Even if Sam could penetrate the Earth’s hard skin and journey deep toward its fiery heart, the now-buried diorite and glittering amethyst, the purple-bubbled gabbro and streaked pegmatite would surround him and ignite a sense of wonder that would hold him stationary between the surface and the centre as the Earth spins slowly, so slowly that those who have always lived on its outer rim think the world is motionless and that the sky is moving.
As morning light began to flow around the edges of the window blind, Sam had the desire to clutch his lover’s body, but he was afraid to wake him. Franz would be furious. At what? Geography? Let be. The words were an indecipherable tattoo beating in his brain.
After breakfast they headed out into a world where everything had sped up. The Earth spun in reverse as they walked along twisting trails, through moss-rimmed craters, stepped in and out of mud footprints that would, from now on, point in one direction only, passed open-mouthed caves where stalactites had finally stopped dripping. The tram car hurtled through the streets where the last snow was melting. At the airport they got lost in an endless, underground labyrinth where they turned right and then left and then back and around; they followed arrows that pointed up, down, in all directions at once, and finally stood in front of Terminal 3, the wind blowing Sam’s hair as his scarf lashed from his neck, and he looked at Franz (a man whose body conquered stone), glanced down at his flapping ticket (to a country no one visits), and when he lifted his head, Franz said, “Sam,” and his voice fissured. “We had some good times but please don’t write. We must forget. Danke.” Then he lurched round and walked stiffly back into the tunnel, and when the glass door closed on his stone-spined back forever, Sam thought: What will become of my country now?
At last Sam stood before the ten iron steps leading into the aircraft. He felt that climbing those stairs would be the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.
When he tore his foot from the earth and let it bang down on the first step, a huge crevice formed in the Northwest Territories and spread south all the way through Manitoba, thus permanently separating east from west. As his left foot struck the second stair, the Continental Divide cracked and British Columbia was thrown into the ocean, never to be seen again. At the third step, the Maritimes were consumed beneath a flash tidal wave. On the fourth, all of Ontario’s skyscrapers cracked and every church steeple in Québec shattered. At the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth steps, brush fires lay waste to the wheat fields of the prairies, the Rocky Mountains tumbled into the foothills, the Arctic tundra was submerged beneath a vast inland sea, and in the southern cities, every shopping centre imploded, the subway tunnels caved in, and all the red-bricked walls in subdivisions were jolted into such odd angles, their houses would never resemble each other again.
As the plane rose, Sam looked through the window and saw the remaining snow in Zurich completely dissolve to water that flowed down the streets and into the lake as people ran outside clapping and dancing. With his face in his hands, he wept loudly without restraint as cold winds thrashed his cheeks and snow poured down from a small cloud just below the carry-on luggage rack. Then, above the water, he saw the Atlantic Ocean burst into flame and become one vast, boiling pit.
When he arrived in Toronto, he didn’t know where he was. Everything had changed. The CN Tower, which had been in the city centre, was in the north. Streets that ran east-west went north-south or diagonally. The city no longer had seven islands in the lake but two hundred. When he boarded the subway, he realized it had been transformed into an amusement-park train that went in a circle around the business district, while the old subway lines had been moved to the countryside so farmers could more easily transport cattle.
Sam tried to take a taxi home but forgot his street name and his neighbourhood’s name. Then he opened a phonebook to search for his address, but the alphabet was in a new order beginning “H R F” and ending “B V E.” He ran into his landlady who pointed east (his apartment had been in the west) and said, “One kilometre. Beside the oil refinery.” Toronto had an oil refinery? As he walked home, the ground kept fracturing beneath his feet. Lines formed in the pavement as he crossed the street. He had to jump over gullies, steadily widening crevices, and when he reached the edge of a new borough called South York and saw his apartment building in the distance, he had to cross a windfilled ravine to reach it.
He entered his apartment and stood looking at the empty walls. He thought everything would be fine once he got back into his old routine. He could forget all that’d happened and become his old complacent self again. But the rocks in their plastic cubes had changed from a bright green to pale grey as if they’d died from lack of oxygen. At night, with his head on the pillow, he could hear it: the fire burning at the Earth’s centre. Molten lava coagulated into steaming mounds that collapsed into fragments that joined other steaming, shifting masses. He felt tricked, as if a mirror had been pulled from in front of his face to reveal a blank space.
