The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  Christine shoots a look at the bloody mass that is Trinculo. He does not return her gaze. “Subtext?”

  “Why, yes,” de Men continues. “Did you think me a dull-witted interpreter of textuality? After all these years, after all of our grafting showdowns, after all of the times I have successfully asserted your place in the machinations of things, you think that I have not anticipated an extra effort on your part?” He holds his arms extended out on either side, one hand in the direction of Trinculo, the other aimed at the woman on the metal bed. “Why, Christine. I believe our literary aims form something of a union. Each of us is merely missing an element that will take the trope to its truest form.” And then he strides the distance so that his bloodless and hoary face flaps loom over Christine’s head.

  When he speaks she can feel the heat of his breath. “Happy birthday,” he whispers. “I’ve brought you a gift from Earth.”

  So the woman is somehow connected to Joan. The great clotted fuck hopes to set a cosmic trap. Well then. The more the merrier, Christine concludes with the deduction speed of someone whose endgame has death at its heart.

  With all the dramatic enthusiasm she can muster, she claps wildly, exclaiming, “How perfectly mysterious of you to heighten the drama!” Her smile remains long after the words leave her mouth.

  Christine then turns to her players, each armed with the transparent wires around their forearms and wrists like the limbs of insects. She has to admit, the flame in their eyes, at another time in her life, would have ignited something like hope in her. Now she has but one ending braided from three strands: to kill the most powerful man in the Sky, to reanimate the story of Joan, and to conjure an epic ending with the only being left on their slipshod pile of space junk who she cares about, taking the whole new world shithouse with them.

  She smells Trinculo’s flayed skin even as the theater darkens. When a stage light illuminates the opening scene, Christine thinks she catches the eye of the woman on the floating cot—are her eyes open? Jean de Men sits next to her and looks to be stroking her thigh. Revulsion creeps up Christine’s gullet, but she swallows it. He has made a spectacle of his violence to remind them all that his control of CIEL is anything he says it is. Always buffeted by technological sentries and killing instruments. Well then, she’ll call and raise; she’ll incorporate his repugnant tableau straight into her drama. The woman on the floating metal slab is alive.

  The audience bobs in the dark. They disgust her, too. She surveys their glowing bodies moving ever-corpseward in the dimmed lights. What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment and some overblown and brief feeling of superiority through . . . what? Height? Floating above their former world? Like a permanently displayed opera audience caught midclap. Useless and vapid aesthetic. Maybe there had been a moment, some revolutionary moment, when they’d had a chance to be something better or more beautiful. But the moment was gone. As far as she’s concerned, being closer to the stars just means closer to what we are made of—death minerals. The faster she can contribute light to the night sky, the better.

  All executions were allowed a kind of accompanying show, but Christine had convinced Jean de Men by upping the bet, by conjuring the specter of his primal enemy and adding it to the so-called proceedings. That is what Trinculo’s trial had produced: conviction on the charge of conspiring to re-mythologize the world’s greatest enemy, incitement to discourse and desire toward dissent. And she was alive. Was she alive? De Men thought so. He’d already been hunting for her. What he’d succeeded in locating was someone who knew her, someone who provided a new occasion for torture.

  Christine hates him so much she wants to crush his stupid jaw.

  She pulls her shoulders up and back with her intention. What she intends in the moment is a trifecta of irreducible direct action, punctuated with the newly grafted bodies of her troupe. What she intends is a literary and flesh uprising, creation and destruction locked in a lover’s kiss.

  Let it begin.

  Act I stages the emergence of the heretic known as Joan of Dirt in the early years when she corrupted the rebellion against Jean de Men’s armies and tricked the resistance forces into following her. It’s fairly consistent with CIEL propaganda doctrine. A series of soliloquies with minimalist pantomimed war in the background. As Act I finds its conclusion, her prize pupil—the grafts not quite losing the last pink tinges of pain—emerges center stage, naked and lined with the writing: “In the beginning, then, was her body bound to dirt and organic life, to trees and sea and minerals.” And then a great hum emanates from the different actors, various pitches and notes fill the room, a tune finally remembered, an epic melody, the trace of which every last human yet carries in the gray folds of memory, the song that rang them all like human tuning forks when they still had a choice: earth and Joan, or saving a self.

