The Book of Joan. Lidia Yuknavitch
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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 pin-headed 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.
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.
INTERROGATIVE/EXCERPT 211.1
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.