The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  But a rustling catches her attention as Leone enters the cave, her entire body surrounded by some grotesque creature—no, it is a man, or perhaps a woman, Joan can’t tell which—but a very human head and brow bone and eyes set deep and covered in mud emerges, and a human hand holding a knife at Leone’s throat, slowly walks her forward.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Beneath a gaunt stare and filthy skin, a man holds a knife blade to Leone’s throat. He inches Leone forward. His eyes black bullets.

  Joan does not flinch. In fact, she barely breathes. She holds the bullet eyes of the man in her gaze, returning something of her might silently back at him. He coughs. A tiny trace of blood where the knife presses in makes a line at Leone’s neck.

  Joan shifts her attention to Leone’s face. Nose. Eyes. When Joan looks into Leone’s eyes, she sees two small blank pools. Without emotion. A jaw set against anything in the world. What other reason was there to survive? Leone’s eyes carried everything they’d ever been through together. Small familiar worlds.

  Courage. Do not fall back. It was the look she’d given Leone in battle for years.

  What, what does this idiotic half-dead man think he is doing in the face of their combined strength and experience? Has he no idea? With his tiny knife and clearly malnourished body? Is he an alien? Does he believe he’s stumbled upon two women from some past where women spoke of la cuisson and les enfants, rather than RPGs and improvised explosive devices? Is she supposed to consider him a foe? She waits. She can smell him as he nears. Dirt, sweat, urine, and the breath of someone who has not bathed or eaten or properly cleaned his teeth in a long while.

  Across from her, with a knife at her neck, Leone closes her eyes. Then opens them and smiles.

  Unbeknownst to the intruder, Leone has slipped her hand down low enough to recover her favorite companion: a Laguiole, a French fighting knife beloved for its cruciform blade and its ties to history. Little Bee.

  Leone swings her arm up and punctures the man’s neck with the knife before he can react. Joan crosses her arms over her chest and tilts her head to the side, silently wondering if Leone has delivered a death stab or merely a wound. Judging from the blood flow, a wound. But this poor pale soul, grabbing at his neck and staggering around the dirt floor in circles, may die anyway.

  She walks over to the man, who drops to his knees and sits panting, his head down, his shoulders heaving.

  “What shall we do with you?” Joan says, squatting down to his level while Leone cleans blood off of Little Bee on her pants leg.

  The man lifts his head.

  Joan puts her fingers under his chin to tilt his face upward. He opens his mouth.

  “C’est moi,” he whispers, “Peter . . .” Blood veins down his forearm between his fingers in rivers. “You are . . .” he says almost inaudibly, slumping farther toward the ground, sucking in a great chestful of air. “You are real after all.” And then his head thuds against the dirt.

  A jolt of recognition shoots through Joan’s shoulders. She lifts his torso. She cradles his head. “Peter?” she shouts.

  Leone at her side, wiping dirt from the man’s face: “Your brother?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the auroral glow of the cave’s light, now orange, then blue and green, shimmering, shifting, Joan watches a dozen or so tiny black worms traverse the landscape of her own palm.

  Worms from hell. That’s what they’d named the tiny creatures upon their discovery long ago—unusual nematodes living and thriving miles below the earth’s surface in water hot enough to scald a human hand. She remembers reading about them as a child in school.

  And yet here they are, surviving forty billion years without notice. That’s how dumb we are about our own origins, our present tense, our future survival. We always look up. What if everything that mattered was always down? Where things are base and lowly. Where worms and shit and beetles bore their way along. Halicephalobus mephisto, named for Mephistopheles, “He who loves not the light.” Lords of the Underworld. “Discovered” back in the day, as if they haven’t already been here forever.

  Joan squats next to her dying brother and watches his eyelids twitch. Her thighs burn from crouching so long next to him. Not long now. He’s in that place between sleep and dead. Soon he’ll turn to energy. Dirt. Worms’ meat. She strokes his head. She remembers him as a boy: his dark thick hair, his eyelashes. Then she dumps the palmful of little worms onto his forehead. She doesn’t know why. He doesn’t move.

