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?
And then the vibration changed, and the sound lowered and began to take shape in her body. Her teeth felt like teeth again. She closed her mouth and eyes. Steadied her own breathing. She wasn’t dead. Or injured. That she could tell. Her hair fell lightly onto her shoulders.
The sound vibrations finally dropped into a kind of low bowl swirling in her skull and then pinpointed itself just between her right eye and ear. Like a fingertip of sound, touching her.
Then the sound had orchestral tune, and then the tune had operatic voice.
Slow and easy at first, the song rapidly grew wild in scope and thrill. Though it dealt with the world in ways that her dreams had already foretold—the same truths about the dying sun and erupted calderas, the same conflicts simmering ever toward war, the same kinds of people and places, like her own house and parents—the more the verses unraveled and sang, the more her body felt like the source of some larger-than-life vibration. She shook her head at one point, as if to say no. But the voices tenored on with grand scale and detail until the ballad was entirely epic, and her place within it, larger than the tree she so mysteriously found herself bound to.
At the end, the song seemed to pose a question. It felt completely right to speak aloud in answer. “But how can I possibly convince anyone of this?” she said. “I will be punished or worse. Doctors will come and tell my parents I’ve lost my mind. That happened, you know, to a neighbor boy. They said his dreams had taken his wits. He kept on digging holes in the ground. Eating the dirt. And, besides, I am scared.”
Math. Science. And music. The three made crossroads in her head. It wasn’t a voice making sentences, but forms and sound and light and song moving through her. Everything she was taking in connected to the ideas she had absorbed in her science classes in school, to the questions she had discovered and nurtured there. She recalled what she’d learned in school and recited it back to herself, almost like a bedtime story: “There may be layers of structure inside an electron, inside a quark, inside any particle you have heard of; these are like little tiny filaments. Like a tiny little string, that’s why it’s called string theory, and the little strings can vibrate in different patterns. There are strings to existence, and harmonies—cosmic harmonies—born of the strings.” Cosmic harmonies made of strings. Cosmic harmonies made of strings. She repeated it in her head until it made a rhythm. Thinking about it made her hold her breath and touch her tongue to her teeth. The crouch of dreams at her temples and fingertips.
Only when the surge had finished its song, all the way to an unimaginable ending, did the tree release its hold on her hand. The vibrations left her body, like a taut string suddenly released, and for a moment she felt lighter than human. Would she be lifted into the dull sky now? But when she looked down she saw her own feet, two brown worn leather short boots just standing, the feet of someone’s daughter just standing in a small wood near a river close to her home. And yet what was inside her now, under her skin between her right eye and ear, would change her forever: a blue light.
Leaving the twigs in the knothole of the evergreen, she ran all the way home. When she burst through the door, her startled mother, who had been standing in front of the screen watching a news report, lost her grip on a glass of water and splashed it straight onto the screen. The image popped and sizzled briefly. The newscaster’s face pixelated and his voice went wonky.
“Damn it!” her mother said, standing up and grabbing a rag from the kitchen. When she returned, she dabbed tentatively at the screen, a little afraid to touch it for fear of electric shock. When she stepped back from the screen and turned around, she gulped at the sight of Joan.
“What on earth is that on your head?”
Joan walked over to her mother, still panting from running. Her mother touched the glowing blue light between her right eye and her ear. “Sweetheart?” her mother whispered. “Honey, what . . .” She fingered Joan’s temple. “What happened to your head, here?”
She felt her mother’s finger in the place. Her mother’s eyes opened too wide, her brow knitting little lines in her forehead. With her mother’s finger in that spot, her entire body vibrated. Great heaves of reassuring song filled her skull. She began to sing. She closed her eyes and turned inward. Somewhere her mother’s voice, far away—Joan, Joan.
She was ten.
Chapter Six
Her brother dug his hands into the sand near the shore. A family vacation. Trying to create a bubble of bliss, away from things. A cabin by the sea near Normandy, France, before the Wars, before geocatastrophe, before nations and cities lost their shapes and names.
Behind her, their parents tended a wood fire. Her mother cooked a braised rabbit. Her father listened to Satie. She saw them through the vacation cabin’s window in the orange inner light. She saw her mother look up now and again toward where she and her brother begged to sit near the sea, at night, to watch the water move. To count stars. To smell ocean. Her mother tasted a wooden spoon, Joan brought her forearm to her lips and licked her arm and smiled at the salted skin.
She looked back toward the ocean and tilted her head to the side and wondered. At the surface of the water, she was sure she saw too-bright hues of blue and green making tendrils in the waves. Gleaming up from the water. Was it a trick of the eye? Or was the sea really glowing?
The crescendo and decrescendo of waves filled her ears.
“Do you see it?” Joan yelled over to her brother, who fashioned a crown from kelp.
