The Lava in My Bones (29 page)

The next day the security guard unlocks Sam's door and grunts, “You have walking privileges. You can go through the hallways and the hospital grounds if you want.” Sam is shocked. He immediately has the desire to race from his room, then recalls that he has nowhere to go. Sam will leave his room but not right now. He spends the day by the window gathering energy. He knows all organisms require a vitalization stage when a change of form is imminent. Again he watches the blank rectangle of lawn. Snow is starting to melt. Small islands of green rise like bruises in
the endless white. From the hall, he hears a water cooler gurgling, announcements on the P.A. “Dr Finstein wanted in Sexology clinic.”

In the late afternoon, Sonny and Cher arrive, and when Sam hears their voices, even without looking at them, he knows something is different. He turns to see that the two men are no longer clothed in lab coats. Instead, Sonny wears white bell-bottoms and a vest that flashes with bits of tinfoil, while Cher wears a strapless, low-cut dress decorated with teardrop sequins. His curly hair has been straightened and hangs down his back. Sonny is blushing. Sam pretends not to notice their new clothes so as not to embarrass them. He likes the change because during today's session, the doctors spend more time looking at each other than at Sam. They keep losing their train of thought; often, for no reason, Cher abruptly wiggles her shoulders, and sometimes when Sam is speaking, they look at each other and hum.

However, their attention turns to him completely when Sonny offers Sam an envelope with his name on it. Sam carefully takes the paper rectangle. The postmark is Labrador.

“Now that we can trust that you won't eat any stones,” explains Sonny, “we can safely give you your letters without fearing you'll choke on the sealing glue.”

Sam glances at the Queen, whose face is crossed by four parallel ripples. He is amazed that someone in the world knows he is here. He is not as sequestered as he thought.

Something at the centre of him shifts. He lifts his head and strains to hear into an empty distance where he searches for the slightest sound. Somewhere in this building is a passageway
between his life and the rest of the world. Somewhere a bridge exists. At that moment, he thinks: why do I forget that life never repeats, that minutes don't return, that life transforms itself each second? Why clutch at phantoms? My time with Franz had little to do with happiness and much to do with something greater. He slowly rips open the envelope and finds a long letter. He reads:

He folds the page. “It's from my mother,” he says. “Doing her usual
schtick
.”

Sam wonders what is happening to his name floating about the outside world; how many other people know he's here? What stories are being told about him? Sam knows that on this dynamic planet everything goes in circles. There are the cycles of day and night as the ground alternately heats and cools, and cycles of seasons as the Earth orbits the sun. There are cycles of the wobble of the Earth on its axis. Even the movement of lava below the Earth's crust is cyclical; it rises up, melts, descends, melts, then rises up again. Everything rotates—planets around space, the moon around the Earth, the Earth around itself.

At that moment something—the way the knife-blade of sunlight lights the top knob on the bedpost, or how Cher's lipstick covers only her lips and never crosses the line onto her skin, or how when he looks out the window, a bird the colour of hazelnuts
is flying in a rising arc through the sky—makes Sam feel that miracles are possible. He senses he will see Franz again. Despite the iron bars of logic that imprison him, he is sure he will meet him one last time.

The force that fuels the world still exists somewhere.

“This mail arrived directly,” explained Sonny. “Other letters are forwarded here.” Ah, they read his letters to find the final piece of the puzzle. “If you're co-operative, we'll share them with you.”

His door will be open this afternoon. He'll search for the mailroom, that wonderful conduit between this hospital and the world outside. Trying to act blasé, he gives the letter to Cher. “I don't need this,” Sam explains. “Crumple it up and put it in your bra. Your left breast is bigger than your right.”

“Thank you, Sam,” she says, her voice a husky vibrato.

The next day Sam crosses the line separating his room from the hallway.

His slippered feet scuffle along the white-tiled floor and he hears new sounds: moans, cries, rattling trolley-carts, laughter, humming razors, static-y intercoms, and bedpans clanging like cymbals.

