Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

From the wall of dirt right in front of us, from stasis and earth, comes motion. The blue light at my head nearly concusses me off my feet; the song is so loud I feel something warm and wet dripping down from my ears. Blood. But that’s nothing. Two young and naked men—and to be sure, they are men; as long and old and dead as time has become, their masculine image is arresting, the dipping between the hips and the small dimples under each hip bone, the beauty of the thick muscle hanging between their legs, the musculature of their chests blooming between the rounds of their shoulders, their jawlines—two young men, one reddish in hue and the other a kind of ochre or sienna, emerge like statues coming to life. They stand in front of me, their gaze focused on something or some time so far beyond me that I may as well not even be here.

“Are they alive?” I say, sounding stupid even to myself.

“Yes. Their bodies, anyway. But they are… asleep. Only deeper.”

My head hurts. Not from the struggle to understand. More like a childhood thing. Like when my skull first came alive with song and light, which nearly killed me.

I look at Nyx. A little spit from my open mouth catches in the wind and strings outward.

“Matter,” Nyx says.

Nyx points to the ground between the two men. Immediately the two figures throw themselves into the ground. Not onto it; into it. Their bodies wrestle the earth, turning and convulsing. Their musculature constricts and expands. It is difficult to tell where one’s legs and arms end and the other’s begin. The earth, too, is dynamic, like clay. Their faces, their open mouths, the cords in their necks animate the space between agony and ecstasy.

My heart breaks with the violent beauty of it. I can’t move. I can’t not look.

Their bodies sink a meter or so, then begin to glow and heat and change colors—red to orange to yellow to green to aqua to indigo to a purple so purple it’s black. Soon their bodies are decomposing right before my eyes. I’m breathing so hard I nearly hyperventilate. I reach my hand out, and I think I shout, but Nyx pushes me hard away from them. As their bodies sink deeper and deeper into the earth, I feel another urge to dive down, grab at least one, pull him back to life. Surely I can save one thing.

Again Nyx blocks me. The song in my head pressures my skull and grows as loud as the sound I remember from the epic angry sea. When, after the terrible watching, I can no longer regard a trace of their bodies, their skeletons, their human form, the song subsides. Slowly and in waves.

At my feet, and extending away from Nyx and me, is a growing carpet of moss. Tiny white flowers. Insects. Vines. The roots of a tree. Life.

“Now you,” Nyx says.

“Me what?”

“What, have you suddenly become an idiot? Your turn. You bring the children.”

At the sound of the word children I stiffen, tree-like. “There’s no way,” I say flatly.

“On the contrary,” Nyx says, “this is the way. Put your hands against the dirt wall.”

“No.” In my head, I see the children in the graves I buried. How I hid them from harm, how they died because of me, how I resurrected them, how they died again at my hands. Every face. Every small body. Their eyes. Mouths. I can’t do it again.

But Nyx means to let things between us live or die here.

The wind subsides, as if Nyx asked it to. “You want up to CIEL? You want your beloved Leone? This is how. Your body. Engenderines were never eco-terrorists. On the contrary. Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another. We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that. Not Leone’s, not even yours. Now bring the children. They have a vital energy. Without it, nothing matters.”

I stare at Nyx for a long time. Then I stare at the ground. Then I walk to the wall of dirt and put my hands against it. I think of their small bodies—their eyes, their mouths. The dirt vibrates. The blue light and song at my head reverbs. And then here they are, two cherub-like kids, one squatting, one standing. What’s left of my heart, shatters.

Nyx lies down on the ground. The children do the same, as if being put to sleep by their mother. The blue light and song emanating from me does not save me from being emotionally gutted. But soon the children have lost their forms to color and sound: water.

They become water.

I stare at the unusual graves. I put my hand into a small stream forming. I stare at the graves of the beautiful young men, too, gone green with nature. Life and death marking the same spot. “How many men are there…”

“Thousands,” Nyx says quietly. “An army.”

I close my eyes. For reasons I can’t explain, I see Olms—so many Olms they make their own mountain. Behind my eyelids, I see strings of light going from the Olms to all the stars in the sky. Then I see just two Olms, curled and wriggling in the palm of a woman’s hand. The woman is whispering. She is beautiful.

I open my eyes. I look up. “How many children?”

“Many.”

“Will any of them… have life? Real life? Human life? Or was my role on Earth simply to condemn them all to dirt?”

“Most of them will have ‘real life,’ as you call it. Some who are regenerated will become elements. Like water. Some will be for the population, whatever that turns out to mean. But that’s not the point right now. Look, it’s pretty simple,” Nyx says.

“How is this fucking simple? You want me to witness these humans—if they really are alive—you want me to watch them devolve right in front of me? How is that not murder?” I feel once again like pure destruction. My blood feels thick in my forearms and legs.

“Not at all,” Nyx says without alarm. “You are giving them a reason to live. You are giving them back their sacred relationship to the planet and the very cosmos they came from.”

To be human. What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it meant rejoining everything we are made from. The song in my head pulses in a single ear-shattering note, then silence. Like an auditory exclamation point.

“I can get you up, if you can kill their future up there. They’re all that’s left of a self-centered species. They aim to destroy us, suck out what’s left of Earth’s resources. You have to choose. Your past is there. You know it is. You have to reenter your own story. And it will likely cost you this thing you call ‘life.’ But it will save your beloved Leone. And much, much more.”

Leone. Like a word untethered from a body.

“What do I do?” I say, the wind still around us.

“Give me your rib,” Nyx says, moving toward me.

“Excuse me?” I touch my own skin.

“Your body. We need it. A piece at a time. Engenderine.”

I stare at the hand that’s missing a finger. If my body carries something better than a self, I surrender it. Nyx lifts my shirt. Pushes a fist inward. Fleshward. I try not to flinch and then I lose consciousness. When I come to, Nyx is gone again and I’m just my wounded body, sutured where a rib should be and face in the dirt. But the dirt is vibrating. I stand up inside sound, the song amplifying in my head, on the ground, up into sky.

The ugly audacity of pomp brings bile up Christine’s throat.

The thunder of CIEL’s orchestral pageantry shakes the walls around Christine and her players as they fill an anteroom next to the pre-execution theater. “For fuck’s sake,” she mutters. They would have to endure some horrid musical preamble, and no doubt several empty idiotic speeches, before her own show could get going. Ah. Now she recognizes the tune: It is the “Theme of Ascension.” Which is, more accurately, the goddam dirge that was created for the celebratory moment of ascending to CIEL. To be followed, no doubt, by the “Crescendo of Dematerialization.” After your fiftieth birthday, and poof —back to shattered DNA strands and space junk. With a soundtrack.