The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  That’s when she sees it. It’s not just an ammo station. It’s a holding station. Slightly to the left, barely camouflaged under some kind of pile of refuse, two pairs of deadened eyes.

  Two animals in a cage.

  No. Inside the crude wooden cage are two children, if you can call them that. Feral. Matted hair and filthy skin, bones nearly visible, eyes as wild as a jaguar’s. Where on Earth had they come from?

  She closes her eyes. Her first thought: she reminded herself again of the fact of things, the traces of human left. We are not, after all, alone. She and Leone had already come across a child or two. Her second: What is the point of saving half-dead children? It’s the kind of question she asks now. A hopeless question. A question without heart. Whatever life is left on Earth and whatever lives are squirming out their worthless worm existence above, she has no part in the drama.

  Joan opens her eyes with her rifle sight poised at the standing guard’s ear. She lifts her head nearly imperceptibly, and signals to Leone where to shoot. For years they have done this odd dance, Joan setting up kills, Leone executing the shots.

  Leone pulls the trigger. Always Leone.

  One guard’s head squirts open like a grape. The headless body wavers and then drops to the earth, thudding and kicking up dirt.

  Joan opens her eyes and draws up on one knee, taking aim at the second guard, who is busy flailing around trying to get at his own rifle as he scrambles for cover beneath the table. Leone follows her gaze. Fixes the target. Fires. His chest spills onto the table, spraying it with blood and fragments of rib.

  Then the night goes quiet again. If there were trees, wind would be whistling through their branches. Joan stands, slings her brutal intimate over her shoulder, and walks the distance to the dead men. With each step she struggles to decide what to do with whatever they find inside that cage.

  In the dark, the blood is black and blue.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At the munitions site, Joan stares first at the dead guards, then briefly up into the godless night sky, then over at the cage. Girls. They didn’t make a fucking sound. That guts her. Though the moon merely smudges a spot in the sky, and the brilliance of stars has faded to a dull salt-and-peppering, the night sky still feels familiar to her. In the dark, a person’s shadow is nothing. Like the past losing its light.

  She doesn’t need to think much about what to do with the pile of girls. There are only two. And one doesn’t have long, from the looks of it. You can see in a person’s eyes when life is leaving. Something going slack and empty. Joan’s heart folds and darkens.

  Leone walks closer and drops her head so profoundly her jaw clacks.

  “Motherfuckers.”

  Then Leone bends down as gentle as a mother, unlatches the cage, and lifts the most lifelike into her arms. “Can you speak?” she whispers to the thing.

  “Can’t feel . . . insides,” the creature rasps.

  Leone clutches the girl so close, Joan fears she’ll break one of the girl’s arms.

  “Leone,” Joan says gently, touching her shoulder.

  Her fellow captive dies the moment they touch her, her mouth open in the shape of an O, her eyes lost to matter.

  Joan looks into the alive girl’s eyes, vacant foggy pools of gray. Did they injure you? Did they starve you? Did they even remember the difference between human and animal? Was there a difference? The girl takes what seems to be a breath larger than she is, stares intensely into Leone’s eyes, and never breathes again.

  They bury the girls in the ground because there is nothing else to do about anything. Joan’s mind carries what everyone’s does: memories, ideas, random bits of knowledge, desires, wounds, synaptic firings. But it carries more than that. Sometimes she wishes it didn’t. How old had those girls been? She was so young when she heard the song that drove the rest of her life. And the first time she was very much afraid. More afraid than she’d ever been about death. Had they been afraid? Of death? Or something else?

  She met Leone when they were both girls. Leone with long black hair, Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back. Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle her. They swam naked in clear pools deep in the mountain ranges of the various countries where they were fighting. How they curled into each other’s bodies alone next to night fires away from their garrisons. How Joan rose in ranks with the speed of a miracle when she proved she could win battles by engulfing the enemy in elements, how Leone was never away from her side, Leone’s eyes shining blue-green like Earth from space, Leone laughing in the most dire of circumstances, the girl that Leone was slipping into—warrior—before she even had a chance to grow breasts.

  If only Joan could give Leone back her childhood—any childhood—with dogs and kites and long swims in azure pools and endless forts they could build together by firelight, a fort for everywhere they had been, and dancing shadows and wolves and night creatures their fellowship . . .

  But there is no such power.

  War pervaded and imploded their childhoods, then became a monolithic violence and power so displaced that it lifted up off the ground to distinguish itself. Like a god would. CIEL.

  And more bloodshed than all wars in human time added together.

  She looks sideways at Leone, standing over the graves of the girls, long enough to see that Leone is not crying. Rather, her face looks like a stone relief: scored by grief, edged with anger.

  She walks over to the second guard Leone shot and nudges him with her boot. His chest is a gristled blood-heap; his face wears the unmistakable slack skin of the dead. The first guard barely has a head. She can smell the metallic mix of blood and spent bullets.

  “You think there’s a Skyline near?” Leone’s voice a compass.

  Skylines. The thousands of invisible tethers reaching from the surface of Earth to CIEL’s geostationary orbits, urban platforms, and to CIEL’s web of stations.

