The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By one thick rock face along the dry riverbed, diving down from the decrepit remains of the city, Nyx stops. I stop, too. Nyx doesn’t even bother to acknowledge me. I see Nyx’s hands go up against the giant gray dirt edifice and I know something will move soon. I know to watch. I feel the ground under us tremor.

  The wind stops.

  For a long minute, the surrounding atmosphere seems to stop moving. I can swear that molecules of hydrogen and oxygen have slowed down enough to be seen. If I am delusional, well, then the delusion swallows me whole.

  From the wall of dirt right in front of us, from stasis and earth, comes motion. The blue light at my head nearly concusses me off my feet; the song is so loud I feel something warm and wet dripping down from my ears. Blood. But that’s nothing. Two young and naked men—and to be sure, they are men; as long and old and dead as time has become, their masculine image is arresting, the dipping between the hips and the small dimples under each hip bone, the beauty of the thick muscle hanging between their legs, the musculature of their chests blooming between the rounds of their shoulders, their jawlines—two young men, one reddish in hue and the other a kind of ochre or sienna, emerge like statues coming to life. They stand in front of me, their gaze focused on something or some time so far beyond me that I may as well not even be here.

  “Are they alive?” I say, sounding stupid even to myself.

  “Yes. Their bodies, anyway. But they are . . . asleep. Only deeper.”

  My head hurts. Not from the struggle to understand. More like a childhood thing. Like when my skull first came alive with song and light, which nearly killed me.

  I look at Nyx. A little spit from my open mouth catches in the wind and strings outward.

  “Matter,” Nyx says.

  Nyx points to the ground between the two men. Immediately the two figures throw themselves into the ground. Not onto it; into it. Their bodies wrestle the earth, turning and convulsing. Their musculature constricts and expands. It is difficult to tell where one’s legs and arms end and the other’s begin. The earth, too, is dynamic, like clay. Their faces, their open mouths, the cords in their necks animate the space between agony and ecstasy.

  My heart breaks with the violent beauty of it. I can’t move. I can’t not look.

  Their bodies sink a meter or so, then begin to glow and heat and change colors—red to orange to yellow to green to aqua to indigo to a purple so purple it’s black. Soon their bodies are decomposing right before my eyes. I’m breathing so hard I nearly hyperventilate. I reach my hand out, and I think I shout, but Nyx pushes me hard away from them. As their bodies sink deeper and deeper into the earth, I feel another urge to dive down, grab at least one, pull him back to life. Surely I can save one thing.

  Again Nyx blocks me. The song in my head pressures my skull and grows as loud as the sound I remember from the epic angry sea. When, after the terrible watching, I can no longer regard a trace of their bodies, their skeletons, their human form, the song subsides. Slowly and in waves.

  At my feet, and extending away from Nyx and me, is a growing carpet of moss. Tiny white flowers. Insects. Vines. The roots of a tree. Life.

  “Now you,” Nyx says.

  “Me what?”

  “What, have you suddenly become an idiot? Your turn. You bring the children.”

  At the sound of the word children I stiffen, tree-like. “There’s no way,” I say flatly.

  “On the contrary,” Nyx says, “this is the way. Put your hands against the dirt wall.”

  “No.” In my head, I see the children in the graves I buried. How I hid them from harm, how they died because of me, how I resurrected them, how they died again at my hands. Every face. Every small body. Their eyes. Mouths. I can’t do it again.

  But Nyx means to let things between us live or die here.

  The wind subsides, as if Nyx asked it to. “You want up to CIEL? You want your beloved Leone? This is how. Your body. Engenderines were never eco-terrorists. On the contrary. Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another. We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that. Not Leone’s, not even yours. Now bring the children. They have a vital energy. Without it, nothing matters.”

  I stare at Nyx for a long time. Then I stare at the ground. Then I walk to the wall of dirt and put my hands against it. I think of their small bodies—their eyes, their mouths. The dirt vibrates. The blue light and song at my head reverbs. And then here they are, two cherub-like kids, one squatting, one standing. What’s left of my heart, shatters.

  Nyx lies down on the ground. The children do the same, as if being put to sleep by their mother. The blue light and song emanating from me does not save me from being emotionally gutted. But soon the children have lost their forms to color and sound: water.

  They become water.

  I stare at the unusual graves. I put my hand into a small stream forming. I stare at the graves of the beautiful young men, too, gone green with nature. Life and death marking the same spot. “How many men are there . . .”

  “Thousands,” Nyx says quietly. “An army.”

  I close my eyes. For reasons I can’t explain, I see Olms—so many Olms they make their own mountain. Behind my eyelids, I see strings of light going from the Olms to all the stars in the sky. Then I see just two Olms, curled and wriggling in the palm of a woman’s hand. The woman is whispering. She is beautiful.

  I open my eyes. I look up. “How many children?”

  “Many.”

  “Will any of them . . . have life? Real life? Human life? Or was my role on Earth simply to condemn them all to dirt?”

