One day, during a lull in the combat, a boy who must have been around fourteen challenged Joan to a fistfight. They’d been living in a Russian forest for most of the summer, an entire child garrison, and were no doubt about to be repositioned to France or England or maybe even California for the fall; children did not fare well in Russian winters. The boy was a simple bully, the type who maintained his power and status through random acts of false bravado. He spit in Joan’s face and held up his fists.
Joan didn’t even raise her arms. She closed her eyes. The boy adopted a boxer’s stance, his feet far apart. But then the ground shook, and at his stupid feet the earth zigzagged and opened up a little, and before anyone could figure out what was happening an alder tree shot up out of the ground with him buried in its crown and didn’t stop until it was grown and he was high up in the sky, squawking like a bird. It was funny, but it was more frightening than it was funny, so there was dead silence.
When finally the boy climbed down, another unexpected thing happened. Instead of crying or lashing out, the boy grabbed Joan’s hand and brought her straight to his father a forest away, a general in command of the most important battalion in the northern hemisphere, and narrated what she’d done. The general then spoke to Joan alone.
For three days.
For three days she told her story, because—unlike her agonized mother or the endless stream of doctors or concerned counselors—this military man listened without saying anything, or judging her, or calling her crazy. At times, it was said, a song radiated out from the room they were in. In that time, a question was born in her—a question he asked her point-blank, alone in a room, at the zenith of the Wars:
“Girl.” A look in his eyes so desperate as to be nameless. “Can you stop this brutal bloodstory?”
Chapter Nine
I wake in my cell wet with sweat, in the limbo of my incarceration, and linger in the memory of reading my graftstory. To fall asleep reading—it feels nostalgically human and earthbound, even in this too-black night of space. Then I realize I’m not wet with anything. I just remember sweat. Long for it.
I’ve had the recurring dream. Again the dream of the sun, the birth of our ending, flickered behind my lids like skull cinema. In the dream, it happens exactly as it did in life, only faster and in retinal flashes. The way dreams distill time and displace images. I am not exactly an actor in the dream scene; I’m more of an observer—or, perhaps more accurate, a scribe. As events play out in my dream, I can see myself grafting the story directly onto my body. It’s as if I am history writing itself. And this: I have hair. Long luxurious cascades of blond hair curling down my arms and back like wood shavings, blowing in the wind and across my face. Mythic. And completely ludicrous.
But my dream has evolved over time. The scene is constructed from shards of a different memory: a memory of a film I saw in childhood. In the film, a Russian man, a doctor of the peasant class, bobbles his way through history as a powerless widget, serving this or that tyrant, this or that historical revolution or resistance, sometimes by accident, rarely by design. Sometimes he is briefly part of a heroic moment, other times he is unfairly incarcerated or punished; there is no cause-and-effect relationship between his own life and the larger story. The doctor loves two women. One is his wife, who comes by him in the natural order of things in their country. The other is a woman who is out of reach by class and beauty and even logic, but like all tragic lovers, they are driven madly into the impossibility of each other. In the film, wars rage and rise and burn and slip to cinder and ash and nothingness. No one is saved. Lovers, children, animals, dreams die.
I cried for days after seeing the film. The epic, romantic story, and even its form, got inside me. The micro element of the personal and the macro sweep of the historical seemed to be composed in the film in a way I’d never imagined, woven together like words and music, like melody and harmony. To be human, the film suggested, was to step into the full flurry and motion of all humanity: to bear the weight of circumstances without flinching, to surrender to the crucible—to admit that history was not something in the past but something you consciously step into. Living a life meant knowing you might be killed instantly, like one who wanders into the path of a runaway train. It was the first time I felt a sense of messianic time, of life that was not limited to the story of a lone human being detached from the cosmos.
When I came out of the theater, I said to my mother, “It’s like we’re stars in space. It’s like space is the theater and we are the bits of stardust and everything everywhere is the story.”
