The Lava in My Bones (10 page)

He measured distances between outcroppings and wrote numbers in his ledger, but watched himself in the third person. His research, which he once believed necessary for the world's survival, now seemed peripheral. Again he shouted, “Why the hell should the Earth be saved?”

Surrounded by woods, Sam remembered his first days in the forest with Franz. Snow had fallen and pine trees reached for the sky. Franz had shown him hidden caves, cedars struck by lightning, his sculpture garden, the fire at the Earth's centre. He remembered how Franz had been those first weeks—freshly inquisitive, curious, open. That was the true Franz, the best Franz, the Franz forming a diamond; the rest of him—ice cream antics and all those clothes—were the external layers. Could Sam again call forth the rock-eater at his centre? Their relationship was founded in basaltic rock, which takes centuries to erode. He'd never find another merging of compounds with this particular
chemical content. Sam remembered things Franz had given him, a triangular photo of a covered bridge, a bouquet of pine needles, artwork, dials with prongs, clay spheres “to use as paperweights,” and all those foods Sam had never eaten before. He'd long remember their first weeks and forget the rest. The problem, he concluded, was they should never have left the forest and gone on city tours and to discotheques. Nature had united them. He should bring Franz to the woods here, to the Matterhorn, or better yet, to Canada.

In a valley in the Alps there is a volcanic gash where lava that lies below the Earth's crust periodically bubbles up. The area is off-limits, but Sam called the Canadian embassy and arranged for a research permit. He was now less interested in the Earth's surface and wanted to understand its centre. The rocks ringing the eternal fire survived temperatures of 700 degrees and never melted. It was there that the mystery lay. He stood at the crack in the ground. The lips of the gash were coated with frazzled weeds. A hot breath brushed against his cheek; was that the smell of sulphur?

“Bloody hell!” He hurried from the crack. He would examine the regions below the Earth's surface, but not now, not this month. At this moment, he wasn't ready.

His plane home was due to leave today. He imagined the Swissair Boeing shooting into the sky without him, and felt liberated. On July 31, Sam boarded the train; when he arrived in Zurich, he felt like he'd returned to his first day there. His viewpoint wasn't scientific, but he recognized that at some point in the past month he'd ceased being a scientist.

When Sam opened the door of the chalet, Franz was working at the computer. Looking straight ahead, Franz said, “Ah, you're still here. Thought you'd flown away.”

“I missed my plane.”

Silence. Both men knew Sam had done that deliberately.

“Going to get another ticket?”

“I'm having trouble accessing my bank account.”

Both knew this wasn't true either.

“You allowed to stay on?”

Swiss Immigration. Sam wouldn't mention that fiasco. He hadn't known what it was like to have so many secrets. For a moment all these changes in himself seemed more miraculous than snow in summer, edible rocks, and visitations from the living ghosts of family members.

Franz said, “I thought so.” Looking toward the window, he handed Sam a small box wrapped in floral paper. The perfect Swiss host. Before opening it, Sam knew what was inside.

“You didn't have to do this!” The same words he used the first time Franz prepared breakfast.

“This is pay-back time for the ice cream thing. That still sickens me.”

Sam removed the paper, opened the box, and eyed the oneway Air Canada ticket to Toronto.

“You have to go, Sam. We could never live together here. Everything is against it. The visa situation. Your employment.” The two men looked at each other. Franz confessed, “I am afraid
of what will become of me if you stay.” Sam searched Franz's eyes for why he loved him. He found it.

“Would you eat a rock for me, Franz? Just this once. Before I go?”

If you love something, put it…

“No, Sam. Let be. Just let be.”

Sam did not know what Franz meant when he said this. Let be. He would spend years examining these words. He would study the forms of the letters under a microscope and make clay figures of the words that he then beat into dust and sifted through for some hint of their compositional qualities. He'd play tapes of those two simple, one-syllable words over and over, searching for what connection they had to the sound of plates shifting beneath the Earth's crust and the hiss of steam stealing through underground caves. Diamonds would glimmer, but Sam would not touch them.

The night before leaving Zurich, as Sam lay awake in the dark beside Franz, he could hear the sound of the Earth creaking on its axis. It is an old world we live on. It has spun around so many times that Sam is often amazed its central shaft hasn't rusted and cracked. He and Franz are not the first to touch its surface with their hands. They are not the first to press its glistening rocks against their skin. The snow has fallen many times before and then melted and frozen again. There is so much that we can never know. There are layers of stone from the Precambrian eon concealed beneath rock from the Phanerozoic, and below that, there are stratum, seams, and lamina from epochs we know nothing of, that we do not have names for, that may never be discovered. In
our lifetimes, we can only know a small portion of what exists. The world is endless and its treasures are inexhaustible.

Even if Sam could penetrate the Earth's hard skin and journey deep toward its fiery heart, the now-buried diorite and glittering amethyst, the purple-bubbled gabbro and streaked pegmatite would surround him and ignite a sense of wonder that would hold him stationary between the surface and the centre as the Earth spins slowly, so slowly that those who have always lived on its outer rim think the world is motionless and that the sky is moving.

As morning light began to flow around the edges of the window blind, Sam had the desire to clutch his lover's body, but he was afraid to wake him. Franz would be furious. At what? Geography? Let be. The words were an indecipherable tattoo beating in his brain.

