The Lava in My Bones (45 page)

Most importantly, Sam's eyes had closed when she existed. As Veronika, he'd be free of Sam. Franz could start anew. Was his epiphany at the Matterhorn a zigzag in his path and Veronika the ultimate goal? Should he reassemble his shredded self into a fabulously new form with jewel-decked fingers that snap, dagger-sharp eyebrows, and a torrent of flame-red hair that, when shaken, crackled like fireworks? If he wasn't completely satisfied the first time, why accept her now? The only options he knew of were old Franz or Veronika. No other choices existed. The decision was easy to make.

He ordered a dress from Cartwright, Labrador, his lover's birthplace, because he assumed it would best neutralize his desires for Sam. He asked for a used dress suffused with the scent of Canadian life. When he opened the box, he discovered a pink rayon dress with thin shoulder straps and layers of ruffled gauze. One side had been torn but repaired. The fabric smelled strangely sweet. The label read Fashions of Esther Beaverbank.
He put on the dress and, when he looked in the mirror, he saw a Veronika that was absolutely ravishing. Here was the outfit she was meant to wear.

The dress had a steel-ringed belt that, once snapped shut, couldn't be reopened. Would he accept living the rest of his life as Veronika? He nodded into the mirror and said, “Yes.” He clicked the clasp and felt the deepest satisfaction he'd ever known. At this point, Sam's ship was halfway across the Atlantic and about to explode.

So Franz lived as the new Veronika. He worked hard designing “We love you, Santa” cards by day and doing serious art at night. He'd never been so productive. But if people loved his work (and they did; his pieces sold for thousands), he didn't care. Veronika didn't need admiration. When Delial showed up asking Franz to come to Odeon to bitch about the snotty new bartender, Veronika calmly said, “No.” The old Franz wouldn't have been able to resist.

The dress exerted its power. His hair grew longer, curlier, and developed bright highlights; his skin appeared smoother, softer, and his voice got higher in pitch. His chin rounded out and hair fell from his jaw. He could stop shaving his face. He barely noticed the changes because as Veronika he didn't obsess over his body. The knobs of his knees receded and his thigh and calf muscles curved sinuously. In bed he sensed his pelvis widening. His hips swayed as he sauntered about his new apartment. He no longer copied gestures from Marlene Dietrich. Once he'd decided Veronika was here for good, everything fell into place intuitively. He'd been transformed into a natural woman and
completely inhabited his body. By the time Sam lay panting on the beach in Portugal, Franz had settled into his new life.

Franz felt better yet wasn't entirely happy. Ghosts from the past hovered at the edges of his grey life and he dreamt about Sam every night. Moonlight shone on his pillow and he'd wake sobbing. His hours were a steady movement back and forth from muted pain to numbness. His days passed unpunctuated and flowed together so seamlessly that by the time Sam arrived in Zurich, Franz felt he'd been living at Viederplatz for a thousand years. He assumed that nothing further would happen to him. This was to be the end of his tale.

When Sam knocks at the door, it's as if someone had slapped Franz across the face. Was it the delivery boy? Did Franz give him the wrong change? Or is it someone else? He remembers the boys who'd attacked him in the alley. As Veronika, he'd conquered aggressiveness in himself, but it still existed in the outside world. Veronika grabs a butcher's knife from the kitchen counter.

She looks through the keyhole to see a man she doesn't know. Veronika clutches her knife and pushes open the door.

The man does not grab at her dress or try to rob her, but simply stares. His eyes expand; his thin lips open and a tongue, like the tip of a billiard cue, emerges. At that moment Veronika realizes, my God, it is Sam. She screeches and drops the knife; its tip pierces the wooden floor and the handle wobbles back and forth. Immediately she becomes aware of her body. She feels embarrassed yet proud. She knows she is beautiful.

Sam finally forces out the words, “Franz, is that you?”

Veronika's voice is velvety smooth. “Yes, it is. And I see it is true: you have come back to me.”

Although the pitch of her voice is as high as a train-whistle, Sam recognizes the percussive t's and c's as his lover's. She
is
Franz. Sam throws himself into Veronika's arms, and she crushes his head against her breasts.

“I've waited so long for you,” gasps Veronika. “And you're here, finally here.” She begins to cry. “Why the hell did you take so long?”

“I couldn't help it,” Sam sobs into her neckline. “I had to escape a mental institute and hike a 2,000-kilometre forest, rescue my sister, kill my mother, and swim half the Atlantic. But none of that matters now. I'm here, Franz. I've arrived.” Sam sniffles. “But before we go any further, let's get you out of this dress. Why are you wearing it?”

Sam's fingers slide along the gauze; they graze the metal belt and leap as if touching a live wire. “My God! You're wearing Sue's dress?” Sue had told her brother every detail of her story.

“I was afraid to go to your country, so instead a piece of your country came to me.”

“You ordered this from Esther's? Oh my God! Do you have a chisel or wire-cutters?”

Then Sam remembers the climax of Sue's story. The one man who'd broken through her dress—Jimmy Bridock—had died. This time, things would be different. Jimmy had been greedy and wanted to possess a body without the owner's permission. He'd tried to steal Sue from herself. He didn't realize that all bodies—men's and women's—are fragile and must be handled gently so as
not to hurt the people living inside them.

For the first time in history, desire transfused by the tender glow of love would cut through the magic belt.

“Hold on!” Sam runs from the apartment and returns carrying a rock snatched from the grounds of Franz's chalet. He plucks Veronika's knife from the floor and aims its tip at the gown's belt-lock. Sam strikes the rock against the end of the knife handle—
bang, bang,
sings the stone—
bang, bang
—filling the long-silent kitchen with a sound that once roused cruel, boutonnière-wearing teenage boys gloating on a football field.

