The Lava in My Bones
Arsenal Pulp Press Vancouver
THE LAVA IN MY BONES
Copyright © 2012 by Barry Webster
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 101 – 211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Lyrics from "I Got You, Babe" by Sonny Bono © 1965 (Renewed) Cotillion Music, Inc. and Chris-Marc Music. Reprinted with permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.
Cover illustration by Carey Ann Schaefer
Book design by Gerilee McBride
Editing by Susan Safyan
Author photograph by Maxime Tremblay
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Webster, Barry, 1961-
The lava in my bones / Barry Webster.
Issued also in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55152-479-5
I. Title.
PS8595.E343L39 2012 C813'.6 C2012-904789-9
For Brian D. and Stephen N.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
—Marie Curie
I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.
—Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Contents
Prologue
Part One: Rock
Part Two: Air
Part Three: Ice
Part Four: Rock
Part Five: Water
Part Six: Rock
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Sam rifled through his lover’s drawer and discovered a dog-eared book called Fairy Tales of Flesh. He flipped the pages hoping to find evidence of himself.
He read long stories about witches with phalluses for teeth, men with breasts for testicles, huge walking elbows, chins, and disjointed body parts who performed elaborate Maypole dances together yet couldn’t synchronize themselves enough to form a functioning human body. One tale described two ghosts who had sex; their ephemeral skins flowed into each other, and the erect penis became so foggy you could run a hand through it. Sam read of rock people who made love with such violence that their bodies fractured, crumbled, and were blown away in the breeze. There were tales about women whose body fluids drowned entire civilizations, lovers who bit off each other’s organs and when they opened their mouths, birds flew out.
The final story described a free-floating world where Mr. Potato Head-like people could remove and try on each other’s body parts as if they were brooches or clip-on bowties; of course, sexual organs were most in demand and people started hoarding. National outrage ensued when police discovered a woman with fourteen breasts and sixteen penises pointing in all directions like the quills on a durian fruit.
Although Sam couldn’t put his finger on exactly how, he knew these tales were telling the very story of his life.
PART ONE
Rock
Sam stares through his barred window at a spot of earth that looks no bigger than a postage stamp. Soon the guard will unlock the door and offer him dinner.
Sam’s not sure if he’s in prison, a hospital, purgatory, or hell. If this is heaven, he thinks, how disappointed his mother will be.
From the hall he hears boots stamping, the squeak of trolley wheels, voices over the loudspeakers, “Ted Murphy wanted in the L-wing.”
Sam puts his head against the crisscrossing bars. The metal is cold against his forehead.
Has the scientific community reacted to his collapse with horror or delight? Surely not indifference. If Franz knew, he’d be mortified. “I had no idea Sam was like that. Scheiss. I should be careful who I hang out with.” Sam’s mother and sister haven’t come banging on the door, which shows he’s made progress in life.
Is Sam ashamed of what he did in full view of the whole world? Studying the snow-covered lawn outside, he realizes he feels no shame, and this self-assurance amazes him.
He remembers the rise of Franz’s stone-solid chest, with scattered hairs bending like windblown grasses.
A few months prior, Sam had lived in a Toronto basement apartment that was empty but for a desk, bed, computer, and stacked plastic cubes containing rock samples. The microscope was never put away but stood defiantly on the desk. While he slept, his hand would twitch in empty space on the bedspread as, with his ear pressed to a pillow pressed to a futon pressed to the earth, he’d hear the fire burning at the Earth’s centre. There, lava coagulated into gigantic globules that collapsed downward into a sea of fire that broke apart and rose up to join other steaming, shifting masses in a subterranean landscape that perpetually devoured and recreated itself. In the morning when Sam woke, his friend was everywhere. Franz’s shoulder was the rock sheath jutting from the dirt beside the apartment parking lot. Protruding stone spheres behind the corner store were nodules in Franz’s spine. The lakeside cliffs were the edges of his forehead and nose. With his hands on his ears, Sam would run down Toronto’s cement-walled streets, through car-flurried intersections, across deserted squares, over empty, wind-whipped fields, but no matter how fast he raced, no matter how many buildings he circled, there was always the sudden, scuffled scrape of stone beneath his feet and the fire roaring at the Earth’s centre.
Franz was everywhere.
But then again, he was nowhere.
Sam stood on the edges of oceans, straining to see his friend’s face in the horizon. He shouted his name into windstorms, waved huge placards from atop mountain cliffs, but the world was too vast, distances were too great, and the Atlantic Ocean was like a wall.
Now Sam touches the gridwork of metal bars with the open palm of one hand. He does not know why desire destroyed him, why his own frail frame couldn’t bear the force of what is a part of human nature.