After breakfast they headed out into a world where everything had sped up. The Earth spun in reverse as they walked along twisting trails, through moss-rimmed craters, stepped in and out of mud footprints that would, from now on, point in one direction only, passed open-mouthed caves where stalactites had finally stopped dripping. The tram car hurtled through the streets where the last snow was melting. At the airport they got lost in an endless, underground labyrinth where they turned right and then left and then back and around; they followed arrows that pointed up, down, in all directions at once, and finally stood in front of Terminal 3, the wind blowing Sam's hair as his scarf lashed from his neck, and he looked at Franz (a man whose body conquered stone), glanced down at his flapping ticket (to a country no one
visits), and when he lifted his head, Franz said, “Sam,” and his voice fissured. “We had some good times but please don't write. We must forget.
Danke.”
Then he lurched round and walked stiffly back into the tunnel, and when the glass door closed on his stone-spined back forever, Sam thought: What will become of my country now?

At last Sam stood before the ten iron steps leading into the aircraft. He felt that climbing those stairs would be the hardest thing he'd ever have to do.

When he tore his foot from the earth and let it bang down on the first step, a huge crevice formed in the Northwest Territories and spread south all the way through Manitoba, thus permanently separating east from west. As his left foot struck the second stair, the Continental Divide cracked and British Columbia was thrown into the ocean, never to be seen again. At the third step, the Maritimes were consumed beneath a flash tidal wave. On the fourth, all of Ontario's skyscrapers cracked and every church steeple in Québec shattered. At the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth steps, brush fires lay waste to the wheat fields of the prairies, the Rocky Mountains tumbled into the foothills, the Arctic tundra was submerged beneath a vast inland sea, and in the southern cities, every shopping centre imploded, the subway tunnels caved in, and all the red-bricked walls in subdivisions were jolted into such odd angles, their houses would never resemble each other again.

As the plane rose, Sam looked through the window and saw the remaining snow in Zurich completely dissolve to water that flowed down the streets and into the lake as people ran outside
clapping and dancing. With his face in his hands, he wept loudly without restraint as cold winds thrashed his cheeks and snow poured down from a small cloud just below the carry-on luggage rack. Then, above the water, he saw the Atlantic Ocean burst into flame and become one vast, boiling pit.

When he arrived in Toronto, he didn't know where he was. Everything had changed. The CN Tower, which had been in the city centre, was in the north. Streets that ran east-west went north-south or diagonally. The city no longer had seven islands in the lake but two hundred. When he boarded the subway, he realized it had been transformed into an amusement-park train that went in a circle around the business district, while the old subway lines had been moved to the countryside so farmers could more easily transport cattle.

Sam tried to take a taxi home but forgot his street name and his neighbourhood's name. Then he opened a phonebook to search for his address, but the alphabet was in a new order beginning “H R F” and ending “B V E.” He ran into his landlady who pointed east (his apartment had been in the west) and said, “One kilometre. Beside the oil refinery.” Toronto had an oil refinery? As he walked home, the ground kept fracturing beneath his feet. Lines formed in the pavement as he crossed the street. He had to jump over gullies, steadily widening crevices, and when he reached the edge of a new borough called South York and saw his apartment building in the distance, he had to cross a windfilled ravine to reach it.

He entered his apartment and stood looking at the empty walls. He thought everything would be fine once he got back into
his old routine. He could forget all that'd happened and become his old complacent self again. But the rocks in their plastic cubes had changed from a bright green to pale grey as if they'd died from lack of oxygen. At night, with his head on the pillow, he could hear it: the fire burning at the Earth's centre. Molten lava coagulated into steaming mounds that collapsed into fragments that joined other steaming, shifting masses. He felt tricked, as if a mirror had been pulled from in front of his face to reveal a blank space.

Every morning he saw the bones of Franz's knuckles in stones that littered city construction sites, his kneecaps in the boulders that marked entrances to suburban parks, the ridge of his eyebrows in the curved rocks arching in bungalow flowerbeds, and when Sam tried to shut Franz out and, by staring through a microscope lens, reduce the world to a tiny circle, there in the lit rock were lines like the veins on the backs of his legs and abrupt indentations that resembled the cleft in his chin. Sam could not escape, no matter how hard he tried.

Six months after his return, he threw a stone across a river and started dating other men. He put an ad in the newspaper, followed strangers onto newly built subway platforms, shook hands a second too long with terse-eyed boys at house parties, and discreetly pressed his knee against the seam-strained crotches of slobbering men on barstools who immediately ordered him drinks or put out their cigarettes and left. Men in the dance bars here resembled those in the Zurich disco, and he wondered if this was a franchise. Once he tried to ram a stone through a dancer's lips, but the man dashed off, called the police, and Sam fled.

He hoped sex would sear Franz from his mind and made love in telephone booths, candlelit boudoirs, gas-station washrooms, on top of the CN Tower—but his hand kept forgetting to cover his mouth, which yawned uncontrollably.

Then he threw a stone across another river and started dating women. He mingled at office parties in companies he didn't work for, offered unmatched socks to ladies in laundromats, and his world became filled with the intoxicating odour of rose-petal perfume, the static crackle of fingernails running through red-dyed hair, the humid, nylon-scented heat wafting from pantyhose left drying on radiators. But in bed he kept looking for body parts that he thought had gotten lost in the covers yet weren't there in the first place, and one day, after giving a long, affectionate speech, he realized he was mouthing the lyrics of a pop song he'd heard on the radio.