The Book of Joan

Chapter Nineteen

Le Ciel.

I see the sky through the blown-to-bits roof of the cave. Dusk. The whisper of stars and borealis. I close my eyes and for a few small seconds I am floating. But the ground is hard under me.

The smell of scorched dirt.

Leone nowhere.

My brother’s dead body slumps between rock and rubble, all trace of our biologic relation gone gray as ash and earth. The ground smolders in a black shadow where Leone’s body was. Death. Death from me, in me, around me. Did I think I escaped it somehow, all these years, hiding from the inevitable? Hiding from the story of myself? Be careful of what stories you tell yourself.

The smell of it sends me back to my own burning, the trigger of sensory perceptions, the smell of my flesh about to go to flame, my skin tightening around feet and shins and thighs and hips and gut and ribs and arms and sternum and neck and mouth—a catalog of death reaching up until my eyes sting and shrink back inward toward my skull. Yes. I remember every moment of it.

Leone.

Inside my chest, my heart—fist-shaped organ—bulges and aches. For a long minute I stand still and consider ending my life. What’s left to live for? I don’t even remember how to care about humanity any longer. Humanity, what we lived, what we made, what we destroyed. For what?

Her name the only word filling me. Leone.

Vanished.

No one was ever more worth fighting for. More worth staying alive for. Though I never said it. Why the fuck didn’t I say it? The only thing that made being human worthwhile was human intimacy, and I managed to fuck up even that. How many years were we alone together? How deep did Leone’s love and loyalty go?

Deeper than caves, than black holes in space.

I force myself to confront the empty. Snot runs like a river over my mouth and chin. Tears bleed into one another so that my eyes ocean. The pain at my temple is granite against granite. The truth is this: Leone is the reason I am alive at all. It was Leone who saved me from the heat and thunderous flame that was supposed to be my execution. It was Leone’s face I saw through the blaze that was meant to reduce me to ash. Leone who whispered, “Don’t say anything. Go limp. There is a vortex—a hole in the floor. Close your eyes.”

Leone whose words memory-echo now into a falling, like falling through all of space and time. Leone who replaced my body with a corpse from god knows where, so that those tyrannical torturers would find a burned-up body or thing, the thing they wanted so much they’d mistake it for me. Leone who rescued my half-burned corpus from the edge of annihilation.

A miracle.

I stare at the blackened dirt where she had just been. To this day, I have little idea how she managed it; we never spoke of it. Not when Leone nursed me one limb and nerve at a time, cave by cave—the Naracoorte, the Lascaux, the Blue Grotto, the Waitomo, the Gunung Mulu, the Sarawak Chamber, the Yasuni. Not when we formed a silent sacred bond based on the simplicity of surviving, limiting our fighting to isolated bursts, human salvage mission interruptions, limited resource robbings, and other tiny Skyline terrorisms. We just moved forward together, in an imagined plot where staying alive and in motion were the only aims.

We became two women’s bodies in motion.

Why didn’t we ever name it? Why didn’t I get on my knees and pray to her in secular sensual waterfalls of thanks every goddamn day of my life? My body aches with regret, like some virus laying waste to my bones and muscles.

There is no name in any language I know except her name.

Leone.

My shoulders heave as if my body has been taken over by a force larger than a self. I cry hysterically. Before I can stop, I vomit, hard enough to crack a rib. The wail that emanates from my abdomen through my gut and ribs, up my stupid throat and out of my mouth, doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me. It’s like I’m watching some shadow narrative, like I’m detached from what’s left of my body, what’s left of Earth, what’s left of anything.

I drop to the ground. I curl into a birth shape—there’s no other way to say it. I rest my head on the dead earth. I smell worms and rocks and the wet of what used to be the cave’s lake and river, now open to air, thanks to the blast. I always knew we’d return to dirt, all of humanity. Maybe that’s why I did what I did. Maybe this is the time for me after all. I put my thumb in my mouth and bite it. I thought I’d already experienced the greatest possible self-loathing. Until now. I beg for decomposition.

From my vantage point, I can see my brother’s blue-hued body. In death, adults reveal some of their childhood selves. The eyes and cheek muscles going slack, back in time to a face without history. As I tighten myself into a ball there on the floor, I think of how my brother must have stood over my crib as a child, witnessing a similar girl.

Remember, he’d said. Remember what?

I look at my hands. I bring them to my face and smell them. Something from childhood. Something half there and half imagined.

The image comes to me in a retinal flash. My brother as a boy, a field away from me. In my hand a red rock. A children’s game. I shove my fist into the dirt and push down and down until my whole girl-arm is buried. My hand connects with something hot or cold, or both, not solid, but moving, like a wave. I let go of the red rock when my hand and arm feel like they’re dissolving. Not until I hear my brother screaming down the field from me—“It’s a rock! A red rock! It shot up out of the ground”—do I understand.

There is current underground.

Could that be what he was talking about before he died? I look at his lifeless face, gray among the detritus on the cave floor across from me.

Without thought, as if from muscle memory, I jam my hands into the earth up to my wrists, nearly breaking them against the hard ground, and then I shove them down deeper, to my elbows, and then deeper still, until I’m shouldering the dirt, my face an inch from it. I smell what’s still alive on the planet, beetles and worms and potato bugs; I stare at my dead brother and the blackened place where Leone used to be; and I press on until half my body is buried. I close my eyes. My face burrows like an animal’s. My mouth tastes the dirt. The blue light at the side of my head ignites and hums. The song explodes inside my skull and the opened cave begins to shiver like a convulsing body. My hands and arms start to burn—or are they freezing?—something, some energy, has my arms, as if they are not part of me any longer, something alive and electrical in the dirt. And then my arms feel like they are no longer arms at all, but extensions of light, long-tendrilled beams shooting out from my torso and into the ground. I’m burying myself, but in my mind’s eye I can see thousands and thousands of beams of light underground, crisscrossing like a strange highway of flame, with my own body serving as an interstice. My head shoots back, my mouth opens, my jaw locks, and light—aqua light and orange light and indigo light and red light—shoots out from my eyes, my nose, my mouth and ears and every pore of my body, and finally an enormous blast catapults me into the air and back down to the earth with the thud of an animal’s body and a snapping sound in my sternum.

Silence.

When I open my eyes to the dead air, calm again, I am not alone. There is my body, my brother’s corpse, the loss of my Leone, and now, someone else.

Someone is here with me.

Chapter Twenty

“Trinculo Forsythe, you stand accused of aiding and abetting a known eco-terrorist and enemy of the state—”

“Your mother was an artless ass-fed canker. Aussi, s’il vous plaît, to what entity precisely do you refer when you use the word state? Because I know you can’t possibly mean this shit-pile of orbiting techno-corporeal hackery. You have no authority over me, you clay-brained skin-husk. Go fold up into your own clouted grafts.”

Christine’s heart breaks open and she falls for Trinculo all over again. He had earned himself a trial after all, and he meant to make it his, starting with this preliminary meeting between accused and abuser—accuser.

Spittle wells up in her mouth. She swallows. Bites the inside of her cheek. She is now in the terrible position of witness, as if her agency had been given a new point of view.

Where is her place in the story?

Her terror slowly degrades her courage. She bites the inner flesh of her cheek harder, tastes the metaled secretion of blood. Snap out of it. You are a writer. But what happens when the story is stolen away from its author? Don’t panic. Don’t be an ass. Learn to inhabit any role.

Christine can’t see everything happening in the room, but thanks to the spider’s microscopic lens she can see things in glimpses, and of course she hears everything. Jean de Men’s horrible overflowing robes of grafted flesh hang from his head like an old French aristocratic wig, draping down from his arms in faux-crocheted brocade, dragging across the floor with ludicrous pomp. His eyes hide beneath several folds of graying grafts, but his mouth is black and open and terrible, his tongue too pink, almost red, his teeth strangely yellow and small.

Her Trinculo, though bound and attached to some kind of mobile sentry unit, looks magnificent in his indifference. Each time Jean de Men speaks or gestures, Trinculo studies the ceiling or floor or his own crotch. If his hands were free, she felt sure he would have scratched his absent balls. But what crumples her heart is his chest—the land of body between his shoulders. The graft there is hers. Or was. She’d spent such careful hours there, inventing a story about a city of androgenes in which only he could provide pleasure. It seemed to her ever after that he carried himself differently. Chest forward, chin up. Shoulders back. As if to tell the microworld of their stupid floating existence: once there were bodies. Read yourself back to life. In place of their sexual union, she’d written desire straight into his flesh.

The spider lodges itself near the bones of his clavicle.

“I see you intend on inhabiting the role of miscreant,” says Jean de Men. “Very well then. Shall we take a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you.” The lack of affect in his voice disturbs her. The look on Jean de Men’s face perverted a smile.

The next place that comes into view Christine never knew existed. For the life of her, she cannot imagine where this place would be in CIEL. The entire room is lined in a sort of black-lacquered tile, which makes it difficult to discern even outlines, so she projects the images onto one of the walls of her quarters—and what she then sees keeps her from swallowing, as if a bone sticks in her throat. In the black room are women. On tables. Anesthetized, by the looks of it: eyes closed, faces loose, mild grafts glowing here and there at the edges of their bodies. Each is strapped down and splayed. There look to be six. Maybe seven. Various ages, but none older than twenty-five, no one of exceptional wealth, judging from their meager grafts. In a circle. They look like human spokes of a deranged prehistoric wheel.

“Magnify,” Christine says, something wrong in her gut.

Between each woman’s spread legs, she sees something she remembers and desires, and at the same time, she is haunted, like in a nightmare: the color red. There is blood. And a kind of surgical apparatus, at work on every one of them. There is no other way to say this. Between the legs of each of these poor creatures is a gash, each undergoing some stage of… what? Experimentation? Mutation? Torture?

Dizziness. She grips the back of a chair, in an attempt to keep watching. Then Jean de Men speaks.

“What. You don’t like the view?”

“Maggot,” Trinculo spits back.

Then Jean de Men reaches into the bloody cleft of the girl nearest to him, pulls out a palm-size wad of flesh, and throws it against the wall. Splat.

Christine vomits.

“This one’s no good,” he mutters to Trinculo, reaching back into the body and pulling out a putrid mass with strands of red, blue, and gray matter. “Something went wrong with our attempts at ovaries. Who knew the stupid little orbs could be so fucking complicated?” He holds the colorful and glistening innards in Trinculo’s face, so close Christine thinks she can smell them.

“The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts, and is desired,” Trinculo whispers.

“Have you had time to rethink my offer?” Jean de Men drops the blob to the floor with a plop.

In the beginning, when Trinculo and I first lived on CIEL, when we first entered adulthood, Trinculo fell in love with an older man who had been the leading doctor in the field of biochemistry. Trinculo’s emerging intellectual force made a helix with this man of comparable intelligence and creative verve. In spite of their age difference, and though they could not enter one another in the gnashing way that a man desires a man, they intwined with one another by mind and hands and mouths and legs, by act of imagination and devotion to what was left of body. Their heat approaching spontaneous combustion in spite of things. When they were discovered, Jean de Men beheaded the doctor, the most gifted medical mind in human history, in front of Trinculo, who was restrained in a chair. The doctor’s head was set in his lap and left there all night under the surveillance of a sentry with orders to kill Trinculo if he moved. He did not move. It was this image that kept Trinculo on task for the rest of his life.

“Let me see. Would I rather join you in your twisted quest to reinvent human reproduction, in other words, your quest to become god of a new asexually reproducing race of impotent and sexless wax figures, or would I rather suffer ten thousand moronic and unimaginative tortures just to watch the drama of disappointment play out on your face?”

“You’ve no idea what pain can become…”

Trinculo spits on the ground. “And you’ve no idea what the attempt to control organized breeding yields.”

Whatever curses Jean de Men hurled at Trinculo next, Christine couldn’t hear them. Trinculo’s cackle drowns them out. Her room shakes with his laughter, the kind of sound one summons at the gates of hell. The laughter one spits out at a mortal enemy. But as the sound disperses, Christine’s room takes on the bodily sensations of Trinculo himself, and what she feels most acutely is a cold and stark awareness. Not fear, but a rage-filled consciousness. Trinculo turns his shoulder enough that she can see more clearly what is in his line of sight. The bodies are of women, barely women at all—no doubt Earth survivors—somewhere between adolescent and young adult.

All but one.

