The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  “You’ve no idea what pain can become . . .”

  Trinculo spits on the ground. “And you’ve no idea what the attempt to control organized breeding yields.”

  Whatever curses Jean de Men hurled at Trinculo next, Christine couldn’t hear them. Trinculo’s cackle drowns them out. Her room shakes with his laughter, the kind of sound one summons at the gates of hell. The laughter one spits out at a mortal enemy. But as the sound disperses, Christine’s room takes on the bodily sensations of Trinculo himself, and what she feels most acutely is a cold and stark awareness. Not fear, but a rage-filled consciousness. Trinculo turns his shoulder enough that she can see more clearly what is in his line of sight. The bodies are of women, barely women at all—no doubt Earth survivors—somewhere between adolescent and young adult.

  All but one.

  One of the bodies is older and has no grafts at all. Her face is rough, as from weather. Her jaw has a cast unlike any of theirs, as if she works it differently, as if her life is held fast in the muscles and tendons leading to her face. Her body is muscular and worn; her hands look as if they have aged ahead of her. Her skin is not white, but of a color that could only have come from climate and extremity. And her head. Her beautiful, terrible, human head. Where folds of grafts or at least their beginnings should be, her entire head is covered in a great filigree of carefully tattooed hair, midnight blue and gold. It cascades down her shoulders, so that her entire hued body shines like an illuminated manuscript. One of her ears appears to be mostly gone.

  She is not of CIEL. She is from Earth, but she is no ordinary capture.

  When Trinculo carefully takes in a huge breath of air and holds it, Christine’s entire room feels as if it might burst.

  “Ah, you’ve noticed our newest arrival,” crows de Men, regaining his composure. “I’d introduce you, but you are already aware of her, yes? Though she has yet to become aware of you. Don’t try to deny it. Did you really think your execution was merely the result of your petty toys and social disruptions? Come now. We are not children here. There are no children here.” He steps close to Trinculo’s face. Close enough to kiss. “You see? I have arranged for Joan to come to us.” His smile slits horizontally across his face.

  An overwhelming despair doubles Christine over.

  “Ahead of me, are you?” Trinculo replies. “Are you sure? Do you even understand my inventions?” Calm, as if he is playing chess.

  “Your inventions? You mean your crass pornography and useless paraphernalia?” Jean de Men steps closer. “You will die. And quite slowly. In excruciating increments. I should think that would please you.”

  “And you, you knotty-pated boil . . . for your sins you will perish in the solar anus of the sun. I’m being literal, by the way. You mental headless worm.”

  Jean de Men hits Trinculo in the face so hard, his head slams into one of the black-lacquered walls.

  Trinculo merely cackles again, stirring the air around them, rebellious as ever.

  Christine’s room seems to rock and split. A crack of light shuts her eyes and a thunderous hum makes her cover her ears. For a minute, a strange electricity seems to pop and fracture the whole of her quarters. Her walls come alive with light, sound, even smell; they seemed to move—until she sees what it is: hundreds of small white salamanders have somehow materialized in her room.

  They are hideous little ghostlike squirming creatures, but her disgust transforms instantly as they crawl out their purpose. For an hour or more she watches as they busy themselves together to build a kind of structure: a kind of lattice, or web, quite beautiful in fact. When they finish, they quiver in unison. She has no idea what is happening until the lighting in her room dims and the web becomes a screen. The Olms light up, glow, and as her eyes begin to adjust, she sees what the screen is unveiling.

  Trinculo’s face and neck and shoulders.

  Only not like she’s ever seen them before. He is bloodied. His flesh literally shredded. She can see his eyeholes, and something of a nose and mouth, but what used to be his countenance has been obliterated.

  “Behold—the monster!” The words come from the hole of his mouth, and his voice is certainly his, but other than that, it is as if the head of death itself is speaking to her.

  “My love,” is all that comes out of her.