  The first nematodes found in the rock-walled mines of South Africa were radiation-eating microbes, complete with nervous, digestive, and reproductive systems. What did it ever mean, discoveries of new realms of biology on Earth? At the time, scientists were giddy over the implications for extraterrestrial research, or astrobiology. A smile stretches over Joan’s face. All that looking up—it meant only that we barely had time to learn about the world around us before the whole shithouse came down. It meant that life not only went on in so-called impossible, inhospitable places, it flourished.

  Absentmindedly, Joan’s fingers flutter at the blue light at the side of her head. Radical changes in morphology brought on by the temper of the sun. Halicephalobus mephisto.

  Her brother moans the moan of the dying. She can see Leone’s figure approaching from a cave corridor. She smells her. Dirt and water and skin.

  What she’s learned from the worms, in her life as a survivor, is more profound than any philosophy or volume of man-made knowledge. The hell-worm is resistant to high temperatures, reproduces asexually, and feeds on subterranean bacteria and toxins. The tiny black swirling colonies live in groundwater that is three to twelve thousand years old. They survive in waters with next to no oxygen. They ignore science and carry on.

  He who loves not the light. “Like me,” Joan whispers to her near corpse of a brother. His body shudders under her speech.

  Like the little worm devils, Joan also found what scientists had left behind when the Earth’s population was subjected to survival of the fittest: fungi. Amoebas. Multicellular life-forms adapting and evolving at fantastic rates—all of it underground. Blind fish and transparent lizards and bone-white long-legged spiders. Spectral bats. Electric freshwater eels. Sound. Light. Energy. And not just in cave-dwelling animals. In plants, too. Living energy. Without photosynthesis.

  Like me, she thinks.

  But now her hands tingle. Leone. Next to her.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  Joan raises her head from her squatting position and speaks to Leone’s pubis. Before she can stop her own imagination, she pictures the barren cave of Leone’s reproductive system. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s your brother.” Leone sighs.

  “He’s dying.” Joan looks up. “That’s what the dead do. They die. We’re meant to die. From the moment we are born.”

  “Bullshit.” Leone shifts her weight to one boot and crosses her arms over her breasts. “No one will ever know. It’s just you, me, and him.” Leone puts her hand on the top of Joan’s head. “And if he knows anything about . . . anything, we need to hear from him.”

  What do we owe the dying? Joan closes her eyes and thinks of burying her face between Leone’s legs. Her whole chest cavity aches, as if her ribs are caving in. Leone, of course, is right. Not because any familial loyalty or love exists between Joan and her brother—too much has happened since. They share DNA, but only in the way the stars and planets and ocean flotsam do. But he’s traveled all this way to find her, and she doesn’t even know what “all this way” really means. Where did he come from? What does he have to tell? How has he survived? Are there others?

  There was only one way to find out, and that was one way she’d vowed never to repeat.

  When Joan learned she could raise the dead, she was fifteen. CIEL was barely in control, engineers still building it ever upward and away from the dying masses. Jean de Men conjured himself as leader. The water wars had ravaged all the continents, laying waste
to what vegetation remained under the gray orange glow of the dying sun. People had become territorial animals, Darwinian cartoons. Cannibalism was rampant except among clusters of well-armed cells, people brought together by desperate familiarity. But cannibalism wasn’t the worst of it. Wars were not the worst of it. A blotted sun, starvation, radiation, violence, terror, were not the worst of it. All the dire fears of a population’s mighty history had been proven petty.

  The worst of it were the radical changes in the human body.

  After every human lost its hair, after fingernails and toenails began peeling away, humanity itself flashed backward.

  Penises atrophying, curling up and in, like baked snails.

  Vaginas suturing themselves shut, using the very secretions that once lubricated the reproductive system. Without fully understanding why, Joan was the only one spared.

