The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  I can see enough of the scarifications now to read a line or two. They are sentences. Stanzas, more precisely. At the neck and shoulder, down her breastless chest and torso. My heart and breath lurch in my chest. A thin rise of electricity shoots from my ear to my forehead. The words on Nyx’s body. I recognize them.

  Then Nyx reenters the metal skirt with more care than it had been removed with, and I’m embarrassed to find tears stinging the corners of my eyes. When Nyx repositions so that my knife is once again poised at the throat, Nyx’s back to me, ready to live or die exactly as before. “Who are you?” Nyx asks.

  I don’t know why I hold Nyx in the headlock still, but I do. “The map,” I begin. “Is it real? Can I get to Leone? Who is Christine?”

  “Who are you?” Nyx repeats. “Do you even know?”

  My throat empties. My mind a vacuum of foreign matter.

  “No,” I whisper back, locked in an antiembrace with this strange other who seems to have so many answers.

  “I told you. You are an engenderine.”

  I don’t move.

  “You are between human and matter. Nearly indistinguishable.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nyx calls it kinema.

  What we are doing, that is, our mode of travel. For some reason, my brain reaches for Galileo, for whom I developed a strange fixation as a child. I secretly wished he’d been my grandfather. Nyx means to train me to ride the motion of energy that is everywhere. “It supercharges you . . .” and I feel like a human battery.

  Kinema brings us hopscotching across Earth. Nyx says I’m learning to control my own energy. Nyx says we have far to travel. As I understand it, it is something like riding telluric current, combined with the most intense human-to-human—or whatever Nyx is and I am—embrace that I’ve ever experienced. Not even a lover’s entangled body knot could be tighter than this embrace. (Not that I would know. The one and only time I let my desire happen I nearly killed Leone.) Our combined energies dematerialize us and rematerialize us anywhere Nyx aims us. Kinema. Just like the red rock with my brother in the field when we were kids.

  I feel the tear of Leone’s future ripping my body apart. If I can’t learn this form of transportation I believe she will die. Nyx knows it—uses it like bait. I do not believe that Nyx gives a shit whether or not Leone lives or dies. All Nyx wants is revenge, and yet Nyx speaks of revenge as a portal back to “love.” Whose love? Where? I want to get up to Leone so badly I have shredded the insides of my cheeks from chewing at them so impatiently.

  We make camp underground in all the caves Leone and I have lived in and more, sometimes finding evidence that others had been there, too, or maybe it was just the trace of things before or during the Wars. It is impossible to tell. Long-deserted fire pits and bone fragments, petroglyphs and the metal carcasses of weapons and vehicles and machines meant for killing, irrigation system remains and adobe structures and lighting and power systems and underground gardens gone crackled and black. Caches of long-spoiled food or irradiated stuff, burned-up bones of people in heaps or scattered like some great carnivorous bird had shat them across land masses. Once we found a tandem bicycle on its side, red and flat-tired, but with spokes intact. For some reason the bike crushed me. It reminded me that individual humans were always yearning for an other. The old ache in my chest. After seeing traces of people for so long, believing most of them dead, it was still shocking if what Peter said was true. That an entire group existed . . . no way to know without looking. Survivors be damned; my only impulse to live rests in the body of Leone.

  Graves.

  We see graves everywhere.

  Something else that haunts me: the graves, they all have different depths. I don’t know what, if anything, it means. There is no hierarchy to death, to grief, to the end of life. The small graves of children, shallower than the graves of adults—does it really mean anything different? Did decomposition happen more quickly for children?

  In any case, they remind me of the children I buried who died where they lay, the children I raised from the dead only to watch them drop to dirt, but not before they each looked me in the eye with one question: Why couldn’t you save me?

  There is a recurring dream I keep having that seems to be telling me something.

  When I was a child, it seemed beautiful: a white lady in space who spun stories like spiderwebs. Roomfuls of stories. And the ink of space surrounding her made her glow all the more, like some kind of moonwoman, her skin radiating night light. The stars seemed to carry her voice.

