Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

Underneath my hand, grafted on my flesh canvas, since they’d taken it from her, I’d written her girlhood.

The first time the blue light flickered alive in Joan’s head, the trees around her crackled and sent her skin shivering. There were still trees, back then. Unusual and seismic prevolcanic activity across the world smoldered the sky. The sun still hung in the sky like a sun, but its light had already begun to fade from bright yellow to muted sepia that lessened the color of colors. Animals still lived, though species were dying off a little at a time. Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France. The countryside of a seemingly ordinary child.

As a girl, she went into the woods to play one of her favorite alone games. The kind of game played by children who talked to themselves and secreted away in their own imaginations. There are entire populations of children living such lives, on the periphery.

In the woods she buried what would have looked like a pile of twigs at the base of an evergreen, in a shallow hole she’d dug in the ground. She liked to dig them back up and rebury them because the smell of dirt and trees calmed her. She liked the way dirt snuck under the crescent moon tops of her fingernails.

The twigs were of varying sizes: some about the length of her hand, a few taller, a few shorter. In her alone games, the twigs were people who had survived a terrible event. They’d had to remake themselves in order to survive. For this reason, the twigs had aligned themselves with Earth and spiders and burrowing bugs.

At this point in her game, each twig was climbing up to a hollow hole in an evergreen tree. When she’d delivered and saved the last twig into its resting spot, she put her hand against the grain of the tree. She closed her eyes and smelled the needles and the sap and the bark. She spread her fingers and put her palm against the evergreen. She could feel the sticky sap kissing her palm.

Suddenly her small fingers buzzed violently. She withdrew her hand quickly and stared at her own palm. Then at the tree. She thought she could smell burning wood. Did it really happen? She smelled her hand. Sap.

No girl can shut down the hunger of her own curiosity, and so she crept quietly back up to the tree’s towering form. She reached her arm out in front of her. She replaced her hand on the tree, closed her eyes, held her breath, and braced herself by setting her feet apart, waiting.

High up, the tops of the trees leaned and whistled in the wind. Wood animals crouched low to the ground. And then the timber beneath her hand shot something into her palm, her fingers, into her wrist, up the bone of her forearm, into her shoulder, so that her head rocked back and her mouth and eyes gaped open. She could feel her teeth ringing. Her hair seemed to pull up and away from her scalp.

The sound in her ears grew louder—like blood in your ears at night with your head on the pillow—until the pounding became thunderous, drowning out the wind, thoughts, home, family, chores. The pounding buzz filled her head as if her head had become a media device gone haywire. She tried to pull her palm away from the tree but couldn’t. She breathed very fast. Her throat constricted. Was this death?

And then the vibration changed, and the sound lowered and began to take shape in her body. Her teeth felt like teeth again. She closed her mouth and eyes. Steadied her own breathing. She wasn’t dead. Or injured. That she could tell. Her hair fell lightly onto her shoulders.

The sound vibrations finally dropped into a kind of low bowl swirling in her skull and then pinpointed itself just between her right eye and ear. Like a fingertip of sound, touching her.

Then the sound had orchestral tune, and then the tune had operatic voice.

Slow and easy at first, the song rapidly grew wild in scope and thrill. Though it dealt with the world in ways that her dreams had already foretold—the same truths about the dying sun and erupted calderas, the same conflicts simmering ever toward war, the same kinds of people and places, like her own house and parents—the more the verses unraveled and sang, the more her body felt like the source of some larger-than-life vibration. She shook her head at one point, as if to say no. But the voices tenored on with grand scale and detail until the ballad was entirely epic, and her place within it, larger than the tree she so mysteriously found herself bound to.

At the end, the song seemed to pose a question. It felt completely right to speak aloud in answer. “But how can I possibly convince anyone of this?” she said. “I will be punished or worse. Doctors will come and tell my parents I’ve lost my mind. That happened, you know, to a neighbor boy. They said his dreams had taken his wits. He kept on digging holes in the ground. Eating the dirt. And, besides, I am scared.”

Math. Science. And music. The three made crossroads in her head. It wasn’t a voice making sentences, but forms and sound and light and song moving through her. Everything she was taking in connected to the ideas she had absorbed in her science classes in school, to the questions she had discovered and nurtured there. She recalled what she’d learned in school and recited it back to herself, almost like a bedtime story: “There may be layers of structure inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle you have heard of; these are like little tiny filaments. Like a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called string theory, and the little strings can vibrate in different patterns. There are strings to existence, and harmonies—cosmic harmonies—born of the strings.” Cosmic harmonies made of strings. Cosmic harmonies made of strings. She repeated it in her head until it made a rhythm. Thinking about it made her hold her breath and touch her tongue to her teeth. The crouch of dreams at her temples and fingertips.

Only when the surge had finished its song, all the way to an unimaginable ending, did the tree release its hold on her hand. The vibrations left her body, like a taut string suddenly released, and for a moment she felt lighter than human. Would she be lifted into the dull sky now? But when she looked down she saw her own feet, two brown worn leather short boots just standing, the feet of someone’s daughter just standing in a small wood near a river close to her home. And yet what was inside her now, under her skin between her right eye and ear, would change her forever: a blue light.

Leaving the twigs in the knothole of the evergreen, she ran all the way home. When she burst through the door, her startled mother, who had been standing in front of the screen watching a news report, lost her grip on a glass of water and splashed it straight onto the screen. The image popped and sizzled briefly. The newscaster’s face pixelated and his voice went wonky.

“Damn it!” her mother said, standing up and grabbing a rag from the kitchen. When she returned, she dabbed tentatively at the screen, a little afraid to touch it for fear of electric shock. When she stepped back from the screen and turned around, she gulped at the sight of Joan.

“What on earth is that on your head?”

Joan walked over to her mother, still panting from running. Her mother touched the glowing blue light between her right eye and her ear. “Sweetheart?” her mother whispered. “Honey, what…” She fingered Joan’s temple. “What happened to your head, here?”

She felt her mother’s finger in the place. Her mother’s eyes opened too wide, her brow knitting little lines in her forehead. With her mother’s finger in that spot, her entire body vibrated. Great heaves of reassuring song filled her skull. She began to sing. She closed her eyes and turned inward. Somewhere her mother’s voice, far away— Joan, Joan .