The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Now my head feels so light I think it may float off my neck. I drop to my knees, nearly passing out. I put my face on the ground. I taste dirt.

  “Watch.” Nyx’s voice again.

  I don’t move, but I eye the wall again. It dances with shadows and shapes, as if the former fire had created projections that lingered.

  “Put your hands into the wall,” Nyx’s voice says.

  Right, I think, as if I should trust the disembodied voice of a blue-green alien. And yet I find myself standing, walking over to the wall, and placing my hands on it. Into it. For the wall is not solid. The shapes crackle and hum with electrical current. On the other side, my elbows feel a great pull—not another person, but a kind of energy that feels centrifugal. Then the wall buckles and I am in to my shoulders, and the wall has become an abalone-colored screen, a 3-D screen quickly swallowing me up, until I find myself standing in a room with something I haven’t seen in what feels like eons.

  A girl.

  I am alone, in a child’s room, with a white-haired girl. A young child’s room, from the looks of it. Three of the walls are violently bombed-out. There is no ceiling. The floor is peppered with rubble and dirt, sticks and leaves and rocks and pieces of walls and things. Shredded stuffed animals, toys, and shoes. And what appears to be the shattered glass of a chemistry set. The bed is unrecognizable, save for the gutted mattress. Somehow, a little desk has survived intact, set in front of what is left of a window.

  “La fenêtre,” the little girl says, pointing to the place where a window used to be.

  “What is your name?” I venture. I have no idea where we are, if things are real or imagined.

  “Nyx,” the girl says. “We should hurry, they’ll be here soon.”

  I step closer to the girl, but she leaps back. “It’s okay,” I say, “I won’t hurt you.”

  The girl laughs. “That’s funny,” she says, returning to her desk.

  “What’s funny about it?”

  “Everyone’s dead, is what.” The girl sits down at the desk, opens it, carefully pulls out a piece of paper and a pencil—two objects that momentarily stun me. Artifacts.

  “Who is ‘everyone’?” I ask.

  The girl sighs. I hear impatience in her sigh. “My sister. My mother. My brother. Like yours. The whole town. La fenêtre,” she says again, nodding her head in the direction of the blown-out wall and window.

  I walk to the opening and look out. I know what she means. It’s like where I lived as a girl. It went like that during the Wars. Things were there and then they were not. People. Buildings. Animals. Sirens, and the sky lighting up with fighters and firepower and the ground and space and sound, and everything real lighting up and rumbling into nothing. Some people were fighters and some people ran for cover and some people just waited for death.

  “My sister was practicing words with me. Every day she taught me new words, and numbers, every day of the Wars, she kept me reading and counting and drawing. To distract me, I guess. To not give up. When the cataclysm hit, my sister melted in front of me. I mean, I know that’s not really what happened, but that’s what I remember. She melted. Like a chemistry experiment. But I didn’t.” The girl concentrates on whatever she’s drawing on the piece of paper. Momentarily she looks up at me. “You didn’t either.”

  “No,” I say. I didn’t know I’d be spared from genocide when I touched my hands to the earth. I thought, maybe even hoped, that I’d melt into raw matter like everyone else. This girl probably didn’t know she wouldn’t burn, either.

  “Engenderines. Both of us.”

  The word sits in the air between us, not materially visible and yet not nothing either. Like molecules. Engenderines were like mythical creatures or astrological signs dot-to-dot in the night sky. Stories of beings who were closer to matter and elements than to human. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know if I’m in a dream space of Nyx’s imagination or if I have somehow time-traveled back to her actual past. I don’t know anything. The girl looks straight up for a moment. “What are you looking for?”

  “They’ll be here soon,” the girl repeats.

  I walk the length of the dream, the room, whatever it is. The landscape around us matches the present tense, not the past. The wronged world. Lunar and scarred. The sepia light of a damaged atmosphere, sun, moon, a flattening color. The treeless horizon and hills made of dirt and dry riverbeds carving out directionless lines. Dead earth.

