The Lava in My Bones (40 page)

My daughter stood at the stern, her back erect, arms outstretched, and face shining as she laughed into the darkening sky. Shaking with fear and fury, I ran to her, quickly unscrewed one lid, and cried, “Be gone, Satan,” as I flung the pee onto her back. The wet coolness made her turn slightly toward me. She smiled and said, “Hi, friend.”

I unscrewed and threw a second batch and got her right in the face. She wiped off her cheeks, giggled, and looked back at the sky.

“It's him! The pee-thrower!” someone yelled.

“Yeah! I saw it too!”

I spun around. A dozen men in boxer shorts faced me. I was still clutching eight vials in my hand. Visible criminal evidence. I pulled my arms inside the sheet.

“We've gotcha, you asshole,” one man said. He stepped forward
and yanked down a corner of my sheet. “He's the pee-thrower, guys. There's his stock inside.”

The crowd lunged. They pinned down my shoulders, tore the sheet from my body. One man kicked me in the face, and my prosthetic nose flew off and bounced on the deck. “Holy shit!” he said. Fingers scrabbled at my putty-coated cheeks. Plastic and gels were wiped from my face, and as the magic fled, I cried, “Help me, God!” and clutched the vials to my chest. When the men discovered I was a woman, they hesitated only a moment. A man stuffed my panties between his teeth, another snapped off my bra and flung it into the sea.

Suddenly, above us, a loud
boom
as the bee clouds joined and began descending.

The men froze, gazing upwards, no longer noticing me. I leapt to my feet and, completely naked, turned to Sue.

But now she saw me. She knew. She stared motionless. Her arms stuck straight down at her sides, her fingers rigid as popsicle sticks. Her mouth opened a hair's breadth and a wisp of a voice emerged: “Mother.”

I drenched her with a third vial. Sue seemed to come to; terrified, she jumped down and began running toward the other end of the ship. I followed, flung a vial full into the small of her back, another onto her shoulders. A week of practice had made my aim exemplary. My feet pummelled along the floorboards that steadily darkened as the bee cloud descended. The roaring increased. Businessmen screamed and moaned, threw themselves onto the deck.

I still insist that my daughter is two grams short a kilo. She
could've darted into the crowd and lost me, or run into the ship and vanished in its interior. But in her hour of need, she went to the worst place for her—yet the best for me. She galloped to the bow to alert Sam.

I followed until I stood panting before my cornered children. I proudly lifted my two remaining vials in the air, the final Holy duo that had taken me so long to find. All the waters of Man had to be spilled before the power of God could reveal Itself. And now that power was in my hands, and my children were at my mercy. Restraint, sensitivity, diplomacy, and all these foreign stratagems had never fit me and were in the past. At last I was the colossus I was meant to be.

Sue huddled, weeping. “Please, Mother, please!”

Sam turned and recognized me. “What the hell!” he gasped. “What are you doing here?!” His eyeballs shrunk to pinpricks. His mouth was open so wide, I could see his tonsils.

I let out a shout that echoed from one side of the world to the other. “Ha! I've been everybody on this ship! I changed from one person to another, and now it's
your
turn to be changed! I converted that freak in the leather jacket, and now I'll convert you. I control it all! It was me, Sam, that found those horrid letters from Switzerland and threw them overboard, just as I now do with the last disgusting sheet.” I pulled out the letter, unfolded it before my quivering son, and mockingly read its final sentences. “‘Your eyes are on me this instant. Please. Never stop looking.' What horse manure!” I flung the sheet into a cresting wave and Franz's words dissolved beneath the ocean surface. Sam screeched and began thumping his feet and pounding his fists against his stomach.

“Do you think you can defy me, who gave you love and life? Thou hast wandered far from thy home in Cartwright, and thy bodies have become infected with poisons. Yet I shall heal thy flesh, re-sanctify thy souls, and take thee back to the place where thou belongest. From now on, thou shalt be on the side of God, yea God, the true force that moveth the world. He is in thee, as I am in thee, for He is me, and I am Him, and so we are, forever more! Satan,” I bellowed, “be gone!”

