Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

“If I cannot make life, I’ll take it—from its very core.” Jean de Men lets his robes slide off of his body, the great waves of grafts cascading down around him like white lava. Naked, he looks to Christine almost like a terrible new terrain. Something bone-colored and multiple in its atrophies, as if death itself had been rebodied. Then he brings the bloody mass of his excavation up to his face and eats at it, a gurgling filling the room.

Christine’s urine leaves her bladder like a child’s. The guards still hold her head nearly against the wound of the woman. But Christine’s spirit does not waver. She did not come here to die. Nor to be humiliated or tortured. She came here to perform. And to kill. What’s more, death does not take the floating woman. On the contrary, her body—even at the site of the gash—seems to radiate heat, even energy. Whoever she is, she is the second strongest woman Christine has ever witnessed. The thought stokes a fury in Christine, makes it grow larger than earth. The smell of piss, blood, shit, and vengeance nearly makes her high.

In spite of everything, she opens her mouth.

“ Joan, ” is all she says. Low and loud, raising her eyes up from the wretched scene of the victim’s body to meet Jean de Men’s. She sees his face shiver, though he continues to hold his hoary grin. And with that trigger word, her players spring toward their truer actions.

Never has youth looked more beautifully or violently alive. Like brutal living poems.

A random arm, then hand, shoots out from nowhere, and Christine sees the woman from the metal slab slash off half of Jean de Men’s dangling face grafts. They fly through the air and land like stranded bloody lace serviettes on the slickening floor. In the whir of the bloodspray, Christine crawls toward Trinculo. As she reaches his body, barely alive, she ungags him. He raises his arm and points to Jean de Men, who is being attacked on all sides by the surge of youths, his flesh slicing away everywhere. And yet he towers and roars, seemingly larger than anyone or thing in the room.

Her body shudders involuntarily as she attempts to embrace Trinc. He winces but does not pull away. “Christ,” he breathes out, pointing in the direction of the carnage. “Paps!”

Poor, beautiful thing. He’s losing it, she thinks. But as she focuses her gaze and follows his shoulder, bicep muscle, forearm, hand and extended finger, at the center of the action, she sees it.

Jean de Men has the breasts of an old woman.

She is seized by her own recognition. Jean de Men is not a man but what is left of a woman. Christine witnesses all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where… where life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp.

Then, like the thrum of a gong or drum, a voice Christine had not written into the script—and yet a voice not completely foreign to her either, a voice she’d held in her heart her entire life—comes to life, in medias res, so that all attention freezes, all heads turn toward the sound radiating from a blue fire:

“You should have killed me better.”

The center of the flame is blue.

Blue light at my head and blue light everywhere around me. In the kimena bringing me to CIEL, understanding cuts my consciousness. My power is not power. It never was. Power is a story humans made when they feared the world they were born into. And feared each other. I am part of all matter and all energy. I am as the smallest particle, meaningless and yet everything. I am quantum.

I materialize into a room filled with fighting. At the time and place that Nyx instructed. CIEL is chaos, figures raging in all directions. I burn where I stand. The fire I arrive with consumes me, but not as severely as I remember during my former execution; there is something distinctly unlike death in it. It stings and puckers my skin, but only slightly. My hair smells of wood and sulfur. It crackles but does not entirely light up. Then I see Nyx in the new theater; she walks into the flames with me. We are eye to eye. Nothing about Nyx is on fire either, and yet we stand in the center of the burning. My rib cage aches.

Through the curtain of blue flame, I can make out bodies. The scene is total mayhem. What I see is a mixture of color and sound, and yet I can distinguish minute details. There are bodies—a kind of orgy of bodies—and for a moment, I think I am witnessing a kind of dance, until I see the rage as color and sound, particle and wave. And blood. A battle is raging. Some of the bodies are gleaming white in my sight, without color, spectral.

“Listen,” Nyx says. I hear it. The white-bodied ones, their sound is discordant and irregular. Others are filled with color and chorus, like strange chimes, all differently hued and shaded and pulsing with harmony, major and minor. It is as if Nyx and I are rearranging the energies in the room.

No life can equal such a death.

I do not know if Nyx actually says it, or if our intertwined bodies have somehow borne the sentence into my consciousness. Color and song rage in and through the flames. The movement of sound and light rise not outside of my body, but through our twinned bodies. Helix. Extending in waves. Nyx’s skin rippling. Eros. Thanatos. Dizzy hyperreality. Nyx’s head rocking back. Nyx’s body separating from mine.

“Joan.”

This time it is not Nyx’s voice.

It is Leone’s.

On the other side of the flames is Leone, quickly losing life, right in front of me. I let Nyx go and surge forward with such force I create a tremor in the room, blue flame shooting in rays around me, accompanied by a vortex of sound being sucked into silence. Nyx tries to grab my arm to stop me, and I nearly wrench it off pulling away. When I reach Leone’s body, my throat locks; my injured ribs feel as if they might explode outward, shattering my body from the inside out. She’s been gutted. She is so pale she looks gray.

But then another body bears down from behind me. I know the voice; I would know it anywhere. It is the voice that sentenced me to burn to death. It is the last voice I heard at the end of the last battle, laughing. It is the voice of cruelty. Of power. Of the Sky, and those who left humanity to rot like refuse on a clod of dead dirt.

Jean de Men grabs me by the neck and starts to squeeze, whispering into my ear. I can feel his spittle as he speaks.

“Did you intend to rise a phoenix? How poetic. I’m going to kill you now, differently from before. I’ll take your life, but attach you to a perfect machine that will keep only your internal organs alive, your useful properties. Your reproductive properties. And then I’ll people this new world endlessly with whomever I like. I’ll people it with devils, if I like. You’ll be an ever-producing cunt, and that’s all you’ll be. Not a myth or a legend, not hope for anyone anywhere.”

My throat constricts. My breathing lurches. My eyes heat and swell. But I can feel the life left in Leone more than my own, and I can feel something else, too.

A woman I’ve never seen before, except in dreamscapes, throwing her white and glistening body straight at us, a human catapult. The woman is screaming at the top of her lungs—screaming some strange lyric, some poem or incantation that gains force and tenor the more she speaks. It is the woman from my dream. My song. My life. Her name comes to me with the same force as her body. Christine.

The blue light at the side of my head roars to life as if to provide accompaniment. Jean de Men’s grip around my neck loosens. Everyone in the room but me grabs at their ears as sound vibrations penetrate through bone and blood. The symphonic blast emanating from my body ripples the very air and walls of the room.