The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  “I bring you a typical Swiss breakfast because I’m a typical Swiss guy.” For the first time, Sam saw Franz smile—so broadly, his eyes twinkled. He was wearing a checked T-shirt and suit jacket. A bit overdressed for a picnic? Noting Sam’s gaze, he explained, “To prevent me from going wild in the forest.”

  “You do that?”

  “I ate a rock yesterday. You make me go crazy. I could get weirder today if I don’t watch out.”

  And then the men ate food. Sam swallowed things Franz’s hands had recently touched: thick slices of salami that left grease dripping from their lips, acrid olives that singed tongues and palates, moisture-beaded grapes that exploded between teeth, and Franz’s own concoction—“that I invented one day when it wouldn’t stop raining and my fridge was too full”—yogurt mixed with cranberries, pomegranate seeds, muesli, and sliced apples.

  Then Franz cocked one eyebrow. “That breakfast wasn’t enough. I’m still hungry as a Schwein.”

  Sam feared what would happen next.

  Franz bent over and scooped up a handful of rocks. Molasse pebbles. His forehead creased. “There’s no choice.” He looked at Sam, took a deep breath, shoved them into his mouth, and swallowed. He clenched his eyes shut, his brow knit. Then his whole face relaxed and he smiled a second time. He offered Sam three beige stones and said gently, “Your turn.”

  Sam studied the rocks like pulled teeth in his palm. He hesitated, placed them on his tongue, tasted earth, dust, gravel. Everything in him said not to. His Adam’s apple popped forward once, twice; the stones plummeted down his gullet, and there was a warm detonative trembling in the centre of his stomach. He had the sudden impulse to gobble up all the pebbles scattered about his feet.

  Franz looked him in the eye and said again, “Your country, Sam. Tell me about your country.”

  And again Sam was in an empty field staring down at a pockmarked rock, and although winds blew all around him he dared not lift his head.

  “Who cares about my country?” He playfully picked a blade of grass and twirled it. “Tell me about yours.”

  Franz leaned back, chuckled. The sun shone right above his head. “Mein Land?” he said raising both hands. “This is it.”

  And so Sam followed him into the wooded park on the edge of the city and up along rock-strewn paths, over twisted tree roots that clutched the earth like gnarled fingers, past moss-mouthed caves where stalactites had been dripping for the past one thousand years, and when they reached the edge of a limestone pit, Franz took off his suit jacket.

  The two men were sweating. Dark blotches marked the back of Franz’s T-shirt, his armpits, the top of his chest. Overhead, leaves rustled; Sam watched light-flecks dance over Franz’s narrow nose that jutted like a ski-jump, his low forehead with bangs that, from here, seemed unevenly cut, his thick thighs and wide kneecaps. A woman’s body would be more different from my own, Sam thought, hence more separate. Again, he felt bewildered.

  Franz spoke to Sam in a hushed voice. “Thanks for coming, stone-man.”

  Sam could only reply, “You’re welcome.”

  A shadow flickered on Franz’s cheek. “I live in a small house up ahead, on the edge of this park. My stepfather was the mayor, and he bought it for me. I’m a spoiled Arschloch; most people only dream about having my life.” He ran one nail-bitten finger across his chin. “You see, I moved here seven years ago because I thought being near nature would help my art—and it did for a while. I painted every day! So many trees here, but mein Gott, your country has so many more. Eventually the trees began to bother me. I get afraid sometimes and will probably move back into the city soon, glaube ich. ’Cause I forget who I think I am when I’m out here.” He looked at the sky. “I don’t verschmelze with nature well, though I want to. Das ist mein Problem. So I was a daredevil to flirt with you and your country yesterday, your giant country of rock and trees. After meeting you, I actually painted a picture—the first time in years—of trees and light that shows how everything’s connected.”

  Sam listened in silence. He’d never heard someone talk so candidly. The words flowed gently into his ears.

  “I’m surprised I like you.”

  “You like me?”

