A knock at the door. The gangly, pimple-cheeked orderly shuffles in with his pail of soapy water. The uneventfulness of institution life magnifies trivialities, which grow like ivy to take up all the space in Sam’s mind. The orderly splashes water across the floor, and Sam becomes angered by the irregular rhythm of the mop slapping tiles.
“You’re not getting at the dust in the corners,” complains Sam. “Use a little elbow grease, for God’s sake.” Two coffee stains darken the orderly’s shirt. “You’re dirtier than the floor you’re cleaning … And that soapy water should be pink, not burgundy.” The intern is quiet today, lost, Sam thinks, in his adolescent dream-world. Whenever he does speak, his words are startlingly pointed. His shoulders are square like Franz’s, whose body remains superimposed over every aspect of Sam’s life. “Get a haircut or a hairnet.” He hears, in his own words, his judging of his Swiss lover. Sam had harshly assessed the frivolity of Franz’s life, and Franz had crudely appraised Sam in return. Another reason, Sam thinks, why things ended as they did.
Before leaving, the intern says, “See ya, dude.” The door slams. Sam wonders: In what way is he a dude?
He glances at the people on the television he received yesterday. Initially the doctors wouldn’t let him have one, fearing that, as he’d eaten rocks, he might try to swallow the copper filaments or the IC chips. They conducted laissez-aller experiments in which unplugged televisions were placed beside his bed for two hours. In the end not even the channel converter had teeth marks on it, so they ordered a Toshiba 20A22. Sam didn’t want a television, but the doctors believed the glare of the screen would rouse him out of his torpor. They succeeded only in enraging him.
On the round-cornered screen a woman simpers, “How old do you think I am?”
Sam shouts, “Ninety-five, you old battleaxe!”
“I tried hot wax treatments and anti-bacterial shampoos, but still got a case of the greasies.”
“Try salting your hair with carbolic acid!”
“My teeth were yellow before I discovered Crest tooth-whitener.”
Everyone relentlessly obsesses over the trivia of their bodies. Sam understands such people now.
He touches the slit in his pillowcase and remembers a zippered pencil case and Esther’s labyrinth of hair. He unplugs the television and peeks down through the window at the battered snow angel. He silently thanks the boy and girl and wishes they’d return.
The world is quiet. He no longer notices the chafing of underground plates and booming thuds as chunks of lava collapse into each other. The fire at the Earth’s centre has stopped roaring. The same sky hangs relentless above, becoming dark, then light, dark, light, as if a cheap plastic switch were being regularly snapped on and off. The Earth is so silent at night, Sam swears he can hear the hydrogen crackling on the surface of the sun. He wonders where unsatiated desire goes. Does it evaporate? Or cannibalize itself? Energy deprived of an outlet continues to exist somewhere.
He sees his own face in the windowpane. He remembers studying himself before his first date with Franz. He tilts his head backward and his cheeks narrow, raises his face and the edges waver. Just by angling his head he can have the face of someone else, the orderly, Esther, the Swiss immigration officer. Could be he become anyone he wants? Perhaps that had been his problem. He’d thought we were singular when each of us is plural. As usual, his reveries are broken by the visit of the doctors.
“Here they are,” he says. “Carrying clipboards with edges sharp as knives and pens they’ll poke into my eyes if I keep them open long enough.” Sam’s words were once soft-centred like plump grapes. Now he spits out hard-edged words whose consonants clatter together like tacks in a jar. Sarcasm is the language of people whose emotions are dying.
The doctors see the unplugged television, stare as if at a freshly killed animal. The two men don’t sigh but, as usual, smile faintly. Why are they never angry? When Sam was a geologist, he had many days of frustration, and rocks are more co-operative than people.
He notices that today is another “special” day. The doctors have brought a rock into the room. They do this only when he’s chained to his bed while two security guards stand by the door with arms crossed. The rock is placed on his desk. The doctors’ pens are poised like aimed darts above their clipboards.
The doctor with a moustache (Sam’s given him the warmly personal name Doctor #1) says, “So, Sam, what do you think of when you see this rock?”
