Lidia Yuknavitch - The Book of Joan

A trial.

Hers.

Like death days, the CIEL Tribunals were all quite theatrical, but none more than Joan’s. Political power, in the conventional sense, had by then been replaced by digitalized matrices and algorithm systems, and so the Tribunal was presided over by seven holographic faces, each perched atop its stark white column: an obscene techno-burlesque of ancient Greece. This theatrical structure was wholly Jean de Men’s figuration. His theory seemed to be that a return to Greek drama, the birth of Western Culture, was how to begin on CIEL, how to structure a social order based entirely on representation—including but not limited to the performance of grafts. Next to the power of grafts, dramatic performance signaled the highest form of realizing reality. When you remember that upon our arrival to CIEL each and every one of us was likely scared shitless, you’ll understand how easy it was for him to invent any social order he liked. He simply replaced all gods, all ethics, and all science with the power of representation, a notion born on Earth, evolved through media and technology, and perfected in space.

I saw most of the reproductions of the trial, not just those put on public display for years and years, but the CIEL media’s reanimation of the original trial, a tradition they continued annually for years, a show mounted in the guise of news.

Trinculo and I had watched those reanimations together; the spectacle brought us to tears even before she opened her mouth to speak. Her countenance; her rigid jawline; her black, sunken eyes; her thick and wild hair, ebony as space; her dead stare into the emptiness that was us, her audience. We saw the ghosts of her history around her: butterflies accompanying her standard on battlefields; dead infants yawning and reviving in her presence. She had inspired hundreds of thousands of rebels to fight for the freedom to exist, even on a dying planet, without tyranny.

Did we feel remorse? In the moment, I am ashamed to admit, we did not. We felt as if she were giving us back something we had lost. We felt desire and nostalgia. For the accused, the residual wholly human who were the rebel survivors, memory was a mysterious but tangible lifeline to a breathable past. Imagine! A past one lived in and died for. A past recollected in our living matter, our cells and pores and neurons.

In the moment then, if I’m being honest with myself, what I felt the hardest was a kind of glory in her death. As if there was something of us in it, something still righteous, something still tied to Earth. Remorse came later. And a guilt larger than a black hole swallowing half of space. Our tears and rage endlessly sucked out of us by space.

For us, she was the force of life we could never return to. The trial, and its subsequent reanimations, were our only remaining connection to the material world. What greedy, envious angels we’d become—wingless wax figures. Half of us walked around hoping someone would throw themselves to the floor and masturbate themselves to death.

The memory brought sweat to my skin. I felt it all over. My ears. My upper lip. My neck. Beneath, where my breasts used to bloom. My thighs, my abdomen, between my legs, where a deeply wanting cavern used to cave toward my soul. I spread my legs just imagining it. And then I ran my fingers lightly, so lightly across my own text, the part of the story that was her trial, my skin coming alive under my fingers.

Q: Will you swear to tell the truth?

A: I don’t know what you’ll ask me. It’s possible you’ll ask me things I won’t tell you.

Q: Shall this defiance be a daily exercise, then?

A: Shall your redundant daily inquiries go on ad nauseam?

Q: Please record the defendant’s refusal to swear an oath to truth.

A: That is not accurate.

Q: It is what you have stated.

A: It is not. I refuse nothing. I have stated that there may be things I will not tell you.

Q: On what authority would you swear, then, if not the court’s?

A: Hmmm. All right, then, I choose the sun.

Q: More absurdity. Have you any allegiance to the truth?

A: I shall follow your rhetorical model. I shall tell lies and truths interchangeably. But I must warn you. I am an expert, especially, at one of those.

Q: Have you no respect for these proceedings, nor dignity in your own person?

A: Of the first, I have nothing. Of the second: My resistance is my dignity.

Q: Continue questioning. Record that the defendant engages in resistance to questioning.

A: Record as well that my accusers are witless cowards.

Q: Strike that from the record. When did you last hear the voices speaking to you?

A: You are funny. Let’s say yesterday and today.

Q: At what time yesterday?

A: They are not “voices” in the way you are supposing. But it would be futile to give an explanation. I heard it three times: once in the morning, or what I think must have been morning; once at the hour of retreat; and once in the evening at the hour of the star’s song. Very often I hear it more frequently than I tell you, so your question is irrelevant.

Q: What were you doing when you heard it yesterday morning?

A: I was asleep, and the sound woke me.

Q: Did the voices touch you?

A: Has a voice ever grabbed at you?

Q: If they have no members, how could they speak?

A: How is it that you speak? How do your beloved technologies speak ?

Q: Do you understand the charges against you?

A: The charges or your oddly lascivious obsessions?

Q: Strike from the record. Are you an enemy of the state?

A: I have been charged with treason and terrorism against the state. Beyond this, the validity of my visions is under question—though, notably, not my military prowess. Somewhat incomprehensibly, my clothing and my… hair?… are cited as crimes against the state. I am sentenced to death; I am to be burned and televised, sent signaling through the flames across the land as proof that my body has become ash. I believe that covers it. The only thing I am unclear about is why we are having this little… tête-à-tête.

Q: Your insubordination does not help your case.

A: And your hypocrisy and genocidal tendencies do not help yours. Out of curiosity, are any voices touching your members?

Iclench my teeth so hard in my mouth my temples ache. I rest my hand near my hip bone. I remember it so achingly, so physically. When Trinculo and I would finally retire from each installment of her trial, we would throw ourselves at each other. We’d cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girlwoman whose body was in defiance of every stab at “living” we took and failed at on a daily basis. We’d drink and writhe together, Trinc and I, displacing our desires by longing for her breasts and hair and cleft, as if her genitalia were as important as her bravery and power. Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn’t what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality—her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. I even had a fantasy of cutting a lock of it for myself, to keep and love—as eternally as a lover’s. Something human of hers, to touch and have and hold.

Underneath my comforter, I lift my hand up to my neck, to the beginning of her story on my body. Her story rises up from my skin as if to answer, flesh to flesh. I close my eyes. When you shut your eyes, the universe is internal. I can feel her story underneath my fingers, burned there, rising from my flesh. I can enter a world not limited by any cell, for the mind, the body, even the eye, is a microcosm of the cosmos.