  The audience leans forward in their chairs, their very DNA subconsciously recalling things they already decided to condemn.

  As Act II is performed, the highlights from the trial of Joan of Dirt, Christine’s heart further fractures. The story of Joan and the body of her beloved Trinculo wind their way around her internal organs. Amidst the reenactment of the trial dialogue, her players erect a kind of scaffolding, so that the tension of the oncoming staged execution can be rendered, even anticipated. Nothing like a good execution story to make the audience salivate. It is the sum total of all entertainment—to drive the viewer to the cusp of their own existence, to heighten it, to leave their mouths open in a gasp shape. And yes, yes, she can tell from their body language, the shapes their mouths are making, they are all want.

  She wishes them all dead.

  She is already anxious for Act III, for Act III embeds a simple gesture that interrupts the expected climax—the moment before Joan of Dirt’s death by fire. In this borrowed time leading up to the execution of her beloved Trinculo, Christine will detour the story.

  Christine steals a glance at Trinculo, who seems to smile in a kind of lipless gory grin, or that’s what she hopes anyway, and then she looks at Jean de Men, whose face puckers and twitches. As the actress-warrior Nyx continues her soliloquy Christine thinks she sees the woman on the metal slab stir. Christine can see plainly now that she is working her hand toward a place below her thigh, stretching it beyond reason, fingers straining. Is it possible she has a weapon?

  Christine circles the stage as benevolently and submissively as possible, bowing now and again silently to audience members and hunk-of-junk minions and even to Jean de Men as she sweeps past him and sees that—yes!—the woman on the floating metal slab has managed to retrieve a knife—a knife the size of a finger. Christine’s chest flutters alive.

  In the heat and almost of things, Christine’s sphincter clenches. Until now, all was seduction. But from this point forward, into Act III, the plot involves deceit. Though the word deceit feels inadequate: the real word is coup. Christine produces an antique opera spyglass—one she’d hidden amongst her salvaged Earth treasures; she hears a murmur of admiration from the audience. She leans into the performance, the insatiable action on its way.

  By the end of Act II, the specially constructed faux-scaffolding is clicking with sparks; Christine even smells the burn of electricity. The audience takes this burning smell as a special theatrical effect, not as what it is: the collected energy of Olms building a structure. The ensuing dialogue nearly achieves the sacred sphere of prayer or song. Dead silence rises within the audience’s listening. Nothing is more enticing to watch than death.

  What comes next is the pièce de résistance: Christine makes her way again to the cusp of Jean de Men’s grotesque train of flesh, splayed out on the floor. Trinculo, though bound like meat, is within arm’s reach. The last line spoken transitions from a soliloquy devised to bridge the play both closer to the present—or at least to their memory of the execution of Joan—and the player giving the soliloquy closer to the audience, ri
ght to the lap of Jean de Men. Near enough to Jean de Men that the player’s knees are nearly touching when they speak the following lines:

  “Remember the Maid above all, alongside all we have recollected here, for her might outmights even the great Iliad, as her fight is meant not to bestow power, but to murder it in its false consciousness and return it to dirt, to compost, to worm’s meat—worm’s . . . meat . . .”

  Christine presses her attention in.

  The audience’s attention changes shape . . . something in the plot twists.

  The words Maid and worm’s meat suspend in the air.

  When Jean de Men speaks he barely moves, his voice, barely audible and elongated and reptilian: “Yooouuuuuuuu . . .”

  He turns on Christine. The play’s ending arrested. He aims his words with measured venom: “You will not live to see an ovation. And no one and nothing you care about will breathe again.” He strikes her head so hard several of her teeth finally do shoot loose. Her nose and mouth bleed.

