The Book of Joan. Lidia Yuknavitch
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and neck and the blood in my ears, and as my body surged from girl to woman, I idiotically lunged at him one day after school in a plain and grassy field, my face filled with girl-flush, my legs shaking, my arms grabbing at him, I half smeared my smile into his and wrong kissed him. And then he stiffened and shot away from me—the look on his face made an uncharitable distance between us, so vast, so vast, like Neptune, that ice giant.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” is all he said, and my first and deepest love of my life, my all-consuming beloved, froze in front of me as the beginning of a man who did not love women. Physical fact. Suddenly even his skin looked like it was pulling away from me.
“I love you,” he said backing away, his eyes drowning in their sockets. “I love you,” he said running from me. And my world ended.
But my love didn’t. Not then, not into my marriage later in life, not now. But there is no word or body for it. We simply both ended up through a trick of fate or fortune together on CIEL. And though we would never be lovers, for different reasons now, neither of us was without desire. His bloomed into a symbolic unending lasciviousness. Mine atrophied into an ache I’ll take to my death.
Now he squeezes his former desire into old dead languages and base, carnal, ever-more obscene utterances as well as objects and technologies, like a fuck-you to this idiotic space-condom we live within.
I burn.
One might say we are desire’s last stand.
There the man stands—although the word man only approximates the beloved creature before me. For he has fully embraced the embodiment of creature, having lost all heart with regard to humanity up here. For clothing he wears only shoes, shiny pointed black boats fit for a dandy in any age. His skin shines the gleaming waxy white of years of skin grafts, his head is as bald as an infant bottom, yet bulging here and there with protruding, irrational grafts. His watery blue eyes are still visible beneath the odd furrows and folds of flesh. He holds his arms out theatrically, thrusts his hips toward me to display himself, and smiles. He could become a gargoyle, and I’d yet love him.
Indeed, what is before me is something of a grotesque. Somewhere near where his stomach should be, I see what could only be a new invention: an intricate belt, silver, bloodred, and black, secured by leather straps and silver chains that web across his chest and shoulders like some deranged spider’s design. In front, at the sides, and it looks to me even in the rear, the belt grows appendages about a foot in length. Each appendage looks to be soldered and carved with great attention and detail—each extends out away from his body enough so that every move he makes creates a kind of half-dangling, half-dancing effect. Two of the jutting objects are more or less cylindrical, ending at their tips with pewter-balled roundness. The other two—shaped a bit like gourds, and as splendid as the cylindrical appendages in color and shine and detail—dangle from the harness, and seem to have small silver motors attached to them. He flips a couple of switches and his hips begin to buzz and whir like some gigantic and wrong insect. For a moment I think he might take flight.
A great shift in the air and space of the room accompanies his entrance. “Well?” he shouts above the din, gyrating and whizzing.
I bring my hand to my neck in mock surprise. “Jesus, Trinculo, have you been injured? Or are you being punished? What on earth is all”—I gesture around him—“that?”
“Ah!” he shouts, stepping toward me gingerly, “but we’re no longer on the Earth, now, are we? This, my full-gorged lady,” he says, approaching, “is the answer to your prayers.”
“I haven’t prayed for years,” I say, ducking around a chair to avoid him. There is no game I will not play with him. No pornographic desire I won’t willingly perform.
He growls. “Come ride me, dewberry.” On Earth, when we’d been so young, he’d taken delight in a digital application that generated medieval obscenities and slurs. He’s carried the habit up into CIEL, into our idiotic adulthood, our doomed present-tense, and I love every word of it. “I’ll bet all the sun in the system I can make you scream god before the night’s gone. But say my name again! I love to hear it.”
“Trinculo!” I shout, then laugh and come back around the chair. I try to embrace him, but find it impossible. “Now, turn that thing off and sit down. Talk to me like a man.”
“Like a what?”
Just then we hear the mechanized sound of the evening gong, signaling the coming arrival of night sentries for the evening lockdown. “Shut it off,” I hiss, wincing at the thought of him being carried off to solitary, yet again. Though his eyes remain playful, the cost of his years of imprisonment and torture is beginning to show. The veins at his temples look crooked and rubbled. His hands shake when he tries to be still. Sometimes, his jaw locks midsentence.
I can see all of him. Trinculo is a pilot of the highest pedigree and expertise. More than that, he is an engineer, as well as an inventor and illustrator whose talents far exceed those of anyone around him. At times people regard him as mad—until his ideas are put to the test, and voilà! His genius is confirmed again. And yet, over the years, his antics have overtaken his contributions to culture, even though his mind is keener than a Da Vinci or Hawking, historically.
The line between genius and madness has always been as thin as an epidermal layer. The truth is Trinculo designed and engineered CIEL, this floating death house. And, though only he and I know it, he still has the knowledge to redirect its aims.
He deactivates his machine. For a moment, I have to admit, it feels like all hope and joy has left the room. “Sit down like a man? Never! As a genital entrepreneur, however, I’d be delighted to talk with you,” he answers. “Besides, I have news.” He sits and crosses his legs as if he’s the most normal person in the world.
“Genital entrepreneur, is it?” I say, lowering my voice. We don’t have long before he’ll have to go.
“At your service. If you will only open your imagination. And your legs.”
“You know as well as I do there’s next to nothing left between my legs. Or yours.” The sentence makes a funeral in the room. Our whole lives and losses reduced to a farce. Comedy and tragedy lock in a kiss.
“All the more reason to climb aboard, my skittish little dreamer. You can be the first astronaut,” he says playfully. His voice and words make my whole body ring. He makes me laugh. Sometimes I think that’s the deepest love of all.
“Trinc,” I say stoically. “We’ve been out here for years and years.” I turn to study the nothingness out the window. My eye falls on the spider making its way back to its perch. I think about the pull of the dead sun and our useless bodies and about what an ironic joke stars are: dead stuff that tricks you into believing in magical light.
“Did you not hear me?” Trinc says, settling himself more carefully into a chair like a human toolbox. “I said I have news.”
“What gossip have you been gathering tonight?” I suddenly feel the need for a drink. “Cognac?” I offer. “I’ve got about a case and a half of real Courvoisier left—then it’s all synthetics, dull as everything else around here—no sign of flesh and blood . . .” I gesture to my colorless grafted body, letting my robe fall open. Modesty left the arena long ago. Besides, Trinc is the only thing left of the word love in my body. He is one of the few people I will share my work with before unveiling it to the public.
Trinc bolts from his seat, his second, mechanical self clamoring around him like a fanfare. “What is that?” he says breathlessly, pointing to my latest self-publishing efforts. “Your breasts . . .”
I look down at my still raw work. “Used-to-be breasts,” I correct him. “Who knew that what once gave life would make such a lovely canvas? But, listen, Trinc, wait until I’ve completed this manuscript,” I say, closing my robe. “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
“Not even a peek?”
“Not even.” I walk over to my dwindling cache of alcohol, root around