The Book of Joan: A Novel
3/5
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About this ebook
A New York Times Notable Book • BuzzFeed 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read this Year • New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • National Bestseller
“Brilliant and incendiary.” — Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review
"Stunning. . . . Yuknavitch understands that our collective narrative can either destroy or redeem us, and the outcome depends not just on who’s telling it, but also on who’s listening.” — O, The Oprah Magazine
“[A] searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy.” — NPR Books
The bestselling author of The Small Backs of Children offers a vision of our near-extinction and a heroine—a reimagined Joan of Arc—poised to save a world ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and forever change history
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.
Editor's Note
Critics’ choice…
One of the most acclaimed novels of 2017, this brilliant post-apocalyptic novel retells the story of Joan of Arc in a techno-futuristic world where a small group of humans fights to survive extinction.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she also teaches Women's Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
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Reviews for The Book of Joan
146 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Intense, a brutal space opera. Like having a violent, spectacular dream about humanity teetering on the bloody brink of its exile from Earth and ultimate demise. While the author's vision is spectacular, I most appreciated the main characters, wacky yet also ruthlessly determined to win or die, and their love for each other.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The earth is dead, populated only by a few dying survivors, the environment reduced to desert. A handful of wealthy people live in a space station tethered to the earth, called CIEL, using the last few resources to live increasingly futile lives. The sudden, dramatic environmental changes as well as the new living conditions have brought changes to the people on CIEL; they are hairless, devoid of pigmentation or genitalia. Without the usual physical markers, people have turned to grafts and scarification to ornament themselves. Christine is one of CIEL's residents. She made her name for her skill in creating elaborate stories on people's bodies. More and more, her mind is on Joan, the young woman who led the armies opposing CIEL's dictator, Jean de Men, and who was burned to death in a public display. There are whispers that Joan isn't dead after all and that rebellion might be possible.I read the first four chapters and then wondered if I'd be able to read the entire book. Christine and her soulmate show their independence by pantomiming sex acts and shouting out Shakespearian-style insults. When they're imprisoned for this, Christine bravely rebels by miming masturbation. I was left wondering if I could find it in myself to be interested in people who, in the face of great evil, reacted by being naughty. The book did improve once the story turned toward earth and to what led to its desolation. There were some fantastically inventive ideas in this book, which in the end were able to pull me through, although they were certainly not enough to make me like The Book of Joan. Primarily, there were two aspects of the book I struggled with. One is that any event that occurred in the novel was slowed down so that the author could point out how Christine and/or Joan felt and how they felt their feeling really, really deeply, perhaps more intensely than any other person has ever felt a feeling. And the other thing was that this book had so many extra words in it. 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.It's not a long book, but there's not a simply described scene in it. And while neither of those qualities is a flaw, they are things that I find annoying. I'll chalk my dislike of this book up to personal taste, while recognizing that many of the ideas put forward were thought-provoking and impressive.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Will be thinking about this one for awhile.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5this is a wonderful book, very well reviewed and for good reason. it reminded me of the handmaids tale. the same rich new writing
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a strange little book where the world has been racked by environmental factors and war. A small colony of privilege human beings are living in space; they are led by a corrupted leader and there are horrifying rules to live by. Resources are scare and life is a living hell. Joan is a mythical person who was on the other side, a rebel, who was supposedly executed years before; however she was not. It was a difficult book to get into as the first 50 pages really did not make a lot of sense. However it was worth the slog through the book and once I got to the end I immediately reread the book and the whole thing made sense.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a story of a future geocataclysmal event. The earth is dying. People of the ruling class have gathered pieces of space junk to build a sustainable living environment, CIEL, which hovers over earth and is ruled by a demented leader. Over the years the people aboard have devolved. They've lost their hair, their gender, their complexion. Long story short, it's not good, it's not healthy. The meek who have remained on earth are not well either and the young warrior, Joan, (loosely based on Joan of Arc) who inspired rebels to fight for freedom is trying to survive, just like the people in CIEL. Christine, living on CIEL and once a follower of their demented leader now despises him with as deep a passion as Joan. Somehow, these two ladies must unite to bring down this tyrant and mend what there is left of humanity. Wow, this novel covers a lot of new age thinking. It's mother earth, it's love, it's creation, destruction, energy, it's "cosmic harmonies made of strings". It's "Everything is matter. Everything is moved by and through energy". It's different.The author chose a prose that is raw and nasty but for some reason urged me on to the seismic climax. If you choose to read this one, prepare yourself for something mind blowing.