The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  What an ungodly choice she made. To destroy life on Earth as we knew it because of the suffering she saw ahead.

  When the volcanoes of earth erupted, when the waters rose and Joan emerged, it was clear to me now, we’d gotten the story all wrong. In our desire to claim her as ours, we’d misread our heroine’s aims. We thought she’d wanted to end the Wars, to save mankind, each of us secretly hoping to be chosen.

  But Joan knew one thing we never learned: to end war meant to end its maker, to marry creation and destruction rather than hold them in false opposition.

  The Bible and the Talmud, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita, the scrolls of Confucius and Purvas and Vedas—all that is over, I understand now. In its place, we begin the Book of Joan. Our bodies holding its words.

  My moment of pause is over. I bring my young comrades back into focus around me—busy as little clone bees—then plunge the heated stylus into the flesh of my left upper thigh, the skin soaring up with red-white, tiny traces of smoke tendril around my work.

  I see her differently now.

  Here is the revised battle scene that delivers to us this new world. Before her signature fills the sky in devastation, she stands at the familiar cusp of war, in the place we carved out for her as our savior, and carries out the opposite of a resurrection: a decreation. I raise the words. I burn:

  Joan’s foot sunk into sand so surrendered to oil that her boots suctioned with each step to the black earth. In front of her, a multitude of snakes: snakes in the form of man-made roads, and river snakes of thickened-black crude, and toxin snakes from rivulets of runoff, and land snakes of sinking sand, and the jut and crease of eroded canyon edges cutting up and slithering out. Everything black and blue and smelling of excavation and the drive to conquer, colonize, deplete.

  She surveyed the territory differently from the way a discoverer would. This was the future city we had made. This viscous thickening wasteland.

  She could cast her mind backward to a world of lush hills and green valleys. To a distinction between earth and sky. She wasn’t old, but still she could remember it. She had been a child when we still had choices: there was us and there was the environment and there was what we were doing to it. The union we were meant to manifest was irrevocably broken.

  What sprawled before her now was a bruise-colored tableau of our insatiable desire for refinement. The Alberta Tar Sands. Oil, then water. That’s the order the story would go in. It wasn’t a secret, not difficult to see coming. It was commonplace, really: how we blind ourselves purposefully in the name of progress.

  She dug the black toe of her boot into the black sand. A black revolutionary next to her. “Not long now,” he said. “This is it.” She nodded. Briefly she wanted to embrace him. She was still a virgin, and for a moment she thought, Why not now? Who knows how much longer we’ll have? They could even double suicide afterward, beat the planet to the punch; return back to matter, just like stars in the sky. Dead and casting light and story backward.

  On her side of the battle, she served firepower equal to Jean de Men’s. Equal numbers: military defectors, civilians, and revolutionaries fighting together. Terrorists, she thought, laughing inside. When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries. People who turn over the earth. She scanned her forces, all unshakably allegiant to her. She dug the heel of her other foot into the wrong earth. Everything smelled like oil and fear. Everyone’s eyes stung with petroleum fumes and firepower. Her body rose up from the ground like a useless question mark. The lip of the terrain, blackened and cracked, oozed.

  On Jean de Men’s side of the battle, he continued the onslaught, marshaling invisible drone strikes while striving to complete the escape route he planned for the elite, abandoning Earth to live in the cosmos. The CIEL safe haven, the orbiting fucks. On his side, an arsenal of biochemical weaponry that would annihilate more than half his own forces in the process. His command included military allegiants and military slaves and deluded civilians and civilian slaves and the worst fodder of all: people without hope in a future. He would use suicide fighters, she knew already. It wasn’t unthinkable. It never had been. Humanity had always been its own monster.

  On her side, however, she had something else: what could be compared only to a new bomb prototype, its power known but untested, that would likely kill enough on both sides to render it genocidal. It was a later evolution of a cluster bomb, but one that relied not on fire or flesh-disintegrating power, but on sound. The harmonics of the universe, turned brutal when marshaled and used. But she did not need this bomb. She could use her body.

  On his side, there lived a hatred for what humanity represented with its diversities and differences, and his pathological desire to abandon the planet, to re-create humankind in a different image. His own.

  On her side, there was a hatred there, too, if she was being honest with herself: for what we had made of ourselves, for the fictions we consistently chose that forced our own undoing; for our fear of otherness; for our inability to conquer ego, our seemingly tsunami-like thirst for never-ending consumption at the price of the planet.

  What is a body? Her body, capable of more than mass destruction. And she’d known it since she was twelve. That is what the song had laid bare to her, so many years ago, among the trees.

  To some it seemed as if Joan could not die. She’d been wounded between the neck and shoulder by shrapnel ricocheting off of a tank in a drone strike. She’d withstood a blow to her skull from a boulder sent hurtling in a firefight near Orléans. She’d been shot, bruised, bloodied, and even buried underneath a one-thousand-year-old medieval wall.