  Children born with unformed genitals, without ears, with barely there translucent lids on their eyes, with unformed fingers. Webbed toes. Little protuberances at the base of the tailbone.

  Devolution.

  When she was fifteen, Joan became responsible for a small cadre of orphaned children. Forty or so of them, in various states of fear and animal longing. Though her parents were long dead, she still had claim to the family home and land; she had fire on her side, which she could raise from the earth by placing her hands on the ground long enough to pull telluric currents alive in hellish swirls. She’d learned to control it. Napalm from the ground up.

  When threatened, burn.

  She kept the children fed. She kept them sheltered and together. But when they were attacked, the danger was always mass death. CIEL militants who came for them didn’t want just one of them, they wanted all of them, for food or slave labor or both. And so, she’d constructed a plan for hiding a field of children.

  She dug forty-one children’s graves on the land where her father had once grown vegetables, carefully lining the graves with mud-green industrial plastic left over from farming, with enough plastic up and outside of the grave to hold the dirt. She designed forty-one rubber tubes leading to an underground airshaft—a vast tubular cave with an underground river—and placed the tubes down in the graves, at head level, for breathing. And when they faced attack, the forty-one children ran to their forty-one gravebeds and dove into them and pulled the plastic sheets over them, forcefully enough to cover themselves with dirt, and breathed life under death through the rubber tubes.

  All anyone who arrived saw was the evidence of a mass burial. A mass murder. Little mounds of dirt clearly meant for children. There, she thought, they would be safe.

  But she underestimated the power of evil. Or, perhaps, the power of power. One night, there came the familiar crack and thunder in the sky of a CIEL probe entering the atmosphere. The children went into action, burying themselves alive with great precision and speed. All night Joan watched over them, waiting for a glimpse of a Skyline. What she did not know was that CIEL had attained the technology to hide the elevators, to render them invisible. And that they could detect the heat of the little bodies still alive beneath all that dirt. They pumped methane gas into the tiny graves, displacing enough oxygen to make the children cough and sputter against their breathing tubes, asphyxiating them all in their false sleep. Like killing moles or rats.

  Joan herself noted the hint of a chemical scent for a moment, but then chemical smells weren’t uncommon in this place.

  In the morning, no one woke.

  One by one she dug them up. She lifted their blue-gray bodies out of the holes and placed them on the higher ground next to their graves.

  The grief that entered her body then was worse than what she’d felt when her parents were killed. Worse than when her brother had been shot and captured. Her grief for these mutating children rose in her like a second self, another body overtaking her own, until it was not an abstract sadness but a material, weighted thing. And the grief turned to rage. And the rage rocked her head back and shore the clothing from her body and cleaved her sight and the song sound emerged in her skull, only so loud this time that it seemed to break every tooth in her mouth. The ground she stood on rumbled and tilted and dropped her to her knees. Recovering her balance, she placed both hands flat on the dirt. Her eyes blue and blazing. The light at her head dancing alive. And then her hands shot light and sound in a thunderous lateral pulse across the dirt.

  Forty small corpses coughed and gasped, shaking their heads in bewilderment, looking around at each other covered in dirt and smelling of death, as if to say, Am I dead, or born?

  A miracle.

  They lived less than twenty-four hours. By the end of the next day they had dropped dead again, some wearing expressions like the ash-covered corpses at Pompeii.

  Her power, then, was impotent. Forever after, the comrades she tried to revive all died the same way, a day or so later. She had the power only to bring death twice.

  Her resurrections, she learned eventually, only succeeded in plants and organic material. Her powers were useless in terms of saving humans. Her powers were of the dirt.

  She knows now, then, that she can bring her brother back to life, only to watch the life drain from him in a second death, one of her making. Or she can let him die his own death, free from the wrong miracle of her.

  She stares at the worms spreading over his forehead and skull, almost like hair.

