Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

In any case, they remind me of the children I buried who died where they lay, the children I raised from the dead only to watch them drop to dirt, but not before they each looked me in the eye with one question: Why couldn’t you save me?

There is a recurring dream I keep having that seems to be telling me something.

When I was a child, it seemed beautiful: a white lady in space who spun stories like spiderwebs. Roomfuls of stories. And the ink of space surrounding her made her glow all the more, like some kind of moonwoman, her skin radiating night light. The stars seemed to carry her voice.

During the Wars, the dream came to me differently. I don’t mean the dream changed; it did not. But how I felt within the dream changed. Suddenly the woman’s stories seemed urgent. Her eyes wider and more focused. Her mouth more deliberate. Her words heavier. Once I thought I even heard her call to me, say my name. But I can’t be sure. Someone else’s voice had woken me for battle. So it’s hard to say whose voice I really heard. It’s just that some part of me wanted it to be hers. I thought I heard the name Christ. I thought it was her name.

Most recently the dream has turned brutal. The woman is still beautiful, still spinning stories, still embedded within the night and stars. But the pull of her voice is so intense I can feel it in my chest and abdomen. The stories are not for little girls. The stories say, Get up. Now . The stories say, Turn your head away from everything you’ve known. Look down. At the dirt itself. Mother. Sister. Daughter . Her name, the woman, I know now it is Christine.

And the dirt, it’s screaming.

Kinema. Nyx is taking me toward something but she won’t tell me what. We kinemaed subterranean passages to avoid Skylines or biologic trace. I’m too much like bait, Nyx says. We don’t have much time, Nyx says. Does this mean that Leone is in danger? Is there some carefully designed form or plan evolving above us? Briefly a tinge of my former desire to fight for humanity surfaces, for a briefer moment still I wish the feeling would linger, but then all I feel is Leone again. And Peter’s dying breath. What do I do?

And always Leone in my throat or my temple or my chest, or in the place where my very sex sits, pounding with a vengeance, asking me why I didn’t love her in every way humanly possible while I still had the chance.

Every night I pull out the map that the child Nyx gave me and stare at it. It looks vaguely astrological. Earth’s landmarks don’t look anything like they once did; they are all either gone or so radically changed that they look like different continents, mountain ranges, dry riverbeds, and jagged ravines. The map displays coordinates that reach toward the sky and beyond the constellations, beyond the crippled sun and moon, with lines and trajectories touching points of stars and planet rings and celestial bodies. Maybe it’s purely a little girl’s beautiful made-up sky system, like in a fairy tale. And yet when I open the piece of paper—only the second piece I’ve seen in decades—I feel hope. I wonder how people must have felt the first time someone drew a map that went beyond the flat world to a round one. I wonder if they felt the way I do now.

For three days we kinema, until finally I look up through a zigzagging crack in a cave’s ceiling at the dull excuse for a moon and ask, “Where are we going? I cannot bear this any longer. I’ll kill myself if Leone dies before we can get up to CIEL.”

“We are almost there,” Nyx says, without looking at me, “but there is a last stop we must attend to.” And then, either compassionately or through annoyance with my endlessly abstract and morbid thoughts, for I think the same thought every day and every night—why should I go on, to be or not to be, what have they done to the body of my dear Leone—Nyx says, “She’s still alive.”

She. Leone. I swallow and my whole life stones in my throat.

“Where the fuck are we going?” I had nothing to lose anymore. Nyx hadn’t killed me; I hadn’t killed Nyx; whatever each of us was after was clearly still unattained.

“You’ll know when you see it,” Nyx answers, and turns away from me, shoulder blades walling me off from any chance at connection. The image of Nyx’s genitalia flashes like an undiscovered landscape over and over again in my head. I can’t not see it.

But I can’t travel any farther without knowing either. “How am I not human? You said I’m not human.” Nyx doesn’t move or open her mouth; she just keeps on stirring soup in a clay pot over a fire. It smells like rabbit, but I know that’s not possible. Bat maybe, oilbird or snake, but not rabbit. I walk toward the mouth of the cave.

“What are you doing?” Nyx stops stirring.

I keep walking.

“HEY!” Nyx yells.

I keep walking. If I am bait, then let them take me. If Leone is alive, then let me go to where she is. I’d rather die near Leone than live another day like this. Another ten feet and I’ll be at the shaft. If I climb out, if they really are looking for me, I’ll be easy to spot on the surface of the dirt planet, firing off ammunitions. I don’t care. If Nyx wants to stop me, hurt me, kill me, let it happen.

But then I’m being embraced from behind, plunged forward into space and time with Nyx’s blue-green arms around me, our heads knocking together. This time the kinema is not to another cave.

I land with Nyx on my back. I sputter at a mouthful of dirt. We are on the surface of the planet I abandoned for the small and secret survival available underground. In short but vivid pulse-bursts, we kinema like bomblets across varied terrains, wrestling like animals.

Earth: the vastness makes my breath jackknife in my chest. The world before I killed it. It used to be beautiful. The beauty is all gone now—but the vastness remains, and I can almost feel beauty just under the surface of things. It hurts to look at it.

We skirt oceans and shorelines like gulls and pelicans once did. We dive valleys between formerly lush mountains, curling around what used to be glistening rivers, snaking through what used to be jungles. All gone to dirt, a still life of dirt, the world an ossuary. We swan over deserts of sand and wind, deserts of ice, life likely hiding underneath. The skies are no longer blue or gray, there is no more summer or rain. It’s all just constant sepia day and eerie bruise-colored night. Wind everywhere. Untamed water. Geology unbound. The entire planet like a series of exposed erosions. We travel the world in quadrants and hemispheres, where countries and cultures are dead.

There’s a reason I left the surface. It wasn’t just to survive.

The landmass before me is as enormous as the sky and space above it. What’s left of civilization is nearly indistinguishable from the erosions of land meeting elements. We stop. Somewhere. Exhausted.

Wind. With little to nothing to block it, the wind tears at us both. My hair pulls hard enough to wrench loose from its roots. My face pulls. I have to hug myself so my arms don’t pinwheel. I brace my legs to keep from falling down. Then the wind subsides, and gusts up again, the intervals irregular. When the wind is not attacking us, Nyx walks ahead. I haven’t walked the surface of Earth without having some kind of purpose or goal—hunting for ammunitions compounds or Skylines—for a long time. There hasn’t been a reason. But what I can see now tugs my memories loose. The word city snakes up my vertebrae, but which? It’s impossible to tell. The once-urban surface pokes up in juts and mounds. Haphazard and irregular skeletons of buildings or freeways. Bridges and roads in pieces, like fragments to nowhere. A city demolished or eaten alive by hurricanes, tsunamis, mudslides, earthquakes, like the last best nuclear bombs times a thousand.