One year earlier, Sam sat nervously on a plane bound for Europe. He fingered the steel seatbelt-buckle that flickered like a winking eye. Tomorrow, at a climate-change conference, he’d give his first lecture ever. At university Sam had avoided public speaking. Now this “genius” who’d gotten a BA, MSc, and PhD in eight years would visit another continent. “Talking,” he muttered as the plane shot like a bullet from the runway, “is necessary. Nothing else works.” Despite all his journal articles and studies for the Science Council of Canada, ice caps were still melting and temperatures were rising. Canadians only half-listened to him, but Europeans were more environmentally aware; at last, he could have an impact.
When Sam passed through Swiss customs on the morning of June 5, he felt he’d burst through a membrane he hadn’t known existed until then. Before him lay thirty long, juicy days in Switzerland. A clock began ticking the countdown to his tragedy.
His first days in Zurich, he wandered as in a dream; the snow-capped mountains loomed in the distance and everything confused him: the slope-roofed Tinkertoy buildings, breez
es smelling of baked bread and parfum Givenchy, cobblestone streets that forked or headed in all directions at once. Sam snaked his fingers into his pocket, touched the card with his hotel’s phone number. In unfamiliar cities he got lost easily. Was that so bad? Sam had no friends to telephone, no one to send postcards to; he hadn’t seen his parents in years. He tried not to think about this.
The streets of Zurich were perilously empty; agitated, Sam searched their polished surfaces for something to occupy his mind. There, a window display of baguettes lined up like artillery. Notice it’s interesting. A tour guide talking about cheese and watches because she doesn’t know what else to say. Remember her.
In the late afternoon, Sam collapsed exhausted onto a chair at a café. The table-top was a perfect circle—the beige marble cool against his palm. The waitress smiled, her lips a pert crescent moon; pigtails hung down the front of her blouse. Sam chuckled. Heidi of the High Alps. Yes, he will think of this waitress if, before his lecture tomorrow, his mind goes blank and he panics. Skirt pleats curved round her large hips and comma-shaped dimples bracketed her lips. Like most women she’d seem attractive until she spoke.
“Ready to order?” she asked in English. The linguistic skills of the Swiss humbled Sam. He admired the gentle swell of the woman’s bosom. Her face curved like a Valentine heart. Yet she lacked mystery. Five minutes alone with her and you’d know everything.
“Just some tea.” Sam rarely had an appetite. A line he’d once heard: “If you love something, you put it in your mouth.” He never understood people who were always hungry.
Behind him, two women were speaking English with American accents. They were from far away, like him, and Sam felt reassured.
“We’ll take the Lake Zurich cruise earlier or we’ll miss the symphony.”
“I so want to see Bamberger conduct.”
“His daughter once dated Tom Cruise.”
Sam often wondered why people had conversations. Nothing new was ever said. Should he start listening? If he changed his behaviour, would the Earth change too? Everything was connected, after all.
Sunlight gleaming on the tabletop hurt his eyes. He was jet-lagged. Yet he sensed something significant was going to happen. He’d dragged himself across the ocean and was farther from home than ever before. If you changed the position of one compound, the elements surrounding it changed too.
Heidi returned with tea. “Here’s your drink,” she sang. Her eyes were lit. She was becoming friendlier. Sam looked away. The click-click of her receding footsteps was like a metronome ticking.
Lately, he’d had nightmares in which he looked into a funhouse mirror, his teeth grew as long as a rabbit’s, his eyes expanded to cover his cheeks, and his ears protruded like parking meters. His face became a baby’s, a gerbil’s, a cow’s.
Sam sipped the tea; it scalded his tongue—he spit it out. What’s with Heidi, bringing him this? Through the window, distant mountains rose and fell like the curves on a woman’s body. The few patches of glaciers were blindingly bright. These mountains looked different from the ones on the placemat. The photos must have been taken around 1983, as every summit was topped by a crown of ice; now, only ten years later, half of Switzerland’s glaciers had melted and landslides occurred regularly.
Women passed on the street like figures on a television screen, yet they were real, and he could touch their skin if he wanted. At night he’d wake with an erection pointing skyward like a finger testing the wind. What happens to energy that isn’t expended?
There was a stack of petit pains on the neighbouring table; he could smell their sweet butter scent, and his stomach growled. If you love something, you put it in your mouth. He reached, snatched one, two, three rolls, swallowed them whole.
Back at the hotel, he strutted through the lobby, and the desk clerk chirped, “The guests are looking forward to your speech tomorrow.”
Sam hoped that when he stepped up to the podium, his voice, normally a mumbled rasp, and his arms, which hung down like pendulums, would transform—his arms dramatically jousting at unseen opponents, his voice resonating. “See my emaciated body,” he’d be saying silently, “these stick-thin forearms, my wrinkled jacket? I’m nothing, for I’ve sacrificed all to save the world. Adore me. I only ever had one girlfriend and I didn’t love her. Take me on your shoulders and parade me through the streets.” At unguarded moments he admitted he was grateful for global warming because it distracted him from his own life and made strangers respect him.