  “Look at this grunt,” Joan says without turning, gesturing toward the dead faceless guard. “He’s got earbuds on. Remember earbuds? Wonder what he was listening to way out here, in the middle of Desert Asshole.” Joan leans down and tugs the earbuds, one of them blackened with blood and dirt, from what is left of his head. She shoves them in her ears. Still warm. She bends down, grabs a black palm-size gadget from his front jacket pocket, and plugs in. She hears something faint and looks over at Leone.

  “What is it? They look Russian. Is it Russian pop music? They all played it back during the sieges. Fucking Russians,” Leone hisses. “I hate old Russian pop music. It all sounds like some drunk Communist with rocks jammed in his mouth.” Leone spits on the ground.

  Hard. They are both hardened.

  True enough, thinks Joan as she fiddles with the device. But in terms of weaponry, military technology, much of what the Russians had during the wars did deserve respect.

  The volume kicks in, and through the earbuds, so recently planted in the ears of her enemy, comes a song. Her throat pangs and her eyes sting until she bites the inside of her cheek to stop it.

  A child’s song.

  A French child’s song.

  One she knows by heart:

  It was in the dark night,

  On the yellowed steeple,

  On the steeple, the moon

  Like a dot on an i.

  Moon, whose dark spirit

  Strolls at the end of a thread,

  At the end of a thread, in the dark

  Your face and your profile?

  Are you nothing more than a ball?

  A large, very fat spider?

  A large spider that rolls

  Without legs or arms?

  Is a worm gnawing at you,

  When your circle lessens,

  When your disk lengthens

  Into a narrow crescent?

  “Joan?” Leone touches her shoulder.

  Joan wipes at her eyes for perhaps the ten-thousandth time. Fatherless and motherless children. Husbands and wive
s and lovers. Sisters. Brothers. Friends. All human relationships atomized. She looks at Leone. She wrenches the bloody earbuds from her ears. What is a human alone? A near-corpse dotting an endless landscape.

  Every so often Joan and Leone had run across one stumbling toward death in the open terrain: a feral child. More often than not they’d die on the spot, or live for a while and then sputter toward death. Once, they managed to nurse one back to life for an entire year; then, one day, a day that haunts Joan still, the boy simply walked off the edge of a cliff before she could stop him. He turned back once to look at her, maybe smiled, or perhaps just lined his mouth with resolution, and he was gone. Forever she wondered what that look meant. Maybe that there are more things to want than life?

  The last child they’d encountered alone was a different boy, so malnourished and exhausted his skin looked gray-blue, his eyes sinking into their skeletal holes. Month by month, he gained strength and muscle and heart. Finally, he was strong enough to talk about the tribes he’d seen “out there.” They thought he was delirious, or that somewhere along his journey he must have lost his wits. They nodded and smiled and gave him simple chores of survival. They taught him how to hunt and what to eat and how to make electricity and light and how to filter water and grow food.

  The boy couldn’t remember his name—or didn’t care—so they’d renamed him Miles, as he’d come an enormous distance. One night, after Leone went night hunting for snakes, Joan and Miles sat near the fire, Joan staring so deeply into it she was barely present, Miles drawing in the dirt floor with a stick.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” he said, jamming the stick into the earth. “About the tribes, I mean?”

  Joan’s fire trance broken, she looked over at him, the flames dancing across his face, making him look animated. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she hedged. “It’s just that I’ve never seen it myself. Just . . . just children, wandering alone or in very small groups, usually captured or killed by CIELs. They’d never allow tribes of adults to exist.”

  He stared at her. He smiled. It really was a smile. But it didn’t indicate happiness, as it might have in some past. What he said next was stark and solemn: “If you don’t let me go back and tell them you are alive, I’m going to walk off of the edge of a cliff. Like the other boy.”

  Joan stood up. Looked down at him. Miles did not flinch. He looked up at her, crossed his arms over his knees. “I will,” he said.

  “You are not a captive here,” she said to him.

  “Your caring for me is the only thing holding me here.” He returned his gaze to the fire.

  For weeks, she and Leone took turns guarding him day and night. If she could just help carry him through this delusion, Joan thought, he might come back to his senses and . . . live. Whatever that meant. But each day he became more withdrawn, sometimes standing and staring at her with a bundle of kindling in his arms, or emerging from an aqua cave pool naked and gleaming and wearing the last traces of corporeal boyhood.

  For weeks she and Leone argued.

  “For Christ’s sake, let him go. He’s not a pet. He doesn’t belong to us. If he wants to walk away chasing some idiotic notion of wandering tribes, let him.” Leone cleaned her knife on the shin of her pants.

  “He’ll die.”

  “He didn’t die getting here, did he? And anyway, if he dies, it will be exactly as if he never came. Everyone”—Leone gestured in the air with her knife—“everyone out here dies. Someday, even us.” She put the blade briefly to her lips.

  That night, again at the fire, Miles spoke again. “There are people waiting for you out there, you know. There are other boys and girls and men and women and others who are waiting for your help.” This time Miles stood.