Sam sighs. Here we go again. “I think of teeth,” he says without thinking. “Molars or bicuspids.”
The furtive scratching on pen on paper.
“No, not bicuspids. Incisors.”
The whip-like slash of pens crossing out words.
“No, not incisors or bicuspids. Not even the teeth of humans.”
Scratch. Whip. Scratch.
Lately his thoughts have started to ricochet, surge, and explode into fragments. In the past, they were tight and cramped, proceeding step-by-step up narrow staircases. “I think of dog’s teeth. The teeth of dogs … that have been swimming in the ocean so long that their teeth look like fins.”
The two doctors glare. They don’t like this answer. The guards uncross, then re-cross their arms. Sam is not deliberately being difficult. He wants to be honest. Psychology is not his field, but he figures if he’s as frank as possible, the doctors might leave him alone. At times he admits they could even help him. “The rocks remind me of bosoms.”
Both doctors start as if shot.
“Yes. Great, big lactating tits.” The image intrigues Sam because he remembers the stories in Fairy Tales of Flesh and still longs for interchangeable body parts. If elbows could become knees or the ends of toes, necks turn into thighs while vaginas transform into armpit cavities or great gaping mouths, then he’d be freed—but from what he doesn’t know. “Boobs. Great big ones. The best ever seen. With beautiful curves and nipples that bulge forward like eyeballs. Each has a nice drop of moisture on the tip.”
The doctors are sitting up straight, their cheeks flushed as they write. The pens screech and cry. Sam is giving the right answers for a change.
“Boobs,” he repeats.
One guard reaches into his pants pocket, makes an adjustment.
“Or no,” he says, troubled. “Actually, the boobs have no nipples … because they’re afraid of looking like bull’s eyes.” Scritch, yowl, shriek, go the pens. “Or maybe they’re not boobs. In fact, those rocks are—testicles,” he shouts, excited. “Great big, swinging knackers. Cleansed of hair and freed from the dictatorial penis. And round, round as globes or women’s bosoms. In fact, those testicles are bosoms. They are testicles that women have instead of boobs. There they are, always flapping against training bras, or swinging like grandfather-clock pendulums, or dangling forward when she’s doing the laundry, or leaping off a diving board, or they drop low-low-low and become narrow, looking hollowed out as they lengthen like a reflection in a funhouse mirror when, after swim practice, she takes off her bathing suit and steps into the crowded sauna where everyone is looking.”
Both guards are sweating and have loosened their ties. A maelstrom of scratching until one doctor’s pen explodes and his clipboard falls to the floor drenched in ink.
After the session, the doctors step into the hallway. Their voices go so fast they sound like bees buzzing. Doctor #1 steps into the doorway and proudly announces that Sam had a breakthrough. “You’re making tremendous progress.” They always say this, but today, for the first time, Sam believes them.
“Sure, if you like,” he answers.
Doctor #2 says, “Pay attention to your dreams tonight.”
Sam eyes the thread dangling from the psychologist’s collar and knows it’d be easy to deceive these men. The surface never matches what’s beneath. Sam had once ignored the distance between the Earth’s surface and its centre. He recalls the gap between Franz’s frivolous life and the fact that his penis made snow fall in summer and his intestines broke down
stone. Franz had taken a great personal risk approaching him at the conference. Only now does Sam understand his generosity.
But that night, Sam can’t sleep. At three a.m. he gets down on the floor and puts his ear to the cold tile, but only hears pipes clinking.
At seven he is woken by the orderly who places orange juice and a bowl of apple crumble on the table. Sam requested a sugar-filled breakfast and the authorities complied. Sam sticks a spoon into the dessert and asks, “Why is there so much crumble and so little apple?”
“I didn’t make it.”
“You’re serving it. That makes you responsible.”
“Quit being hard on me. I’m only doing my job.”
“Only doing your job? What kind of job is that? And I’m not being hard on you.”
But Sam knows he is. He’s spent his life assessing people—when he deigned to notice them at all. No wonder he had no friends; he didn’t judge Franz in the early weeks, but as he got to know him, he quietly mocked him.
