Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

In a matter of days, they, and everything alive left in CIEL, will burn in the radioactive solar flares of the sun. That life-giving star. That fiery death’s head.

Leone’s body on Earth. It’s the only life I’ve ever wanted. Bringing her home is the death of me, I know. I don’t care. She’ll live. She’ll become. Whatever that ends up meaning. Some story we don’t know yet untied from all the ones that have come before.

“Why death?” Leone sits propped up against a boulder, looking out toward the sea at the mouth of the Blue Grotto. My head in her lap. The sun muted and laden. She’s still weak, but her body will eventually heal.

“It’s the least I can give,” I say. “My body will create a mega catalyst of sorts.”

She coughs.

She closes her eyes, listening to the waves scoop up and drag the rocks on the shore, clicking like a new language. It seems true that everything from this moment on will be a new language. Every element and body and energy redirecting itself, making different patterns and forms. When she opens her eyes again, her pupil, cornea, iris, all look like micronebulae.

I sit up. The stone in my throat throbs enough to choke my voice from me.

I curl into Leone’s torso and nestle my head between her jaw and shoulder. The body is a real place. A territory as vast as Earth.

What used to be the sun is setting, kissing the lip of the water in the distance. It’s beautiful, but different than before. It looks… It doesn’t matter, someone will make up new words for it. I smile. Tears fill my eyes. I try to picture Leone’s face, every detail, her neck and jaw and shoulders.

“Where’s this special suicide supposed to take place?” Leone asks.

“Sarawak Caves. When you feel up to it. I want you to be there. I’ve learned a new way to travel.”

Leone laughs.

“And it’s not suicide,” I correct her.

“Why there?”

“Biodiversity,” I say. Leone stares at me without emotion. Or with something bordering on incredulity. “The other choice was underneath the ice near what used to be Russia.”

Leone looks back out at the water. “Good choice. I approve. Russia’s cold as fuck.”

Leone struggles beneath me so that I have to surrender my former position hidden against the warmth of her flesh. I hold her tight, speaking over her shoulder.

Leone sits as upright as a slice of shale. Her eyes bullets. “I hate you.”

But I know she’ll do anything for me. “Leone?”

“What?”

Nothing comes out of my mouth. I try to make my torso and arms into a sentence. I try to give her the words through my body. I want her to fall in love. I want her to fall in love so hard it hurts. I want that love to be something I’ve never even imagined. With everything left in me, I want to say something beautiful. Something unlike anything that’s ever been said between two people—not in the history I’ve known, anyway.

I point to the dusk—to the place where the sky and its fading light meet the dark and depth of the water, where soon the sky, stitching star to star, will reflect the black sea perfectly.

I press my cheek against Leone’s. I press my lips to hers. First she resists, then she doesn’t.

Mouth to mouth and hip to hip and rib cage to rib cage we quietly go down into one another—the microcosm of space held in a doubled body, the starjunk within us igniting, our bones, briefly, singing. I am not killing her. She is not dying. Desire blooms between us, my ravaged body, hers. We will not conceive this way. Reproduction will become another kind of story.

She locks my mouth shut with hers.

I can feel her teeth and tongue with mine. I nod. I kiss yes into her.

When the time comes, Leone’s hand shakes only briefly as she retrieves Little Bee from her leg holster. She presses her lips again against mine. The warm wet of blood from my neck spreads quickly over her knife hand. I swallow. Blood pours from my neck. Everything is a blur, colder but still beautiful, different, like looking into a microscope. Or into space.

When the sound of my last labored breath ends, and my eyes go dull and blank, Leone will close them. Then Leone will lift me and carry me to the edge of the world, the cusp between earth and sea and sky. She will rest my body in the dirt next to the regenerating ocean and lie down on top of me.

A night and day will pass. Leone will not move, even when she can no longer feel a trace of my body left, my skull gone to worms, my torso and ribs sunk into earth and extending in lines between plate tectonics, the cradle of my pelvis disintegrating and rebecoming in new DNA strands, my femur, tibia, fibula, the phalanges of my feet and hands. I don’t know where they will go, I just know we are made from everything we see.

Because one human who loved another asked for it.

The dirt wetted and blooming in all directions.

A different story, leading whoever is left toward something we’ve not yet imagined.

Leone reaches into the pocket nearest Little Bee and pulls out the one material thing, tangible and otherworldly, Joan ever gave her, an artifact. On paper.

Leone.

If there is such a thing as a soul, then you are mine.

I have a series of confessions to make. They are nonsensical, I’m sure, but what does it matter? Life lost its senses long ago. I admire the way you soldier on as if there is something we are moving “to.” Living “for.” Have I ever told you that you are the best pilot I’ve ever met in my life, the best sharpshooter, the finest singer and drinker as well? Of course I haven’t. It’s been your bad luck to end up with an isolate who is nearly a mute.

In the beginning, I carried two pieces of paper with us. You know—the ones you used to ask me to pull out so that you could smell from time to time. I don’t know when you stopped doing that, or why. I suspect that was the moment you lost hope that our lives would ever lead to anything but this, wandering and surviving.

On one of the pieces of paper I wrote a letter to humanity. Yes, I mean the boy—the last one—the one who tried to convince us there were others. I sent a letter with him. Remember? Were you surprised? I know you think of me like the walking dead, and maybe that’s true—maybe I am a corpse version of my former self. I’ve often wondered why, on some half-moonlit night, you did not put me out of my misery. I sometimes think you may have gotten very close to taking Little Bee to my throat, before hesitating at the last moment. Your heart is too big. Do you know that? I know that, your whole life, you’ve paraded a thick and cynical self, attached to no one and nothing, galaxies away from words like “love,” but I also know that you’re as filled with emotion as a pulsar. It’s a wonder you haven’t supernovaed from the inside out.

The other piece of paper, you are holding in your hand now. I did have something to say, you see. Oceans. Universes.

Leone.

If you were gone, I promised myself I’d simply return to matter. Maybe I’d walk into the sea, a de-evolving mammal, back to my breathable blue past. Maybe I’d yet leap into the sky from the edge of a cliff.

To fall.

I know how much it bothers you that I’m not more… verbal. I’ve known for years. My voice somehow left my actions, that year I woke in Lascaux with you. The last thing I remembered before that? Burning. My own capture, torture, trial, and burning.

And then I was born again.

Into a cave life, among new species now allowed to thrive, their predators erased or dwindling.

It never occurred to me to question how I survived.