A: The charges or your oddly lascivious obsessions?
Q: Strike from the record. Are you an enemy of the state?
A: I have been charged with treason and terrorism against the state. Beyond this, the validity of my visions is under question—though, notably, not my military prowess. Somewhat incomprehensibly, my clothing and my . . . hair? . . . are cited as crimes against the state. I am sentenced to death; I am to be burned and televised, sent signaling through the flames across the land as proof that my body has become ash. I believe that covers it. The only thing I am unclear about is why we are having this little . . . tête-à-tête.
Q: Your insubordination does not help your case.
A: And your hypocrisy and genocidal tendencies do not help yours. Out of curiosity, are any voices touching your members?
I clench my teeth so hard in my mouth my temples ache. I rest my hand near my hip bone. I remember it so achingly, so physically. When Trinculo and I would finally retire from each installment of her trial, we would throw ourselves at each other. We’d cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks and sewed-up dry cunts, a girlwoman whose body was in defiance of every stab at “living” we took and failed at on a daily basis. We’d drink and writhe together, Trinc and I, displacing our desires by longing for her breasts and hair and cleft, as if her genitalia were as important as her bravery and power. Unlike those in power here on CIEL, reproduction wasn’t what we mourned. We mourned the carnal. Societies may be organized around procreation, but individuals are animals. I think we craved her sexuality—her sexual reality. The fact of her body. Not particularly female, leaning toward male, an exquisite androgyny. Her head of thick black hair a mighty emblem of desire. I even had a fantasy of cutting a lock of it for myself, to keep and love—as eternally as a lover’s. Something human of hers, to touch and have and hold.
Underneath my comforter, I lift my hand up to my neck, to the beginning of her story on my body. Her story rises up from my skin as if to answer, flesh to flesh. I close my eyes. When you shut your eyes, the universe is internal. I can feel her story underneath my fingers, burned there, rising from my flesh. I can enter a world not limited by any cell, for the mind, the body, even the eye, is a microcosm of the cosmos.
Underneath my hand, grafted on my flesh canvas, since they’d taken it from her, I’d written her girlhood.
Chapter Five
The first time the blue light flickered alive in Joan’s head, the trees around her crackled and sent her skin shivering. There were still trees, back then. Unusual and seismic prevolcanic activity across the world smoldered the sky. The sun still hung in the sky like a sun, but its light had already begun to fade from bright yellow to muted sepia that lessened the color of colors. Animals still lived, though species were dying off a little at a time. Domrémy-la-Pucelle, France. The countryside of a seemingly ordinary child.
As a girl, she went into the woods to play one of her favorite alone games. The kind of game played by children who talked to themselves and secreted away in their own imaginations. There are entire populations of children living such lives, on the periphery.
In the woods she buried what would have looked like a pile of twigs at the base of an evergreen, in a shallow hole she’d dug in the ground. She liked to dig them back up and rebury them because the smell of dirt and trees calmed her. She liked the way dirt snuck under the crescent moon tops of her fingernails.
The twigs were of varying sizes: some about the length of her hand, a few taller, a few shorter. In her alone games, the twigs were people who had survived a terrible event. They’d had to remake themselves in order to survive. For this reason, the twigs had aligned themselves with Earth and spiders and burrowing bugs.
At this point in her game, each twig was climbing up to a hollow hole in an evergreen tree. When she’d delivered and saved the last twig into its resting spot, she put her hand against the grain of the tree. She closed her eyes and smelled the needles and the sap and the bark. She spread her fingers and put her palm against the evergreen. She could feel the sticky sap kissing her palm.
Suddenly her small fingers buzzed violently. She withdrew her hand quickly and stared at her own palm. Then at the tree. She thought she could smell burning wood. Did it really happen? She smelled her hand. Sap.
No girl can shut down the hunger of her own curiosity, and so she crept quietly back up to the tree’s towering form. She reached her arm out in front of her. She replaced her hand on the tree, closed her eyes, held her breath, and braced herself by setting her feet apart, waiting.
High up, the tops of the trees leaned and whistled in the wind. Wood animals crouched low to the ground. And then the timber beneath her hand shot something into her palm, her fingers, into her wrist, up the bone of her forearm, into her shoulder, so that her head rocked back and her mouth and eyes gaped open. She could feel her teeth ringing. Her hair seemed to pull up and away from her scalp.
The sound in her ears grew louder—like blood in your ears at night with your head on the pillow—until the pounding became thunderous, drowning out the wind, thoughts, home, family, chores. The pounding buzz filled her head as if her head had become a media device gone haywire. She tried to pull her palm away from the tree but couldn’t. She breathed very fast. Her throat constricted. Was this death?