  “Do not despair. Nothing of me was ever my skin,” he whispers.

  In a heap of shoulders, and with her hands covering her face, Christine knows what she was looking at: he’s been skinned. Stripped of all his grafts. It was a form of public shaming—not common, but it happened. His body would remain filleted like that for as long as he survived. Meanwhile, his image was surely being broadcast in the halls and rooms and fake environments all over CIEL.

  “I can’t actually see you,” he continues. “This is not a two-way visual. But I can feel you, hear you, sense the rise and fall of your breathing. I can tell, for instance, that you are about to cry. I command you to cease and desist, my dizzy-eyed pumpion.”

  She smiles, drowning.

  “Ah, there she is,” he says.

  Christine sits on the floor. She looks up at him on the screen. She can’t imagine her life with him not in it.

  “I’ve much to tell you, and little time. Had we but world enough, and time, huh? Alas. Allow me to narrate. Our tyrannical bunion brain, Jean de Men, has gone mad. First, my new . . . look. He intended to perform a full Blood Eagle—”

  “A what?”

  “The Blood Eagle was a method of torture and execution, sometimes mentioned in old Nordic saga legends. It was performed by cutting the ribs of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled bloodstained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim’s back. Salt was sprinkled in the wounds—”

  “Trinc! He did that to you? I’ll slit his fucking throat. I’ll burn his skull and—”

  “Calm, my perfect clam. He did not. He simply removed my outer epidermis. I’ll live. But it is, as they say, beyond painful. Luckily I have a habit of crossing such territories regularly. We have that in common. But I digress.” He pauses. “He’s gone over the edge, Christ. With a sadism of a singularly gendered sort. This”—he waves his hand in a way that re-presents his face—“is nothing. What’s important is, he’s cloistered himself away in some kind of dungeonesque laboratory. He’s—” He closes his eyes. “He’s gutting women open like fish. He’s trying to create a reproductive system. What he’s doing to those women . . . my God. Well. Not God, of course . . .”

  Her hands and feet go cold. She swallows. Her throat fills with rocks. The space between her legs aches.

  “Don’t try to picture it, Christ. Don’t.”

  “How many are there?” she asks.

  “Over the years since we’ve been up here? I can’t say. Many, though, very many. All ages, all in various states of . . . horrid evolution. All linked crudely to so-called medical apparatuses. It is one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”

  It was obvious: he meant to breed them. Not through two gendered humans engaging in the sacred or profane old practice of love and lust, but by binding “women” to an ever-producing gender and forcing sexual reproduction through their bodies. Christine briefly thought of a film she’d seen as a girl on the topic of artificial swine stimulation: how Danish farmers had hooked their sows up to machines that triggered upsuck orgasm using a five-point stimulation system. Each pig was raised to produce as many piglets as possible, then slaughtered when her body could no longer reproduce.

  She didn’t want what Trinculo was saying to be true. Everyone on CIEL knew that frozen sperm and eggs had traveled with them to their new world. There’d simply been no place to unite them—though they had tried. In trial after trial, they had attempted fertilization and conception and gestation, all of it in artificial environments, in animals until there were no animals left, then in cloned offspring that mutated and died or generated disease. They’d even tried the
process of growing beings like crops. Nothing had worked.

  “If you can bear it, there is more,” Trinculo continues. “It has come to his attention that there is a unique solution to his problem. A larger-than-life solution. A kind of human conduit for all living matter. Someone he tried to kill before, but now knows is alive and well. Someone who, through some genetic act of grace, has retained her body intact, her reproductive organs, even her hair.”

  Joan.

  “All right, let’s speed this tale along. They mean to rid themselves of me by the end of the week. The days run away like horses! Remember horses? Remember poets . . .” He laughs, a sound with more sadness in it than space. “He means to enslave her for the rest of time, to use her to propagate our ridiculous species, if you can even call what we’ve become up here a species. But what he has yet to discover is that her body is more than a breeding gold mine. Her body is of the earth more uniquely than any other in human existence. Fuck all! I haven’t the time to explain properly—I can only cut to it. She’s the rarest of engenderines, Christine. If she comes awake to it, she has the power to regenerate the entire planet and its relationship to the sun. She can bring the planet she killed back to life.”

