The Lava in My Bones (28 page)

He snatches the bowl in his trembling hands. With a spoon he tentatively scoops and slides the syrup peach-buttock between his lips. The sweetness is revolting, the syrup thick like slime, but he chews the firm flesh and swallows. All of a sudden there are tears in his eyes. The orderly winks and heads out the door. Sam is learning more from him than from the doctors.

Sam decides to set in motion a process of change to align himself with this formative principle. He moves his bed to the north side of the room, puts his pyjamas on inside out, practises
standing on his head until his face is borscht-red, and instead of muttering about Franz and the fire at the Earth's centre, he conjugates French verbs out loud. He knows he appears outlandish but is beginning to see that the ridiculous is closer to life's source than the sensible.

The doctors enter the room and gasp. Doctor #2 writes a whole paragraph. They sit on their chairs and clear their throats.

Then Sam says, “Can I ask a question? Why are there always two of you treating me? You're like Bobsy and Dobsy. Or Jekyll and Hyde. Or Sonny and Cher.”

The men's eyes brighten. Doctor #1 puts his hand on his chin and asks, “If that were true, which one of us do you think would be Sonny and which would be Cher?”

“That's a stupid question,” Sam answers, disgusted. “I thought you considered me intelligent. You, sir, have a bat-like hair growth below your nostrils—and would obviously be Sonny. Whereas you, sir,” he glances at Doctor #2, “are a voluptuous, leggy brunette and could only be Cher. I'm amazed you'd ask such a silly question. I think the role assignment is clear.”

The moustached doctor frowns. Evidently he wanted to be Cher. “You have two doctors,” he says, “because your high IQ makes you a challenge to health-care professionals. Your recovery is very important to the scientific community. If you recover, we all recover.”

“So I've got two.”

“Yes,” he answers. “Two mints are better than one.” And to emphasize his point, he pops a mint into his mouth and bites it.

Sam doesn't want to talk about his life today, so he describes
the cracks in the ceiling, their resemblance to seismograph lines or to the frenzied scribblings of a junkie trying to write his own name.

The men sit still as totem poles. Sam sighs again. He sighs so much that eighty percent of the air in the hospital must be made up of his carbon dioxide. Clearly, the doctors want him to talk about his family and childhood, so as usual he nestles down into his chair, as if in preparation for a bedtime story someone else will tell. He closes his eyes, concentrates, and begins to recount the tales of his life. He refuses to see patterns, but describes things randomly with no beginnings, middles, or ends. Yet sometimes the events arrange themselves into forms Sam wasn't looking for. The stories connect to the ones told the previous day or are as self-contained and alone as a single star in the sky. As he speaks, the men's pens stroke lovingly at their sheets, moving back and forth, up and down, rhythmically like waves. He expects to see their pages covered with curlicues and fluid, elegant spirals when, in fact, they are printing sentences that march compliantly between narrow lines that shoot straight across the page.

“My father was a fisherman,” Sam says. “He was a fisherman living on the edge of the ocean. He spent all his youth hauling in nets of fish that gleamed like jewels and fluttered like fingers wagging until one day, there were no fish left. Now he floats staring dumbly into dark water. He curses and fidgets, and gets so tangled up in his nets that he cannot move but sits baking in the sun like a fish caught in a net. I have had to paddle out in a rowboat to rescue him. As I cut through the net to free him, he continues to gaze into the watery depths. Looking for what?
Fins flickering? Hands waving? The flash of an eye that opens and closes?”

“Do
you
look for eyes in water?” asks the Sonny-like doctor.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you look for eyes in kitchen-sink dishwater, toilet bowls, or the wonderful minestrone soup they serve here on Fridays?”

“You mean Mondays,” corrects Cher.

“One of the two days,” continues Sonny.

Sam says, “I don't think I look for eyes anywhere.”

“Do you look for naked bodies in water? Is that what you look for?”

He recalls grey water rippling against white porcelain. “Thursday night was bath night for our family. My sister always took hers before mine. Sitting in the tepid water, I could still smell her body.”

“Your sister. Yes. Tell us about her.”

Sam speaks honestly. “My sister has spent her life winking at people who won't wink back. She's fluttered her eyelashes, and my lashes have tried to match their velocity but failed. We played together, painted purple dots on neighbours' doorsteps, draped our bodies over clotheslines and pretended we were shirts drying, ran up and down the valleys, our arms outstretched. But my sister is attached to my mother who is, in turn, attached to my father, and the same electricity flows through all of them. When I became aware of the rocks in the ground beneath my feet, I abandoned my sister and hiked to the steel city where I live. Still, my sister wanders up one street and down another and the footprints she leaves are larger than the shoes that made them. She
lives trapped where the edges of buildings are blurred by sheaths of fog, sunlight makes flat windowpanes appear concave, and at night the ocean futilely bangs its head against the shore. Sue has heard the distant pounding, but will she ever wake?

“I hear her voice call me in the early morning and the sound becomes a rope that coils around my neck and pulls. I want to free my sister but don't know how. She trusts wind more than stone, but air brings you nothing and that's what she has. My father has fish, I have rocks, but my sister has zero.”

“And your mother,” Sonny asks. “What about her?”

