Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

Theft, assault, and murder are still punishable, but rarely occur on CIEL—there is very little race, class, or gender distinction among us any longer, the wealth distribution ranges from affluent to very affluent. Thus violence between people meandering around each other like elaborate lace figures fizzled out. Theological insurrections or holy wars are the stuff of historical dramas, staged with spectacular effects for ravenous audiences. The various religions that were the source of so much war on Earth historically went out with a whimper when we realized our sky world was, to put it bluntly, dull as death. God has no weight in space except as reinvented entertainment. Trying to cheat your ending, trying to secretly live beyond the age of fifty, well, that is more than punishable. There is no place to hide or run to in a closed system. Your death, fittingly, is staged and broadcasted with great choreography and pomp. Endings are theatrical spectacles.

So what crimes are left? Are we just pacifists and dullards? Chief among the CIEL offenses are any acts resembling the act of sex, the idea of sex, the physical indicators of sexuality. All sex is restricted to textual, and all texts are grafts. Our bodies are meant to be read and consumed, debated, exchanged, or transformed only cerebrally. Any version of the act itself is an affront to social order, not to mention a brutal reminder of our impotency as a nonprocreating group.

Another offense carrying dramatic weight is any attempt at anything but blind allegiance when it comes to the official deathstory of Joan of Dirt—the last great story before our ascension. The death that gave us life.

Neither Trinculo nor I have any intention of repenting anything. I sit in the white doing nothing but feeling my own arms and legs, running my fingers up and down my body. Bringing the flesh story silently to life. The room’s censors blink and hiss. I smile at my own illegibility. There is no scanner that can read flesh words.

In an effort to make the Liberty Room as receptive as possible to frightened accusees, to encourage confessions I suppose, the sounds of space are piped in on a permanent basis. The sound is like a cross between distressed whalesong, or my memory of whalesong, and irregular high-pitched tinnitus, interrupted by low vibrating moans. As I sit alone in my Liberty Room, I concentrate on imagining a kind of experimental soundtrack, matching the sounds with the images forming in my head and to the graftstory under my fingers. And always the haunting bursts of a forgotten song sporadically ripping in and out of my brain’s audio.

I stare hard at the white walls. Floor. Ceiling. I mean to face off with them. If they want everything of me—every heartbeat, facial tic, thought, or fart—I’ll give it to them. On my own terms.

First, I strip. Then, I mold myself ass side down to the white floor of the Liberty Room and masturbate.

Oh I don’t mean I somehow grow a clitoris back or slit open my own crotch to re-create a pair of flaming red lips. I mean that I drive my hand between my legs and use my middle finger on my right hand as conductor; I haven’t forgotten the symphony just because my body has changed. I mean I spread my legs as wide as I can without dislocating my hips. I mean that I arch my back and thrust my hips up toward nothingness. I make the mouth shapes of oh god oh god. I haven’t lost that place in my brain where fantasy lives and thrives, screaming. Trinculo and another man with cocks hard and purple with blood, their skin slick with sweat and longing. Trinculo behind the other man rubbing the meat of his chest and pinching each nipple, then mapping his stomach with one hand making its way down to his cock, the beauty of an about to burst cock, Trinculo’s hand wrapping around the thick flesh while he presses his own blood and muscle up against and then into the man again and again. The man’s head rocked back so hard his jaw looks broken. His cock extends and explodes. I mouth the air with my eyes closed. All my fantasies involve Trinculo fulfilling his desires while mine are ecstatically excluded. I’ve forged my desire from deprivation. I linger in the ecstatic state. I touch death. I shudder violently.

I make such a show of my autoeroticism that the telltale red observational beam shoots on and scans every biological thing about me. I laugh. The light jumps around erratically. All they’ll get out of me is an irregular heartbeat. I am not wet or sweating, but in my mind I lie spread-eagle, gushing and spent.

My crotch itches. I scratch it, eyeing the room’s perimeters. In the Liberty Room, as I sit illegally aching for Trinculo, something scrapes in the corner. I shake my head to ascertain whether or not it is real. It is. Is it some idiotic bot they’ve planted in here with me? I rise and inspect the space in the corner. The scratching continues, and then a small black hole about the size of a thumb’s head opens up where white meets white. Small but real. And then, through the black hole, comes my spider, carrying on its back a sensory disc about the size of what I recall as an olive. I almost think I hear the corner laughing. How giddy I am for the company of my spider, strange companion. Still naked, I take the disc and place it at the spot between my ear and my temple, one of the many data points where our nano implants can interface with media—place it confidently, for the gift can only have come from one person: Trinculo.

The hologram shoots open slightly in front of my face. I smile. Of course it is this: one of the underground rebel clips of Joan, blurry and with a jump cut to her death, but unmistakably her. Bless him. The world’s most bizarre love note.

Her space-black hair. Her face, filling the screen. Before they burned her, they beat her. Bruises blossoming around her eyes and nose and mouth. And yet there is something in the pupils of a person with no hope of survival left. It’s something like a black hole. When she spoke, she looked right through me, her words resounding through my spine:

“I am not afraid; I was born to do this. Children say that people are killed sometimes for speaking the truth. I say children have been used as the raw material of war. Think of chimney sweeps or child laborers whose hands were small enough to handle certain machinery in Nazi death camps. Think of blood diamonds and sex and drug trafficking driving world economies. Think of children in Sierra Leone, Somalia, the Sudan. In the Congo, Ivory Coast, Burundi. In Iraq, Iran, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka. In Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In Greece, Italy, Chechnya, Russia, Ireland, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Colombia, Haiti. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. China. The Earth wants her children back.”

I remember what and where her first action was: thousands of improvised explosive devices covering the Tar Sands in Alberta like malignant cancer cells invading a body. And I remember the last battle of the Wars, on the same landscape, her epic face-off with Jean de Men.

In the face of a final battle, sat the Alberta Tar Sands, she dropped to the dirt with her entire body and rested there, facedown, arms and legs spread. And didn’t move. An army of resistance soldiers creating a sea of human protection around her.

For days.

First, a series of violent solar storms occurred—one atop the other—and for a while everyone thought, My god, a natural disaster, beyond imagination . The skies wore clouds in colors we’d never seen before.

Then the world’s super volcanoes—the enormous calderas, Yellowstone, Long Valley, Valles, North Sumatra’s Lake Toba, Taupo, Aira in Japan—erupted in chorus, almost as if by cosmic design. Tsunamis, hurricanes, and typhoons followed as if in accompaniment. Ice caps speed-melted. The waters rose. Not gradually, as they had been, swallowing up coasts and islands worldwide, but in a matter of weeks. In America, New York and the upper and lower East Coast, Florida gone, San Francisco and most of California drowned and sank, Atlantis-like. Geocatastrophe.