The Book of Joan - Lidia Yuknavitch

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decide that tonight can be a share-the-bottle night.

      Something about the work, still stinging on my flesh, something about Trinc’s pseudolascivious new contraption—it was all making me melancholy and death-conscious. Yet I like it—that feeling that we should pay attention to tiny moments, since the world can change faster than the strum of a spider’s web-string, and that maybe, just maybe, our last act could still be a good angry fuck.

      “What news?” I say, opening the bottle and filling my throat. We don’t have much time, after all; I can hear the sentries already, making their curfew rounds a floor below us. The liquid travels down my throat in a heatwet. I close my eyes. I hear Trinc breathing. For a nanosecond, I feel the story I have grafted rising up from my body like a third person in the room with us. Then he turns his ridiculous machine back on, as a wild cacophony fills the room. “Are you insane?” I hissed. “They’ll put you away again.”

      But there he is, stubbornly human, in front of me again, nearly taking flight, laughing his motherloving ass off. For a moment he looks like a boy. His eyebrows raised. His cheeks flush. His smile threatens to overtake his face. Like the girls and boys we all were, once, on a planet orbiting the sun.

      “Relax, before you go all onion-eyed!” he yells at me. “You tickle-brained harlot!”

      And here I burst into laughter—how can I help it, with this absurdity whirring around me like a giant bad moth experiment? I spit out my mouthful of drink. We’ll probably both get solitary.

      “We’ll not be moldwarp tonight!” he purrs. “Mount the table and spread your legs, Christine. I’ll bore a new hole into your luscious otherworldly flesh.”

      I follow his commands. The game of heterosexual desire that will never consummate cleaves my mind. My heart a dumb lump beating my chest up. And yet it feels good to not think, to let the alcohol restore my body to numbness—good enough that I turn away with faux modesty, pour some alcohol onto my fresh graft and let the sweet hurt flood my torso. I mount the table. I spread my legs as wide as I can manage. But his own contraption makes the old familiar position nearly impossible.

      Slopped in Courvoisier, I have an idea. “You go over there, and I’ll come at you with a running jump.” Though I can already hear the buzzy whir of mechanical sentries approaching, I run at Trinc like I used to run at bushes as a child—willfully, with full faith, both that they’d catch me and that I’d be covered in tiny cuts and scrapes. “If you drop me I’ll murder you,” is the last thing I say.

      As he positions himself directly at me, pewtered tips gleaming black and blue, the door bursts open and gray-white sentries pile in, rifles aimed at our imagined copulation. I run anyway.

      He catches me.

      Just like a hero from the old, dead books. He does not penetrate me, but as I clasp my legs around him, bear-hugging his torso and burying my face in the folds of his grafts, he whispers into my ear, raising every hair and fast-devolving erogenous cell to the surface of my body.

      “She’s alive. Your dead icon? She’s alive.”

      Close by, on a nearly invisible web, a spider’s eight eyes fix on the action and widen.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Before one is condemned to bothersome incarcerations for minor crimes, before one is relegated to a cell like a child or a dog receiving a time-out, one is funneled into a private CIEL Liberty Room.

      O Panoptes, Greek giant of a hundred eyes, how they’ve multiplied your vision. Embedded within the larger honeycomb of CIEL is the Panopticon, rising up in the center of everything, littered with rows of cells set in a circle. The Panopticon allows for continual surveillance, since recording devices stand in for eyes. Inside one’s regular cell, the surveillance is continual. All of our cells have three walls, the fourth opening up to the inner surveillance of the Panopticon. Nestled within the Panopticon are a lesser number of enclosed Liberty Rooms. In this purgatorial white space—white floor, white walls, white ceiling, like being inside a 3-D piece of paper—one is given the “opportunity” to explain one’s crimes, revise one’s values, repent. The old sin-and-redemption dynamic. The entire surface area of the Liberty Room is AV-sensitive. A person’s heart rate and biologic status, and even thoughts and dreams are recorded and assessed.

      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.

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