The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  The men’s eyes brighten. Doctor #1 puts his hand on his chin and asks, “If that were true, which one of us do you think would be Sonny and which would be Cher?”

  “That’s a stupid question,” Sam answers, disgusted. “I thought you considered me intelligent. You, sir, have a bat-like hair growth below your nostrils—and would obviously be Sonny. Whereas you, sir,” he glances at Doctor #2, “are a voluptuous, leggy brunette and could only be Cher. I’m amazed you’d ask such a silly question. I think the role assignment is clear.”

  The moustached doctor frowns. Evidently he wanted to be Cher. “You have two doctors,” he says, “because your high IQ makes you a challenge to health-care professionals. Your recovery is very important to the scientific community. If you recover, we all recover.”

  “So I’ve got two.”

  “Yes,” he answers. “Two mints are better than one.” And to emphasize his point, he pops a mint into his mouth and bites it.

  Sam doesn’t want to talk about his life today, so he describes the cracks in the ceiling, their resemblance to seismograph lines or to the frenzied scribblings of a junkie trying to write his own name.

  The men sit still as totem poles. Sam sighs again. He sighs so much that eighty percent of the air in the hospital must be made up of his carbon dioxide. Clearly, the doctors want him to talk about his family and childhood, so as usual he nestles down into his chair, as if in preparation for a bedtime story someone else will tell. He closes his eyes, concentrates, and begins to recount the tales of his life. He refuses to see patterns, but describes things randomly with no beginnings, middles, or ends. Yet sometimes the events arrange themselves into forms Sam wasn’t looking for. The stories connect to the ones told the previous day or are as self-contained and alone as a single star in the sky. As he speaks, the men’s pens stroke lovingly at their sheets, moving back and forth, up and down, rhythmically like waves. He expects to see their pages covered with curlicues and fluid, elegant spirals when, in fact, they are printing sentences that march compliantly between narrow lines that shoot straight across the page.

  “My father was a fisherman,” Sam says. “He was a fisherman living on the edge of the ocean. He spent all his youth hauling in nets of fish that gleamed like jewels and fluttered like fingers wagging until one day, there were no fish left. Now he floats staring dumbly into dark water. He curses and fidgets, and gets so tangled up in his nets that he cannot move but sits baking in the sun like a fish caught in a net. I have had to paddle out in a rowboat to rescue him. As I cut through the net to free him, he continues to gaze into the watery depths. Looking for what? Fins flickering? Hands waving? The flash of an eye that opens and closes?”

  “Do you look for eyes in water?” asks the Sonny-like doctor.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you look for eyes in kitchen-sink dishwater, toilet bowls, or the wonderful minestrone soup they serve here on Fridays?”

  “You mean Mondays,” corrects Cher.

  “One of the two days,” continues Sonny.

  Sam says, “I don’t think I look for eyes anywhere.”

  “Do you look for naked bodies in water? Is that what you look for?”

  He recalls grey water rippling against white porcelain. “Thursday night was bath night for our family. My sister always took hers before mine. Sitting in the tepid water, I could still smell her body.”

  “Your sister. Yes. Tell us about her.”

  Sam speaks honestly. “My sister has spent her life winking at people who won’t wink back. She’s fluttered her eyelashes, and my lashes have tried to match their velocity but failed. We played together, painted purple dots on neighbours’ doorsteps, draped our bodies over clotheslines and pretended we were shirts drying, ran up and down the valleys, our arms outstretched. But my sister is attached to my mother who is, in turn, attached to my father, and the same electricity flows through all of them. When I became aware of the rocks in the ground beneath my feet, I abandoned my sister and hiked to the steel city where I live. Still, my sister wanders up one street and down another and the footprints she leaves are larger than the shoes that made them. She lives trapped where the edges of buildings are blurred by sheaths of fog, sunlight makes flat windowpanes appear concave, and at night the ocean futilely bangs its head against the shore. Sue has heard the distant pounding, but will she ever wake?

