The Lava in My Bones (7 page)

Outside, it had stopped snowing. A cold wind pierced the fabric of Sam's thin coat. He peered into the frozen waters of Lake Zurich. He'd find a way to stay in Switzerland even if it meant breaking the law. Sam was amazed at himself; he'd never believed himself capable of courage. White powder blew across ice and a distant fire roared.

A week later, Sam announced to Franz that he'd called his university and they'd allowed him to stay longer. His department assigned to him two more lectures at the University of Zurich plus field research.

One half of Franz's mouth twisted upward, the other half curled down. Sam was supposed to be here temporarily. Franz walked into the bedroom and closed the door, but later spent the rest of that morning and the entire afternoon out shopping. He arrived home with three Armani suits and bags of glittering scarves and belts. Sam believed he'd bought these clothes to impress him. Then Franz spent the whole evening on the phone with his friends Darcy, Darlene, and Delicia—“all pet names because they're all my pets.” Sam couldn't understand the conversations in German but assumed Franz was talking about him.

That night, while making love, Franz said, “Sam, you're not very good at this.”

Sam gasped, but had suspected that, yes, he was lousy in bed. He had a penis but only recently realized his pelvis was attached. Sam had to remind himself that these limbs and this torso were
his. He mentally desired his lover, but his fingers would brush inanely through the air around Franz's body while scientific formulas
whirled unimpeded through his brain. How could he activate his body and make it his own?

Afterwards Franz looked out the window and said, “I worry now that I shouldn't have gone to that conference. Today I looked at a Versace shirt, but it didn't interest me any more. Then I saw this cute salesman,
sehr schön,
with a flat-top haircut—the kind I like—and I gawked at him for ten minutes but didn't get excited. I only want you, Sam. I still can't visualize you when I'm away. And when I'm with you I hardly see you. I hear things.”

“Hear what?”

“Winds blowing. Animal sounds—moose? Sam, what if I'm … disintegrating?”

Sam threw himself onto Franz's body. Never had he wanted him as much as he did then.

Sam began to struggle. His boyfriend's masculinity attracted him, but sometimes when Franz softened and kissed him murmuring
“Mein Schatz,”
he seemed diminished and Sam's desire shrank. Yet when Franz turned away, Sam entered a zone of strange agony. Franz tumbled toward him in bed and Sam's body braced; he fled Franz's longing and returned in desperation when the ardour cooled; the two became hot, then cold, and then hot just as the Earth's surface heats and cools; they chased each other across the bedspread that seemed as vast as an Arctic
plain. Sam wondered if sexual relationships between men were always so difficult. Through the window he observed numerous Esthers drifting past snow-topped hedges. If he could reach out and touch that blonde hair—but it'd dissolve like candy floss in his hand.

One afternoon, rummaging in Franz's drawers, he came across
Fairy Tales of Flesh,
a book written by an unspecified author from an unknown country. Sam spent all afternoon reading it.

“Franz, these tales are fantastic!” he cried, running into the study. “There's this neat story about a free-floating world where Mr. Potato Head people can exchange and try on each other's body parts. One lady loses her false teeth and instead wears matching toenails in her mouth; this other guy attaches two boobs to his head like Mickey Mouse ears and is overjoyed. The message is that the inside of people is the most important, and the outside of the body is just ornamental.”

Franz felt as though Sam had brought a loaded gun into the room. “Get that
verdammt
thing out of here. I bought that when I first moved out here. I didn't think I still had it.”

Some days Franz was thrilled when his boyfriend arrived home. He took Sam in his arms. “I thought about you all day. I couldn't work but kept drawing circles,” and to prove it, he showed him reams of paper covered in spiralling ovals. Other days he said, “Back so soon? Thought you had work to do. Remember: If you stop researching global warming, you'll have one of your guilt trips.” One afternoon Franz said,
“Christus,
can't you give me a moment to myself? IKEA wants their catalogue design tomorrow, and I can't work with you mooning around.”
Sam found these puzzling changes cute; Franz was one of those temperamental artists he'd always heard about.

Snooping, Sam discovered a dozen new paintings stashed in the living room closet. Franz had been painting when Sam was out. Each showed trees interspersed with elongated squares of light. He began to regularly ogle these hidden images.

One night Franz panicked and grabbed Sam's forearm, pressed it against his own, and exclaimed, “You're you and I'm me, right? This damned line between us”—he pointed at the crack separating their skins—“can't be crossed—we won't become each other,
nicht wahr
? Even though I speak to you in your mother tongue there's no way I'll start being like you?”

“Of course not. And I won't become like you either.” Yet Sam wasn't sure of this.

