Читать книгу The Book of Joan - Lidia Yuknavitch - Страница 13

CHAPTER TWO

My door juts open without warning, sending the spider on the fern skittering across its web. I quickly draw an azure silken robe around my night’s work. My body stings and itches against the fabric. I hear his bellow before I see him.

“Christ! Come here this instant, you reeling-ripe dove-egg. Get here and lay me a kiss. I do believe I’ve outdone myself today.”

No matter how often he calls me “Christ” instead of Christine, it makes me smile. And every time I see him, my mind cleaves, half shooting back to the past, half lodged in the present, shaking.

What is a love story?

Every time I see him, which is every morning and day and night, I think of all the love stories that go untold. The broken love stories, the damaged ones, the ones that don’t fit the old tropes. Did any real life love ever fit a trope? My body is stabbed through with a recurring flashback. How deeply I fell for him on Earth when I was fourteen. I can see us both, gangly and awkward, both of us with shoulder-length hair, all elbows and shoulders and knees, really we looked like siblings. How we spent every morning and all day and most of all the nights together, in the woods or at riverbeds or at school or holidays or climbing out of our bedrooms and meeting up for invented adventures or painting or drawing or reading or stargazing or walking and doing nothing but breathing—I remember eventually feeling like he was the very air I breathed, the matter of my molecules, the pulse at my wrists and neck and the blood in my ears, and as my body surged from girl to woman, I idiotically lunged at him one day after school in a plain and grassy field, my face filled with girl-flush, my legs shaking, my arms grabbing at him, I half smeared my smile into his and wrong kissed him. And then he stiffened and shot away from me—the look on his face made an uncharitable distance between us, so vast, so vast, like Neptune, that ice giant.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” is all he said, and my first and deepest love of my life, my all-consuming beloved, froze in front of me as the beginning of a man who did not love women. Physical fact. Suddenly even his skin looked like it was pulling away from me.

“I love you,” he said backing away, his eyes drowning in their sockets. “I love you,” he said running from me. And my world ended.

But my love didn’t. Not then, not into my marriage later in life, not now. But there is no word or body for it. We simply both ended up through a trick of fate or fortune together on CIEL. And though we would never be lovers, for different reasons now, neither of us was without desire. His bloomed into a symbolic unending lasciviousness. Mine atrophied into an ache I’ll take to my death.

Now he squeezes his former desire into old dead languages and base, carnal, ever-more obscene utterances as well as objects and technologies, like a fuck-you to this idiotic space-condom we live within.

I burn.

One might say we are desire’s last stand.

There the man stands—although the word man only approximates the beloved creature before me. For he has fully embraced the embodiment of creature, having lost all heart with regard to humanity up here. For clothing he wears only shoes, shiny pointed black boats fit for a dandy in any age. His skin shines the gleaming waxy white of years of skin grafts, his head is as bald as an infant bottom, yet bulging here and there with protruding, irrational grafts. His watery blue eyes are still visible beneath the odd furrows and folds of flesh. He holds his arms out theatrically, thrusts his hips toward me to display himself, and smiles. He could become a gargoyle, and I’d yet love him.

Indeed, what is before me is something of a grotesque. Somewhere near where his stomach should be, I see what could only be a new invention: an intricate belt, silver, bloodred, and black, secured by leather straps and silver chains that web across his chest and shoulders like some deranged spider’s design. In front, at the sides, and it looks to me even in the rear, the belt grows appendages about a foot in length. Each appendage looks to be soldered and carved with great attention and detail—each extends out away from his body enough so that every move he makes creates a kind of half-dangling, half-dancing effect. Two of the jutting objects are more or less cylindrical, ending at their tips with pewter-balled roundness. The other two—shaped a bit like gourds, and as splendid as the cylindrical appendages in color and shine and detail—dangle from the harness, and seem to have small silver motors attached to them. He flips a couple of switches and his hips begin to buzz and whir like some gigantic and wrong insect. For a moment I think he might take flight.

A great shift in the air and space of the room accompanies his entrance. “Well?” he shouts above the din, gyrating and whizzing.

I bring my hand to my neck in mock surprise. “Jesus, Trinculo, have you been injured? Or are you being punished? What on earth is all”—I gesture around him—“that?”

“Ah!” he shouts, stepping toward me gingerly, “but we’re no longer on the Earth, now, are we? This, my full-gorged lady,” he says, approaching, “is the answer to your prayers.”

“I haven’t prayed for years,” I say, ducking around a chair to avoid him. There is no game I will not play with him. No pornographic desire I won’t willingly perform.

He growls. “Come ride me, dewberry.” On Earth, when we’d been so young, he’d taken delight in a digital application that generated medieval obscenities and slurs. He’s carried the habit up into CIEL, into our idiotic adulthood, our doomed present-tense, and I love every word of it. “I’ll bet all the sun in the system I can make you scream god before the night’s gone. But say my name again! I love to hear it.”

“Trinculo!” I shout, then laugh and come back around the chair. I try to embrace him, but find it impossible. “Now, turn that thing off and sit down. Talk to me like a man.”

“Like a what?”

Just then we hear the mechanized sound of the evening gong, signaling the coming arrival of night sentries for the evening lockdown. “Shut it off,” I hiss, wincing at the thought of him being carried off to solitary, yet again. Though his eyes remain playful, the cost of his years of imprisonment and torture is beginning to show. The veins at his temples look crooked and rubbled. His hands shake when he tries to be still. Sometimes, his jaw locks midsentence.