  Trinculo tries to stand but is forced nearly to his knee knobs by CIEL minions. Christine rises, unafraid of the oncoming storm. She always knew Jean de Men’s actions would enter the drama. In fact, she’d counted on it. Collecting herself, she takes a run at him, leaps up, swings her arm, and jams the handle of her spyglass straight into the eyehole of Jean de Men. A collective gasp rises. The first flutterings of chaos erupt as half of the audience stands up while the other half shuffles toward exits.

  What Jean de Men does next derails her plot. Instead of instantly raining more insults or abuse down upon her, instead of throwing her across the room—events she and her players are ready for—he moves with an ugly calm. He walks toward the unknown woman on the floating metal slab. “You want to see the value of women warriors in the epic story of humanity? Hmmm? You want to see an allegory for your petty plight? Here. Let me help you. Bring Christine closer. This is a performance she won’t want to miss.”

  With that, a spotlight Christine had not asked for shines hotly on the body of the suspended woman. Her players motionless, caught in light.

  As a mechanical guard jerks and drags Christine to where Jean de Men stands, she stares at Trinculo’s face. If you could call it a face. What is a face when it has been distorted beyond recognition? And yet she knows his body better than she knows herself: his eyes. His teeth. The hole of his mouth. His jaw and brow bone. If his head had been only a skull, she’d have loved and made love to the skull.

  But Christine’s attention is wrenched forcibly toward another. Up close she can now see that the woman, it turns out, has been severely beaten. When de Men stops shouting, Christine hears the woman’s crushed breathing, and even a kind of moan, barely audible but human. Christine notices the woman’s knife hand poised against her own leg.

  “Bring her head and face near,” Jean de Men commands, and Christine’s face is shoved down toward the woman’s hips. Jean de Men pushes back the folds of his heavy crimson robe, pushes back the folds of grafts from his forearm, and displays a scalpel. Christine shoots a glance back at her troupe. They stand motionless, naked, their actions momentarily arrested, but they stand on the balls of their feet, she can see, and their neck muscles are taut as animals’. They are ready. She need only give the word. Her mind is in overdrive.

  A calm like the eye of a hurricane comes over Christine. Time opens, briefly. There are different ways to understand cruelty. One can observe it, in which case the scene can become a kind of aesthetic, as with a play or painting or a film; regardless of the emotions evoked by the display, the distance keeps the viewer safe from harm. It is said that those who are forced to repeatedly observe brutality adopt this point of view as a survival strategy. One can also be a victim, and often in such cases victims can cope only by leaving their bodies. A disassociation with a vengeance, with the hopes of either survival or death. Finally, one can be the perpetrator. That most primal darkness is alive and well in all of us, only the slimmest moral code to stop our actions. With repeated indulgence, the distinctions disappear between the small and sad desire to be well liked, for instance, or held in ways we didn’t get held, or breast-fed, or just clapped on the back after a drink like a friend, and the large force of giving pain, which serves as a kind of intense opiate against the fear that we are nothing or, worse, unlovable.

  In that moment, Christine hurls into a nearly unbearable storm of the three: she is observer. She is victim. And she is perpetrator. Her face so close to the blood and bone of it, she could have crawled into the woman’s body.

  And then it’s Jean de Men’s voice returning her to the present tense. “One must be willing to penetrate life in order to fully live it,” he whispers. Then he slices open the pants of the woman on the litter, drives the scalpel between her legs quickly, and then lets the silver tool drop to the floor, digging his fingers between her legs. He plunges his hand, then wrist, forearm, elbow up into her body, blood and scream shocking everything living. The audience a murmuring gasping mass.

  For a moment, horror freezes Christine. Her voice seizes, locks in her throat. She smells pennies and putrefaction. The woman thunders and wrenches against her binds—more animal now than human. Jean de Men’s face multiplies in layers and curls, his smile overtaking his overgrafted face, and then he pulls his hand back out. Blood and sinew and slime juice over his hand and arm. Christine gags. Sanguine fluid rivers between the woman’s legs and pours onto the floor.

