The Book of Joan

  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 like an archaeologist, and retrieve the familiar bottle in its velvet pouch. I scan the room for glasses to drink from, then 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 webstring, 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—ho
w 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. I shudder violently.

  I make such a show 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 ope
n 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, facedown, 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.