Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

She was ten.

Her brother dug his hands into the sand near the shore. A family vacation. Trying to create a bubble of bliss, away from things. A cabin by the sea near Normandy, France, before the Wars, before geocatastrophe, before nations and cities lost their shapes and names.

Behind her, their parents tended a wood fire. Her mother cooked a braised rabbit. Her father listened to Satie. She saw them through the vacation cabin’s window in the orange inner light. She saw her mother look up now and again toward where she and her brother begged to sit near the sea, at night, to watch the water move. To count stars. To smell ocean. Her mother tasted a wooden spoon, Joan brought her forearm to her lips and licked her arm and smiled at the salted skin.

She looked back toward the ocean and tilted her head to the side and wondered. At the surface of the water, she was sure she saw too-bright hues of blue and green making tendrils in the waves. Gleaming up from the water. Was it a trick of the eye? Or was the sea really glowing?

The crescendo and decrescendo of waves filled her ears.

“Do you see it?” Joan yelled over to her brother, who fashioned a crown from kelp.

He followed her finger pointing out toward the water. Then he picked up a palm-size flat beach rock and threw it toward the light. “A submarine!” he shouted. “A spy boat!”

Their father’s stories about this place flitted across her mind. Once, he’d told them, there were wars. Submarines. Gunboats. But now this was a coastline for vacationing families and tourists and boys who threw rocks. She laughed.

Her brother shot at submarines with a rifle of driftwood. P-p-p-p-p-ow pow pow .

Joan stood up and walked to the edge of the water. She pressed up from her toes, stretching out her eleven years. She craned her neck. The mystery of it wouldn’t go away in her head. She’d never seen a light like this. If she could just get closer to it. Her fingers itched. She took her shoes off.

“What are you doing?” her brother said, taking his own shoes off in response.

Joan took her T-shirt off. Her jeans.

“You’re gonna freeze your ass off!” Her brother laughed, but his clothes came off, too. They were siblings, after all.

She laughed at the cuss words they said so freely away from the ears of fathers or mothers. “Your ass, too!” she yelled.

Joan looked back over her shoulder toward the cabin, then waded in up to her shins. Night ocean water licked the bones of her. The wet sand under her feet sucked at her soles and toes with each step. Cold traveled from her ankles to her shins and up and up to her jaw. She shivered. She waded up to her thighs. She looked to her left and her brother was up to his hips. His grin slipped toward something else. He was not a strong swimmer.

“Stay there,” she commanded, and she watched him grip his own biceps. His upright torso swayed with the rise and fall of the water. She’d always been the more curious one. The one who explored and climbed and dug and jumped. His gifts rested elsewhere: he was beautiful—more beautiful than she. He was loyal. He played any game she invented.

“Go back,” she yelled. He turned. She saw the sharp juts of his shoulder blades when he turned to shore. Razor-backed boy.

The cold water light called her further out.

Now or never.

With a giant gulp of air, she leapt forward in a dive and disappeared into the black and blue water. Underwater she opened her eyes, but everything was black like sleep. Her eyeballs went cold. And her teeth.

When her head surfaced and she opened her eyes, they stinging with salt water, she saw that she was close enough to swim to the hued blue-green water light.

Then time stopped. The cold and the lights and the salted wet and the floating and her arms and her legs and the world upside down. She floated on her back and soon the night sky didn’t seem “up,” it seemed a mere reflection of the water she floated in. The black of the sky like the ocean, and the stars in the sky like the prickling of imagination in her skin and mind, and the cold vast space like the cold unending water, and the motion of things like the speed of light. She smiled and contemplated the pleasantness of drowning.

For who was she in this night-lit water? Something had happened to her and no one understood it. Everyone was going on like there wasn’t a song ringing in her very bones, a song that came in epic waves, about the story of a girl saving the world. No. Not saving it. A something else. Loving it. But when she’d called it a love song it made everything worse. When she called it a love song, everyone wanted to know who the object of her affection was, what was she hiding. So she stopped mentioning the fact of it. This holiday they were a family on the beach, but the last doctor instructed her family that she might be losing her mind, and there was talk of an institution. She saw the fret in the lines around her mother’s mouth. She read her father’s worry in the hand running through his hair. If the light in her head made her crazy, would they simply send her away? Like a criminal to prison?

Why not slip under the water blanket, she thought, the blanket of night sky.

By the time she heard the yelling from shore, by the time her brother ran back to the cabin and her mother dropped the wooden spoon that tasted of braised rabbit and her father ran outside in his socks and her brother ran from water to cabin back to water in just his underwear, a pale shivering seal, she was far enough out that her entire family looked like a cartoon of people, small and jumping around and yelling.

She dove back down into the light one more time—under nightwater the light looked blurry like in dreams—and then surfaced and swam back, her arms frozen, and yet the girl of her never once wavered—she’d swum to the light. She swam back. It was not difficult. Only water between her and land.

What they saw when she emerged shut everyone up. Everyone’s arms hung at their sides. Everyone’s breath heaved from yelling. Everyone’s eyes grew wide. Everyone’s mouth opened. She glowed from head to toe. Her body cold light.

Her skin gleamed neon blue and green.

“It’s algae,” her father finally said. He ripped his shirt off and rushed to cover his daughter’s shivering body. Her father turned back to her mother while he briskly rubbed at Joan’s arms, as if the conversation would return everything to normal. “Like the trails left by submarines…” he offered, laughing crazily like too-worried parents do.

Her mother came to embrace her in a kind of parent cocoon, her face between relief and a pure unanswered question.

“Like in the war,” her father said, still rubbing. “Bioluminescent algae. It’s all over her skin. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Things used to make sense like that. A father, a mother, children. A brief vacation.

Bioluminescence obsessed her for months. She grew her own algae in a closet aquarium. She became addicted to her technology, searching for knowledge. And she begged her parents to vacation next in New Zealand, at the Natural Bridge colony, home to the largest colony of bioluminescent glowworms in the world. And they did. Something about the fear of their daughter losing her mind. At sunset, she, along with her parents and hundreds of tourists, could be seen exploring overhangs and crevices that were filled with glowworms, literally millions of them. Even though the surrounding area was pitch-dark, inside the caves the sun seemed to shine from the nooks and crannies surrounding them.

All of this before the sun itself, like girlhood, broke and dimmed Earth forever.

When I began her story, when I began grafting her alive on the surface of my skin, I missed the smells of the body—missed them violently. I missed the smell of sweat. Blood. Cum. Even shit. Our bodies have lost all sensory detail. I should be stinking and matted and chapped, stuck in this idiotic cell. My teeth should feel covered in a wrong spit film.