Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“I want this.” This time her voice is steady and at least two octaves lower. Her eyes meet mine. Her silly shoulder grafts recede behind the square-shape of her jaw. I see some strength in the aqua color of her skin—a little hint of defiance. “I want to be good at it. I want to be better than other people at it. I want people to come to me and ask for it.”

There is hope for her yet.

I begin. “The electrocautery method I use requires a pen-like tool containing a red-hot, exchangeable tip.” I lift it up in front of her face. “See? This technique has a higher accuracy than others; it offers the most control, the most consistent depth and width of burn. As in tattooing, one traces the design over a stencil. When it comes to textual grafts, however, it’s best to draw on personal taste to help in type designs and the shapes of lines and stanzas and paragraphs.”

God damn it if the words are not burning in my throat as I say them. Trinculo designed and made these exchangeable tips for me. And so I find myself resuming my instruction with a kind of berserk vengeance, crying all the way through over Trinculo’s fate. The girl cannot see my tears. They pool like salted pearls at the corners of my deep-set eyes, hidden by a few folds and curls of flesh I grafted in the shape of ocean waves around my eyes and brow bone. Each tear makes its way down the raised rivulets and hills covering my cheekbones, then slips imperceptibly into the corner of my mouth. I drink in my love and anger and fear.

I don’t know how long Trinculo has. Ordinarily there is no rush with this sort of thing—executions are theatrical entertainment for CIEL residents and thus ebb and flow according to supply and demand. But the threads of my plan were starting to weave, in my head, into a kind of brutal braid. I would attend the execution, of course. I would display my body work there, too, my corporeal defiance. But by now I had even more in mind.

As I work I envision an entire performance, one that would take as much time in preparation as I could spare. I will collect, fragment, and displace individual lines from my epic body poem onto the bodies of others until we became an army of sorts, all of us carrying the micrografts that related my own macro epic: a resistance movement of flesh. The action will culminate in plural acts of physical violence so profound during our performance no one will ever forget the fact of flesh.

All that is left is for me to engineer Trinculo’s escape as part of the drama. To do that means contact with him. I need more information.

The spider is back. This does not surprise me. I stare at it, weaving its minute bridges on the fern. Comrade.

“Absinthe makes a remarkably good astringent,” I say, turning my attention back to my pupil. She looks at me with the face of one who knows nothing. “Old Earth relics,” I answer. Her eyes narrow. I dab her left forearm with absinthe. She smiles. “We are going for a single line. A training sentence. ‘Jean de Men is pigshit.’ I’ll do the first half, then you try.”

I wait for a response. Nothing.

“Are you certain which side you are on?”

She nods, but says nothing. Then she thrusts her arm out at me between us, acquiescing. When I touch the hot metal to her skin, I hear her suck in a breath that is thick enough to cut her throat.

Slowly I begin to trace the letters with the burning hot end of the pen. “You don’t want to drag the tool across the skin too much. Short, quick strokes work best.” I hear her try to regulate her breathing, her nostrils. She clenches her teeth. “Nothing to worry about. I’m only going to give you second-degree burns. By stopping short of third-degree, we’ll be spared seeing your fatty layers. After all, we barely know each other.” I smile.

The smell of burning flesh is pungent, dizzying, like burning brown sugar mixed with steak searing on a grill. Sometimes there is a popping or a crackling. With this pupil, however, I hear only a hissing from her skin, and a sad little moan.

“What is your name?” I ask, without pausing for her answer. “The smell of burning human flesh is a delicate mélange. Muscles burning smell like the kind of animal meals humans used to eat: meat on a grill. Fat smells more like bacon, like breakfast on Earth. Cattle were bled after slaughter, and the beef and pork we ate contained very few blood vessels. But when a whole human body burns, well, all that iron-rich blood gives the smell a coppery, metallic component.”

Her cheeks shake; her eyes are filling with tears. To her credit, she does not flinch. But I see the cords in her neck as thick as ropes. Her skin seems almost to glow.

“You know,” I say, “full bodies include internal organs, which rarely burn completely because of their high fluid content; they smell like burnt liver.” I pause to study her face—this is someone who has no idea of animals or what it was to eat them. I wonder what she is conjuring in her head. “They say that cerebrospinal fluid burns up in a musky, sweet perfume.”

I see her gulp. Her face looks a little sunken.

“Burning skin has a charcoal-like smell, while setting hair on fire produces a sulfurous odor. This is because the keratin in our hair contains large amounts of cysteine, a sulfur-containing amino acid. But you wouldn’t know anything about hair, now would you? You’ve seen pictures?” She nods. “Hooves and nails also contain keratin, which explains why real tortoiseshells smell like hair when lit on fire. The smell of burnt hair could cling to the nostrils for days,” I say.

I finish my half of the sentence. The skin of her arm rages red and puffs with burn. My pupil sits upright but looks exhausted. She pants some. Whatever comes out of her mouth next, as I hand her the pen, will be entirely telling. It will decide things. For that matter, she might faint, right there.

“What is a tortoiseshell?” she says, staring into my eyes.

Then she sets to work on her own arm.

I hear her grunt now and then. I can see the word pigshit rising and reddening on her arm before me. I smile. Hope for her yet. But there is more.

“I’m not just some witless young woman,” she says.

Was this bravery or a fool’s admission? I am momentarily intrigued. I am also prickling with the understanding that these are the last young anythings that will exist on CIEL without another radical change, one that hasn’t a prayer of coming.

“Do you want to know how to get into Trinculo’s cell?”

My breath catches in my lungs. I stare at her hard.

She smiles and continues her self-grafting. “There’s something about me that’s different from anyone else. Only Trinculo knows. He helped… refine my gift.”

Without meaning to, I grab her wrist. The burning pen suspended in the air between us. “What gift?” I hold her wrist tight.

She lets me. “Walls,” she whispers.

I swing my head around to study the walls of my quarters. I have no clue what she is talking about. “What about walls?”

“Let go of me.”

I let go.

She stands, and as she walks over to my wall and places her hands upon it, I see the woman she will become in her spine; I see that she is not a useless creature after all. I see the wall turn to water, or what looks like water, and then the wall is gone, and the room alongside mine, which happens to be an information center, is suddenly there.

I gasp.

She is what Trinculo calls an engenderine . Someone whose mutation has resulted in a kind of human-matter interface. Though I’d not believed him. I thought the idea was merely his hope and desire, tangled into myth. But I am the one who is stupid and useless.

Then she restores the wall to its former status and returns to our work. She sets back at her own arm without saying anything else.