  “Yes. You’re small like a Vogel. You’re not my type, and I usually get who I want. I actually barely notice what you physically look like. Funny. Usually someone’s body is all I see. You’re sweet. Du bist wirklich ein süsser Mann.” A breeze moaned through the treetops. He moved toward Sam and quickly and unobtrusively kissed him on the lips—Franz’s mouth was harder than a woman’s, the lips thinner, dryer, and beneath, the solid bone-plate of jaw. Sam smelled sweat, aftershave, a cinnamon-soap scent. Franz stepped away and sat on a flat rock protruding from the ground.

  Sam wondered if anyone saw the kiss, concluded this was irrelevant. He crouched on a stone outcropping.

  Franz pulled out a knife and cut an apple. “Are you still hungry?” He handed Sam a slice. “We could’ve gotten to my place a lot faster, but the scenic route is better.” He looked straight at Sam and said, “Or maybe I’m delaying ’cause I’m scared.” He held Sam’s gaze for a long time and Sam felt he was being offered something. “Sometimes I pretend I’m far from Zurich.” He pointed his knife-tip south. “But in that direction another town begins. Head in any Richtung, and you’ll hit a border, the German, Italian, or Austrian. I’m surrounded by borders. Unlike yours, my country is so small, some days it seems I know everyone in it.” Franz fingered an apple slice. Again he stared directly at Sam. He said, “I feel trapped.”

  How strange to talk about sentiments. What should Sam say? He’d mirror Franz. “I’ve been feeling peculiar lately too. It’s one reason I came to Europe. I thought if I corrected my own life, the world would fix itself as well. Funny, eh?”

  Then the conversation shifted, rose like a wave, and the two men started talking about a thousand things: hiking boots, airplane tickets, the difficulty of tying sailor’s knots, ice cream that’s been refrozen, fire extinguishers, and the hard pit at the centre of avocadoes they both always wanted to eat but couldn’t. Franz kept saying, “You’re right,” while Sam responded, “Yes. Yes, yes.”

  Winds swept softly through the underbrush. Light-flecks scuttled over Sam’s thighs. A cool breeze brushed his eyelashes. He thought that everything was normal in his life and nothing was changing. He didn’t know that on the far side of the world, earthquakes were happening in the country where he lived, granite mountains were imploding, and shale cliffs were falling into the sea.

  He lifted the piece of apple Franz gave him, put it into his mouth.

  Franz pointed at the dark cleft in the centre of the limestone pit. “Fall in that, and you’ll keep falling and never stop.”

  And for the first time Sam heard it, the sound that would follow him for the rest of his life: the fire burning at the Earth’s centre. Molten lava separated to join swelling masses that broke apart to meld with other shifting masses …

  Sam looked at Franz and Franz looked at Sam and their apples cracked between their teeth. A bird flew overhead. Somewhere, water trickled. The forest was dark and then light and then dark. Franz took Sam’s hand in his—a hairy, rough-skinned hand—and led him the rest of the way down the twisting trail until they stood in the clearing where, years ago, Franz had built his sculpture garden. Studded about the square yard was artwork that would remain in Sam’s mind for a lifetime: large stone circles with lines through them and clay spheres penetrated by steel rods that went in one side and out the other; everything round was divided yet connected by lines that criss-crossed at multitudinous angles, and everything was chopped into segments that fit into a framework that was spherical. Plastic slatted wheels rotated on metal axles, wooden hoops adorned with streamers whirled round iron poles, as huge metallic disks spun in the wind, their styrene spokes clattering against out-thrusting metal prongs. Everything had an axis as well as an outer surface, and suddenly Sam realized that if you drew a line from Canada to
the Earth’s centre, it joined a similar line from Switzerland and the two countries were connected in an obvious, logical, not-even-mysterious way. All at once Sam saw himself in his own barren field studying the crystal-flecked surface of a rock, and as Franz’s words pushed relentlessly against his eardrums, “Now tell me about your country, tell me,” he finally let the rock drop to the ground, lifted his head, and saw where he lived.

  He beheld a vast plain and a forest and beyond, another forest and lakes and cliffs and more forests and trees and plains and rocks, and suddenly a shrieking wind from the Arctic Circle hurtled down across a vast distance to blast every cell in the surface, subsurface, and deepest layers of his body.

  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 mon
ochrome 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.