One of the bodies is older and has no grafts at all. Her face is rough, as from weather. Her jaw has a cast unlike any of theirs, as if she works it differently, as if her life is held fast in the muscles and tendons leading to her face. Her body is muscular and worn; her hands look as if they have aged ahead of her. Her skin is not white, but of a color that could only have come from climate and extremity. And her head. Her beautiful, terrible, human head. Where folds of grafts or at least their beginnings should be, her entire head is covered in a great filigree of carefully tattooed hair, midnight blue and gold. It cascades down her shoulders, so that her entire hued body shines like an illuminated manuscript. One of her ears appears to be mostly gone.

She is not of CIEL. She is from Earth, but she is no ordinary capture.

When Trinculo carefully takes in a huge breath of air and holds it, Christine’s entire room feels as if it might burst.

“Ah, you’ve noticed our newest arrival,” crows de Men, regaining his composure. “I’d introduce you, but you are already aware of her, yes? Though she has yet to become aware of you. Don’t try to deny it. Did you really think your execution was merely the result of your petty toys and social disruptions? Come now. We are not children here. There are no children here.” He steps close to Trinculo’s face. Close enough to kiss. “You see? I have arranged for Joan to come to us.” His smile slits horizontally across his face.

An overwhelming despair doubles Christine over.

“Ahead of me, are you?” Trinculo replies. “Are you sure? Do you even understand my inventions?” Calm, as if he is playing chess.

“Your inventions? You mean your crass pornography and useless paraphernalia?” Jean de Men steps closer. “You will die. And quite slowly. In excruciating increments. I should think that would please you.”

“And you, you knotty-pated boil… for your sins you will perish in the solar anus of the sun. I’m being literal, by the way. You mental headless worm.”

Jean de Men hits Trinculo in the face so hard, his head slams into one of the black-lacquered walls.

Trinculo merely cackles again, stirring the air around them, rebellious as ever.

Christine’s room seems to rock and split. A crack of light shuts her eyes and a thunderous hum makes her cover her ears. For a minute, a strange electricity seems to pop and fracture the whole of her quarters. Her walls come alive with light, sound, even smell; they seemed to move—until she sees what it is: hundreds of small white salamanders have somehow materialized in her room.

They are hideous little ghostlike squirming creatures, but her disgust transforms instantly as they crawl out their purpose. For an hour or more she watches as they busy themselves together to build a kind of structure: a kind of lattice, or web, quite beautiful in fact. When they finish, they quiver in unison. She has no idea what is happening until the lighting in her room dims and the web becomes a screen. The Olms light up, glow, and as her eyes begin to adjust, she sees what the screen is unveiling.

Trinculo’s face and neck and shoulders.

Only not like she’s ever seen them before. He is bloodied. His flesh literally shredded. She can see his eyeholes, and something of a nose and mouth, but what used to be his countenance has been obliterated.

“Behold—the monster!” The words come from the hole of his mouth, and his voice is certainly his, but other than that, it is as if the head of death itself is speaking to her.

“My love,” is all that comes out of her.

“Do not despair. Nothing of me was ever my skin,” he whispers.

In a heap of shoulders, and with her hands covering her face, Christine knows what she was looking at: he’s been skinned. Stripped of all his grafts. It was a form of public shaming—not common, but it happened. His body would remain filleted like that for as long as he survived. Meanwhile, his image was surely being broadcast in the halls and rooms and fake environments all over CIEL.

“I can’t actually see you,” he continues. “This is not a two-way visual. But I can feel you, hear you, sense the rise and fall of your breathing. I can tell, for instance, that you are about to cry. I command you to cease and desist, my dizzy-eyed pumpion.”

She smiles, drowning.

“Ah, there she is,” he says.

Christine sits on the floor. She looks up at him on the screen. She can’t imagine her life with him not in it.

“I’ve much to tell you, and little time. Had we but world enough, and time, huh? Alas. Allow me to narrate. Our tyrannical bunion brain, Jean de Men, has gone mad. First, my new… look. He intended to perform a full Blood Eagle—”

“A what?”

“The Blood Eagle was a method of torture and execution, sometimes mentioned in old Nordic saga legends. It was performed by cutting the ribs of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled bloodstained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim’s back. Salt was sprinkled in the wounds—”

“Trinc! He did that to you? I’ll slit his fucking throat. I’ll burn his skull and—”

“Calm, my perfect clam. He did not. He simply removed my outer epidermis. I’ll live. But it is, as they say, beyond painful. Luckily I have a habit of crossing such territories regularly. We have that in common. But I digress.” He pauses. “He’s gone over the edge, Christ. With a sadism of a singularly gendered sort. This”—he waves his hand in a way that re-presents his face—“is nothing. What’s important is, he’s cloistered himself away in some kind of dungeonesque laboratory. He’s—” He closes his eyes. “He’s gutting women open like fish. He’s trying to create a reproductive system. What he’s doing to those women… my God. Well. Not God, of course…”

Her hands and feet go cold. She swallows. Her throat fills with rocks. The space between her legs aches.

“Don’t try to picture it, Christ. Don’t.”

“How many are there?” she asks.

“Over the years since we’ve been up here? I can’t say. Many, though, very many. All ages, all in various states of… horrid evolution. All linked crudely to so-called medical apparatuses. It is one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”

It was obvious: he meant to breed them. Not through two gendered humans engaging in the sacred or profane old practice of love and lust, but by binding “women” to an ever-producing gender and forcing sexual reproduction through their bodies. Christine briefly thought of a film she’d seen as a girl on the topic of artificial swine stimulation: how Danish farmers had hooked their sows up to machines that triggered upsuck orgasm using a five-point stimulation system. Each pig was raised to produce as many piglets as possible, then slaughtered when her body could no longer reproduce.

She didn’t want what Trinculo was saying to be true. Everyone on CIEL knew that frozen sperm and eggs had traveled with them to their new world. There’d simply been no place to unite them—though they had tried. In trial after trial, they had attempted fertilization and conception and gestation, all of it in artificial environments, in animals until there were no animals left, then in cloned offspring that mutated and died or generated disease. They’d even tried the process of growing beings like crops. Nothing had worked.

“If you can bear it, there is more,” Trinculo continues. “It has come to his attention that there is a unique solution to his problem. A larger-than-life solution. A kind of human conduit for all living matter. Someone he tried to kill before, but now knows is alive and well. Someone who, through some genetic act of grace, has retained her body intact, her reproductive organs, even her hair.”

Joan.

“All right, let’s speed this tale along. They mean to rid themselves of me by the end of the week. The days run away like horses! Remember horses? Remember poets…” He laughs, a sound with more sadness in it than space. “He means to enslave her for the rest of time, to use her to propagate our ridiculous species, if you can even call what we’ve become up here a species. But what he has yet to discover is that her body is more than a breeding gold mine. Her body is of the earth more uniquely than any other in human existence. Fuck all! I haven’t the time to explain properly—I can only cut to it. She’s the rarest of engenderines, Christine. If she comes awake to it, she has the power to regenerate the entire planet and its relationship to the sun. She can bring the planet she killed back to life.”

“The planet she killed?” Christine repeats, realizing she’d been gripping her own arms hard enough to leave pink finger marks. Well, there it was. Her suspicions confirmed. Perhaps she’d always known, deep down, but now it was settled.

“Ah, but destruction and creation have always been separated by a membrane as thin as the skin on a scrotum, my love. I must go. They’re coming. I have nightly… sessions with my demons. But we’ll have urgent matters to discuss. They’re working on ways to attract her. I’ll return to you each night, like this, until I can return no more. Adieu.” He kisses his filleted hand and then blows it out toward her. The Olms slowly and gently disassemble themselves.

“Darkness,” Christine says, her voice blank. The room goes black. She crumples down on the floor, spreads her arms and legs and closes her eyes. She tries to imagine what it would be like to be tortured in the manner Trinc described—the gash forced into her body, the artificial organs built into her to simulate a reproductive system. She imagines Trinculo, how his very presence sets her abdomen and the smooth dead territory of her former sex on fire. What is left of her actual reproductive system? Everything inside her shrunken and atrophied and dysfunctional; she’d seen the X-rays. How had they kept themselves alive for as long as possible this way, curling up into nothingness while they adorned their outer husks with proof of their existence and matter… Dear dead disgusting God.

Trinculo. Skinned alive like a goddamn cat.

We’ve become signs, she thinks—mere signs of our former selves. Dislodged from plot and action in our own lives.

Her mind contorts. What do we mean by love anymore? Love is not the story we were told. Though we wanted so badly for it to hold, the fairy tales and myths, the seamless trajectories, the sewn shapes of desire thwarted by obstacles we could heroically battle, the broken heart, the love lost the love lorn the love torn the love won, the world coming back alive in a hard-earned nearly impossible kiss. Love of God love of country love for another. Erotic love familial love the love of a mother for her children platonic love brotherly love. Lesbian love and homosexual love and all the arms and legs of other love. Transgressive love too—the dips and curves of our drives given secret sanctuary alongside happy bright young couplings and sanctioned marriages producing healthy offspring.

Oh love.

Why couldn’t you be real?

It isn’t that love died. It’s that we storied it poorly. We tried too hard to contain it and make it something to have and to hold.

Love was never meant to be less than electrical impulse and the energy of matter, but that was no small thing. The Earth’s heartbeat or pulse or telluric current, no small thing. The stuff of life itself. Life in the universe, cosmic or as small as an atom. But we wanted it to be ours. Between us. For us. We made it small and private so that we’d be above all other living things. We made it a word, and then a story, and then a reason to care more about ourselves than anything else on the planet. Our reasons to love more important than any others.

The stars were never there for us—we are not the reason for the night sky.

The stars are us.

We made love stories up so we could believe the night sky was not so vast, so unbearably vast, that we barely matter.

From what Trinculo said, Joan was closer to matter than human.

Christine sheds her clothing. She runs her hands over every part of her body that she can reach. She reads and reads—hands to a body. She slaps at some areas to release sensation. It’s possible she even weeps. But she is not alone. Christine is part of Joan’s story now, and Joan is part of Christine’s, and no world will ever be the same.

Chapter Twenty-One

I am not dead.

I see a throat and chin looming above me. I feel a cool oil rubbed gently into my forehead and temples; it smells of lavender and sage. “Leone,” I whisper through the gestures.

A figure leans back away from me. Ah. It is not Leone; how could it be. It’s a young adult—maybe sixteen or eighteen—who looks back at me. Hairless, aqua-skinned, black-eyed. I blink hard in an attempt to focus. Skin still aqua. I scan our surroundings. A cave, but not where we were before. Farther in. A modest fire nearby. Glowworms lighting the walls in a delicate web.

“I am Nyx,” says the person whose skin looks wrong, gently dabbing oil again on my forehead.

“Like the moon, or the goddess?” Storage and retrieval—I can’t help it. My particular brain retrieves data whether I want it to or not. A survivalist’s occupational hazard when all books, buildings, data banks, all collected forms of knowledge, have been annihilated.

“Just Nyx.”

The figure leans back over me and more gentle than a whisper dabs at the place where the blue light lives in my head. I can see grafts from shoulder to shoulder. Stupidly, I think I see my own name embossed there in the flesh as Nyx draws away again.

My elbows ache, but I use them to sit up anyway. I study this speaker’s body and face. The broad and muscled shoulders. The masculine lantern jaw, the thick neck, yet with cheekbones and brow that are soft, calm, kind. Long-fingered and gentle hands, like an artist’s. But that’s an idiotic thought. This clearly is a young warrior. And yet the gentleness of this person’s touch says caretaker. It’s not clear whether this Nyx is a boy leaning toward manhood or a girl leaning into womanhood. Besides, that skin seems to trump the question of gender. What on earth could be the cause of this moonlike hue? Is Nyx diseased? Alien? Mutated? Enemy, or something else? Everything seems possible when you haven’t seen much humanity for decades.

“Yes,” Nyx says, checking my pulse as efficiently and smoothly as a nurse.

“Sorry?” I say.

“I can hear every word you are thinking.” Nyx lets go of my wrist and stands, walks to the fire, and puts it out with bare hands. Light remains around us in the form of the glowworm walls and now blue ghost fireflies, whose appearance shivers the cave ceiling and creates a blue-green glow. Nyx stands, arms crossed. “But none of these questions are very important.”

So did I hallucinate you? I stare at Nyx, testing this telepathy bullshit. Or are there more of… you?

Nothing. I’m an idiot.

“You’ll want to stand up and walk around soon,” Nyx redirects. “You want the energy between your body and the ground to rebalance itself as soon as possible. The travel we have ahead is difficult.”