  “Most of them will have ‘real life,’ as you call it. Some who are regenerated will become elements. Like water. Some will be for the population, whatever that turns out to mean. But that’s not the point right now. Look, it’s pretty simple,” Nyx says.

  “How is this fucking simple? You want me to witness these humans—if they really are alive—you want me to watch them devolve right in front of me? How is that not murder?” I feel once again like pure destruction. My blood feels thick in my forearms and legs.

  “Not at all,” Nyx says without alarm. “You are giving them a reason to live. You are giving them back their sacred relationship to the planet and the very cosmos they came from.”

  To be human. What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it meant rejoining everything we are made from. The song in my head pulses in a single ear-shattering note, then silence. Like an auditory exclamation point.

  “I can get you up, if you can kill their future up there. They’re all that’s left of a self-centered species. They aim to destroy us, suck out what’s left of Earth’s resources. You have to choose. Your past is there. You know it is. You have to reenter your own story. And it will likely cost you this thing you call ‘life.’ But it will save your beloved Leone. And much, much more.”

  Leone. Like a word untethered from a body.

  “What do I do?” I say, the wind still around us.

  “Give me your rib,” Nyx says, moving toward me.

  “Excuse me?” I touch my own skin.

  “Your body. We need it. A piece at a time. Engenderine.”

  I stare at the hand that’s missing a finger. If my body carries something better than a self, I surrender it. Nyx lifts my shirt. Pushes a fist inward. Fleshward. I try not to flinch and then I lose consciousness. When I come to, Nyx is gone again and I’m just my wounded body, sutured where a rib should be and face in the dirt. But the dirt is vibrating. I stand up inside sound, the song amplifying in my head, on the ground, up into sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The ugly audacity of pomp brings bile up Christine’s throat.

  The thunder of CIEL’s orchestral p
ageantry shakes the walls around Christine and her players as they fill an anteroom next to the pre-execution theater. “For fuck’s sake,” she mutters. They would have to endure some horrid musical preamble, and no doubt several empty idiotic speeches, before her own show could get going. Ah. Now she recognizes the tune: It is the “Theme of Ascension.” Which is, more accurately, the goddam dirge that was created for the celebratory moment of ascending to CIEL. To be followed, no doubt, by the “Crescendo of Dematerialization.” After your fiftieth birthday, and poof—back to shattered DNA strands and space junk. With a soundtrack.

  Trinculo’s so-called trial was to happen in trompe l’oeil, its image appearing over and over again in holographic bursts. It would be broadcast in corridors and common rooms and walls in our CIEL quarters.

  Christine had been granted a performance as part of the spectacle of Trinculo’s execution, though gaining permission did take some bribery of various guards and under-administrators. In the end Christine was able to convince them that she could provide a superior companion show for his death.

  The silver spider swings and leaps in great arcs, drawing her attention to the performance space, which faces a cathedral-size window with a giant T-square covering it, the horizontal beam slightly higher than center. Beyond it, the horizonless ink of space and the dots of dead stars. How has she never seen it this way before? It is a goddam cross.

  Her line of little rebels ready themselves feverishly. At that age, their cheeks seem to almost flush. But she knows she’s just wishing it. Their eyes yet blaze, though. They still have identifiable necks and cheekbones and scapulae. Lips not yet distorted or spidering around the edges. Her now-favorite, the girl with the epaulets, the girl—or she has decided it is a girl—with the aqua-hued skin, shoots orders at the others.

  “Leave any thoughts of a future in this room. The future is . . .” Nyx risks a glance at Christine. “The future is dung. A compost heap masquerading as life, floating in space without reason or purpose. The old are the only endgame, and they reek of rot and pus.”

  Christine’s lips curl up in a smile. There is no doubt that this young woman has been influenced by Trinculo. What an inspiring group of faux offspring they’ve made! Standing in their deep-hued silken robes, their white skin blazing through silk color, the troupe looks briefly to her like hope. A violent, alien, and homeless flock of creatures trapped between sexual development and arrest. It’s a wonder they don’t spontaneously combust.

  If there had ever been a God, and Christine for one had never believed in one, then that God had perpetrated the most evil of jokes on the human race. He’d brought them to a kind of evolutionary climax, only to put the whole thing into reverse.

  Now Jean de Men meddles with this sorry story of creation. And those relegated to CIEL bestow upon him such reverence and power that he nearly levitates with it. Under the guise of creating culture, he had set out to regulate and reinvent sexuality and everything that came with it, across the bodies of all women, and turn them into pure labor and materiality. What could be more biblical than that? All he needed was an apple and a goddamn snake.

  Courage, Christine tells herself. To straighten her spine, she casts her mind through the wormhole of history, back to a parallel universe, from Joan’s trial, shortly before her execution:

  Interrogative/Excerpt 221.4

  Q: These are the citations of a heretic. You admit your heresy?