He glances into the common room furnished with rocking chairs, a painting of a sunset, round-cornered coffee tables, and an ankle-deep shag carpet the colour of clay. Farther down the hall is the gym, where armies of people move their limbs like pistons; torsos on mats fold themselves up and down like giant
wallets opening and closing. Old women and young men hobble along a running track that takes them back to where they came from and then sends them off again. How interesting the world is, even this little community within the walls of the asylum. So much variety, motion, activity, and colour. Why had he once scorned human beings? Why had he liked to feel separate? What the eye sees is so different from what actually is. He remembers Delial's horror when Sam tried on a yellow shirt in Excelsior's. “It doesn't match your skin colour; you look like a cadaver,” he'd said. Why did people's gazes stop at the surface? He recalls how he'd disdained Franz's stacks of clothing and realizes that he assessed his lover unfairly. He should've appreciated Franz's creativity, the way he viewed his own body as a canvas to be covered with an endless cavalcade of textures, colours, and forms, transforming himself into a different person every day.

Sam now wants to enter people's minds and hear their thoughts. How are they different from his? What a burden it is to be just one person limited by a single psychology. Why had his curiosity extended only as far as inanimate geology? He tried to save the world but was blind to the people in it.

Down in the basement Sam discovers the hospital kitchen. He peers through the round window in the door and observes rows of bran muffins nestled like chicks in tin cubby-holes. A baker with a white cylinder on his head is swinging a rolling pin in the air. Farther along, the boiler room; next, the humid laundry room, the security office, and finally, in the hall's dead end, the mailroom. He stands at the open doorway. Inside is a silent counter with a button-bell on top. If he goes in and rings it, will
what is rightfully his be given him?

Back in his room, Sam lies on the bed, not in foetal position, but for the first time in months, flat on his back.

Sam finally asks Sonny and Cher if he can have access to his own mail. They now wear very elaborate costumes. Sonny sports flashy ties and macraméd vests, has a gold ring in one ear, and is growing sideburns. Cher has jiggling bracelets on her wrists and carries a feather boa. Her long glitter-sparkling nails curve elegantly and her breasts seem to be getting bigger. Perhaps it's the effect created by her dress, which pushes her chest flesh forward, or maybe she got implants when no one was looking. The sessions are repeatedly punctuated by her neigh-like laugh. Sonny and Cher's trust of Sam increases with the strength of their new identities and love for each other. Sonny says they can allow him mail access as long as he agrees to discuss his letters with them.

“I will,” Sam says. “Believe me.” And he means it.

Each day he munches his peach melba and enjoys it. One morning he spontaneously embraces the startled orderly.

Franz's growing diamond begins to obsess Sam. Unstable transition metals like nitrogen and carbon would be required for this gem. Franz surely contains such substances, for he changed constantly. Gemstones need highly fluctuating temperatures,
evident in Franz's manias and paranoia. Diamonds do not form near the surface but must be deeply buried, at times as far as 400 kilometres below the lithospheric plates. They are often brought to the surface through volcanic eruption. The suspense of not knowing what form this eruption will take in Franz is agony to Sam. Although his belief in Franz's diamond seems like faith, he knows it is based on geological phenomena and grounded in fact.

The first time Sam requests his mail, the postal clerk asks his name, then runs one hand along her right breast and says, “Nothing today.”

The second time, she runs her other hand over her other breast and says, “Nothing today.”

The third time he asks, there is mail.

The letter has no return address. He runs up to his room, tears it open, and recognizes his father's handwriting. He reads:

“Gishy-fish. The fins flash and the waves splash. Mishy-mish. The boat croaks and the tokes smote. Where is she with the flaxen hair and the scales that shine and flippers that flime? Gishy-fish. And the curves seen through brine as her hair undulates like seaweed at the seaside? My son, I have loved you more than the—lishy-kish—more than the—kishy-wish—take the sun and put it in your pocket for my heart goes out to—gishy-fish, mishy-mish …”

Sam doesn't need to read any more. He folds the page and puts it back into its envelope.

That afternoon he explains Father to Sonny and Cher. “He's lost at sea always searching for a glimpse of the mermaid that only exists in myth.” He fears Sonny will start asking about his father's testicles, but he only says, “That's a beautiful story.”