Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

I glance over at the spider, who has managed to spin quite the intricate web while we worked. Later, when I am alone, and after I complete my real work on my own body, I hope that it will traverse my newly burnt skin with its story and knowledge. A palimpsest.

I turn to the girl, if the word girl is even what this person is, who seems to have become a woman, whatever that means, in the space of our session.

“Nyx,” she says, “My name is Nyx.”

Now we are three.

As I continue to graft Joan’s story onto my body, there’s a moment that I think will kill me.

But it doesn’t.

Moreover, the fragmented song in my skull is beginning to coalesce. Or at least it seems so.

The way I see it, I have one answer left in my body: my body itself. Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies. That is how art has preserved its toehold in our universe. Where there was poverty, there was also a painting someone stared at until it filled them with grateful tears. Where there was genocide, there was a song that refused to quiet. Where a planet was forsaken, there was someone telling a story with their last breath, and someone else carrying it like DNA, or star junk. Hidden matter.

Our performance would be staged at the cusp of Trinculo’s execution. Our “players” would include inmates smuggled from their cells and bonded—grafted—to our cause. The CIEL authorities and Jean de Men would have their performance, and we would have ours. In my mind’s eye Trinculo will travel a Skyline back to Earth—for according to Nyx, it is possible—and be reborn to live out his days away from this terrible, lifeless boat of nothing. There must be somewhere on Earth that is inhabitable amidst the chaos and detritus. Surely there’s a pocket or cave capable of sustaining a life. And if not, then I know he’d rather give his body to the good dirt we came from than to this suspended and systematized animation we mistook for a shot at more life.

My door vibrates, and in tumble more of my comrades. Young. Smooth-skinned. Sexless, but filled with an astonishingly repressed agency they have no idea what to do with. Oh, what an orgy we could make with Trinculo’s inventions! Our imaginations not yet dead. But we have work to do.

I set about instructing them in pairs, so that they can save time and work on one another’s bodies. During breaks, so that no one loses consciousness, I rehydrate them and lay out the plan for the performance. There is a question from a young man—though in place of his former flesh indication of manhood there is only a smooth lump, no balls hanging down like swollen round fruit, no smell of musk or hay or sweat. My god, I realize, these are the last “youth” that will ever exist in our reproduction-less wasteland, at least in purely human, uncloned form.

“Is this Trinculo… important to the performance?”

For a moment I experience an animal surge to kill him then and there, an urge to bite through his jugular and shoot his body out into space through an air lock like a foreign body. But that will only lead to another incarceration, which we haven’t the time for. I muster the patience of a mother.

“My love, my… petal, ” I say, stroking his face. “Trinculo is worth ten thousand of us.” I narrate his prowess as a pilot and engineer. I give him and the others the backstory they need and want. The call for resistance.

“Now burn,” I command. And they set back to work on one another, searing the story of a girl into flesh, giving body to her name.

Nyx rises and moves toward a far wall. Far enough away as not to attract any attention. “Go now,” I say, and Nyx dissolves into the barely perceptible wall.

For myself, I steal time.

I scan the room of young rebels until my eyes blur over and they lose their meaning as signs. As I do, I hold the tool of my trade inches from my own inner thighs.

Before a burn, there is the sensation of molecules screaming, rearranging themselves.

Sometimes time opens up and pauses. My flesh has long ago learned to anticipate the burn. But in this extended moment I feel all the molecules in my body stop moving. Impending death wrenches stories away from their trajectories. Think of loved ones succumbing to disease, or wars, or natural disasters. The calm before the moment of destruction. The part of her story I intend to scar myself with at my thighs has taken a turn, and I will respond accordingly.

I had been thinking of her as a hero. Joan. The way we’ve all been trained to understanding that word and idea. Bound to a story that is not only man-made, but man-centered. How does that change when the terms of the story come from the body of a woman who is unlike any other in human history? A body tethered, not to god or some pinnacle of thought or faith, but to energy and matter? To the planet.

If we look at history—those of us who study it, who can remember it—we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we’ll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It’s as if humans can’t understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.

When the current crises became global in scope, when the very ground underneath our feet and the skies meant to give us life turned on us, our desperation grew to cinematic proportions. We abandoned all previous fathers, who now seemed puny and impotent. Who was God, even, in the face of geocatastrophe? Dinosaurs never cared about a god.

When I think about how and when Jean de Men became the leader of CIEL—how we acquiesced—my compassion for our survival washes away rather quickly. I look in the mirror, and see who and what we have become. The only way we survived even this long is at the expense of what’s left of Earth’s resources. Including the humans we forsook, their eyes turned Skyward.

It makes me laugh before it makes me cry: he was a celebrity, de Men. Handsome and strong. A capable new father. We worshipped his mutable charisma. We worshipped the story of ourselves that he gave us: that we were bright and beautiful and with wealth . That we were the next chapter of human history. That we were an evolutionary step forward. We bought it and ate it like fine chocolate.

Body to body, then, I join Joan in rejecting the teachings of a pseudo messiah figure. I join Joan in rejecting messiahs altogether. The story born of her actual body will be burned into mine not to mythologize her or raise her above anyone or anything, but to radically resist that impulse. Not toward any higher truth other than we are matter, as dirt and water and trees and sky are matter, as animals were and stars and human bodies are matter. To claim our humanity as humanity only, an energy amidst all other energy and matter that emerges, lives, dies, and then changes form.

What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?

I will write it. I will tell the truth. Be the opposite of a disciple. Words and my body the site of resistance.

When I learn that Trinculo has asked to be burned at the stake, in the manner of Joan, I know two things. One, that they will hasten his execution for having the audacity to make this request, a fact that overcomes my entire body so quickly and violently that I drop to the floor, and two, that the image that has haunted me my entire ascended life will begin to come back to me in dreams.

I am, as it turns out, wrong about the latter. It comes to me not just in dreams, but also in waking life: while I work, when I eat, even when I sit in a chair and think of nothing. It obsessively replaces my present tense. Like a film stuck in my skull.