The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  PD wrapped the rope twice around her chest and pinned her arms and body to the gnarled wood of the tree. Behind her, he worked on knots he’d improvised himself. When he finished, he stood in front of her and crossed his arms. “Your hair’s gonna get sap in it.”

  Opening one eye, Jo asked her brother, “Wait, do you have something to gag me with?”

  PD looked around. He was pretty sure he knew what a gag was, but not entirely. It sounded like it had to do with barfing. But he suspected it was more like in the movies, when someone’s mouth was tied shut. “I could tie my socks together?” he offered.

  “Do it,” she said, and PD set about removing his socks and tying them together, with a knot in the middle that he centered in the hole of his sister’s mouth.

  “Gaaahhhhhhhr,” Jo said.

  “What?” PD couldn’t understand his sister.

  “Gaaaaahhhhhhhhhd. Naw Ruhhh Awaaaaawy.”

  And so her brother Peter ran from the dark woods at dusk back toward their house.

  At home, he washed his face and hands. He put on new socks to warm his feet. He ate a cheese sandwich and drank a soda. He turned on the television. Night fell. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, he wondered how long “later” was supposed to be. At seven, his mother asked, Where is Joan? It seemed part of the game. Upstairs reading like always, he said. Take this dinner up to her then, his mother said, your father will be late tonight. And so he took the dinner up and put it in the middle of her bed and shut the door.

  The longer he waited, the more interesting the game seemed. Maybe this once he really could save his sister, rather than the other way around. Wasn’t she always the one saving him? When he nearly fell off the roof of the house, having climbed up without permission and slipped, dangling from the eaves, didn’t she make a pile of leaves and hay and pillows and trash to break his fall? When he got locked in the granary just before the grain fill, didn’t she crawl through a sewer, come up through the floor, and get him back out to safety, just before the grain fill siren? When he’d taken up his mother’s carving knife to become a real pirate and not a pretend one, slicing open his own forearm, hadn’t she pushed so hard on the skin of his arm that it left a bruise, taken off her own shirt, and tied a tourniquet before either of them quite knew what that word meant? He thought of all this as he sat in the living room, watching television, into the night.

  Near ten o’clock his mother ushered him with her dish towel toward bed, and told him to tell Joan it was time for lights-out as well. Peter said good night, shut his bedroom door, then climbed out of his window with a flashlight and set out to save Joan.

  It wasn’t hard to reach the wood. A well-worn path lit up before him. But the wood was dark even in daylight, darker still at night, so finding where they’d left off was a bit more difficult. Tree and wind and night sounds rose and fell. He smelled bark and dirt and wet. He wished he’d brought a coat—the air raised the hair on his arms and he could feel the dampness of the ground cover seeping through his sneakers.

  Fear takes hold of children differently. Shadows quicken their becomings, and what might be the scratching of branches or the whistling of wind in leaves and needles can take on the low-pitched hum of a growl or a grunt. Birds that cheer during the day, with their colors and flight, in the darkness sound and look the same as bats. And bats seem everywhere. He was no longer cold. He was sweating. But none of the growing wood terror caught his breath like the image he came upon after climbing a small rise that felt familiar under his feet. A great crackling sound grew as he ascended the hill. Like the sound of a hundred twigs being broken. His heart clattered inside his rib cage. His hands filmed with sweat. A light seemed to glow up and beyond what he could see. At the top of the rise he breathed hard like a runner and his skin itched and something smelled wrong, and he felt light-headed, and then he held all the breath in his body.

  Fire.

  The forest before him lit up. Orange and white and red. He could see he was in the right place. Where he’d left his sister. Heat burned inside his nostrils, his eyebrows. He held his arm up to shield his face. “Jo!” he yelled. But he could not see her tied to any tree, and all the trees he could see were ablaze, and he saw no evidence of a rope, or the dirty knotted socks of a stupid boy, and he coughed, and smoke stung his eyes and tears wet his cheeks and his throat constricted when he tried again to call out the name of his sister. PD dropped like kindling to the ground in a pile of boy. Crying.

