Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“Ah,” Jean de Men growls. “I see you’ve not lost your knack for reinventing the utterly obvious.”

“As usual, your… eminence, you play the game entire galaxies ahead of me. I could never hope to compete in the realm of such brilliance—as brilliant as the fire of the sun,” she says, bowing for effect. “And I mean that literally.” She astral projects her heart into Trinculo’s.

For a moment Jean de Men seems to her like a cartoon of himself. It is easy to think of him as a buffoon—this idiotic blowhard, this accidentally ascended charlatan. But Christine knows better. All of human history has taught us how easily the clownish, the insane, the needy, the self-absorbed, even the at-first righteous can be grooved or embossed by the simplicity of power erosions.

Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil? Whether he registers her true meaning or not, she can’t be sure. Then he stares her down and bellows, loud enough to shake her shoulders: “ Places, all! These proceedings will commence.”

She does not want to lose the chance to correct her logistics and aim. Would the woman’s presence impact her plan? Did de Men have something in mind with her body? “I wonder, sir, might you introduce the audience to your companion?” Christine gestures in the direction of the floating extra.

The reptilian slide that Jean de Men’s robes make as they Ssss across the floor, ceases. He turns first to the woman on the alloyed cot, and then back to Christine. “In honor of the spectacle at hand, a most venerable execution, I have decided to amplify the subtext.”

Christine shoots a look at the bloody mass that is Trinculo. He does not return her gaze. “Subtext?”

“Why, yes,” de Men continues. “Did you think me a dull-witted interpreter of textuality? After all these years, after all of our grafting showdowns, after all of the times I have successfully asserted your place in the machinations of things, you think that I have not anticipated an extra effort on your part?” He holds his arms extended out on either side, one hand in the direction of Trinculo, the other aimed at the woman on the metal bed. “Why, Christine. I believe our literary aims form something of a union. Each of us is merely missing an element that will take the trope to its truest form.” And then he strides the distance so that his bloodless and hoary face flaps loom over Christine’s head.

When he speaks she can feel the heat of his breath. “Happy birthday,” he whispers. “I’ve brought you a gift from Earth.”

So the woman is somehow connected to Joan. The great clotted fuck hopes to set a cosmic trap. Well then. The more the merrier, Christine concludes with the deduction speed of someone whose endgame has death at its heart.

With all the dramatic enthusiasm she can muster, she claps wildly, exclaiming, “How perfectly mysterious of you to heighten the drama!” Her smile remains long after the words leave her mouth.

Christine then turns to her players, each armed with the transparent wires around their forearms and wrists like the limbs of insects. She has to admit, the flame in their eyes, at another time in her life, would have ignited something like hope in her. Now she has but one ending braided from three strands: to kill the most powerful man in the Sky, to reanimate the story of Joan, and to conjure an epic ending with the only being left on their slipshod pile of space junk who she cares about, taking the whole new world shithouse with them.

She smells Trinculo’s flayed skin even as the theater darkens. When a stage light illuminates the opening scene, Christine thinks she catches the eye of the woman on the floating cot—are her eyes open? Jean de Men sits next to her and looks to be stroking her thigh. Revulsion creeps up Christine’s gullet, but she swallows it. He has made a spectacle of his violence to remind them all that his control of CIEL is anything he says it is. Always buffeted by technological sentries and killing instruments. Well then, she’ll call and raise; she’ll incorporate his repugnant tableau straight into her drama. The woman on the floating metal slab is alive.

The audience bobs in the dark. They disgust her, too. She surveys their glowing bodies moving ever-corpseward in the dimmed lights. What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment and some overblown and brief feeling of superiority through… what? Height? Floating above their former world? Like a permanently displayed opera audience caught midclap. Useless and vapid aesthetic. Maybe there had been a moment, some revolutionary moment, when they’d had a chance to be something better or more beautiful. But the moment was gone. As far as she’s concerned, being closer to the stars just means closer to what we are made of—death minerals. The faster she can contribute light to the night sky, the better.

All executions were allowed a kind of accompanying show, but Christine had convinced Jean de Men by upping the bet, by conjuring the specter of his primal enemy and adding it to the so-called proceedings. That is what Trinculo’s trial had produced: conviction on the charge of conspiring to re-mythologize the world’s greatest enemy, incitement to discourse and desire toward dissent. And she was alive . Was she alive? De Men thought so. He’d already been hunting for her. What he’d succeeded in locating was someone who knew her, someone who provided a new occasion for torture.

Christine hates him so much she wants to crush his stupid jaw.

She pulls her shoulders up and back with her intention. What she intends in the moment is a trifecta of irreducible direct action, punctuated with the newly grafted bodies of her troupe. What she intends is a literary and flesh uprising, creation and destruction locked in a lover’s kiss.

Let it begin.

Act I stages the emergence of the heretic known as Joan of Dirt in the early years when she corrupted the rebellion against Jean de Men’s armies and tricked the resistance forces into following her. It’s fairly consistent with CIEL propaganda doctrine. A series of soliloquies with minimalist pantomimed war in the background. As Act I finds its conclusion, her prize pupil—the grafts not quite losing the last pink tinges of pain—emerges center stage, naked and lined with the writing: “In the beginning, then, was her body bound to dirt and organic life, to trees and sea and minerals.” And then a great hum emanates from the different actors, various pitches and notes fill the room, a tune finally remembered, an epic melody, the trace of which every last human yet carries in the gray folds of memory, the song that rang them all like human tuning forks when they still had a choice: earth and Joan, or saving a self.

The audience leans forward in their chairs, their very DNA subconsciously recalling things they already decided to condemn.

As Act II is performed, the highlights from the trial of Joan of Dirt, Christine’s heart further fractures. The story of Joan and the body of her beloved Trinculo wind their way around her internal organs. Amidst the reenactment of the trial dialogue, her players erect a kind of scaffolding, so that the tension of the oncoming staged execution can be rendered, even anticipated. Nothing like a good execution story to make the audience salivate. It is the sum total of all entertainment—to drive the viewer to the cusp of their own existence, to heighten it, to leave their mouths open in a gasp shape. And yes, yes, she can tell from their body language, the shapes their mouths are making, they are all want.

She wishes them all dead.

She is already anxious for Act III, for Act III embeds a simple gesture that interrupts the expected climax—the moment before Joan of Dirt’s death by fire. In this borrowed time leading up to the execution of her beloved Trinculo, Christine will detour the story.