  “There used to be a forest, there”—the girl points—“and a lake. And horses and cows and swans—even a black one like in fairy tales. Swans don’t really have a purpose. But I miss them the most. Maybe because of fairy tales.”

  I walk back to the white-haired girl at her little desk. “Who will be here soon?” I ask, wondering if we are closer to or farther away from danger here. Wondering if I even care. There is a calm here. A still.

  “The men is who,” the girl says.

  “I see. How many men?” Even I don’t quite understand the aim of my question.

  “Thousands,” the girl says. “Whole armies.”

  I remember men. I just can’t remember how long it’s been since I saw them en masse. My brother’s corpse flashes up behind my eyes. Then my chest clicks my shoulders and spine into alertness. Wherever I am, I realize, I can’t stay. “What is this picture you are drawing? Is it about the Wars? With armies of men?”

  The girl looks up at me as if I’m stupid or insane. Her brows furrow. “Real men are coming,” she says, “though they were just boys back then . . .” Her face loosens. “I saved them.” The hair on my arms prickles up like a tiny forest.

  “Saved them from what?” I ask.

  The girl puts her pencil down, picks up the beautiful piece of paper, and hands it to me. “For you,” she says, in a voice older than her years.

  I look down. On the piece of paper the girl has drawn an intricate map.

  “For you,” she says again. “This is the way to Leone.”

  In the center of the map is a name: Christine.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Christine surveys her players. Their skin looks lifted and taut, like youth. But youth toward what? CIELers had no future. They glowed like dying stars, pretending their light and puffed-up cascades of flesh gave them presence and meaning. They carried stupid stories of themselves around like capes and headdresses. Underneath they were all atrophying bones and sacks of meat with half-century shelf lives.

  Each player has a different silk robe on—her idea—in a palette of deep azures and burgundy reds, blacks and purples and the dark green of deep forests. Or what she remembers of forests anyway. It is more color than she’s seen in years.

  When the time comes, of course, they will perform naked, their young and still-stinging grafts pearling and gleaming alive—as if to say, something almost human was here. Corrupted, white and wounded and unflinching. They will perform an epic poem written across their bodies. And at the apex of the drama, nearly Greek in its design, they will move to kill as many CIELers as they can, slaughter and liberate their targets.

  To Nyx, she gave a special operation: find Joan. Bring her up. The execution this time would not be hers.

  She gives each of them a single transparent wire cord, wrapped around their forearms and wrists. Slicing through the necks of mature CIELers is easy. Their skin never met with weather, and thus is spongey and elasticized from graft upon graft. Pain receptors dulled by the palimpsest of flesh. Christine and her troupe can cut them open like so many decadent cakes.

  Trinculo’s side of the plan gives her a pain at her temple and a tightness at her throat. She cannot get the image of his flayed head and torso out of her mind’s eye. Red and meat-rivered, with blue sinewy veins and arteries, bulging eyes, a gaping mouth. Like the inside-out of a body. And yet she knows, more than she’s known anything in her life, that he will succeed with his part of the plan.

  He’d said as much in his last soliloquy animated by the Olms:

  To
leave light and breath—that is the dare:

  To chance losing oneself irreverently to space

  Rather than clinging to the fiction of time

  Or to repeat the old agons endlessly

  Until we go to dirt. To leave, to surrender—

  Lightless into further dark—sweet surrender to starstuff

  The heart beaten, and the bones that hold our sagging meat sacks

  The skin we’ve overused. What better union

  Expresses our desire. To loosen molecules back to spacejunk

  To surrender being—possibly evolve: yes, that’s the fuck of it,

  Spiraling toward an end could begin again beginning

  As we pretend to leap at our own demise,

  Wait. There could be matter dark and as yet undiscovered

  Holding open being and knowing ceaselessly

  Like a cavernous mouth, exposing the fear beyond our fear:

  What if there is no death.

  Soft you now,

  The fair Christine!—Nymph, in thy orisons

  Be all my sins remembered.

  He was a terrible poet. And yet she instantly memorized his stanzas and replaced the original from which he’d stolen it. His silly, melodramatic, reworded speech!