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was excruciating, and not in a good way. I never manage to become pleased to be reading it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Strong stuff! Not for the faint of heart, but it's as amazing and fresh as N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, which for me is high praise indeed. I especially admire the economical (and often poetic) prose that serves to build a world, flesh out characters (!), and propel an ambitious/fascinating/timely plot. Many "literary novels" can't do this at twice the length and still remain relevant to an early 21st-century reader. I plan to let this one simmer subconsciously for a few weeks, and then read it again. I've already checked out several of the author's other works from the library, in anticipation of more brilliant, well-crafted prose.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I'm sitting on my review of this book because I'm still processing my thoughts. Every attempt I make at categorizing this book seems to fall short of what it actually is. (This is probably for the better.) I actually encourage you to read other reviews. This book deserves conversation, possibly more than it requires reading it. As heretical as it feels to say it, this could make a truly terrifying, dynamic TV mini-series.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was amazing. Surreal. Complex. Literary fantastical SF. Sublime prose, verging on poetry at times. Amazing world building, both in terms of the eco-catastrophe/its causes, and the way that the rich have chosen to live their lives post catastrophe. Complex, fascinating characters.I .. might have missed the Joan of Arc story line early on if it wasn't foregrounded by the blurb, and that would have been a shame.Particularly recommended if you like Joanna Russ' writing in general, or Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the head in particular.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Joan starts off as one of the most prophetic, imaginative, and thought-provoking novels of the social media era. It ends far away, a genre-bending, weird thriller that at least remains thought provoking. Throughout it all, the language is rich and the story is compelling. Although the incongruous final acts managed to alienate me as a reader, I was pulled in for so much of the story and enjoyed the experience.A reimagining of sorts of Joan of Arc, The Book of Joan is a dystopian tale of what happens when a madman becomes the world's most powerful leader. As decisions to plunder the world for a profit turn disastrous, the earth chooses a hero, Joan. Really, does this future seem so far fetched? And do these characters' reflections on the dictator Jean de Men sound the least bit foreign?...he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshiped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.And again:If we look at history—those of us who study it, who can remember it—we understand the reason why those who come to power swiftly, amid extreme national crises, are so dangerous: during such crises, we all turn into children aching for a good father. And the truth is, in our fear and despair, we'll take any father. Even if his furor is dangerous. It's as if humans can't understand how to function without a father. Perhaps especially then, we mistake heroic agency for its dark other.In the first two parts of the novel, this is the story we get. It is a constant condemnation of many things, including commonly held notions of power, sexuality, and art, all told in vividly stunning passages. In this future, humans have begun a process of de-evolution. As humanity veers toward extinction, many of the remaining asexual population have become hypersexualized. They seek to recreate themselves through intricate grafts. Through two-thirds of this novel, the story is language driven, and characters and plot are merely devices to give body to the words. This is the creation story in reverse as told through the intricate weaving of words.In the final part of The Book of Joan, the story got a bit messy for me, as I'm sure it will with many readers not so accustomed to hard sci-fi. The action is turned up and the threads become so knotted with one another and with techno-babble that it's difficult to discern what is going on. Add to that the final scenes, where oddity becomes normality and a particular plot device I've never been a fan of makes an appearance. The big revelation is that a character (who in this review shall remain unnamed) is not who they have purported to be. The mask is removed and we're all suppose to gasp. Personally, I've never seen this done well in any novel and my reaction is to throw the book across the room.What would've been a solid review for this novel was hurt some by this conclusion. What drew me into this book originally was the nearness of the events and the construction of language, but as everything drifted from what was familiar, I myself became untethered. And though I recognize that the story ends with the same strong commentary on power, sexuality, and art that it began with, it was a commentary addressed to a much different audience.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joan of Arc Reimagined
The Hundreds Years’ War, a conflict between a French faction supported by England and the House of Valois, was notable for its length, spanning generations, for the scorched earth tactics employed by the Burgundians/English, and for the myth arising around a young child savior, Joan of Arc. In Lidia Yuknavitch’s dystopian novel, Joan finds herself resurrected in the person of a girl who rather than deriving her powers from religious visions obtains them as a result of her oneness with dirt, that is the Earth, encompassing all its powers of creation.
