The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Peter digs into his rucksack and pulls out a tin container. He opens it briefly. Inside are about a dozen salamanders, all without pigment, their white bodies and eyeless heads looking vaguely embryonic. “Everything you need to know—where all our bases are stationed worldwide, what our numbers are, who to contact, how we travel, and most important, the entire cosmology of the CIEL—is contained in these. Joan will be able to upload them.”

  “Upload them exactly how?” Leone asks.

  “Listen,” he says, directing his attention briefly to Leone, “these are Olms. They use light and electronic microscopy. They have ampullary organs—”

  “Electrical receptors?” Leone asks. She peers into the tin and watches the little blind white creatures squirm. “They transfer current?”

  “Yes. Sunk deep into their epidermis. They register electric fields. They use the earth’s magnetic fields to orient, which makes them superb carriers of information. You need only let them crawl on her body.” He stares at Joan. “Your particular body.” He hands the tin filled with blind white salamanders to Leone.

  “What?” Joan mutters. And then: “I’m like an Olm, then? I’m like them?” Her own thoughts and words seem dumb to her.

  Peter moves closer to Joan there in the dirt. He places both of his hands upon her shoulders. Joan closes her fingers gently around the spider to protect it from harm, though briefly she wonders why. Peter looks so deeply into her eyes that, for a moment, she can see his face as it was when he was a child. Had there been a world, people who worked and raised children, families that ate meals and pet dogs and watched television in the evenings? Wasn’t there a moon in the sky at night, stars, a sun in the morning brilliant and true, and animals and trees and fertile dirt and birdsong?

  “It’s more than sound, what you heard, what moved through you, Joan. More than song. More than energy even. You are . . .”

  Joan had to catch her brother by the elbows as his knees buckled. “There’s so much more,” he whispers, tears filling his eyes.

  In that moment, the cave’s walls creak. She looks at Leone, whose face wears the same worry. Something is coming, or something is about to fall apart; they usually happened together.

  “Joan!” her brother yells and coughs out to her above the rising geological noise. He grabs her arms tight enough to leave finger bruises. “Your hands in the dirt. Remember?” he rasp-screams at her. His eyes fluttering. His breath leaving.

  “Remember what?” Joan screams while trying to support his falling weight. Leone moves in to help carry him—but then there is a crack as loud as a continent breaking free. The granite ceiling of the cave groans and then splits in lines extending outward; the ground beneath them arches and contorts, bringing them all down. She sees the curve and sheen of the cave walls flexing—dust falls slowly like ash, and then pellets of rock like rain and then larger stones crumble loose, until the very walls heave and shatter around them. Another blast sends a jolt up her spine and she hits her head on the cave floor. When she opens her eyes, a hard lightning of white and silver light scissors down into the cave with such force that Joan loses her hearing. If it had hit her, she would have surely died.

  As the dust and light and sound dissipate, Joan crawls on the ground to her brother. She shakes him violently. Nothing but corpse. She crawls farther to Leone, who rolls back and forth on the ground holding her ears. Up close she sees why: it isn’t the noise that is traumatizing her. Leone is missing an ear. And more: she is bleeding from the nose. As they look into each other’s eyes, though, they manage to understand one another. Leone, beautiful even at the most insane moments, still clutching her rifle in one hand and the tin of Olms in the other, blood pouring from the place where her ear used to be, smiles with animal ferocity.

  “What? I can’t hear you motherfuckers!” Leone shouts, grinning like a jackal.

  Then comes a thunderous roar that presses both of their eyes closed. White light. Silence. Then a black and blue tornado of electrical force that shoots through everything living. The sound is so hard and loud that Joan’s mouth blasts open involuntarily and her arms fly out on either side of her body and for a moment she lifts off the ground and then back down with an impact so terrible it seems like her entire skeleton collapses.

  And then a terrible silent nothing.

  For a moment she thinks she is dead. She can’t hear. She can’t see. Her whole body feels electrocuted.

  When sight and sound return to her, she realizes that the cave walls and ceiling have collapsed to open air. Her brother’s body rests half-buried in rubble. But something is even more profoundly wrong.

