The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

  “Listen,” Nyx says. I hear it. The white-bodied ones, their sound is discordant and irregular. Others are filled with color and chorus, like strange chimes, all differently hued and shaded and pulsing with harmony, major and minor. It is as if Nyx and I are rearranging the energies in the room.

  No life can equal such a death.

  I do not know if Nyx actually says it, or if our intertwined bodies have somehow borne the sentence into my consciousness. Color and song rage in and through the flames. The movement of sound and light rise not outside of my body, but through our twinned bodies. Helix. Extending in waves. Nyx’s skin rippling. Eros. Thanatos. Dizzy hyperreality. Nyx’s head rocking back. Nyx’s body separating from mine.

  “Joan.”

  This time it is not Nyx’s voice.

  It is Leone’s.

  On the other side of the flames is Leone, quickly losing life, right in front of me. I let Nyx go and surge forward with such force I create a tremor in the room, blue flame shooting in rays around me, accompanied by a vortex of sound being sucked into silence. Nyx tries to grab my arm to stop me, and I nearly wrench it off pulling away. When I reach Leone’s body, my throat locks; my injured ribs feel as if they might explode outward, shattering my body from the inside out. She’s been gutted. She is so pale she looks gray.

  But then another body bears down from behind me. I know the voice; I would know it anywhere. It is the voice that sentenced me to burn to death. It is the last voice I heard at the end of the last battle, laughing. It is the voice of cruelty. Of power. Of the Sky, and those who left humanity to rot like refuse on a clod of dead dirt.

  Jean de Men grabs me by the neck and starts to squeeze, whispering into my ear. I can feel his spittle as he speaks.

  “Did you intend to rise a phoenix? How poetic. I’m going to kill you now, differently from before. I’ll take your life, but attach you to a perfect machine that will keep only your internal organs alive, your useful properties. Your reproductive properties. And then I’ll people this new world endlessly with whomever I like. I’ll people it with devils, if I like. You’ll be an ever-producing cunt, and that’s all you’ll be. Not a myth or a legend, not hope for anyone anywhere.”

  My throat constricts. My breathing lurches. My eyes heat and swell. But I can feel the life left in Leone more than my own, and I can feel something else, too.

  A woman I’ve never seen before, except in dreamscapes, throwing her white and glistening body straight at us, a human catapult. The woman is screaming at the top of her lungs—screaming some strange lyric, some poem or incantation that gains force and tenor the more she speaks. It is the woman from my dream. My song. My life. Her name comes to me with the same force as her body. Christine.

  The blue light at the side of my head roars to life as if to provide accompaniment. Jean de Men’s grip around my neck loosens. Everyone in the room but me grabs at their ears as sound vibrations penetrate through bone and blood. The symphonic blast emanating from my body ripples the very air and walls of the room.

  The song was never inside me. The song used me as a conduit. The song is all the universe in strange focus.

  From within the flames—flames that are me—Jean de Men’s body contorts.

  That’s when I see it. Something that inverts all logic. Jean de Men. He has a naked and withered woman’s body, or the horrible attempts at the creation or destruction of one, her full height towering above anyone in the room, her bleeding grafts and residual folds of skin undulating like an octopus.

  I pull away from the horrid corporeal truth of her. Wrong mother. Woman destroyed. I push energy like a wall between us with my hands. She lunges at me, Christine biting and clamped to her shoulder like a barnacle.

  “Burn, heretic!” Jean de Men sends a row of technological sentries hurling toward me, throwing their own flames.

  But I do not burn.

  “The flames you sent me to, I give them back to you. Your planet sends her regards,” I say. Almost as if someone had scripted the lines.

  And then it is just the two of us at one another, trying to wrestle-kill each other, twisted into strands of light and sound.

  “Hold the embrace!” It’s Nyx’s voice. Nonsense, I think, but I do it anyway. I hold Jean de Men in my arms as if unto death. As if we were lovers. As if it were a death grip or kiss. The ground beneath us begins to melt. When I look down, some neon-colored corridor is opening, a drop to something, I don’t know what. The song in my head bleeds out into the entire room. Olms flash on and off all around us like my memory of firecrackers. A hole. A hole of light.