“Wait,” I say, trying to stand. My head swims. My legs go boneless. “I have questions. A shitload of questions…” My eyes swim in their sockets.

“Are you experiencing any variations in sight?” Nyx asks, walking over to the nearest cave wall.

“Why?”

Nyx’s hands are on the cave wall in front of my face. I feel the ground vibrate up through my ankles, shins, spine, shoulders, giving my bones back to me. “Keep your eye on the wall,” Nyx instructs. “And you did not hallucinate me. There are many humans left on Earth. We number in the thousands. Of varying strength and abilities. But I’m the only one who is dual-world. And very few of us are like you and me.”

Dual-world. I snap to standing, though my head throbs and spins. My heart beats me up in my chest. “Do you know how to get up to CIEL?” If Leone is still alive, that’s where she’s been taken. If that’s even possible. Nyx doesn’t answer. “Listen,” I venture, standing and lunging like some newborn, now-extinct gazelle toward Nyx. “I need you to get me up there—” But Nyx cuts me off, and I feel the very air between us press against my chest, keeping me from forward motion.

“The wall,” Nyx says, gesturing toward the sloped walls of the cave.

I swivel my bloated head. “What about it? It’s a wall,” I say, impatiently. But then it isn’t.

First the wall goes from dark umber to amber to azure. Then it begins to sweat and glisten. And then the wall seems to swim in front of us, until what had been solid is suddenly not, and Nyx walks straight through it, blurring out of sight. Within a minute, the wall returns to its impenetrable self.

Nothingness.

Pure and thick.

“Okay! You have my attention,” I yell. The walls echo back at me. “What the fuck was that?” My voice merely ricochets around. I walk closer to the wall. I put my hands against it; solid matter. “Nyx?” Nothing. Just the vanishing points in the cave where light gives way to shadow.

Then it’s Nyx’s voice: “Please take care to move slowly; you are not exactly among the living.”

What the fuck does that mean? Not exactly among the living?

Now my head feels so light I think it may float off my neck. I drop to my knees, nearly passing out. I put my face on the ground. I taste dirt.

“Watch.” Nyx’s voice again.

I don’t move, but I eye the wall again. It dances with shadows and shapes, as if the former fire had created projections that lingered.

“Put your hands into the wall,” Nyx’s voice says.

Right, I think, as if I should trust the disembodied voice of a blue-green alien. And yet I find myself standing, walking over to the wall, and placing my hands on it. Into it. For the wall is not solid. The shapes crackle and hum with electrical current. On the other side, my elbows feel a great pull—not another person, but a kind of energy that feels centrifugal. Then the wall buckles and I am in to my shoulders, and the wall has become an abalone-colored screen, a 3-D screen quickly swallowing me up, until I find myself standing in a room with something I haven’t seen in what feels like eons.

A girl.

I am alone, in a child’s room, with a white-haired girl. A young child’s room, from the looks of it. Three of the walls are violently bombed-out. There is no ceiling. The floor is peppered with rubble and dirt, sticks and leaves and rocks and pieces of walls and things. Shredded stuffed animals, toys, and shoes. And what appears to be the shattered glass of a chemistry set. The bed is unrecognizable, save for the gutted mattress. Somehow, a little desk has survived intact, set in front of what is left of a window.

“La fenêtre,” the little girl says, pointing to the place where a window used to be.

“What is your name?” I venture. I have no idea where we are, if things are real or imagined.

“Nyx,” the girl says. “We should hurry, they’ll be here soon.”

I step closer to the girl, but she leaps back. “It’s okay,” I say, “I won’t hurt you.”

The girl laughs. “That’s funny,” she says, returning to her desk.

“What’s funny about it?”

“Everyone’s dead, is what.” The girl sits down at the desk, opens it, carefully pulls out a piece of paper and a pencil—two objects that momentarily stun me. Artifacts.

“Who is ‘everyone’?” I ask.

The girl sighs. I hear impatience in her sigh. “My sister. My mother. My brother. Like yours. The whole town. La fenêtre,” she says again, nodding her head in the direction of the blown-out wall and window.

I walk to the opening and look out. I know what she means. It’s like where I lived as a girl. It went like that during the Wars. Things were there and then they were not. People. Buildings. Animals. Sirens, and the sky lighting up with fighters and firepower and the ground and space and sound, and everything real lighting up and rumbling into nothing. Some people were fighters and some people ran for cover and some people just waited for death.

“My sister was practicing words with me. Every day she taught me new words, and numbers, every day of the Wars, she kept me reading and counting and drawing. To distract me, I guess. To not give up. When the cataclysm hit, my sister melted in front of me. I mean, I know that’s not really what happened, but that’s what I remember. She melted. Like a chemistry experiment. But I didn’t.” The girl concentrates on whatever she’s drawing on the piece of paper. Momentarily she looks up at me. “You didn’t either.”

“No,” I say. I didn’t know I’d be spared from genocide when I touched my hands to the earth. I thought, maybe even hoped, that I’d melt into raw matter like everyone else. This girl probably didn’t know she wouldn’t burn, either.

“Engenderines. Both of us.”

The word sits in the air between us, not materially visible and yet not nothing either. Like molecules. Engenderines were like mythical creatures or astrological signs dot-to-dot in the night sky. Stories of beings who were closer to matter and elements than to human. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know if I’m in a dream space of Nyx’s imagination or if I have somehow time-traveled back to her actual past. I don’t know anything. The girl looks straight up for a moment. “What are you looking for?”

“They’ll be here soon,” the girl repeats.

I walk the length of the dream, the room, whatever it is. The landscape around us matches the present tense, not the past. The wronged world. Lunar and scarred. The sepia light of a damaged atmosphere, sun, moon, a flattening color. The treeless horizon and hills made of dirt and dry riverbeds carving out directionless lines. Dead earth.

“There used to be a forest, there”—the girl points—“and a lake. And horses and cows and swans—even a black one like in fairy tales. Swans don’t really have a purpose. But I miss them the most. Maybe because of fairy tales.”

I walk back to the white-haired girl at her little desk. “Who will be here soon?” I ask, wondering if we are closer to or farther away from danger here. Wondering if I even care. There is a calm here. A still.

“The men is who,” the girl says.

“I see. How many men?” Even I don’t quite understand the aim of my question.

“Thousands,” the girl says. “Whole armies.”

I remember men. I just can’t remember how long it’s been since I saw them en masse. My brother’s corpse flashes up behind my eyes. Then my chest clicks my shoulders and spine into alertness. Wherever I am, I realize, I can’t stay. “What is this picture you are drawing? Is it about the Wars? With armies of men?”

The girl looks up at me as if I’m stupid or insane. Her brows furrow. “Real men are coming,” she says, “though they were just boys back then…” Her face loosens. “I saved them.” The hair on my arms prickles up like a tiny forest.

“Saved them from what?” I ask.

The girl puts her pencil down, picks up the beautiful piece of paper, and hands it to me. “For you,” she says, in a voice older than her years.

I look down. On the piece of paper the girl has drawn an intricate map.

“For you,” she says again. “This is the way to Leone.”

In the center of the map is a name: Christine.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Christine surveys her players. Their skin looks lifted and taut, like youth. But youth toward what? CIELers had no future. They glowed like dying stars, pretending their light and puffed-up cascades of flesh gave them presence and meaning. They carried stupid stories of themselves around like capes and headdresses. Underneath they were all atrophying bones and sacks of meat with half-century shelf lives.

Each player has a different silk robe on—her idea—in a palette of deep azures and burgundy reds, blacks and purples and the dark green of deep forests. Or what she remembers of forests anyway. It is more color than she’s seen in years.

When the time comes, of course, they will perform naked, their young and still-stinging grafts pearling and gleaming alive—as if to say, something almost human was here. Corrupted, white and wounded and unflinching. They will perform an epic poem written across their bodies. And at the apex of the drama, nearly Greek in its design, they will move to kill as many CIELers as they can, slaughter and liberate their targets.

To Nyx, she gave a special operation: find Joan. Bring her up. The execution this time would not be hers.

She gives each of them a single transparent wire cord, wrapped around their forearms and wrists. Slicing through the necks of mature CIELers is easy. Their skin never met with weather, and thus is spongey and elasticized from graft upon graft. Pain receptors dulled by the palimpsest of flesh. Christine and her troupe can cut them open like so many decadent cakes.

Trinculo’s side of the plan gives her a pain at her temple and a tightness at her throat. She cannot get the image of his flayed head and torso out of her mind’s eye. Red and meat-rivered, with blue sinewy veins and arteries, bulging eyes, a gaping mouth. Like the inside-out of a body. And yet she knows, more than she’s known anything in her life, that he will succeed with his part of the plan.

He’d said as much in his last soliloquy animated by the Olms:

He was a terrible poet. And yet she instantly memorized his stanzas and replaced the original from which he’d stolen it. His silly, melodramatic, reworded speech!

And then the Olms had loosened and disassembled, and his wounded image falling back to nothing. His good-bye kiss.

But she has other ideas.

Her players await further instruction. Looking at them, her eyes well up like little saucers. She feels entire oceans of tears only barely held back by the dyke of her resolve. She will not surrender him to the universe without a fight. She will bring all of literary history forward like a tidal wave.

She loves him unto dead matter, where they can be joined again with whole universes.

“The play’s the thing,” she announces to her players; if they notice the waver in her voice or the dull redundancy of the line from history, they do not show it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

At the sound of the word Leone, a space-splitting roar tears into the dream girl’s room. My head feels split open. The only force I know of like that is a Skyline crackling open, but how could that be? Hadn’t Nyx bridged me into some otherwhere? Not Earth, not space, maybe not even real? As instantly as it hits, dead silence and empty dark vacuum me back to dirt and cave walls. My eyes adjust and my senses kick. In my hand, though, is the map.

“Now would be a good fucking time to reappear,” I yell into the empty. “Nyx!”

“Telluric current,” Nyx responds, standing behind me like it’s the most normal thing in the world, as if we’d been that way all along. “In tandem with your mind’s eye. It’s how we’ll travel.”

At the sound of her emotionless voice, anger balls up in my gut and blooms into my lungs and esophagus. With what life I have left in me, I unsheathe a blade at my thigh, twirl and lunge at Nyx with the knife to her neck.

Under the knife I can see Nyx’s throat shiver. I watch her swallow in slow motion. I watch the veins at her temple river outward and pulse. When Nyx speaks, her tone is smooth. Even pinned and head-cocked, Nyx’s voice sounds calm. I decide I hate Nyx.

“Death,” Nyx murmurs. “It’s always about death. If there’s a mortal short circuit to humanity’s existence, it’s the obsession with death as an ending. Death? You think death means anything to me? Before you kill me, let me tell you a story.”

I push the knife far enough into Nyx’s neck to draw a line of blood.

Without moving, Nyx speaks. “We’ve believed in you for years—the story of you. At least dignify what’s left of my life by letting me tell mine?”

It’s a fair point. I loosen my grip and the knife’s pressure, but hold my position. Nyx continues, unaffected.

“You are familiar, I believe, with Jean de Men? Do you know about his experiments in biosynthetics?” A long silence blooms between us. The damp dark air seems to breathe. “I thought not. No one is. You might say I’m Jean de Men’s creature. Allow me to demonstrate?”

Nyx pushes hard against the knife’s edge poised at her throat, easing up inch by inch until we stand facing one another. I let it happen. A small but insignificant path of blood leaves a trace at Nyx’s neck. Then slowly, carefully, Nyx unbuckles the metal skirt that binds legs, hips, waist, and torso. As each buckle loosens, I realize I am holding my breath. I don’t know why. I try to breathe like a normal, war-tested veteran. But what appears before me undoes me again.

The metal garment releases and falls to the ground, and the aquamarine of Nyx’s skin pigment grows even more vivid. Almost like a canvas. My sight is drawn to that place between the hips and legs. Humans are always drawn to sexuality, whether we admit it or not. There is no not looking. There, where sexuality used to announce itself, is a malformed penis; someone’s attempt at reconstructing the complex organ. It hangs like a truncated and crooked worm, the head misshapen. But that’s not all. Intimately close to the penis is a partially sutured half-open gash running from the space between Nyx’s legs to the right hip bone. Jagged and ugly. Another attempt at genitalia. Botched. My mind tries to tear my eyes away from the sight, but the body doesn’t lie. I can’t look away.

“Yes, look. Like a malformed hermaphrodite. Perhaps my ‘parent’ couldn’t decide—boy or girl. Jean de Men tried both. In the face of my perfectly intact anatomy, he butchered me like meat.”

