The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

At night Sam and Franz lay across from each other naked and strangely shy. In his fingers Franz clutched a rock tightly as if dropping it would leave an irreparable dent in the Earth’s surface. He kissed Sam’s chest, and Sam’s body shivered. He offered him the stone, and Sam cradled it in his hands. Dolomite-stone coated with Franz’s fingerprints, the dew-drops of his perspiration and pheromones, a Swiss rock bearing the weight of his twenty-seven years. Its surface had touched both Franz and the Earth. Trembling violently, Sam inserted the stone into his mouth, and it shimmied toward his Adam’s apple, then paused on the line separating head from body. Each time he feared the rock would slide into him like a machete, lacerate his digestive tract and emerge from his anus blood-drenched and sticky with viscera. Yet he remembered that Franz’s sweat had saturated it, and when the rock finally dissolved in his stomach acids and its fragments shot to the farthest reaches of his body, he felt united with Franz and the Earth. His body became rock.

  “How funny,” Sam commented. “All my life I’ve analyzed the natural forces of the world and now I’ve become one. These rocks are a natural Viagra.”

  Franz stared at the forest outside the bedroom window. He said, “I hope we don’t disappear.”

  Sam studied the room—bottles of cologne on the dresser, beige and burgundy T-shirts in the closet. The carpet was thick, plush broadloom, and the end-table lamp curved like a woman’s body. Inside the lamp, goldfish swam around her navel. The French curtains were drawn; the air smelled of spicy cologne and damp wool.

  Franz began to chat. “People I know would be amazed to see me with you here. It’d wreck my image.” He chuckled and held Sam tighter.

  “Because I’m a scientist? You only know artists?”

  “That’s partly it. Everybody I know is actually in advertising. But my friends look and judge. They think I’m great—and I believe them. I love the attention. I can’t live without it. It’s my weakness. My friend Delial always compliments me on my clothing choices. He says I look good in Dolce & Gabbana, but I wear Diesel.” Sam became aware of huge differences between himself and Franz and wanted to discover more; they made their relationship seem improbable, hence miraculous. Sam glanced at the party invitations on the night table, at hairbrushes lined up like objets d’art. This was the insipid surface of Franz that the world saw and that had nothing to do with the rock-eater at his centre. “Delial doesn’t know the difference since he works in ladies’ Kleidung. I guess the fabric is thinner for women. Men are stronger so the material’s tougher or we’ll tear it with our larger muscles.” Was he serious? Such a silly comment. “Diesel probably has outlets beside Italian Customs on our border. It’d make sense because their brands arrive here before the others.” Sam snickered. He remembered the first thing Franz said at the conference, “Rocks are hard.” Franz could be hare-brained but was adorable. Sam kissed the crook of his arm.

  “These people who admire you … are they men or women?”

  Franz sat up. “I hardly know any women. I work alone here so I don’t have colleagues. At the bar I frequent, everyone’s male.” So Franz’s social world was crowded but miniscule. “Of course, I have a mother, this prissy over-elegant Frau living in Oberstrass. And I see women there—” Franz reached and flicked on the television remote. A woman in a red skirt was soundlessly running up and down supermarket aisles. “Someone ordinary like her is lucky. She can go where she wants and no one pays attention. Women don’t have to be so tough all the time.” Franz spoke sadly. “Some days I want to become someone like that, someone who’s … peripheral. I get tired of getting looked at, but I look too, I assess. I’m picky—except with you, Sam”—he turned to him—“who I don’t seem to see.” His lips closed around Sam’s. “I have a family, of course, my stepfather and brothers. I see them once a month for dinner. My parents are angry that I’ll never give them grandchildren.”

  “Having babies is bad,” Sam said reassuringly. “There are too many people on Earth already.” He had started to confess his private thoughts. “The average person in the First World creates 726 kilograms of garbage a year. A person like me releases 450 litres of carbon dioxide daily. To be frank, I’ve never known why people exist. The Earth would be better off without people.”

  “Without people!” Franz cried. “Then we’d be in a … Leere—a void.” Shivering, he got up and put on a silk shirt, wrapping it tightly around him. “What would be here then, Sam? Only trees and the ground? The world is full of people, Gott sei Dank. Sam, tell me something about you involving people, something that isn’t abstract or about this ‘force that moves the world’ stuff.”

