The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Then the world’s super volcanoes—the enormous calderas, Yellowstone, Long Valley, Valles, North Sumatra’s Lake Toba, Taupo, Aira in Japan—erupted in chorus, almost as if by cosmic design. Tsunamis, hurricanes, and typhoons followed as if in accompaniment. Ice caps speed-melted. The waters rose. Not gradually, as they had been, swallowing up coasts and islands worldwide, but in a matter of weeks. In America, New York and the upper and lower East Coast, Florida gone, San Francisco and most of California drowned and sank, Atlantis-like. Geocatastrophe.

  The sun’s eye smote. Organic processes like photosynthesis and ecosystems, dead. The relation between Earth and its inhabitants, dead.

  War, dead.

  Earth reduced to a dirt clod, floating in space.

  The atrocity of speed in destruction.

  The magnitude of those days still makes me hold my breath.

  The white of this room and the white of my skin makes me sick.

  A fierce rage blooms in me. I think perhaps it is courage. When I’ve seen enough, I remove the sensory disc, place it in my mouth with an exaggerated gesture, and swallow.

  For an instant I close my eyes and my entire body remembers the smell. The taste. The sound. How the tips of my fingers itched at her burning. How hope of any sort—faith, desire, wonder, imagination—died. That moment, captured obscenely, enforced upon us for years.

  Another cruel red light, something like what used to be the red dot of a scope rifle, accompanied by a deafening buzz, signals that my observation in the Liberty Room has concluded. My repentance never came. Likely it’s back to my regular cell. If anything, I’ve made things worse for myself. For a brief moment I wish that they would just shoot me. Let me die with my imagined whetted desire, Trinculo, and the image of Joan of Dirt.

  Instead I redress. I feel the sensory disc making its way slowly down my throat, as if I’ve swallowed a large dog biscuit. I am indeed remanded to my cell. If they want my little love note, they’ll have to literally retrieve it from my shit or cut it out of me.

  The spider. It follows me. I find that I want it to.

  Chapter Four

  The song haunts me still, a prison of its own. Great swaths of orchestral thrum come and go in bursts. Louder than before. Perhaps I am losing my mind.

  My regular cell in the Panopticon has the look of an antiquated gas chamber. At least what I’ve read and imagined about gas chambers on Earth—I never actually saw one, although I vaguely remember representations in film and television. And, anyway, I’m remembering wrong. This isn’t a gas chamber, it is more like a three-walled lethal injection room. With a cot in the center, where the condemned can be restrained with leather straps—arms making a human cross, the shape of Jesus—and horrid chemicals pumped into veins. Usually there is a viewer window for witnesses to watch the condemned exit human life. As far back as humans go, we have held such rituals. I don’t care which careful slice of history you choose to cling to, there is no part of being human that does not include the death spectacle: the resort to killing, through war or “justice” or revenge. Curious ways of practicing our humanity, we humans have.

  The walls of this room are a shade of dark nauseating green, cast in hard geometric tiles. The floor, an equally attractive mold-colored cement. The toilet and sink a dead varnished metal. I begin at one end and walk the distance to the opening—no door, no wall, just an electric field that would be like walking into a fire for anyone who cared to try it.

  Six strides.

  Think of all the experimentation earthlings did on animals for all those years. Human prisoners had luxurious surroundings compared to the tiny compartments and cages reserved for animals such as primates and mice doomed to experimentation, or bred for human consumption: chickens, pigs, lambs, cows. The fastest way to drive living beings mad, then as today, is to confine them to a small, stimulus-less place and deprive them of any interaction with their species. We’ve taken the idea one more step. We can see one another. Hear one another. But we cannot reach one another, which creates a heightened longing impossible to name.

  Here in the Panopticon, prisoners are held in clear view of the system of disembodied technologies standing guard over them, and the resulting self-consciousness is hard to take. That endless electrical pulse gets inside you. My heartbeat and breathing bounce off the very walls of the room, echoing back at me. The Cyclops eyes of the machines with their eight dangling arms—systems designed to keep the vital organs of the facility in working order, and its puny inhabitants alive—beam straight through me. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to shit and urinate for an all-seeing, nonhuman audience.

  More than the machines, I see every other living inhabitant. We peer out stupidly at one another, waiting for food or changes in light—or, worse, trying not to look at each other at all, but not looking is next to impossible when you’re facing other eyes and bodies. Every time I come here, and this is the fifth time, I think of elephants and chimps and dolphins. Of all the animals I’d read about in books and historical media, zoo-bound elephants and chimpanzees and glassed-in dolphins were the ones that raised the greatest compassion within me. Even thinking about it, I find that my throat locks up. It’s unbearable. Any idiot can read about the intelligence of those animals. What we did to them—and to so-called lesser humans, too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future.

  I look out at our community. All our naked, white waxen bodies gleaming in artificial light. Our faces ever receding as indicators of our humanity. One floor above, I see a man (is it a man?) directly across from me. His grafts extend from his eyebrows upward, from his ears outward, like waves of sea foam. He must be very wealthy.

