The Lava in My Bones (42 page)

Later shark fins break the water's surface and circle Sam. Their lead-black eyes glimmer; their teeth, rows of jagged pyramids, gleam in lipless mouths. He leaps up and lands—
baff!
—on a slippery shark back and claws his fingers into its spongy surface. The fish buckles and thrashes but he holds tight as if to a rodeo horse, working one claw through the outer skin. Finally he shoves his whole hand into the hot mucus-like flesh. With one thrust, he rams his arm in right up to the shoulder; his fingers, trapped in a sticky pudding, graze the beating heart. He clutches and yanks it up through the opening and stuffs the bloody, dripping mess
between his lips. The other shark flees.

The wooden plank floats in a lily pad of shark blood, drifting sticks of cartilage, and masses of porridge-like flesh. The shark gristle gets stuck between Sam's teeth; the cartilage is wiry and must be bent into curlicues before swallowing; the outer skin has a sticky membrane that's tricky to peel off. The shark's organs, especially the pancreas and gall bladder, taste spicier than the outer extremities. The fins take a lot of chewing, and the eyes explode like grapes between Sam's teeth.

All night Sam lies flat on his back, listens to his breathing, the creaking of wood, and the endless start and finish of sentences that will never be spoken. Above, the stars are spread across the sky like a million unblinking eyes. The moon is a half-crescent. Sam can make out the beige dot of Venus, the ghost-planet.

He's come to love his own planet deeply. He loves its colours, its multitude of landforms, the way mountains are hidden under the ocean but visible and garishly ice-capped on land. He loves the Earth's sensuality, its dripping stalactites, river-rumbling gorges, hot and cold regions, wet and dry spots. There are many people like Sue on Earth. He will not just sit back passively and watch the world turn into a monochrome cinder devoid of the opposites that keep energy circulating. If he reaches Europe, he'll fight to preserve the ice and fire that maintain life. He'll find that source that fuels the world and discover a way to reinforce it. Then the Sues on Earth will be saved.

The next morning, the sun rises shyly above the eastern horizon. The sky is the grey-green colour of a gall bladder. He sits up, and the plank descends and then bounces up as if on springs. He
scratches his salt-crusty armpits, rotates onto his stomach, shoves his legs into the mouth of the sea, and begins egg-beatering.

Occasionally flying fish fly over him. Pods of dolphins pass, their bodies arching like horses' necks. A seagull swoops and scoops a fish from the water. Sam gasps—birds mean land. Or did this one follow the ship and is now lost? He stares hard into the blank horizon, tries to will into existence a blue cliffside curving like an elbow. Waves lift and drop, his plank lifts and drops, his body lifts and drops. The sky is an azure expanse stretching from one horizon line to the other. He sprawls face-down on his plank, pummelling his callused feet into the dark skin of the sea. But he remembers the bird, its sudden drop and quick ascent.

Later that day, he sees a second seagull. “Tell Franz I'm coming,” Sam shouts. The sun warms his cheeks and the wind ruffles his hair; he hears his sister encouraging him, “Kick, brother, kick …” He remembers the wonderful movement of body parts in
Fairy Tales of Flesh,
and how penises could be interchanged with the tips of toes, how Velcro-backed nipples could be stuck onto kneecaps. Now he knows that tale is true, as nothing is stable in this world.

More fish swim in the water beneath him now. Eels flap like trailing bits of streamers amongst the rows of plankton reaching up like fingers. Sudden splashing as out of nowhere, sturgeons leap in parallel arches. Schools of silver fish race through the striped shadows, their scales winking, as overhead, pelicans fly with fish dancing in their beaks, the beat of their wings like laundry flapping on a line. He paddles over glimmering mazes of boulders, through swamps of seaweed. In the late afternoon, a
whale surfaces beside him, and a rainbow-coloured geyser spurts from the top of its head. Sam quenches his thirst by grabbing and sucking blood from a tuna.

