The Lava in My Bones (31 page)

He knows he's heading east because the moon is in the sky's fourth quadrant. Although shock waves whiplash through his body as his slippered feet strike the earth, he runs. Although plants strike his shins and tree branches slash his cheeks, he runs.
Although mosquitoes fly into his hair, eyes, and up his nose, his hands blister as he climbs wood fences, and his calves, thighs, and face become splattered with mud and manure, he runs.

He cartwheels over stone walls, hurtles through crabgrass-devoured ditches and wanders, panting across light-drenched, sign-flashing highways where cars charge trailing flames of light; horn blares are like sudden explosions.

A strange second sound fills the air and becomes louder as he heads east. At first Sam thinks it's a train whistle, then a tuning fork struck so hard its prongs will oscillate forever. The pulsating ringing is coming from the northeast. The sound enters his ears, seeps into his lower cranium, and journeys down through his torso until all his bones and interior organs, hard and soft, vibrate to the same rhythm.

In the morning, the sun puts one blunt fingertip above the horizon-line and lights up the apartment blocks of Peterborough. His hospital shirt and pants are in shreds and his feet bloodied and swollen. He attempts to comb his hair with mud-caked fingers. Sam heads north toward the airport and arrives an hour later. His feet slap the pavement as he races across the parking lot. He pushes through a plate-glass door, steps inside. Directly in front is the Air Canada counter and a smiling woman in a navy blazer. When he approaches the desk, the woman stops smiling.

“I want a ticket to Zurich,” Sam says. “For the next plane.”

A deep crease forms in her forehead. “We don't have direct flights to Europe, sir. You have to fly to Toronto and get a connecting flight there.”

“I have no time for that.” When Sonny and Cher discover he's
escaped, a warrant for his capture will be published immediately. “I want Zurich now!” A queue of people giddily flapping yellow cards shuffles through a doorway below a flashing light. “I'll give you all I have.” He realizes he has neither money nor I.D.

The woman politely says, “Just one minute, sir.” She speaks into a microphone. “Security. Desk number five.”

Sam curses, runs to the front of the queue, throws down a man in dreadlocks, knocks over a lady in purdah, hurls a pen-clicking businessman against the wall, and charges through the door. Inside is a tunnel crowded with more people. “Get out of my way!” he shouts, pushing through. Shrieking passengers fall like bowling pins; crutches and canes clatter on tiles, but he races ahead without mercy. At the end of the tunnel is a red line on the floor and beyond, the stairs into the plane. If he crosses that line, he can storm the plane. The pilot will take him wherever Sam demands, and if he refuses, Sam will clobber him senseless and fly the plane himself.

Hands suddenly clutch Sam's shoulders, pull his arms behind his back. Two men in grey uniforms. Security pigs.

“Let go of me!”

Their grip on his forearms tightens.

Then an amazing thing happens. As he thinks of Franz standing with arms outstretched on the other side of the world, the words from the letter in his underpants cross the divide separating paper and skin, seep into his pores, enter his bloodstream, and shoot to all the extremities of his body. His pituitaries go into hysterics and erupt every last bit of adrenalin in their reservoir, and Sam becomes possessed of a strength he's never known.
His biceps swell, ripping his sleeve seams, his pectorals flicker, thigh muscles bulge, and deep crevices etch themselves into his once soft stomach.

In one quick movement, Sam spirals his arms like propellers and the guards are hurled to the ground. He charges forward down the tunnel only to be stopped—
bap!
—by a wall of sheet metal that strikes his forehead, nose, and kneecaps, and clangs a high C. He pounds at the plane door with his fists, he scrapes and paws, puts his fingers into the crack and pulls.

The guards on the ground are radioing for help. “Terrorist at Gate Five.”

Swearing, Sam hurtles back out through the tunnel, inadvertently steps on the hands and faces of people he'd already trampled once. “Not again!” they scream. “No!” Outside, the woman in the blazer is bellowing, “Reinforcements at Gate Five!”

Sam sprints through the glass door and finally stands alone in the wind-swept parking lot. He does not run far. A half-kilometre from the airport, he climbs down into a rainwater culvert and lies there panting. Rings of corrugated metal circle his body. He stays there until nightfall. Then, after dark, when a plane arrives, he'll storm the runway.

All day as he listens to the screech of planes taking off, the circular ridges of metal around him hum and vibrate, pressing so deeply into his flesh, he fears he'll have zebra patterns on his skin for the rest of his life. He rolls onto his stomach, and an iron
ridge rises up to his eyeball. His bangs feel sticky on his forehead; his lips pucker into a steel ridge. Sam clicks his jaw, stretches his feet, and his toes fan outwards. He notices his heart pounding as perspiration trickles along his scalp, tickles the hair in his armpits, and pools in the small of his back. As his lungs expand, the two halves of his ribcage separate; his flattened testicles sprawl outward like elephant ears. This is his body. This is him. He feels his mind at last sliding down into the heat of his torso, stretching out tentacles into his four limbs. He takes possession of his body as never before. He is it and it is him. He refuses to separate himself from it ever again.

