The Lava in My Bones (8 page)

“What's the matter with you?” said Sam. He'd never been in a same-sex relationship and wondered if this was standard.

“I thought you were here for a short time. And now I can't end it. I'm afraid.
Ich habe Angst.”

“But I'm not going to do anything bad to you.”

At home Franz took the latest painting off the easel. “Take this as a present. I don't want to look at it.”

All the next day, Franz's face continued to twist into myriad patterns until he finally said, “We've got to get out of this room. Let's go to the city.” He grabbed Sam's hand. “Tour! I'll give you a tour!”

Sam became more confused than ever. Together they visited the Zunfthaus zur Waag, “where hatmakers met regularly during the Renaissance,” explained Franz. On the Quai Bridge, Sam saw Lake Zurich on one side and the medieval city centre on the other. At Zurich's original Roman customhouse, Franz pointed at the plaque commemorating the women who'd saved the city from disaster. “The Hapsburg armies were near; all the men had died, so the women put on soldier's uniforms and marched. When the Austrians saw the soldiers coming, they didn't wait to see what bodies were under the uniforms and fled.”

Yet Sam felt he was not in Franz's home country but in his own. Was it the occasional flash of metal and steel amidst all the wood and cement? Or the still air, the lack of odour, the discreet way people walked down streets, speaking only when necessary? Or was it simply rock, the same rock beneath his feet and before his eyes? Sam wondered if narcissism was the cause of the world. After the Big Bang happened, did a billion gases come racing together because everything was in love with itself?

Franz asked again, “So, next Wednesday you fly off?” His repetition of this question was starting to really bother Sam.

“No, I don't have to leave yet. I still have to do my Matterhorn studies.” This was true. Since meeting Franz, he'd abandoned his
research, giving himself up to eating rocks rather than studying them.

Franz's head swung up and he stared into the distance. Sam studied the furrowed brow, twitching cheeks and lips. Sam had never before witnessed intense inner struggle on his account. His mother and father had simple, unimpeded desires, but inside Franz great forces were pressing together, creating—what exactly? The Earth's lithospheric plates move back and forth and are in constant tension; the internal pressure creates substances below the surface, hard, compact, scratch-resistant matter. Franz contained even more contradictions and tensions than the Earth. Something solid was growing below the surface. Sam remembered the elongated square lights in Franz's paintings. They reminded him of diamonds. Was Franz creating a diamond? Sam yearned to be present when what was forming inside Franz was pushed to the surface.

Then his lover's face softened. Something in him shifted, unlocked, and he gushed, “I'm so happy you'll stay longer,” and Sam felt he was being given the universe.

Then Franz stepped back. He again clenched his lips, squinted, and barked, “Disco. Tonight we have to go to the disco. There's no other choice.”

The room was a sea of half-naked, gyrating bodies, thumping music, multi-coloured flashing lights, and clouds of dry ice. The bass beat was so loud that Sam's collar vibrated against his neck.
The room smelled of stale beer, marijuana, and dry dust.

Franz marched proudly into the disco. All the disparate parts of himself were rushing together like balls of mercury. He seemed solid, lacquered. He said to Sam, “Don't start talking to people about geology here. No one will be interested. And I have to confess: when you go on about your greenhouse effect,
Scheiss,
I listen, but I don't get a third of what you're saying.”

In a quiet alcove, Sam met Franz's friends. Although their names were different, they seemed to be the same person repeated five times. Each wore a matching belt and trouser set and a tight black T-shirt cut off at the shoulders. Their hairstyles matched: short and wavy, curling around their ears—like Franz's; they each wore spicy orange cologne. Even their faces resembled each other's, square-jawed with pronounced cheek bones—had they had plastic surgery? Sam noticed that everyone in the bar, including Franz, had similar bodies—round biceps, thick forearms, and pectorals so developed they came perilously close to resembling women's breasts.

The friends' eyes glittered as they regarded Sam's narrow face, skinny arms, laced shoes. His white shirt hung on his bony shoulders like lopsided curtains, and his too-short pants revealed that his socks didn't match. For the first time Franz had refused to lend him some clothes. Franz eyed the creased shirt, trying to fixate on Sam's flaws.

Franz made the introductions. The clone-men pursed their lips and shook Sam's hand.

“You're the one who's stolen our Frankie away.”

“I guess I'm the robber,” Sam admitted.

“We hope you'll give him back in one piece.”

“And Franz's piece is too good to be broken.” The five men let out a uniform titter.

“You mean, you've all had sex with him?” Sam assumed that in this milieu, despite the threat of AIDS, everyone screwed everyone. That's what they said in the newspapers and movies.

The men choked on their drinks. “That'd be incest,” one man cried. “Like having sex with Aunt Beatrice.”

Franz said, “Sam is new to the community. He doesn't know a lot of things.”

“So that explains it,” replied Darcy. The tip of his thin tongue stuck briefly from his mouth like a pointing finger, then vanished between lips. A lizard's tongue, thought Sam.

“Hey, Franz!” the bartender yelled. “Where'd you get the shirt?”

Franz hurried over. “C&A. Lycra-cotton blend, for 240 francs.”

The bartender pretended to applaud hysterically. Franz ordered drinks. A man on a stool patted him on the back and another ran up to say hello. Everyone here knew Franz. This is not the real Franz, thought Sam, but the one that dominated before I arrived and cracked his shell.

On the packed dance floor, shirtless men moved their arms like pistons and pumped their biceps to the disco beat.

