The Lava in My Bones (9 page)

He retaliated by hooking up speakers that played Donna Summer tunes and hanging a spinning glitter ball that transformed the dining room into a discotheque. Overnight, piles of clothing appeared everywhere. Sam got stuck in swelling dunes of Italian T-shirts outside the washroom, squeezed past hedges of Ascot Chavez vest and jacket sets. Piles of sequined shirts glittered like coral; satin vests floated in dizzying eddies while faux goat-leather belts thrashed like snakes in fast-moving streams of silk socks and Tommy Hilfiger underpants. Franz maxed out his
credit card and received a call from his stepfather: “Your bank account's empty. What the hell are you doing with our money?”

Sam and Franz no longer listened but shout-talked at each other. Sam became so wound up and confused, he told Franz that the northern lights were in Toronto, people spoke French in Iqaluit, the Mackenzie River flowed southward, and the Pacific Ocean lapped at the sandy foot of Labrador. He deliberately told lies and said that icicles as long as skyscrapers hung in city streets and pack-dogs pulled trains through ice-coated subway tunnels.

One evening, his photos, rocks, and aurora borealis projector disappeared beneath a blizzard of multi-coloured fabrics; the phone was buried and rang incessantly. Because of Sam, Franz had bankrupted himself.

“Do you want my money?” Sam yelled. “Accept it as rent.” He would have loved Franz to become financially dependent on him.

Franz finally noticed that the paintings he'd hidden in the closet weren't right side up. Clearly Sam had been leering at them. Weeping, Franz folded and shoved each into the garbage bin.

The next morning, Sam woke to discover all the clothing and Canadiana were gone. The rooms were empty but for the furniture present on his first day there. Franz sat at the kitchen table, polished and intact, every hair in place. His eyes had glazed over. He seemed to have stopped breathing. He was wearing makeup. A mirror glimmered behind him.

“I bought you an outfit,” he told Sam. “So you'll look better when we go out.”

“You're still ashamed of how I look!”

“No, I like it when you look bad,” he confessed. “I wish I could make that matter more. But we're going to an art exhibition and … some people I dated will be there.” Sam had been afraid to ask about this. “Don't worry. I wasn't with anyone for long. I always hunt for flaws and end my relationships quickly, but with you,” he said bitterly, “everything's—camouflaged. Tonight you need to look decent. You'll never look as good as I do, but, of course, we'll try. Your new clothes are on the sofa.” As Sam headed into the living room, Franz said,
“Scheiss,
my hands are rough. I should've bought Swello, that new hand cream everyone's talking about.”

Sam felt suffocated in his new attire. The collar was too tight. The glossy leather shoes squeezed his toes into a needle point, and the coarse pants scratched at the inside of his thighs.

On the street, the snow had started to melt. The taxi wheels hissed through puddles. Sam tried to talk of Canada, but Franz made a perfunctory “cut it” gesture with one hand. Sam attempted to catch Franz's eye, glare deeply into his head, his brain, and see the diamond forming, but Franz talked pointlessly on and on to the taxi-driver. “Power,” Franz said to Sam before getting out. “I need to be a more powerful person. Power is important.”

The men entered an immense ballroom. Horrified, Sam glimpsed his mother and sister in the crowd, both wearing tight-fitting ballgowns. They held cocktails (though his mother didn't drink) and floated among the guests. No one else noticed them.

An enormous chandelier shimmering with tear-shaped glass drops hung from the ceiling like a giant grenade. Rows of men
in tuxedoes zigzagged through the crowd like rivers of black ink. Clinging dresses outlined breasts, accentuated pointing nipples, or clutched the pale bottom halves of fleshy bosoms that jiggled like shelled eggs in cups. A small room off to the side contained the artist's lithographs.

Standing before a sketch, Franz said, “‘Mosque in Turkey.' Turkey. I always wondered why they named a country after a bird.” Sam smirked. Franz's inanities were still hilarious. Then Franz cried,
“Scheiss!
Fuck, mine are as good as these and I didn't get an exhibition.” Then he peered at the floor. “Sometimes I wish I were another person. I'm only doing ad work from now on. And I'm moving and getting a condo right in the city
Zentrum.”

They headed back into the ballroom, where an orchestra played. Ladies' laughter sounded like tinkling glass. The chandelier still hung like a plated grenade that Sam knew would drop.

“Looks like I don't know anyone here,” Franz said sorrowfully. “No exes anywhere. None of my friends either, but who cares. Sometimes I'm not even sure I even fucking know my friends.” He gazed at Sam for a long time.

There was a raucous buzz, and someone stepped to the microphone. “Welcome, everyone, to the
vernissage
of Jean-Paul Gaudet.” The roar of applause. “I'm Lukas Warner, Jean-Paul's agent. Jean-Paul's been working on this collection for the past five years, and we're all very proud of him.”

Franz hurried over to the dessert table and began speed-talking to a purple-haired woman wearing tiny Statue of Liberty earrings. He thrust his jaw forward. Franz could no longer get excited about other men; might women interest him? “I've often
wondered,” he said, “what women want. Believe it or not, I hardly know any.” He carefully put his hand on the side of her neck and she giggled.

A green-haired man strutted to the mic. “Hello, everybody. I'm Jean-Paul.” Ecstatic cheering and whooping. Who says the Swiss are uptight? “So glad you could all come. I want to thank everyone for their support, especially”—he began reading from a long list—“Bettina Schumacher, Joseph Schmidt …”

Sam's sister drifted by, the train of her dirty dress trailing along the marble tiles.