  “I hear her voice call me in the early morning and the sound becomes a rope that coils around my neck and pulls. I want to free my sister but don’t know how. She trusts wind more than stone, but air brings you nothing and that’s what she has. My father has fish, I have rocks, but my sister has zero.”

  “And your mother,” Sonny asks. “What about her?”

  Sam speaks honestly. “My mother does not have zero. Every number added up is hers. She looks up into the sky and it is an extension of her cerebral cortex. She looks down at the earth and those are her feet growing lichen and grass shrubs. When the wind blows, she falls to her knees, the world enters her, and she opens her mouth and gives the world back to itself in long, unbroken syllables. Bonfires glow in every corner of her skull, and her skin conceals muscles of such strength that she can fell trees with one blow of the hatchet and crumble shale rocks in her hands. She has braided the hair of my sister into such iron-solid scrollwork, a smithy’s poker can’t undo it. My mother gives and takes as does the universe, but there are things beyond her fingertips, and she can not accept this. When I was a child, Mother towered so high, I could not believe there could be a sky above her. She is an ocean that bubbles and pitches, but is so all-encompassing and formless that only the solid, defined edges of rocks could save me, and so I smashed stone against stone until I built a world she couldn’t touch and would fear if she knew it existed. For she is merciless. She pours bleach onto the bright, upturned faces of sunflowers so the birds that eat the seeds die. She hacks at the roots of raspberry bushes that are more fruitful than the womb that bore us. One day I discovered my second rock collection covered with blood; she’d tried to smash the stones with her bare hands. The next day she mail-ordered a Charles Atlas wrist-strengthener, and a week later I could hear her in the basement groaning as she squeezed the latex balls. After dinner she challenged my father to an arm-wrestle and won. That night my rocks in their trays looked like sugar cookies that would dissolve when touched. At midnight I put my rocks in a box under my arm and left Labrador for good. As I passed my sister’s door, I pressed my lips against the polished wood. She’d be in hysterics in the morning. I was creeping through the living room when my father walked in, still wearing his oilskins. I held one finger before my lips and we stared at each other for a long time. Then I passed through the doorway and, for the first time in my life, climbed up and over the lip of the valley and headed east toward the city.”

  Sonny’s voice becomes very quiet. “And this,” he says, “Franz person. Tell us about him.”

  Sam jerks up his head. Four eyes and two ballpoint pen nibs glare back.

  No. He will not speak honestly. He will not offer Franz’s body on a platter so that they can separate pelvis from torso. He will not let them peel Franz from his brain and shape him into whatever form suits them. There’s a type of cave lichen that’s killed by the light that makes it visible. Let them shine their flashlights elsewhere. The world’s centre remains stone-circled for a reason.

  Sam has thrown story after story at the doctors—“Here, catch this”—and they race to catch a ball arcing high in the air, but one ball is never enough, and Sam has to juggle, volley, and lob in all directions to keep their over-washed, antiseptic-reeking hands off Franz. He peers at a stain on the wall and tells them Franz was a rosy-cheeked milkmaid living in the high Alps and that his skin was white as cream and his hair soft as lamb’s wool; together they’d stand in alpine meadows and blow long, curling horns, then prance about fields with bells on their necks until they fell naked beside piles of sheep dung and proceeded to make love. At the moment of c
limax, Franz would yodel; his voice echoing about the mountains caused avalanches and made goats fall off cliffs.

  “Can you impersonate this yodelling for us?” asks Sonny.

  Sam can’t, so he explains that Franz was a seventy-year-old blacksmith who beat metal beside the lake below the Matterhorn; the sound of pounding metal was so infectious, Sam would perform avant-garde interpretive dances on glaciers, jutting his hips to and fro and clawing his fingers before his face as if scraping hardened frost from the air.

  “Can you perform this dance now?”