Now, I believe that more than ever.
As Earth’s resources dwindle, technology is seized by those who kill best. CIEL rises more quickly than any empire ever known. Access to CIEL is restricted to the affluent. Those left on Earth are considered either collateral damage or raw material for the use of the living.
Inside of war, or dream, or memory, a warrior emerges.
An electrical twitch briefly crackles the Panopticon, like a machine taking a breath or snoring.
Someone in another cell coughs.
Someone breathes.
Someone cries.
I put my hands over my eyes, to make the black more like space or death or what I remember of movie theaters. Tiny sparks of white dance under my closed lids. Memory plays out in condensed and displaced fragments, as in a tiny experimental film.
My body grows abnormally quickly and changes shape. I have the winged arms of a great womanbird, the haunches of a lioness. By the end of the dream I am a white sphinx, in some desert I don’t know, sand blowing across my interspecies textures—feathers, fur, scales, and skin—for eternity.
It’s a stupid dream.
Except that Trinculo likes the sphinx part. He’s often asking if we can “play sphinx.” It’s hard not to give in. There’s something wonderful about assuming that position on the ground, posing my head regally, making L’s of my arms and extending my ass behind me like an elegant animal.
Without much consideration I jump from my bed and creep toward the opening of my cell. I get down on my hands and knees. I know he can’t possibly see me in the mandated dark time of the Panopticondrum, but perhaps he can feel my energy. I point my body as gloriously as I can manage in Trinculo’s direction. I lift my head, square my jaw, and rest my arms there on the cold floor, and stare hard into the black, through the back wall of my cell, as if I could see through the wall out into space, straight into the sun. Burn my eyes from my head. Burn us all to death. Get it over with. Finish it. Burn us into living matter again.
“Trinculo,” I scream, sounding like a new animal species.
Silence.
But then, “Cackle for me, you far-flung sea witch!”
And there my beloved is after all, Trinculo’s voice floating up from his cell to mine.
Followed shortly by the arrival of a short and slightly crooked android, whose appearance recalls that of a tree stump. If the android had been a person, it would have been considered ugly, even malformed. As a machine, it just looks pathetic. I learn that I am being issued a citation only, and I will be released that afternoon. There is, apparently, no charge strong enough to hold me, although they confiscated several material items from my living space.
I step forward toward the viewing wall, as I’d come to think of it. “What’s the story?” I yell playfully across the space between us.
“What?” he shouts. “I demand my cackle, you gut-infested she-whore!”
If a cackle was what would give him pleasure in this idiotic interim, it was the least I could do. I draw in a huge breath of air and give it my all. What emerges sounds like a grandmother with respiratory problems, or perhaps a turkey’s gobble.
“That is by far the worst cackle I have ever heard,” he says dully. His voice carries a fatigue older than his years.
It is true. I am ashamed, but in my defense, I have no idea how to produce a worthy cackle. “What’s the verdict?” I hurl down toward his
layer of purgatory. I know his punishment will be more severe than mine. He is under surveillance for a prior offense of a sexual nature.
What I receive in return is possibly history’s greatest and most profound cackle. But then Trinc does something odd: his cackle abruptly arrests, and then, nothing. Something is wrong. There is never a truncated joke with Trinculo. I crane my neck to try to catch a glimpse of him, but it is no use. I signal to my automated keepers that I want a word. Something like a treadmill comes toward me and cocks its “head.”
“Data on Cell Seven-seven-two,” I say, without inflection. “Trinculo Forsythe.”
“Negative,” is the only response the thing offers in return.
“Listen, you jumble of bolts and wire, I have high-level clearance. Christine Pizan. You will tell me the data on Cell Seven-seven-two. Or I’ll thread a rusty bolt through your ass-valves.”