That night Sam dreamed he was seated before crowds of men with electric sockets for eyes. Someone kept calling “Where’s the plug?” He noticed a two-pronged plug lay on his knee. Nearby, tips of volcanoes puffed like lips exhaling smoke.
In the morning Sam arranged his papers and practised his first sentence, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Good.”
At last he was sitting at a table before a room full of scientists. In his bag were gleaming cobalt, pyroxene-filled trachyte, sharp-edged obsidian, pock-cratered basalt. To one side, the podium where the German doctor was speaking. Sam’s knees trembled; goosebumps prickled on his forearms. Was he tense because he’d crossed the ocean, something he’d once felt forbidden to do? Or was this the same edginess he’d experienced in his Toronto apartment, now magnified in the absence of his university degrees on the wall? He recalled the mall at the end of his street, its fake palm trees beneath the glass pyramid skylight, people eating chop suey with styrene forks at Gourmet Fair. A world made of plastic.
Applause. The German scuffled to his seat.
Sam clutched the bag full of stones, stood up, took two steps to the podium, and pulled the mic to his lips. “Ladies and—.” Germs. Yes, he almost said, germs. “Gentlemen.” His voice boomed so loudly that it startled him. “We have been paying attention to the poisons that kill the world, such as carbon dioxide, which heats up the atmosphere and is melting our ice caps.” Before him the dark mass of people throbbed like a giant restless amoeba. He forced out the words: “The polar regions are warming up and the tropics are overheated. The two extremes—heat and cold—must be maintained for life to exist.” Spectators shifted in their chairs; they’d heard all this before. “Until now climatologists have given warnings, but have politicians listened to these scientists of the air? The recent Rio Summit achieved little. Geology—” he said challengingly, “holds the answer.”
He plucked a stone from his bag, held it up; his trembling fingertips pressed its contours, the jagged crevices, twinkling crystals. Get personal, he thought. Tell them about your life. His speech coach said that spectators love personal anecdotes. “Rock is why I became a geologist.” His cheeks felt warm. God, was he blushing? “Rocks are intimately connected to us. No matter what we do, we are standing on stone.” He repeated his memorized lines. “Rocks bear the imprint of the weight of our bodies and, like snowflakes, no two are alike. They are us. I am in love with rock”—his voice became husky—“more than I love myself. This rock from Labrador is me. Labrador is where I spent my childhood. Look into a rock from your home; you’re looking into something essential to you.” Now his main point. He deliberately banged one fist on the podium, which wobbled drunkenly. A sound in the dark. Giggling? “Instead of focussing on the poisons destroying the Earth, we must study rocks and the forces protecting our planet. Rocks are the immune system fighting toxins in our atmosphere. Rocks are less affected by global warming than water or air. They are part of that larger force that isn’t conquered … Yet what exactly is this force that spins the world?” Perspiration ran through the hair on the back of his scalp. “If some scientists question God’s existence, where then do they think rock’s energy comes from?” A complete hush. Were spectators bored or captivated? “If rocks embody the power that moves the world, we must find that force and strengthen it. Only then can we halt the Greenhouse Effect.”
The empty silence lasted.
When the lights were turned on, three arms flew up. The shadowed, outer
edges of the crowd pressed against walls that seemed to push inwards. Had he spoken well? Would the world change? He was struck by his egotism.
Answering the few questions, Sam noticed a man sitting in the front and centre of the room, as still as a boulder.
At last, coffee break. Relief flooded him. Sam fingered a Styrofoam cup. “Very bad for the ozone,” he murmured.
Then the man approached him. Cautiously. The man from the centre. Later Sam would find out that he rarely approached people; people approached him. Uncharacteristically, he shuffled his feet. His head hung shyly. Also, atypical. On the day he met Sam, Franz was a man he had never been before and never would be again.
With one glance, Sam labelled him a frivolous peacock. The man wore a feminine mauve blouse that glimmered in the light, shiny canoe-shaped shoes with steel tips, and tight, herringbone-patterned jeans. He was the only man not wearing a suit, and Sam wondered why they had let him in.
Sam turned away and sauntered to the snack table, unaware that walking ten metres to speak to Sam was the hardest thing Franz had ever done, and it was followed by rejection, something he’d never experienced, especially in public.
Sam chatted with the Finnish biologist: “… and I’ll be studying felsite deposits on rocks below the Matterhorn next week …”
When the biologist excused himself—“I forgot to pick up a nametag”—Franz stepped into the space he’d vacated. He scrutinized the rock Sam was still clutching, then examined the space above his head. Was this man timid or mentally ill? Sam wondered. Months later he would learn the meaning of all this.
“Mr Masonty,” he said. “My name is Franz Niederberger. I notice that your rock belongs to a stone mass bigger than all of Switzerland.” He stared directly into Sam’s eyes, then again at the space beside his cheek.
The Lava in My Bones Page 1