The Lava in My Bones (46 page)

Every evening, Sam returns from the library famished. He has rediscovered his hunger. Veronika makes him wonderful cakes, which he thoroughly enjoys, though sometimes she cheats and buys him the frozen Sara Lee kind.

They have sex twice a week. Loving a woman has been an adjustment for Sam, and he's learning to appreciate a whole new type of beauty. Each day he wants her more. Veronika often sets her hair in a labyrinthine structure that she's discovered drives him wild with desire.

On weekends, Sam likes to take Veronika to the lava pit in the Alps. They stand holding hands near the crevice from which lava steams, bubbles, and hisses. Sam fears nothing now and will step past the markers placed by the Swiss authorities and kneel at the edge of the crack in the earth. Veronika calls, “Be careful, sweetie.”
Feeling no trepidation, he rams his arm in, right up to the elbow. Rising steam singes his fingertips, hot vapours burn his cheeks and make his eyes water, and the pungent sulphur scent fills his sinuses; he feels at one with the planet as he touches this live current of electricity connecting him to the centre of the Earth.

Sam and Veronika also like to play sex games on the weekends. “Pow, pow,” he yells, chasing her with his erect penis. He remembers Franz's story about his own penis becoming a weapon. “And now I've got the loaded gun,” he states proudly, “or a flying missile, whichever you prefer.” Veronika laughs at the ludicrousness of the game. The most ludicrous things are the truest.

“Your penis isn't a weapon,” she asserts. “No offence, but it reminds me of a toy from my childhood, a hairless puppy-dog head I called Snoopy-Doopy.” She chuckles. “Want to call your cock that?” She pats Snoopy-Doopy's stiff little head, which bobs up and down, as if nodding and answering, “Yes, please do!” Then she throttles Snoopy-Doopy until he ejaculates and, for a moment, flying sperm arcs in a white rainbow above the bedspread. Sam remembers the forest dripping with his semen in northern Ontario, his sister's honey splashed on rocks, and his mother's stream of urine flying through the air and understands that bodily fluids are the most wonderful thing in the world; they are the oil that lubricates the Earth's engine.

Not everything is rosy. One afternoon in the town of Singen, Sam and Veronika are in the Walmart parking lot loading patio
furniture into the trunk of their car. Sam is having trouble with the striped table umbrella. He throws it to the ground. “I'm upset, Veronika. I'm sorry, but I've been depressed all day.”

Veronika puts down her potted bamboo plant. “Why, honey?”

“When we were choosing briquettes for our barbecue, I just …” He sighs. “I wondered why we've ended up like this. Think of all the adventures that you and I have had over the past years, all the ecstasy, torment, moments of terror and beauty, our spectacular reunion—and we end up here, a suburban couple like the rest of the boring people on this boring continent.”

Veronika ponders. “Perhaps being boring is your destiny. You always say we shouldn't cling to our identities, and now life has given you the role of being a boring and tedious little man. Maybe you should accept that.”

“But I don't want that. It doesn't match with … everything!”

“Or does it?” Veronika turns toward the parking lot. Suddenly light flashes from a chrome fender, piercing her eye, and she has a shattering revelation. She opens her mouth and says the most insightful thing Sam ever heard or will hear. “Everybody is us, Sam. We are not boring; everyone is fascinating. Look at them all.” Her face glows as she gazes at couples pushing strollers, blinking cars turning into parking spots. “Everyone has had the same experiences. They've gone from being one person to another, had their moments of exaltation and terror, their journeys across oceans, flights through forests, rapture before mountain lakes, but they didn't have to leave the country, and it all happened when they weren't paying attention; they were asleep or looking at dry cleaning bills or wondering why the television remote
stopped working or if little Natalie should take tap or ballet. No one is dull
inside,
and it's never the end, Sam. There's no final stage! Other adventures will follow, and we'll keep changing. I'm so excited about what our unknown future together holds, just as I'm thrilled we bought these barbecue briquettes and can't wait to see how delicious our steaks will be.”

Sunlight reflects off every single hood of the parked cars placed in perfectly parallel rows all the way to the horizon. “Thank God,” Sam says with tears in his eyes, “I've got such an intelligent wife. I'd love to make love to you right now. Let's go inside and do it on the bedding display.” They both laugh out loud and will not stop laughing for a long time because they know laughter is the root of everything.

When they get home, they hurl themselves onto each other's naked bodies and recommence pawing, groping, and scratching at this barrier of skin that keeps them from reaching one another's core, which beckons so tantalizingly, that you swear you could touch it with your fingertips, but can't. Not quite.

Sam purchases a new car—a Subaru electric model. He buys grey flannel suits. Veronika hires an assistant to do her file management, leaving her free for more creative work. The lovers rekindle their friendships with Holder, Darcy, and Delial. Sam and Veronika enjoy having them over for dinner, for they're nostalgic reminders of the past; also, having gay friends is a testimony to their open-mindedness.

“Even though we're suburbanites,” Sam chirps happily, “that doesn't mean we're Nazis.”