For a moment I feel sorry for it, as if its feelings may have been hurt. The machine does a sort of half-circle this way and that, and its bobble-headed screen tips toward the floor. Then it buzzes back to attention, pushes away from my viewing hole, and blurts, “No access.” It then hovers higher and shoots a laser that slices a gash in the wall less than a centimeter from my cheek. I half expect to feel blood when I reach to touch my face. Killing me would mean nothing. Letting me live means next to nothing, too.
I move as close as possible to the electrical current that is my cell’s wall and yell, “Trinculo?”
Nothing.
Back in bed, I hold as still as a corpse, hoping that the tiny silver spider will visit me. More than waiting: I hope so hard I try to will my desire into the insect’s shape. When you live in space, far from the former natural world, it’s easy to remember that everything is merely matter and energy. Conjuring up a cyber creature seems as simple as calling a dog to your feet. And yet, if it was truly no more than a matter of energies, I could simply walk through the containment wall and its force field, like monks walking through fire in old stories of faith or magic. In truth I’d be burned to a crisp so instantly it would appear as if I simply vanished. There’s not much blood or guts or gore in space. Most energies simply signal through the flames when they end. One dissipates.
The spider does indeed visit me. Late. Wakes me from sleep. It is in the space between my shoulder and my jaw. It tickles, but also feels comforting somehow, almost like a caress. God, how lonely and stupid I’ve become. I close my eyes, hold still, and wait for the small pattern I suspect might emerge against my skin. I tap my fingers after each beat to be sure.
-- -.-- / - . . . . .-. --- . . . - . -. / . / .- -- / - --- / - . . . . / . -.- . -.-. .- - . -.
My—beloved—I—am—to—be—executed.
My beloved I am to be executed.
Morse code. I begin to cry. We haven’t used this form of communication since we were children making forts in the woods. I don’t know the circumstances, or what specific transgressions he’s been accused of, or when or how or what, but I know that when the Tribunal orders execution there is no bargaining. Even if Trinculo were granted a trial—unlikely, due to the vast number of his violations—his trial would merely be theater for the rest of us. My mind and throat lock simultaneously. My body goes cold and stiff. For a time I think I can easily will myself to die, right there in the idiotic cell. But then a rage comes over me like none I’ve ever felt before. A heat that begins in my belly and twists up my torso and flares out toward my rib cage. I sit up. The spider clings to my neck. I clench my fists hard enough that my fingernails dig into my palms, leaving little half smiles.
They cannot have him. I will not let them. Our lives may not be worth anything in this moronic CIEL world of pageantry and void, but one might yet bring meaning to a single life; one can still take one’s energy and direct it toward another, fully, unto death. I don’t know how I will save his life and get him off this orbiting pot of hubris, but I will find a way.
The spider has one last dance before it leaps away from me and into some crack in the system.
-. --- / -. --- - / -. . . . . .--. .- . .-. / . / . -. - . -. -. / - --- / -.-. --- -- . / - . . . .- -.-. -.- / .- . . . / -.-- --- .- .-. / . . . - .- --. . -. .-
Do not despair I intend to come back as your vagina.
My dear Trinculo. Finding light in death, sex even in doom.
I see neither him nor the spider again, before I am escorted back to my living quarters.
My plans are not changing, just evolving. Just gaining in human plot and depth. However, my rage is changing. She is beginning to take on an epic deathsong. The song. In my head. It’s coming back.
Chapter Ten
“Is there any chance of serious permanent injury?” My pupil looks at me, courage skin deep at best.
“What, you mean like burning through to an internal organ, like a heart?” I stare at her little head. Why are young adults’ heads so little? They look malformed. “We have no time for stage fright,” I say matter-of-factly. “Leave your fears outside my door or go do something else with your life. This is serious work, I have a deadline, and I don’t have the time or the patience to handhold apprentices.” I sit upright and stiff and look her dead in the face. Her skin is so translucently white it looks almost blue, as if her veins and arteries are gaining dominance. No, not blue, aqua—blue-green and pallid. Or maybe I’m just trying too hard to remember colors. She has grafts on each shoulder, tiny ornamental wing patterns, and some idiotic positive maxim. She looks like some cross between an amphibious creature and a baby eagle. I have no intention of mouth-feeding her. She’d best grow talons in the next sixty seconds or she’ll be out. “Make a choice,” I say. “Now.”