Every morning he saw the bones of Franz’s knuckles in stones that littered city construction sites, his kneecaps in the boulders that marked entrances to suburban parks, the ridge of his eyebrows in the curved rocks arching in bungalow flowerbeds, and when Sam tried to shut Franz out and, by staring through a microscope lens, reduce the world to a tiny circle, there in the lit rock were lines like the veins on the backs of his legs and abrupt indentations that resembled the cleft in his chin. Sam could not escape, no matter how hard he tried.
Six months after his return, he threw a stone across a river and started dating other men. He put an ad in the newspaper, followed strangers onto newly built subway platforms, shook hands a second too long with terse-eyed boys at house parties, and discreetly pressed his knee against the seam-strained crotches of slobbering men on barstools who immediately ordered him drinks or put out their cigarettes and left. Men in the dance bars here resembled those in the Zurich disco, and he wondered if this was a franchise. Once he tried to ram a stone through a dancer’s lips, but the man dashed off, called the police, and Sam fled.
He hoped sex would sear Franz from his mind and made love in telephone booths, candlelit boudoirs, gas-station washrooms, on top of the CN Tower—but his hand kept forgetting to cover his mouth, which yawned uncontrollably.
Then he threw a stone across another river and started dating women. He mingled at office parties in companies he didn’t work for, offered unmatched socks to ladies in laundromats, and his world became filled with the intoxicating odour of rose-petal perfume, the static crackle of fingernails running through red-dyed hair, the humid, nylon-scented heat wafting from pantyhose left drying on radiators. But in bed he kept looking for body parts that he thought had gotten lost in the covers yet weren’t there in the first place, and one day, after giving a long, affectionate speech, he realized he was mouthing the lyrics of a pop song he’d heard on the radio.
Then he threw a stone into another river and started dating hermaphrodites, transsexuals, men who were women, and women who were men or both or neither or who didn’t know. He dated people dressed as animals and animals dressed as people, and spent an entire evening chatting with a panty-clad blow-up doll that he deflated and inflated for variety.
But amidst the myriad faces of the world’s people who sat across the table from him in ten-star restaurants where vichyssoise and shark flambé were just the appetizers, where the table was piled high with long-stemmed roses, where Valentine’s Day came twice a week, the violinist never left your side, and champagne bottles popped non-stop, always as Sam finished his drink, he found an ice cube bouncing against his lips, colliding with his teeth, chilling his tongue, skull, and body until, shivering, he had to run to the washroom, where every solid object—the cubicle walls, gleaming chrome taps, tin wastepaper basket—seemed a part of Franz’s body.
If only the world would stop spinning and he be released from its centrifugal forces! But no. There was the ground forever beneath his feet, the fire burning at the Earth’s centre, winds blowing one way
, then another. The problem was the looking-glass: his country and Franz’s were the same but opposite. Sam was Franz, and he wasn’t. No one else in his home country had the same merging of fire and ice. Sam tried to order Fairy Tales of Flesh, but it wasn’t distributed on his side of the Atlantic.
Then he drew Franz’s jewel-flashing eyes on a piece of paper that he tried to burn, but it wouldn’t catch fire. He flushed the sheet down the toilet, but the next day it returned, diamonds flowing through his taps, swirling over the plates he ate from, shooting from the showerhead to saturate his body. He was regularly surprised by mid-summer snowstorms in supermarket parking lots, in dentists’ waiting rooms, on lonely beaches where he pulled up rocks from the earth.
Sam was not made for such drama. He was meant to live out his seventy-odd years in quiet obscurity and then be buried a mere two metres below the Earth’s surface. He did not expect the world’s subterranean plates to shift and collide. He did not expect the oceans to conspire against him. He gazed into horizons. He shouted into windstorms.
Finally one night he raced out into his landlady’s garden, hurled himself onto the ground, clawed his fingers into the earth, and dug up limestone, shale pebbles, dolomite, sandstone, gypsum, travertine, and rammed it all down his throat.
The next morning, he woke up in Emergency.
PART TWO
Air
My body was changing. This happens to girls my age, so I wasn’t surprised. In health class I’d learned how our breasts would swell, our hips billow, and patches of hair appear on our bodies. I expected everything and, despite Mother’s warnings, revelled in the new flesh covering my bones, the rounding-out of what had once been level.