“Look at how you dress. I'd never wear clothes like yours.”

“And your interest in advertising bores me. I could never care about that.”

The men looked uneasily into each other's eyes yearning to hear a giant “Yes” from the universe. Sam knew it was essential they remain separate; just as snow and fire must exist for the Earth to survive, the two men must not neutralize each other's extreme qualities.

Sam became troubled about how the opposite sex fit into all this. With women he had a script to follow. He knew who should open the door, pay for dinner; sex seemed more straightforward, less negotiable.

One evening Sam guiltily snuck over to south Bahnhofstrasse, where female prostitutes paced, smoking and scratching their
armpits. A woman in a micro-skirt and twisted halter top that pushed one boob up and the other down chewed gum in a darkened doorway. Sam was not dressed as elegantly as the Swiss men, so she said in English, “Hello. Want some
Spass?”

He took a step toward her and grimaced. In one quick movement she grabbed him by the arm and manoeuvred him into a dark room with a mattress on the floor. She asked him to show his money, which he did. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

Sam undid his belt, not quite knowing why he was here. He didn't want to abandon Franz, but hoped that making love to a woman would clarify his mind. When she was finally naked in his arms, he realized his desire for her was too lukewarm to act on.

“Nothing personal,” he muttered. “But I could only be happy with you if you had Franz Niederberger's body and voice.”

“I'm good at doing imitations.”

“I want to eat rocks.” He paid her and left.

On the tramway, wheels clattered and the air smelled of gasoline and wet socks. At station stops, people wearily shuffled on and off. Sam studied a dozing banker, a mother holding a sleeping baby, a bent elderly lady with watery eyes, an adolescent picking at his pimples with the end of a comb. The whole scene seemed pervaded with an indefinable grief. He felt sorry for every single person there, longed to take each rider's hands in his and comfort them, saying, “In the past, I was solitary and desperate, just like you. I never realized we were so alike.”

Arriving home Sam caught Franz finishing up a painting. Franz blushed; he didn't put the canvas in the closet right way
but turned from his easel and took Sam in his arms. As Sam felt Franz's hands warm against the small of his back, he looked at the painted tree trunks sloping upwards, branches like fingers clawing at the sky, and the lights like eyes flashing fire.

Days passed. This was the first time since he'd left Labrador that someone always greeted Sam when he arrived home, the first time someone said goodbye when he left, the first time he told someone the trivia of his day (and how much more meaningful that seemed than his scientific ideas), the first time someone laughed at his jokes, talked to him at midnight, looked out the window beside him, prepared his breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Franz gave him a haircut. With each snip, the follicles in his skull tickled.
“Scheiss,
Sam, what bastard did this to you? It's good you met me so I can repair your ‘do'.” Sam enjoyed feeling Franz's fingers move about his head like delicately stepping spider's legs. Then Franz asked, “When are you going home, by the way?”

“I'm not sure. It's my university's decision.” A lie. Sam knew that at any given moment Franz could simply tell him to go back to the hotel, but he didn't. If this were a fairy tale, that meant the dragon had been slain. Or hadn't arrived yet.

When Sam gave his next talk at the University of Zurich, he spoke before a near-empty auditorium. “If we can discover that force that jump-starts energy combustion, we can align our technologies to it, and our lifestyles will not kill our planet. But what could that initial force be? The energy created when electrons collide? The friction caused by water eroding rock? Somewhere in the relationship between rock, water, ice, and air
is the secret of that robust energy that moves our Earth and fights its destruction.” In the front row one man snored, his head bobbing. Two women in the back were reading magazines. “Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you have any idea what I'm saying at all, you bunch of brain-dead morons?”

The sleeper belched.

Meanwhile, Franz went to Excelsior's to seduce the salesman with the haircut. Later, on the man's pitching waterbed, Franz felt seasick and threw up in the night-table drawer. “I don't know what's wrong with me.” He clutched himself, rocking on the rug. “Normally you're my type. I don't know what's happening to me.” He went home and couldn't stop painting trees and beams of light.

The next day Franz told Sam, “I'm going to change the locks on the door. You won't be able to come in unless I'm here, but it's no big deal.” But Franz didn't change the locks. Then he prepared a Spanish quiche but ate it all himself, saying, “Didn't think you'd be hungry.” He washed his clothes but not Sam's. The grease-stained pillow lay beside Franz's clean one.

They went to a fancy party, and Franz “accidentally” spilled red wine on Sam's lapel, then later “inadvertently” pushed Sam's face into a bowl of trifle. Franz apologized profusely, and on the way home started crying.