  During the Wars, the dream came to me differently. I don’t mean the dream changed; it did not. But how I felt within the dream changed. Suddenly the woman’s stories seemed urgent. Her eyes wider and more focused. Her mouth more deliberate. Her words heavier. Once I thought I even heard her call to me, say my name. But I can’t be sure. Someone else’s voice had woken me for battle. So it’s hard to say whose voice I really heard. It’s just that some part of me wanted it to be hers. I thought I heard the name Christ. I thought it was her name.

  Most recently the dream has turned brutal. The woman is still beautiful, still spinning stories, still embedded within the night and stars. But the pull of her voice is so intense I can feel it in my chest and abdomen. The stories are not for little girls. The stories say, Get up. Now. The stories say, Turn your head away from everything you’ve known. Look down. At the dirt itself. Mother. Sister. Daughter. Her name, the woman, I know now it is Christine.

  And the dirt, it’s screaming.

  Kinema. Nyx is taking me toward something but she won’t tell me what. We kinemaed subterranean passages to avoid Skylines or biologic trace. I’m too much like bait, Nyx says. We don’t have much time, Nyx says. Does this mean that Leone is in danger? Is there some carefully designed form or plan evolving above us? Briefly a tinge of my former desire to fight for humanity surfaces, for a briefer moment still I wish the feeling would linger, but then all I feel is Leone again. And Peter’s dying breath. What do I do?

  And always Leone in my throat or my temple or my chest, or in the place where my very sex sits, pounding with a vengeance, asking me why I didn’t love her in every way humanly possible while I still had the chance.

  Every night I pull out the map that the child Nyx gave me and stare at it. It looks vaguely astrological. Earth’s landmarks don’t look anything like they once did; they are all either gone or so radically changed that they look like different continents, mountain ranges, dry riverbeds, and jagged ravines. The map displays coordinates that reach toward the sky and beyond the constellations, beyond the crippled sun and moon, with lines and trajectories touching points of stars and planet rings and celestial bodies. Maybe it’s purely a little girl’s beautiful made-up sky system, like in a fairy tale. And yet when I open the piece of paper—only the second piece I’ve seen in decades—I feel hope. I wonder how people must have felt the first time someone drew a map that went beyond the flat world to a round one. I wonder if they felt the way I do now.

  For three days we kinema, until finally I look up through a zigzagging crack in a cave’s ceiling at the dull excuse for a moon and ask, “Where are we going? I cannot bear this any longer. I’ll kill myself if Leone dies before we can get up to CIEL.”

  “We are almost there,” Nyx says, without looking at me, “but there is a last stop we must attend to.” And then, either compassionately or through annoyance with my endlessly abstract and morbid thoughts, for I think the same thought every day and every night—why should I go on, to be or not to be, what have they done to the body of my dear Leone—Nyx says, “She’s still alive.”

  She. Leone. I swallow and my whole life stones in my throat.

  “Where the fuck are we going?” I had nothing to lose anymore. Nyx hadn’t killed me; I hadn’t killed Nyx; whatever each of us was after was clearly still unattained.

  “You’ll know when you see it,” Nyx answers, and turns away from me, shoulder blades walling me off from any chance at c
onnection. The image of Nyx’s genitalia flashes like an undiscovered landscape over and over again in my head. I can’t not see it.

  But I can’t travel any farther without knowing either. “How am I not human? You said I’m not human.” Nyx doesn’t move or open her mouth; she just keeps on stirring soup in a clay pot over a fire. It smells like rabbit, but I know that’s not possible. Bat maybe, oilbird or snake, but not rabbit. I walk toward the mouth of the cave.

  “What are you doing?” Nyx stops stirring.

  I keep walking.

  “HEY!” Nyx yells.

  I keep walking. If I am bait, then let them take me. If Leone is alive, then let me go to where she is. I’d rather die near Leone than live another day like this. Another ten feet and I’ll be at the shaft. If I climb out, if they really are looking for me, I’ll be easy to spot on the surface of the dirt planet, firing off ammunitions. I don’t care. If Nyx wants to stop me, hurt me, kill me, let it happen.