Nyx’s stance widens and I blush.

“I was twelve. Just a couple of years after my girlhood, which you just visited. While you were out crusading your teen years away in the Wars, some of us were the objects of inhuman experimentation. I was not born like this. I was made from the body of an Earth-born child I can barely remember.”

I watch Nyx touch the faint blood left from my knife at the throat, then taste it. For a moment I think I taste copper. But Nyx is not finished with the story.

“When I escaped and joined the resistance it wasn’t for you. Your glory or cause. It was for more than survival. It was for revenge. This body—my body. I am the proof of what happens when power turns its eye toward procreation. I am a monstrosity. But that’s not the worst part. A body is just a body. You know? Something deeper lives in all of us. Do you know what it is?”

I didn’t. Did I? I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Love,” Nyx said.

My chest constricts, as if the word itself was a vise.

“I loved people before Jean de Men did this to me. I know what love was.” Nyx looks down at the ground.

Did I?

Nyx walks around me in a slow circle. “I loved my father. He was shot in the skull less than a foot from my face. I loved my mother.” Nyx touches my shoulder so that I turn at the same circumference and rate of the circle she makes around me. “My mother was stripped naked, then eviscerated—crotch to throat—in front of me.” Nyx gestures up and down the length of a torso. “Jean de Men told me it was part of my education toward an immortal future, one in which humanity sacrificed itself for an evolutionary leap. On my knees, lost in some kind of horror and emotional chaos, I wanted to suck the bullet from my father’s head and lodge it in my own brain. I wanted to crawl inside the carcass of my mother and die there. Then Jean de Men put a blade in my hands, and a blade at my skull, and forced me to gut a girl my own age—or die. And then another. And another. I fell into a kind of numb terror—”

“My God.” My voice surprises me.

“No,” Nyx answers, “if anything is true, it’s that God was a fiction. What haunts me is that we placed so many brutal figureheads at his feet.” She looks up toward the ceiling. It looks briefly like the gesture of prayer, but I know better. Everything above us is brutal and mutilated.

“He said he needed the anatomical material. He said good each time I stuck the blade into another girl.” I stare at Nyx, looking for emotion in her pupils. Nyx returns an icy gaze. “Inside the numb, I vowed to murder not just Jean de Men, but anyone anywhere whose existence depended on attaining power. Which is nearly everyone.” Nyx approaches me now and stares through me. “You are alive because I haven’t decided who you are. Saviors are dead. God is dead. Are you about power, or love? It’s a simple choice I’ll have to make.”

Now, this. An equality of hate. Rage, wedged between us like the ghosts of the girls we were.

Nyx’s body pulses, resonating with the story. “I was not very old when I hid the boys,” she continues. “But I already had a deep field of knowledge.”

My gaze lingers, traveling Nyx’s corpus with an empathy I did not intend to feel. Torture has so many layers, like the layers of the body’s skin, or the different realms of atmosphere between breathing and exploding in space. At the heart of torture there is a brutality beyond inflicting pain. It is the brutality of stealing an identity, a sense of self, a soul. The pain-wracked body is only a symbol of a deeper struggle that is bodiless. It is the struggle to be. Not just to cling to consciousness, but a kind of radical compassion to exist as a self in relation to others. The torturer attempts to murder that desire for compassionate relationship. To erase even its possibility. The tortured body is the opposite of the newborn. Instead of a will toward life and the stretch to bond with an other, there is a brutal will toward death and the end of that longing.

When torture succeeds, that is.

Nyx’s body tells me that Nyx’s torturer has not succeeded.

“What boys?” I manage.

The burns on my face sting and ache. Nyx is staring at them. I step toward her until we are close enough to embrace. That’s when I see them: upon Nyx’s arms and torso, something besides the spectacle of the wounds.

The words. Faint and raised like embossed flesh. She is covered in them—tiny scar-words, white as bone fragments. And I am right. My name appears more than once. Unable to read fully in the dim light, I convulse with the desire to get closer. I raise my hand toward Nyx’s skin. It hovers there between us like dead faith. Nyx simply pushes my hand away into space.

I can see enough of the scarifications now to read a line or two. They are sentences. Stanzas, more precisely. At the neck and shoulder, down her breastless chest and torso. My heart and breath lurch in my chest. A thin rise of electricity shoots from my ear to my forehead. The words on Nyx’s body. I recognize them.

Then Nyx reenters the metal skirt with more care than it had been removed with, and I’m embarrassed to find tears stinging the corners of my eyes. When Nyx repositions so that my knife is once again poised at the throat, Nyx’s back to me, ready to live or die exactly as before. “Who are you?” Nyx asks.

I don’t know why I hold Nyx in the headlock still, but I do. “The map,” I begin. “Is it real? Can I get to Leone? Who is Christine?”

“Who are you?” Nyx repeats. “Do you even know?”

My throat empties. My mind a vacuum of foreign matter.

“No,” I whisper back, locked in an antiembrace with this strange other who seems to have so many answers.

“I told you. You are an engenderine.”

I don’t move.

“You are between human and matter. Nearly indistinguishable.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Nyx calls it kinema.

What we are doing, that is, our mode of travel. For some reason, my brain reaches for Galileo, for whom I developed a strange fixation as a child. I secretly wished he’d been my grandfather. Nyx means to train me to ride the motion of energy that is everywhere. “It supercharges you…” and I feel like a human battery.

Kinema brings us hopscotching across Earth. Nyx says I’m learning to control my own energy. Nyx says we have far to travel. As I understand it, it is something like riding telluric current, combined with the most intense human-to-human—or whatever Nyx is and I am—embrace that I’ve ever experienced. Not even a lover’s entangled body knot could be tighter than this embrace. (Not that I would know. The one and only time I let my desire happen I nearly killed Leone.) Our combined energies dematerialize us and rematerialize us anywhere Nyx aims us. Kinema. Just like the red rock with my brother in the field when we were kids.

I feel the tear of Leone’s future ripping my body apart. If I can’t learn this form of transportation I believe she will die. Nyx knows it—uses it like bait. I do not believe that Nyx gives a shit whether or not Leone lives or dies. All Nyx wants is revenge, and yet Nyx speaks of revenge as a portal back to “love.” Whose love? Where? I want to get up to Leone so badly I have shredded the insides of my cheeks from chewing at them so impatiently.

We make camp underground in all the caves Leone and I have lived in and more, sometimes finding evidence that others had been there, too, or maybe it was just the trace of things before or during the Wars. It is impossible to tell. Long-deserted fire pits and bone fragments, petroglyphs and the metal carcasses of weapons and vehicles and machines meant for killing, irrigation system remains and adobe structures and lighting and power systems and underground gardens gone crackled and black. Caches of long-spoiled food or irradiated stuff, burned-up bones of people in heaps or scattered like some great carnivorous bird had shat them across land masses. Once we found a tandem bicycle on its side, red and flat-tired, but with spokes intact. For some reason the bike crushed me. It reminded me that individual humans were always yearning for an other. The old ache in my chest. After seeing traces of people for so long, believing most of them dead, it was still shocking if what Peter said was true. That an entire group existed… no way to know without looking. Survivors be damned; my only impulse to live rests in the body of Leone.

Graves.

We see graves everywhere.

Something else that haunts me: the graves, they all have different depths. I don’t know what, if anything, it means. There is no hierarchy to death, to grief, to the end of life. The small graves of children, shallower than the graves of adults—does it really mean anything different? Did decomposition happen more quickly for children?

In any case, they remind me of the children I buried who died where they lay, the children I raised from the dead only to watch them drop to dirt, but not before they each looked me in the eye with one question: Why couldn’t you save me?

There is a recurring dream I keep having that seems to be telling me something.

When I was a child, it seemed beautiful: a white lady in space who spun stories like spiderwebs. Roomfuls of stories. And the ink of space surrounding her made her glow all the more, like some kind of moonwoman, her skin radiating night light. The stars seemed to carry her voice.

During the Wars, the dream came to me differently. I don’t mean the dream changed; it did not. But how I felt within the dream changed. Suddenly the woman’s stories seemed urgent. Her eyes wider and more focused. Her mouth more deliberate. Her words heavier. Once I thought I even heard her call to me, say my name. But I can’t be sure. Someone else’s voice had woken me for battle. So it’s hard to say whose voice I really heard. It’s just that some part of me wanted it to be hers. I thought I heard the name Christ. I thought it was her name.

Most recently the dream has turned brutal. The woman is still beautiful, still spinning stories, still embedded within the night and stars. But the pull of her voice is so intense I can feel it in my chest and abdomen. The stories are not for little girls. The stories say, Get up. Now. The stories say, Turn your head away from everything you’ve known. Look down. At the dirt itself. Mother. Sister. Daughter. Her name, the woman, I know now it is Christine.

And the dirt, it’s screaming.

Kinema. Nyx is taking me toward something but she won’t tell me what. We kinemaed subterranean passages to avoid Skylines or biologic trace. I’m too much like bait, Nyx says. We don’t have much time, Nyx says. Does this mean that Leone is in danger? Is there some carefully designed form or plan evolving above us? Briefly a tinge of my former desire to fight for humanity surfaces, for a briefer moment still I wish the feeling would linger, but then all I feel is Leone again. And Peter’s dying breath. What do I do?

And always Leone in my throat or my temple or my chest, or in the place where my very sex sits, pounding with a vengeance, asking me why I didn’t love her in every way humanly possible while I still had the chance.

Every night I pull out the map that the child Nyx gave me and stare at it. It looks vaguely astrological. Earth’s landmarks don’t look anything like they once did; they are all either gone or so radically changed that they look like different continents, mountain ranges, dry riverbeds, and jagged ravines. The map displays coordinates that reach toward the sky and beyond the constellations, beyond the crippled sun and moon, with lines and trajectories touching points of stars and planet rings and celestial bodies. Maybe it’s purely a little girl’s beautiful made-up sky system, like in a fairy tale. And yet when I open the piece of paper—only the second piece I’ve seen in decades—I feel hope. I wonder how people must have felt the first time someone drew a map that went beyond the flat world to a round one. I wonder if they felt the way I do now.

For three days we kinema, until finally I look up through a zigzagging crack in a cave’s ceiling at the dull excuse for a moon and ask, “Where are we going? I cannot bear this any longer. I’ll kill myself if Leone dies before we can get up to CIEL.”

“We are almost there,” Nyx says, without looking at me, “but there is a last stop we must attend to.” And then, either compassionately or through annoyance with my endlessly abstract and morbid thoughts, for I think the same thought every day and every night—why should I go on, to be or not to be, what have they done to the body of my dear Leone—Nyx says, “She’s still alive.”

She. Leone. I swallow and my whole life stones in my throat.

“Where the fuck are we going?” I had nothing to lose anymore. Nyx hadn’t killed me; I hadn’t killed Nyx; whatever each of us was after was clearly still unattained.

“You’ll know when you see it,” Nyx answers, and turns away from me, shoulder blades walling me off from any chance at connection. The image of Nyx’s genitalia flashes like an undiscovered landscape over and over again in my head. I can’t not see it.

But I can’t travel any farther without knowing either. “How am I not human? You said I’m not human.” Nyx doesn’t move or open her mouth; she just keeps on stirring soup in a clay pot over a fire. It smells like rabbit, but I know that’s not possible. Bat maybe, oilbird or snake, but not rabbit. I walk toward the mouth of the cave.

“What are you doing?” Nyx stops stirring.

I keep walking.

“HEY!” Nyx yells.

I keep walking. If I am bait, then let them take me. If Leone is alive, then let me go to where she is. I’d rather die near Leone than live another day like this. Another ten feet and I’ll be at the shaft. If I climb out, if they really are looking for me, I’ll be easy to spot on the surface of the dirt planet, firing off ammunitions. I don’t care. If Nyx wants to stop me, hurt me, kill me, let it happen.

But then I’m being embraced from behind, plunged forward into space and time with Nyx’s blue-green arms around me, our heads knocking together. This time the kinema is not to another cave.

I land with Nyx on my back. I sputter at a mouthful of dirt. We are on the surface of the planet I abandoned for the small and secret survival available underground. In short but vivid pulse-bursts, we kinema like bomblets across varied terrains, wrestling like animals.

Earth: the vastness makes my breath jackknife in my chest. The world before I killed it. It used to be beautiful. The beauty is all gone now—but the vastness remains, and I can almost feel beauty just under the surface of things. It hurts to look at it.

