The Lava in My Bones (44 page)

The next day, on Bahnhofstrasse, Sam glimpses the man who once took him shopping for clothes. Sam can't recollect his name but shouts, “Franz's friend!” He lunges and clutches the man's shirt sleeve. “Remember me? We went shopping when I was with Franz Niederberger.”

The man's eyes widen. “Oh, yeah.” Sam recalls that he's called Delial. “That's right. You're the one who changed Frankie.”

“Changed him? What do you mean?”

Delial bites his lip, plucks a petal from the flower in his lapel, drops it to the sidewalk, and crushes it beneath his feet. “Is Franz all right? That's a matter of opinion.”

“But where he is? Is he in Zurich?”

“Yes, he's here.”

“He is! Thank God! Where?”

“I can't tell you.” His lips close firmly then open to say, “I can't tell you anything. I'm forbidden to.”

Sam clenches a fist. “Listen! I've come all the way from Canada. I'm not interested in playing games. You wouldn't believe what I suffered through to get here.” He'd willingly tell Delial about his adventures but knows he won't be believed. Little does Sam know that Franz's story strains credibility more than his own.

“Let's talk about it in Odeon tonight then. At ten o'clock. At a private table, where no one can hear us.” Delial twists his lips and steps into the flowing stream of pedestrians.

As promised, Delial arrives at the café. His fuschia top is covered with sequins that clatter together when he folds his arms.

After a double martini he says, “Sam, I thought that I have no right to tell you the story of Franz. But I will, because I hope you can change things for him. We all miss our old Frankie so much.” Delial lowers his head; a tear streams down his cheek. Sam lets him have his moment. Delial wipes his face with a napkin, clears his throat, and says, “The sun shines after even the darkest storm. And now I'll tell the tale of Franz Niederberger. It goes like this: After you left, Franz started behaving oddly. He was often frightened, paranoid and, for a while, disappeared from view.”

“I know all about that. He described it to me in a letter he sent.”

“Yes, he did send you a letter. We know about that. He invited you back, but you took such a long time, such a long, long time to return. You're here now, but it's too little, too late. He stopped believing you would ever come, Sam. Time passed and you sent no news. Why couldn't you have sent a letter? A postcard? A dove with a olive branch in its mouth? He thought you'd forgotten him, or that you'd never forgive his treatment of you, you snarky bitch. Why did you abandon him like that?”

“I didn't!” Sam says. “There was no way I could contact him. I was locked in an insane asylum, then lost in a forest, and then stuck on a boat crossing the ocean, which exploded because of my stupid, fucking mother. I did worry but assumed that as long as he was in my mind, I was in his. But what's happened to Franz? Tell me!”

“Some say a tragedy has happened. Some say it's wonderful. To me it's such a massive change—and all change, except how hemlines change when the fall line is introduced, terrifies me. First he burned down his chalet to destroy all evidence of his past life. Presently he lives in a tiny apartment just off Viederplatz. He's practically a hermit; he rarely goes out but has food delivered. As you may know, after he disappeared from view, his early artwork, the spinning wheels, etcetera, have been discovered and
Tagesspiegel
claims he's a genius. But he refuses all exposure, no interviews, photo gigs, or television appearances. But worst of all—” Delial chokes, can't speak.

“Most of all what?
What
?”

“I can't describe what's happened.” Delial grabs his handbag from the counter and storms toward the exit. “And it's all your fault!” he shouts, racing out. Sam scribbles Viederplatz on the back of a matchbox.

The next morning, he stands in the centre of the square. Franz is in one of these four buildings. Sam imagines Franz sleeping behind one of the walls, his butt rising in the air while an erection dents the mattress. He looks at every list of entry buttons beside every door. None has Franz's name.

At seven a.m., two Asian men wearing toques cross the square;
at seven-fifteen, an old lady drags an empty grocery cart along the cobblestones, then returns at nine-thirty, her buggy full of apples. At one, two, and three minutes after ten o'clock, three men in business suits march past, their lower legs flicking like jack-knife blades. At eleven o'clock, a stray dog runs over and pees against the square's lone tree, and Sam remembers the dog he saw from the asylum window. Two policemen stroll through at eleven-thirty; at noon, a woman rushes out, her hair tied in scraps of newspaper. Sam doesn't leave the bench to have a snack or use a toilet fearing he'll miss something. In the late afternoon, he walks over to a man sweeping leaves to ask, “Do you know in which of these
Gëbaude
Franz Niederberger lives?”

“Sorry, I don't.”

He asks tenants exiting or entering buildings. Always the same answer. He wonders if Delial lied to him about the address.

The next morning, he posts himself on the same bench and studies people's faces more closely. Perhaps Franz made an appearance yesterday but was unrecognizable. He scrutinizes a man's cleft chin, the nostril of a teenager, the cheek of an old man who scuffles by in broken shoes.

The third day, Sam despairs. Franz is nowhere. At dusk he watches a young boy carrying groceries to the apartment tower. The boy puts a key in the lock; the door opens, and he enters. He reappears a minute later without the bag. He tosses a coin in the air. A delivery boy. Franz's delivery boy? Sam charges across the square. “You,” he cries. “Were you just at the Niederberger residence?”

The boy cracks gum between his teeth. “What's it to you?”

“I need to go there. I need to get inside. Please tell me the address. Give me your key.”

The boy crosses his arms on his chest, sensing that, for once, he has some power. Sam has to give him the 200 francs in his pocket, and agree to deliver groceries for the kid all next week. He must wait an agonizing six days before the boy gives him the passkey. The Niederberger delivery is only once a week. Finally Sam has the key in his pocket. The apartment number is 1000. He carries a bag full of eggs, muesli, and orange juice. Franz must be on a health kick.