  But here, here at the lip of the Tar Sands, she and her army stood silently, her white banner undulating in the wind, watching a nonlethal drone fly toward her almost soundlessly. Long-range scanners had tracked it for over a mile. She thought about crows and pigeons from history, carrying battle messages between forces. Briefly it perhaps looked like a white prehistoric—or future-esque—bird.

  When the drone was as close to her face as if she were facing off with an actual person in front of her, a screen dropped down, a screen about the size of a human head, a screen filled with the image of Jean de Men’s face. “Coward,” she said.

  “Please do accept my apologies,” his voice scratched out from the screen above the hum of the drone’s rotors, “but my actual presence is not required. Be assured that I have my finger on all the buttons: you live or die as a species today.”

  She spat on the ground. “Full of sound and fury, as always, signifying nothing; really, Jean, you should have spent your last hours studying literature, history, philosophy, rather than spending all this idiotic energy projecting your image at me.”

  His smile cut the screen in half. “Test me. I beg you. This chess match will not be won through traditional means.”

  “There is no longer any such thing as tradition. We are at the end of the world.” She stepped closer to his screen-face. “There is no chess match when multiple universes stretch and frown and squat to shit; when the existence of parallel realities in physics proves that tragedy and comedy, love and hate, life and death, were never really opposites; when language and being and knowing themselves are revealed to have been blinded by dumb binaries. We’re living one version of ourselves. You are simply this version of yourself. Endless matter changing forms. In another version of yourself, exactly next to this, you are dead matter.”

  The screen laughed. “Come now, do you after all this time actually fear death? Ordinary, human, death? Fear the death of your so-called fame and legacy, fear the pain and torture of capture, fear the length and depth of your impending humiliations and the story we will make of that.”

  So close to the drone’s screen she could kiss it, she whispered, “The intimacy I have with my enemy is deeper than any lover could know; be careful, brutal opponent, of stepping into your thickest nightmare, your deepest desire, the desire to be named lovingly, taken to a
milky tit you never experienced, not forgiven of your sins but embraced for them, incinerated for them, sent back to glowing white hot matter with a compassion and orgasm so complete it erases your humanity altogether . . .”

  It’s said that she quite calmly lifted her hand up to the screen and punched a hole through it. The drone wobbling and cascading to dirt, like a felled bird.

  And then the two sides of things buckled and heaved in collision like two tectonic plates.

  In their aftermath, of course, new continents might eventually form.

  The human race might be obliterated, or survive in an orbiting dreamscape, or in some new animal evolution, or in some other way.

  Her eyes set.

  Her hands ready to go to dirt.

  He didn’t know.

  He had no idea what this young adult had in her hands. He still thought of her as a female, a child, playing some kind of game in which he could outwit her.

  It wasn’t quite killing or saving, what she had in hand. Not creation or destruction.

  And yet it was all of these.

  She closed her eyes and saw again the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned aquifer poisoned air poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power—the only star in the sky—a ruthless inhuman grotesque—a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world’s roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike—all manner of animal—including humans—hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.

  She saw unstoppable and perpetual war as existence.

  Her eyes stung and blurred with salted wet, but only for a few seconds. About the time humanity has lived on Earth compared to the cosmos. “Bring your last war,” she whispered into her headpiece, deciding in that instant that all life was already death. “This ending is just beginning.” She did not fire a rifle. She did not trigger a bomb. She looked once at Leone; she set her shoulders, her jaw; she put her hands down into the dirt. Sand. Oil. Molecules of air. History. Religion. Philosophy. Human relationships. Evolution.

  From the carcass of the drone on the ground, Jean de Men’s voice yet warbled out, “Apostate, vile whore, immoral terrorist, this day you die.” Secure in his power and armed forces, his army already surging forth, drones going to wing the way insects and birds used to.

  “There is no self and other,” she said, laughing into the mouth of death, the blue light at her temple gleaming laser-like into the sky and surrounding air, the song in her head crescendoing in tidal waves and reverberating in the bones of every man, woman, and child around her, her armies plunging and rising as if carried by apocalyptic body song.

  And when she rested her body down upon the dirt, arms spread, legs spread, face down, there was a breach to history as well as evolution.

  And the sky lit with fire, half from the weapons of his attack, half from her summoning of the earth and all its calderas—war and decreation all at once, a seeming impossibility.

  Alive. Trinculo says she’s alive, down there, existing in spite of everything.

  The song. In my head. It’s hers. I remember now. It went into us. I don’t know how.

  Once, she had a voice.

  Now her voice is in my body.

  Book Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Night. Every time the dull gouache of day gives way to the ebony of night, Joan feels like an alien. Fucking lunar landscape. Nearly impossible to believe this is Earth; even she has to remind herself she is not belly-down on the moon. That the dirt in her mouth holds no nutrients, that it has become more like chalk. She knows all through her bones and her flesh that her body against the ground is closer to reptile than human, for—like that of a reptile stalking the vast desert wastelands—her existence has been reduced to the slender impulse of survival. Salvage missions. There’s no life left but them. Or what is left of Earth. That’s what she’s coming to believe. Earth is, now, a spotted apocalyptic terrain: muted sepia sun during the day, moon so faint it looks like a bruise at night. A lifeless ball of dirt. At least at the surface.