Yet it was here that I made a fatal mistake. Just as Sue, out of shame, had once pulled a dress up and over her streaming body, just as my husband leapt into an ocean yearning to grasp a vision he hoped would save him, just as Sam boarded a plane in Zurich before realizing that Franz truly loved him, just as Franz raised his arms beside a lake and called, “You inspire me,
Liebhaber,”
though Sam was too far away to hear him, just as all these things shouldn't have happened but did, so did I, caught up in the moment and yearning for a liberation from the relentless calculations of measurements and numbered vials, so did I risk all on one moment and throw care to the wind—I greedily tossed not one vial, then the other, but my two vials
at exactly the same time,
one from my right hand and the other from my left. The twin streams joined to form a golden river that hung in the air like a wraith between me and my children for one perilous second.

Yet just when my elbows leapt forward from the sides of my body, so did a swordfish with silver scales bright as flashing eyes and a bill pointing not east or west but north, shoot up from the watery depths and travel in a perfect arc between me and my offspring. At the highest point of its trajectory, it shielded Sue
and Sam long enough for the rushing stream of urine to splash across its body, saturate its skin, seep into its gills, and spurt off its bill, before completing its half-circle and re-entering the sea. The gash made in the water closed like a healed wound.

Immediately all around us, the ocean burst forth with the Glory of God. Leaping salmon sang the Hallelujah chorus. Schools of dolphins passed wearing choir gowns. A whale rose spurting the water of Lourdes, as on its forehead a preaching mackerel clung. Starfish changed into crosses. Shark fins were adorned with scripture verses, “For God so loved the world” and “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” The sea was of God, but this boat and my children were still of Man.

“No!” I screamed. “
Nooooooo!
”

The empty vials fell, rolled and knocked together on the floorboard of the atheist ship. Sue's laughter was so high-pitched and cruel, I felt wires were being driven into my eardrums. She leapt down onto the deck and clapped her hands together. Darkness fell as the black swath of scrabbling legs and multi-sectioned torsos closed over the ship like a massive hand. If I could not save my children through the power of God, then my body would suffice. I grabbed Sue by the hair and pulled her toward the cabin entrance that gaped like the maw of a huge mouth.

“Let me go!” she screeched.

How small and frail she seemed then, with her sparrow bones and spaghetti-noodle muscles. She thinks she's so fantastic, but she's a stick-girl, not a real person at all. As I dragged her, honey splattered across my face, neck, lips; I tasted the horrid sweetness on my tongue. I pushed her down the staircase, wrapped both
arms round her chest, and hauled her, while she pleaded to be let go. Her legs thrashed on the carpet. She tried to hook her feet around the guardrail. In vain she struck her head against my chest. Her honey flowed in waves over both of us, melding our bodies together. I was horrified yet excited. “You want to stick to everything,” I gasped—I shoved her into my room—“but that everything includes
me
.” I locked the door behind us. “We're going to wait until the bees pass and then, holding hands, we'll pray for the Holy Spirit to descend and fill us. Then we and your brother shall return to Cartwright.”

Honey flowed from her bent knees and splattered loudly on the floor.

“I want to be … like a friend to you from now on,” I said. The floor lurched and we heard the deafening roaring of power drills all around us; another jolt and a furious whining. The floor, walls, ceiling began to shake. A light bulb popped from the ceiling and hung swinging on its wire. Amidst the deafening roar was a ghastly creaking sound.

Sue's eyes were lit as with a thousand torches. She cried, “Yes, Drooper, Snagglepuss, Einstein, come, come,
come!
”

“Who's Drooper?” I yelled, shaking her. “What's happening?” I abruptly slapped her across the face as hard as I could. She collapsed onto the floor, a red crescent-moon glowing on her cheek.

She moaned, “Come, come!”

Before I could stop myself, I grabbed her head, struck it once, twice against the wall. “Make this stop,” I shouted. “Whatever's happening, make it stop!”

Weeping, she murmured, “Drooper …”

On the wall, beside her cut cheek, appeared a rotating spiral that bulged into a spinning anthill, another whirling sawdust circle grew beside it, then one in the ceiling and another on the wall; two, four, five, seven, ten above my head, rows on every wall. We were trapped in a horrid room of spinning eyes shedding sawdust tears.