  And then the Olms had loosened and disassembled, and his wounded image falling back to nothing. His good-bye kiss.

  But she has other ideas.

  Her players await further instruction. Looking at them, her eyes well up like little saucers. She feels entire oceans of tears only barely held back by the dyke of her resolve. She will not surrender him to the universe without a fight. She will bring all of literary history forward like a tidal wave.

  She loves him unto dead matter, where they can be joined again with whole universes.

  “The play’s the thing,” she announces to her players; if they notice the waver in her voice or the dull redundancy of the line from history, they do not show it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  At the sound of the word Leone, a space-splitting roar tears into the dream girl’s room. My head feels split open. The only force I know of like that is a Skyline crackling open, but how could that be? Hadn’t Nyx bridged me into some otherwhere? Not Earth, not space, maybe not even real? As instantly as it hits, dead silence and empty dark vacuum me back to dirt and cave walls. My eyes adjust and my senses kick. In my hand, though, is the map.

  “Now would be a good fucking time to reappear,” I yell into the empty. “Nyx!”

  “Telluric current,” Nyx responds, standing behind me like it’s the most normal thing in the world, as if we’d been that way all along. “In tandem with your mind’s eye. It’s how we’ll travel.”

  At the sound of her emotionless voice, anger balls up in my gut and blooms into my lungs and esophagus. With what life I have left in me, I unsheathe a blade at my thigh, twirl and lunge at Nyx with the knife to her neck.

  Under the knife I can see Nyx’s throat shiver. I watch her swallow in slow motion. I watch the veins at her temple river outward and pulse. When Nyx speaks, her tone is smooth. Even pinned and head-cocked, Nyx’s voice sounds calm. I decide I hate Nyx.

  “Death,” Nyx murmurs. “It’s always about death. If there’s a mortal short circuit to humanity’s existence, it’s the obsession with death as an ending. Death? You think death means anything to me? Before you kill me, let me tell you a story.”

  I push the knife far enough into Nyx’s neck to draw a line of blood.

  Without moving, Nyx speaks. “We’ve believed in you for years—the story of you. At least dignify what’s left of my life by letting me tell mine?”

  It’s a fair point. I loosen my grip and the knife’s pressure, but hold my position. Nyx continues, unaffected.

  “You are familiar, I believe, with Jean de Men? Do you know about his experiments in biosynthetics?” A long silence blooms between us. The damp dark air seems to breathe. “I thought not. No one is. You might say I’m Jean de Men’s creature. Allow me to demonstrate?”

  Nyx pushes hard against the knife’s edge poised at her throat, easing up inch by inch until we stand facing one another. I let it happen. A small but insignificant path of blood leaves a trace at Nyx’s neck. Then slowly, carefully, Nyx unbuckles the metal skirt that binds legs, hips, waist, and torso. As each buckle loosens, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t know why. I try to breathe like a normal, war-tested veteran. But what appears before me undoes me again.

  The metal garment releases and falls to the ground, and the aquamarine of Nyx’s skin pigment grows even more vivid. Almost like a canvas. My sight is drawn to that place between the hips and legs. Humans are always drawn to sexuality, whether we admit it or not. There is no not looking. There, where sexuality used to announce itself, is a malformed penis; someone’s attempt at reconstructing the complex organ. It hangs like a truncated and crooked worm, the head misshapen. But that’s not all. Intimately close to the penis is a partially sutured half-open gash running from the space between Nyx’s legs to the right hip bone. Jagged and ugly. Another attempt at genitalia. Botched. My mind tries to tear my eyes away from the sight, but the body doesn’t lie. I can’t look away.

  “Yes, look. Like a malformed hermaphrodite. Perhaps my ‘parent’ couldn’t decide—boy or girl. Jean de Men tried both. In the face of my perfectly intact anatomy, he butchered me like meat.”

  Nyx’s stance widens and I blush.