  That’s impossible, so Sam tells them Franz was a Zurich housewife who incessantly polished delicate china figurines on mahogany shelves; the last time Sam visited, he’d swung his coat over his shoulder and a statuette of a shepherd playing a hornpipe fell and smashed on the hardwood. Franz picked up each glass shard and dropped them into a bin with no injury to himself, but when Sam touched just one piece, scratches appeared on the palms of his hands and every finger bled.

  “Could you show us the scars?”

  On and on it goes. “Tell us about Franz! Franz! Franz!” repeating that name over and over; it is so disorienting to Sam that his own words stick like mud to the roof of his mouth, and he is no longer his new derisive, sarcastic self. Blood slows to become sludge in his veins, his brain spins like a weathercock in empty space; he feels he is sinking and can only see the terrible distance between his body and Franz’s. As he huddles finally brain-naked before them, the doctors lick their lips and go for the kill. They hurl questions like stones at his exposed flesh.

  “How could six weeks with one person have changed you so utterly?”

  “Was it because he was your first real lover and the betrayal so sudden?”

  “What is this diamond that has become so important?”

  “And why Switzerland, why not Austria, Sweden, or Italy? For God’s sake, why not Italy?”

  “Surely there were signs you’d collapse before you met him. What glue held you together?”

  “Why did this glue stop working when you entered Switzerland?”

  They attempt to uproot desire from its hiding place, give it dimensions, weight, a back and a front. But once you describe something, you destroy it. Sam writhes beneath the onslaught of language until he collapses weeping on the floor before them. “I don’t know why anything’s happened! I don’t know who Franz truly is, why the ocean exists, why rocks don’t fly, and why we can’t walk on water! I don’t know anything anymore! Please let me be!”

  The two doctors look at each other. Have they peeled off a layer of resistance?

  “I don’t understand why you’re so harsh with me, Sonny.” Sam wipes tears from his cheeks. “And you, Cher, I really had high hopes for you.” He looks up at the two doctors and says, “Sonny and Cher, I’m disappointed in the both of you.” At the mention of their linked names, the men beam.

  Sam confesses a secret. “I feel embarrassed because I’ve had this relationship that you, as scientists, know is meaningless. It can’t produce offspring and is an evolutionary mistake. I don’t know why I’m a biological non-sequitur.”

  Sonny looks directly at Cher. Then he reaches over and takes her hand in his.

  The next day the security guard unlocks Sam’s door and grunts, “You have walking privileges. You can go through the hallways and the hospital grounds if you want.” Sam is shocked. He immediately has the desire to race from his room, then recalls that he has nowhere to go. Sam will leave his room but not right now. He spends the day by the window gathering energy. He knows all organisms require a vitalization stage when a change of form is imminent. Again he watches the blank rectangle of lawn. Snow is starting to melt. Small islands of green rise like bruises in the endless white. From the hall, he hears a water cooler gurgling, announcements on the P.A. “Dr Finstein wanted in Sexology clinic.”

  In the late afternoon, Sonny and Cher arrive, and when Sam hears their voices, even without looking at them, he knows something is different. He turns to see that the two men are no longer clothed in lab coats. Instead, Sonny wears white bell-bottoms and a vest that flashes with bits of tinfoil, while Cher wears a strapless, low-cut dress decorated with teardrop sequins. His curly hair has been straightened and hangs down his back. Sonny is blushing. Sam pretends not to notice their new clothes so as not to embarrass them. He likes the change because during today’s session, the doctors spend more time looking at each other than at Sam. They keep losing their train of thought; often, for no reason, Cher abruptly wiggles her shoulders, and sometimes when Sam is speaking, they look at each other and hum.

  However, their attention turns to him completely when Sonny offers Sam an envelope with his name on it. Sam carefully takes the paper rectangle. The postmark is Labrador.

  “Now that we can trust that you won’t eat any stones,” explains Sonny, “we can safely give you your letters without fearing you’ll choke on the sealing glue.”