  Leone is gone.

  Book Three

  Chapter Nineteen

  Le Ciel.

  I see the sky through the blown-to-bits roof of the cave. Dusk. The whisper of stars and borealis. I close my eyes and for a few small seconds I am floating. But the ground is hard under me.

  The smell of scorched dirt.

  Leone nowhere.

  My brother’s dead body slumps between rock and rubble, all trace of our biologic relation gone gray as ash and earth. The ground smolders in a black shadow where Leone’s body was. Death. Death from me, in me, around me. Did I think I escaped it somehow, all these years, hiding from the inevitable? Hiding from the story of myself? Be careful of what stories you tell yourself.

  The smell of it sends me back to my own burning, the trigger of sensory perceptions, the smell of my flesh about to go to flame, my skin tightening around feet and shins and thighs and hips and gut and ribs and arms and sternum and neck and mouth—a catalog of death reaching up until my eyes sting and shrink back inward toward my skull. Yes. I remember every moment of it.

  Leone.

  Inside my chest, my heart—fist-shaped organ—bulges and aches. For a long minute I stand still and consider ending my life. What’s left to live for? I don’t even remember how to care about humanity any longer. Humanity, what we lived, what we made, what we destroyed. For what?

  Her name the only word filling me. Leone.

  Vanished.

  No one was ever more worth fighting for. More worth staying alive for. Though I never said it. Why the fuck didn’t I say it? The only thing that made being human worthwhile was human intimacy, and I managed to fuck up even that. How many years were we alone together? How deep did Leone’s love and loyalty go?

  Deeper than caves, than black holes in space.

  I force myself to confront the empty. Snot runs like a river over my mouth and chin. Tears bleed into one another so that my eyes ocean. The pain at my temple is granite against granite. The truth is this: Leone is the reason I am alive at all. It was Leone who saved me from the heat and thunderous flame that was supposed to be my execution. It was Leone’s face I saw through the blaze that was meant to reduce me to ash. Leone who whispered, “Don’t say anything. Go limp. There is a vortex—a hole in the floor. Close your eyes.”

  Leone whose words memory-echo now into a falling, like falling through all of space and time. Leone who replaced my body with a corpse from god knows where, so that those tyrannical torturers would find a burned-up body or thing, the thing they wanted so much they’d mistake it for me. Leone who rescued my half-burned corpus from the edge of annihilation.

  A miracle.

  I stare at the blackened dirt where she had just been. To this day, I have little idea how she managed it; we never spoke of it. Not when Leone nursed me one limb and nerve at a time, cave by cave—the Naracoorte, the Lascaux, the Blue Grotto, the Waitomo, the Gunung Mulu, the Sarawak Chamber, the Yasuni. Not when we formed a silent sacred bond based on the simplicity of surviving, limiting our fighting to isolated bursts, human salvage mission interruptions, limited resource robbings, and other tiny Skyline terrorisms. We just moved forward together, in an imagined plot where staying alive and in motion were the only aims.

  We became two women’s bodies in motion.

  Why didn’t we ever name it? Why didn’t I get on my knees and
pray to her in secular sensual waterfalls of thanks every goddamn day of my life? My body aches with regret, like some virus laying waste to my bones and muscles.

  There is no name in any language I know except her name.

  Leone.

  My shoulders heave as if my body has been taken over by a force larger than a self. I cry hysterically. Before I can stop, I vomit, hard enough to crack a rib. The wail that emanates from my abdomen through my gut and ribs, up my stupid throat and out of my mouth, doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me. It’s like I’m watching some shadow narrative, like I’m detached from what’s left of my body, what’s left of Earth, what’s left of anything.

  I drop to the ground. I curl into a birth shape—there’s no other way to say it. I rest my head on the dead earth. I smell worms and rocks and the wet of what used to be the cave’s lake and river, now open to air, thanks to the blast. I always knew we’d return to dirt, all of humanity. Maybe that’s why I did what I did. Maybe this is the time for me after all. I put my thumb in my mouth and bite it. I thought I’d already experienced the greatest possible self-loathing. Until now. I beg for decomposition.