  Slowly, the way a morning mist dips, curls, and descends on hills and around treetops, a soft cool wet fell on his crouched back. A low sound rose up from the ground that he could feel in his knees and hands, a vibration of sorts, and then the sound took shape and became a hum, like a thousand children hitting the same low note. The very night gave way to water, different from rain though—more of a full and even wetting than individual drops—and the trees were doused and the orange light slowly turned blue. Blue light bloomed everywhere. He could see the entire forest. His hands—his body—the ground and trees and everything around him was blue. A coolness evened out the heat.

  Out of the blue he heard his name echoed.

  He raised his head and saw his sister walking toward him, naked. She knelt on the ground and cradled his head and torso in her arms and set him up against her thighs. She wiped dirt and tears, soot and loose hair from his face. The great humming forest song crescendoed, then died down to a near silence. After, crickets chirped naturally.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, nearly into her stomach.

  “Listen to me,” Joan said. “Something has happened. Don’t be afraid. The earth . . . she’s alive.”

  Chapter Eight

  I’ve been drawing.

  On the walls of my cell. Bodies. Huge Hieronymus Bosch–style scenarios. With the handle of the toilet I broke off. I’ve been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born. It’s our idiotic minds that overwrite everything. But the body has a point of view. It keeps its secrets. Makes its own stories. By any means necessary.

  When I graftstoried her youth, I’d given her a childhood based on the facts we’d all learned from oral stories passed around before the ascension, and from the fragmented videos that survived her capture, torture, trial, and burning.

  The story now rose up in welts from my skin. Her childhood at my torso. Here her mother, father, brother. Her town in the small of my back. But her comrade in arms, Leone, I’d written in the terms of a beloved—Leone I wrote at my thighs and up, into the very cradle of my former sexuality.

  Joan’s favorite class was science. She had been interested in the study of microbes and quantum physics, interested in the fact that they were both part of the study of string theory. The small and the large inextricably wedded for eons. Her favorite dead people were Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin, whom she sometimes drew pictures of surrounded by a DNA double helix. Her favorite living people were her forever friend, a Vietnamese-French girl named Leone, and her brother, PD. Although she couldn’t talk to animals, she felt more kindred with them than with people. But the world was her deepest intimate. Trees and dirt and rocks and rain, and ocean and river water compelled her almost completely.

  At school she could temporarily forget the strange blue light and song in her head. Learning about the world’s geology, she could pretend that her only true relationship was to the natural world. She could ignore the fact that the thing in her head, and her parents’ increasing anxiety while watching the nightly world news, had nothing whatsoever to do with the girlhood of things.

  But even at school there had been signs of things to come. Like the day a boy with hair the color of rust pushed Leone in the center of her chest so hard she fell down on the ground, her breathing went wobbly, and Joan ran to call a teacher. They took Leone away in an ambulance.

  When they took Leone away, Joan went into a
cement recess tunnel and cried and pulled out some of her own hair. After school, she found the boy with hair the color of rust and said “Come here.”

  Unafraid of girls, he said “What?” and stepped toward her.

  She put her hands on his shoulders and closed her eyes.

  “What are you doing, freak?”

  She felt the blue light flutter slightly above her ear, underneath her hair. Her mouth twitched slightly.

  “Whatever,” he said, but she kept her hands clamped onto his shoulders like girl epaulets. He couldn’t get free.

  “What the hell?” he yelled, but it was no use.

  She opened her eyes just as the trees around them began to shiver, their leaves rustling off the branches in great swirls. Then the wind kicked up more than seemed normal, and the boy’s feet lifted out from under him, so that he was really pinned to the world only by Joan’s hands on his shoulders, her hair lifting up a little. She opened her eyes.

  “Lemme go! Lemme go,” he’d screamed.