Sam smells something sour, hears rasping, and feels a tickle on the top of his head. He raises his chin, and peers into the bloodshot eyes of a snorting rat, its tongue flickering. Sam bangs his hands against the metal and the animal scurries away but reappears at the other end of the tunnel where it grunts and shuffles.

Sam instinctively puts his hand in his torn pants to feel the edges of Franz's letter. It is still there. No one will take it from him.

The sun sets and the drain darkens. Sam crawls out of the hole. He stares down at his feet; the moonlight makes them appear thicker and wider. He lifts each foot and notices his swollen soles have hardened into inch-thick calluses and his toenails are now hooked talons. Opening his mouth, he places his fingertip against the incisors that are now surprisingly long and sharp. A stab of pain. He examines his finger, marvelling at the pearl of blood on its tip. He uses his teeth to gnaw a hole in the airport fence. Crouching, he watches a staircase on wheels drift onto the
runway, float about indecisively, then veer toward a small parked plane. When the stair lip touches the plane's shell, a jolt goes through Sam's body. He races out onto the lit-up tarmac, but just before he reaches the stairs, a herd of pot-bellied security guards stampede out of a wooden hut and surround him. Some men have batons in their hands, others carry lemon donuts and a few, crullers. All are chewing. Sam kicks one man in the stomach, hoofs another in the balls, then joins his raised arms like a hatchet and hacks a third man on the head. He turns and charges up the staircase. At the top—that same damned high-pitched ringing! It's not an alarm but a shrill throbbing coming from the eastern forests, from the direction of—Labrador. The plane's steel door closes against his face.

He dashes back down and races through the sea of writhing security guards wiping jelly off their faces and babbling into walkie-talkies. Sam knows he can't come to this airport again. Next time surely the entire police force will be here, and as strong as his body was becoming, there are limits to what it can do.

So he runs all night and all the next day. Outside Belleville's small airport, he encounters and challenges the same floating staircase, the same guards, the same flight and escape. And again in Kingston, Gananonque, and Smith Falls. When Sam reaches the Perth airport, he peers through the wire-mesh fence to see the armed guard assembled on the runway. He resigns himself: he'll have to travel to Zurich by sea.

The closest Atlantic port is Ogunquit, Maine, but Sam could get caught crossing the US border. Percé, Québec has too few ships. Halifax, too many people. The best bet seems to be Sydney, Nova Scotia. Beneath the cover of night, he'll sneak into the cargo hold of a Europe-bound ship.

Suddenly the constant ringing sound pops, sputters once, twice, and forms syllables. “Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run!” His sister's words extort him to approach the future by returning to the past. Cartwright has a port, and he knows the schedule of departing ships by heart. But he does not want to return to Labrador. It's too far out of the way. The detour will take too much time. He's spent his life extricating himself from the fires of Cartwright. Why return to a place he so desperately wanted to leave? He's not responsible for his sister's welfare. Let Sue save herself. But strands of guilt thread themselves through his whole body.

“Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run …”

The next week he sleeps by day and runs by night. His sister's voice continues to call across a great distance. There it is beneath the sound of his feet thumping the earth, leaves
shushing,
tree branches creaking, and the roar of cars passing on the nearby highway. Should he really go to Cartwright?

He passes dried-up streams, brittle forests about to burst into flame. Global warming has wreaked its havoc here. Is Sam strong enough to return to the town of his birth?

He finds soiled newspapers and, curious, reads them. One morning he discovers a piece of newspaper with a photo of his own face glowering below the words, “Escaped Mental Patient Attacks Airport Staff. Sam Masonty, a schizophrenic psychotic has escaped from the York Mental Institution. Doctors Browning and Silversen say he is a threat to public safety …”

Sonny and Cher. Those assholes. After all he'd done for them. Sam knows he has difficulty trusting people, and now Sonny and Cher made his worst fear come true. He reads on: “Joe Baxter, an orderly, was fired because he witnessed the patient's escape but waited hours before reporting it.” Sam can't bear to read more. He crumples up the paper and buries it. He will have to steer clear of all human habitation.

He travels northward through the deep wilderness, and his body continues to change each day. By the time he reaches Hyndford, his torso is a tree trunk of pulsating muscle. The last patch of clothing falls from him, and hair now sprouts from every pore in his skin, claws protrude from his fingertips, and the centre of his face expands outward to form a very definite, cone-shaped snout. The wilderness affects him in ways he hadn't anticipated. Sam doesn't mind his new body—the fur keeps him warm at night, and his claws are particularly good for digging up acorns and peeling off tree bark. He subsists on a diet of swamp grasses, berries, birch branches, and squirrels that he catches, places between his lips, and decapitates with a quick, downward thrust of his upper jaw.