  But then I’m being embraced from behind, plunged forward into space and time with Nyx’s blue-green arms around me, our heads knocking together. This time the kinema is not to another cave.

  I land with Nyx on my back. I sputter at a mouthful of dirt. We are on the surface of the planet I abandoned for the small and secret survival available underground. In short but vivid pulse-bursts, we kinema like bomblets across varied terrains, wrestling like animals.

  Earth: the vastness makes my breath jackknife in my chest. The world before I killed it. It used to be beautiful. The beauty is all gone now—but the vastness remains, and I can almost feel beauty just under the surface of things. It hurts to look at it.

  We skirt oceans and shorelines like gulls and pelicans once did. We dive valleys between formerly lush mountains, curling around what used to be glistening rivers, snaking through what used to be jungles. All gone to dirt, a still life of dirt, the world an ossuary. We swan over deserts of sand and wind, deserts of ice, life likely hiding underneath. The skies are no longer blue or gray, there is no more summer or rain. It’s all just constant sepia day and eerie bruise-colored night. Wind everywhere. Untamed water. Geology unbound. The entire planet like a series of exposed erosions. We travel the world in quadrants and hemispheres, where countries and cultures are dead.

  There’s a reason I left the surface. It wasn’t just to survive.

  The landmass before me is as enormous as the sky and space above it. What’s left of civilization is nearly indistinguishable from the erosions of land meeting elements. We stop. Somewhere. Exhausted.

  Wind. With little to nothing to block it, the wind tears at us both. My hair pulls hard enough to wrench loose from its roots. My face pulls. I have to hug myself so my arms don’t pinwheel. I brace my legs to keep from falling down. Then the wind subsides, and gusts up again, the intervals irregular. When the wind is not attacking us, Nyx walks ahead. I haven’t walked the surface of Earth without having some kind of purpose or goal—hunting for ammunitions compounds or Skylines—for a long time. There hasn’t been a reason. But what I can see now tugs my memories loose. The word city snakes up my vertebrae, but which? It’s impossible to tell. The once-urban surface pokes up in juts and mounds. Haphazard and irregular skeletons of buildings or freeways. Bridges and roads in pieces, like fragments to nowhere. A city demolished or eaten alive by hurricanes, tsunamis, mudslides, earthquakes, like the last best nuclear bombs times a thousand.

  Earth is a cemetery. There is nothing to say. Nothing to say about all of this empty. There was no proper eulogy. I think of all the so-called lifeless planets out there floating in space. Was this really the end of our story? To join the galaxies of spinning, floating planets, home to nothing, to no one but the elements that comprised us? We deserve it. For what we’ve done to each other. For what we did to this orb we found ourselves inhabiting. This beautiful, godforsaken place where once there was life.

  For what I did.

  Nyx steps ahead of me, leaving dust holes in the terrain. I know it is a city, this place—not just because of the mighty architectural icons or beehive-like living structures and transportation labyrinths, but because I can see the carcasses of misshapen airplanes.

  And I know exactly where we were.

  City of light or water or art. City of history and sprawling avenues spoking out from its landmarks, stretching out like the lines of an urban poem. City of rivers and streams threading through arrondissements and kissing tree-lined quays. Ghosts of cathedrals pulling faith in between the past and the present, rising from an island waterway, stretching to see a sister church. Old stone, older than stone-making, stone-giving cobblestoned streets pressed up against districts, once as distinct as the people on the planet; neighborhoods like chapters from books, or what used to be books, turning and lifting now into some raw otherness. City of walking by day, and metros snaking and tunneling underneath it all, some subterranean transit worming forward and backward having once teemed with human.

  The memories make a wasteland of my eyes and throat. Wind continues to pummel us as we walk.