  “That ‘stuff’ is important. I’m glad you keep attending the conference, but did you notice the media stopped reporting?”

  “So?”

  “I’m more responsible for all of this than you are. I have knowledge and that makes me accountable.”

  “Sam, say something simple about yourself.”

  Sam pondered. “When I was a child, I was fascinated by trout swimming upstream.”

  “Good. How about deine Familie? Your father?”

  “My father? Hmmm. I haven’t seen him for years. He is kind of … bizarre. He works as a fisherman. He lives with my mother and sister but has always ignored everyone.” He ran one finger along Franz’s knee. “I think he still spends all his time on his boat. He’ll sit there for hours, staring down into the ocean. Some have said he’s looking for mermaids.”

  “Mermaids!”

  “Yes, he wants to make love to one. Really. He believes a mermaid with golden hair will appear and he’ll fall into the water and live with her forever.”

  “You’re serious? Like in a fairy tale? Fairy tales are exciting but dangerous, Sam.”

  “You mean I’m not in one now?”

  “You think I’m Prince Charming? I’m too neurotic to be Prince Charming.”

  Sam laughed. “I think my father looks for mermaids in the same way I always eyed women from a distance or in magazines, fixating to anaesthetize myself and forget my boring life. I’d watch movies to find out how normal people lived.”

  “How is Mutter?”

  “My mother is … also special. She’s religious and hated that I did well in science. It offended her values. I think she just didn’t want me to become separate from her; without me and Dad, she had no men in her life. Once, I started dating this girl, Esther, and she tried to stop it. At one point she got so angry that she trashed my precious rock collection. It was a great collection. I’d been working on it since childhood … It’s weird, but whenever I was alone and tried to jack off, that woman would walk right in. She had a sixth sense, and I guess she didn’t want me up to any monkey business. It was like living beneath a giant searchlight. I couldn’t hide. She never understood that forcing people doesn’t work.”

  “Hearing you talk about yourself,” Franz said unhappily, “makes me like you more.” Clutching his elbows he hurried into the bathroom.

  Sam listened to the gentle hiss of Franz’s urine striking the rim of the toilet bowl and remembered Esther crouching in the leaves. He eyed the alabaster brightness of the skin on Franz’s behind, the muscle that twitched in his dimpled bicep, the elegant curve in the small of his back. Astounding to think that just a few weeks ago Sam had not been sensate to such beauty. He remembered Esther’s body and recalled his adolescent self masturbating to body parts swirling about his brain like blots in a kaleidoscope. Too often women reminded him of his mother, but he’d liked the labyrinth of Esther’s hair, the way he sensed no one could get to the centre of it. If a woman had eaten rocks, would it have affected him as Franz had? Probably. So much in life was accidental. He’d liked Esther’s freckled nose, her pointed chin, and now here he was with Franz’s earlobes, flat pectorals, tangled armpit hairs, rough-skinned testicles, and thighs that sloped inward like celery stalks. What relationship did each part have to the body as a whole and how did they connect to the person inside? Penises, toe knuckles, bellybuttons, vagina
s. Sam felt the expansiveness of his own desires as he sensed, stretching away on all sides of him, an endless forest of jutting elbows, erect penises, stiff nostril hairs, clitoral flaps, quivering eyelids, testicles round as ice cream scoops, and pert feisty nipples—a wonderful wilderness he could get lost in and explore for the rest of his life.

  It was then that Sam told Franz about the wooden man in the pencil case. He asked him, “Are you that man?” Franz jump-spun in the air and, whooping, danced a can-can, kicking his feet and spinning his arms like windmills.

  Sam laughed so much his abdominals throbbed, and he wondered if he’d ever truly laughed before. Franz could hold back no longer. He tumbled into bed on top of Sam, and as the two made love, snow piled up outside the window, on the carpet, and finally over their bodies. Franz shivered and his teeth clattered.

  In the middle of the night Sam woke. All the snow was gone. The clock ticked loudly as if someone were striking two sticks together. He blinked once, twice, and realized that a woman was standing at the foot of the bed! It was his mother, one arm stretched out, fingers pointed. The edges of her body wavered as if under water. He tried to cover himself, but she’d seen everything. “Abomination! Sinner!” How odd that she’d show up when he was with a man; it was women she hated—“like prostitutes,” she often said. He covered his eyes with his hands, slapped his face, but the apparition wouldn’t vanish. Then he saw his father hunched over on the desk in the corner. A girl limped into the room; her long hair fell like taffy over her plaid shirt, and her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s—Sam’s sister, whom he’d left behind in Labrador. His mother turned and walked into the closet, slamming the door so loudly that Sam was surprised Franz didn’t wake. Sam never had these nocturnal family visits in Toronto. Why were they happening in Switzerland?