In the beginning, Joan misuses her power as she wages a war of total destruction again an evil, insane, charismatic Jean de Men. As the mythic Joan fell into the hands of Burgundians, so Jean de Men captures Joan. Similar to Joan of Arc, de Men puts her on a showy trial and executes her by fire at the stake. The result, of course, is the opposite of his intension and Joan becomes both legend and hope encapsulated in a book engraved by electrocautery on the skin of Christine Pizan. Christine knows a secret, that Joan did not perish, and it’s Christine’s mission to defeat de Men and allow Joan to use her powers of fecundity to restore the world, much as it was those supporting Joan of Arc to use her to produce an independent France.
Yuknavitch conjures some pretty striking images, particularly of Jean de Men’s domaine, a suborbital city, CIEL, in the sky populated by a class of horribly mutated humans, white hairless beings devoid of sexuality, unable to reproduce themselves, who exit to exit, and who scribe their existence on their skin and skin graphs that hang from them like robes. CIEL hovers above a burned over world, one denuded of vegetation, a ball of brown dirt. Underneath that bare surface, ragtag groups of survivors exist, many of them awaiting a savior they know will return with the power to make things whole again.
Now, to enjoy Yuknavitch’s novel, readers have to put logic aside, because her world is quite fantastical. It defies logic, much in the way destroying your own planet by polluting it and ravaging it with wars does, and by restricting, subjugating, and punishing those who give and nurture life does. In this regard, Yuknavitch makes a dramatic point. Unfortunately, if things get too out of hand, too much like she envisions here, there will be no savior at the ready to put things right again, at least not for millions of years. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reminded me a bit of Kameron Hurley's short story "The Corpse Archives". Very good ~literary~ sci-fi. Good timing with the Handmaid's Tale miniseries releasing in March and probably an upswing in readership for this kind of thing.
All that said, I did like it!
Book preview
The Book of Joan - Lidia Yuknavitch
Dedication
This book is for Brigid.
Epigraph
We are all creatures of the stars.
―Doris Lessing
Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire. It kills the other story options.
―Marguerite Duras
Be careful what stories you tell yourselves about beauty, about otherness. Be careful what stories ‘count.’ They will have consequences that shiver the planet.
―The Book of Joan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Book One
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Book Two
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Book Three
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Advance Praise for The Book of Joan
Also by Lidia Yuknavitch
Text Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book One
Prologue
In the hundreds of thousands of years before the Chicxulub asteroid impact that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs on earth, volcanoes in a region of India known as the Deccan Traps erupted repeatedly. They spewed sulfur and carbon dioxide, poisoning the atmosphere and destabilizing ecosystems.
The dinosaurs and most manner of living things were already at death’s door by the time the asteroid hit.
The Deccan Traps changed the ecosystem radically. Blotted out the sun. Death became history, geography rewrote itself. And yet earth was reborn. It was not a miracle that life was destroyed and then re-emerged. It was the raging stubbornness of living organisms that simply would not give in.
Life re-emerged as it always does. From the depths of oceans and riverbeds to the frozen biospheres hidden under ice sheaths to the very core of the world’s underground caves, from the tomb-like otherworlds of earth, matched in diversity and design only by one thing: interstellar space.
The next time a geocataclysm like this happened, the origin was anything but random.
Chapter One
Burning is an art.
I remove my shirt and step toward a table where I have spread out the tools I will need. I swab my entire chest and shoulders with synthetic alcohol. My body is white against the black of space where we hover within a suborbital complex. CIEL.
Through the wall-size window, I can see a distant nebula; its gases and hypnotic hues make me hold my breath. What a puny word that is, beautiful. Oh, how we need a new language to go with our new bodies.
I can also see the dying ball of dirt. Earth, circa 2049, our former home. It looks smudged and sepia.
A fern perched in the window catches my eye. Well, what used to be a fern. I never had a green thumb, even those long years ago when I lived on Earth. This fern is mostly a sad little curve of stick flanked by a few dung-green wisps; it wilts and droops like a defunct old feathery cock. Its photosynthesis is entirely artificial. If it were allowed the sun
we’ve got now, with the absence of adequate ozone layers, it would instantly die. Solar flares irradiate us daily, even as we are protected by STEs—superior technological environments,
they’re called.