One thing that I didn’t expect—and couldn’t stand—was the stickiness. A glue-like residue coated my skin, veneered my armpits, the tips of my breasts, and the space between my legs. It was clammy and viscous, made my thighs cling together and stuck my arms to my torso. My toes melded into one solid, beak-like protuberance. I perspired daily, but I did not perspire as other sixteen-year-old girls did for, you see—I sweated honey. This is not a metaphor but true life. From my pores came liquid, golden honey such as bees make, such as Father puts on his toast every morning before he slices it into strips.
“Tests show that your perspiration has the normal levels of sodium and chloride,” said Dr Merton, his voice level, “but its unusually high levels of sugar make its composition similar to”—he gulped—“bee-honey.”
Mother raised one hand and cried, “God, don’t let me lose my daughter just as I lost my son!”
That’s you, Sam. She considers you lost.
Although you can not hear my thoughts, Sam, I imagine I’m talking to you. Prayers to the brother who abandoned me. The day after you left Labrador, my honey started flowing. Is my body weeping for your loss?
At home Mother removed my clothes and coated me with sea salt, driftwood shavings, baking soda, coral dust—anything to staunch the flow. She forbade me to eat corn syrup, caramel squares, or Jujubes; she uprooted all the flowers in our garden fearing they’d attract honey-making bees, though bees hadn’t been seen in this part of Labrador for decades (the only thing for them here is rock stained with sea salt). One night Mother sneaked into our neighbour’s yard and gutted their tiny tulip bed. “I don’t know who did it,” she said into the phone the next morning. Mother even drove me to Mary’s Harbour to get a second opinion, but the doctor there agreed with Dr Merton. “Your perspiration has the standard levels of protein and fatty acids, but there’s all that unmetabolized sugar! I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Mother threatened to leave Labrador to get help. Of course, she’s afraid to leave. She doesn’t want what happened to you, Sam, to happen to me.
Our town, Cartwright, was similar to many other villages along the shore, full of the smell of bonfires and rotting flounder, the cry of seagulls and the thump of wood hitting the earth. Every day fishermen shuffled their feet along the boards of the once-busy port. Gales blew everywhere, wailing up one street and down another. Wind rattled our windows at night, splattered bugs on our walls, and whipped telephone wires. I’d always feared the Cartwright wind but lately would flee our clapboard house to run into it. Some things are greater than fear, and I wanted to know what they were.
Every night, doing my homework I felt honey drops crawling down my neck, beading in the small of my back, collecting in creases around my waist, and dropping in globules from my vagina. Honey seeped through my hair, darkened the fabric of my shirts. Each time Mother threw my clothes in the washer, the agitator got clogged and the machine stopped running. When I took a shower, my sweat flowed down the drain and blocked the pipes in the basement, and Father had to phone the plumber. I was blamed for the pipes cracking beneath the sidewalk, the sewers backing up on our street, and a fire-hydrant that exploded.
School, however, was where things were the worst. When classes started in September, I thought I could hide my affliction, but Mr Schmidt soon noticed syrup beads clinging to my forehead and said, “Sue, are you feeling ill? Do you want to go home?” Whenever I raised my hand to answer a question, my arm made a loud ffffflit sound and everyone turned toward me. One day when I flung back my hair, a honey-drop flew off and landed on the open textbook of Estelle Beaverbank, Esther’s younger sister. Like Esther, she had a mountain of blonde hair lacquered into a complex series of curlicues and a slot-like mouth you wanted to slip a nickel into. She cried out, “Oooh, gross! Sue’s a filthy glue-girl!”
At that moment, all was lost. “So that’s what it is,” said Mr Schmidt. “I wondered why the doorknobs were sticky.”
Over the next weeks, my honey flow increased and soon my residue was everywhere—on the edges of chairs I sat on, the side of a doorjamb I’d brushed past, on hall walls I’d leaned against, on the edges of toilet seats, and on the piece of chalk I’d used on the blackboard. Small glue footprints ran up and down the aisles between our desks and along the hallway’s square tiles. In Home Ec, the sewing machine needles became jammed and wouldn’t budge. In the library, when I put a book on the shelf, students had trouble removing it and when they did, they couldn’t open it. A steadily increasing puddle grew beneath my chair in homeroom, and during gym class my honey was splattered everywhere, across the gymnastics bar, along the hobbyhorse, all over the somersault mats. The shot-putts became so coated, no one would throw them. The school had to hire an extra janitor to deal with the clean-up.