  “I’m no help to anyone,” Joan said, her voice filled with low storm. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m going to tell you a story. You’ll like it. It’s about a girl who turns into a song.”

  Joan’s head snapped up. Song?

  “Once there was a child warrior girl,” he began. And when he was finished, Joan was crying.

  In the end, Joan extended her hand and made Leone cut off her pinkie finger, as well as a lock of her hair. She wrapped the severed finger with the hair, then wrote a letter on paper she’d learned to make from hemp over the years. She still didn’t believe the boy, but she let him walk away; in his shoulders and scapula, she could see the man he would become, if he made it to manhood. She didn’t believe him, but she did believe in letting him have his story. To have a story was to have a self.

  Joan squats down and runs her hands along a row of PG-29 rockets, lifting one with both hands.

  Leone eyes the rocket. “Christ, isn’t that what we used in Orléans? Back in the day?”

  But Joan is falling into memory, and guilt again.

  And who did you think you were when they called your name?

  Did you think you were who they said, the sound of your name lifting up off of your body in a great crescendo, the sound turning always to fever and ritual and chant, the sound of your name driving masses of men, women, and children, their teeth gnashing, their bodies falling forward in their own brutal and quickening deaths? The mother kissing her son good night the night before the battle, the son still dreaming of talking animals, his sister’s soft breathing through her small nose in the bed near him, the father locking the doors—as if everyone were part of a story that would make history, and not a story that would engender slaughter.

  Did the white of your war banner give you the right to make murder a beautiful story? Who were you at sixteen, your chest yet unformed, your shoulders and biceps balling up like a boy’s, your voice not low in your throat, but high, just under your jawline, a girl’s voice, a cheekbone beneath the blue light flickering like some alien insect at the surface of your skin? When they mindlessly followed you into the fire of battle, when they shed their despair and aimed their hope straight at your face, when they turned their eyes to yours and surrendered, smiling, when you sent them into siege and seizure and bloodletting—in the moments before their deaths, did your valiancy outweigh your heart? Did you even have a heart? When you walked them into hell, was your heart open?

  Did the song in your head give you the right to kill them?

  Her vision blurs. Sometimes she sees things that are not there. She is used to it and at the same time not. Her head light; she can’t feel her feet or hands. She looks up. When she looks back to her physicality she is in a floating room with slate-colored walls and floors. The windows black as space. It’s a room she’s never inhabited. A room made of pure imagination. Or of dread.

  “Joan?”

  Who calls out to her in such a room? But there is no room. It is Leone, and the ground under her feet, and the smell of their rifles and of bodies recently made dead. She snaps to.

  “Same firepower. From the past. Yes.”

  Joan watches Leone run her hand along the length of a single PG-29 rocket. Her eyes linger on the small bone at Leone’s wrist.

  Ironic. A replica of the very munitions she herself used in Orléans. Years ago. A nine-day battle at the height of her command. Those old dead wars leaving artifacts everywhere.

  So the CIEL bastards are using old Earth firepower. She turns the tubular metal object over in her hands. She holds the blue black metal cylinder upright. She smells it. Dirt and death and alloy. She strokes the length of it, its shaft a tandem warhead and rocket booster. She fingers the folding stabilizer fins at its tail, spits on its metal side.

  Fuckers.

  The only place someone needs weapons of war is down here. Not up there. Did that mean there were large numbers of humans left? How many? Where? Or just random individuals? Untethered civilian armies? Random feral children?

  Wind skates the valley. In the distance, foothills climb up toward a low mountain range. A rain forest once rimmed the rocky face of these mountains; she can’t remember its name.

  Joan gazes once
more at the dead men, then pockets the recorder and earbuds and looks up again at the night. There’s probably a Skyline near. Wherever there is a munitions station, a Skyline isn’t far away. The dark and thickened sky may obscure it from view, but she knows what is up there: invisible technological tethers dangling down to Earth like umbilical cords. The planet’s population of Earth’s elite above, now living an ascended existence away from a dying environment.

  Joan walks over to a field table under the camouflage canopy and rummages around. The table is littered with topographical maps, rendered in plastic. She spreads her palm on one flat of the table and leans over it. “What’s this?”

  Leone comes close beside her and shines infrared light from the barrel of her rifle onto the map. “Looks like . . . what the fuck are those weird markings?” Leone laughs under her breath. “They look like fucking lightning bolts. Were these idiots just sitting here doodling?”

  Nothing but night answers.

  Joan looks out into the dark desert in front of them, then over to the foothills and mountains. The topography no longer means anything. There are deserts and mountains and water. Sometimes. Maps are useless. Life is underground.

  How many salvage missions had they traveled together around the world, abandoned tanks and military vehicles they’d located and hidden like vertebrae on a spine? Collecting food and ammunitions and supplies for survival—at first with the assumption that they’d have to stockpile large quantities for their comrades, survivors, former rebels and civilians, maybe even enemies. But through all their travels and elaborate missions a bald truth emerged: the people they found came to them, now and then, in the form of a single feral child, or as enemy combatants stationed sparsely along their path, guarding resource arsenals headed Skyward.