I’ve not seen CIEL from the outside for a long time, but I remember it looking like too many fingers on a ghost-white hand. Sky junk. Rats in a maze, we are. Far enough from the sun to exist in an inhabitable zone, and yet so close, one wrong move and we’re incinerated. In our man-made, free-floating station, with our rage-mouthed Empire Leader, Jean de Men, fastened at the helm of things. We’re the aftermath of earth-life. CIEL was built from redesigned remnants from old space stations and science extensions of former astro and military industrial complexes. We who live here number in the thousands, from what used to be hundreds of countries. Every single one of us was a member of a former ruling class. Earth’s the dying clod beneath us. We siphon and drain resources through invisible technological umbilical cords. Skylines. That almost sounds lyrical.
The fern, like all green matter at this point, is cloned. And me? As we’ve been told a million times, radical changes in the ozone, atmosphere, and magnetic fields caused radical changes in morphology.
How’s that for a cosmic joke of the ruling class? The meek really did inherit the Earth. And the wealthy suck at it like a tit. There’s no telling how many meek are left. If any. I sigh so loud I can almost see it leaving my mouth. The air here is thick and palpable.
There is a song lodged in my skull, one whose origin I can’t recall. The tune is both omnipresent and simultaneously unreachable; the specifics drift away like space junk. There are times I think it will drive me mad, and then I remember that madness is the least of my concerns.
Today is my birthday, and pieces of the song from nowhere haunt my body, a sporadic orchestral thundering that rises briefly and then recedes. Sound fills my ears and whole head, a vibration that rings every bone in my body and then nothing. By birthday,
what I mean is that today marks my last year until ascension. Now, at forty-nine, I’m aging out, a threat to resources in a finite, closed system. CIEL authorities may permit a staged theatrical spectacle when your time is up, but dead is dead, no matter when you lived. At one time, in the early years here, I remember, we still believed that ascension involved some rise into a higher state of being. Not just an escape from a murdered planet to a floating space world, but a climb toward an actual evolution of the mind and soul. It still strikes me as absurd that all our mighty philosophies and theologies and scientific advances were based on looking up. Every animal ever born—blind or stupid or sentient—looked up. What of it? What if it was only a dumb reflex?
I’ve since come to understand that there are simply too many of us for Jean de Men’s Empire to sustain unless we continue to discover new treasure troves left on Earth or evolve into beings who don’t need plain old food and water. Our recycled meat sacks provide water when we die. It’s the one biotechnological achievement we’ve been able to successfully create
up here. You can get pure water from a corpse. So far in the evolution of the process, they can extract about a hundred liters of water from a fresh corpse—about twenty days’ survival ration. That’s not very efficient.
No one knows if or how fast those odds will improve. We only know we tried space suits and recycled urine and exhalation modes and a whole wave of deaths resulted from the biotoxins. So we continue to draw from mother Earth, to suck her diseased body dry.
The fern and I stare each other down. When I first came here, I was fourteen and dying from unrequited love. Or hormonally unstoppable love at least. I am now forty-nine, in my penultimate year. If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best, lying in wait for another epoch. Maybe we will evolve into asexual systems. It feels that way from here. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Desperately wishful. My throat constricts. There are no births here. There is a batch of youth in their late teens and early twenties. After that, who knows.
This is my room: stylishly decorated in blue-gray slate slabs. A memory foam bed on a metal slab, a slab of a desk, various metal chairs, a cylindrical one-room shower and human waste purge station. The most apparent thing in my quarters is a one-wall window into space, or oblivion, with a protective shade to help us forget that the sun might eat us alive at any moment, or that a black hole might sneak up on us like a kid playing hide-and-seek.
This is my home: CIEL. A home, forever away from home.
I live alone in my quarters. Oh, there are others here on CIEL. I used to have a husband. Just a word now, like home, earth, country, self. Maybe everything we’ve ever experienced was just words.
Record,
I whisper to the air in the room around me. This is like what prayer used to be.
"Audiovisualsensory?" A voice that sounds vaguely like my mother’s. Mother: another word and idea fading from memory.
Yes,
I answer. The entire room vibrates, comes to life, activates to record every move and sound I make.