Veronika exclaims, “Stop. You're hurting me.” Sue had used the very same words.

“Sorry, cupcake. I'll be more careful.”

Eventually the dress cracks opens like an egg, and Veronika and Sam sigh at exactly the same time.

“Free at last,” says Veronika. Franz's naked body towers over Sam, and he leaps back astonished. For what had seemed an eternity, the dress had bound Franz's unresisting body, and its power was absolute. Sam scrutinizes the perfectly formed D-cup breasts, the hairless expanse of the stomach, the sides of the torso curving inward. Sam's hand flies to his face as he sees that Franz's penis—the once-indomitable, colossal sceptre with its mighty tomahawk head has, as prophesied in a story told long ago, receded into his body, to be replaced by a swath of elegantly crimped pubic hair and a perfectly formed vagina that glowers from between his legs like a sullen eye that never blinks.

Franz has long known about his own loss and gain. Over the past months, he has noticed changes in his genitalia
whenever he urinated or whacked off. By the time Sam reached the Portuguese-Spanish border, Franz's transformation into a woman was complete.

Franz shrugs and says, “You win a few, you lose a few.”

Mystified, Sam, who's learned to cherish man-to-man desire, looks helplessly up and down the body of the naked female before him. Where is the masculine cleft in Franz's chin, the steel thigh muscles that, when contracted, bulge upwards, his clock-pendulum testicles, his foreskin, one moment as loose as an elephant's snout, the next as tight as the skin on a broccoli stem—the list of Franz's desirable male body parts was endless. Sam senses that the whole universe is laughing at him. The truest things in life are the most ridiculous.

Veronika examines this man born on the outer edge of the universe who'd claimed he'd travelled half the world for her. Was this true? “Have you crossed the Earth for me, darling? Did you really do that for me?”

Sam feels he's being observed by someone else. Is it God or one of his henchmen wanting to get in on the action before the book ends?

Sam knows he's being tested. He can make the right decision and save his life and the Earth he lives on or make the wrong one and destroy everything. An unseen power he neither knows nor understands is pushing him toward Veronika, who now lies on the sofa beckoning with open arms and puckering lips. Something is pressuring him into the banal life he hoped to flee. Will he become as boring as everyone else? From now on, will he simply be another unremarkable, suburban heterosexual man?
If he rejects Veronika, would that mean getting trapped again on the surface of life? The Franz he loves is in Veronika and will always be there, even as her body ages, withers, stiffens, and dies. Sam knows there is a fire at the centre of everyone, and a fire has at last created a jewel on Earth. He remembers that story in
Fairy Tales of Flesh
about the Mr. Potato Head people who exchange body parts. The story didn't have a climax or dénouement because no real tragedy had taken place; it didn't matter what body parts people had because the
you
uniting them was always the same; you could have ten, twenty, even a hundred penises or your every pore could be a vagina smiling its toothless grin, but you were the same person underneath. The surface is but a dazzling show of interchangeable patterns—mesmerizing, hypnotising, and wonderful—that blind us to the fire inside. Yes, Sam decides at last, he will stay with Veronika. He will share his life with her.

“I love you, Veronika,” he says. “You are the most beautiful person I've even seen. You are the diamond found at the end of my quest.”

All at once the fire at the Earth's centre roars so loudly, everyone in the world hears it. Police shout “Halt!” in 6,000 different languages, traffic stops, people fall down staircases, waiters drop plates, lovers have orgasms, elderly people wake up and decide to die, government leaders resign, and babies cease fidgeting and spread open palms to the world. The Earth's core detonates, and lava shoots up through the planet's vents and longitudinal fissures, blasting the tephra stoppers from volcano mouths as, on every continent, streams of torrid molten rock hurtle into the atmosphere. Earthquakes shatter mountain ranges, mile-high
waves pummel cliffs, steaming lava engulfs valleys and riverbeds, and Arctic winds thrash at the Earth's two poles, freezing its crowns into impenetrable scabs of ice. A crack opens up in the main street of Cartwright, and the town is blown off the face of the Earth.

Sam rips off his clothes, throws himself onto Veronika, and the two claw at each other's skin, this frustrating outer layer as if they could tear it away and slide effortlessly between the ribbons of veins, could penetrate flesh and enter tissues to search for the very centre of the person they love. Where is the centre located? In the heart? Pancreas? Small intestine? They'd soon discover that the self continually flees from one body part to the next and is so hard to catch that when you've explored every organ and arrive at the very last one—perhaps the pituitary gland—the person you seek has gone to the organ you visited last week. But which one?
Which one
? That was the agonizing question that could never be answered.

The next day, Sam and Veronika move in together. A week later, they are engaged to be married.

When Sam visits the University of Zurich, the director of the geology department remembers him from the conference and offers him a job. Armed with an offer of employment and the name of a Swiss citizen soon to be his wife, he marches over to the immigration office. The officer who once rejected him is ecstatic. “Glad to see your life's turned around. I'm
giving you an
Arbeitserlaubnis
that can be renewed each year. Congratulations, and welcome to Switzerland.”

Six months later, Sam and Veronika move into a wonderful chalet in the country. Veronika furnishes it with tables and chairs from IKEA. Sam spends his days researching environmental problems. He writes articles for scientific journals and once a week gives a lecture at the university. Veronika hasn't given up her job but works out of the chalet. Sam is hoping to attend the Kyoto Conference on climate change; if not invited, he and Veronika will join the demonstrators. Veronika bought Sam a bullhorn and he's been practising shouting through it. Veronika's gift-card business becomes a roaring success. Her “Happy Easter” cards are translated into several different languages, and she's planning on developing a “Happy Summer Holiday” series.