We skirt oceans and shorelines like gulls and pelicans once did. We dive valleys between formerly lush mountains, curling around what used to be glistening rivers, snaking through what used to be jungles. All gone to dirt, a still life of dirt, the world an ossuary. We swan over deserts of sand and wind, deserts of ice, life likely hiding underneath. The skies are no longer blue or gray, there is no more summer or rain. It’s all just constant sepia day and eerie bruise-colored night. Wind everywhere. Untamed water. Geology unbound. The entire planet like a series of exposed erosions. We travel the world in quadrants and hemispheres, where countries and cultures are dead.

There’s a reason I left the surface. It wasn’t just to survive.

The landmass before me is as enormous as the sky and space above it. What’s left of civilization is nearly indistinguishable from the erosions of land meeting elements. We stop. Somewhere. Exhausted.

Wind. With little to nothing to block it, the wind tears at us both. My hair pulls hard enough to wrench loose from its roots. My face pulls. I have to hug myself so my arms don’t pinwheel. I brace my legs to keep from falling down. Then the wind subsides, and gusts up again, the intervals irregular. When the wind is not attacking us, Nyx walks ahead. I haven’t walked the surface of Earth without having some kind of purpose or goal—hunting for ammunitions compounds or Skylines—for a long time. There hasn’t been a reason. But what I can see now tugs my memories loose. The word city snakes up my vertebrae, but which? It’s impossible to tell. The once-urban surface pokes up in juts and mounds. Haphazard and irregular skeletons of buildings or freeways. Bridges and roads in pieces, like fragments to nowhere. A city demolished or eaten alive by hurricanes, tsunamis, mudslides, earthquakes, like the last best nuclear bombs times a thousand.

Earth is a cemetery. There is nothing to say. Nothing to say about all of this empty. There was no proper eulogy. I think of all the so-called lifeless planets out there floating in space. Was this really the end of our story? To join the galaxies of spinning, floating planets, home to nothing, to no one but the elements that comprised us? We deserve it. For what we’ve done to each other. For what we did to this orb we found ourselves inhabiting. This beautiful, godforsaken place where once there was life.

For what I did.

Nyx steps ahead of me, leaving dust holes in the terrain. I know it is a city, this place—not just because of the mighty architectural icons or beehive-like living structures and transportation labyrinths, but because I can see the carcasses of misshapen airplanes.

And I know exactly where we were.

City of light or water or art. City of history and sprawling avenues spoking out from its landmarks, stretching out like the lines of an urban poem. City of rivers and streams threading through arrondissements and kissing tree-lined quays. Ghosts of cathedrals pulling faith in between the past and the present, rising from an island waterway, stretching to see a sister church. Old stone, older than stone-making, stone-giving cobblestoned streets pressed up against districts, once as distinct as the people on the planet; neighborhoods like chapters from books, or what used to be books, turning and lifting now into some raw otherness. City of walking by day, and metros snaking and tunneling underneath it all, some subterranean transit worming forward and backward having once teemed with human.

The memories make a wasteland of my eyes and throat. Wind continues to pummel us as we walk.

When I last set foot in this city, before the Wars—we were children, my brother’s face not yet etched with violence, mine not yet fully bloomed into a woman’s map of rage and despair, the two of us laughing within the city, Paris, peopled with—oh, how richly peopled it had been! An image: two glasses of wine making that glass-to-glass note as my parents toasted. Tears sting the corners of my eyes as Nyx and I trudge through the desolation. I can already taste the salt hopelessness of the imagined memory—the city and life of lovers that Leone and I would never be or inhabit: streets full of Africans and Asians, Chinese and Vietnamese—my love Leone sometimes stopping to speak Vietnamese—the city teeming with Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Serbs, with city natives and those from the countryside, feeling foreign amid the urban rush and wail of capital and culture, Americans and Brits straining to become kindred in spite of themselves, Italians swarming and winding ’round Germans and Australians too blond or too tall—all of it surging like a single organism of flesh and bone through the streets and alleys always smelling of bread and urine and cheese and soot and riverstink… how a single glass of wine on any night next to the river touched to the lips between two people could feel like every love there ever was or would be… the night like the water lapping over us, the sky filling with stars that stitched our names…

Bridges bridging land and water and past and present, from upstream to downstream to bays and on to oceans…

Before me now, not a single remaining bridge fully crosses the dusted gutted riverbed. The nubs of the city’s iconic skyline are as unrecognizable as half-rotten corpses on a battlefield.

The wind kicks up again and purges my memories. This land a waste.

Though I wish my own voice would just swallow itself or destroy me, I speak across a lull in the wind’s torrent: “Why are we here? This city is dead.”

But Nyx is already walking down into the Seine’s cavernous, dry riverbed. “Stop being so blind. There’s a city underneath this. I thought you understood about subterranean life. Everything is matter.”

At first I hear this as “everything matters,” then realize my error. Nyx’s deliberateness, the determination of her walk away from me, pulls me along. I clamber down and fall part of the way, rolling like blown detritus. I land at Nyx’s feet. I look up. “What kind of ‘city’ could there be underneath all this?” My voice fills with bile. Suddenly, instinctively, I know exactly where we are. I cannot believe they chose the city I loved so much.

We are at the site of my execution, what was restaged on CIEL.

“Once a city of culture,” Nyx says, holding a hand out to help me stand.

Chapter Twenty-Five

On CIEL, Christine walks down a corridor and looks at two Olms in the palm of her hand. She’s taken to carrying a few of them around with her everywhere—even, truth be told, talking to them sometimes. What better time to be losing one’s mind?

Between Trinculo updates and the spider’s Morse code, what she has learned is this: the Olms were like early evolutionary versions of Joan. They had developed new sensory organs from their subterranean existence, just as all evolutionary changes happened—only, with the speed of geocatastrophe, it had all happened much faster. The blue light at the side of Joan’s head, and the so-called song that accompanied it, were like a string linking her to something other. Her new sensory organ did indeed give her elemental powers on Earth. But that was only part of the story. Joan’s body had the power to conduct all living matter, to destroy yes, but also to regenerate.

Christine stops in her tracks for a moment and blows on the Olms in her hand. They circle and tighten into a little white ball. We’re all made of star stuff, she thinks, but Joan has a direct line to a cosmic system.

For a moment, Christine’s sympathy for Joan pools in her imagination. What must it have been like, as a girl, to carry a song of all creation and destruction in her head? What must it be like to carry the burden of humanity—and its end—around in a woman’s body, when a woman’s body was made to create life? Christine places her hand on her own pubis. The pubic bone remained, but nothing else did.

She holds a micro version of what Joan has likely felt on a cosmic level: survivor’s guilt.

Joan had been unable to save humanity.

It is a wonder she did not suicide after she survived her own execution, only to engender destruction.

Christine ducks into an alcove. The hiss and hum of the CIEL breathing system drones on. Metallic sentries and bloated white doilies—what is left of the human race—parade by her. She touches her free hand to her chest, feeling the raised words, reading them as Braille.

She holds the little Olms up to her lips and whispers to them, soft as a lullaby: “I understand it now. You have to let go of the idea that you are a singular savior or destroyer. Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy. Bodies are miniature renditions of the entire universe. We are a collective mammalian energy source. That is what we have always been. What an epic error we made in misinterpreting it all.” The Olms crawl up her wrist and forearm, then up to her shoulder, resting at the place between her jaw and collarbone, where she’s recently burned a plot twist into Joan’s story.

Chapter Twenty-Six

By one thick rock face along the dry riverbed, diving down from the decrepit remains of the city, Nyx stops. I stop, too. Nyx doesn’t even bother to acknowledge me. I see Nyx’s hands go up against the giant gray dirt edifice and I know something will move soon. I know to watch. I feel the ground under us tremor.

The wind stops.

For a long minute, the surrounding atmosphere seems to stop moving. I can swear that molecules of hydrogen and oxygen have slowed down enough to be seen. If I am delusional, well, then the delusion swallows me whole.

From the wall of dirt right in front of us, from stasis and earth, comes motion. The blue light at my head nearly concusses me off my feet; the song is so loud I feel something warm and wet dripping down from my ears. Blood. But that’s nothing. Two young and naked men—and to be sure, they are men; as long and old and dead as time has become, their masculine image is arresting, the dipping between the hips and the small dimples under each hip bone, the beauty of the thick muscle hanging between their legs, the musculature of their chests blooming between the rounds of their shoulders, their jawlines—two young men, one reddish in hue and the other a kind of ochre or sienna, emerge like statues coming to life. They stand in front of me, their gaze focused on something or some time so far beyond me that I may as well not even be here.

“Are they alive?” I say, sounding stupid even to myself.

“Yes. Their bodies, anyway. But they are… asleep. Only deeper.”

My head hurts. Not from the struggle to understand. More like a childhood thing. Like when my skull first came alive with song and light, which nearly killed me.

I look at Nyx. A little spit from my open mouth catches in the wind and strings outward.

“Matter,” Nyx says.

Nyx points to the ground between the two men. Immediately the two figures throw themselves into the ground. Not onto it; into it. Their bodies wrestle the earth, turning and convulsing. Their musculature constricts and expands. It is difficult to tell where one’s legs and arms end and the other’s begin. The earth, too, is dynamic, like clay. Their faces, their open mouths, the cords in their necks animate the space between agony and ecstasy.

My heart breaks with the violent beauty of it. I can’t move. I can’t not look.

Their bodies sink a meter or so, then begin to glow and heat and change colors—red to orange to yellow to green to aqua to indigo to a purple so purple it’s black. Soon their bodies are decomposing right before my eyes. I’m breathing so hard I nearly hyperventilate. I reach my hand out, and I think I shout, but Nyx pushes me hard away from them. As their bodies sink deeper and deeper into the earth, I feel another urge to dive down, grab at least one, pull him back to life. Surely I can save one thing.

Again Nyx blocks me. The song in my head pressures my skull and grows as loud as the sound I remember from the epic angry sea. When, after the terrible watching, I can no longer regard a trace of their bodies, their skeletons, their human form, the song subsides. Slowly and in waves.

At my feet, and extending away from Nyx and me, is a growing carpet of moss. Tiny white flowers. Insects. Vines. The roots of a tree. Life.

“Now you,” Nyx says.

“Me what?”

“What, have you suddenly become an idiot? Your turn. You bring the children.”

At the sound of the word children I stiffen, tree-like. “There’s no way,” I say flatly.

“On the contrary,” Nyx says, “this is the way. Put your hands against the dirt wall.”

“No.” In my head, I see the children in the graves I buried. How I hid them from harm, how they died because of me, how I resurrected them, how they died again at my hands. Every face. Every small body. Their eyes. Mouths. I can’t do it again.

But Nyx means to let things between us live or die here.

The wind subsides, as if Nyx asked it to. “You want up to CIEL? You want your beloved Leone? This is how. Your body. Engenderines were never eco-terrorists. On the contrary. Our love for Earth and for all living matter violently trumps humans’ love for one another. We are not more than the animals we made extinct. We are not above the organic life we destroyed. We are of it. Our desire, unlike what yours has been thus far, is to give the earth back its life. No single human life is more important than that. Not Leone’s, not even yours. Now bring the children. They have a vital energy. Without it, nothing matters.”

I stare at Nyx for a long time. Then I stare at the ground. Then I walk to the wall of dirt and put my hands against it. I think of their small bodies—their eyes, their mouths. The dirt vibrates. The blue light and song at my head reverbs. And then here they are, two cherub-like kids, one squatting, one standing. What’s left of my heart, shatters.

Nyx lies down on the ground. The children do the same, as if being put to sleep by their mother. The blue light and song emanating from me does not save me from being emotionally gutted. But soon the children have lost their forms to color and sound: water.

They become water.

I stare at the unusual graves. I put my hand into a small stream forming. I stare at the graves of the beautiful young men, too, gone green with nature. Life and death marking the same spot. “How many men are there…”

“Thousands,” Nyx says quietly. “An army.”

I close my eyes. For reasons I can’t explain, I see Olms—so many Olms they make their own mountain. Behind my eyelids, I see strings of light going from the Olms to all the stars in the sky. Then I see just two Olms, curled and wriggling in the palm of a woman’s hand. The woman is whispering. She is beautiful.

I open my eyes. I look up. “How many children?”

“Many.”

“Will any of them… have life? Real life? Human life? Or was my role on Earth simply to condemn them all to dirt?”