  They wait. She and Leone. For the right moment.

  Joan rolls onto her back, looks over to another boulder, where Leone crouches. Then she closes her eyes and feels her own face. It is calming to feel her face. When she closes her eyes and tracks the burns on her skin, her neck, shoulders, it is as if she enters another dimension, one in which her body becomes an undiscovered land and not the grotesque burned thing that she knows it is. Under her hands, she can reinvent things on the surface of her skin. She can imagine that her face is a terrain. The burns stretching and diving like microravines and mountains, or pinching and puckering like the foothills of a country. She used to have a country. Everyone did.

  Once there was a girl from France. She heard a song and became a warrior for her country, but her country lost its shape and aim in the Wars, as all countries did, and then there were just combatants and civilians, and then just civilians gone brutal against one another, endless violence. Then the girl made a choice.

  Once there was a girl.

  She does this at night, when she can’t sleep. She closes her eyes and ritually runs her fingertips over the geography of her face. Years of childhood and family recede and depress, replaced by the valleys and mountains of scar tissue and aging. Under her right eye and where her cheekbone begins, the war years. Her gone adolescence. At her nose bridge the burned skin turns, almost spiral, and in her mind’s eye she can feel how near rage and love are in us all. We try to pretend they are opposites or at far poles from one another, but really they meet and bridge at the center of a face. They make a nexus. She feels the fiction of faith at the bridge of her nose. If she presses down on the waxen scar she can feel her skeleton underneath. How easily she could bore her finger like a drill into her own gray matter.

  Near her jaw, against the edge of her mouth, she feels the people she once loved. Her mother. Her father. Her brother. And then those she learned to love through labor and resistance. Brothers and sisters in arms. Love is a word with ever-exploding definitions forged at the corners of her mouth, her mouth now set like a jagged slit against any expression or feeling.

  Her face is a new world. Her skin carries the trace of her primary wound. She lives in the killer’s body; she lives in the body of one who might make life. She thought the killing was justified. In the wasteland that is left of her desires and righteous aims, she can see now that there is no just violence. Violence merely is. It murders us the moment we bring it to consciousness. Under her fingertips her burned chin sits like a guilty, poreless butte, a stubborn reminder that she was put to flame. Burned after she blotted out the sun.

  If she travels the territory back up to the left side of her face carefully with her fingertips, where the burns left their most brutal mark, that place where her eye is misshapen—the lid pulling down too far, farther than a sleeper’s—that place is Leone.

  My eye is you, Leone.

  My eye was always you.

  A clicking sound. Leone signaling. Joan opens her eyes, scans the scene before them, and nods back to Leone.

  Joan elbows her way less than an inch at a time along the ground, through low-lying thistles and the skeletal remains of shrub brush. The dirt smells of dried and dead things and grinds into her clothing. She pauses and clutches a handful of dirt that h
as a small bit of nearly petrified twig in it. She smiles. Reaches for her rifle. The rifle’s infrared light traces a path along the ground in front of her. When she reaches a boulder twice human in size, she pushes herself up into a crouched position. It’s roughly three hours till what passes for daylight. She props her rifle up onto her thigh, turns, and sits down with her back against the rock.

  She takes a deep but soundless breath. Holds it. Closes her eyes. When she opens them, the vertical line of her rifle in front of her splits her vision.

  What moves her is the gas-piston operating system of her weapon, the quick-change barrel, the firing pin block, and ambidextrous charging handle. She knows the Magpul Masada better than any human. Whatever conversations, whatever potential human relationships passed earlier in her life are moot. Her weapon is now her brutal kindred spirit.

  On the other side of the boulder, one hundred yards across rock and dead brush and dirt in an area that was once populated by a small stand of fir trees, is a camouflaged technological arsenal, guarded by what looks like two CIEL human sentries. Their skin too white. Grafted and puckered. Leone discovered the site nearly by accident in a routine radar sweep, literally suspended over their heads at a crap station in Tunnel 27. Joan can make out the rise of a Russian-made machine gun turret alongside a row of explosive warheads—probably American, or perhaps French—from the blue sheen of their shells. It’s difficult to tell if the small mound is meant strictly for munitions or if it holds some deeper useful secret. Kill the guards, raid the arsenal, blow it to shit. There is always a chance of finding something useful. Joan pulls down her night goggles and inhales. Her bicep twitches. She swallows. Dirt and the memory of sage. Night sniping always calms her nerves.

  Low to the ground again, she peers through her scope; the sentries’ alabaster skin glints in the dulled moonlight. One guard stands up like an idiot—stretching? He scratches the place where his balls used to be. His head gleams in the muted moonlight. The other guard sits at some kind of makeshift outdoor terminal. The flaps of the camouflage are up. Probably they’ve had no action for some time. She aims the infrared laser at the ear of the standing guard.