“You're not supposed to knock at the door,” the boy says. “Just put the bag down and leave.”

Sam struts confidently across Viederplatz. The key fits the lock perfectly. After stepping inside Sam makes an effort to control himself. He climbs the stone steps. Each
clop-clop
of his shoes is like the
tick-tock
of a clock that's been counting the minutes since his birth, has been ticking throughout this book, and will tick until the world's end. He climbs to the second landing, then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth.

Sam trembles before the door of apartment 1000. It has one eye-hole. he becomes self-conscious. He combs his hair with his fingertips, tucks in his shirt, cups his hands, and smells his breath—so silly, he who was once a beast in the woods. In his mind he repeats the sentence he'd practised over and over while floating on the wooden plank, “Franz, at long last we meet again. I have crossed the Earth for you.”

He clears his throat. He knocks once, twice.

From inside, silence, then a cough and the creak of a chair.
Percussive footsteps approach the door. The spy-hole snaps open and an eye—an emerald-green eye, yes, Franz's eye!—fills the hole. Sam hears a gasp. The rattling of chains, the door swings open violently, bangs once against the wall.

Franz Niederberger is standing facing Sam Masonty.

But Sam cannot give his speech because Franz is not what he once was. He is what he has become. He has become Veronika.

The story goes like this: one year ago at the foot of the Matterhorn, Franz sent Sam a letter. He returned to Zurich and waited. The sun crossed the sky a hundred times. Each morning Franz put on a new shirt, gelled his hair, sprinkled his neck with lavender, gargled with a lemon-lime spritzer, and sprawled across the divan, his arms spread, an inviting smile on his lips, and his erect penis pointing like a wand toward the closed door. The door never opened. Weeks passed. Months passed. Franz started wearing shirts that weren't so new or were un-ironed or stained with ketchup. He clutched the VCR remote and watched snippets of soap operas and infomercials all day. The door remained shut.

Huddled on the floor, he glared morosely into the carpet. Little did he know that by this point, Sam had received his letter, escaped from the asylum, and was futilely trying to board planes in Ontario airports. Franz assumed Sam had already arrived in Zurich but was having second thoughts, or didn't know if he wanted to again involve himself with such a pompous prick. Crippled with indecision, perhaps, Sam was hiding somewhere in the city. One day Franz charged from his chalet, slamming the door so hard the living room window cracked. He hunted every street, searched bars, laundromats, telephone booths, and the city
council chambers. He spent a whole month searching for Sam in the Earth Sciences department of the University of Zurich before their security guards threw him out.

On the summit of Mount Käferburg, Franz spread his arms above the city of his birth, and bellowed, “I'm here, Sam. Take me!” He repeatedly pounced on bespectacled pedestrians he thought were Sam. Franz took to getting drunk in village bars. He blubbered non-stop to anyone who would listen. “I've done the math; he should've arrived six months ago.” He was ashamed of the letter he'd sent, sure it had disgusted Sam. He concluded the Matterhorn experience was simply his ego wrapping round itself.

In the chalet, everything reminded him of Sam: the jar of Nutella Sam had poked his finger into, the Lake Louise towel he deliberately forgot, the shirt he borrowed from Franz for the gala. The day Sam crossed the border into Québec, Franz, in a tormented fit, poured gasoline over the floorboards of his chalet and, with matches from Sam's hotel, burned it down. He moved to the city where he rented a flat on this quiet square. He sold his remaining artwork for pennies. He resolved to support himself by creating placemats and Christmas cards for the rest of his life.

Franz never left his apartment. He was sometimes seen at a window shaking a broom or staring mournfully at the moon. He hoped solitude would purge Sam from his brain, but it intensified his ex-lover's presence. He listened to mind-control tapes, performed self-hypnosis, even purchased a device that shot electrical currents through his penis whenever he got a hard-on when thinking of Sam.

One night he drank fifteen bottles of Swiss beer and three bottles of Canadian whiskey. In a blind furor, he stumbled out onto the street. Hours later he woke up in the alleyway where the two boys had tried to rape him when he was Veronika. This time he was completely alone; Sam's eyes no longer watched from the sky. As he lay face-first in a puddle of his own vomit, he recognized that the thing he'd feared most had happened. He had disintegrated. His personality had dissolved. All those forces he'd opened himself up to when he risked going to that geology conference, then approaching a Canadian, taking him to have sex in a forest, and afterwards eating rocks day after day, all those gigantic forces had come hurtling into his life with hurricane strength and finally obliterated everything. Franz hadn't been wrong to fear nature. He should've respected his own phobias and lived protected inside his small, trivial life. He once dreaded that the Matterhorn would pulverize him, but in the end it was Sam who accomplished that.

Franz rolled over and peered at the full moon bathing the grey stone street in a soft white light. He scraped his dinner off his eyebrows and continued to lay there for hours. Then he heard a voice, a woman's voice. “Franz, you must put everything back together. You have broken into fragments, but you must assemble them differently this time, in a better way, into a superior form.” He knew the voice was coming from himself. It was the voice of Veronika, the woman born beneath the warm rays of Sam's gaze so long ago. He seldom acknowledged her. But he remembered her fondly now. As Veronika, he was never pompous or self-obsessed. She'd listened when he was criticized.
How courageously she'd acted when those two boys assaulted her. She'd strutted about Zurich self-contained in her nifty outfits, needing nothing from anyone. She didn't seem capable of viciousness. Veronika was strong and indifferent yet open-minded—everything Franz wasn't. Veronika never needed her ego stroked. She was non-judgmental and, as an artist, much freer than Franz. Light exploded on her canvases to create the most beautiful paintings Franz had ever seen. Maybe she wasn't an accident. Franz recognized that Veronika was more significant than his own superb body. If he'd gone to the Matterhorn as Veronika, the outcome would have been very different.