“Most of them will have ‘real life,’ as you call it. Some who are regenerated will become elements. Like water. Some will be for the population, whatever that turns out to mean. But that’s not the point right now. Look, it’s pretty simple,” Nyx says.

“How is this fucking simple? You want me to witness these humans—if they really are alive—you want me to watch them devolve right in front of me? How is that not murder?” I feel once again like pure destruction. My blood feels thick in my forearms and legs.

“Not at all,” Nyx says without alarm. “You are giving them a reason to live. You are giving them back their sacred relationship to the planet and the very cosmos they came from.”

To be human. What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it meant rejoining everything we are made from. The song in my head pulses in a single ear-shattering note, then silence. Like an auditory exclamation point.

“I can get you up, if you can kill their future up there. They’re all that’s left of a self-centered species. They aim to destroy us, suck out what’s left of Earth’s resources. You have to choose. Your past is there. You know it is. You have to reenter your own story. And it will likely cost you this thing you call ‘life.’ But it will save your beloved Leone. And much, much more.”

Leone. Like a word untethered from a body.

“What do I do?” I say, the wind still around us.

“Give me your rib,” Nyx says, moving toward me.

“Excuse me?” I touch my own skin.

“Your body. We need it. A piece at a time. Engenderine.”

I stare at the hand that’s missing a finger. If my body carries something better than a self, I surrender it. Nyx lifts my shirt. Pushes a fist inward. Fleshward. I try not to flinch and then I lose consciousness. When I come to, Nyx is gone again and I’m just my wounded body, sutured where a rib should be and face in the dirt. But the dirt is vibrating. I stand up inside sound, the song amplifying in my head, on the ground, up into sky.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The ugly audacity of pomp brings bile up Christine’s throat.

The thunder of CIEL’s orchestral pageantry shakes the walls around Christine and her players as they fill an anteroom next to the pre-execution theater. “For fuck’s sake,” she mutters. They would have to endure some horrid musical preamble, and no doubt several empty idiotic speeches, before her own show could get going. Ah. Now she recognizes the tune: It is the “Theme of Ascension.” Which is, more accurately, the goddam dirge that was created for the celebratory moment of ascending to CIEL. To be followed, no doubt, by the “Crescendo of Dematerialization.” After your fiftieth birthday, and poof—back to shattered DNA strands and space junk. With a soundtrack.

Trinculo’s so-called trial was to happen in trompe l’oeil, its image appearing over and over again in holographic bursts. It would be broadcast in corridors and common rooms and walls in our CIEL quarters.

Christine had been granted a performance as part of the spectacle of Trinculo’s execution, though gaining permission did take some bribery of various guards and under-administrators. In the end Christine was able to convince them that she could provide a superior companion show for his death.

The silver spider swings and leaps in great arcs, drawing her attention to the performance space, which faces a cathedral-size window with a giant T-square covering it, the horizontal beam slightly higher than center. Beyond it, the horizonless ink of space and the dots of dead stars. How has she never seen it this way before? It is a goddam cross.

Her line of little rebels ready themselves feverishly. At that age, their cheeks seem to almost flush. But she knows she’s just wishing it. Their eyes yet blaze, though. They still have identifiable necks and cheekbones and scapulae. Lips not yet distorted or spidering around the edges. Her now-favorite, the girl with the epaulets, the girl—or she has decided it is a girl—with the aqua-hued skin, shoots orders at the others.

“Leave any thoughts of a future in this room. The future is…” Nyx risks a glance at Christine. “The future is dung. A compost heap masquerading as life, floating in space without reason or purpose. The old are the only endgame, and they reek of rot and pus.”

Christine’s lips curl up in a smile. There is no doubt that this young woman has been influenced by Trinculo. What an inspiring group of faux offspring they’ve made! Standing in their deep-hued silken robes, their white skin blazing through silk color, the troupe looks briefly to her like hope. A violent, alien, and homeless flock of creatures trapped between sexual development and arrest. It’s a wonder they don’t spontaneously combust.

If there had ever been a God, and Christine for one had never believed in one, then that God had perpetrated the most evil of jokes on the human race. He’d brought them to a kind of evolutionary climax, only to put the whole thing into reverse.

Now Jean de Men meddles with this sorry story of creation. And those relegated to CIEL bestow upon him such reverence and power that he nearly levitates with it. Under the guise of creating culture, he had set out to regulate and reinvent sexuality and everything that came with it, across the bodies of all women, and turn them into pure labor and materiality. What could be more biblical than that? All he needed was an apple and a goddamn snake.

Courage, Christine tells herself. To straighten her spine, she casts her mind through the wormhole of history, back to a parallel universe, from Joan’s trial, shortly before her execution:

Christine returns to the present tense with a vengeance. She turns from the vast and moronic cross to face her players. “Tonight we arrest the future by igniting the past.”

She puts her hands upon the shoulders of her best warrior. “Nyx,” she says, “I am glad to have known you, even if briefly.” She means it just as it sounds, as a deathkiss.

“To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter—isn’t that evolution’s climax?” Nyx says triumphantly, smiling, nearly glowing, leaving Christine feeling something like the heartstab of a proud mother.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The entering entourage of power is ugly. High-up CIEL figures and assorted mechanical sentries. But Trinculo’s presence interrupts the ceremonial structure like a horse in a solemn parade unloading its shit in clumps.

“Fire what petty gelatinous wit you can muster, you fen-soaked death sacks,” Trinculo hisses, “I have no skin to harm.” His eyes gleam like succulent black holes. His body crouches, ready to spring… mythical creature.

“Gag and bind the troll,” Jean de Men orders, mocking Trinculo with a flip of his weighted wrist, dangling old white grafts like wrong doilies.

But her beloved’s voice—Trinculo’s—it is in her. His voice so rings Christine’s corpus that she feels she might faint. Every bone in her body vibrates with his language. And yet the image of Trinculo entering the theater plunges her doomward. From where she and her players are, they can easily see the procession: CIEL thugs lead Trinculo, the colossally arrogant Jean de Men follows, flesh dragging behind him in a bridal train. Christine holds her breath so as not to spit her entire mouthful of teeth at him.

But there is another.

A woman who appears to be unconscious or asleep is suspended midair on a kind of floating metal bed. She is not from CIEL. It is the woman with skin the color of someone who lives in weather. Or someone avoiding weather. On Earth. It reminds Christine of memories of the desert Southwest. The Earth woman’s head and shoulders, decorated with ornately designed tattoos in place of hair, seem warm amidst all the white. Her jaw squares up from the metal carrier. Now and then, Christine sees Trinculo steal glances at the woman. Who is she? Does Trinculo know her? Why is Jean de Men making a show of her?

Standing apart from them, the pearly beast Jean de Men smiles. Or at least the folds of his face arch upward.

“Some demigod,” Christine mutters under her breath.

As if Jean de Men can hear her, he turns to address Christine. “What is the title of your theatrical addition to our official proceedings?” He weaves his white whittled fingers in between each other.

The audience leans in her direction. A circle of milky figures, pallid and achromatic, their graft flabs hanging about them. Maybe one hundred, middle-aged, all shy of fifty but not by much.

“A Brief History of the Heretic Maid, your… grace,” Christine responds, still managing to keep her teeth unclenched. “Or do you prefer ‘your eminence’?” De Men scowls. She thinks she hears the woman on the floating slab breathing. With difficulty.

“Ah,” Jean de Men growls. “I see you’ve not lost your knack for reinventing the utterly obvious.”

“As usual, your… eminence, you play the game entire galaxies ahead of me. I could never hope to compete in the realm of such brilliance—as brilliant as the fire of the sun,” she says, bowing for effect. “And I mean that literally.” She astral projects her heart into Trinculo’s.

For a moment Jean de Men seems to her like a cartoon of himself. It is easy to think of him as a buffoon—this idiotic blowhard, this accidentally ascended charlatan. But Christine knows better. All of human history has taught us how easily the clownish, the insane, the needy, the self-absorbed, even the at-first righteous can be grooved or embossed by the simplicity of power erosions.

Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil? Whether he registers her true meaning or not, she can’t be sure. Then he stares her down and bellows, loud enough to shake her shoulders: “Places, all! These proceedings will commence.”

She does not want to lose the chance to correct her logistics and aim. Would the woman’s presence impact her plan? Did de Men have something in mind with her body? “I wonder, sir, might you introduce the audience to your companion?” Christine gestures in the direction of the floating extra.

The reptilian slide that Jean de Men’s robes make as they Ssss across the floor, ceases. He turns first to the woman on the alloyed cot, and then back to Christine. “In honor of the spectacle at hand, a most venerable execution, I have decided to amplify the subtext.”

Christine shoots a look at the bloody mass that is Trinculo. He does not return her gaze. “Subtext?”

“Why, yes,” de Men continues. “Did you think me a dull-witted interpreter of textuality? After all these years, after all of our grafting showdowns, after all of the times I have successfully asserted your place in the machinations of things, you think that I have not anticipated an extra effort on your part?” He holds his arms extended out on either side, one hand in the direction of Trinculo, the other aimed at the woman on the metal bed. “Why, Christine. I believe our literary aims form something of a union. Each of us is merely missing an element that will take the trope to its truest form.” And then he strides the distance so that his bloodless and hoary face flaps loom over Christine’s head.

When he speaks she can feel the heat of his breath. “Happy birthday,” he whispers. “I’ve brought you a gift from Earth.”

So the woman is somehow connected to Joan. The great clotted fuck hopes to set a cosmic trap. Well then. The more the merrier, Christine concludes with the deduction speed of someone whose endgame has death at its heart.

With all the dramatic enthusiasm she can muster, she claps wildly, exclaiming, “How perfectly mysterious of you to heighten the drama!” Her smile remains long after the words leave her mouth.

Christine then turns to her players, each armed with the transparent wires around their forearms and wrists like the limbs of insects. She has to admit, the flame in their eyes, at another time in her life, would have ignited something like hope in her. Now she has but one ending braided from three strands: to kill the most powerful man in the Sky, to reanimate the story of Joan, and to conjure an epic ending with the only being left on their slipshod pile of space junk who she cares about, taking the whole new world shithouse with them.

She smells Trinculo’s flayed skin even as the theater darkens. When a stage light illuminates the opening scene, Christine thinks she catches the eye of the woman on the floating cot—are her eyes open? Jean de Men sits next to her and looks to be stroking her thigh. Revulsion creeps up Christine’s gullet, but she swallows it. He has made a spectacle of his violence to remind them all that his control of CIEL is anything he says it is. Always buffeted by technological sentries and killing instruments. Well then, she’ll call and raise; she’ll incorporate his repugnant tableau straight into her drama. The woman on the floating metal slab is alive.

The audience bobs in the dark. They disgust her, too. She surveys their glowing bodies moving ever-corpseward in the dimmed lights. What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment and some overblown and brief feeling of superiority through… what? Height? Floating above their former world? Like a permanently displayed opera audience caught midclap. Useless and vapid aesthetic. Maybe there had been a moment, some revolutionary moment, when they’d had a chance to be something better or more beautiful. But the moment was gone. As far as she’s concerned, being closer to the stars just means closer to what we are made of—death minerals. The faster she can contribute light to the night sky, the better.

All executions were allowed a kind of accompanying show, but Christine had convinced Jean de Men by upping the bet, by conjuring the specter of his primal enemy and adding it to the so-called proceedings. That is what Trinculo’s trial had produced: conviction on the charge of conspiring to re-mythologize the world’s greatest enemy, incitement to discourse and desire toward dissent. And she was alive. Was she alive? De Men thought so. He’d already been hunting for her. What he’d succeeded in locating was someone who knew her, someone who provided a new occasion for torture.

Christine hates him so much she wants to crush his stupid jaw.

She pulls her shoulders up and back with her intention. What she intends in the moment is a trifecta of irreducible direct action, punctuated with the newly grafted bodies of her troupe. What she intends is a literary and flesh uprising, creation and destruction locked in a lover’s kiss.

Let it begin.

Act I stages the emergence of the heretic known as Joan of Dirt in the early years when she corrupted the rebellion against Jean de Men’s armies and tricked the resistance forces into following her. It’s fairly consistent with CIEL propaganda doctrine. A series of soliloquies with minimalist pantomimed war in the background. As Act I finds its conclusion, her prize pupil—the grafts not quite losing the last pink tinges of pain—emerges center stage, naked and lined with the writing: “In the beginning, then, was her body bound to dirt and organic life, to trees and sea and minerals.” And then a great hum emanates from the different actors, various pitches and notes fill the room, a tune finally remembered, an epic melody, the trace of which every last human yet carries in the gray folds of memory, the song that rang them all like human tuning forks when they still had a choice: earth and Joan, or saving a self.