  When I last set foot in this city, before the Wars—we were children, my brother’s face not yet etched with violence, mine not yet fully bloomed into a woman’s map of rage and despair, the two of us laughing within the city, Paris, peopled with—oh, how richly peopled it had been! An image: two glasses of wine making that glass-to-glass note as my parents toasted. Tears sting the corners of my eyes as Nyx and I trudge through the desolation. I can already taste the salt hopelessness of the imagined memory—the city and life of lovers that Leone and I would never be or inhabit: streets full of Africans and Asians, Chinese and Vietnamese—my love Leone sometimes stopping to speak Vietnamese—the city teeming with Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Serbs, with city natives and those from the countryside, feeling foreign amid the urban rush and wail of capital and culture, Americans and Brits straining to become kindred in spite of themselves, Italians swarming and winding ’round Germans and Australians too blond or too tall—all of it surging like a single organism of flesh and bone through the streets and alleys always smelling of bread and urine and cheese and soot and riverstink . . . how a single glass of wine on any night next to the river touched to the lips between two people could feel like every love there ever was or would be . . . the night like the water lapping over us, the sky filling with stars that stitched our names . . .

  Bridges bridging land and water and past and present, from upstream to downstream to bays and on to oceans . . .

  Before me now, not a single remaining bridge fully crosses the dusted gutted riverbed. The nubs of the city’s iconic skyline are as unrecognizable as half-rotten corpses on a battlefield.

  The wind kicks up again and purges my memories. This land a waste.

  Though I wish my own voice would just swallow itself or destroy me, I speak across a lull in the wind’s torrent: “Why are we here? This city is dead.”

  But Nyx is already walking down into the Seine’s cavernous, dry riverbed. “Stop being so blind. There’s a city underneath this. I thought you understood about subterranean life. Everything is matter.”

  At first I hear this as “everything matters,” then realize my error. Nyx’s deliberateness, the determination of her walk away from me, pulls me along. I clamber down and fall part of the way, rolling like blown detritus. I land at Nyx’s feet. I look up. “What kind of ‘city’ could there be underneath all this?” My voice fills with bile. Suddenly, instinctively, I know exactly where we are. I cannot believe they chose the city I loved so much.

  We are at the site of my execution, what was restaged on CIEL.

  “Once a city of culture,” Nyx says, holding a hand out to help me stand.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  On CIEL, Christine walks down a corridor and looks at two Olms in the palm of her hand. She’s taken to carrying a few of them around with her everywhere—even, truth be told, talking to them sometimes. What better time to be losing one’s mind?

  Between Trin
culo updates and the spider’s Morse code, what she has learned is this: the Olms were like early evolutionary versions of Joan. They had developed new sensory organs from their subterranean existence, just as all evolutionary changes happened—only, with the speed of geocatastrophe, it had all happened much faster. The blue light at the side of Joan’s head, and the so-called song that accompanied it, were like a string linking her to something other. Her new sensory organ did indeed give her elemental powers on Earth. But that was only part of the story. Joan’s body had the power to conduct all living matter, to destroy yes, but also to regenerate.

  Christine stops in her tracks for a moment and blows on the Olms in her hand. They circle and tighten into a little white ball. We’re all made of star stuff, she thinks, but Joan has a direct line to a cosmic system.

  For a moment, Christine’s sympathy for Joan pools in her imagination. What must it have been like, as a girl, to carry a song of all creation and destruction in her head? What must it be like to carry the burden of humanity—and its end—around in a woman’s body, when a woman’s body was made to create life? Christine places her hand on her own pubis. The pubic bone remained, but nothing else did.

  She holds a micro version of what Joan has likely felt on a cosmic level: survivor’s guilt.

  Joan had been unable to save humanity.

  It is a wonder she did not suicide after she survived her own execution, only to engender destruction.

  Christine ducks into an alcove. The hiss and hum of the CIEL breathing system drones on. Metallic sentries and bloated white doilies—what is left of the human race—parade by her. She touches her free hand to her chest, feeling the raised words, reading them as Braille.

  She holds the little Olms up to her lips and whispers to them, soft as a lullaby: “I understand it now. You have to let go of the idea that you are a singular savior or destroyer. Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy. Bodies are miniature renditions of the entire universe. We are a collective mammalian energy source. That is what we have always been. What an epic error we made in misinterpreting it all.” The Olms crawl up her wrist and forearm, then up to her shoulder, resting at the place between her jaw and collarbone, where she’s recently burned a plot twist into Joan’s story.