The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Slowly I begin to trace the letters with the burning hot end of the pen. “You don’t want to drag the tool across the skin too much. Short, quick strokes work best.” I hear her try to regulate her breathing, her nostrils. She clenches her teeth. “Nothing to worry about. I’m only going to give you second-degree burns. By stopping short of third-degree, we’ll be spared seeing your fatty layers. After all, we barely know each other.” I smile.

  The smell of burning flesh is pungent, dizzying, like burning brown sugar mixed with steak searing on a grill. Sometimes there is a popping or a crackling. With this pupil, however, I hear only a hissing from her skin, and a sad little moan.

  “What is your name?” I ask, without pausing for her answer. “The smell of burning human flesh is a delicate mélange. Muscles burning smell like the kind of animal meals humans used to eat: meat on a grill. Fat smells more like bacon, like breakfast on Earth. Cattle were bled after slaughter, and the beef and pork we ate contained very few blood vessels. But when a whole human body burns, well, all that iron-rich blood gives the smell a coppery, metallic component.”

  Her cheeks shake; her eyes are filling with tears. To her credit, she does not flinch. But I see the cords in her neck as thick as ropes. Her skin seems almost to glow.

  “You know,” I say, “full bodies include internal organs, which rarely burn completely because of their high fluid content; they smell like burnt liver.” I pause to study her face—this is someone who has no idea of animals or what it was to eat them. I wonder what she is conjuring in her head. “They say that cerebrospinal fluid burns up in a musky, sweet perfume.”

  I see her gulp. Her face looks a little sunken.

  “Burning skin has a charcoal-like smell, while setting hair on fire produces a sulfurous odor. This is because the keratin in our hair contains large amounts of cysteine, a sulfur-containing amino acid. But you wouldn’t know anything about hair, now would you? You’ve seen pictures?” She nods. “Hooves and nails also contain keratin, which explains why real tortoiseshells smell like hair when lit on fire. The smell of burnt hair could cling to the nostrils for days,” I say.

  I finish my half of the sentence. The skin of her arm rages red and puffs with burn. My pupil sits upright but looks exhausted. She pants some. Whatever comes out of her mouth next, as I hand her the pen, will be entirely telling. It will decide things. For that matter, she might faint, right there.

  “What is a tortoiseshell?” she says, staring into my eyes.

  Then she sets to work on her own arm.

  I hear her grunt now and then. I can see the word pigshit rising and reddening on her arm before me. I smile. Hope for her yet. But there is more.

  “I’m not just some witless young woman,” she says.

  Was this bravery or a fool’s admission? I am momentarily intrigued. I am also prickling with the understanding that these are the last young anythings that will exist on CIEL without another radical change, one that hasn’t a prayer of coming.

  “Do you want to know how to get into Trinculo’s cell?”

  My breath catches in my lungs. I stare at her hard.

  She smiles and continues her self-grafting. “There’s something about me that’s different from anyone else. Only Trinculo knows. He helped . . . refine my gift.”

  Without meaning to, I grab her wrist. The burning pen suspended in the air between us. “What gift?” I hold her wrist tight.

  She lets me. “Walls,” she whispers.

  I swing my head around to study the walls of my quarters. I have no clue what she is talking about. “What about walls?”

  “Let go of me.”

  I let go.

  She stands, and as she walks over to my wall and places her hands upon it, I see the woman she will become in her spine; I see that she is not a useless creature after all. I see the wall turn to water, or what looks like water, and then the wall is gone, and the room alongside mine, which happens to be an information center, is suddenly there.

  I gasp.

  She is what Trinculo calls an engenderine. Someone whose mutation has resulted in a kind of human-matter interface. Though I’d not believed him. I thought the idea was merely his hope and desire, tangled into myth. But I am the one who is stupid and useless.

  Then she restores the wall to its former status and returns to our work. She sets back at her own arm without saying anything else.

  I glance over at the spider, who has managed to spin quite the intricate web while we worked. Later, when I am alone, and after I complete my real work on my own body, I hope that it will traverse my newly burnt skin with its story and knowledge. A palimpsest.

  I turn to the girl, if the word girl is even what this person is, who seems to have become a woman, whatever that means, in the space of our session.

  “Nyx,” she says, “My name is Nyx.”

  Now we are three.

  Chapter Eleven

  As I continue to graft Joan’s story onto my body, there’s a moment that I think will kill me.

  But it doesn’t.

  Moreover, the fragmented song in my skull is beginning to coalesce. Or at least it seems so.

  The way I see it, I have one answer left in my body: my body itself. Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.

  Our performance would be staged at the cusp of Trinculo’s execution. Our “players” would include inmates smuggled from their cells and bonded—grafted—to our cause. The CIEL authorities and Jean de Men would have their performance, and we would have ours. In my mind’s eye Trinculo will travel a Skyline back to Earth—for according to Nyx, it is possible—and be reborn to live out his days away from this terrible, lifeless boat of nothing. There must be somewhere on Earth that is inhabitable amidst the chaos and detritus. Surely there’s a pocket or cave capable of sustaining a life. And if not, then I know he’d rather give his body to the good dirt we came from than to this suspended and systematized animation we mistook for a shot at more life.