The audience leans forward in their chairs, their very DNA subconsciously recalling things they already decided to condemn.

As Act II is performed, the highlights from the trial of Joan of Dirt, Christine’s heart further fractures. The story of Joan and the body of her beloved Trinculo wind their way around her internal organs. Amidst the reenactment of the trial dialogue, her players erect a kind of scaffolding, so that the tension of the oncoming staged execution can be rendered, even anticipated. Nothing like a good execution story to make the audience salivate. It is the sum total of all entertainment—to drive the viewer to the cusp of their own existence, to heighten it, to leave their mouths open in a gasp shape. And yes, yes, she can tell from their body language, the shapes their mouths are making, they are all want.

She wishes them all dead.

She is already anxious for Act III, for Act III embeds a simple gesture that interrupts the expected climax—the moment before Joan of Dirt’s death by fire. In this borrowed time leading up to the execution of her beloved Trinculo, Christine will detour the story.

Christine steals a glance at Trinculo, who seems to smile in a kind of lipless gory grin, or that’s what she hopes anyway, and then she looks at Jean de Men, whose face puckers and twitches. As the actress-warrior Nyx continues her soliloquy Christine thinks she sees the woman on the metal slab stir. Christine can see plainly now that she is working her hand toward a place below her thigh, stretching it beyond reason, fingers straining. Is it possible she has a weapon?

Christine circles the stage as benevolently and submissively as possible, bowing now and again silently to audience members and hunk-of-junk minions and even to Jean de Men as she sweeps past him and sees that—yes!—the woman on the floating metal slab has managed to retrieve a knife—a knife the size of a finger. Christine’s chest flutters alive.

In the heat and almost of things, Christine’s sphincter clenches. Until now, all was seduction. But from this point forward, into Act III, the plot involves deceit. Though the word deceit feels inadequate: the real word is coup. Christine produces an antique opera spyglass—one she’d hidden amongst her salvaged Earth treasures; she hears a murmur of admiration from the audience. She leans into the performance, the insatiable action on its way.

By the end of Act II, the specially constructed faux-scaffolding is clicking with sparks; Christine even smells the burn of electricity. The audience takes this burning smell as a special theatrical effect, not as what it is: the collected energy of Olms building a structure. The ensuing dialogue nearly achieves the sacred sphere of prayer or song. Dead silence rises within the audience’s listening. Nothing is more enticing to watch than death.

What comes next is the pièce de résistance: Christine makes her way again to the cusp of Jean de Men’s grotesque train of flesh, splayed out on the floor. Trinculo, though bound like meat, is within arm’s reach. The last line spoken transitions from a soliloquy devised to bridge the play both closer to the present—or at least to their memory of the execution of Joan—and the player giving the soliloquy closer to the audience, right to the lap of Jean de Men. Near enough to Jean de Men that the player’s knees are nearly touching when they speak the following lines:

“Remember the Maid above all, alongside all we have recollected here, for her might outmights even the great Iliad, as her fight is meant not to bestow power, but to murder it in its false consciousness and return it to dirt, to compost, to worm’s meat—worm’s… meat…”

Christine presses her attention in.

The audience’s attention changes shape… something in the plot twists.

The words Maid and worm’s meat suspend in the air.

When Jean de Men speaks he barely moves, his voice, barely audible and elongated and reptilian: “Yooouuuuuuuu…”

He turns on Christine. The play’s ending arrested. He aims his words with measured venom: “You will not live to see an ovation. And no one and nothing you care about will breathe again.” He strikes her head so hard several of her teeth finally do shoot loose. Her nose and mouth bleed.

Trinculo tries to stand but is forced nearly to his knee knobs by CIEL minions. Christine rises, unafraid of the oncoming storm. She always knew Jean de Men’s actions would enter the drama. In fact, she’d counted on it. Collecting herself, she takes a run at him, leaps up, swings her arm, and jams the handle of her spyglass straight into the eyehole of Jean de Men. A collective gasp rises. The first flutterings of chaos erupt as half of the audience stands up while the other half shuffles toward exits.

What Jean de Men does next derails her plot. Instead of instantly raining more insults or abuse down upon her, instead of throwing her across the room—events she and her players are ready for—he moves with an ugly calm. He walks toward the unknown woman on the floating metal slab. “You want to see the value of women warriors in the epic story of humanity? Hmmm? You want to see an allegory for your petty plight? Here. Let me help you. Bring Christine closer. This is a performance she won’t want to miss.”

With that, a spotlight Christine had not asked for shines hotly on the body of the suspended woman. Her players motionless, caught in light.

As a mechanical guard jerks and drags Christine to where Jean de Men stands, she stares at Trinculo’s face. If you could call it a face. What is a face when it has been distorted beyond recognition? And yet she knows his body better than she knows herself: his eyes. His teeth. The hole of his mouth. His jaw and brow bone. If his head had been only a skull, she’d have loved and made love to the skull.

But Christine’s attention is wrenched forcibly toward another. Up close she can now see that the woman, it turns out, has been severely beaten. When de Men stops shouting, Christine hears the woman’s crushed breathing, and even a kind of moan, barely audible but human. Christine notices the woman’s knife hand poised against her own leg.

“Bring her head and face near,” Jean de Men commands, and Christine’s face is shoved down toward the woman’s hips. Jean de Men pushes back the folds of his heavy crimson robe, pushes back the folds of grafts from his forearm, and displays a scalpel. Christine shoots a glance back at her troupe. They stand motionless, naked, their actions momentarily arrested, but they stand on the balls of their feet, she can see, and their neck muscles are taut as animals’. They are ready. She need only give the word. Her mind is in overdrive.

A calm like the eye of a hurricane comes over Christine. Time opens, briefly. There are different ways to understand cruelty. One can observe it, in which case the scene can become a kind of aesthetic, as with a play or painting or a film; regardless of the emotions evoked by the display, the distance keeps the viewer safe from harm. It is said that those who are forced to repeatedly observe brutality adopt this point of view as a survival strategy. One can also be a victim, and often in such cases victims can cope only by leaving their bodies. A disassociation with a vengeance, with the hopes of either survival or death. Finally, one can be the perpetrator. That most primal darkness is alive and well in all of us, only the slimmest moral code to stop our actions. With repeated indulgence, the distinctions disappear between the small and sad desire to be well liked, for instance, or held in ways we didn’t get held, or breast-fed, or just clapped on the back after a drink like a friend, and the large force of giving pain, which serves as a kind of intense opiate against the fear that we are nothing or, worse, unlovable.

In that moment, Christine hurls into a nearly unbearable storm of the three: she is observer. She is victim. And she is perpetrator. Her face so close to the blood and bone of it, she could have crawled into the woman’s body.

And then it’s Jean de Men’s voice returning her to the present tense. “One must be willing to penetrate life in order to fully live it,” he whispers. Then he slices open the pants of the woman on the litter, drives the scalpel between her legs quickly, and then lets the silver tool drop to the floor, digging his fingers between her legs. He plunges his hand, then wrist, forearm, elbow up into her body, blood and scream shocking everything living. The audience a murmuring gasping mass.

For a moment, horror freezes Christine. Her voice seizes, locks in her throat. She smells pennies and putrefaction. The woman thunders and wrenches against her binds—more animal now than human. Jean de Men’s face multiplies in layers and curls, his smile overtaking his overgrafted face, and then he pulls his hand back out. Blood and sinew and slime juice over his hand and arm. Christine gags. Sanguine fluid rivers between the woman’s legs and pours onto the floor.

“If I cannot make life, I’ll take it—from its very core.” Jean de Men lets his robes slide off of his body, the great waves of grafts cascading down around him like white lava. Naked, he looks to Christine almost like a terrible new terrain. Something bone-colored and multiple in its atrophies, as if death itself had been rebodied. Then he brings the bloody mass of his excavation up to his face and eats at it, a gurgling filling the room.

Christine’s urine leaves her bladder like a child’s. The guards still hold her head nearly against the wound of the woman. But Christine’s spirit does not waver. She did not come here to die. Nor to be humiliated or tortured. She came here to perform. And to kill. What’s more, death does not take the floating woman. On the contrary, her body—even at the site of the gash—seems to radiate heat, even energy. Whoever she is, she is the second strongest woman Christine has ever witnessed. The thought stokes a fury in Christine, makes it grow larger than earth. The smell of piss, blood, shit, and vengeance nearly makes her high.

In spite of everything, she opens her mouth.

“Joan,” is all she says. Low and loud, raising her eyes up from the wretched scene of the victim’s body to meet Jean de Men’s. She sees his face shiver, though he continues to hold his hoary grin. And with that trigger word, her players spring toward their truer actions.

Never has youth looked more beautifully or violently alive. Like brutal living poems.

A random arm, then hand, shoots out from nowhere, and Christine sees the woman from the metal slab slash off half of Jean de Men’s dangling face grafts. They fly through the air and land like stranded bloody lace serviettes on the slickening floor. In the whir of the bloodspray, Christine crawls toward Trinculo. As she reaches his body, barely alive, she ungags him. He raises his arm and points to Jean de Men, who is being attacked on all sides by the surge of youths, his flesh slicing away everywhere. And yet he towers and roars, seemingly larger than anyone or thing in the room.

Her body shudders involuntarily as she attempts to embrace Trinc. He winces but does not pull away. “Christ,” he breathes out, pointing in the direction of the carnage. “Paps!”

Poor, beautiful thing. He’s losing it, she thinks. But as she focuses her gaze and follows his shoulder, bicep muscle, forearm, hand and extended finger, at the center of the action, she sees it.

Jean de Men has the breasts of an old woman.

She is seized by her own recognition. Jean de Men is not a man but what is left of a woman. Christine witnesses all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where… where life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp.

Then, like the thrum of a gong or drum, a voice Christine had not written into the script—and yet a voice not completely foreign to her either, a voice she’d held in her heart her entire life—comes to life, in medias res, so that all attention freezes, all heads turn toward the sound radiating from a blue fire:

“You should have killed me better.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The center of the flame is blue.

Blue light at my head and blue light everywhere around me. In the kimena bringing me to CIEL, understanding cuts my consciousness. My power is not power. It never was. Power is a story humans made when they feared the world they were born into. And feared each other. I am part of all matter and all energy. I am as the smallest particle, meaningless and yet everything. I am quantum.

I materialize into a room filled with fighting. At the time and place that Nyx instructed. CIEL is chaos, figures raging in all directions. I burn where I stand. The fire I arrive with consumes me, but not as severely as I remember during my former execution; there is something distinctly unlike death in it. It stings and puckers my skin, but only slightly. My hair smells of wood and sulfur. It crackles but does not entirely light up. Then I see Nyx in the new theater; she walks into the flames with me. We are eye to eye. Nothing about Nyx is on fire either, and yet we stand in the center of the burning. My rib cage aches.

Through the curtain of blue flame, I can make out bodies. The scene is total mayhem. What I see is a mixture of color and sound, and yet I can distinguish minute details. There are bodies—a kind of orgy of bodies—and for a moment, I think I am witnessing a kind of dance, until I see the rage as color and sound, particle and wave. And blood. A battle is raging. Some of the bodies are gleaming white in my sight, without color, spectral.

“Listen,” Nyx says. I hear it. The white-bodied ones, their sound is discordant and irregular. Others are filled with color and chorus, like strange chimes, all differently hued and shaded and pulsing with harmony, major and minor. It is as if Nyx and I are rearranging the energies in the room.

No life can equal such a death.

I do not know if Nyx actually says it, or if our intertwined bodies have somehow borne the sentence into my consciousness. Color and song rage in and through the flames. The movement of sound and light rise not outside of my body, but through our twinned bodies. Helix. Extending in waves. Nyx’s skin rippling. Eros. Thanatos. Dizzy hyperreality. Nyx’s head rocking back. Nyx’s body separating from mine.

“Joan.”

This time it is not Nyx’s voice.

It is Leone’s.

On the other side of the flames is Leone, quickly losing life, right in front of me. I let Nyx go and surge forward with such force I create a tremor in the room, blue flame shooting in rays around me, accompanied by a vortex of sound being sucked into silence. Nyx tries to grab my arm to stop me, and I nearly wrench it off pulling away. When I reach Leone’s body, my throat locks; my injured ribs feel as if they might explode outward, shattering my body from the inside out. She’s been gutted. She is so pale she looks gray.

