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.