  “If I cannot make life, I’ll take it—from its very core.” Jean de Men lets his robes slide off of his body, the great waves of grafts cascading down around him like white lava. Naked, he looks to Christine almost like a terrible new terrain. Something bone-colored and multiple in its atrophies, as if death itself had been rebodied. Then he brings the bloody mass of his excavation up to his face and eats at it, a gurgling filling the room.

  Christine’s urine leaves her bladder like a child’s. The guards still hold her head nearly against the wound of the woman. But Christine’s spirit does not waver. She did not come here to die. Nor to be humiliated or tortured. She came here to perform. And to kill. What’s more, death does not take the floating woman. On the contrary, her body—even at the site of the gash—seems to radiate heat, even energy. Whoever she is, she is the second strongest woman Christine has ever witnessed. The thought stokes a fury in Christine, makes it grow larger than earth. The smell of piss, blood, shit, and vengeance nearly makes her high.

  In spite of everything, she opens her mouth.

  “Joan,” is all she says. Low and loud, raising her eyes up from the wretched scene of the victim’s body to meet Jean de Men’s. She sees his face shiver, though he continues to hold his hoary grin. And with that trigger word, her players spring toward their truer actions.

  Never has youth looked more beautifully or violently alive. Like brutal living poems.

  A random arm, then hand, shoots out from nowhere, and Christine sees the woman from the metal slab slash off half of Jean de Men’s dangling face grafts. They fly through the air and land like stranded bloody lace serviettes on the slickening floor. In the whir of the bloodspray, Christine crawls toward Trinculo. As she reaches his body, barely alive, she ungags him. He raises his arm and points to Jean de Men, who is being attacked on all sides by the surge of youths, his flesh slicing away everywhere. And yet he towers and roars, seemingly larger than anyone or thing in the room.

  Her body shudders involuntarily as she attempts to embrace Trinc. He winces but does not pull away. “Christ,” he breathes out, pointing in the direction of the carnage. “Paps!”

  Poor, beautiful thing. He’s losing it, she thinks. But as she focuses her gaze and follows his shoulder, bicep muscle, forearm, hand and extended finger, at the center of the action, she sees it.

  Jean de Men has the breasts of an old woman.

  She is seized by her own recognition. Jean de Men is not a man but what is left of a woman. Christine witnesses all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where
breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where . . . where life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp.

  Then, like the thrum of a gong or drum, a voice Christine had not written into the script—and yet a voice not completely foreign to her either, a voice she’d held in her heart her entire life—comes to life, in medias res, so that all attention freezes, all heads turn toward the sound radiating from a blue fire:

  “You should have killed me better.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The center of the flame is blue.

  Blue light at my head and blue light everywhere around me. In the kimena bringing me to CIEL, understanding cuts my consciousness. My power is not power. It never was. Power is a story humans made when they feared the world they were born into. And feared each other. I am part of all matter and all energy. I am as the smallest particle, meaningless and yet everything. I am quantum.

  I materialize into a room filled with fighting. At the time and place that Nyx instructed. CIEL is chaos, figures raging in all directions. I burn where I stand. The fire I arrive with consumes me, but not as severely as I remember during my former execution; there is something distinctly unlike death in it. It stings and puckers my skin, but only slightly. My hair smells of wood and sulfur. It crackles but does not entirely light up. Then I see Nyx in the new theater; she walks into the flames with me. We are eye to eye. Nothing about Nyx is on fire either, and yet we stand in the center of the burning. My rib cage aches.

  Through the curtain of blue flame, I can make out bodies. The scene is total mayhem. What I see is a mixture of color and sound, and yet I can distinguish minute details. There are bodies—a kind of orgy of bodies—and for a moment, I think I am witnessing a kind of dance, until I see the rage as color and sound, particle and wave. And blood. A battle is raging. Some of the bodies are gleaming white in my sight, without color, spectral.