Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

The sun’s eye smote. Organic processes like photosynthesis and ecosystems, dead. The relation between Earth and its inhabitants, dead.

War, dead.

Earth reduced to a dirt clod, floating in space.

The atrocity of speed in destruction.

The magnitude of those days still makes me hold my breath.

The white of this room and the white of my skin makes me sick.

A fierce rage blooms in me. I think perhaps it is courage. When I’ve seen enough, I remove the sensory disc, place it in my mouth with an exaggerated gesture, and swallow.

For an instant I close my eyes and my entire body remembers the smell. The taste. The sound. How the tips of my fingers itched at her burning. How hope of any sort—faith, desire, wonder, imagination—died. That moment, captured obscenely, enforced upon us for years.

Another cruel red light, something like what used to be the red dot of a scope rifle, accompanied by a deafening buzz, signals that my observation in the Liberty Room has concluded. My repentance never came. Likely it’s back to my regular cell. If anything, I’ve made things worse for myself. For a brief moment I wish that they would just shoot me. Let me die with my imagined whetted desire, Trinculo, and the image of Joan of Dirt.

Instead I redress. I feel the sensory disc making its way slowly down my throat, as if I’ve swallowed a large dog biscuit. I am indeed remanded to my cell. If they want my little love note, they’ll have to literally retrieve it from my shit or cut it out of me.

The spider. It follows me. I find that I want it to.

The song haunts me still, a prison of its own. Great swaths of orchestral thrum come and go in bursts. Louder than before. Perhaps I am losing my mind.

My regular cell in the Panopticon has the look of an antiquated gas chamber. At least what I’ve read and imagined about gas chambers on Earth—I never actually saw one, although I vaguely remember representations in film and television. And, anyway, I’m remembering wrong. This isn’t a gas chamber, it is more like a three-walled lethal injection room. With a cot in the center, where the condemned can be restrained with leather straps—arms making a human cross, the shape of Jesus—and horrid chemicals pumped into veins. Usually there is a viewer window for witnesses to watch the condemned exit human life. As far back as humans go, we have held such rituals. I don’t care which careful slice of history you choose to cling to, there is no part of being human that does not include the death spectacle: the resort to killing, through war or “justice” or revenge. Curious ways of practicing our humanity, we humans have.

The walls of this room are a shade of dark nauseating green, cast in hard geometric tiles. The floor, an equally attractive mold-colored cement. The toilet and sink a dead varnished metal. I begin at one end and walk the distance to the opening—no door, no wall, just an electric field that would be like walking into a fire for anyone who cared to try it.

Six strides.

Think of all the experimentation earthlings did on animals for all those years. Human prisoners had luxurious surroundings compared to the tiny compartments and cages reserved for animals such as primates and mice doomed to experimentation, or bred for human consumption: chickens, pigs, lambs, cows. The fastest way to drive living beings mad, then as today, is to confine them to a small, stimulus-less place and deprive them of any interaction with their species. We’ve taken the idea one more step. We can see one another. Hear one another. But we cannot reach one another, which creates a heightened longing impossible to name.

Here in the Panopticon, prisoners are held in clear view of the system of disembodied technologies standing guard over them, and the resulting self-consciousness is hard to take. That endless electrical pulse gets inside you. My heartbeat and breathing bounce off the very walls of the room, echoing back at me. The Cyclops eyes of the machines with their eight dangling arms—systems designed to keep the vital organs of the facility in working order, and its puny inhabitants alive—beam straight through me. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to shit and urinate for an all-seeing, nonhuman audience.

More than the machines, I see every other living inhabitant. We peer out stupidly at one another, waiting for food or changes in light—or, worse, trying not to look at each other at all, but not looking is next to impossible when you’re facing other eyes and bodies. Every time I come here, and this is the fifth time, I think of elephants and chimps and dolphins. Of all the animals I’d read about in books and historical media, zoo-bound elephants and chimpanzees and glassed-in dolphins were the ones that raised the greatest compassion within me. Even thinking about it, I find that my throat locks up. It’s unbearable. Any idiot can read about the intelligence of those animals. What we did to them—and to so-called lesser humans, too—my god, what kind of brutal abomination dismisses the suffering of the majority of the world’s population as worth sustaining a tiny number of pinheaded elites—is proof enough that we don’t deserve a future.

I look out at our community. All our naked, white waxen bodies gleaming in artificial light. Our faces ever receding as indicators of our humanity. One floor above, I see a man (is it a man?) directly across from me. His grafts extend from his eyebrows upward, from his ears outward, like waves of sea foam. He must be very wealthy.

I search and search for my beloved. Then I clap eyes on him. Two floors down, several rooms over, far left—I see Trinculo. His apparatus is gone—I feel a pang of rage and grief at the thought that it may have been destroyed—and yet the sight of him fills me with relief. I will him to see me, but he is already ahead of me. He stands perfectly straight, naked, spreads his legs for dramatic effect, and salutes me, then bows with tremendous flourish. Finally, voiceless and yet eloquent beyond measure, he farts, loudly. Though I can barely hear it from where I sit, the gesture gives me a kind of painful pleasure. When you have loved someone for a very long time, intimacy is in everything. I hope he smears his cell walls with shit, a futuresque de Sade.

I stare out at the machines and other technological forms, the blazing screens, white or black, reducing existence to data and light and hum. The odd heads and eyes and arms protruding from a central system. The gleaming colored wires snaking forever, coiling and braiding like strands of DNA. In their presence, I only ever feel biosynthetic. Maybe there never has been a time when we were human apart from this. Maybe we were always meant to come to this part of our own story, where the things we thought we created were revealed to have been within us all along, our brains simply waiting for us to recognize the corresponding forms of space and technology “out there” that we dumbly misread as distinctly human organs.

Still, being stared at by artificial intelligence is unnerving. I walk to the oddly comforting cot—with its three-layered mattress, cozy comforter, and equally luxurious pillow; had someone somewhere secretly loved The Princess and the Pea ?—and put my back to it all. I pull the plush cover over my head and instantly feel as if I am in another world.

At some point my data will be delivered to me and I’ll have an idea of how long my stay will be. Likely not long, I know; my only infraction was entertaining one of Trinculo’s endless dramas and making an ass out of myself in the Liberty Room. Though they will of course find the Courvoisier, which saddens me. Drinking it always made my lips burn in a way that brought back memories of Earth, and I liked to be drunk with Earth memories. Under my blanket I repicture it.