I mean to give myself two birthday presents before I’m forced to leave this existence and turn to dust and energy. The first is a recorded history. Oh, I know, there’s a good chance this won’t attract the epic attention I am shooting for. On the other hand, smaller spectacles have moved epochs. And anyway, I’ve got that gnawing human compulsion to tell what happened.
The second present is a more physical lesson. I am an expert at skin grafting, the new form of storytelling. I intend to leave the wealth of my knowledge and skill behind. And the last of my grafts I intend to be a masterwork.
I finish applying astringents. My flesh pinkens and screams its tiny objection. I position the full-length mirror in front of me—tilt it to bear the weight of my entire body’s reflection. The song plays and plays in my head and rings in my rib cage now and again.
I am without gender, mostly. My head is white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we can interact with technology. I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but that’s it. Nothing else of woman is left. I clear my throat and begin: Herein is the recorded history of Christine Pizan, second daughter of Raphael and Risolda Pizan.
I think briefly of my dead parents, my dead husband, my dead friends and neighbors and all the people who peopled my childhood on Earth. Then I think of the crowd of clotted milk we’ve got left existing up here in CIEL. Briefly I want to vomit or cry.
My skin is . . . Siberian. Bleak and stinging. The faint burn of the astringent reminds me that I still have nerve endings. The tang in my nostrils reminds me that I still have sensory stimulation, and the data traveling to my brain reminds me that my synapses are firing yet. Still human, I guess.
The fern and I trade glances. What a pair—an intellectual who’s seen too much and a too-cloned plant. What fruitless survival. But after many years, I have finally arrived at a raison d’être. To tease a story from within so-called history. To use my body and art to do it. To raise words, to raise lives. And to resurrect a killing scene.
My nipples harden in the cool, dim room. Before me on the table, the tools of my trade, grafting, buzz to life. My torso, its virgin expanse flecked with goose bumps. The exquisitely small beauty of this reaction. Will goose bumps ever leave us?
In the mirror, I look into my eyes and begin my demonstration.
Whatever you do, never use a strike branding instrument larger than a handheld wrench. Skin type is profoundly important; so are the depth of the cut, and how the wounds are treated while healing. Scars tend to spread when they heal. Electrocautery devices are infinitely preferable to strike branding.
I mean to instruct.
I bring a handheld blowtorch to the head of a small branding glien.
If you mean merely to make a symbol, a simple act of representation, multistrike branding is preferable to strike branding; you will have more flexibility and be able to give the illusion, at least, of style. For example, to get a V shape, it’s preferable to use two distinct lines rather than a single, V-shaped piece of metal. But if what you want involves intricate design, ornate shapes, the curves and dips of lines, syntax, diction, electrocautery is the obvious choice.
I pick up the electrocautery device. So much like what used to be a pen . . .
I whisper, only bolder.
I hold up my arms to show the variety of symbols: Hebrew, Native American, Arab, Sanskrit, Asian, mathematical and scientific.
See? This is pi.
My beautiful butterfly wings—adorned and phenomenal. I have reserved self-branding for hidden parts of my body. Until now.
I make my first marks. Burning epidermis gives off a charcoal-like smell.
I pause a moment, at my reflection. Though we’ve all gotten used to the new look of ourselves, let’s face it: we are an ugly lot aloft in CIEL. Hairlessness happened first, then the loss of pigmentation. CIEL has presented humanity with new bodies: armies of marble-white sculptures. But nowhere near as beautiful as those from antiquity. Perhaps the geocatastrophe, perhaps one of the early viruses, perhaps errors in the construction of our environment, perhaps just karma for killing the natural world, did this to our bodies. I’ve wondered lately what’s next. What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next? No one on Earth was ever literally white. But that construct kept race and class wars and myths alive. Up here we are truly, dully white. Like the albumen of an egg.
I focus on my labor.
Though it is technically possible to use a medical laser for scarification, this technique involves not an actual laser, but rather an electrosurgical pen that uses electricity to cut and cauterize the skin, similar to the way an arc welder used to work. Electric sparks jump from the handheld pen of the device to the skin, vaporizing it.
I pick up my electrosurgical pen. I have become accustomed to not flinching, not grimacing, not displaying any physical response to the strange pain of it. What is pain compared to the cessation of lifestory.
