Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

She surveyed the territory differently from the way a discoverer would. This was the future city we had made. This viscous thickening wasteland.

She could cast her mind backward to a world of lush hills and green valleys. To a distinction between earth and sky. She wasn’t old, but still she could remember it. She had been a child when we still had choices: there was us and there was the environment and there was what we were doing to it. The union we were meant to manifest was irrevocably broken.

What sprawled before her now was a bruise-colored tableau of our insatiable desire for refinement. The Alberta Tar Sands. Oil, then water. That’s the order the story would go in. It wasn’t a secret, not difficult to see coming. It was commonplace, really: how we blind ourselves purposefully in the name of progress.

She dug the black toe of her boot into the black sand. A black revolutionary next to her. “Not long now,” he said. “This is it.” She nodded. Briefly she wanted to embrace him. She was still a virgin, and for a moment she thought, Why not now? Who knows how much longer we’ll have? They could even double suicide afterward, beat the planet to the punch; return back to matter, just like stars in the sky. Dead and casting light and story backward.

On her side of the battle, she served firepower equal to Jean de Men’s. Equal numbers: military defectors, civilians, and revolutionaries fighting together. Terrorists, she thought, laughing inside. When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries. People who turn over the earth. She scanned her forces, all unshakably allegiant to her. She dug the heel of her other foot into the wrong earth. Everything smelled like oil and fear. Everyone’s eyes stung with petroleum fumes and firepower. Her body rose up from the ground like a useless question mark. The lip of the terrain, blackened and cracked, oozed.

On Jean de Men’s side of the battle, he continued the onslaught, marshaling invisible drone strikes while striving to complete the escape route he planned for the elite, abandoning Earth to live in the cosmos. The CIEL safe haven, the orbiting fucks. On his side, an arsenal of biochemical weaponry that would annihilate more than half his own forces in the process. His command included military allegiants and military slaves and deluded civilians and civilian slaves and the worst fodder of all: people without hope in a future. He would use suicide fighters, she knew already. It wasn’t unthinkable. It never had been. Humanity had always been its own monster.

On her side, however, she had something else: what could be compared only to a new bomb prototype, its power known but untested, that would likely kill enough on both sides to render it genocidal. It was a later evolution of a cluster bomb, but one that relied not on fire or flesh-disintegrating power, but on sound. The harmonics of the universe, turned brutal when marshaled and used. But she did not need this bomb. She could use her body.

On his side, there lived a hatred for what humanity represented with its diversities and differences, and his pathological desire to abandon the planet, to re-create humankind in a different image. His own.

On her side, there was a hatred there, too, if she was being honest with herself: for what we had made of ourselves, for the fictions we consistently chose that forced our own undoing; for our fear of otherness; for our inability to conquer ego, our seemingly tsunami-like thirst for never-ending consumption at the price of the planet.

What is a body? Her body, capable of more than mass destruction. And she’d known it since she was twelve. That is what the song had laid bare to her, so many years ago, among the trees.

To some it seemed as if Joan could not die. She’d been wounded between the neck and shoulder by shrapnel ricocheting off of a tank in a drone strike. She’d withstood a blow to her skull from a boulder sent hurtling in a firefight near Orléans. She’d been shot, bruised, bloodied, and even buried underneath a one-thousand-year-old medieval wall.

But here, here at the lip of the Tar Sands, she and her army stood silently, her white banner undulating in the wind, watching a nonlethal drone fly toward her almost soundlessly. Long-range scanners had tracked it for over a mile. She thought about crows and pigeons from history, carrying battle messages between forces. Briefly it perhaps looked like a white prehistoric—or future-esque—bird.

When the drone was as close to her face as if she were facing off with an actual person in front of her, a screen dropped down, a screen about the size of a human head, a screen filled with the image of Jean de Men’s face. “Coward,” she said.

“Please do accept my apologies,” his voice scratched out from the screen above the hum of the drone’s rotors, “but my actual presence is not required. Be assured that I have my finger on all the buttons: you live or die as a species today.”

She spat on the ground. “Full of sound and fury, as always, signifying nothing; really, Jean, you should have spent your last hours studying literature, history, philosophy, rather than spending all this idiotic energy projecting your image at me.”

His smile cut the screen in half. “Test me. I beg you. This chess match will not be won through traditional means.”

“There is no longer any such thing as tradition. We are at the end of the world.” She stepped closer to his screen-face. “There is no chess match when multiple universes stretch and frown and squat to shit; when the existence of parallel realities in physics proves that tragedy and comedy, love and hate, life and death, were never really opposites; when language and being and knowing themselves are revealed to have been blinded by dumb binaries. We’re living one version of ourselves. You are simply this version of yourself. Endless matter changing forms. In another version of yourself, exactly next to this, you are dead matter.”

The screen laughed. “Come now, do you after all this time actually fear death? Ordinary, human, death? Fear the death of your so-called fame and legacy, fear the pain and torture of capture, fear the length and depth of your impending humiliations and the story we will make of that.”

So close to the drone’s screen she could kiss it, she whispered, “The intimacy I have with my enemy is deeper than any lover could know; be careful, brutal opponent, of stepping into your thickest nightmare, your deepest desire, the desire to be named lovingly, taken to a milky tit you never experienced, not forgiven of your sins but embraced for them, incinerated for them, sent back to glowing white hot matter with a compassion and orgasm so complete it erases your humanity altogether…”

It’s said that she quite calmly lifted her hand up to the screen and punched a hole through it. The drone wobbling and cascading to dirt, like a felled bird.

And then the two sides of things buckled and heaved in collision like two tectonic plates.

In their aftermath, of course, new continents might eventually form.

The human race might be obliterated, or survive in an orbiting dreamscape, or in some new animal evolution, or in some other way.

Her eyes set.

Her hands ready to go to dirt.

He didn’t know.

He had no idea what this young adult had in her hands. He still thought of her as a female, a child, playing some kind of game in which he could outwit her.

It wasn’t quite killing or saving, what she had in hand. Not creation or destruction.

And yet it was all of these.

She closed her eyes and saw again the future. Waves and waves of global torture and slaughter weaving their way slowly across the planet. Calculated starvations and ghettoizations in the form of so-called refugee camps larger than former cities or even countries where millions and millions perished or killed one another in the crazed haze of being left for dead. Poisoned land poisoned water poisoned aquifer poisoned air poisoned animals poisoned food. Children set to forced labor to collect and surrender resources all over the world, armies of orphans working and killing and dying for an ever-narrowing pinpoint of power—the only star in the sky—a ruthless inhuman grotesque—a darkness made from all of us. She saw survival overtaking the possibility of empathy in such vast swaths of being that people looked disfigured and lost-eyed, as if consciousness receded and an empty-headed nothingness took its place. She saw birds dropping from the skies and bees peppering the world’s roads and fish washing ashore in cascades and deer and bear alike—all manner of animal—including humans—hunted and slaughtered or starved to extinction. Everything consuming every other thing.