He says sadly, “All right. I’ll see if I can choke it down.”
That afternoon Doctors #1 and #2 bring in a cardboard-backed map of the world.
“Today we’d like to talk about sexuality.”
That again? Sam feels sorry for these doctors because they remind him of how he once was, fixated on details and over-defining everything. Franz had done that too. He’d said, “The first time I saw you, I knew you were homo.” Sam had disliked the label’s fated quality. “You weren’t more Liberace than Rock Hudson, but you fit on the scale somewhere. If you were with a woman, you wouldn’t know which way was up. At first glance I thought you were asexual. I couldn’t imagine you’d be lying here naked with me.” That comment still bothers Sam. He lives in a body. When he dreams of his lover, blood floods his loins and he wakes, the sheets wet.
Doctor #1 points at the map and asks Sam which country’s colour appeals to him most.
“Christ,” Sam mutters. They want him to talk of Switzerland. His fourth time in Emergency, a nurse overheard him mumbling about the Alps, deliriously repeating Franz’s name and describing his chest, the lock of hair that fell like a comma over his forehead, the shape of his penis “pointed like a tomahawk,” and the diamond growing inside him. She told everything to the hospital psychiatrist who passed the information on. People in the sciences forget nothing, Sam knows. He was once like them. Even today the structural formula of boron-bearing cyclosilicate is engraved on the insides of his eyelids. Sam sympathizes with these men yet scorns them, consumed as they are with fact-fetishizing inquisitiveness.
All our old methods! Sam regards them as rusted machines in a historical museum. How afraid we are of the gaps between words, the space separating the dot of the “i” from the stem, multiplication tables complete but for one missing number. Sam is the fraction whose top half won’t dance with its lower. He’s the digit whose square root is reducible to nothing. He is two lines that never intersect, the fulcrum two degrees short of north and one degree east of west. He is the phrase with no subjects, two objects, and five verbs that don’t accord but is a sentence nonetheless. Doctors murmur, “Such a shame, a brilliant, educated man.” The doctors fear he rode the rails of logic and fell off, and if he can’t be saved, they can’t either.
Sam pities these men for they’ll never hear the fire roaring at the Earth’s centre, see snow in summer, touch icicles hanging from shower curtains, or discover that a man’s sweat tastes like liquorice one moment and molasses the next. Deep within Sam, he feels a rising wave of sorrow; he’s going to burst into tears. The walls of the room are horrifyingly white. He chokes down a sob, trapped as he is here in the palace of Reason. Yet he will not give Franz to these doctors as easily as the Earth once offered him her secrets.
He studies the map of the world, sees the continents as multicoloured Rorschach blotches on a turquoise sea.
“Pink is a nice colour,” he says. “The British Commonwealth is pink, except for Lesotho, which is as red as a stubbed toe. Or a flattened tsetse fly.” Scratch-scratch. They love his metaphors. He feeds them more. “Or a mashed tomato. Or a ketchup stain on a tablecloth.” The worse the image is, the more honest it seems.
Yellow. Switzerland is yellow. Half-conscious in the emergency ward, he looked through the window and thought the sky was yellow.
The doctors shift in their chairs, cough. Finally Doctor #2 speaks. “We were thinking about what you said yesterday about testicles.” Ah, Sam knew they’d come back to this. “Have you had any other thoughts on that? Especially as pertains to your relationship with your father.”
“I’ve never seen my father’s testicles.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Is it possible you’ve seen them but forgot?” asks Doctor #1.
Doctor #2 says, “Maybe you repressed the memory.”
Sam reflects. His father wore chequered boxer shorts. They were wide-legged and he had trouble stuffing them into his pants. He wore hip-waders overtop. “No, I never saw them. He was a fisherman.”
“Well!” Doctor #1 sniffs. “Fishermen do have testicles.”
“I know that.”
“And?” says Doctor #1.
The pens are still.
“Yes, and?” repeats Doctor #2.
Sam says, “And what?”
Both doctors stare.