  The next day, snow fell while Franz huddled over his desk eagerly working on a new ad for Credit Suisse, and Sam sensed his family was everywhere. His sister’s ghostly head peeked over the railings of snow-covered balconies; his mother’s face appeared on statues or in museum paintings in which only the eyeballs moved. He saw his sister’s scribbling on graffitied walls: “Please help me!” and “How could you desert me?” Sam and Franz attended a soccer game at the indoor stadium, but when the first goal was scored, the voice over the loudspeakers morphed into his mother’s: “You think you’re so smart, abandoning your nearest and dearest. Listen, hotshot, we’ve been following you a long time, but you were too frightened to see us.”

  Franz watched his Canadian lover bat at clouds of dust and stumble into snow-drifts.

  When Franz agreed to paint Sam’s picture, the ghosts vanished. Sam sat quietly as—swishity-swash—the brush swept back and forth across the canvas. The result: no face, arms, or hands, but violent slashes of ochre, throbbing purple globes, orange lightning-bolts. Never had Sam suspected such things existed inside him. Never had anyone noticed. Franz said, “Tell me about your country again, Sam, tell me …” and Sam felt possessed of real power.

  If Sam stayed longer than three months, he’d need a visa. It was best to apply early so he headed to the Swiss Immigration Office.

  He struggled through a form in four languages, none of them English. The French instructions helped him most.

  When his number was called, he approached a man sitting at a wooden desk and stamping strips of paper. Behind him sat similar people at similar desks with similar paper strips. “Hello,” Sam said.

  “Guten Tag.” The man had pointed diagonal streaks of grey in his jet-black hair; he wore rectangular glasses whose thick lenses made his eyes look pinched.

  Sam offered him the form. Some boxes weren’t checked off and lines were left blank. “Sorry, but I couldn’t understand these languages well.”

  The man’s eyes flickered. With lips pursed, he looked over what little was written. He took Sam’s passport and flipped through it peremptorily. He asked, “So what will be you doing in Switzerland? You have been offered a job?”

  “No, not yet, but I’ll get one.”

  “What is your field?”

  Sam knew immigrants in nursing or medicine were in demand. “I’m a geologist.”

  The man glowered. “So what would you do here, then?”

  Sam immediately felt bashful, the way he’d been in Toronto. He was regressing as if Franz had never happened. “I can look at a rock and, among other things, determine its chemical content.”

  One of the man’s eyelids lowered slightly. “Mr—” he glanced at the sheet, “Masonty. We do not give out residence or work permits for spontaneous demands unless there is an urgent reason involved. What is the reason?”

  Sam gulped. He’d tell him everything. “I really like somebody. For the first time ever. And he’s of the male sex so I can’t legally marry him and stay here. But if I were here, I could help him with his art. I could oil his sundials and the spinning, plastic wheels on his lawn. I think it will be good for me … for us, which will be good for the whole country.”

  The man burst out laughing. Then he removed his glasses, wiped his eyes, and put his glasses back on. “Switzerland has a great love of the homosexuals.” Sam bristled at the sound of that word. “We would never put you in camps or force you to walk down the street wearing funny hats. But such unions have no legal status here. They have no effect on the speed of our tramways or the quality of nuts in our chocolate or the price of gold bullion. As for work opportunities, we have no need for rock examiners in Switzerland.” He grinned ironically. “Our economy isn’t built on rock but on money made of metal.” With a dramatic flourish, he reached into his pocket and let fall a handful of coins that clattered on the desk. “If our banks were full of rocks, you could spend your time counting them. But we have no rocks in any banks here. We have many rocks in the Swiss countryside but prefer to leave them unexamined. So I’m sorry, Mr Masonty,” and then he stamped—bang!—a black square in Sam’s passport. “You must leave before the date stated.” He handed him the blue booklet labelled with the name of Sam’s country and said, “Sir, enjoy your visit.”

  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 ca
n’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.