  “The planet she killed?” Christine repeats, realizing she’d been gripping her own arms hard enough to leave pink finger marks. Well, there it was. Her suspicions confirmed. Perhaps she’d always known, deep down, but now it was settled.

  “Ah, but destruction and creation have always been separated by a membrane as thin as the skin on a scrotum, my love. I must go. They’re coming. I have nightly . . . sessions with my demons. But we’ll have urgent matters to discuss. They’re working on ways to attract her. I’ll return to you each night, like this, until I can return no more. Adieu.” He kisses his filleted hand and then blows it out toward her. The Olms slowly and gently disassemble themselves.

  “Darkness,” Christine says, her voice blank. The room goes black. She crumples down on the floor, spreads her arms and legs and closes her eyes. She tries to imagine what it would be like to be tortured in the manner Trinc described—the gash forced into her body, the artificial organs built into her to simulate a reproductive system. She imagines Trinculo, how his very presence sets her abdomen and the smooth dead territory of her former sex on fire. What is left of her actual reproductive system? Everything inside her shrunken and atrophied and dysfunctional; she’d seen the X-rays. How had they kept themselves alive for as long as possible this way, curling up into nothingness while they adorned their outer husks with proof of their existence and matter . . . Dear dead disgusting God.

  Trinculo. Skinned alive like a goddamn cat.

  We’ve become signs, she thinks—mere signs of our former selves. Dislodged from plot and action in our own lives.

  Her mind contorts. What do we mean by love anymore? Love is not the story we were told. Though we wanted so badly for it to hold, the fairy tales and myths, the seamless trajectories, the sewn shapes of desire thwarted by obstacles we could heroically battle, the broken heart, the love lost the love lorn the love torn the love won, the world coming back alive in a hard-earned nearly impossible kiss. Love of God love of country love for another. Erotic love familial love the love of a mother for her children platonic love brotherly love. Lesbian love and homosexual love and all the arms and legs of other love. Transgressive love too—the dips and curves of our drives given secret sanctuary alongside happy bright young couplings and sanctioned marriages producing healthy offspring.

  Oh love.

  Why couldn’t you be real?

  It isn’t that love died. It’s that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.

  Love was never meant to be less than electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The Earth’s heartbeat or pulse or telluric current, no small thing. The stuff of life itself. Life in the universe, cosmic or as small as an atom. But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we’d be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story, and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet. Our reasons to love more important than any others.

  The stars were never there for us—we are not the reason for the night sky.

  The stars are us.

  We made love stories up so we could believe the night sky was not so vast, so unbearably vast, that we barely matter.

  From what Trinculo said, Joan was closer to matter than human.

  Christine sheds her clothing. She runs her hands over every part of her body that she can reach. She reads and reads—hands to a body. She slaps at some areas to release sensation. It’s possible she even weeps. But she is not alone. Christine is part of Joan’s story now, and Joan is part of Christine’s, and no world will ever be the same.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I am not dead.

  I see a throat and chin looming above me. I feel a cool oil rubbed gently into my forehead and temples; it smells of lavender and sage. “Leone,” I whisper through the gestures.

  A figure leans back away from me. Ah. It is not Leone; how could it be. It’s a young adult—maybe sixteen or eighteen—who looks back at me. Hairless, aqua-skinned, black-eyed. I blink hard in an attempt to focus. Skin still aqua. I scan our surroundings. A cave, but not where we were before. Farther in. A modest fire nearby. Glowworms lighting the walls in a delicate web.

  “I am Nyx,” says the person whose skin looks wrong, gently dabbing oil again on my forehead.