  I search and search for my beloved. Then I clap eyes on him. Two floors down, several rooms over, far left—I see Trinculo. His apparatus is gone—I feel a pang of rage and grief at the thought that it may have been destroyed—and yet the sight of him fills me with relief. I will him to see me, but he is already ahead of me. He stands perfectly straight, naked, spreads his legs for dramatic effect, and salutes me, then bows with tremendous flourish. Finally, voiceless and yet eloquent beyond measure, he farts, loudly. Though I can barely hear it from where I sit, the gesture gives me a kind of painful pleasure. When you have loved someone for a very long time, intimacy is in everything. I hope he smears his cell walls with shit, a futuresque de Sade.

  I stare out at the machines and other technological forms, the blazing screens, white or black, reducing existence to data and light and hum. The odd heads and eyes and arms protruding from a central system. The gleaming colored wires snaking forever, coiling and braiding like strands of DNA. In their presence, I only ever feel biosynthetic. Maybe there never has been a time when we were human apart from this. Maybe we were always meant to come to this part of our own story, where the things we thought we created were revealed to have been within us all along, our brains simply waiting for us to recognize the corresponding forms of space and technology “out there” that we dumbly misread as distinctly human organs.

  Still, being stared at by artificial intelligence is unnerving. I walk to the oddly comforting cot—with its three-layered mattress, cozy comforter, and equally luxurious pillow; had someone somewhere secretly loved The Princess and the Pea?—and put my back to it all. I pull the plush cover over my head and instantly feel as if I am in another world.

  At some point my data will be delivered to me and I’ll have an idea of how long my stay will be. Likely not long, I know; my only infraction was entertaining one of Trinculo’s endless dramas and making an ass out of myself in the Liberty Room. Though they will of course find the Courvoisier, which saddens me. Drinking it always made my lips burn in a way that brought back memories of Earth, and I liked to be drunk with Earth memories. Under my blanket I repicture it.

  A trial.

  Hers.
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  Like death days, the CIEL Tribunals were all quite theatrical, but none more than Joan’s. Political power, in the conventional sense, had by then been replaced by digitalized matrices and algorithm systems, and so the Tribunal was presided over by seven holographic faces, each perched atop its stark white column: an obscene techno-burlesque of ancient Greece. This theatrical structure was wholly Jean de Men’s figuration. His theory seemed to be that a return to Greek drama, the birth of Western Culture, was how to begin on CIEL, how to structure a social order based entirely on representation—including but not limited to the performance of grafts. Next to the power of grafts, dramatic performance signaled the highest form of realizing reality. When you remember that upon our arrival to CIEL each and every one of us was likely scared shitless, you’ll understand how easy it was for him to invent any social order he liked. He simply replaced all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on Earth, evolved through media and technology, and perfected in space.

  I saw most of the reproductions of the trial, not just those put on public display for years and years, but the CIEL media’s reanimation of the original trial, a tradition they continued annually for years, a show mounted in the guise of news.

  Trinculo and I had watched those reanimations together; the spectacle brought us to tears even before she opened her mouth to speak. Her countenance; her rigid jawline; her black, sunken eyes; her thick and wild hair, ebony as space; her dead stare into the emptiness that was us, her audience. We saw the ghosts of her history around her: butterflies accompanying her standard on battlefields; dead infants yawning and reviving in her presence. She had inspired hundreds of thousands of rebels to fight for the freedom to exist, even on a dying planet, without tyranny.

  Did we feel remorse? In the moment, I am ashamed to admit, we did not. We felt as if she were giving us back something we had lost. We felt desire and nostalgia. For the accused, the residual wholly human who were the rebel survivors, memory was a mysterious but tangible lifeline to a breathable past. Imagine! A past one lived in and died for. A past recollected in our living matter, our cells and pores and neurons.

  In the moment then, if I’m being honest with myself, what I felt the hardest was a kind of glory in her death. As if there was something of us in it, something still righteous, something still tied to Earth. Remorse came later. And a guilt larger than a black hole swallowing half of space. Our tears and rage endlessly sucked out of us by space.

  For us, she was the force of life we could never return to. The trial, and its subsequent reanimations, were our only remaining connection to the material world. What greedy, envious angels we’d become—wingless wax figures. Half of us walked around hoping someone would throw themselves to the floor and masturbate themselves to death.

  The memory brought sweat to my skin. I felt it all over. My ears. My upper lip. My neck. Beneath, where my breasts used to bloom. My thighs, my abdomen, between my legs, where a deeply wanting cavern used to cave toward my soul. I spread my legs just imagining it. And then I ran my fingers lightly, so lightly across my own text, the part of the story that was her trial, my skin coming alive under my fingers.

  Interrogative/Excerpt 211.1

  Q: Will you swear to tell the truth?

  A: I don’t know what you’ll ask me. It’s possible you’ll ask me things I won’t tell you.