  From my vantage point, I can see my brother’s blue-hued body. In death, adults reveal some of their childhood selves. The eyes and cheek muscles going slack, back in time to a face without history. As I tighten myself into a ball there on the floor, I think of how my brother must have stood over my crib as a child, witnessing a similar girl.

  Remember, he’d said. Remember what?

  I look at my hands. I bring them to my face and smell them. Something from childhood. Something half there and half imagined.

  The image comes to me in a retinal flash. My brother as a boy, a field away from me. In my hand a red rock. A children’s game. I shove my fist into the dirt and push down and down until my whole girl-arm is buried. My hand connects with something hot or cold, or both, not solid, but moving, like a wave. I let go of the red rock when my hand and arm feel like they’re dissolving. Not until I hear my brother screaming down the field from me—“It’s a rock! A red rock! It shot up out of the ground”—do I understand.

  There is current underground.

  Could that be what he was talking about before he died? I look at his lifeless face, gray among the detritus on the cave floor across from me.

  Without thought, as if from muscle memory, I jam my hands into the earth up to my wrists, nearly breaking them against the hard ground, and then I shove them down deeper, to my elbows, and then deeper still, until I’m shouldering the dirt, my face an inch from it. I smell what’s still alive on the planet, beetles and worms and potato bugs; I stare at my dead brother and the blackened place where Leone used to be; and I press on until half my body is buried. I close my eyes. My face burrows like an animal’s. My mouth tastes the dirt. The blue light at the side of my head ignites and hums. The song explodes inside my skull and the opened cave begins to shiver like a convulsing body. My hands and arms start to burn—or are they freezing?—something, some energy, has my arms, as if they are not part of me any longer, something alive and electrical in the dirt. And then my arms feel like they are no longer arms at all, but extensions of light, long-tendrilled beams shooting out from my torso and into the ground. I’m burying myself, but in my mind’s eye I can see thousands and thousands of beams of light underground, crisscrossing like a strange highway of flame, with my own body serving as an interstice. My head shoots back, my mouth opens, my jaw locks, and light—aqua light and orange light and indigo light and red light—shoots out from my eyes, my nose, my mouth and ears and every pore of my body, and finally an enormous blast catapults me into the air and back down to the earth with the thud of an animal’s body and a snapping sound in my sternum.

  Silence.

  When I open my eyes to the dead air, calm again, I am not alone. There is my body, my brother’s corpse, the loss of my Leone, and now, someone else.

  Someone is here with me.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Trinculo Forsythe, you stand accused of aiding and abetting a known eco-terrorist and enemy of the state—”

  “Your mother was an artless ass-fed canker. Aussi, s’il vous plaît, to what entity precisely do you refer when you use the word state? Because I know you can’t possibly mean this shit-pile of orbiting techno-corporeal hackery. You have no authority over me, you clay-brained skin-husk. Go fold up into your own clouted grafts.”

  Christine’s heart breaks open and she falls for Trinculo all over again. He had earned himself a trial after all, and he meant to make it his, starting with this preliminary meeting between accused and abuser—accuser.

  Spittle wells up in her mouth. She swallows. Bites the inside of her cheek. She is now in the terrible position of witness, as if her agency had been given a new point of view.

  Where is her place in the story?

  Her terror slowly degrades her courage. She bites the inner flesh of her cheek harder, tastes the metaled secretion of blood. Snap out of it. You are a writer. But what happens when the story is stolen away from its author? Don’t panic. Don’t be an ass. Learn to inhabit any role.

  Christine can’t see everything happening in the room, but thanks to the spider’s microscopic lens she can see things in glimpses, and of course she hears everything. Jean de Men’s horrible overflowing robes of grafted flesh hang from his head like an old French aristocratic wig, draping down from his arms in faux-crocheted brocade, dragging across the floor with ludicrous pomp. His eyes hide beneath several folds of graying grafts, but his mouth is black and open and terrible, his tongue too pink, almost red, his teeth strangely yellow and small.