Mr Schmidt treated me with the condescending tolerance one accords a physically challenged student who, through no fault of her own, is a complete nuisance. “We’ll have to delay the geography test until tomorrow,” he sighed. “I need to unroll the map of Europe, but it’s stuck shut.”
After the initial shock, people became fascinated with my physical condition. Groups of girls invited me to walk part-way home with them. Brows creased, they’d glare at the skin on my neck.
“It’s all through your hair. Can you comb it?”
I couldn’t.
“Is it true you can’t wear a pretty formal dress? Estelle says your sweat would wreck anything nice.”
“I guess that’s true.”
I wasn’t used to making conversation, but now the pattern of dialogue consisted of a series of simple questions I had only to answer.
“When did you start getting it?”
“It started just a bit seven years ago, the day after my brother left home. But last month on my birthday, it really started flowing.”
“Wow,” the girls would say in unison. They were my first “friends.” When you lived with us, Sam, I didn’t see the point in socializing. Now I wanted to meet people.
The boys started inviting me to hang out with them at the end of the school day. Sometimes I’d escape down the alley beside the portables, but one Friday, feeling curious, I shrugged and followed. For a minute I thought I was being led to “the bushes”—a spot at the end of the football field where people hung out or “g
ot friendly”—but they turned the opposite way, toward a large oak tree. We sat in a circle on the shaded grass while the boys eyed me solemnly. No one spoke. Boys up close seemed alarming. Unlike you, Sam, they had dirt-like moustaches and grubby hands, and their clothes smelled like sour milk. The sun hung high in the sky; a dragonfly circled my forehead. Then the boys dared each other to touch me. I studied my legs draped in wrinkled trousers that resembled their own. I felt embarrassed without knowing why.
“Put your finger on the drop on the end of her chin and put it in your mouth. Here’s two bucks you won’t.”
“Touch her ankle and lick it, shitface. If you do, I’m the one who steals cigs from Variety Plus tonight.”
“Ten bucks if you put your tongue in her ear; there’s a whole poolful in there.”
None of them touched me. They leered at a honey drop clinging to the end of my elbow. As they waited for it to fall, their faces stopped twitching, their eyes darkened, and they became stone still. One boy accidentally got some on his hand but didn’t put it in his mouth. When he got up to go home—it was dinnertime by then—he just wiped it on the grass and sauntered off, trying to look courageous.
Estelle often chatted with Millie by the north wall. When the boys passed, she’d glance at the stains on their pants. Then her head would turn in my direction so quickly that her neck muscles clicked. Her eyes slitted and her lips formed a perfect horizontal line. “The guys in this school are going mental if they wanna be with Sue.”
My downfall was set in motion the day Jimmy Bridock asked me on a date. Jimmy smelled like wood fires, smoked venison, and gunpowder. He had a lick of hair that swung over his forehead like a cow’s tail batting flies. His round cheeks were volcanic with acne, and he had moist eyes and cracked lips always twisting one way then another, as if chronically unsure of what expression to make. His father took him to the bush where Jimmy cut the steel-jawed traps that clenched dead foxes. He had a homing pigeon’s ability to locate trapped animals. Even when I was a little girl, he’d liked me. When I’d push open the door of the grade-school washroom, he’d be standing in the hall with his head down. I’d walk past him and he’d look away and kick at the floor—but when I turned back, he’d be squinting after me. He’d never spoken to me because he probably sensed that my attention was directed elsewhere, for those were the days when your presence filled me, Sam, and I didn’t notice other kids. I think our isolation crippled me. Still, I remember the wonderful contraptions you made for me, pendulums swinging from axles you nailed into my bedroom wall, whirling bike wheels perched on steel prongs, and circular plates that hung from ropes—you’d set everything spinning and turn the radio up full blast, “The Nipper in the Cod and the Codder in the Pail,” and it seemed the circles were spinning to the sound and the music was rotating the circles and what we heard and saw were joined to the same relentless, throbbing, rhythmic source.
The Lava in My Bones Page 7