverse the process.

The second epigraph is taken from Selected Writings: Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Mark Atherton (London: Penguin, 2001). The majority of the Hildegard quotes reproduced throughout The Rabbit Hutch are from this volume.

In “Afterlife,” Blandine quotes from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge Classics, 2002).