  Her Trinculo, though bound and attached to some kind of mobile sentry unit, looks magnificent in his indifference. Each time Jean de Men speaks or gestures, Trinculo studies the ceiling or floor or his own crotch. If his hands were free, she felt sure he would have scratched his absent balls. But what crumples her heart is his chest—the land of body between his shoulders. The graft there is hers. Or was. She’d spent such careful hours there, inventing a story about a city of androgenes in which only he could provide pleasure. It seemed to her ever after that he carried himself differently. Chest forward, chin up. Shoulders back. As if to tell the microworld of their stupid floating existence: once there were bodies. Read yourself back to life. In place of their sexual union, she’d written desire straight into his flesh.

  The spider lodges itself near the bones of his clavicle.

  “I see you intend on inhabiting the role of miscreant,” says Jean de Men. “Very well then. Shall we take a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you.” The lack of affect in his voice disturbs her. The look on Jean de Men’s face perverted a smile.

  The next place that comes into view Christine never knew existed. For the life of her, she cannot imagine where this place would be in CIEL. The entire room is lined in a sort of black-lacquered tile, which makes it difficult to discern even outlines, so she projects the images onto one of the walls of her quarters—and what she then sees keeps her from swallowing, as if a bone sticks in her throat. In the black room are women. On tables. Anesthetized, by the looks of it: eyes closed, faces loose, mild grafts glowing here and there at the edges of their bodies. Each is strapped down and splayed. There look to be six. Maybe seven. Various ages, but none older than twenty-five, no one of exceptional wealth, judging from their meager grafts. In a circle. They look like human spokes of a deranged prehistoric wheel.

  “Magnify,” Christine says, something wrong in her gut.

  Between each woman’s spread legs, she sees something she remembers and desires, and at the same time, she is haunted, like in a nightmare: the color red. There is blood. And a kind of surgical apparatus, at work on every one of them. There is no other way to say this. Between the legs of each of these poor creatures is a gash, each undergoing some stage of . . . what? Experimentation? Mutation? Torture?

  Dizziness. She grips the back of a chair, in an attempt to ke
ep watching. Then Jean de Men speaks.

  “What. You don’t like the view?”

  “Maggot,” Trinculo spits back.

  Then Jean de Men reaches into the bloody cleft of the girl nearest to him, pulls out a palm-size wad of flesh, and throws it against the wall. Splat.

  Christine vomits.

  “This one’s no good,” he mutters to Trinculo, reaching back into the body and pulling out a putrid mass with strands of red, blue, and gray matter. “Something went wrong with our attempts at ovaries. Who knew the stupid little orbs could be so fucking complicated?” He holds the colorful and glistening innards in Trinculo’s face, so close Christine thinks she can smell them.

  “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts, and is desired,” Trinculo whispers.

  “Have you had time to rethink my offer?” Jean de Men drops the blob to the floor with a plop.

  In the beginning, when Trinculo and I first lived on CIEL, when we first entered adulthood, Trinculo fell in love with an older man who had been the leading doctor in the field of biochemistry. Trinculo’s emerging intellectual force made a helix with this man of comparable intelligence and creative verve. In spite of their age difference, and though they could not enter one another in the gnashing way that a man desires a man, they intwined with one another by mind and hands and mouths and legs, by act of imagination and devotion to what was left of body. Their heat approaching spontaneous combustion in spite of things. When they were discovered, Jean de Men beheaded the doctor, the most gifted medical mind in human history, in front of Trinculo, who was restrained in a chair. The doctor’s head was set in his lap and left there all night under the surveillance of a sentry with orders to kill Trinculo if he moved. He did not move. It was this image that kept Trinculo on task for the rest of his life.

  “Let me see. Would I rather join you in your twisted quest to reinvent human reproduction, in other words, your quest to become god of a new asexually reproducing race of impotent and sexless wax figures, or would I rather suffer ten thousand moronic and unimaginative tortures just to watch the drama of disappointment play out on your face?”