  “Okay,” she said, and did, and he flew with the force of the wind circling them up into the air and around until she breathed out and he landed on the ground with the loud thud of a boy dropping from the sky. A leg broken. He whimpered.

  Before she ran again to get an adult, though, she said to the broken boy, “Don’t ever touch Leone again or you’ll never leave the sky.”

  Leone—whose small heart had a defect at birth, who carried a heart that started out in a pig. Xenotransplantation and Leone had become Joan’s favorite words. Xenotransplantation represented a change in the distance between people and animals in a way she loved. Leone represented Leone, just Leone, Leone. Sometimes Joan would spin around alone in a circle saying the beautiful word out loud to no one but her body, hands clasped over her heart, eyes closed, like praying.

  Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back, Leone with a smile as wicked as a cracked apple, Leone with eyes like blue-green pools, Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle or chase or race Joan. They swam naked in clear pools in the foothills; they curled into each other’s bodies alone, next to night fires, away from adults. Leone became Joan’s idea of love.

  The day Joan threw the boy into the sky and let him drop, things shifted. As adults carried the boy away on a stretcher, Joan heard him yelling, “There’s something wrong with her!” Men with grave faces and women with upside-down smiles stared at her.

  Like most gifts emergent too soon in children, Joan’s drew quick scrutiny. Little did we know her next gift would be so perfectly timed with history’s next chapter.

  Sometimes I’m not sure I remember the beginning of war or how the Wars ended. It feels like we’d been born into perpetual war, to be honest, and now we hover above our own past like impotent Greek gods, without any use, living off of the dying and dry planet below.

  In my memory, back on Earth, the word war stopped being a picture or a subject or a nightly news show somewhere far away in the past. It fragmented and shattered and splayed itself across all times and places. Alliances formed or deformed quickly, as in chemistry experiments. Large powers were dispersed into smaller ones; small powers joined in collectives, like bees in hives, and grew dangerously alive. Leaders rose and fell faster than seasons.

  There wasn’t time to educate the children.

  As in medieval times, and during other world wars, children simply had to learn to live within the miasma of violence. Pick up this weapon. Don’t think. Act.

  The year before the Wars began, it seemed that technology and evolution were on the cusp of a strange bright magnificence. Technology had made houses smart, and cars, and employment centers, and education. The physical world seemed only a membrane between humans and the speed and hum of information. The age of synthetic biology came along in just the way the age of computers had: in a makeshift garage lab, some brainy nerd kid on the edge of adulthood discovered the pieces of an intense puzzle all on her own. Soon microbes were created that converted corn into plastic, in a process a little like brewing beer. Throw a seed out the window at night, and before long you could have a garden of unearthly delights: anything from a toddler’s sippy cup to a complete set of synthetic scaffolding for a house.

  It wasn’t that difficult, as things turned out. The more we understood our bodies, the more we understood the universe, and vice versa. A living organism was a ready-made production system that, nearly exactly like a computer, was ruled by a program. Its genome. Synthetic biology and synthetic genomics capitalized on the fact that biological organisms were already programmable manufacturing systems. Microbes couldn’t turn a rock into gold, but they damn sure could convert shit into electricity.

  The newly engineered microbes of this era could detect poisons in drinking water or aerosol spray. They could spread out laterally to create biofilm; they could copy superimposed patterns and images, serving as microbial photocopy machines. E. coli—one of the world’s fastest-duplicating bacterial machines—could be reprogrammed to make bactoblood for fast and easy transfusions. Microbe technology gave rise to fast and reliable new ways to detect and identify diseases; genetic microbe solutions, combined with stem cell medical advances, made old narratives about sickness and health fall away as quickly as the old story about Earth being flat. Human limbs could be made to regenerate. Deceased hearts made to beat. Blinded eyes made to see. Secular miracles.