Sam speaks honestly. “My mother does not have zero. Every number added up is hers. She looks up into the sky and it is an extension of her cerebral cortex. She looks down at the earth and those are her feet growing lichen and grass shrubs. When the wind blows, she falls to her knees, the world enters her, and she opens her mouth and gives the world back to itself in long, unbroken syllables. Bonfires glow in every corner of her skull, and her skin conceals muscles of such strength that she can fell trees with one blow of the hatchet and crumble shale rocks in her hands. She has braided the hair of my sister into such iron-solid scrollwork, a smithy's poker can't undo it. My mother gives and takes as does the universe, but there are things beyond her fingertips, and she can not accept this. When I was a child, Mother towered so high, I could not believe there could be a sky above her. She is an ocean that bubbles and pitches, but is so all-encompassing and formless that only the solid, defined edges of rocks could save me, and so I smashed stone against stone until I built a world she couldn't touch and would fear if she knew it existed.
For she is merciless. She pours bleach onto the bright, upturned faces of sunflowers so the birds that eat the seeds die. She hacks at the roots of raspberry bushes that are more fruitful than the womb that bore us. One day I discovered my second rock collection covered with blood; she'd tried to smash the stones with her bare hands. The next day she mail-ordered a Charles Atlas wrist-strengthener, and a week later I could hear her in the basement groaning as she squeezed the latex balls. After dinner she challenged my father to an arm-wrestle and won. That night my rocks in their trays looked like sugar cookies that would dissolve when touched. At midnight I put my rocks in a box under my arm and left Labrador for good. As I passed my sister's door, I pressed my lips against the polished wood. She'd be in hysterics in the morning. I was creeping through the living room when my father walked in, still wearing his oilskins. I held one finger before my lips and we stared at each other for a long time. Then I passed through the doorway and, for the first time in my life, climbed up and over the lip of the valley and headed east toward the city.”

Sonny's voice becomes very quiet. “And this,” he says, “Franz person. Tell us about him.”

Sam jerks up his head. Four eyes and two ballpoint pen nibs glare back.

No. He will not speak honestly. He will not offer Franz's body on a platter so that they can separate pelvis from torso. He will not let them peel Franz from his brain and shape him into whatever form suits them. There's a type of cave lichen that's killed by the light that makes it visible. Let them shine their flashlights
elsewhere. The world's centre remains stone-circled for a reason.

Sam has thrown story after story at the doctors—“Here, catch this”—and they race to catch a ball arcing high in the air, but one ball is never enough, and Sam has to juggle, volley, and lob in all directions to keep their over-washed, antiseptic-reeking hands off Franz. He peers at a stain on the wall and tells them Franz was a rosy-cheeked milkmaid living in the high Alps and that his skin was white as cream and his hair soft as lamb's wool; together they'd stand in alpine meadows and blow long, curling horns, then prance about fields with bells on their necks until they fell naked beside piles of sheep dung and proceeded to make love. At the moment of climax, Franz would yodel; his voice echoing about the mountains caused avalanches and made goats fall off cliffs.

“Can you impersonate this yodelling for us?” asks Sonny.

Sam can't, so he explains that Franz was a seventy-year-old blacksmith who beat metal beside the lake below the Matterhorn; the sound of pounding metal was so infectious, Sam would perform avant-garde interpretive dances on glaciers, jutting his hips to and fro and clawing his fingers before his face as if scraping hardened frost from the air.

“Can you perform this dance now?”

That's impossible, so Sam tells them Franz was a Zurich housewife who incessantly polished delicate china figurines on mahogany shelves; the last time Sam visited, he'd swung his coat over his shoulder and a statuette of a shepherd playing a hornpipe fell and smashed on the hardwood. Franz picked up each glass shard and dropped them into a bin with no injury to himself,
but when Sam touched just one piece, scratches appeared on the palms of his hands and every finger bled.

“Could you show us the scars?”

On and on it goes. “Tell us about Franz! Franz! Franz!” repeating that name over and over; it is so disorienting to Sam that his own words stick like mud to the roof of his mouth, and he is no longer his new derisive, sarcastic self. Blood slows to become sludge in his veins, his brain spins like a weathercock in empty space; he feels he is sinking and can only see the terrible distance between his body and Franz's. As he huddles finally brain-naked before them, the doctors lick their lips and go for the kill. They hurl questions like stones at his exposed flesh.

“How could six weeks with one person have changed you so utterly?”

“Was it because he was your first real lover and the betrayal so sudden?”

“What is this diamond that has become so important?”

“And why Switzerland, why not Austria, Sweden, or Italy? For God's sake, why not Italy?”

“Surely there were signs you'd collapse before you met him. What glue held you together?”

“Why did this glue stop working when you entered Switzerland?”

They attempt to uproot desire from its hiding place, give it dimensions, weight, a back and a front. But once you describe something, you destroy it. Sam writhes beneath the onslaught of language until he collapses weeping on the floor before them. “I don't know why anything's happened! I don't know who Franz
truly is, why the ocean exists, why rocks don't fly, and why we can't walk on water! I don't know anything anymore! Please let me be!”

The two doctors look at each other. Have they peeled off a layer of resistance?

“I don't understand why you're so harsh with me, Sonny.” Sam wipes tears from his cheeks. “And you, Cher, I really had high hopes for you.” He looks up at the two doctors and says, “Sonny and Cher, I'm disappointed in the both of you.” At the mention of their linked names, the men beam.

Sam confesses a secret. “I feel embarrassed because I've had this relationship that you, as scientists, know is meaningless. It can't produce offspring and is an evolutionary mistake. I don't know why I'm a biological non-sequitur.”

Sonny looks directly at Cher. Then he reaches over and takes her hand in his.