  Q: Shall this defiance be a daily exercise, then?

  A: Shall your redundant daily inquiries go on ad nauseam?

  Q: Please record the defendant’s refusal to swear an oath to truth.

  A: That is not accurate.

  Q: It is what you have stated.

  A: It is not. I refuse nothing. I have stated that there may be things I will not tell you.

  Q: On what authority would you swear, then, if not the court’s?

  A: Hmmm. All right, then, I choose the sun.

  Q: More absurdity. Have you any allegiance to the truth?

  A: I shall follow your rhetorical model. I shall tell lies and truths interchangeably. But I must warn you. I am an expert, especially, at one of those.

  Q: Have you no respect for these proceedings, nor dignity in your own person?

  A: Of the first, I have nothing. Of the second: My resistance is my dignity.

  Q: Continue questioning. Record that the defendant engages in resistance to questioning.

  A: Record as well that my accusers are witless cowards.

  Q: Strike that from the record. When did you last hear the voices speaking to you?

  A: You are funny. Let’s say yesterday and today.

  Q: At what time yesterday?

  A: They are not “voices” in the way you are supposing. But it would be futile to give an explanation. I heard it three times: once in the morning, or what I think must have been morning; once at the hour of retreat; and once in the evening at the hour of the star’s song. Very often I hear it more frequently than I tell you, so your question is irrelevant.

  Q: What were you doing when you heard it yesterday morning?

  A: I was asleep, and the sound woke me.

  Q: Did the voices touch you?

  A: Has a voice ever grabbed at you?

  Q: If they have no members, how could they speak?

  A: How is it that you speak? How do your beloved technologies speak?

  Q: Do you understand the charges against you?

  A: The charges or your oddly lascivious obsessions?

  Q: Strike from the record. Are you an enemy of the state?

  A: I have been charged with treason and terrorism against the state. Beyond this, the validity of my visions is under question—though, notably, not my military prowess. Somewhat incomprehensibly, my clothing and my . . . hair? . . . are cited as crimes against the state. I am sentenced to death; I am to be burned and televised, sent signaling through the flames across the land as proof that my body has become ash. I believe that covers it. The only thing I am unclear about is why we are having this little . . . tête-à-tête.

  Q: Your insubordination does not help your case.

  A: And your hypocrisy and genocidal tendencies do not help yours. Out of curiosity, are any voices touching your members?

  I clench my teeth so hard in my mouth my temples ache. I rest my hand near my hip bone. I remember it so achingly, so physically. When Trinculo and I would finally retire from each installment of her trial, we would throw ourselves at each other. We’d cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girlwoman whose body was in defiance of every stab at “living” we took and failed at on a daily basis. We’d drink and writhe together, Trinc and I, displacing our desires by longing for her breasts and hair and cleft, as if her genitalia were as important as her bravery and power. Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn’t what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality—her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. I even had a fantasy of cutting a lock of it for myself, to keep and love—as eternally as a lover’s. Something human of hers, to touch and have and hold.

  Underneath my comforter, I lift my hand up to my neck, to the beginning of her story on my body. Her story rises up from my skin as if to answer, flesh to flesh. I close my eyes. When you shut your eyes, the universe is internal. I can feel her story underneath my fingers, burned there, rising from my flesh. I can enter a world not limited by any cell, for the mind, the body, even the eye, is a microcosm of the cosmos.

  Underneath my hand, grafted on my flesh canvas, since they’d taken it from her, I’d written her girlhood.

  Chapter Five

  The first time the blue light flickered alive in Joan’s head, the trees around her crackled and sent her skin shivering. There were stil
l trees, back then. Unusual and seismic prevolcanic activity across the world smoldered the sky. The sun still hung in the sky like a sun, but its light had already begun to fade from bright yellow to muted sepia that lessened the color of colors. Animals still lived, though species were dying off a little at a time. Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France. The countryside of a seemingly ordinary child.

  As a girl, she went into the woods to play one of her favorite alone games. The kind of game played by children who talked to themselves and secreted away in their own imaginations. There are entire populations of children living such lives, on the periphery.

  In the woods she buried what would have looked like a pile of twigs at the base of an evergreen, in a shallow hole she’d dug in the ground. She liked to dig them back up and rebury them because the smell of dirt and trees calmed her. She liked the way dirt snuck under the crescent moon tops of her fingernails.

  The twigs were of varying sizes: some about the length of her hand, a few taller, a few shorter. In her alone games, the twigs were people who had survived a terrible event. They’d had to remake themselves in order to survive. For this reason, the twigs had aligned themselves with Earth and spiders and burrowing bugs.

  At this point in her game, each twig was climbing up to a hollow hole in an evergreen tree. When she’d delivered and saved the last twig into its resting spot, she put her hand against the grain of the tree. She closed her eyes and smelled the needles and the sap and the bark. She spread her fingers and put her palm against the evergreen. She could feel the sticky sap kissing her palm.