One Saturday morning there is a knock at the door. Sam
assumes it's Darcy, who forgot his braces and knit cardigan at their house. (Although only twenty-eight, Darcy has taken to dressing like an elderly man. “Senior chic is the latest trend in the gay community,” he says. “All the guys at Wu-Wu's wear slippers and have pretend walkers.”) Yet when Sam opens the door, to his amazement, Sue is standing there in her old pigtails and jumper.

“I've been travelling a lot,” she says in a confident adult voice. “I've seen the world and decided to stop by and say hi.” Sam bursts into tears, and the siblings embrace.

When he introduces her to Sue, Veronika is overjoyed. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “I've heard all about you!”

Over croissants, Sue says, “Switzerland—it reminds me of home, almost, but not quite.” Yes, Sam thinks, she's become a victim of the looking glass.

The next day, Sue's bees arrive. They perch on the backyard tree, which shimmers like a giant lollipop. Veronika has heard the story and knows not to be afraid. She and Sue get along fabulously. They play catch in the backyard, stroll arm and arm along the Lake Zurich boardwalk, and shop for clothes on Bahnhofstrasse.

On the day Sam and Veronika get married, Sue gives them the best wedding gift of all, a pencil case with a picture of a mountain on it. On their wedding night, they unzip the shiny case to find inside, a joint-limbed man made of rocks. Sam tears him into two pieces. He devours the head and torso, and Veronika nibbles the pelvis and legs. The lovers swallow at exactly the same time. Outside, it starts to snow, and it won't stop for a very long time. Before going to bed, they open
Fairy Tales of Flesh
and re-read
their favourite story about the Mr. Potato Head people.

“If you were in this tale, which character would you be?” Veronika asks. “The man who keeps trying on penises hoping to find one whose size corresponds to his body weight, or the woman with two assholes who exchanges them for a foreskin she can wear as a sunhat?”

“Neither. I'd be the man with breasts for testicles and a penis where his chin should be. What about you?”

“I think I'd be the foreskin lady. I've always wanted a good sunhat.”

Three years later, they all gather beside a glacier at the base of the Matterhorn. Veronika claps her hands, and Sam shouts, “Go, buster, go,” as a spry toddler with twigs stuck behind his ears scampers into the arms of Aunt Sue. Overhead, a cloud of bees swarms, their stingers glinting in the sun.

Sam, Veronika, Sue, and Little Sam.

Did they live happily ever after?

It's anyone's guess.

The Earth kept spinning, and many other things happened to its inhabitants.

And so the wind blows.

Breezes circle the southern tip of our Earth, speed across frozen, sunlit plains, suicide-leap over ice cliffs, grate at the ragged edges where glacier meets sea. As the Earth spins, the centrifugal force whips wind into fast-moving, ever-widening arcs, and the streams of air spiral northward, pick up moisture, and join other gales to become one vast, buckling, rioting river that ascends, flattens, bifurcates, and whips ocean waves into walls that crash into other water walls and against cliffs, as far below, lava gurgles, spits, and crackles, and seismic plates lurch and buckle, eternally tortured and tension-taut; overhead, dizzying wind-blasts lasso mountain peaks, volcano mouths disgorge pulsating black balloons into the atmosphere, the Earth whirls like a ball too slippery to grasp and, as cold fronts clash with warm fronts and with fronts that are hotter still, CFCs gobble the ozone that replenishes itself and is devoured again, continents tremble like toys shaken in plastic packages, the moon hurtles in its orbit like an out-of-control whirligig, and as air, waves, clouds, and winds collide like cymbals crashing, clashing, clanging in this endless orchestra of the Earth, we all stand up, sweat rising to the surface of our skins, our nostril hairs quivering like radar devices detecting approaching storms, and then we feel it, the lava burning in our bones.

I would like to thank Brian Lam for all of his hard work and Susan Safyan for her insightful guidance. Thanks to James C. Johnstone for his support and hospitality and to Robert Jennings for his encouragement and unfailing sense of humour. I also thank Terrie Hamazaki for her feedback and for answering all my inane questions.

I am grateful to all those who read the manuscript in its various incarnations, including Patricia Anderson, Dayle Berke, Mary Frances Coady, Kelly Dignan, Peter Dubé, Matthew Fox, Amelia Gilliland, Claude Lalumière and, in particular, Zsuzsi Gartner.

Thanks to the participants at the Sage Hill Novel Colloquium 2005, especially Marilyn Bowering.

I also acknowledge the assistance of Julie and Rachelle Horne, John Mingolla, Jean-François Roulier, and the staff and my colleagues at Marianopolis College. Thanks to Derek Webster of
Maisonneuve
magazine and Zsolt Alapi of
Writing in the Cegeps
(Siren Song Publishing) for publishing the excerpt “Sweat.”

I am indebted to the following texts:
Theory and Problems of Introductory Geology
by Richard W. Ojakangas and
The Earth
by Martin Redfern.

I am grateful for the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Arts Council.