  I convulse with understanding: I’ve made my own Skyline.

  I seize the moment, I grab Jean de Men by the throat with both hands, even as the enemy stands tall as a tree in front of me. I mean to send the energy the earth has given me all my life back into this hole. I mean to send this thing back into matter itself. Even if it kills me. I will take Jean de Men back down to the planet, to die in the heat and radiation of my embrace.

  Music pulses through the floors and walls. The entire room has become an astral orchestra. For the first time in my life, the song in my head is not just in my head. It is omnipresent. In everyone. Of everyone and everything. I squeeze Jean de Men’s neck with a force even I didn’t know I had.

  A flash of light. A weird calm surrounds us. I feel Nyx’s hand on my shoulder. Hear Nyx’s voice. “Let go,” Nyx says. “Let this destruction go. Collect the others. Take Leone. This killing scene has another side. Creation.”

  Cutting into the moment, a ghoulish thing—a red corpse? A skeleton out of Renaissance art?—leaps onto the back of Jean de Men. Is it a demon? A harpie? Just before the creature brandishes a large scalpel, I can swear I hear the reddened thing say: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, you rat-hearted dung-wombed cow.” And the red creature slits open the chest of Jean de Men.

  Then it’s just Nyx thrusting both hands into the carcass, opening up Jean de Men’s body, summoning an electrical current as old as a star.

  Christine, burning white with skin grafts, stands up among the carnage, a new definition of the word beautiful emerging.

  The three of them—Nyx, Christine, and the red and raw creature—circle and ravage Jean de Men. Slowly at first and then with increasing velocity and form, at de Men’s feet, children begin to materialize from nothingness and rise. First just a few, then many, a hundred or more. Naked children. The wail that emerges from Jean de Men reverbs my jaw; her head rocks back; some as-yet unnamed emotion beyond measure. The children of all colors and ages swarm from the ground up, devouring, consuming, like a swarm of bees at a honeycomb, until I see nothing left of Jean de Men beneath the multitudinous wave.

  The simplicity of the next moment cleaves my heart.

  I stride the distance left to my beloved Leone and scoop her body up. The aquamarine corridor of the Skyline I’ve created gleams like a pool on the floor in the chaos. I look at the small army of men who came with me, their battle now done, so beautiful just standing there. I look to the pool, where they gather. Then a surreal haze takes them all, a great rush of color and sound, a fire of indigo and purple, a great big ball of burning blue deathsong. The last thing I see is the white woman Christine holding the red-as-meat man in her arms like Christ: Pietà is the only word for it in the world.

  With Leone cradled in my arms and only a faint hope toward Earth, I jump.

  Chapter Thirty

  “How long, my love?” Christine holds Trinculo in her arms and lap, her back against a window filled with space. Both of them dewy with something new. Something beautifully, erotically human. Unstoppable sweat. None of the CIEL environmental controls are able to keep up with the new trajectory, straight into the eye of the sun. Maybe they are not sweating. But they only believe that they are.

  Around their bodies, nothing but carnage.

  “You know, in some of the early representations of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, she looks to be fondling his tiny
penis,” Trinculo says, steady voiced and serious.

  She can’t help herself. She laughs.

  “Christ,” he says, and at the sound of her old nickname she bursts into tears. But he keeps on: “Did you know that the penis of the Argonaut mollusk was detachable? These male mollusks had a sacrificial way of impregnating their female counterparts.” The lights in the room flicker and die, but he keeps speaking. “The male had one arm longer than his others, known as a hectocotylus, which is used to transfer sperm to the female. The arm stored up the sperm, and when the male found a female he wanted to mate with, he would detach the arm during the mating process. I often think of that.”

  Between laughter and sobbing, Christine manages: “What else is left in that obscene mind of yours?”