  My door vibrates, and in tumble more of my comrades. Young. Smooth-skinned. Sexless, but filled with an astonishingly repressed agency they have no idea what to do with. Oh, what an orgy we could make with Trinculo’s inventions! Our imaginations not yet dead. But we have work to do.

  I set about instructing them in pairs, so that they can save time and work on one another’s bodies. During breaks, so that no one loses consciousness, I rehydrate them and lay out the plan for the performance. There is a question from a young man—though in place of his former flesh indication of manhood there is only a smooth lump, no balls hanging down like swollen round fruit, no smell of musk or hay or sweat. My god, I realize, these are the last “youth” that will ever exist in our reproduction-less wasteland, at least in purely human, uncloned form.

  “Is this Trinculo . . . important to the performance?”

  For a moment I experience an animal surge to kill him then and there, an urge to bite through his jugular and shoot his body out into space through an air lock like a foreign body. But that will only lead to another incarceration, which we haven’t the time for. I muster the patience of a mother.

  “My love, my . . . petal,” I say, stroking his face. “Trinculo is worth ten thousand of us.” I narrate his prowess as a pilot and engineer. I give him and the others the backstory they need and want. The call for resistance.

  “Now burn,” I command. And they set back to work on one another, searing the story of a girl into flesh, giving body to her name.

  Nyx rises and moves toward a far wall. Far enough away as not to attract any attention. “Go now,” I say, and Nyx dissolves into the barely perceptib
le wall.

  For myself, I steal time.

  I scan the room of young rebels until my eyes blur over and they lose their meaning as signs. As I do, I hold the tool of my trade inches from my own inner thighs.

  Before a burn, there is the sensation of molecules screaming, rearranging themselves.

  Sometimes time opens up and pauses. My flesh has long ago learned to anticipate the burn. But in this extended moment I feel all the molecules in my body stop moving. Impending death wrenches stories away from their trajectories. Think of loved ones succumbing to disease, or wars, or natural disasters. The calm before the moment of destruction. The part of her story I intend to scar myself with at my thighs has taken a turn, and I will respond accordingly.

  I had been thinking of her as a hero. Joan. The way we’ve all been trained to understanding that word and idea. Bound to a story that is not only man-made, but man-centered. How does that change when the terms of the story come from the body of a woman who is unlike any other in human history? A body tethered, not to god or some pinnacle of thought or faith, but to energy and matter? To the planet.

  If we look at history—those of us who study it, who can remember it—we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we’ll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It’s as if humans can’t understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.

  When the current crises became global in scope, when the very ground underneath our feet and the skies meant to give us life turned on us, our desperation grew to cinematic proportions. We abandoned all previous fathers, who now seemed puny and impotent. Who was God, even, in the face of geocatastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god.

  When I think about how and when Jean de Men became the leader of CIEL—how we acquiesced—my compassion for our survival washes away rather quickly. I look in the mirror, and see who and what we have become. The only way we survived even this long is at the expense of what’s left of Earth’s resources. Including the humans we forsook, their eyes turned Skyward.

  It makes me laugh before it makes me cry: he was a celebrity, de Men. Handsome and strong. A capable new father. We worshipped his mutable charisma. We worshipped the story of ourselves that he gave us: that we were bright and beautiful and with wealth. That we were the next chapter of human history. That we were an evolutionary step forward. We bought it and ate it like fine chocolate.

  Body to body, then, I join Joan in rejecting the teachings of a pseudo messiah figure. I join Joan in rejecting messiahs altogether. The story born of her actual body will be burned into mine not to mythologize her or raise her above anyone or anything, but to radically resist that impulse. Not toward any higher truth other than we are matter, as dirt and water and trees and sky are matter, as animals were and stars and human bodies are matter. To claim our humanity as humanity only, an energy amidst all other energy and matter that emerges, lives, dies, and then changes form.

  What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?

  I will write it. I will tell the truth. Be the opposite of a disciple. Words and my body the site of resistance.

  When I learn that Trinculo has asked to be burned at the stake, in the manner of Joan, I know two things. One, that they will hasten his execution for having the audacity to make this request, a fact that overcomes my entire body so quickly and violently that I drop to the floor, and two, that the image that has haunted me my entire ascended life will begin to come back to me in dreams.

  I am, as it turns out, wrong about the latter. It comes to me not just in dreams, but also in waking life: while I work, when I eat, even when I sit in a chair and think of nothing. It obsessively replaces my present tense. Like a film stuck in my skull.