  “Like the moon, or the goddess?” Storage and retrieval—I can’t help it. My particular brain retrieves data whether I want it to or not. A survivalist’s occupational hazard when all books, buildings, data banks, all collected forms of knowledge, have been annihilated.

  “Just Nyx.”

  The figure leans back over me and more gentle than a whisper dabs at the place where the blue light lives in my head. I can see grafts from shoulder to shoulder. Stupidly, I think I see my own name embossed there in the flesh as Nyx draws away again.

  My elbows ache, but I use them to sit up anyway. I study this speaker’s body and face. The broad and muscled shoulders. The masculine lantern jaw, the thick neck, yet with cheekbones and brow that are soft, calm, kind. Long-fingered and gentle hands, like an artist’s. But that’s an idiotic thought. This clearly is a young warrior. And yet the gentleness of this person’s touch says caretaker. It’s not clear whether this Nyx is a boy leaning toward manhood or a girl leaning into womanhood. Besides, that skin seems to trump the question of gender. What on earth could be the cause of this moonlike hue? Is Nyx diseased? Alien? Mutated? Enemy, or something else? Everything seems possible when you haven’t seen much humanity for decades.

  “Yes,” Nyx says, checking my pulse as efficiently and smoothly as a nurse.

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “I can hear every word you are thinking.” Nyx lets go of my wrist and stands, walks to the fire, and puts it out with bare hands. Light remains around us in the form of the glowworm walls and now blue ghost fireflies, whose appearance shivers the cave ceiling and creates a blue-green glow. Nyx stands, arms crossed. “But none of these questions are very important.”

  So did I hallucinate you? I stare at Nyx, testing this telepathy bullshit. Or are there more of . . . you?

  Nothing. I’m an idiot.

  “You’ll want to stand up and walk around soon,” Nyx redirects. “You want the energy between your body and the ground to rebalance itself as soon as possible. The travel we have ahead is difficult.”

  “Wait,” I say, trying to stand. My head swims. My legs go boneless. “I have questions. A shitload of questions . . .” My eyes swim in their sockets.

  “Are you experiencing any variations in sight?” Nyx asks, walking over to the nearest cave wall.

  “Why?”

  Nyx’s hands are on the cave wall in front of my face. I feel the ground vibrate up through my
ankles, shins, spine, shoulders, giving my bones back to me. “Keep your eye on the wall,” Nyx instructs. “And you did not hallucinate me. There are many humans left on Earth. We number in the thousands. Of varying strength and abilities. But I’m the only one who is dual-world. And very few of us are like you and me.”

  Dual-world. I snap to standing, though my head throbs and spins. My heart beats me up in my chest. “Do you know how to get up to CIEL?” If Leone is still alive, that’s where she’s been taken. If that’s even possible. Nyx doesn’t answer. “Listen,” I venture, standing and lunging like some newborn, now-extinct gazelle toward Nyx. “I need you to get me up there—” But Nyx cuts me off, and I feel the very air between us press against my chest, keeping me from forward motion.

  “The wall,” Nyx says, gesturing toward the sloped walls of the cave.

  I swivel my bloated head. “What about it? It’s a wall,” I say, impatiently. But then it isn’t.

  First the wall goes from dark umber to amber to azure. Then it begins to sweat and glisten. And then the wall seems to swim in front of us, until what had been solid is suddenly not, and Nyx walks straight through it, blurring out of sight. Within a minute, the wall returns to its impenetrable self.

  Nothingness.

  Pure and thick.

  “Okay! You have my attention,” I yell. The walls echo back at me. “What the fuck was that?” My voice merely ricochets around. I walk closer to the wall. I put my hands against it; solid matter. “Nyx?” Nothing. Just the vanishing points in the cave where light gives way to shadow.

  Then it’s Nyx’s voice: “Please take care to move slowly; you are not exactly among the living.”

  What the fuck does that mean? Not exactly among the living?