The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  Snooping, Sam discovered a dozen new paintings stashed in the living room closet. Franz had been painting when Sam was out. Each showed trees interspersed with elongated squares of light. He began to regularly ogle these hidden images.

  One night Franz panicked and grabbed Sam’s forearm, pressed it against his own, and exclaimed, “You’re you and I’m me, right? This damned line between us”—he pointed at the crack separating their skins—“can’t be crossed—we won’t become each other, nicht wahr? Even though I speak to you in your mother tongue there’s no way I’ll start being like you?”

  “Of course not. And I won’t become like you either.” Yet Sam wasn’t sure of this.

  “Look at how you dress. I’d never wear clothes like yours.”

  “And your interest in advertising bores me. I could never care about that.”

  The men looked uneasily into each other’s eyes yearning to hear a giant “Yes” from the universe. Sam knew it was essential they remain separate; just as snow and fire must exist for the Earth to survive, the two men must not neutralize each other’s extreme qualities.

  Sam became troubled about how the opposite sex fit into all this. With women he had a script to follow. He knew who should open the door, pay for dinner; sex seemed more straightforward, less negotiable.

  One evening Sam guiltily snuck over to south Bahnhofstrasse, where female prostitutes paced, smoking and scratching their armpits. A woman in a micro-skirt and twisted halter top that pushed one boob up and the other down chewed gum in a darkened doorway. Sam was not dressed as elegantly as the Swiss men, so she said in English, “Hello. Want some Spass?”

  He took a step toward her and grimaced. In one quick movement she grabbed him by the arm and manoeuvred him into a dark room with a mattress on the floor. She asked him to show his money, which he did. “Take off your clothes,” she said.

  Sam undid his belt, not quite knowing why he was here. He didn’t want to abandon Franz, but hoped that making love to a woman would clarify his mind. When she was finally naked in his arms, he realized his desire for her was too lukewarm to act on.

  “Nothing personal,” he muttered. “But I could only be happy with you if you had Franz Niederberger’s body and voice.”

  “I’m good at doing imitations.”

  “I want to eat rocks.” He paid her and left.

  On the tramway, wheels clattered and the air smelled of gasoline and wet socks. At station stops, people wearily shuffled on and off. Sam studied a dozing banker, a mother holding a sleeping baby, a bent elderly lady with watery eyes, an adolescent picking at his pimples with the end of a comb. The whole scene seemed pervaded with an indefinable grief. He felt sorry for every single person there, longed to take each rider’s hands in his and comfort them, saying, “In the past, I was solitary and desperate, just like you. I never realized we were so alike.”

  Arriving home Sam caught Franz finishing up a painting. Franz blushed; he didn’t put the canvas in the closet right way but turned from his easel and took Sam in his arms. As Sam felt Franz’s hands warm against the small of his back, he looked at the painted tree trunks sloping upwards, branches like fingers clawing at the sky, and the lights like eyes flashing fire.

  Days passed. This was the first time since he’d left Labrador that someone always greeted Sam when he arrived home, the first time someone said goodbye when he left, the first time he told someone the trivia of his day (and how much more meaningful that seemed than his scientific ideas), the first time someone laughed at his jokes, talked to him at midnight, looked out the window beside him, prepared his breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Franz gave him a haircut. With each snip, the follicles in his skull tickled. “Scheiss, Sam, what bastard did this to you? It’s good you met me so I can repair your ‘do’.” Sam enjoyed feeling Franz’s fingers move about his head like delicately stepping spider’s legs. Then Franz asked, “When are you going home, by the way?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s my university’s decision.” A lie. Sam knew that at any given moment Franz could simply tell him to go back to the hotel, but he didn’t. If this were a fairy tale, that meant the dragon had been slain. Or hadn’t arrived yet.

  When Sam gave his next talk at the University of Zurich, he spoke before a near-empty auditorium. “If we can discover that force that jump-starts energy combustion, we can align our technologies to it, and our lifestyles will not kill our planet. But what could that initial force be? The energy created when electrons collide? The friction caused by water eroding rock? Somewhere in the relationship between rock, water, ice, and air is the secret of that robust energy that moves our Earth and fights its destruction.” In the front row one man snored, his head bobbing. Two women in the back were reading magazines. “Do you know what I’m talking about? Do you have any idea what I’m saying at all, you bunch of brain-dead morons?”

  The sleeper belched.

  Meanwhile, Franz went to Excelsior’s to seduce the salesman with the haircut. Later, on the man’s pitching waterbed, Franz felt seasick and threw up in the night-table drawer. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He clutched himself, rocking on the rug. “Normally you’re my type. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He went home and couldn’t stop painting trees and beams of light.

  The next day Franz told Sam, “I’m going to change the locks on the door. You won’t be able to come in unless I’m here, but it’s no big deal.” But Franz didn’t change the locks. Then he prepared a Spanish quiche but ate it all himself, saying, “Didn’t think you’d be hungry.” He washed his clothes but not Sam’s. The grease-stained pillow lay beside Franz’s clean one.

  They went to a fancy party, and Franz “accidentally” spilled red wine on Sam’s lapel, then later “inadvertently” pushed Sam’s face into a bowl of trifle. Franz apologized profusely, and on the way home started crying.

  “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 ha
d 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.