The Lava in My Bones (41 page)

Without thinking, I swallowed it. The rock lodged in the space between my Adam's apple and windpipe. Sam didn't smile or frown. No light shone in his eyes. The rock lingered for a
moment between my head and my torso, then sunk down like a comet falling to the earth. The weight of the rock pulled me into the ocean; I raised both arms to my son and the vanishing sky and cried silent words to the boy, sky, and world, which I saw were all, at long last, leaving me. “Everything cometh of me! I am the root of thy entire civilization. Mine body conceived this world and gave birth to it. I am the rock surface thou walkest on, the salt springs thou drinkest from. I am the foam in thy mouth and the spittle on thy lips. I am the solidity of thy bones, the wetness of thy kidneys, and the dog-ear aorta-flaps of thy heart. In my absence, no wind whips ember into flame, water leaves no pattern on rock; ice hardens not, and clouds are pinned like prisoners to a sky they cannot cross. I am the electricity that floweth through nuclei. I am the eye that never closeth, the finger that forever points, the wheel that spinneth relentlessly, and the axle that runneth from the North Pole to the South. Trying to escape me is trying to climb from the skin that encaseth thee. The walls of mine womb are the furnace that forged the world, are of the world and are the world. Abandon me and thee abandonest thyself, for I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the Beginning and I am the End!” Descending into the sea, I shut my mouth and accepted everything.

Light faded.

The waters closed above my head, and I was gone forever.

Rock

Sam clutches the slippery edge of a bobbing wooden plank as
waves swell like lungs inflating. Flicking fingers of water slap the plank's edge and dissolve into sunlit spray that showers his cheeks with bullet-bright drops. The pungent seaweed scent shoots up his nostrils, and fur shines slick against his body. His legs dangle in the water, the hard plank edge thrusting into the soft folds of his stomach.

Amidst bobbing chunks of splintered wallboard, sofas spinning in circles, wood pillars chugging like pistons, thousands of dancing Styrofoam balls, the wreckage is dotted with the swaying bodies of people wailing.

“Somebody save us!”

“Help me!
He-elp!
”

Their exclamations are punctuated by the creak and groan of wood and what sounds like giant billiard balls clacking together.

Sam glares into the whirlpool where his mother vanished and wonders how she could have so successfully concealed herself from him and Sue. He'd thought her incapable of functioning outside Cartwright, yet she'd lived incognito in the clothes of more than a hundred people. He imagines the terrific stress of her non-stop camouflage, the constant threat of being discovered.
Her God must have given her something. The energy that moves the world can't only be in rocks. Whatever the Earth's vital power is, his mother had possessed it.

Feeling exhausted, Sam mutters to the sea, “Mother, it's not your fault you were the way you were. You were limited; I'm limited; we all are. But I refuse to feel guilt. Sorry, but you deserve what you got. Of course you raised us, and I will never forget that.” There is sadness in his voice. He slowly paddles past a drifting chest of clothes and gets momentarily stuck in a mound of gluey foam.

Sam beholds the blue sky where his sister vanished and feels such a rush of love that he chokes on salt water. He's touched by her kindness. She offered him a strength that she'd once expected from him but which he couldn't provide. Sam didn't save Sue; Sue saved Sam. Reversal is a cornerstone of life. How wonderful it was to depend on someone. He wishes Sue were here to help him now. Amazing that he could be deeply affected by someone other than Franz. He never suspected such strength in his sister or mother. Why does he continue to look only at life's surface? From now on, he won't trust a fraction of what he sees. His sister's flight to the sky fills him with wonder. Wherever she is now, Sue has found happiness; Sam's sure of it, and is delighted for her.

Below him, sharks circle, flashing scissor-sharp teeth; manta rays' magic-carpet bodies undulate like severed wings filmed in slow motion. As Sam contemplates his sister's generosity, he feels the range of his concern for the world expanding outward. When a sobbing woman tries to clamber onto a nearby banquet table,
Sam paddles over and says, “I'll hold the table steady while you climb on.” But all around him there are gasps, screams, shrieks—he's forgotten about his appearance. Flying bars of wood strike his forehead, a camera smacks him on the mouth, and two teeth fall out. “It's him!” people shout. “He caused all this!” In a torrent of whizzing plastic balls and wood chips, he swims away. Sam is not angry at the business people; they look only at the world's exterior, and need to learn what his mother and Sue have taught him about what lies beneath.

He fingers his cut lip, paddles past seesawing wooden panels and somersaulting barrels. Soon he can no longer hear the frenzied moaning as the ship vanishes behind waves. Gurgling sounds rise from the depths below; the wind sighs. Sam tries not to panic. The edge of the plank repeatedly jabs like a blunt sabre blade beneath his ribs. He pulls himself up onto it, but the plank sinks slightly, and the strands of his fur splay outward like the hairs on a Venus flytrap. He listens to the wheezing of his lungs as he pants. Before his eyes, foam-tipped waves gather, curl, and crash forward, over and over, steadily, rhythmically, like a million sentences beginning and ending.

The sky into which his sister vanished is as clear as a pupil-less eye.

What the hell is he supposed to do now? The ship voyage had already lasted six days, and they'd travelled past the midpoint of the Atlantic. How far is the European coast from here? He could linger near the wreckage until help arrives. A helicopter will surely be sent. But if he's taken to Europe, he'll be put in a zoo. If he's returned to North America, Sonny and Cher will get
him, and he'll never see Franz again. By studying the angle of the sun to the sea, Sam determines which way is east. He scrutinizes the horizon, which looks like the line across a 1950s television screen about to explode into moving images.