  “Well, since you asked, the genitalia of the female spotted hyena—you remember what those look like? Hyenas?”

  She nods.

  “That of the female closely resembled that of the male: the clitoris was shaped and positioned like a penis, and was capable of erection. The female also possessed no external vagina; the labia were fused to form a pseudo-scrotum. The pseudo-penis was traversed to its tip by a central urogenital canal, through which the female urinated, copulated, and gave birth.” A low electronic voice articulates a danger warning. But Trinculo does not pause. There would be no repairing what he’d set asunder; only he knew what he had done to their otherworld. Only he knew how to undo it.

  “This unusual trait made mating more laborious for the male than in other mammals,” he continues, “while also ensuring that rape was physically impossible. Of the female, that is.” He pauses. “Leopard slugs had long blue penises that jutted out from the tops of their heads.” He stares off into space, then adds, “Don’t even get me started on the corkscrew penis of ducks.”

  “This is what you are pondering, at the end of life?” Christine asks gently, lovingly, perhaps more lovingly than she’s ever asked anything before.

  “Life,” he says, “I’m thinking about life. How good it was. Could have been, if the order of things had been different. Might be, next time. In a way, you and I? We are the proud parents of what’s going to happen down there. I’m sorry about this next bit, because I’m awfully late, but I wanted to be sure to get this in.” He looks up at her, his eyelids missing, his nose mostly gone. “Happy belated birthday. You moon-breasted skysong. You wet and ever-blooming perfect.”

  She leans in, opens her mouth to his, and lets their souls merge.

  In a matter of days, they, and everything alive left in CIEL, will burn in the radioactive solar flares of the sun. That life-giving star. That fiery death’s head.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Leone’s body on Earth. It’s the only life I’ve ever wanted. Bringing her home is the death of me, I know. I don’t care. She’ll live. She’ll become. Whatever that ends up meaning. Some story we don’t know yet untied from all the ones that have come before.

  “Why death?” Leone sits propped up against a boulder, looking out toward the sea at the mouth of the Blue Grotto. My head in her lap. The sun muted and laden. She’s still weak, but her body will eventually heal.

  “It’s the least I can give,” I say. “My body will create a mega catalyst of sorts.”

  She coughs.

  She closes her eyes, listening to the waves scoop up and drag the rocks on the shore, clicking like a new language. It seems true that everything from this moment on will be a new language. Every element and body and energy redirecting itself, making different patterns and forms. When she opens her eyes again, her pupil, cornea, iris, all look like micronebulae.

  I sit up. The stone in my throat throbs enough to choke my voice from me.

  I curl into Leone’s torso and nestle my head between her jaw and shoulder. The body is a real place. A territory as vast as Earth.

  What used to be the sun is setting, kissing the lip of the water in the distance. It’s beautiful, but different than before. It looks . . . It doesn’t matter, someone will make up new words for it. I smile. Tears fill my eyes. I try to picture Leone’s face, every detail, her neck and jaw and shoulders.

  “Where’s this special suicide supposed to take place?” Leone asks.

  “Sarawak Caves. When you feel up to it. I want you to be there. I’ve learned a new way to travel.”

  Leone laughs.

  “And it’s not suicide,” I correct her.

  “Why there?”

  “Biodiversity,” I say. Leone stares at me without emotion. Or with something bordering on incredulity. “The other choice was underneath the ice near what used to be Russia.”

  Leone looks back out at the water. “Good choice. I approve. Russia’s cold as fuck.”

  Leone struggles beneath me so that I have to surrender my former position hidden against the warmth of her flesh. I hold her tight, speaking over her shoulder.

  Leone sits as upright as a slice of shale. Her eyes bullets. “I hate you.”

  But I know she’ll do anything for me. “Leone?”

  “What?”

  Nothing comes out of my mouth. I try to make my torso and arms into a sentence. I try to give her the words through my body. I want her to fall in love. I want her to fall in love so hard it hurts. I want that love to be something I’ve never even imagined. With everything left in me, I want to say something beautiful. Something unlike anything that’s ever been said between two people—not in the history I’ve known, anyway.

