The Book of Joan Read online

  I stare at a holographic snippet: Jean de Men’s head grotesquely bulbous, his garish face all forehead: “Your life is not for them, not for the putrid detritus resisting the future, clinging to Earth for a life that cannot be sustained. Earth was but an early host for our future ascension. Your life can have meaning and justification if you but turn your sights toward a higher truth.” I recognize these words from his weekly, unstoppable addresses that puncture all the rooms of CIEL, recitations of the best of his own quotes.

  Bile bubbles up my throat.

  I skip around the stupid recording, trying to locate that song, but I can’t find a trace of it. I start to second-guess myself: Why did I associate it with him? Had I imagined it as a ludicrous soundtrack to his rise to power? And, if not from then, from where? It was almost as if the song came from the cosmos around us, from the giant mouth or throat I sometimes imagine we are living within.

  “Resume audio recording,” I say, taking a breath. “Go back. I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts, Jean de Men.” I wipe my brow. Though I haven’t perspired in years, I’m sure I feel moisture there.

  “The graft he created was a romance graft, of all things, and it became quite famous: widely purchased, widely celebrated by so-called experts, widely and absurdly adulated, and though no one likes to admit this, widely exchanged between bargain shoppers who wanted knockoffs and cheaply made things amidst the smutted alleys of the black market. Everyone, everywhere, had to have it.

  “Why? Because, even in this de-sexualized world, the idea of love and all her courtesans—desire, lust, eroticism, the chase, the capture, the devouring—had a stubborn staying power. In the end, for those of us who survived and ascended, who agreed to a finite life span in exchange for part of a life—our last wish didn’t turn out to be power or money or property or fame. Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie—anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to. The hunger for love replaced the hunger for god or science. The hunger for love became an opiate. In a world that had lost its ability to procreate, the story of love became paramount.

  “It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story where our bodies could still want and do what bodies want to do.

  “You see, radical changes in the magnetic field induced radical changes in the morphology of life. That part everyone knew to expect. What no one knew for certain was how quickly these changes would occur after the geocatastrophe and the subsequent forms of radiation. These radical changes happened faster to us than they ever had to lab rats or chimps. That’s what happens when geocatastrophe is amplified by radiation. Put simply, we devolved. Our sexualities mutated and devolved faster than you can say fuck.

  “The end of genitalia. Our bodies could no longer manifest our basest desires nor our lofty ideas of a future. In our desperation and denial, we turned to the only savior in sight, technology and those who most loudly inhabited it. After we tired of television, after we tired of films, after social media failed to feed our hungers, after holograms and virtual realities and pharmaceuticals and ever more mind-boggling altered states of being, someone somewhere looked down in despair at the sad skin of his or her own arm and noticed, for the first time, a frontier.”

  I take a colossal breath of air and hold it. I hold my arms out in the air to either side of me. In the mirror I look vaguely like a butterfly. I blow the air out and watch my own skin sack deflate.

  Skin. The new paper. Canvas. Screen.

  In the form of scarification, we made art of what was left of our own dumb flesh.

  “In the wake of our hunger, up here in our false heaven, skin grafts were born.” I pace the room, talking to no one, continuing my narration. “Grafts were skin stories: a distant descendant of tattoos, an inbred cousin of Braille. Before long, you could judge people’s worth and social class by the texture of their skin. The richest of us had skin like a great puffed-up flesh palimpsest—graft upon graft, deep as third-degree burns, healed in white-on-white curls and protrusions and ridges. One had to stare into a face for longer than a minute to find the wallows where eyes should be, the hole where a mouth still lived. Faces looked like white piles of doilies from some medieval era. Even hands bloomed with intricate and white raised welts and bumps.

  “At the time, I was selling grafts myself: erotic micrografts particularly suited for that soft sweet hollow between the jaw and shoulder where, when a person turns their head in shyness or desire, a little flesh cup forms. Go ahead. Lean your chin to your own shoulder and you’ll have some idea of it.

  “I’d made grafts into a fine little business for myself, of necessity: after my husband died in the first round of CIEL epidemics, I had to support myself.”

  I try to say my husband’s name. I open my mouth in the shape of his name, and I still cannot enunciate it. His death happened so swiftly—like one sharp breath. My grief bore a hole down into me, replacing that former aperture of life.

  “My grafts were of no outstanding literary merit, but they fed a need in people—these little love grafts they could touch during the day when they felt alone or sad, their eyes closed for a moment, their hands at their necks, their thoughts turned to some past amorous instant. Women in particular were my main clientele, but men bought them as well. I suppose they are sentimental. When most sensory experience has been obliterated, perhaps sentimentality is the only defense against loneliness.