The next night, he endures a storm at sea. He desperately grasps the plank, terrified it will slip out from beneath him. Waves spin him like a poker wheel, fling him skyward like a Frisbee. Whirlpools rage in his ears and eyeballs; enswathed in flying streams of brine, breaking whitecaps, somersaulting salmon, boomeranging driftwood shards, and air bubbles that pop like fire crackers, he feels he's never been so close to the core of nature and senses that chaos is the root of everything. Chaos is the transition point as forms change into each other. Where there's chaos, there's movement and energy, and what has energy is most alive. Chaos is creating Franz's diamond. Sam kicks his feet, and a kinetic jolt shoots from his soles to his cranium. If he survives, he won't return to his civilized, over-planned life. How he loves the disorganized present in which he's a free radical ricocheting with an energy all his own. Waves breaking sound like whips cracking the air, and Sam is ecstatic. He longs for mayhem, confusion, extremity of all forms, a destruction of limits, and the explosive energy released when systems break down. For a moment, he wants to become the sea.

In the morning, the ocean is as still as a pane of glass. The surface of his board is coated with seaweed slime and barnacles. Sam kicks, and his body crawls slug-like across the glimmering expanse. On his fifth day alone at sea, Sam notices his body is changing. His matted coat of fur sheds to reveal his old pink skin; his claws have started to recede into fingers, his snout
shrivels into the blunt bump of his nose. The rippling muscles of his shoulders, thighs, chest, and biceps dissolve to taut violin strings, and his ribcage and skull shrink.

At first he thinks this is due to non-stop physical activity, lack of rest, and an unbalanced diet. He is losing his hunger and some days eats very little.
If you love something, you put it in your mouth.
If he feeds on anything, he feeds on himself. Yet as he moves farther away from his time in the woods and closer to Franz, his sparrow-like body is returning. He remembers Franz's buff fashion-obsessed friends who took steroids and spent hours in gyms. He scrutinizes the gentle curve on his sparse thighs, his button-like kneecaps, the sensitive gully of his stomach, his delicate fingers. He puts a hand on the skin on the inside of his thigh and it seems the softest thing he's ever touched. So this is what it means be to be human. This is what everyone has been afraid of all along.

Only Sam's penis doesn't change but retains the serpentine form it developed in the forest. When it's erect, Sam uses it as a rudder so he can travel straight east and not on a diagonal. He drapes the flaccid penis across his shoulders or over his tender nipples to prevent sunburn.

If you don't truly live in your body, he knows now, you're not truly on the Earth and can't feel the fire at its centre. The people who believe that we're souls without bodies are the ones who damage the world. Has Franz learned to possess the skin he lives in or is he still observing himself from the outside?

Days pass and no land appears. Any seagulls Sam meets are as lost as he is. The horizons are purple with the pollutants that now
roam across the globe. In his third week at sea, he loses the power to count days and panics. He sees his famished, shrinking body, and in his head a thousand bells chime. The sun ascending is like a rotating clock-hand. His legs thrash at the mercilessly flat sea face, and his arms flail like feather-shorn wings. The moon chases the sun across the sky, and then the sun chases the moon; by studying their angles, he estimates he's at forty degrees north, the same latitude as Portugal.

Staring east, he prays for a bulge, a hillside, a slight dribble of land, but there is only that agonizingly straight line with the sun peeking over it. Knowing he's closer to Europe than North America torments him—he can almost smell Franz's spicy cologne, is sure he hears Zurich's tram-cars clattering; squinting, he can see the Matterhorn peak. Whatever Franz has become is within reach: the
splish-splash
of waves sounds like Franz's laughter; the moaning wind is Franz's sigh after he ejaculates; the darkening horizon is the shadow he makes when he steps in front of the bedroom window.

One morning Sam wakes, his head dangling over the plank like that of a doll with a broken neck. The sea grazes the tip of his nose, a sliver of air separates him from the depths. In the clear water, a pencil-thin fish darts once, twice, as if jerked along a wire. It is then that he lifts his head and sees the Portuguese coast. Mountains of umber rock undulate between ragged peaks above a beach across which groves of shaggy palm trees shake their heads in the wind.

