Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

When the time comes, of course, they will perform naked, their young and still-stinging grafts pearling and gleaming alive—as if to say, something almost human was here. Corrupted, white and wounded and unflinching. They will perform an epic poem written across their bodies. And at the apex of the drama, nearly Greek in its design, they will move to kill as many CIELers as they can, slaughter and liberate their targets.

To Nyx, she gave a special operation: find Joan. Bring her up. The execution this time would not be hers.

She gives each of them a single transparent wire cord, wrapped around their forearms and wrists. Slicing through the necks of mature CIELers is easy. Their skin never met with weather, and thus is spongey and elasticized from graft upon graft. Pain receptors dulled by the palimpsest of flesh. Christine and her troupe can cut them open like so many decadent cakes.

Trinculo’s side of the plan gives her a pain at her temple and a tightness at her throat. She cannot get the image of his flayed head and torso out of her mind’s eye. Red and meat-rivered, with blue sinewy veins and arteries, bulging eyes, a gaping mouth. Like the inside-out of a body. And yet she knows, more than she’s known anything in her life, that he will succeed with his part of the plan.

He’d said as much in his last soliloquy animated by the Olms:

He was a terrible poet. And yet she instantly memorized his stanzas and replaced the original from which he’d stolen it. His silly, melodramatic, reworded speech!

And then the Olms had loosened and disassembled, and his wounded image falling back to nothing. His good-bye kiss.

But she has other ideas.

Her players await further instruction. Looking at them, her eyes well up like little saucers. She feels entire oceans of tears only barely held back by the dyke of her resolve. She will not surrender him to the universe without a fight. She will bring all of literary history forward like a tidal wave.

She loves him unto dead matter, where they can be joined again with whole universes.

“The play’s the thing,” she announces to her players; if they notice the waver in her voice or the dull redundancy of the line from history, they do not show it.

At the sound of the word Leone, a space-splitting roar tears into the dream girl’s room. My head feels split open. The only force I know of like that is a Skyline crackling open, but how could that be? Hadn’t Nyx bridged me into some otherwhere? Not Earth, not space, maybe not even real? As instantly as it hits, dead silence and empty dark vacuum me back to dirt and cave walls. My eyes adjust and my senses kick. In my hand, though, is the map.

“Now would be a good fucking time to reappear,” I yell into the empty. “Nyx!”

“Telluric current,” Nyx responds, standing behind me like it’s the most normal thing in the world, as if we’d been that way all along. “In tandem with your mind’s eye. It’s how we’ll travel.”

At the sound of her emotionless voice, anger balls up in my gut and blooms into my lungs and esophagus. With what life I have left in me, I unsheathe a blade at my thigh, twirl and lunge at Nyx with the knife to her neck.

Under the knife I can see Nyx’s throat shiver. I watch her swallow in slow motion. I watch the veins at her temple river outward and pulse. When Nyx speaks, her tone is smooth. Even pinned and head-cocked, Nyx’s voice sounds calm. I decide I hate Nyx.

“Death,” Nyx murmurs. “It’s always about death. If there’s a mortal short circuit to humanity’s existence, it’s the obsession with death as an ending. Death? You think death means anything to me? Before you kill me, let me tell you a story.”

I push the knife far enough into Nyx’s neck to draw a line of blood.

Without moving, Nyx speaks. “We’ve believed in you for years—the story of you. At least dignify what’s left of my life by letting me tell mine?”

It’s a fair point. I loosen my grip and the knife’s pressure, but hold my position. Nyx continues, unaffected.

“You are familiar, I believe, with Jean de Men? Do you know about his experiments in biosynthetics?” A long silence blooms between us. The damp dark air seems to breathe. “I thought not. No one is. You might say I’m Jean de Men’s creature. Allow me to demonstrate?”

Nyx pushes hard against the knife’s edge poised at her throat, easing up inch by inch until we stand facing one another. I let it happen. A small but insignificant path of blood leaves a trace at Nyx’s neck. Then slowly, carefully, Nyx unbuckles the metal skirt that binds legs, hips, waist, and torso. As each buckle loosens, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t know why. I try to breathe like a normal, war-tested veteran. But what appears before me undoes me again.

The metal garment releases and falls to the ground, and the aquamarine of Nyx’s skin pigment grows even more vivid. Almost like a canvas. My sight is drawn to that place between the hips and legs. Humans are always drawn to sexuality, whether we admit it or not. There is no not looking. There, where sexuality used to announce itself, is a malformed penis; someone’s attempt at reconstructing the complex organ. It hangs like a truncated and crooked worm, the head misshapen. But that’s not all. Intimately close to the penis is a partially sutured half-open gash running from the space between Nyx’s legs to the right hip bone. Jagged and ugly. Another attempt at genitalia. Botched. My mind tries to tear my eyes away from the sight, but the body doesn’t lie. I can’t look away.

“Yes, look. Like a malformed hermaphrodite. Perhaps my ‘parent’ couldn’t decide—boy or girl. Jean de Men tried both. In the face of my perfectly intact anatomy, he butchered me like meat.”

Nyx’s stance widens and I blush.

“I was twelve. Just a couple of years after my girlhood, which you just visited. While you were out crusading your teen years away in the Wars, some of us were the objects of inhuman experimentation. I was not born like this. I was made from the body of an Earth-born child I can barely remember.”

I watch Nyx touch the faint blood left from my knife at the throat, then taste it. For a moment I think I taste copper. But Nyx is not finished with the story.

“When I escaped and joined the resistance it wasn’t for you. Your glory or cause. It was for more than survival. It was for revenge. This body—my body. I am the proof of what happens when power turns its eye toward procreation. I am a monstrosity. But that’s not the worst part. A body is just a body. You know? Something deeper lives in all of us. Do you know what it is?”

I didn’t. Did I? I opened my mouth but nothing came out.