Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

Christine steals a glance at Trinculo, who seems to smile in a kind of lipless gory grin, or that’s what she hopes anyway, and then she looks at Jean de Men, whose face puckers and twitches. As the actress-warrior Nyx continues her soliloquy Christine thinks she sees the woman on the metal slab stir. Christine can see plainly now that she is working her hand toward a place below her thigh, stretching it beyond reason, fingers straining. Is it possible she has a weapon?

Christine circles the stage as benevolently and submissively as possible, bowing now and again silently to audience members and hunk-of-junk minions and even to Jean de Men as she sweeps past him and sees that—yes!—the woman on the floating metal slab has managed to retrieve a knife—a knife the size of a finger. Christine’s chest flutters alive.

In the heat and almost of things, Christine’s sphincter clenches. Until now, all was seduction. But from this point forward, into Act III, the plot involves deceit. Though the word deceit feels inadequate: the real word is coup . Christine produces an antique opera spyglass—one she’d hidden amongst her salvaged Earth treasures; she hears a murmur of admiration from the audience. She leans into the performance, the insatiable action on its way.

By the end of Act II, the specially constructed faux-scaffolding is clicking with sparks; Christine even smells the burn of electricity. The audience takes this burning smell as a special theatrical effect, not as what it is: the collected energy of Olms building a structure. The ensuing dialogue nearly achieves the sacred sphere of prayer or song. Dead silence rises within the audience’s listening. Nothing is more enticing to watch than death.

What comes next is the pièce de résistance: Christine makes her way again to the cusp of Jean de Men’s grotesque train of flesh, splayed out on the floor. Trinculo, though bound like meat, is within arm’s reach. The last line spoken transitions from a soliloquy devised to bridge the play both closer to the present—or at least to their memory of the execution of Joan—and the player giving the soliloquy closer to the audience, right to the lap of Jean de Men. Near enough to Jean de Men that the player’s knees are nearly touching when they speak the following lines:

“Remember the Maid above all, alongside all we have recollected here, for her might outmights even the great Iliad, as her fight is meant not to bestow power, but to murder it in its false consciousness and return it to dirt, to compost, to worm’s meat— worm’s… meat…”

Christine presses her attention in.

The audience’s attention changes shape… something in the plot twists.

The words Maid and worm’s meat suspend in the air.

When Jean de Men speaks he barely moves, his voice, barely audible and elongated and reptilian: “ Yooouuuuuuuu…”

He turns on Christine. The play’s ending arrested. He aims his words with measured venom: “You will not live to see an ovation. And no one and nothing you care about will breathe again.” He strikes her head so hard several of her teeth finally do shoot loose. Her nose and mouth bleed.

Trinculo tries to stand but is forced nearly to his knee knobs by CIEL minions. Christine rises, unafraid of the oncoming storm. She always knew Jean de Men’s actions would enter the drama. In fact, she’d counted on it. Collecting herself, she takes a run at him, leaps up, swings her arm, and jams the handle of her spyglass straight into the eyehole of Jean de Men. A collective gasp rises. The first flutterings of chaos erupt as half of the audience stands up while the other half shuffles toward exits.

What Jean de Men does next derails her plot. Instead of instantly raining more insults or abuse down upon her, instead of throwing her across the room—events she and her players are ready for—he moves with an ugly calm. He walks toward the unknown woman on the floating metal slab. “You want to see the value of women warriors in the epic story of humanity? Hmmm? You want to see an allegory for your petty plight? Here. Let me help you. Bring Christine closer. This is a performance she won’t want to miss.”

With that, a spotlight Christine had not asked for shines hotly on the body of the suspended woman. Her players motionless, caught in light.

As a mechanical guard jerks and drags Christine to where Jean de Men stands, she stares at Trinculo’s face. If you could call it a face. What is a face when it has been distorted beyond recognition? And yet she knows his body better than she knows herself: his eyes. His teeth. The hole of his mouth. His jaw and brow bone. If his head had been only a skull, she’d have loved and made love to the skull.

But Christine’s attention is wrenched forcibly toward another. Up close she can now see that the woman, it turns out, has been severely beaten. When de Men stops shouting, Christine hears the woman’s crushed breathing, and even a kind of moan, barely audible but human. Christine notices the woman’s knife hand poised against her own leg.

“Bring her head and face near,” Jean de Men commands, and Christine’s face is shoved down toward the woman’s hips. Jean de Men pushes back the folds of his heavy crimson robe, pushes back the folds of grafts from his forearm, and displays a scalpel. Christine shoots a glance back at her troupe. They stand motionless, naked, their actions momentarily arrested, but they stand on the balls of their feet, she can see, and their neck muscles are taut as animals’. They are ready. She need only give the word. Her mind is in overdrive.

A calm like the eye of a hurricane comes over Christine. Time opens, briefly. There are different ways to understand cruelty. One can observe it, in which case the scene can become a kind of aesthetic, as with a play or painting or a film; regardless of the emotions evoked by the display, the distance keeps the viewer safe from harm. It is said that those who are forced to repeatedly observe brutality adopt this point of view as a survival strategy. One can also be a victim, and often in such cases victims can cope only by leaving their bodies. A disassociation with a vengeance, with the hopes of either survival or death. Finally, one can be the perpetrator. That most primal darkness is alive and well in all of us, only the slimmest moral code to stop our actions. With repeated indulgence, the distinctions disappear between the small and sad desire to be well liked, for instance, or held in ways we didn’t get held, or breast-fed, or just clapped on the back after a drink like a friend, and the large force of giving pain, which serves as a kind of intense opiate against the fear that we are nothing or, worse, unlovable.

In that moment, Christine hurls into a nearly unbearable storm of the three: she is observer. She is victim. And she is perpetrator. Her face so close to the blood and bone of it, she could have crawled into the woman’s body.

And then it’s Jean de Men’s voice returning her to the present tense. “One must be willing to penetrate life in order to fully live it,” he whispers. Then he slices open the pants of the woman on the litter, drives the scalpel between her legs quickly, and then lets the silver tool drop to the floor, digging his fingers between her legs. He plunges his hand, then wrist, forearm, elbow up into her body, blood and scream shocking everything living. The audience a murmuring gasping mass.

For a moment, horror freezes Christine. Her voice seizes, locks in her throat. She smells pennies and putrefaction. The woman thunders and wrenches against her binds—more animal now than human. Jean de Men’s face multiplies in layers and curls, his smile overtaking his overgrafted face, and then he pulls his hand back out. Blood and sinew and slime juice over his hand and arm. Christine gags. Sanguine fluid rivers between the woman’s legs and pours onto the floor.