She gulps.
Her epaulets shiver.
“Listen, why do you want to do this?” It seems a fair question. Most of my former pupils come on a dare, or for the novelty of being the one who can scar people rather than being the one scarred. Whether they knew it or not, I always knew there was a hint of sadism to the choice. The best grafters were more than sadists. They were masochists as well. More: they were comfortable with that relationship, that dance between selves. And they couldn’t stay away from it if they tried.
“I . . .” Her words swallow back down her throat.
“Right, then,” I say, and start to pack up my tools.
“Wait!” She grabs my forearm.
When she does she immediately draws her hand back, as if she hadn’t expected the layers and layers of textual content there. We both look down at my arm, its white and tanned intricacies creating an entire poetic landscape where skin used to be. Then she puts her hand back on my arm and holds it there, running her fingers over what is there as if she is reading Braille.
“I want this.” This time her voice is steady and at least two octaves lower. Her eyes meet mine. Her silly shoulder grafts recede behind the square-shape of her jaw. I see some strength in the aqua color of her skin—a little hint of defiance. “I want to be good at it. I want to be better than other people at it. I want people to come to me and ask for it.”
There is hope for her yet.
I begin. “The electrocautery method I use requires a pen-like tool containing a red-hot, exchangeable tip.” I lift it up in front of her face. “See? This technique has a higher accuracy than others; it offers the most control, the most consistent depth and width of burn. As in tattooing, one traces the design over a stencil. When it comes to textual grafts, however, it’s best to draw on personal taste to help in type designs and the shapes of lines and stanzas and paragraphs.”
God damn it if the words are not burning in my throat as I say them. Trinculo designed and made these exchangeable tips for me. And so I find myself resuming my instruction with a kind of berserk vengeance, crying all the way through over Trinculo’s fate. The girl cannot see my tears. They pool like salted pearls at the corners of my deep-set eyes, hidden by a few folds and curls of flesh I grafted in the shape of ocean waves around my eyes and brow bone. Each tear makes
its way down the raised rivulets and hills covering my cheekbones, then slips imperceptibly into the corner of my mouth. I drink in my love and anger and fear.
I don’t know how long Trinculo has. Ordinarily there is no rush with this sort of thing—executions are theatrical entertainment for CIEL residents and thus ebb and flow according to supply and demand. But the threads of my plan were starting to weave, in my head, into a kind of brutal braid. I would attend the execution, of course. I would display my body work there, too, my corporeal defiance. But by now I had even more in mind.
As I work I envision an entire performance, one that would take as much time in preparation as I could spare. I will collect, fragment, and displace individual lines from my epic body poem onto the bodies of others until we became an army of sorts, all of us carrying the micrografts that related my own macro epic: a resistance movement of flesh. The action will culminate in plural acts of physical violence so profound during our performance no one will ever forget the fact of flesh.
All that is left is for me to engineer Trinculo’s escape as part of the drama. To do that means contact with him. I need more information.
The spider is back. This does not surprise me. I stare at it, weaving its minute bridges on the fern. Comrade.
“Absinthe makes a remarkably good astringent,” I say, turning my attention back to my pupil. She looks at me with the face of one who knows nothing. “Old Earth relics,” I answer. Her eyes narrow. I dab her left forearm with absinthe. She smiles. “We are going for a single line. A training sentence. ‘Jean de Men is pigshit.’ I’ll do the first half, then you try.”
I wait for a response. Nothing.
“Are you certain which side you are on?”
She nods, but says nothing. Then she thrusts her arm out at me between us, acquiescing. When I touch the hot metal to her skin, I hear her suck in a breath that is thick enough to cut her throat.
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