  I point to the dusk—to the place where the sky and its fading light meet the dark and depth of the water, where soon the sky, stitching star to star, will reflect the black sea perfectly.

  I press my cheek against Leone’s. I press my lips to hers. First she resists, then she doesn’t.

  Mouth to mouth and hip to hip and rib cage to rib cage we quietly go down into one another—the microcosm of space held in a doubled body, the starjunk within us igniting, our bones, briefly, singing. I am not killing her. She is not dying. Desire blooms between us, my ravaged body, hers. We will not conceive this way. Reproduction will become another kind of story.

  She locks my mouth shut with hers.

  I can feel her teeth and tongue with mine. I nod. I kiss yes into her.

  When the time comes, Leone’s hand shakes only briefly as she retrieves Little Bee from her leg holster. She presses her lips again against mine. The warm wet of blood from my neck spreads quickly over her knife hand. I swallow. Blood pours from my neck. Everything is a blur, colder but still beautiful, different, like looking into a microscope. Or into space.

  When the sound of my last labored breath ends, and my eyes go dull and blank, Leone will close them. Then Leone will lift me and carry me to the edge of the world, the cusp between earth and sea and sky. She will rest my body in the dirt next to the regenerating ocean and lie down on top of me.

  A night and day will pass. Leone will not move, even when she can no longer feel a trace of my body left, my skull gone to worms, my torso and ribs sunk into earth and extending in lines between plate tectonics, the cradle of my pelvis disintegrating and rebecoming in new DNA strands, my femur, tibia, fibula, the phalanges of my feet and hands. I don’t know where they will go, I just know we are made from everything we see.

  Because one human who loved another asked for it.

  The dirt wetted and blooming in all directions.

  A different story, leading whoever is left toward something we’ve not yet imagined.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Leone reaches into the pocket nearest Little Bee and pulls out the one material thing, tangible and otherworldly, Joan ever gave her, an artifact. On paper.

  Leone.

  If there is such a thing as a soul, then you are mine.

  I have a series of confessions to make. They are nonsensical, I’m sure, but what does it matter? Life lost its senses long ago. I admire the way you soldier on as if there is something we are moving “to.” Living “for.” Have I ever told you that you are the b
est pilot I’ve ever met in my life, the best sharpshooter, the finest singer and drinker as well? Of course I haven’t. It’s been your bad luck to end up with an isolate who is nearly a mute.

  In the beginning, I carried two pieces of paper with us. You know—the ones you used to ask me to pull out so that you could smell from time to time. I don’t know when you stopped doing that, or why. I suspect that was the moment you lost hope that our lives would ever lead to anything but this, wandering and surviving.

  On one of the pieces of paper I wrote a letter to humanity. Yes, I mean the boy—the last one—the one who tried to convince us there were others. I sent a letter with him. Remember? Were you surprised? I know you think of me like the walking dead, and maybe that’s true—maybe I am a corpse version of my former self. I’ve often wondered why, on some half-moonlit night, you did not put me out of my misery. I sometimes think you may have gotten very close to taking Little Bee to my throat, before hesitating at the last moment. Your heart is too big. Do you know that? I know that, your whole life, you’ve paraded a thick and cynical self, attached to no one and nothing, galaxies away from words like “love,” but I also know that you’re as filled with emotion as a pulsar. It’s a wonder you haven’t supernovaed from the inside out.

  The other piece of paper, you are holding in your hand now. I did have something to say, you see. Oceans. Universes.

  Leone.

  If you were gone, I promised myself I’d simply return to matter. Maybe I’d walk into the sea, a de-evolving mammal, back to my breathable blue past. Maybe I’d yet leap into the sky from the edge of a cliff.

  To fall.

  I know how much it bothers you that I’m not more . . . verbal. I’ve known for years. My voice somehow left my actions, that year I woke in Lascaux with you. The last thing I remembered before that? Burning. My own capture, torture, trial, and burning.