Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“What? I can’t hear you motherfuckers!” Leone shouts, grinning like a jackal.

Then comes a thunderous roar that presses both of their eyes closed. White light. Silence. Then a black and blue tornado of electrical force that shoots through everything living. The sound is so hard and loud that Joan’s mouth blasts open involuntarily and her arms fly out on either side of her body and for a moment she lifts off the ground and then back down with an impact so terrible it seems like her entire skeleton collapses.

And then a terrible silent nothing.

For a moment she thinks she is dead. She can’t hear. She can’t see. Her whole body feels electrocuted.

When sight and sound return to her, she realizes that the cave walls and ceiling have collapsed to open air. Her brother’s body rests half-buried in rubble. But something is even more profoundly wrong.

Leone is gone.

Le Ciel.

I see the sky through the blown-to-bits roof of the cave. Dusk. The whisper of stars and borealis. I close my eyes and for a few small seconds I am floating. But the ground is hard under me.

The smell of scorched dirt.

Leone nowhere.

My brother’s dead body slumps between rock and rubble, all trace of our biologic relation gone gray as ash and earth. The ground smolders in a black shadow where Leone’s body was. Death. Death from me, in me, around me. Did I think I escaped it somehow, all these years, hiding from the inevitable? Hiding from the story of myself? Be careful of what stories you tell yourself.

The smell of it sends me back to my own burning, the trigger of sensory perceptions, the smell of my flesh about to go to flame, my skin tightening around feet and shins and thighs and hips and gut and ribs and arms and sternum and neck and mouth—a catalog of death reaching up until my eyes sting and shrink back inward toward my skull. Yes. I remember every moment of it.

Leone.

Inside my chest, my heart—fist-shaped organ—bulges and aches. For a long minute I stand still and consider ending my life. What’s left to live for? I don’t even remember how to care about humanity any longer. Humanity, what we lived, what we made, what we destroyed. For what?

Her name the only word filling me. Leone.

Vanished.

No one was ever more worth fighting for. More worth staying alive for. Though I never said it. Why the fuck didn’t I say it? The only thing that made being human worthwhile was human intimacy, and I managed to fuck up even that. How many years were we alone together? How deep did Leone’s love and loyalty go?

Deeper than caves, than black holes in space.

I force myself to confront the empty. Snot runs like a river over my mouth and chin. Tears bleed into one another so that my eyes ocean. The pain at my temple is granite against granite. The truth is this: Leone is the reason I am alive at all. It was Leone who saved me from the heat and thunderous flame that was supposed to be my execution. It was Leone’s face I saw through the blaze that was meant to reduce me to ash. Leone who whispered, “Don’t say anything. Go limp. There is a vortex—a hole in the floor. Close your eyes.”

Leone whose words memory-echo now into a falling, like falling through all of space and time. Leone who replaced my body with a corpse from god knows where, so that those tyrannical torturers would find a burned-up body or thing, the thing they wanted so much they’d mistake it for me. Leone who rescued my half-burned corpus from the edge of annihilation.

A miracle.

I stare at the blackened dirt where she had just been. To this day, I have little idea how she managed it; we never spoke of it. Not when Leone nursed me one limb and nerve at a time, cave by cave—the Naracoorte, the Lascaux, the Blue Grotto, the Waitomo, the Gunung Mulu, the Sarawak Chamber, the Yasuni. Not when we formed a silent sacred bond based on the simplicity of surviving, limiting our fighting to isolated bursts, human salvage mission interruptions, limited resource robbings, and other tiny Skyline terrorisms. We just moved forward together, in an imagined plot where staying alive and in motion were the only aims.

We became two women’s bodies in motion.

Why didn’t we ever name it? Why didn’t I get on my knees and pray to her in secular sensual waterfalls of thanks every goddamn day of my life? My body aches with regret, like some virus laying waste to my bones and muscles.

There is no name in any language I know except her name.

Leone.

My shoulders heave as if my body has been taken over by a force larger than a self. I cry hysterically. Before I can stop, I vomit, hard enough to crack a rib. The wail that emanates from my abdomen through my gut and ribs, up my stupid throat and out of my mouth, doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me. It’s like I’m watching some shadow narrative, like I’m detached from what’s left of my body, what’s left of Earth, what’s left of anything.

I drop to the ground. I curl into a birth shape—there’s no other way to say it. I rest my head on the dead earth. I smell worms and rocks and the wet of what used to be the cave’s lake and river, now open to air, thanks to the blast. I always knew we’d return to dirt, all of humanity. Maybe that’s why I did what I did. Maybe this is the time for me after all. I put my thumb in my mouth and bite it. I thought I’d already experienced the greatest possible self-loathing. Until now. I beg for decomposition.

From my vantage point, I can see my brother’s blue-hued body. In death, adults reveal some of their childhood selves. The eyes and cheek muscles going slack, back in time to a face without history. As I tighten myself into a ball there on the floor, I think of how my brother must have stood over my crib as a child, witnessing a similar girl.

Remember, he’d said. Remember what ?

I look at my hands. I bring them to my face and smell them. Something from childhood. Something half there and half imagined.

The image comes to me in a retinal flash. My brother as a boy, a field away from me. In my hand a red rock. A children’s game. I shove my fist into the dirt and push down and down until my whole girl-arm is buried. My hand connects with something hot or cold, or both, not solid, but moving, like a wave. I let go of the red rock when my hand and arm feel like they’re dissolving. Not until I hear my brother screaming down the field from me—“It’s a rock! A red rock! It shot up out of the ground”—do I understand.

There is current underground.

Could that be what he was talking about before he died? I look at his lifeless face, gray among the detritus on the cave floor across from me.

Without thought, as if from muscle memory, I jam my hands into the earth up to my wrists, nearly breaking them against the hard ground, and then I shove them down deeper, to my elbows, and then deeper still, until I’m shouldering the dirt, my face an inch from it. I smell what’s still alive on the planet, beetles and worms and potato bugs; I stare at my dead brother and the blackened place where Leone used to be; and I press on until half my body is buried. I close my eyes. My face burrows like an animal’s. My mouth tastes the dirt. The blue light at the side of my head ignites and hums. The song explodes inside my skull and the opened cave begins to shiver like a convulsing body. My hands and arms start to burn—or are they freezing?—something, some energy, has my arms, as if they are not part of me any longer, something alive and electrical in the dirt. And then my arms feel like they are no longer arms at all, but extensions of light, long-tendrilled beams shooting out from my torso and into the ground. I’m burying myself, but in my mind’s eye I can see thousands and thousands of beams of light underground, crisscrossing like a strange highway of flame, with my own body serving as an interstice. My head shoots back, my mouth opens, my jaw locks, and light—aqua light and orange light and indigo light and red light—shoots out from my eyes, my nose, my mouth and ears and every pore of my body, and finally an enormous blast catapults me into the air and back down to the earth with the thud of an animal’s body and a snapping sound in my sternum.