  “Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward. Now that the penis is defunct, a curling-up little insect, well, who can blame them for their behaviors?

  “My dead husband was formerly a skin-graft author as well. Only his grafts were glorious: irreverent, debased, disgustingly pleasurable sex grafts for genital areas only. What was left of the penis, the cunt, the ass, under the secret cups of breasts, between the thighs, any erogenous zone. It became considered guttery to wear his work. It’s tempting to record a history entirely about that . . .” I can feel my own eyes brightening.

  “Worth mention: the skull grafts of the most affluent are perhaps the most ostentatious—or hideous, depending on your point of view and your ideas about class division—for they tower and curl like those great powdered wigs from history, falling down the backs of men and women as if their bones and brains leaked out from the mountainous tops of their bald heads and tumbled slowly down their necks, or like sea-foam tumors pouring their way toward their backs. They have their skin stretched and then branded. And stretched again and branded. Think of it!

  “I don’t know why I started dreaming of oceans and mountains just now. There are no mountains or oceans here . . . nothing of their majesty to believe in . . .”

  I hear my voice trail off. “Pause.” My digression gives me a pain between my shoulders, like someone pressing a gun between my breasts. I stare out of the window into everything that is nothing. The gnarled dot of Earth stares back at me like a wrong marble.

  I would like, before my death, to step on Earth again. But it is not possible.

  Something of a secret contemplation sits in my imagination in this last year of my life. The woman whose story broke the world. They say she is dead. We all witnessed her execution, or its representation. But people will make belief out of anything, especially if it comes with a good story, and despite my cynicism and age, I want to believe in her. Like the way old people on Earth used to turn to a story we made called god. But to speak her name or circulate her image or story beyond the endlessly represented image and story of her “official”
death, is a crime. So I hold the thought and words in my head and heart. I clear my throat. “Resume recording.”

  “I am a businesswoman. I write for pay. My little ballads have their niche. Near the neck. The jugular.”

  Something catches my eye again.

  Ah. There is a spider making its way across a web from the fern to my arm. I hold still. The spider arrives. It tickles. I watch it make its way from my wrist bone toward the crook of my arm. I wonder how many spiders we have left. Whether they, too, will someday be gone, like animals and plants and all the things we so desperately tried to export and overclone in the sky. A laughable Noah’s Ark—all the undesirables cloned and perfected! Though I must admit, the spiders are doing better than the butterflies. They keep cocooning and emerging half formed, caught between larva and winged thing. It’s one of the saddest things to behold, as they lie in their crippled fluttering, half-flighted, reminding us that evolution is filled with deathstory.

  This stanza on my body needs to heal before I can continue with the graft. Again, I apply a mild astringent. The sting is brief like a whisper. I blow on my own chest.

  In the mirror, everything on my body is red and swollen and illegible. But words are coming. Soon there will be raised skinwords, whiter than white. Replacing all trace of breast and woman.

  I’m old enough to have read books. Seen films. Studied art and history. I smile. I remember everything. Yet that story, of a girl-warrior killed on the cusp of her womanhood, and what happened after—it tilted the world on its axis, didn’t it? Tilted the lives of those on Earth, which glides still below us. Tilted the lives of the whitened bodies dying out above, we pathetic angels.

  But not all legend becomes history, and not all literature deserves to become legend. “Resume.”

  “The work of the famous Jean de Men—remember him?—had long been deemed the gold standard of narrative grafts, and specifically of romance grafts. His creations had the added enticement of fitting perfectly around a person’s torso; receiving one of his grafts, it was said, was like being wrapped in a love story, like receiving a long-awaited embrace.

  “All of it—and this is where things began to catch fire—I considered utter pig shit.” A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs. Or any animals.

  “I know. Who am I to challenge him, this prize celebrity of the surviving CIEL elite? And yet, I say, pig shit. The reason being this: all the women in his work demanded to be raped. All the women in his stories used language and actions designed to sanction, validate, and accelerate that act. All the women served but one purpose in the plot—to offer their small red flaps of flesh to be parted by the cock, to allow their hole to be plumbed, unto the little death—and when the men were done with them, the women were discarded. Killed or left for dead, impregnated or driven crazy, hidden or locked up by marriage or prison, relegated to a life of sexual commerce in order to survive. In his world, for his women, happily ever after meant rape, death, insanity, prison, or marriage. He took this broken romance trope and elevated it to the level of an almighty text, and thus, it permeated consciousness. Became a habit of being. Power.

