Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“The planet she killed?” Christine repeats, realizing she’d been gripping her own arms hard enough to leave pink finger marks. Well, there it was. Her suspicions confirmed. Perhaps she’d always known, deep down, but now it was settled.

“Ah, but destruction and creation have always been separated by a membrane as thin as the skin on a scrotum, my love. I must go. They’re coming. I have nightly… sessions with my demons. But we’ll have urgent matters to discuss. They’re working on ways to attract her. I’ll return to you each night, like this, until I can return no more. Adieu.” He kisses his filleted hand and then blows it out toward her. The Olms slowly and gently disassemble themselves.

“Darkness,” Christine says, her voice blank. The room goes black. She crumples down on the floor, spreads her arms and legs and closes her eyes. She tries to imagine what it would be like to be tortured in the manner Trinc described—the gash forced into her body, the artificial organs built into her to simulate a reproductive system. She imagines Trinculo, how his very presence sets her abdomen and the smooth dead territory of her former sex on fire. What is left of her actual reproductive system? Everything inside her shrunken and atrophied and dysfunctional; she’d seen the X-rays. How had they kept themselves alive for as long as possible this way, curling up into nothingness while they adorned their outer husks with proof of their existence and matter… Dear dead disgusting God.

Trinculo. Skinned alive like a goddamn cat.

We’ve become signs, she thinks—mere signs of our former selves. Dislodged from plot and action in our own lives.

Her mind contorts. What do we mean by love anymore? Love is not the story we were told. Though we wanted so badly for it to hold, the fairy tales and myths, the seamless trajectories, the sewn shapes of desire thwarted by obstacles we could heroically battle, the broken heart, the love lost the love lorn the love torn the love won, the world coming back alive in a hard-earned nearly impossible kiss. Love of God love of country love for another. Erotic love familial love the love of a mother for her children platonic love brotherly love. Lesbian love and homosexual love and all the arms and legs of other love. Transgressive love too—the dips and curves of our drives given secret sanctuary alongside happy bright young couplings and sanctioned marriages producing healthy offspring.

Oh love.

Why couldn’t you be real?

It isn’t that love died. It’s that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.

Love was never meant to be less than electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The Earth’s heartbeat or pulse or telluric current, no small thing. The stuff of life itself. Life in the universe, cosmic or as small as an atom. But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we’d be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story, and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet. Our reasons to love more important than any others.

The stars were never there for us—we are not the reason for the night sky.

The stars are us.

We made love stories up so we could believe the night sky was not so vast, so unbearably vast, that we barely matter.

From what Trinculo said, Joan was closer to matter than human.

Christine sheds her clothing. She runs her hands over every part of her body that she can reach. She reads and reads—hands to a body. She slaps at some areas to release sensation. It’s possible she even weeps. But she is not alone. Christine is part of Joan’s story now, and Joan is part of Christine’s, and no world will ever be the same.

Iam not dead.

I see a throat and chin looming above me. I feel a cool oil rubbed gently into my forehead and temples; it smells of lavender and sage. “Leone,” I whisper through the gestures.

A figure leans back away from me. Ah. It is not Leone; how could it be. It’s a young adult—maybe sixteen or eighteen—who looks back at me. Hairless, aqua-skinned, black-eyed. I blink hard in an attempt to focus. Skin still aqua. I scan our surroundings. A cave, but not where we were before. Farther in. A modest fire nearby. Glowworms lighting the walls in a delicate web.

“I am Nyx,” says the person whose skin looks wrong, gently dabbing oil again on my forehead.

“Like the moon, or the goddess?” Storage and retrieval—I can’t help it. My particular brain retrieves data whether I want it to or not. A survivalist’s occupational hazard when all books, buildings, data banks, all collected forms of knowledge, have been annihilated.

“Just Nyx.”

The figure leans back over me and more gentle than a whisper dabs at the place where the blue light lives in my head. I can see grafts from shoulder to shoulder. Stupidly, I think I see my own name embossed there in the flesh as Nyx draws away again.

My elbows ache, but I use them to sit up anyway. I study this speaker’s body and face. The broad and muscled shoulders. The masculine lantern jaw, the thick neck, yet with cheekbones and brow that are soft, calm, kind. Long-fingered and gentle hands, like an artist’s. But that’s an idiotic thought. This clearly is a young warrior. And yet the gentleness of this person’s touch says caretaker. It’s not clear whether this Nyx is a boy leaning toward manhood or a girl leaning into womanhood. Besides, that skin seems to trump the question of gender. What on earth could be the cause of this moonlike hue? Is Nyx diseased? Alien? Mutated? Enemy, or something else? Everything seems possible when you haven’t seen much humanity for decades.

“Yes,” Nyx says, checking my pulse as efficiently and smoothly as a nurse.

“Sorry?” I say.

“I can hear every word you are thinking.” Nyx lets go of my wrist and stands, walks to the fire, and puts it out with bare hands. Light remains around us in the form of the glowworm walls and now blue ghost fireflies, whose appearance shivers the cave ceiling and creates a blue-green glow. Nyx stands, arms crossed. “But none of these questions are very important.”

So did I hallucinate you? I stare at Nyx, testing this telepathy bullshit. Or are there more of… you?

Nothing. I’m an idiot.

“You’ll want to stand up and walk around soon,” Nyx redirects. “You want the energy between your body and the ground to rebalance itself as soon as possible. The travel we have ahead is difficult.”

“Wait,” I say, trying to stand. My head swims. My legs go boneless. “I have questions. A shitload of questions…” My eyes swim in their sockets.

“Are you experiencing any variations in sight?” Nyx asks, walking over to the nearest cave wall.

“Why?”

Nyx’s hands are on the cave wall in front of my face. I feel the ground vibrate up through my ankles, shins, spine, shoulders, giving my bones back to me. “Keep your eye on the wall,” Nyx instructs. “And you did not hallucinate me. There are many humans left on Earth. We number in the thousands. Of varying strength and abilities. But I’m the only one who is dual-world. And very few of us are like you and me.”

Dual-world. I snap to standing, though my head throbs and spins. My heart beats me up in my chest. “Do you know how to get up to CIEL?” If Leone is still alive, that’s where she’s been taken. If that’s even possible. Nyx doesn’t answer. “Listen,” I venture, standing and lunging like some newborn, now-extinct gazelle toward Nyx. “I need you to get me up there—” But Nyx cuts me off, and I feel the very air between us press against my chest, keeping me from forward motion.