He followed her finger pointing out toward the water. Then he picked up a palm-size flat beach rock and threw it toward the light. “A submarine!” he shouted. “A spy boat!”
Their father’s stories about this place flitted across her mind. Once, he’d told them, there were wars. Submarines. Gunboats. But now this was a coastline for vacationing families and tourists and boys who threw rocks. She laughed.
Her brother shot at submarines with a rifle of driftwood. P-p-p-p-p-ow pow pow.
Joan stood up and walked to the edge of the water. She pressed up from her toes, stretching out her eleven years. She craned her neck. The mystery of it wouldn’t go away in her head. She’d never seen a light like this. If she could just get closer to it. Her fingers itched. She took her shoes off.
“What are you doing?” her brother said, taking his own shoes off in response.
Joan took her T-shirt off. Her jeans.
“You’re gonna freeze your ass off!” Her brother laughed, but his clothes came off, too. They were siblings, after all.
She laughed at the cuss words they said so freely away from the ears of fathers or mothers. “Your ass, too!” she yelled.
Joan looked back over her shoulder toward the cabin, then waded in up to her shins. Night ocean water licked the bones of her.
The wet sand under her feet sucked at her soles and toes with each step. Cold traveled from her ankles to her shins and up and up to her jaw. She shivered. She waded up to her thighs. She looked to her left and her brother was up to his hips. His grin slipped toward something else. He was not a strong swimmer.
“Stay there,” she commanded, and she watched him grip his own biceps. His upright torso swayed with the rise and fall of the water. She’d always been the more curious one. The one who explored and climbed and dug and jumped. His gifts rested elsewhere: he was beautiful—more beautiful than she. He was loyal. He played any game she invented.
“Go back,” she yelled. He turned. She saw the sharp juts of his shoulder blades when he turned to shore. Razor-backed boy.
The cold water light called her further out.
Now or never.
With a giant gulp of air, she leapt forward in a dive and disappeared into the black and blue water. Underwater she opened her eyes, but everything was black like sleep. Her eyeballs went cold. And her teeth.
When her head surfaced and she opened her eyes, they stinging with salt water, she saw that she was close enough to swim to the hued blue-green water light.
Then time stopped. The cold and the lights and the salted wet and the floating and her arms and her legs and the world upside down. She floated on her back and soon the night sky didn’t seem “up,” it seemed a mere reflection of the water she floated in. The black of the sky like the ocean, and the stars in the sky like the prickling of imagination in her skin and mind, and the cold vast space like the cold unending water, and the motion of things like the speed of light. She smiled and contemplated the pleasantness of drowning.
For who was she in this night-lit water? Something had happened to her and no one understood it. Everyone was going on like there wasn’t a song ringing in her very bones, a song that came in epic waves, about the story of a girl saving the world. No. Not saving it. A something else. Loving it. But when she’d called it a love song it made everything worse. When she called it a love song, everyone wanted to know who the object of her affection was, what was she hiding. So she stopped mentioning the fact of it. This holiday they were a family on the beach, but the last doctor instructed her family that she might be losing her mind, and there was talk of an institution. She saw the fret in the lines around her mother’s mouth. She read her father’s worry in the hand running through his hair. If the light in her head made her crazy, would they simply send her away? Like a criminal to prison?
Why not slip under the water blanket, she thought, the blanket of night sky.
By the time she heard the yelling from shore, by the time her brother ran back to the cabin and her mother dropped the wooden spoon that tasted of braised rabbit and her father ran outside in his socks and her brother ran from water to cabin back to water in just his underwear, a pale shivering seal, she was far enough out that her entire family looked like a cartoon of people, small and jumping around and yelling.
She dove back down into the light one more time—under nightwater the light looked blurry like in dreams—and then surfaced and swam back, her arms frozen, and yet the girl of her never once wavered—she’d swum to the light. She swam back. It was not difficult. Only water between her and land.
What they saw when she emerged shut everyone up. Everyone’s arms hung at their sides. Everyone’s breath heaved from yelling. Everyone’s eyes grew wide. Everyone’s mouth opened. She glowed from head to toe. Her body cold light.
Her skin gleamed neon blue and green.
“It’s algae,” her father finally said. He ripped his shirt off and rushed to cover his daughter’s shivering body. Her father turned back to her mother while he briskly rubbed at Joan’s arms, as if the conversation would return everything to normal. “Like the trails left by submarines . . .” he offered, laughing crazily like too-worried parents do.
Her mother came to embrace her in a kind of parent cocoon, her face between relief and a pure unanswered question.
“Like in the war,” her father said, still rubbing. “Bioluminescent algae. It’s all over her skin. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
Things used to make sense like that. A father, a mother, children. A brief vacation.