  “Therefore in the court of public consumption, writer to writer, I endlessly leveled my charges against the celebrity: egregious gender nostalgia was where I started. From there I evolved my accusations to include insidious forms of subjugation, narrative hate speech, representations manifesting brutal atrocities committed between people, and finally, murderously mythologizing what it meant for us to ascend to CIEL . . . creating a violently false fiction that we would somehow save humanity. Despite my efforts, I could not topple the prevailing power model, one man, his machines in a sky world, his flock of fucking wealthy sheep with nowhere else to go. Creating our different art forms and setting them against each other was the only war I could wage. Representation against representation.

  “My little erotic grafts changed form. Now they were armed. I married Eros with Thanatos and began re-creating the story of our bodies, not as procreative species aiming for survival, but rather, as desiring abysses, creation and destruction in endless and perpetual motion.

  “Like space.

  “In my literary resistance movement, hundreds of women swore their allegiance to the cause. They left lovers and husbands and children. They shifted loyalty in their reading first, and then hungrily, their lives. There was, after all, nowhere to put their former efforts at becoming beautiful sexual objects, or lovers of men, or mothers. Those of gender fluid persuasions could finally breathe as the rest of us caught up to their lived experiences. More surprisingly, some men of open minds started contacting me to discuss ideas. And in the course of these meetings, a common conviction formed among us. A new philosophy took hold and pulsed: the idea that men and women—or the distinction between men and women—was radically and forever dead. We organized. We agitated. We formed secret societies of flesh truths. We held midnight pantomimed orgies exploring our newly discovered bodies—perhaps we were some new species, some new genus with alternative sexual opportunities! We celebrated ourselves with illegal contraband, ever trying to keep the flames of our humanity, our drives and pleasures and pains, alive. None more than my beloved Trinculo.

  “What gave my little literary challenge epic impact? What added epic weight to literary representation, was skin. The medium itself was the human body. Not sacred scrolls. Not military ideologies or debatable intellectual theories. Just the only thing we had left, and thus the gap between representation and living, collapsed. In the beginning was the word, and the word became our bodies.

  “The protest we mounted, out here among the stars and radiation, excited me to no end. It became an underground sensation. My work did not so much gain in popularity, rather, it set people on fire.” The word fire seems a fitting place to pause my audio recording.

  In the dim light of the CIEL room, in this last year of my life, I feel the skin between my shoulders ache, from my neck to the bottom edges of my rib cage. It reddens. And swells. I stare at my torso in the mirror and it almost seems to pulse. To be burned alive with meaning; the opposite of Joan’s death. A fire to replace what used to burn between our legs. But I already know the endgame of the battle I am waging. I already know what I want.

  The spider—I can feel it at my neck. I capture it by cupping my hand at the very spot where I would wear one of my own skin grafts. I consider squeezing it dead in my palm. What’s one more dead spider clone? But I do not. I carry it carefully in its hand house to the ridiculous stick of a fern. It crawls up the shaft, then immediately dangles from it with a silken thread.

  The will to live is so strong. I feel the sporadic waves in my ears; the blasted song in my head is receding but not leaving.

  I want her story back.

  The one that was taken from her and replaced with heretic. Eco-terrorist. Murderous maiden who made the earth scream.

  I want to use my body to get it.

  Chapter Two

  My door juts open without warning, sending the spider on the fern skittering across its web. I quickly draw an azure silken robe around my night’s work. My body stings and itches against the fabric. I hear his bellow before I see him.

  “Christ! Come here this instant, you reeling-ripe dove-egg. Get here and lay me a kiss. I do believe I’ve outdone myself today.”

  No matter how often he calls me “Christ” instead of Christine, it makes me smile. And every time I see him, my mind cleaves, half shooting back to the past, half lodged in the present, shaking.

  What is a love story?

  Every time I see him, which is every morning and day and night, I think of all the love stories that go untold. The broken love stories, the damaged ones, the ones that don’t fit the old tropes. Did any real life love ever fit a trope? My body is stabbed through with a recurring flashback. How deeply I fell for him on Earth when I was fourteen. I can see us both, gangly and awkward, both of us with shoulder-length hair, all elbows and shoulders and knees, really we looked like sib
lings. How we spent every morning and all day and most of all the nights together, in the woods or at riverbeds or at school or holidays or climbing out of our bedrooms and meeting up for invented adventures or painting or drawing or reading or stargazing or walking and doing nothing but breathing—I remember eventually feeling like he was the very air I breathed, the matter of my molecules, the pulse at my wrists 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.