Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

Leone picks up a second RPG and rocket to take with them. Joan turns to follow, her RPG back silently on her shoulder. Leone says nothing. They walk side by side. Dirt kicks up at their feet. Joan looks over at Leone’s jaw. Somehow the square of it, the way she clenches her teeth, soothes her.

“Any idea what the fuck that was?”

Joan’s throat hurts from Leone’s voice. It has an edge to it, like shale—when did that happen? When they were fifteen, hiking the mountains of Vietnam, didn’t they sing songs—children’s songs, half in French, half in Vietnamese—and laugh, throwing their heads back in the torrents of rain? Who are they now, every muscle in their legs taut and extended to make the long trek back to the cave, two dead men behind them? Leone with the square shoulders and heavy stomp of Achilles. Her tattooed head. Her eyes a shape between a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Her relentlessly present jaw.

Joan holds her hand out in front of her—the scars and aches, the flicker of blue light near her temple a part of her very consciousness and physical being—are these the bodies of women?

Leone was right: energy, particularly lethal energy, didn’t used to come down Skylines. In the early years, Skylines had been visible: sophisticated tethers through which all manner of things—food, water, weapons, oil, coal, gas—could be transported between Earth’s surface and the platforms. They used to be easy to attack, an efficient way to cut off supply lines. As war raged on and unmanned drones replaced most of the CIEL’s fighting forces, further modifications were made, and now all the Skylines were invisible to the naked eye. The only way to take a Skyline out now: wait for the brain-splitting sound. The light show in the thermosphere. Act fast or be blown to bits.

Joan stares skyward. This was more like a bomb delivery. Almost as if they were targeted and attacked. If that’s true, then something is changing. Something bad.

Joan looks up. Soon dawn will turn the graying night into morning, a pale orange color, purpling at the horizons like an inverted flame. “Whoever or whatever it is, it isn’t friendly.” She keys her sight to the ground, the surrounding landscape. It will take more than the dawn of morning to get home.

“Nothing coming down those lines is friendly,” Leone says, switching her RPG to her other shoulder.

As child warriors, Joan and Leone hiked this terrain with half a garrison, in the years when war was the worst thing that could happen to people. Until the belly of the earth herself had screamed.

In her mind’s eye, Joan remembers what an astonishing jungle trek it used to be to get to the Son Doong Cave. Starting at the headquarters of a coca factory, you would climb the mountains steadily in a northeastern direction, winding around hillfaces until you reached a virgin forest. From there, the floor of the forest grew up and over you, its vines and roots and sharp stones growing in size. Next you macheted your way through thick green tangle just to find the barely-there trail.

She remembers the green, so green you could smell it, could feel the trees’ humidity all over your skin.

Joan stares at her feet, trudging the distance. Puffs of dust kick up. She coughs. The ground is cracked and lunar now. Chalky and dirt white. The climbs still took you up and down, but the missing forests, vines, great prehistoric plants and roots and rocks—barely anything remained of that world.

Joan rubs the place at her head where the blue light lives. At eleven, her mother took her to several neurological specialists; each had advised surgery and removal of whatever was causing the blue light. A tumor? Shrapnel? None had any idea of the origin of the light, or what it was, or how it had entered the head of a girl. Joan herself had told no one about touching the tree—and had revealed only the sparest of details about how song and a thunderous bolt of energy had thrown her head back and her arms out; how there had been no pain, but something far beyond pain, some ecstatic state in intimate resolve with the forest around her. How a song of the earth’s death and resurrection filled her head. Something about humanity returning to matter.

One doctor suggested psychiatric experts, recommended a Swedish clinic specializing in child trauma and delusional states—for mustn’t it be true that she’d done this thing to herself? Or let someone do it to her, some psychopathic adult who had brainwashed the poor child and injected something unknown into her skull?

As they near the cave, Joan smells the wet. Wet life that exists only underground. The light between her ear and eye flicker. She sees an azure blue in her periphery when the light is active. And hears the low humming.

When they reach the cave’s mouth, Joan holds her hand up to signal that she will enter first. As always. The cave opens up from the earth in a yawn. Joan toes her feet into footholds carefully etched into the walls of the shaft. She lodges her foot into the first recess and plants her hand against the wall, feeling around with her thumb until she finds a small hole. She sticks her thumb in the hole and disables a thousand tiny poisoned darts ready to pierce anything coming unannounced down the shaft, sixty-five meters deep. She looks briefly up at Leone.

“You’re so retro,” Leone jokes. “All black leather and metal. Still badass after all these years.”

Joan hadn’t considered clothing in a long time. Clothing: a melding of metal and neoprene, fatigues patched together with combat scraps, layers of woven or laminated fibers from old dead wars.

“No one’s visited who isn’t friendly,” Joan says, smiling up at Leone, blood—perhaps hers, perhaps that of a dead soldier, perhaps both—paints her skin near her ear. Itching.

“I told you, nothing Skyward is good,” Leone answers, following her down like a savvy animal.

Briefly, Joan eyes Leone’s body. They’ve grown so close to the land and what is left of it, so accustomed to subterranean life, that she sometimes wonders if they are evolving into a new species, like the thousands they come across underground all over the world. But the shape of Leone’s ass, the slimness of her waist, her breasts and biceps and shoulders and hands as strong as starfish, still say woman in ways Joan refuses to feel all the way through.

Midway down the shaft, water and mud and lichen slicken the walls. Working her way through each foothold and thumb-hole, Joan carves a clear path for them both. At the bottom, she leaps with a thud to the ground. Leone follows. The air immediately takes on its own environment. Cool air trade winds with hot and humid air in pockets and swells. The smell of dirt and rock and shit pungent as peat.

The entryway to home: 5.6 kilometers of passages and a chamber measuring 100 by 240 meters. Joan runs her fingers through her coarse black hair, her hand getting stuck just behind her neck in the thick, forested tangle. Christ. She’ll have to do something about that. But then, why? Even the word— hair —she hasn’t thought of it in years.

This cave is a mouth, a throat, a gullet—and Joan alone knows the perfect passage down, tuning in to the earth’s pulse and rhythm. The floor of the cave falls downward and is everywhere covered with large blocks of stone formations piled in odd order. Joan puts her hand on a stalactite that has nearly completed its journey; a slime of mudwater and regurgitated seeds oozes beneath her fingers. Water, dripping for eons from the roof, creates hundreds of stalactites that slowly point their way toward the ground.

Leone’s voice ricochets around the cave. “Ah, the perfume of shit and slime.”