Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“Love,” Nyx said.

My chest constricts, as if the word itself was a vise.

“I loved people before Jean de Men did this to me. I know what love was.” Nyx looks down at the ground.

Did I?

Nyx walks around me in a slow circle. “I loved my father. He was shot in the skull less than a foot from my face. I loved my mother.” Nyx touches my shoulder so that I turn at the same circumference and rate of the circle she makes around me. “My mother was stripped naked, then eviscerated—crotch to throat—in front of me.” Nyx gestures up and down the length of a torso. “Jean de Men told me it was part of my education toward an immortal future, one in which humanity sacrificed itself for an evolutionary leap. On my knees, lost in some kind of horror and emotional chaos, I wanted to suck the bullet from my father’s head and lodge it in my own brain. I wanted to crawl inside the carcass of my mother and die there. Then Jean de Men put a blade in my hands, and a blade at my skull, and forced me to gut a girl my own age—or die. And then another. And another. I fell into a kind of numb terror—”

“My God.” My voice surprises me.

“No,” Nyx answers, “if anything is true, it’s that God was a fiction. What haunts me is that we placed so many brutal figureheads at his feet.” She looks up toward the ceiling. It looks briefly like the gesture of prayer, but I know better. Everything above us is brutal and mutilated.

“He said he needed the anatomical material. He said good each time I stuck the blade into another girl.” I stare at Nyx, looking for emotion in her pupils. Nyx returns an icy gaze. “Inside the numb, I vowed to murder not just Jean de Men, but anyone anywhere whose existence depended on attaining power. Which is nearly everyone.” Nyx approaches me now and stares through me. “You are alive because I haven’t decided who you are. Saviors are dead. God is dead. Are you about power, or love? It’s a simple choice I’ll have to make.”

Now, this. An equality of hate. Rage, wedged between us like the ghosts of the girls we were.

Nyx’s body pulses, resonating with the story. “I was not very old when I hid the boys,” she continues. “But I already had a deep field of knowledge.”

My gaze lingers, traveling Nyx’s corpus with an empathy I did not intend to feel. Torture has so many layers, like the layers of the body’s skin, or the different realms of atmosphere between breathing and exploding in space. At the heart of torture there is a brutality beyond inflicting pain. It is the brutality of stealing an identity, a sense of self, a soul. The pain-wracked body is only a symbol of a deeper struggle that is bodiless. It is the struggle to be. Not just to cling to consciousness, but a kind of radical compassion to exist as a self in relation to others. The torturer attempts to murder that desire for compassionate relationship. To erase even its possibility. The tortured body is the opposite of the newborn. Instead of a will toward life and the stretch to bond with an other, there is a brutal will toward death and the end of that longing.

When torture succeeds, that is.

Nyx’s body tells me that Nyx’s torturer has not succeeded.

“What boys?” I manage.

The burns on my face sting and ache. Nyx is staring at them. I step toward her until we are close enough to embrace. That’s when I see them: upon Nyx’s arms and torso, something besides the spectacle of the wounds.

The words. Faint and raised like embossed flesh. She is covered in them—tiny scar-words, white as bone fragments. And I am right. My name appears more than once. Unable to read fully in the dim light, I convulse with the desire to get closer. I raise my hand toward Nyx’s skin. It hovers there between us like dead faith. Nyx simply pushes my hand away into space.

I can see enough of the scarifications now to read a line or two. They are sentences. Stanzas, more precisely. At the neck and shoulder, down her breastless chest and torso. My heart and breath lurch in my chest. A thin rise of electricity shoots from my ear to my forehead. The words on Nyx’s body. I recognize them.

Then Nyx reenters the metal skirt with more care than it had been removed with, and I’m embarrassed to find tears stinging the corners of my eyes. When Nyx repositions so that my knife is once again poised at the throat, Nyx’s back to me, ready to live or die exactly as before. “Who are you?” Nyx asks.

I don’t know why I hold Nyx in the headlock still, but I do. “The map,” I begin. “Is it real? Can I get to Leone? Who is Christine?”

“Who are you?” Nyx repeats. “Do you even know?”

My throat empties. My mind a vacuum of foreign matter.

“No,” I whisper back, locked in an antiembrace with this strange other who seems to have so many answers.

“I told you. You are an engenderine.”

I don’t move.

“You are between human and matter. Nearly indistinguishable.”

Nyx calls it kinema .

What we are doing, that is, our mode of travel. For some reason, my brain reaches for Galileo, for whom I developed a strange fixation as a child. I secretly wished he’d been my grandfather. Nyx means to train me to ride the motion of energy that is everywhere. “It supercharges you…” and I feel like a human battery.

Kinema brings us hopscotching across Earth. Nyx says I’m learning to control my own energy. Nyx says we have far to travel. As I understand it, it is something like riding telluric current, combined with the most intense human-to-human—or whatever Nyx is and I am—embrace that I’ve ever experienced. Not even a lover’s entangled body knot could be tighter than this embrace. (Not that I would know. The one and only time I let my desire happen I nearly killed Leone.) Our combined energies dematerialize us and rematerialize us anywhere Nyx aims us. Kinema. Just like the red rock with my brother in the field when we were kids.

I feel the tear of Leone’s future ripping my body apart. If I can’t learn this form of transportation I believe she will die. Nyx knows it—uses it like bait. I do not believe that Nyx gives a shit whether or not Leone lives or dies. All Nyx wants is revenge, and yet Nyx speaks of revenge as a portal back to “love.” Whose love? Where? I want to get up to Leone so badly I have shredded the insides of my cheeks from chewing at them so impatiently.

We make camp underground in all the caves Leone and I have lived in and more, sometimes finding evidence that others had been there, too, or maybe it was just the trace of things before or during the Wars. It is impossible to tell. Long-deserted fire pits and bone fragments, petroglyphs and the metal carcasses of weapons and vehicles and machines meant for killing, irrigation system remains and adobe structures and lighting and power systems and underground gardens gone crackled and black. Caches of long-spoiled food or irradiated stuff, burned-up bones of people in heaps or scattered like some great carnivorous bird had shat them across land masses. Once we found a tandem bicycle on its side, red and flat-tired, but with spokes intact. For some reason the bike crushed me. It reminded me that individual humans were always yearning for an other. The old ache in my chest. After seeing traces of people for so long, believing most of them dead, it was still shocking if what Peter said was true. That an entire group existed… no way to know without looking. Survivors be damned; my only impulse to live rests in the body of Leone.

Graves.

We see graves everywhere.

Something else that haunts me: the graves, they all have different depths. I don’t know what, if anything, it means. There is no hierarchy to death, to grief, to the end of life. The small graves of children, shallower than the graves of adults—does it really mean anything different? Did decomposition happen more quickly for children?