A wave swells, lifts him skyward, and it seems everything that ever happened in his life has been for this moment. The sky is
an azure dome and the burning sun blazes in its eastern corner. The seawater somersaults around itself, its farthest reaches bathing edges of prone continents. Far below, the ocean floor is unfissured and deeper still, the Earth's core is safely encased in its protective stone ring. Switzerland rests snug inside its borders, its mountains as hard as steel thrones, and Canada sprawls across its paralyzing mantle of ice. For the first time in Sam's life, the world's principal substances, those main building-blocks of life—Rock, Ice, Air, and Water—are locked in a perfectly balanced tension. Then he hears that distant roar, the fire burning at the Earth's centre.

Nearing the shore, he sings out Franz's name at the top of his lungs when immediately he is caught in a fast-flowing coastal rivulet; waves foam, lash and whip, and his board seesaws wildly like a bucking stallion. Sam clamps his hands around the seaweed-slippery edges and presses his cheek against the wood when, to his horror, the plank slides forward and leaps skyward as if shot from a cannon. He is pulled down into a raging torrent; bubble-flecked water pummels his eye sockets, roars in his ears, and arms of water ram their fists into his mouth, down his throat, and into his lungs. The undertow catches his ankles, and as he hurtles head-first toward boulders looming on the sea floor, he is gripped by a fear of death, all the more ridiculous because he's just about to see Franz and fulfill his most profound desire, a desire that is itself ridiculous because Franz is ridiculous, and their relationship is ridiculous. All at once the ridiculousness of everything—his impending death, Franz, ships exploding, girls sweating honey, supernatural urine, the Dairy Queen, men
loving mermaids, summertime snowstorms, skies full of bees, Pentecostals at sea bottoms, giant spinning wheels, steel dresses, earthquakes on the far side of the world, and this Earth spinning so blindly on an axis without oil—assaults him, and the wonderful illogicalness of Life stares him in the face like God. The Earth was formed by driving forces, fire, wind, granite melting—yes, for one golden moment
rocks and fire were exactly the same thing
; Sam realizes his obsession with Franz is as strong as these thrashing currents and central to life's beautiful implausibility. Desire fuels the world, dissolves the edges of our selves so that we're freed into formlessness and releases a potent energy that makes plants grow, rain fall, planets go off-course, stars explode, the sun harden, lava drip, and volcanoes open their mouths to the sky.

As his arms and legs flail in the fast-moving currents, he is confident that his body will save him, for it is matter, part of a universe that endures. One of his feet strikes a boulder; his head is above water, he wheezes, coughs, and vomits. The waves have stopped buckling. He sees a beach where people are running back and forth. Sam begins to cry. Kerchiefed men race into the water yelling words that are lost in the wind. The men approach, shouting,
“Vindo! Vindo!”
Their hands reach under Sam's armpits and lift his body, which now seems as light as driftwood. He shivers uncontrollably and his teeth clatter like stones in a cup. The men lay him carefully on the wind-bitten earth. He rotates onto one side and instinctively curls into fetal position.

People holding nets mutter. “
É surpreendente!
” They are troubled by his protruding ribs, yet amazed by the length of his penis whose end trembles on the sand like a sniffling elephant snout.
Someone throws a blanket over him.

Before his eyes, sand spins in miniature whirlpools. He smells damp earth, oil, barbecued chicken. A seagull cries overhead. The lost bird?

The day Sam leaves the Portuguese hospital, all the nurses, doctors, and nuns give him gifts for his voyage—sweet bread,
caldeirada, chourico
sausage, clean clothes, and some money. The employees had taken a liking to him and treated this mysterious man without a passport. Touched by their kindness, Sam wipes a tear from his cheek. How different they are from Sonny and Cher. He takes one last look at the crowd-thronged building. Dressed in the freshly pressed clothes of an orderly, he steps forward onto the cobbled streets of Europe.