  Of course, with the speed of these advances—with the superhuman shotgun blasts of these cures and hopes and solutions—came their counterparts: terrible advances in warfare. When the first nuclear drone attacks erupted, for a while, and counterpart drones returned fire, the War was waged almost without soldiers. But all agon eventually reduces itself to human violence. It was almost as if humans couldn’t bear their distance from the killing. The drama. The theater of war.

  Then came what was once supposed unthinkable: child armies.

  Child armies were born quickly and organically, in the moment after the family, as a unit of social organization, broke down and lost its role within the social structure. At first their emergence seemed only expedient, only circumstantial: there were child porters, spies, messengers, scouts. It took only a little longer until there were child shields, and finally child soldiers, in every army. But then the world has always made violent use of children. The rhetoric of protecting children from war, shielding those most vulnerable from our most horrific truths, was always a hypocrisy designed to protect the illusions that adults carry that we care more about our children than we do about ourselves, until finally that pretense, too, fell.

  And then the wars crescendoed, vacuuming civilian life away forever.

  As a child soldier, Joan had been extraordinary. Her military prowess only missed earning her official recognition because she so often laid down her arms in secret, or near-secret, during pivotal moments in battle. Almost no one saw her quietly sliding her rifle down the side of her body while the blue light near her temple ignited. No one but she heard the cacophonous song raging in her head, an epic battle story she was living one stanza at a time. When she reached out to touch trees or water or dirt, and the entire battlefield buckled like a sheet being shaken, or the earth opened up and literally swallowed the tanks and Humvees and front-line fighters of whomever the enemy was that week, or water simply left its banks at the sides of rivers and swept fighters away from the knees up. No one was looking quite directly at her.

  The first time Leone saw Joan’s otherworldly combat techniques, the story goes, was one day when they arrived too late at a battle zone. Joan’s mother had been stationed there as a nurse. Just before they reached the site, a vibration bomb had gone off, exploding everyone—including Joan’s mother—from the inside out. Joan and Leone had run into the medical tents too late to stop the blood from splattering indifferently over patients and doctors and nurses.

  In my narrative, I give her mother’s face a half-smile, blue eyes, rose cheeks. As if she’d been rememberi
ng her daughter in the moment before her death. But in truth we’ll never know. They were unable to revive Joan’s mother, her face already the color of a pale moon on a quiet winter night, her eyes terribly open, her throat bombed open like a second mouth. Leone saw Joan jam her hand into her mother’s raw and splayed-open gullet. The image of Joan’s hand within the red and blue and bone made Leone retch. When Joan turned away from her mother and stood up, the look on her face was murderous and iced.

  I graft the scene at my abdomen.

  Joan walked straight back out into the fray that day, her hand still bloody with dead mother muck. She bent down toward the ground low enough to put her cheek to the earth. Leone saw something flickering near Joan’s ear and thought it might be an enemy laser sight, so she hid behind a blown-up jeep and tried to cover Joan from possible snipers. But no sniper shot came. Instead, she recognized the familiar blue light at Joan’s temple, and watched Joan put her lips to the earth, almost like she was giving the earth mouth-to-mouth.

  Then everything everywhere burst into flames, save the two of them. Plastic polystyrene and hydrocarbon benzene, together, made a hot fire jelly. Like Napalm B, it caused fire, explosions, burns, asphyxiation . . . and stuck to human skin. At the time, that’s what Leone interpreted: jets had flown by and dropped Napalm B. In their wake, burning bodies everywhere—enemies and comrades alike.

  When Leone looked at Joan’s face as she retreated from the field, she could have sworn she saw her whole head glowing aquamarine, like the light in the center of a single flame.

  “There are no more mothers,” Joan said, and in her voice was a rage as old as Earth’s canyons, cut by erosion and plate tectonics and the force of water. And yet her emotions were still those of a teen, unable to contain what raged inside her body.

  As Leone witnessed the transformation of the girl whose side she never left again, she became attracted to Joan the way magnets are, irreducibly linked to this girl and her body and her ungodly nature. Her flux and glare.