I can see all of him. Trinculo is a pilot of the highest pedigree and expertise. More than that, he is an engineer, as well as an inventor and illustrator whose talents far exceed those of anyone around him. At times people regard him as mad—until his ideas are put to the test, and voilà! His genius is confirmed again. And yet, over the years, his antics have overtaken his contributions to culture, even though his mind is keener than a Da Vinci or Hawking, historically.

The line between genius and madness has always been as thin as an epidermal layer. The truth is Trinculo designed and engineered CIEL, this floating death house. And, though only he and I know it, he still has the knowledge to redirect its aims.

He deactivates his machine. For a moment, I have to admit, it feels like all hope and joy has left the room. “Sit down like a man? Never! As a genital entrepreneur, however, I’d be delighted to talk with you,” he answers. “Besides, I have news.” He sits and crosses his legs as if he’s the most normal person in the world.

“Genital entrepreneur, is it?” I say, lowering my voice. We don’t have long before he’ll have to go.

“At your service. If you will only open your imagination. And your legs.”

“You know as well as I do there’s next to nothing left between my legs. Or yours.” The sentence makes a funeral in the room. Our whole lives and losses reduced to a farce. Comedy and tragedy lock in a kiss.

“All the more reason to climb aboard, my skittish little dreamer. You can be the first astronaut,” he says playfully. His voice and words make my whole body ring. He makes me laugh. Sometimes I think that’s the deepest love of all.

“Trinc,” I say stoically. “We’ve been out here for years and years.” I turn to study the nothingness out the window. My eye falls on the spider making its way back to its perch. I think about the pull of the dead sun and our useless bodies and about what an ironic joke stars are: dead stuff that tricks you into believing in magical light.

“Did you not hear me?” Trinc says, settling himself more carefully into a chair like a human toolbox. “I said I have news.”

“What gossip have you been gathering tonight?” I suddenly feel the need for a drink. “Cognac?” I offer. “I’ve got about a case and a half of real Courvoisier left—then it’s all synthetics, dull as everything else around here—no sign of flesh and blood . . .” I gesture to my colorless grafted body, letting my robe fall open. Modesty left the arena long ago. Besides, Trinc is the only thing left of the word love in my body. He is one of the few people I will share my work with before unveiling it to the public.

Trinc bolts from his seat, his second, mechanical self clamoring around him like a fanfare. “What is that?” he says breathlessly, pointing to my latest self-publishing efforts. “Your breasts . . .”

I look down at my still raw work. “Used-to-be breasts,” I correct him. “Who knew that what once gave life would make such a lovely canvas? But, listen, Trinc, wait until I’ve completed this manuscript,” I say, closing my robe. “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

“Not even a peek?”

“Not even.” I walk over to my dwindling cache of alcohol, root around like an archaeologist, and retrieve the familiar bottle in its velvet pouch. I scan the room for glasses to drink from, then decide that tonight can be a share-the-bottle night.

Something about the work, still stinging on my flesh, something about Trinc’s pseudolascivious new contraption—it was all making me melancholy and death-conscious. Yet I like it—that feeling that we should pay attention to tiny moments, since the world can change faster than the strum of a spider’s web-string, and that maybe, just maybe, our last act could still be a good angry fuck.

“What news?” I say, opening the bottle and filling my throat. We don’t have much time, after all; I can hear the sentries already, making their curfew rounds a floor below us. The liquid travels down my throat in a heatwet. I close my eyes. I hear Trinc breathing. For a nanosecond, I feel the story I have grafted rising up from my body like a third person in the room with us. Then he turns his ridiculous machine back on, as a wild cacophony fills the room. “Are you insane?” I hissed. “They’ll put you away again.”

But there he is, stubbornly human, in front of me again, nearly taking flight, laughing his motherloving ass off. For a moment he looks like a boy. His eyebrows raised. His cheeks flush. His smile threatens to overtake his face. Like the girls and boys we all were, once, on a planet orbiting the sun.

“Relax, before you go all onion-eyed!” he yells at me. “You tickle-brained harlot!”

And here I burst into laughter—how can I help it, with this absurdity whirring around me like a giant bad moth experiment? I spit out my mouthful of drink. We’ll probably both get solitary.

“We’ll not be moldwarp tonight!” he purrs. “Mount the table and spread your legs, Christine. I’ll bore a new hole into your luscious otherworldly flesh.”

I follow his commands. The game of heterosexual desire that will never consummate cleaves my mind. My heart a dumb lump beating my chest up. And yet it feels good to not think, to let the alcohol restore my body to numbness—good enough that I turn away with faux modesty, pour some alcohol onto my fresh graft and let the sweet hurt flood my torso. I mount the table. I spread my legs as wide as I can manage. But his own contraption makes the old familiar position nearly impossible.

Slopped in Courvoisier, I have an idea. “You go over there, and I’ll come at you with a running jump.” Though I can already hear the buzzy whir of mechanical sentries approaching, I run at Trinc like I used to run at bushes as a child—willfully, with full faith, both that they’d catch me and that I’d be covered in tiny cuts and scrapes. “If you drop me I’ll murder you,” is the last thing I say.

As he positions himself directly at me, pewtered tips gleaming black and blue, the door bursts open and gray-white sentries pile in, rifles aimed at our imagined copulation. I run anyway.

He catches me.

Just like a hero from the old, dead books. He does not penetrate me, but as I clasp my legs around him, bear-hugging his torso and burying my face in the folds of his grafts, he whispers into my ear, raising every hair and fast-devolving erogenous cell to the surface of my body.

“She’s alive. Your dead icon? She’s alive.”

Close by, on a nearly invisible web, a spider’s eight eyes fix on the action and widen.