  “I was twelve. Just a couple of years after my girlhood, which you just visited. While you were out crusading your teen years away in the Wars, some of us were the objects of inhuman experimentation. I was not born like this. I was made from the body of an Earth-born child I can barely remember.”

  I watch Nyx touch the faint blood left from my knife at the throat, then taste it. For a moment I think I taste copper. But Nyx is not finished with the story.

  “When I escaped and joined the resistance it wasn’t for you. Your glory or cause. It was for more than survival. It was for revenge. This body—my body. I am the proof of what happens when power turns its eye toward procreation. I am a monstrosity. But that’s not the worst part. A body is just a body. You know? Something deeper lives in all of us. Do you know what it is?”

  I didn’t. Did I? I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “Love,” Nyx said.

  My chest constricts, as if the word itself was a vise.

  “I loved people before Jean de Men did this to me. I know what love was.” Nyx looks down at the ground.

  Did I?

  Nyx walks around me in a slow circle. “I loved my father. He was shot in the skull less than a foot from my face. I loved my mother.” Nyx touches my shoulder so that I turn at the same circumference and rate of the circle she makes around me. “My mother was stripped naked, then eviscerated—crotch to throat—in front of me.” Nyx gestures up and down the length of a torso. “Jean de Men told me it was part of my education toward an immortal future, one in which humanity sacrificed itself for an evolutionary leap. On my knees, lost in some kind of horror and emotional chaos, I wanted to suck the bullet from my father’s head and lodge it in my own brain. I wanted to crawl inside the carcass of my mother and die there. Then Jean de Men put a blade in my hands, and a blade at my skull, and forced me to gut a girl my own age—or die. And then another. And another. I fell into a kind of numb terror—”

  “My God.” My voice surprises me.

  “No,” Nyx answers, “if anything is true, it’s that God was a fiction. What haunts me is that we placed so many brutal figureheads at his feet.” She looks up toward the ceiling. It looks briefly like the gesture of prayer, but I know better. Everything above us is brutal and mutilated.

  “He said he needed the anatomical material. He said good each time I stuck the blade into another girl.” I stare at Nyx, looking for emotion in her pupils. Nyx returns an icy gaze. “Inside the numb, I vowed to murder not just Jean de Men, but anyone anywhere whose existence depended on attainin
g power. Which is nearly everyone.” Nyx approaches me now and stares through me. “You are alive because I haven’t decided who you are. Saviors are dead. God is dead. Are you about power, or love? It’s a simple choice I’ll have to make.”

  Now, this. An equality of hate. Rage, wedged between us like the ghosts of the girls we were.

  Nyx’s body pulses, resonating with the story. “I was not very old when I hid the boys,” she continues. “But I already had a deep field of knowledge.”

  My gaze lingers, traveling Nyx’s corpus with an empathy I did not intend to feel. Torture has so many layers, like the layers of the body’s skin, or the different realms of atmosphere between breathing and exploding in space. At the heart of torture there is a brutality beyond inflicting pain. It is the brutality of stealing an identity, a sense of self, a soul. The pain-wracked body is only a symbol of a deeper struggle that is bodiless. It is the struggle to be. Not just to cling to consciousness, but a kind of radical compassion to exist as a self in relation to others. The torturer attempts to murder that desire for compassionate relationship. To erase even its possibility. The tortured body is the opposite of the newborn. Instead of a will toward life and the stretch to bond with an other, there is a brutal will toward death and the end of that longing.

  When torture succeeds, that is.

  Nyx’s body tells me that Nyx’s torturer has not succeeded.

  “What boys?” I manage.

  The burns on my face sting and ache. Nyx is staring at them. I step toward her until we are close enough to embrace. That’s when I see them: upon Nyx’s arms and torso, something besides the spectacle of the wounds.

  The words. Faint and raised like embossed flesh. She is covered in them—tiny scar-words, white as bone fragments. And I am right. My name appears more than once. Unable to read fully in the dim light, I convulse with the desire to get closer. I raise my hand toward Nyx’s skin. It hovers there between us like dead faith. Nyx simply pushes my hand away into space.