Baby, we're shakin' it, groovin' it,

Makin' it, movin' it…

A man's sweaty ponytail whipped back and forth; thighs bulged from satin shorts; boys clad in white underwear wrestled in elevated dance-cages; men stamped their feet, dramatically banged their fists and arms against walls; heads pivoted on
thick-muscled shoulders. Sam was amazed by the fetid intensity of this throbbing testosterone-filled space. We live in bodies that are worlds unto themselves, self-enclosed, skin-prisoned, he thought. He studied his own forearm, the subtle bump of a knuckle, his milky skin—this container he'd scarcely noticed before in which he lived.

After handing Sam a drink, Franz leaped onto the dance floor. He flung one arm in the air, spun round, shook his little butt. He made whooping sounds, blew air-kisses to spectators. Sam couldn't bear to watch him. At home Franz kept his voice low, as if in a cathedral, but here he shouted and strutted, chattered inanely to whoever and watched his own pelvis whirling as if it were a new toy he was mesmerized by.

When the song ended, Franz shouted to Delial, “I can't stand Tom, that silly queen!” A man tapped him on the shoulder; Franz turned, shrieked, “Tom!” and embraced him. For an instant Sam feared his obsession with Franz was a precious rock that could disintegrate.

At midnight Franz began chatting up a man in a tank top with tattoos of anchors on his huge biceps. Franz reached over and jerkily stroked the man's chest with uncharacteristically awkward gestures. Sam became so angry, he surprised himself. He pushed through the crowds. Sam knew he was ridiculous; he'd become a character in a soap opera doing the kind of thing he once scorned. Straight from a Harlequin romance, Sam defiantly positioned himself between the two men. Sam faced the tank-topped man, who said,
“Entschuldigung!
”

“Franz and I are together, so you'd best leave now.” Sam was
glad he'd seen those movies. The words felt fresh in his mouth.

“Du bist mit ihm
?” the man blurted. He flicked his finger against Sam's collar and disappeared into the crowd.

“It's not what you think,” Franz said. “I didn't really want him. I wished I did; I just wanted to prove …
Scheiss.
I don't know what to think anymore.
Ich weiss nicht.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Sam said at last, “that I don't understand the German you keep using?”

“Well, I understand it, and that's what counts. After all, they are my words.”

Sam couldn't forget Franz's hand lingering beside the anchor tattoo. The next morning, Sam wasted no time. He found Delial's number in Franz's phone book and called him.

“I need help, Delial.” How odd it felt to ask for aid. “I need to learn how to keep Franz with me and,” he admitted angrily, “away from the others. His attachment to me is … weaker than I'd hoped. I felt so uncomfortable last night and he made no concessions to me at all.”

If Franz wouldn't live in Sam's world, then Sam would learn to live in his.

Delial chirped, “That is a magnificent thing to say, and you are a magnificent man for saying it.” He proceeded to make suggestions and Sam agreed with everything. First Delial recommended a gym, “Atlas Special. Franz never goes there. Way too hetero for him.”

Over the next week, Sam secretly lifted weights. He marvelled at how his forearm veins bulged after his workouts. He ate a high-protein diet and studied muscle metabolism charts. Sam
knew bodies weren't separate from minds, yet he worried that he was interfering with a natural process. In that disco, desire seemed twisted into such narrow shapes, it nearly choked to death. Sam considered plastic surgery to give him a chiselled jaw and pectoral implants. “That takes months!” exclaimed Delial. Why weren't things as instantaneous as society promised? “How long are you here for, anyway?”

“That's the million-dollar question.”

Delial suggested an image consultant. “Madame Inga Binga from Hollywood. The advisor to the rich and famous. She'll make you a star.” After just one meeting Sam could smile engagingly, wave his hand in the air just so, walk suavely without tripping; now he could shake hands with a solid grip and get through a short conversation without mentioning geology.

“But my problems are deeper than all this,” Sam later confessed to Delial. “I hate to say it, but I'm a lousy lay. That's more important than I thought at first.”

Delial shook his head. “Poor boy. That's something you must never admit out loud.” Together they browsed the bookstore's self-help section. Sam bought and read
Give Him the Boner from Paradise.

“This isn't going to work,” he cried, exasperated. “The problem is more profound. The breach between the mind and body can't be healed by more knowledge.”

“Then we'll go shopping. It's the only way to solve a crisis.”

Darcy joined Delial and Sam, and they spent the entire weekend in designer clothing boutiques.

On Monday Sam arrived at the chalet with his hair cut and
gelled, cerise Ermenegildo Zegna jeans and a skin-tight Lycra vest that pushed his meagre pectorals up and forward. Franz's chin dropped, and Sam understood he'd made a huge mistake.

“That's not how you dress,” Franz shouted. “It's how I dress.”

At dinner when Franz commented on an art exhibition in Italy that he was too afraid to visit, Sam finally understood what had made him attractive to Franz in the first place: his country.

Next came the fight to the finish. Sam blanketed the walls of Franz's house with photographs of Canadian forests, Lake Louise, prairie grain fields, fjords on Baffin Island, caverns on the Bruce Peninsula, mountains in the Yukon; he covered the coffee table with rocks labelled with provinces' names. He installed a boom-box and played tapes of icebergs creaking, loons crying, the north wind wailing through juniper branches. Franz entered the living room to see a projector shooting a vermilion light across the ceiling. “The aurora borealis,” Sam explained. To his delight, Arctic winds began pounding the windows, snow piled up in the bedroom, and icicles formed on the shower curtain rod. Franz covered his ears as he stumbled through snow-clogged rooms.