What happened next was so sudden, unexpected, and of such magnitude, I would not have believed it possible and had neither the time nor ability to assess its significance. The pulverizing realization that what one most wishes for in life has been irretrievably lost, mixed with the horror of death and transformed the sad body I lived in into a writhing avatar of blind terror and panic; the ship, now hole-ridden as cheesecloth, exploded into a thousand fragments.

I was plunged down into the frigid sea; my body thrashed and flailed in the icy water; blank greyness pushed into my eye sockets and down my throat. My arms and leg muscles cramped. My lungs shrieked for oxygen. Flapping my hands like featherless wings, I slowly rose until eventually my head burst up through the sea's surface. I coughed as I inhaled air and my lungs ballooned. Above, in the insanely blue sky, the sun bounced up and down like a yo-yo. A flap of drenched hair hung over one of my eyes.

Debris danced on the ocean waves. Dismembered sofas bobbed like gigantic buoys and enormous wood beams rocked back and forth. Plastic lawn chairs spun in whirlpools, crepe-paper streamers flowed amidst the debris like strings of multi-coloured blood. Shrieking businesspeople clung to seesawing boards, floating
wood rails, and severed tabletops. Some men wore life jackets upside-down or inside-out; they paddled around shouting and angrily pushing people off boards.

Small waves smacked my face like hands; I tasted blood on my tongue, and salt burned in my eyes and on my cheeks. “Sam!” I cried. “Sue!” The horrific buzzing still filled the air.

A man shouted, “Give me your life-jacket, asshole.”

Off to the side, a swarm of flickering bees hovered in a perfect oval above the water. A growth swelled on its top; the whole vibrating form looked like a giant, wavering hat. A section of the upper growth separated itself and stuck out like a tree branch. It was an arm. A person sat upon it and had turned toward me.

It was Sue, her long honey-hair dripping down her back, her wide open lips melting as they formed first an O, then a crescent-moon smile. Her arm moved, waving lugubriously like seaweed under water and she let out a laugh, but even it, normally bright-pitched and metallic, faded the moment it sounded. The bee canopy rose and shot up into the sky, carrying my daughter farther from the Earth than she'd ever been. I watched the oval shrink, become half its size, then a third, a quarter, an eighth. Before it disappeared completely, a giant, gold-threaded spinning wheel flashed for a split second, revolving in the endless blue like a Ferris wheel. The mother in the sky. The mother in the sky existeth!

A wave swelled, and I was submerged. Wood specks and salt water flowed up my nostrils. I re-emerged into the sunlight, coughing and weeping. I cried out, “Sam!” He was all I had left. “Sam, where are you?!”

I paddled through a mass of cellophane-wrapped dry cleaner's clothes flapping on the water. My thighs and shoulder muscles were stiffening; my jaw had taken on a will of its own, and my teeth clattered together like dice in a jar. “Sam!” I screamed. I passed two men grappling on a floating door and realized it'd been my door. Sam clung to a piece of wood and sobbed. His sheet had fallen off, and his wolfish body was completely exposed. Wet fur clung to his skin.

Swimming towards him, I shouted, “Sam!” I took a breath. “Sue's gone.” I was still weeping. “She's gone … for good. And now it's just us together. I so want to be with … my intelligent son. Oh, Sam, let's find a way back to Labrador. Let's try to make things work this time.”

For the first time in years, Sam looked straight at me. His eyes were a network of red veins tipped with soot-black pupils. Frizzed hair framed his face and sprouted from the creases in his cheeks. He was not the beautiful boy I'd known.

Still, I could get used to it.

I spun my arms like propeller blades, and my body rose out of the water and up to him. Sam opened his mouth wide and his green tongue swept over jagged teeth. He closed his lips. Was he going to kiss me? For a second I wished he would. Instead he said, “For fuck sakes, Mother. Do you always have to bloody well wreck everything?” He lifted a closed fist above my face, opened his hand, and let drop a stone into my open mouth.