Sam watched Franz, who now turned toward him and grinned as he put his hand right down the back of the woman's dress. The crowd parted before an enraged Sam, who marched over, enacting the high drama of life that he previously didn't believe existed. This must be what other people feel every moment of their lives, he thought. Sam stepped between Franz and the woman, and this time addressed his lover. “So what exactly are you doing?”

Franz turned away abruptly so he wouldn't have to look in Sam's eyes.

Over the loudspeakers, “and the person I'd like to thank most is—”

All at once Sam's ballgown-clad mother appeared at the podium. She grabbed the microphone and shouted, “The person he certainly wouldn't want to thank is my rotten little son. He's standing over there. He abandoned his sister and me and has only ever thought about himself.”

Eyes lowered, Franz said, “You'd do me a favour, Sam, if you'd just leave. This is all too much for me.”

Sam just stared at his lover. Behind Franz, they were handing out dishes of syrup-covered ice cream. His mother continued, “And he couldn't give two figs about the rest of us. He'd once been such a sensitive boy, but he changed and we don't know why—”

Suddenly Franz felt a flash of real anger and, thankful for it, reached back, snatched a dish of dessert off the table and, making a swift arc through the air, overturned it on top of Sam's head.

His mother stopped speaking. The room was silent but for the sound of the ice-cream slopping down onto the shoulders of Sam's suit jacket. Everyone turned toward him as chocolate sauce filled his eyebrows, dribbled down his cheek. He tasted sweetness on his lips.

Franz's mouth was wide open. He was amazed at what he'd done. Sam's mother and sister had disappeared. The woman beside him tittered and then someone else laughed and, like fire leaping from tree to tree until the entire forest was ablaze, laughter engulfed the room. Sam pushed past people whose bodies were like tree trunks that wouldn't move, out the main door, and onto the lamp-lit streets. He was crying now.

From behind him, a thundering boom and an ear-splitting shriek. The chandelier had dropped.

Sam began running. What the hell was he doing in Zurich? Why had he ever come here? And where could he go now? What country, what place? Not Canada. This trip had taught him hunger and he'd never feel satisfied in Toronto again. The genie was out of the bottle and Sam couldn't put him back in.

He passed lumbering stone edifices he didn't know the names of, deserted squares, garish over-lit fountains, gleaming windows
full of merchandise that appeared and vanished like hallucinations. In an empty intersection he stopped running and shouted, “Why should the Earth be saved? What's so fucking great about it?” To Sam, the only choices were suffocating isolation or pain-fraught involvement in life. “Let the ice-caps melt and flood the coasts! Let jungles turn to deserts! Let hurricane winds strip every bit of foliage from the Earth so our planet becomes a peach pit spinning in space. Who cares? The universe is vast, and there are so many other planets to worry about if we won't worry about ours. And as for that fucking force that moves the world, whatever it is, it's misguided. It should go somewhere else, to a place where it's wanted rather than wasting its time here!” Sam realized these thoughts had long been buried in his mind. He'd worked manically on his research to avoid his true feelings.

At the chalet, he washed himself and threw the soiled clothes into the garbage where, he thought, they belonged. He fell asleep and had a nightmare. He dreamt his mother raised her ballgown to show she had a giant wood pencil for a penis. She shoved it into a hole in the top of Franz's head and began grinding, grinding, filling his head with sawdust. “He never had any brains to begin with,” she yelled, “so what difference does it make?” Sam woke in a cold sweat, ran his hand over his body, chest, genitals, kneecaps to make sure everything was still there.

The next morning Sam opened his eyes; his lover was leaning over him. Right away Franz said,
“Es tut mir Leid.
I'm sorry for what I did last night. I don't know what came over me, I just … You don't know how sorry I am. You can stay here as long as you want, just tell me,
sag mir…
” Franz wanted what he hated.

Sam did the best he could. He described wind-swept glaciers and flowers that bloomed once a century in the sun-starved tundra. Snow fell silently in the summer streets of Zurich and a distant fire roared.

Again Sam's genitals became rock, and this astonished him as much as anything. Through Franz, he was becoming the stone Earth; the final border separating him from the planet was disappearing. And this transformation to rock was fuelled by desire, the most ephemeral thing on Earth.

Sam got up and sadly prepared his lunch and backpack. He left a note. “Gone to Zermatt. Be back in two days.”

Diamonds are created at a great depth, between 300 and 400 kilometres below the Earth's surface. The deeper a diamond is buried, the greater it grows. Diamonds are brought to the Earth's surface through volcanic eruption. What form would Franz's final eruption take? Sam hoped he'd be present to see the result.

The Matterhorn is a massive crooked finger angling skyward. Sam was conscious of it everywhere in Zermatt and wasn't sure if he was watching it or it was watching him. By a lake at its foot, he studied a sheet of gabbro protruding from the ground. He fingered the angular lumps and pulverized fragments from 300 million years ago, when the continents were united. He ran his
fingers over the bulbous rock veins and sniffed the dust on his fingertips. He intoned lines from a speech he could give. “The North American and Eurasian plates were once joined. Present-day Canada touched Switzerland but broke away. Then Spain rotated downward while Italy, protruding like a unicorn's horn from Africa's forehead, rammed upwards into Europe.” Staring into the greenish xenoliths, Sam realized that Franz's country and his own contained the same crystalline rock. The gabbro sheet stood before him like a mirror. He could be in Canada now, but he was on the other side of the ocean. Things were the same and different. He'd gone through a looking-glass and out the other side. Feeling spooked, he hurried away from the lake.