Sam explodes. “Look, if I’d known my father’s balls were so important, I would’ve asked to see them before leaving Labrador, but I never did, and do I regret that? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. When you’re living on the ocean, you don’t think about looking at your father’s nuts. All that salt-water exposure would have made them wrinkled anyway.”
“Your father’s testicles anger you,” observes Doctor #2. “The mention of them strikes a sensitive spot.”
“Are you disgusted by the body in general?” asks Doctor #1.
“Or perhaps,” chirps Doctor #2—he grins and his teeth shine like blanched almonds—“you’re afraid to realize your father’s testicles look like rocks!” He lets out a little crow and sits up, beating his hands together.
The other doctor frowns. Sam was supposed to come to this conclusion himself.
Doctor #2’s shoulders sink, and he ahems.
Sam wonders if he is afraid of the human body. He remembers the curve of Franz’s lower ribs visible where his stomach sloped into its magnificent washboard. “No,” he says. “I am in love with the human body. Never again will I number, diagram, or measure it. It is enough as is.”
The two doctors glare tight-lipped. Their pens hang like skydivers caught in mid-fall. Today Sam hasn’t given the right answers. When they leave, Sam leaps down, puts his ear to the floor. Still, only silence.
Sam hates when the psychiatrists dredge up his past. He feels they’re building an invisible house around him, locking him in patterns he should flee. The ghosts of his mother and sister appeared in Zurich because they knew they were being abandoned. The past pulls hardest when it’s in danger of losing you to the present. Any woman he slept with was always in danger of transmogrifying into his mother, who’d sneak in slyly and he’d wake up in her arms.
At eight in the morning, the intern says, “Breakfast time, big boy.”
Immediately Sam sees that the bowl contains peach cobbler, not apple crumble. A peeled peach half gleams like a severed buttock. Sam goes berserk. “You call yourself a hospital orderly and you can’t tell the difference between two kinds of fruit!” Again he hears the judgment in his voice and pities the man, but can’t stop himself. “I am a person who eats apple crumble. Hear that? Apple crumble for breakfast and from time to time melba toast when the mood hits.”
“Don’t you think it’s time for a change, dude? It’s why you’re here.” The intern has a silver cap on his front tooth that catches the light and sparkles like the mineral zircon. Sam never noticed it before. “Things change, don’t they? I’m not wearing the same underwear I had on last night, and if I were, you wou
ldn’t like the stench.”
The realization is like a pole rammed into his ribcage: things change. Every organism continually transmogrifies, and if it stops doing so, it dies. He recalls how Franz’s penis altered; some days it seemed a weapon, then a writing implement, a comfy armrest, a feisty Aunt Mabel, a stern schoolmaster, a lance raised in battle, then a droopy sad-sack friend who never goes to the movies no matter how often you ask. Perhaps Franz is still changing now, the hidden gemstone taking nutrients from all parts of his body. Sam himself had changed so much in Zurich that it’d terrified him. Why can’t he move forward now? Why cling to an iron-rimmed identity he’s been carting along the Earth’s surface for a quarter of a century?
He snatches the bowl in his trembling hands. With a spoon he tentatively scoops and slides the syrup peach-buttock between his lips. The sweetness is revolting, the syrup thick like slime, but he chews the firm flesh and swallows. All of a sudden there are tears in his eyes. The orderly winks and heads out the door. Sam is learning more from him than from the doctors.
Sam decides to set in motion a process of change to align himself with this formative principle. He moves his bed to the north side of the room, puts his pyjamas on inside out, practises standing on his head until his face is borscht-red, and instead of muttering about Franz and the fire at the Earth’s centre, he conjugates French verbs out loud. He knows he appears outlandish but is beginning to see that the ridiculous is closer to life’s source than the sensible.
The doctors enter the room and gasp. Doctor #2 writes a whole paragraph. They sit on their chairs and clear their throats.
Then Sam says, “Can I ask a question? Why are there always two of you treating me? You’re like Bobsy and Dobsy. Or Jekyll and Hyde. Or Sonny and Cher.”
The Lava in My Bones Page 17