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:
Interrogative/Excerpt 221.4
Q: These are the citations of a heretic. You admit your heresy?
A: These . . . terms. Apostate. Heretic. Terrorist. Who owns the definitions? Language has no allegiance. No grand authority. We pose our authority arbitrarily upon it, but in the end, language is a free-floating system, like space junk or the sediments in oceans that eventually collect into rocks to form matter. What can be made can be unmade. Your definitions do not apply to anything in my experience. But to be precise, upon the topic of heresy, if by “heresy” you mean dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice, then yes, I am a heretic. Your dominant theories, opinions, and practices disgust me. My aim was to murder them. But in truth I am no heretic at all, because it is your theories and practices that are heretical. Against the planet. Against the universe. Against being.
Q: You see? Impossible. The defendant insists upon pursuing insolence. Do you place so little value on your life? Your people?
A: One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief—that is a fate more terrible than dying.
Q: You move nearer every breath and word toward execution.
A: I am not afraid. I was born to do this.
Q: Insolence. You are not the child you once were. Your current circumstances are dire. We have no false mercy.
A: I was in my tenth year when the song in my head fully emerged and the light at my skull flickered alive to help govern my conduct. The first time, I was very much afraid. Then I was not. And never have been after.
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.