The Lava in My Bones (5 page)

He'd never seen himself so clearly.

Sam said, “Franz, my country is—” and as spiked disks clattered furiously at the back of his head, he told Franz everything: How the fierce, ravenous, northern winds roar down across seven billion forests full of 1,000 billion trees where they tear off pine branches, fracture birches, uproot junipers and wild crocuses,
drag up rocks from the earth, and dash grey, gritty water against cliffs; the air is full of the piercing wail of starved coyotes and grizzly bears; snow falls in avalanches from the sky and becomes an army of ice-pebbles beating your cheeks as, gazing at empty horizons, you call out for a warm breeze that never comes—for your heart can pound all it wants, but your blood will never be enough to warm the extremities of your body, and your thigh muscles can strain all they can, but will never hold your torso straight against the wind, and you can barricade your doors and windows behind mountains of wool blankets, but the gales will smash every window of every building you've ever been in, hurl your wool coverings to the farthest corners of the Earth, and drive its steely, icy claws into every pore in your skin at once.

In the country he lives in, it is always minus 7,000 degrees Celsius, the wind has never stopped blowing, and winter is 1,000 months long.

Seeing Franz before him, Sam hurled himself onto the inexpressible warmth of his body and, as his mouth wandered wildly over the rock edge of Franz's chin, the hard, level expanse of his chest, the solid protuberance of his groin, an Arctic wind beat at his back and neck, drove snowflakes through his hair, striking faster, colder as Franz's flesh burned like fire beneath him.

That day, for the first time in history, there was a snowstorm in Switzerland in mid-summer. Shopkeepers goggled in disbelief as white flakes appeared in the formerly blue sky; the bankers stopped walking and checked to make sure the date dials on their watches were correct. Soon, the streets were clogged, tram cars couldn't run; the café owners took their tables inside and
changed the day's special from pasta salad to fondue.

When Franz and Sam finished making love, they looked out at a world transformed into an endless series of ghost-like mounds of pure white snow.

When Sam woke the next morning, he lurched upright in bed. Why had a man's body brought him pleasure? Was he himself a man? Two men together was pointless—they can't produce babies. What's happened to logic? Does science have anything to do with this? With a flash of panic, Sam thought: the world is still dying and I'm doing nothing about it.

That week Sam ate rocks every day; he couldn't resist their beckoning curvaceousness, their ribald density and earthy flavour. They swelled his libido, and Franz ate rocks with him. He became accustomed to Franz's maleness, the deep voice vibrating the chest cavity, the hardness of his eyebrow-ridge, wiry hair curling in unexpected places, and the raw apple scent of his groin.

Sam steps away from the barred window and sits on the cot in his bare-walled room.

I'm imprisoned now,
he thinks,
in Ontario.

Light gleams on the floor tiles, and the air smells of antiseptic. He hears a staticky radio from the room next door. Someone coughs outside his door. The door does not open.

Sam puts his face in his hands. He knows that organisms are never completely at one with their environment. The world is 4.6 billion years old, and the subterranean plates of its continents have shifted and readjusted themselves many times. The Earth is so altered from what it once was and has become so multifarious that it's impossible to find an organism aligned with every element in its habitat. Yet that's the way Sam still remembers his first week in Zurich. He is sure Franz remembers too.

Although Switzerland has closed its borders to him, the caféawnings are folded up, and the bankers' briefcases locked tighter than ever, Sam is sure there are moments when Franz sees his friend's face in a flash of light reflected in a shop window or in the blurred flutter of wings as pigeons fly from the fountain beside the statue of Alfred Escher, and at times, in darkest night, when Zurich is engulfed in its tomb-like silence, Franz can hear the faint, barely perceptible sound of Sam weeping on the far side of the world.

If Sam could forget how they wandered arm-in-arm down the city streets as snow banks rose on all sides, growing higher and higher, glittering beneath a crystal sun in a subzero cold he could no longer feel. Sam forgot calendars existed. He was deaf to the sound of the Swiss time-pieces ticking in the windows of every shop, on the wall of every restaurant, on the wrists of people who glanced at the two men in the streets. The silent snow, the rise and fall of its knolls and dales, was everything to him, the laughing children throwing snowballs across the street, the water dripping down the steamy insides of café windows, the icicles hanging like metallic spears that everyone feared would
drop. And that day Sam made a magnificent, life-sized snowman of Franz right there in the middle of the financial district, and it lasted two days before a plough came.

Sam could press handfuls of snow against his cheeks and feel no pain, and when he touched the nylon surface of Franz's winter coat, though it seemed as thick as the internal layers of the Earth, he could feel Franz's heart beating deep inside. How he came to know Franz's body in that short time, its stone ridges and hidden valleys. He knew it as he once knew the mall at the end of his street, the grey walls of his Toronto apartment, his trays full of rocks, and the night-black computer screen.