Bioluminescence obsessed her for months. She grew her own algae in a closet aquarium. She became addicted to her technology, searching for knowledge. And she begged her parents to vacation next in New Zealand, at the Natural Bridge colony, home to the largest colony of bioluminescent glowworms in the world. And they did. Something about the fear of their daughter losing her mind. At sunset, she, along with her parents and hundreds of tourists, could be seen exploring overhangs and crevices that were filled with glowworms, literally millions of them. Even though the surrounding area was pitch-dark, inside the caves the sun seemed to shine from the nooks and crannies surrounding them.
All of this before the sun itself, like girlhood, broke and dimmed Earth forever.
Chapter Seven
When I began her story, when I began grafting her alive on the surface of my skin, I missed the smells of the body—missed them violently. I missed the smell of sweat. Blood. Cum. Even shit. Our bodies have lost all sensory detail. I should be stinking and matted and chapped, stuck in this idiotic cell. My teeth should feel covered in a wrong spit film.
But our bodies barely respond to anything. Not even my own piss has a smell. And besides, fewer and fewer of us retain any forms of physical longing. I suspect what has taken the place of drives and sensory pleasure is a kind of streamlined consciousness that does not require thinking or feeling. It was too much for us, in the end. Now all that remains is a tiny band of like-minded resistance bodies. Anti bodies, next to the bodies of most on CIEL, who are fast becoming pure representations of themselves. Simulacral animated figurines.
I wonder sometimes if that’s why grafting was born. It restores us to the evidence of a body. Like wrinkles or stretch marks. And yet I suspect that my own proclivity for grafting has a deeper, darker meaning. There seems something I am desperate to raise: not human virtue, but its opposite. Our most base corporeal drives. I stopped caring about reason when we ascended and untethered ourselves from the grime and pulse of humanity, when we turned on ourselves and divided ourselves and proved what we had been all along: ravenous immoral consumers. Eaters of everything alive, as long as it sustained a story that gave us power over the struggling others.
I rub the small of my back. An ache rests there, under my grafts.
A special stylus exists specifically designed for self-grafting. Though I am as close to ambidextrous as any grafter could be, I find the tool useful for reaching certain areas one cannot quite see directly. My beloved Trinculo modified the design; I can thus graft story even at the small of my back. There, and below, I raise welted flesh devoted to her origins.
Before geologic catastrophe, I wrote, there was a town, there was her family. Before the earth groaned and reordered human existence, she came from a town where the ordinary heavy mists of dark mornings blanketed the water-meadows and clapped shut the window of the sky each day. A town of cold and penetrating wet that rested in your elbows and shoulders and hips, no matter your age. The Earth was not yet a lunar landscape of jagged rocks, treeless mountains, or scorched dirt thirsting toward death. The fertile flatlands stretched out into rolling hills, forests, and eventually a river. There was no violence in the land itself.
On one side of her childhood home the woods sprouted beechwood, a translucent green canopy brightly shot with sun. The forest floor wore anemones, wild strawberries, lily of the valley, Solomon’s seal—all of it opening occasionally into clearings, then into deeper woods and darker, older trees.
On the opposite side of their home was a deeper, darker wood hoary with age—firs and pines and knotted oaks. Most children avoided this wood, as it was known to be the home of wild boars and wolves.
It was said, much later, to be haunted by a young girl who brought trees to life and made the
dirt sing.
But this was the time of playing made-up games born of their child minds. Of long dusk hours spent with her brother, Peter, after everyone had grown accustomed to the softly glowing blue light at the side of her head when no one—not police, government officials, doctors, clergy, or anyone in between—could explain it. So she spent many evenings in the woods together with her brother—Jo and PD, they were—imagining worlds together.
“It’s important. Just do it,” Jo demanded, holding out her arms.
“Why?” PD wanted to know. “The rope’s barely long enough to go round you twice, and besides, you’ll get sap all over you.”
“Because that’s the game,” Jo said. “You tie me to the tree and I pretend you’ve been captured. Then you rescue me.”
“That’s stupid. I’m right here.”
“No, stupid. After you tie me to the tree, you run away. You wait. You know, for kind of a long time. Later you come pretend to rescue me.”
“I still think it’s stupid,” PD said under his breath, unraveling the length of rope.
Joan lowered her voice to a girl-growl. “There are wolves and spikey-haired pigs in these woods, you know,” she reminded him.
“I’ve never seen them.” PD lifted the length of thick braided rope from his shoulder. To an onlooker they might have resembled child twins, were it not for the length of Joan’s ebony hair. Peter’s came only to his shoulders. But their bodies were still young enough to look physically alike—thin and taut, all collarbones and elbows, without any sign of muscle yet.
Jo lodged herself against the great sentry of a fir tree and thrust her arms out behind her. She tilted her head up toward the sky and closed her eyes. “Make sure it’s tight. Or it’ll be dumb,” she said.