But then another body bears down from behind me. I know the voice; I would know it anywhere. It is the voice that sentenced me to burn to death. It is the last voice I heard at the end of the last battle, laughing. It is the voice of cruelty. Of power. Of the Sky, and those who left humanity to rot like refuse on a clod of dead dirt.

Jean de Men grabs me by the neck and starts to squeeze, whispering into my ear. I can feel his spittle as he speaks.

“Did you intend to rise a phoenix? How poetic. I’m going to kill you now, differently from before. I’ll take your life, but attach you to a perfect machine that will keep only your internal organs alive, your useful properties. Your reproductive properties. And then I’ll people this new world endlessly with whomever I like. I’ll people it with devils, if I like. You’ll be an ever-producing cunt, and that’s all you’ll be. Not a myth or a legend, not hope for anyone anywhere.”

My throat constricts. My breathing lurches. My eyes heat and swell. But I can feel the life left in Leone more than my own, and I can feel something else, too.

A woman I’ve never seen before, except in dreamscapes, throwing her white and glistening body straight at us, a human catapult. The woman is screaming at the top of her lungs—screaming some strange lyric, some poem or incantation that gains force and tenor the more she speaks. It is the woman from my dream. My song. My life. Her name comes to me with the same force as her body. Christine.

The blue light at the side of my head roars to life as if to provide accompaniment. Jean de Men’s grip around my neck loosens. Everyone in the room but me grabs at their ears as sound vibrations penetrate through bone and blood. The symphonic blast emanating from my body ripples the very air and walls of the room.

The song was never inside me. The song used me as a conduit. The song is all the universe in strange focus.

From within the flames—flames that are me—Jean de Men’s body contorts.

That’s when I see it. Something that inverts all logic. Jean de Men. He has a naked and withered woman’s body, or the horrible attempts at the creation or destruction of one, her full height towering above anyone in the room, her bleeding grafts and residual folds of skin undulating like an octopus.

I pull away from the horrid corporeal truth of her. Wrong mother. Woman destroyed. I push energy like a wall between us with my hands. She lunges at me, Christine biting and clamped to her shoulder like a barnacle.

“Burn, heretic!” Jean de Men sends a row of technological sentries hurling toward me, throwing their own flames.

But I do not burn.

“The flames you sent me to, I give them back to you. Your planet sends her regards,” I say. Almost as if someone had scripted the lines.

And then it is just the two of us at one another, trying to wrestle-kill each other, twisted into strands of light and sound.

“Hold the embrace!” It’s Nyx’s voice. Nonsense, I think, but I do it anyway. I hold Jean de Men in my arms as if unto death. As if we were lovers. As if it were a death grip or kiss. The ground beneath us begins to melt. When I look down, some neon-colored corridor is opening, a drop to something, I don’t know what. The song in my head bleeds out into the entire room. Olms flash on and off all around us like my memory of firecrackers. A hole. A hole of light.

I convulse with understanding: I’ve made my own Skyline.

I seize the moment, I grab Jean de Men by the throat with both hands, even as the enemy stands tall as a tree in front of me. I mean to send the energy the earth has given me all my life back into this hole. I mean to send this thing back into matter itself. Even if it kills me. I will take Jean de Men back down to the planet, to die in the heat and radiation of my embrace.

Music pulses through the floors and walls. The entire room has become an astral orchestra. For the first time in my life, the song in my head is not just in my head. It is omnipresent. In everyone. Of everyone and everything. I squeeze Jean de Men’s neck with a force even I didn’t know I had.

A flash of light. A weird calm surrounds us. I feel Nyx’s hand on my shoulder. Hear Nyx’s voice. “Let go,” Nyx says. “Let this destruction go. Collect the others. Take Leone. This killing scene has another side. Creation.”

Cutting into the moment, a ghoulish thing—a red corpse? A skeleton out of Renaissance art?—leaps onto the back of Jean de Men. Is it a demon? A harpie? Just before the creature brandishes a large scalpel, I can swear I hear the reddened thing say: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, you rat-hearted dung-wombed cow.” And the red creature slits open the chest of Jean de Men.

Then it’s just Nyx thrusting both hands into the carcass, opening up Jean de Men’s body, summoning an electrical current as old as a star.

Christine, burning white with skin grafts, stands up among the carnage, a new definition of the word beautiful emerging.

The three of them—Nyx, Christine, and the red and raw creature—circle and ravage Jean de Men. Slowly at first and then with increasing velocity and form, at de Men’s feet, children begin to materialize from nothingness and rise. First just a few, then many, a hundred or more. Naked children. The wail that emerges from Jean de Men reverbs my jaw; her head rocks back; some as-yet unnamed emotion beyond measure. The children of all colors and ages swarm from the ground up, devouring, consuming, like a swarm of bees at a honeycomb, until I see nothing left of Jean de Men beneath the multitudinous wave.

The simplicity of the next moment cleaves my heart.

I stride the distance left to my beloved Leone and scoop her body up. The aquamarine corridor of the Skyline I’ve created gleams like a pool on the floor in the chaos. I look at the small army of men who came with me, their battle now done, so beautiful just standing there. I look to the pool, where they gather. Then a surreal haze takes them all, a great rush of color and sound, a fire of indigo and purple, a great big ball of burning blue deathsong. The last thing I see is the white woman Christine holding the red-as-meat man in her arms like Christ: Pietà is the only word for it in the world.

With Leone cradled in my arms and only a faint hope toward Earth, I jump.

Chapter Thirty

“How long, my love?” Christine holds Trinculo in her arms and lap, her back against a window filled with space. Both of them dewy with something new. Something beautifully, erotically human. Unstoppable sweat. None of the CIEL environmental controls are able to keep up with the new trajectory, straight into the eye of the sun. Maybe they are not sweating. But they only believe that they are.

Around their bodies, nothing but carnage.

“You know, in some of the early representations of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, she looks to be fondling his tiny penis,” Trinculo says, steady voiced and serious.

She can’t help herself. She laughs.

“Christ,” he says, and at the sound of her old nickname she bursts into tears. But he keeps on: “Did you know that the penis of the Argonaut mollusk was detachable? These male mollusks had a sacrificial way of impregnating their female counterparts.” The lights in the room flicker and die, but he keeps speaking. “The male had one arm longer than his others, known as a hectocotylus, which is used to transfer sperm to the female. The arm stored up the sperm, and when the male found a female he wanted to mate with, he would detach the arm during the mating process. I often think of that.”

Between laughter and sobbing, Christine manages: “What else is left in that obscene mind of yours?”

“Well, since you asked, the genitalia of the female spotted hyena—you remember what those look like? Hyenas?”

She nods.

“That of the female closely resembled that of the male: the clitoris was shaped and positioned like a penis, and was capable of erection. The female also possessed no external vagina; the labia were fused to form a pseudo-scrotum. The pseudo-penis was traversed to its tip by a central urogenital canal, through which the female urinated, copulated, and gave birth.” A low electronic voice articulates a danger warning. But Trinculo does not pause. There would be no repairing what he’d set asunder; only he knew what he had done to their otherworld. Only he knew how to undo it.

“This unusual trait made mating more laborious for the male than in other mammals,” he continues, “while also ensuring that rape was physically impossible. Of the female, that is.” He pauses. “Leopard slugs had long blue penises that jutted out from the tops of their heads.” He stares off into space, then adds, “Don’t even get me started on the corkscrew penis of ducks.”

“This is what you are pondering, at the end of life?” Christine asks gently, lovingly, perhaps more lovingly than she’s ever asked anything before.

“Life,” he says, “I’m thinking about life. How good it was. Could have been, if the order of things had been different. Might be, next time. In a way, you and I? We are the proud parents of what’s going to happen down there. I’m sorry about this next bit, because I’m awfully late, but I wanted to be sure to get this in.” He looks up at her, his eyelids missing, his nose mostly gone. “Happy belated birthday. You moon-breasted skysong. You wet and ever-blooming perfect.”

She leans in, opens her mouth to his, and lets their souls merge.

In a matter of days, they, and everything alive left in CIEL, will burn in the radioactive solar flares of the sun. That life-giving star. That fiery death’s head.

Chapter Thirty-One

Leone’s body on Earth. It’s the only life I’ve ever wanted. Bringing her home is the death of me, I know. I don’t care. She’ll live. She’ll become. Whatever that ends up meaning. Some story we don’t know yet untied from all the ones that have come before.

“Why death?” Leone sits propped up against a boulder, looking out toward the sea at the mouth of the Blue Grotto. My head in her lap. The sun muted and laden. She’s still weak, but her body will eventually heal.

“It’s the least I can give,” I say. “My body will create a mega catalyst of sorts.”

She coughs.

She closes her eyes, listening to the waves scoop up and drag the rocks on the shore, clicking like a new language. It seems true that everything from this moment on will be a new language. Every element and body and energy redirecting itself, making different patterns and forms. When she opens her eyes again, her pupil, cornea, iris, all look like micronebulae.

I sit up. The stone in my throat throbs enough to choke my voice from me.

I curl into Leone’s torso and nestle my head between her jaw and shoulder. The body is a real place. A territory as vast as Earth.

What used to be the sun is setting, kissing the lip of the water in the distance. It’s beautiful, but different than before. It looks… It doesn’t matter, someone will make up new words for it. I smile. Tears fill my eyes. I try to picture Leone’s face, every detail, her neck and jaw and shoulders.

“Where’s this special suicide supposed to take place?” Leone asks.

“Sarawak Caves. When you feel up to it. I want you to be there. I’ve learned a new way to travel.”

Leone laughs.

“And it’s not suicide,” I correct her.

“Why there?”

“Biodiversity,” I say. Leone stares at me without emotion. Or with something bordering on incredulity. “The other choice was underneath the ice near what used to be Russia.”

Leone looks back out at the water. “Good choice. I approve. Russia’s cold as fuck.”

Leone struggles beneath me so that I have to surrender my former position hidden against the warmth of her flesh. I hold her tight, speaking over her shoulder.

Leone sits as upright as a slice of shale. Her eyes bullets. “I hate you.”

But I know she’ll do anything for me. “Leone?”

“What?”

Nothing comes out of my mouth. I try to make my torso and arms into a sentence. I try to give her the words through my body. I want her to fall in love. I want her to fall in love so hard it hurts. I want that love to be something I’ve never even imagined. With everything left in me, I want to say something beautiful. Something unlike anything that’s ever been said between two people—not in the history I’ve known, anyway.

I point to the dusk—to the place where the sky and its fading light meet the dark and depth of the water, where soon the sky, stitching star to star, will reflect the black sea perfectly.

I press my cheek against Leone’s. I press my lips to hers. First she resists, then she doesn’t.

Mouth to mouth and hip to hip and rib cage to rib cage we quietly go down into one another—the microcosm of space held in a doubled body, the starjunk within us igniting, our bones, briefly, singing. I am not killing her. She is not dying. Desire blooms between us, my ravaged body, hers. We will not conceive this way. Reproduction will become another kind of story.

She locks my mouth shut with hers.

I can feel her teeth and tongue with mine. I nod. I kiss yes into her.

When the time comes, Leone’s hand shakes only briefly as she retrieves Little Bee from her leg holster. She presses her lips again against mine. The warm wet of blood from my neck spreads quickly over her knife hand. I swallow. Blood pours from my neck. Everything is a blur, colder but still beautiful, different, like looking into a microscope. Or into space.

When the sound of my last labored breath ends, and my eyes go dull and blank, Leone will close them. Then Leone will lift me and carry me to the edge of the world, the cusp between earth and sea and sky. She will rest my body in the dirt next to the regenerating ocean and lie down on top of me.

A night and day will pass. Leone will not move, even when she can no longer feel a trace of my body left, my skull gone to worms, my torso and ribs sunk into earth and extending in lines between plate tectonics, the cradle of my pelvis disintegrating and rebecoming in new DNA strands, my femur, tibia, fibula, the phalanges of my feet and hands. I don’t know where they will go, I just know we are made from everything we see.

Because one human who loved another asked for it.

The dirt wetted and blooming in all directions.

A different story, leading whoever is left toward something we’ve not yet imagined.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Leone reaches into the pocket nearest Little Bee and pulls out the one material thing, tangible and otherworldly, Joan ever gave her, an artifact. On paper.

Leone’s voice does not tremor or falter. When she finishes, she rips the paper into small pieces and consumes them, one at a time.

Chapter Thirty-Three

What is the word for her body?