How glorious Franz looked feasting in that Italian restaurant, his hands stuffed with bread. He could chatter so in the cinema where they saw a terrible movie about bank robbers stranded in the Sahara desert, but Franz could be serious too. He told Sam about his father's death; he'd been young and it was unexpected. His dad had always wanted to be a deep-sea diver, but had ended up living his life here in Switzerland, the most land-locked country in the world. Franz would press his face into Sam's shoulder and let him stroke his hair as Sam described wind-swept glaciers, flowers that bloomed once a century in the sun-starved tundra, and the vast outer reaches of the Arctic Ocean covered with ice that he hoped would never melt.

On his fifteenth day in Zurich, Sam was horrified to discover he didn't want to leave. Toronto now seemed a place of exile.
He'd only tolerated it because his Labrador childhood had been worse. Here the Alps undulated like roller-coaster hills, and Franz's body rose on the bed like a mountain range beside him. He no longer obsessed over global warming; there was snow in every street, and the weather was simply too cold.

At the conference, the shocked scientists had no choice but to defend themselves. “This uncharacteristic cool spell is exceptional and doesn't contradict the forward progression of global warming.”

Everywhere Sam heard the sound of the fire roaring at the Earth's centre. It roared when he slept, and it roared when he woke. There it was, thundering beneath the blare of the kitchen radio, behind the shout of the newspaper delivery boy, under the chirping of birds in the park and the rumbling of street traffic. The sound drowned out babies crying, cars honking, organ music from Grossmünster cathedral, the thumping disco beat in fashion boutiques, Franz's snoring, and Sam's own heartbeat. The roar intensified the more rocks he swallowed. How could he have never noticed before and why did only he seem to hear it? There is fire at the Earth's centre and ice on its surface. These two extremes had never existed in Sam's monochrome life before, but now the world was in order.

Sam had twenty-five days left until his flight home, then twenty, then fifteen. He wouldn't stay in Zurich forever, but he couldn't leave yet. He had to discover why the world was breaking into pieces and holding together at the same time. Besides, he'd never been so happy.

Franz stepped out of a snowstorm and through the door. He
embraced Sam. “I'm confused too about what's happening with the weather in Zurich. I'll have withdrawal symptoms when you and the rocks leave. You have fifteen days left in my country. You are a scientist. Why not move out of the hotel and we'll finish our experiments here?”

Sam packed his bags in the Schweizer Inn and called the receptionist. “I'll be staying somewhere else. Don't worry about me.” He didn't care if the other scientists knew he was “having an affair” with that odd Swiss painter. His name in the same sentence as “affair”! Giggling, he pushed through the hotel's revolving door.

Franz watched Sam hang his flannel pants and button-down shirts in the closet. For the first time, Franz realized he disliked Sam's clothes. With Sam present, the pinesap scent from the trees outside seemed more intense. Rocks were stacked in the corner and Franz's stomach growled.

Franz was always smiling and never mentioned an exact departure date, so Sam assumed he could stay as long as he wanted. He headed to the Swissair office to cancel his return flight.

“Mr Masonty, we can reschedule your return for another month, but that's the limit allowed for this ticket.”

Sam would discover that life's greatest disappointments involved planes. He did not belong in the air but on the fire-centred Earth. He decided to miss his flight and go home when he was ready. He'd tell his university that he was doing research.

At night Sam and Franz lay across from each other naked and strangely shy. In his fingers Franz clutched a rock tightly as if dropping it would leave an irreparable dent in the Earth's surface.
He kissed Sam's chest, and Sam's body shivered. He offered him the stone, and Sam cradled it in his hands. Dolomite-stone coated with Franz's fingerprints, the dew-drops of his perspiration and pheromones, a Swiss rock bearing the weight of his twenty-seven years. Its surface had touched both Franz and the Earth. Trembling violently, Sam inserted the stone into his mouth, and it shimmied toward his Adam's apple, then paused on the line separating head from body. Each time he feared the rock would slide into him like a machete, lacerate his digestive tract and emerge from his anus blood-drenched and sticky with viscera. Yet he remembered that Franz's sweat had saturated it, and when the rock finally dissolved in his stomach acids and its fragments shot to the farthest reaches of his body, he felt united with Franz and the Earth. His body became rock.

“How funny,” Sam commented. “All my life I've analyzed the natural forces of the world and now I've become one. These rocks are a natural Viagra.”

Franz stared at the forest outside the bedroom window. He said, “I hope we don't disappear.”

Sam studied the room—bottles of cologne on the dresser, beige and burgundy T-shirts in the closet. The carpet was thick, plush broadloom, and the end-table lamp curved like a woman's body. Inside the lamp, goldfish swam around her navel. The French curtains were drawn; the air smelled of spicy cologne and damp wool.