Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

The song was never inside me. The song used me as a conduit. The song is all the universe in strange focus.

From within the flames—flames that are me—Jean de Men’s body contorts.

That’s when I see it. Something that inverts all logic. Jean de Men. He has a naked and withered woman’s body, or the horrible attempts at the creation or destruction of one, her full height towering above anyone in the room, her bleeding grafts and residual folds of skin undulating like an octopus.

I pull away from the horrid corporeal truth of her. Wrong mother. Woman destroyed. I push energy like a wall between us with my hands. She lunges at me, Christine biting and clamped to her shoulder like a barnacle.

“Burn, heretic!” Jean de Men sends a row of technological sentries hurling toward me, throwing their own flames.

But I do not burn.

“The flames you sent me to, I give them back to you. Your planet sends her regards,” I say. Almost as if someone had scripted the lines.

And then it is just the two of us at one another, trying to wrestle-kill each other, twisted into strands of light and sound.

“Hold the embrace!” It’s Nyx’s voice. Nonsense, I think, but I do it anyway. I hold Jean de Men in my arms as if unto death. As if we were lovers. As if it were a death grip or kiss. The ground beneath us begins to melt. When I look down, some neon-colored corridor is opening, a drop to something, I don’t know what. The song in my head bleeds out into the entire room. Olms flash on and off all around us like my memory of firecrackers. A hole. A hole of light.

I convulse with understanding: I’ve made my own Skyline.

I seize the moment, I grab Jean de Men by the throat with both hands, even as the enemy stands tall as a tree in front of me. I mean to send the energy the earth has given me all my life back into this hole. I mean to send this thing back into matter itself. Even if it kills me. I will take Jean de Men back down to the planet, to die in the heat and radiation of my embrace.

Music pulses through the floors and walls. The entire room has become an astral orchestra. For the first time in my life, the song in my head is not just in my head. It is omnipresent. In everyone. Of everyone and everything. I squeeze Jean de Men’s neck with a force even I didn’t know I had.

A flash of light. A weird calm surrounds us. I feel Nyx’s hand on my shoulder. Hear Nyx’s voice. “Let go,” Nyx says. “Let this destruction go. Collect the others. Take Leone. This killing scene has another side. Creation.”

Cutting into the moment, a ghoulish thing—a red corpse? A skeleton out of Renaissance art?—leaps onto the back of Jean de Men. Is it a demon? A harpie? Just before the creature brandishes a large scalpel, I can swear I hear the reddened thing say: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, you rat-hearted dung-wombed cow.” And the red creature slits open the chest of Jean de Men.

Then it’s just Nyx thrusting both hands into the carcass, opening up Jean de Men’s body, summoning an electrical current as old as a star.

Christine, burning white with skin grafts, stands up among the carnage, a new definition of the word beautiful emerging.

The three of them—Nyx, Christine, and the red and raw creature—circle and ravage Jean de Men. Slowly at first and then with increasing velocity and form, at de Men’s feet, children begin to materialize from nothingness and rise. First just a few, then many, a hundred or more. Naked children. The wail that emerges from Jean de Men reverbs my jaw; her head rocks back; some as-yet unnamed emotion beyond measure. The children of all colors and ages swarm from the ground up, devouring, consuming, like a swarm of bees at a honeycomb, until I see nothing left of Jean de Men beneath the multitudinous wave.

The simplicity of the next moment cleaves my heart.

I stride the distance left to my beloved Leone and scoop her body up. The aquamarine corridor of the Skyline I’ve created gleams like a pool on the floor in the chaos. I look at the small army of men who came with me, their battle now done, so beautiful just standing there. I look to the pool, where they gather. Then a surreal haze takes them all, a great rush of color and sound, a fire of indigo and purple, a great big ball of burning blue deathsong. The last thing I see is the white woman Christine holding the red-as-meat man in her arms like Christ: Pietà is the only word for it in the world.

With Leone cradled in my arms and only a faint hope toward Earth, I jump.

“How long, my love?” Christine holds Trinculo in her arms and lap, her back against a window filled with space. Both of them dewy with something new. Something beautifully, erotically human. Unstoppable sweat. None of the CIEL environmental controls are able to keep up with the new trajectory, straight into the eye of the sun. Maybe they are not sweating. But they only believe that they are.

Around their bodies, nothing but carnage.

“You know, in some of the early representations of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, she looks to be fondling his tiny penis,” Trinculo says, steady voiced and serious.

She can’t help herself. She laughs.

“Christ,” he says, and at the sound of her old nickname she bursts into tears. But he keeps on: “Did you know that the penis of the Argonaut mollusk was detachable? These male mollusks had a sacrificial way of impregnating their female counterparts.” The lights in the room flicker and die, but he keeps speaking. “The male had one arm longer than his others, known as a hectocotylus, which is used to transfer sperm to the female. The arm stored up the sperm, and when the male found a female he wanted to mate with, he would detach the arm during the mating process. I often think of that.”

Between laughter and sobbing, Christine manages: “What else is left in that obscene mind of yours?”

“Well, since you asked, the genitalia of the female spotted hyena—you remember what those look like? Hyenas?”

She nods.

“That of the female closely resembled that of the male: the clitoris was shaped and positioned like a penis, and was capable of erection. The female also possessed no external vagina; the labia were fused to form a pseudo-scrotum. The pseudo-penis was traversed to its tip by a central urogenital canal, through which the female urinated, copulated, and gave birth.” A low electronic voice articulates a danger warning. But Trinculo does not pause. There would be no repairing what he’d set asunder; only he knew what he had done to their otherworld. Only he knew how to undo it.

“This unusual trait made mating more laborious for the male than in other mammals,” he continues, “while also ensuring that rape was physically impossible. Of the female, that is.” He pauses. “Leopard slugs had long blue penises that jutted out from the tops of their heads.” He stares off into space, then adds, “Don’t even get me started on the corkscrew penis of ducks.”

“This is what you are pondering, at the end of life?” Christine asks gently, lovingly, perhaps more lovingly than she’s ever asked anything before.

“Life,” he says, “I’m thinking about life. How good it was. Could have been, if the order of things had been different. Might be, next time. In a way, you and I? We are the proud parents of what’s going to happen down there. I’m sorry about this next bit, because I’m awfully late, but I wanted to be sure to get this in.” He looks up at her, his eyelids missing, his nose mostly gone. “Happy belated birthday. You moon-breasted skysong. You wet and ever-blooming perfect.”

She leans in, opens her mouth to his, and lets their souls merge.