The Book of Joan. Lidia Yuknavitch
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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, face-down, 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. Geo-catastrophe.
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.
CHAPTER FOUR
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