  “Do it,” Leone says. “I’ll bury him.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The walls of the cave glow brown and black and orange, shapes running and mutating across them. Joan watches Leone add peat to the fire, changing the patterns of the flames, then retrieve Little Bee from her boot sheath and hold the blade into the flame. Joan turns and stares at her brother’s corpse. In this shadowy light, he looks like a film of someone sleeping.

  The line between living and not. In medicine, they don’t call bringing the dead back to life “resurrection.” They call it Lazarus syndrome: the spontaneous return of circulation. You’d think that, after all these years and dead gods, they’d have used a less biblical term. And what is the word for what she is about to do?

  Joan looks at her hands as she washes them in a bowl, then watches her own hands between Leone’s hands, Leone washing her hands for her—a mixture of silver and lavender.

  Out of the blue, Leone says, “Remember the ribbon eels?” and her face lights up.

  Joan’s heart beats up in her chest for a long minute. She remembers: a month’s respite from war she’d spent with Leone, near Australia. The neon blue and yellow backs and bellies of ribbon eels, sliding through ocean water, alongside them in an underwater cave pool. The two of them laughing.

  If she closes her eyes she can almost remember that sound, Leone’s laugh.

  In the subterranean caves of Christmas Island, a variety of hermaphroditic and protandric species thrives. The ribbon eel is one of them, an elegant creature with a long, thin body, high dorsal fins, and huge nostrils. Juveniles and subadults are jet-black with a yellow dorsal fin; females are yellow, with a black anal fin with white margins. The adult males turn blue with a yellow dorsal fin. As they mature, they would swap genders. Eels that were born male grew into females that changed color and laid eggs. They could live twenty years this way, their gender entirely fluid.

  Without looking up she says to Leone, “Remember to make the incision just underneath the rib, about—”

  “I know,” Leone says, “about the length of your finger.” Leone holds Joan’s left hand, the hand missing its pinkie. For a while they just sit there on the ground like that.

  “Okay,” Joan says. “Now.”

  Leone kneels and Joan helps her to rest Peter’s head and shoulders up onto Leone’s thighs. His arms stretch out to either side of him. His head tilts, his lips part. How serene the dead can look, like dreamless sleepers. Leone, in one perfect motion, leans in and presses the skin of the dead brother’s flesh smooth, then slices open something like a mouth just below his last righ
t rib. A dark red, almost black ooze emerges in a thin line.

  Without hesitation, Joan slips three of her fingers through the ooze into the wound. Inside, his body is moist and cool and wrong. She places her other hand on his shoulder. She closes her eyes, drops her head, and slows her own breath to next to nothing. She listens for blue light.

  The heart, filled with electrical impulses—without moving a muscle, she reaches for it with her entire body.

  A low hum strums the floor of the cave, the walls. The faint crackle of the fire. Then the hum crescendoes and a flutter of batwings rise and fall.

  Nothing.

  “Joan?” Leone says.

  But Joan doesn’t hear her. The blue light at her head expands out in waves. She’s gone in, gone deeper. So deep that her hand passes through her brother’s body and into the dirt beneath him—into the memory of him as a boy, running in the yard. “Look at the sun,” he said, “it knows our names!” The walls of the cave ring her ribs, her jaw and skull. And deeper still, into the wound of memory: she can see the day he was born in the past. She can see the umbilical cord, slimy pearled spiral of life.

  “Joan?” Leone shouts.

  Joan opens her eyes. Sound falling away.

  His eyelids quivering.

  And then he gasps so violently that his chest lurches upward and Leone falls backward, and when Joan’s hand lunges deeper into the gash they’ve cut open, blood spurts out in a blue-red surge. Joan suctions loose her fingers and then covers the bleeding cut with her hand flat, holding it hard against him. “The poultice,” Joan says.

  Leone recovers her balance and applies a poultice and bandage they’ve prepared.

  For a time, all three of them sit huddled together, just breathing. As their breathing quiets and settles into quiet harmony, a déjà vu joins them in the room. The last time they were together they were at war, the last battle so to speak, the one that included Joan’s capture, and they’d each been gravely wounded, and Joan had been taken from the world.