Again he feels a flash of anger at his mother for wrecking everything. But he bravely intones, “On your mark! Get set! Go!” He starts paddling, the bald sun beating onto his skull. It occurs to Sam how ridiculous his situation is. Logic clearly has no place in life. He, a scientist who loved logic, has ended up a monster paddling a board in the middle of the ocean. The truest things in life, he sees, are the most ludicrous. He and Franz were ludicrous; two men—a fact Sam still finds peculiar—from the two most unromantic countries in the world, and they weren't opposite (opposites attract, don't they?) but similar; they ate rocks amidst summer snowstorms; one of them was a nerd, the other a narcissist, and their social worlds didn't overlap. Logic is a house that's burning, and nothing remains solid for long. Nature's frayed edges keep evolution happening. Sam believes now that people repeatedly collide with each other swiftly, brutally—not to produce children but to shatter their sense of self, and be thrust into a creative space beyond reason, where anything can happen. Only through the destruction of psychological borders is freedom possible. That must be, Sam concludes at last, why other people exist on Earth.

He glances into the sea. If only there was the flash of a fin or a bubble ascending to the surface, but the relentless grey water is as blank as the blue sky overhead. Sam says out loud, “What if I don't make it? What if I never get to Europe? Or, if I arrive, will
things be as I expect?” How many days has it been since Franz sent his letter from the base of the Matterhorn? He'd changed so quickly from wanting Sam to turning against him and then wanting him again. He could turn against Sam if he thought he'd never show up. Maybe he's forgotten him already. Perhaps the diamond stopped forming.

Sam kicks his legs in the water and is soon puttering up and down the roller-coaster waves. He will not stop paddling until he sees the European cliffs rise like herds of blue dinosaurs lifting their heads into the sky. His skin could turn green, his muscles dissolve to skipping ropes of tendon, and his dehydrated torso become a solid lump of salt, but his thighs will pummel like fists into the face of the grey, unrelenting sea. Somewhere on the ocean floor, he knows, runs the seam marking the meeting point of the North American and Eurasian plates.

Kicking, Sam murmurs, mutters, babbles, his voice crescendos into a high-pitched falsetto of terror. “What if Franz doesn't want me anymore? Will he be there when I arrive? What if my desire doesn't last the journey and I'm indifferent when I meet him?” No, Sam will fight the forces within himself that could destroy his desire. Each phase of his journey is not a chapter but a book. It seems years since he was trapped in that asylum, decades since he writhed in a garden, his stomach full of stones, centuries since that pterodactyl-winged airplane snatched him from Zurich's runway and dumped him onto Toronto's cruel streets, and though he ran non-stop from his country's centre to its circumference, the journey, when viewed from this rocking stick of wood on the North Atlantic, seems to have lasted since the dawn
of time. Every wave that slaps the plank is a passing second in the interminable epoch before he meets Franz again. The time-line of life, though elastic, only stretches so far before it snaps.

Why is returning so much more difficult than leaving? His body points like a rifle at his lover's homeland. But the water against his skin is too warm (Sam estimates it's thirteen degrees Celsius), an effect of global warming.

Though the ocean depths are opaque, Sam knows he's paddling over underwater mountains, buried volcanic islands, and vast landslides. The sea floor holds particles from distant deserts as well as volcanic ash and dissolved fragments of fish skeletons, whale ear-bones, and sediments from icebergs that melted. Along the sea bottom scuttle blind shrimp, eyeless crabs, and mute clams that live off white smokers. Is Mother enjoying her new neighbours?

The waves ascend and descend with a hypnotising monotony. Sam swears he won't stop kicking until he smells baked bread and sees cobblestone streets. At mid-day, the sun's rays blaze into his skull, and images of Franz fill his mind: Franz throwing a snowball, Franz wearing a bowler hat, Franz smiling on a merry-go-round horse—wait a minute! Franz was never on a merry-go-round horse! At some point the Franz in Sam's mind separated from the real Franz and spins in a self-enclosed circle. What happens if Sam arrives in Europe and the imaginary and real Franz don't match? Will the two Franzes have a fight? Which one would win? Sam worries that if Franz doesn't believe he's returning, he'll find someone else. Sam should've sent him a postcard the day he left Sonny and Cher, but he had no idea his
journey back would last an eternity.

Sam tells himself to remember his sister. She was strong and conquered insurmountable obstacles. Recalling the profundity of her pain, the arduous road she travelled, he promises that he'll never feel sorry for himself again. He tries not to think about her or he'll start weeping, and the ocean is wet enough. He marvels at how much power people can have inside themselves. As he mounts the crest of a wave, he feels he's being pulled by the hidden strength of all the people he's ever known.

In the late afternoon, hunger claws at the inside of his stomach. When a school of blue fish flow beneath the plank like spilled paint, he shoves his claws into the sea, squeezes his fingers shut, and drags up two salmon that flap in the air like severed hands. Their eyes, round as globes, can't blink; the lips throb, gills flutter like featherless wings. He stuffs their bodies between his lips, bites once, then rams their torsos into his mouth and munches. He gulps loudly as the trembling bone-crunchy mass slides down his gullet. He belches and all the horizons hear him.