This is a more precise form of scarification, because it allows the artist to control the depth and nature of the damage being done to the skin. With traditional direct branding, heat is transferred to the tissues surrounding the brand, burning and damaging them. Electrosurgical branding, in contrast, vaporizes the skin so quickly and precisely that it creates little to no damage to the surrounding skin. You see?
The skin near my collarbone screams. Tiny reddened hieroglyphics speckle my chest.
In a few hours, I will have completed a first stanza across the canvas of my breastplate.
This reduces the pain and hastens the healing after the scarification is complete.
I’m no longer sure exactly what the word pain means.
Everything in a life has more than one story layer. Like skin does: epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous or hypodermis. My history has a subtext.
I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts—our now dictatorial leader, Jean de Men.
I pause. Hold.
The names of things. They betray our stupidity. CIEL, on Earth, was the name for an international environmental organization, but also for a young person’s video game before the Wars, before the great geological cataclysm. I remember. Now it’s what we call our floating world. What lame gods we’ve made.
And Jean de Men. I always found that name hilarious: John of men. He wrote what was considered the most famous CIEL narrative graft of our time. Which somehow became hailed, by consensus, as the greatest text of all time. As if time worked that way. As if earth’s history and everything in it had evaporated.
My head hurts.
As the trace of song in my brain returns in orchestral bursts to taunt me, I stride like an impatient warrior to my treasure chest, filled with the last of Earth-based items I could not part with. I shove the chest aside—for the real treasure is beneath it, secreted away in the floor in a storage hole that opens only at my voice.
Within, a plain cardboard box. Which is not nothing: in a paperless existence, cardboard is like . . . what? Oil. Gold. I open it, and dig through its contents—CDs, videos, other ancient recording media artifacts—as if my hands are anxious spiders. I know the object I want better than I know my own hand: a scuffed-up thumb drive. I hold the thumb drive near my jugular. Our necks, our temples, our ears, our eyes, all have data points to interface with media. Implants and nanotechnology lodged exclusively in our heads, pushing thought out, fluttering and alive near the surface of our skin.
My room ignites with holographic projections: fragments of Jean de Men’s evolution. It’s a perfect and terrifying consumer culture history, really. His early life as a self-help guru, his astral rise as an author revered by millions worldwide, then overtaking television—that puny propaganda device on Earth—and finally, the seemingly unthinkable, as media became a manifested room in your home, he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger. What was left? When the Wars broke out, his transformation to sadistic military leader came as no surprise.
We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.
Our existence makes my eyes hurt.
People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand. Jean de Men. Some strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan. A war-hungry mountebank. How stupidly we believe in our petty evolutions. Yet another case of something shiny that entertained us and then devoured us. We consume and become exactly what we create. In all times.
I stare at a holographic snippet: Jean de Men’s head grotesquely bulbous, his garish face all forehead: Your life is not for them, not for the putrid detritus resisting the future, clinging to Earth for a life that cannot be sustained. Earth was but an early host for our future ascension. Your life can have meaning and justification if you but turn your sights toward a higher truth.
I recognize these words from his weekly, unstoppable addresses that puncture all the rooms of CIEL, recitations of the best of his own quotes.
Bile bubbles up my throat.
I skip around the stupid recording, trying to locate that song, but I can’t find a trace of it. I start to second-guess myself: Why did I associate it with him? Had I imagined it as a ludicrous soundtrack to his rise to power? And, if not from then, from where? It was almost as if the song came from the cosmos around us, from the giant mouth or throat I sometimes imagine we are living within.
Resume audio recording,
I say, taking a breath. Go back. I first attracted attention in CIEL when I questioned the literary merit of a highly regarded author of narrative grafts, Jean de Men.
I wipe my brow. Though I haven’t perspired in years, I’m sure I feel moisture there.
"The graft he created was a romance graft, of all things, and it became quite famous: widely purchased, widely celebrated by so-called experts, widely and absurdly adulated, and though no one likes to admit this, widely exchanged between bargain shoppers who wanted knockoffs and cheaply made things amidst the smutted alleys of the black market. Everyone, everywhere, had to have it.
"Why? Because, even in this de-sexualized world, the idea of love and all her courtesans—desire, lust, eroticism, the chase, the