  After Joan’s trial, it was decreed that, for maximum media impact, she would be executed using a method from antiquity. Specifically, a medieval burning. Several reasons were given: first, no trace of her corpse could be left behind. She must be reduced to ash and scattered into space. While some expressed concern that her ashes might be captured and used to lionize her—or, worse, to anoint a new terrorist leader—the larger concern was that any piece of her body that remained might be seized upon as something of a holy relic—and one tangible, material relic could be as dangerous as an entire belief system.

  Furthermore, it was decided that an old-fashioned burning would have the ultimate dramatic effect, that no other form of execution could tap into a collective psychic desire to watch the object of one’s devotion in peril. Though there was, admittedly, much discussion about devising an electric chair execution, which some claimed would have an equivalent impact on the populace, but which was ultimately rejected because it required too elaborate a mise-en-scène. Drowning was a popular suggestion, but water was scarce, and suggestions of producing a CGI version were quickly dismissed, as even the best simulations of water always looked like antiseptic gel. Since the event was to be filmed and disseminated via media outlets all over the world, a fire death was likely to create the most dazzling visual display, and thus promised to draw the largest possible audience.

  Finally, it was decided: a burning execution, a barbarity dredged up from the annals of history. It would serve to remind the remaining population on Earth that the very elements they had fought to claim and protect on that ball of dirt they called home could at any moment destroy them—whether through ecological cataclysm or through fire itself, the simplest and most elemental force in nature. As easily as it had evolved them, it could destroy.

  For fire’s sake they burned her.

  A scaffold was erected, in the manner of old. Joan was positioned upon the scaffold within a staged version of some bombed-out city, barren as a desert; she was not made privy to the location of her execution, only that it would happen at night.

  High winds tricked dust into the air, making the stage appear to float on a cloud of dirt.

  She looked up at the black and blue of the night sky. We looked down at her, without her consciousness of our gaze. Or perhaps with her full awareness: at one point, the cameras caught her looking up, and in doing so she seemed to acknowledge the ultimate power of our position and the utter futility of her own.

  Then the drama began. To be clear, it took several rehearsals of the burning to achieve the desired result, the perfect shot. Even with a director of the highest pedigree.

  Hands propelled her roughly toward the scaffold where the stake and faggots were waiting, and hoisted her upon it; it was built of plaster and was very high, so high that the executioner had some trouble in reaching her. Instead of a crown of thorns, a tall paper cap, like a mitre, was set upon her head, bearing the words heretic, apostate, eco-terrorist.

  She requested a tree branch. She said she only wanted to see it.

  Instead, a visual facsimile was supplied. Joan flew into a rage.

  “You mean to execute me and you cannot supply a single branch from a tree? What are you, sadists? Neanderthals? I know you must have one. You must have saved something from your destruction—a trophy, a prize, like a serial killer would. You must have an entire museum devoted to your every act of devastation.”

  Finally, in what was considered an act of compassion, a small fig tree in a planter was placed in front of her, atop a wooden stage of sorts. The tree was as plastic as the planter.

  Meanwhile, she was bound to the stake. She called out to the land, the earth, to animals, to the bones of animals, to the sky and rain and dead sun, to rivers and salted oceans and fungi and algae and insects—to beetles, of all things. To species long extinct and those now in their compromised twilight. Anxious CIEL authorities piped in synthesized laughter in a feckless attempt to undermine her message.

  Before the kindling
and wood were ignited, other forms of burning were produced. Boiling oil was poured upon her exposed flesh, molten lead directly onto her chest. Burning resin, wax, and sulfur melted together over her body, forming streams of liquid fire until the top few layers of her roasted away and her skin began to slip from her body. The scent of burnt blood and honey, mixed with meat and acrid ash, was recorded. Finally the wood was lit, and the flames leapt up the length of her body. How mesmerized we were at the image, a beacon through the flames, as if somehow her features had ascended Skyward— mouth and eyes too open, visage frozen upward, asking only Why? Or so we thought at the time.

  As Trinculo and I buried our faces into each other’s flesh, cradling each other like animals, Joan of Dirt burned. She, the last piece of earth and everything it stood for.

  It wasn’t Why she’d uttered that night, we later learned. In fact, it wasn’t a word at all.

  It had been music. A song whose origins floated above our heads in the deep fields of space, cosmic strings plucked and rippling through time itself. A song that comes back to me a phrase at a time.

  But it wasn’t a woman’s body burning we saw the day of her execution. That was all a matter of special effects.

  Joan had escaped that day. Rather than admit it, they’d opted to spread false images of her death around the world, in endless succession, until the images and stories became one and the same. Until her death replaced her altogether.

  But she was still out there.

  There is no complicated set of ideas to consider. They are going to execute my beloved Trinculo, and no one but I will even take a breath differently. I have three aims: to finish my body work and develop a cell of like-minded comrades; to free Trinculo before they kill him; and to drive Jean de Men and the entire CIEL world straight into the godforsaken sun. Finish it.

  There is a new kind of resistance myth emerging, one I suddenly understand: the world ended at the hands of a girl.