  A: These . . . terms. Apostate. Heretic. Terrorist. Who owns the definitions? Language has no allegiance. No grand authority. We pose our authority arbitrarily upon it, but in the end, language is a free-floating system, like space junk or the sediments in oceans that eventually collect into rocks to form matter. What can be made can be unmade. Your definitions do not apply to anything in my experience. But to be precise, upon the topic of heresy, if by “heresy” you mean dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice, then yes, I am a heretic. Your dominant theories, opinions, and practices disgust me. My aim was to murder them. But in truth I am no heretic at all, because it is your theories and practices that are heretical. Against the planet. Against the universe. Against being.

  Q: You see? Impossible. The defendant insists upon pursuing insolence. Do you place so little value on your life? Your people?

  A: One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief—that is a fate more terrible than dying.

  Q: You move nearer every breath and word toward execution.

  A: I am not afraid. I was born to do this.

  Q: Insolence. You are not the child you once were. Your current circumstances are dire. We have no false mercy.

  A: I was in my tenth year when the song in my head fully emerged and the light at my skull flickered alive to help govern my conduct. The first time, I was very much afraid. Then I was not. And never have been after.

  Christine returns to the present tense with a vengeance. She turns from the vast and moronic cross to face her players. “Tonight we arrest the future by igniting the past.”

  She puts her hands upon the shoulders of her best warrior. “Nyx,” she says, “I am glad to have known you, even if briefly.” She means it just as it sounds, as a deathkiss.

  “To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter—isn’t that evolution’s climax?” Nyx says triumphantly, smiling, nearly glowing, leaving Christine feeling something like the heartstab of a proud mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The entering entourage of power is ugly. High-up CIEL figures and assorted mechanical sentries. But Trinculo’s presence interrupts the ceremonial structure like a horse in a solemn parade unloading its shit in clumps.

  “Fire what petty gelatinous wit you can muster, you fen-soaked death sacks,” Trinculo hisses, “I have no skin to harm.” His eyes gleam like succulent black holes. His body crouches, ready to spring . . . mythical creature.

  “Gag and bind the troll,” Jean de Men orders, mocking Trinculo with a flip of his weighted wrist, dangling old white grafts like wrong doilies.

  But her beloved’s voice—Trinculo’s—it is in her. His voice so rings Christine’s corpus that she feels she might faint. Every bone in her body vibrates with his language. And yet the image of Trinculo entering the theater plunges her doomward. From where she and her players are, they can easily see the procession: CIEL thugs lead Trinculo, the colossally arrogant Jean de Men follows, flesh dragging behind him in a bridal train. Christine holds her breath so as not to spit her entire mouthful of teeth at him.

  But there is another.

  A woman who appears to be unconscious or asleep is suspended midair on a kind of floating metal bed. She is not from CIEL. It is the woman with skin the color of someone who lives in weather. Or someone avoiding weather. On Earth. It reminds Christine of memories of the desert Southwest. The Earth woman’s head and shoulders, decorated with ornately designed tattoos in place of hair, seem warm amidst all the white. Her jaw squares up from the metal carrier. Now and then, Christine sees Trinculo steal glances at the woman. Who is she? Does Trinculo know her? Why is Jean de Men making a show of her?

  Standing apart from them, the pearly beast Jean de Men smiles. Or at least the folds of his face arch upward.

  “Some demigod,” Christine mutters under her breath.

  As if Jean de Men can hear her, he turns to address Christine. “What is the title of your theatrical addition to our official proceedings?” He weaves his white whittled fingers in between each other.

  The audience leans in her direction. A circle of milky figures, pallid and achromatic, their graft flabs hanging about them. Maybe one hundred, middle-aged, all shy of fifty but not by much.

  “A Brief History of the Heretic Maid, your . . . grace,” Christine responds, still managing to keep her teeth unclenched. “Or do you prefer ‘your eminence’?” De Men scowls. She thinks she hears the woman on the floating slab breathing. With difficulty.r />
  “Ah,” Jean de Men growls. “I see you’ve not lost your knack for reinventing the utterly obvious.”

  “As usual, your . . . eminence, you play the game entire galaxies ahead of me. I could never hope to compete in the realm of such brilliance—as brilliant as the fire of the sun,” she says, bowing for effect. “And I mean that literally.” She astral projects her heart into Trinculo’s.

  For a moment Jean de Men seems to her like a cartoon of himself. It is easy to think of him as a buffoon—this idiotic blowhard, this accidentally ascended charlatan. But Christine knows better. All of human history has taught us how easily the clownish, the insane, the needy, the self-absorbed, even the at-first righteous can be grooved or embossed by the simplicity of power erosions.

  Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil? Whether he registers her true meaning or not, she can’t be sure. Then he stares her down and bellows, loud enough to shake her shoulders: “Places, all! These proceedings will commence.”

  She does not want to lose the chance to correct her logistics and aim. Would the woman’s presence impact her plan? Did de Men have something in mind with her body? “I wonder, sir, might you introduce the audience to your companion?” Christine gestures in the direction of the floating extra.

  The reptilian slide that Jean de Men’s robes make as they Ssss across the floor, ceases. He turns first to the woman on the alloyed cot, and then back to Christine. “In honor of the spectacle at hand, a most venerable execution, I have decided to amplify the subtext.”