  Sam glances at the Queen, whose face is crossed by four parallel ripples. He is amazed that someone in the world knows he is here. He is not as sequestered as he thought.

  Something at the centre of him shifts. He lifts his head and strains to hear into an empty distance where he searches for the slightest sound. Somewhere in this building is a passageway between his life and the rest of the world. Somewhere a bridge exists. At that moment, he thinks: why do I forget that life never repeats, that minutes don’t return, that life transforms itself each second? Why clutch at phantoms? My time with Franz had little to do with happiness and much to do with something greater. He slowly rips open the envelope and finds a long letter. He reads:

  My dear son,

  You are imprisoned in a psychiatric institution and pain is all around you. You must know I love you as God loves you. You are in my heart and my hopes follow you everywhere …

  He folds the page. “It’s from my mother,” he says. “Doing her usual schtick.”

  Sam wonders what is happening to his name floating about the outside world; how many other people know he’s here? What stories are being told about him? Sam knows that on this dynamic planet everything goes in circles. There are the cycles of day and night as the ground alternately heats and cools, and cycles of seasons as the Earth orbits the sun. There are cycles of the wobble of the Earth on its axis. Even the movement of lava below the Earth’s crust is cyclical; it rises up, melts, descends, melts, then rises up again. Everything rotates—planets around space, the moon around the Earth, the Earth around itself.

  At that moment something—the way the knife-blade of sunlight lights the top knob on the bedpost, or how Cher’s lipstick covers only her lips and never crosses the line onto her skin, or how when he looks out the window, a bird the colour of hazelnuts is flying in a rising arc through the sky—makes Sam feel that miracles are possible. He senses he will see Franz again. Despite the iron bars of logic that imprison him, he is sure he will meet him one last time.

  The force that fuels the world still exists somewhere.

  “This mail arrived directly,” explained Sonny. “Other letters are forwarded here.” Ah, they read his letters to find the final piece of the puzzle. “If you’re co-operative, we’ll share them with you.”

  His door will be open this afternoon. He’ll search for the mailroom, that wonderful conduit between this hospital and the world outside. Trying to act blasé, he gives the letter to Cher. “I don’t need this,” Sam explains. “Crumple it up and put it in your bra. Your left breast is bigger than your right.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” she says, her voice a husky vibrato.

  The next day Sam crosses the line separating his room from the hallway.

  His slippered feet scuffle along the white-tiled floor and he hears new sounds: moans, cries, rattling trolley-carts, laughter, humming razors, static-y intercoms, and bedpans clanging like cymbals.

  He glances into the common room furnished with rocking chairs, a painting of a sunset, round-cornered coffee tables, and an ankle
-deep shag carpet the colour of clay. Farther down the hall is the gym, where armies of people move their limbs like pistons; torsos on mats fold themselves up and down like giant wallets opening and closing. Old women and young men hobble along a running track that takes them back to where they came from and then sends them off again. How interesting the world is, even this little community within the walls of the asylum. So much variety, motion, activity, and colour. Why had he once scorned human beings? Why had he liked to feel separate? What the eye sees is so different from what actually is. He remembers Delial’s horror when Sam tried on a yellow shirt in Excelsior’s. “It doesn’t match your skin colour; you look like a cadaver,” he’d said. Why did people’s gazes stop at the surface? He recalls how he’d disdained Franz’s stacks of clothing and realizes that he assessed his lover unfairly. He should’ve appreciated Franz’s creativity, the way he viewed his own body as a canvas to be covered with an endless cavalcade of textures, colours, and forms, transforming himself into a different person every day.

  Sam now wants to enter people’s minds and hear their thoughts. How are they different from his? What a burden it is to be just one person limited by a single psychology. Why had his curiosity extended only as far as inanimate geology? He tried to save the world but was blind to the people in it.

  Down in the basement Sam discovers the hospital kitchen. He peers through the round window in the door and observes rows of bran muffins nestled like chicks in tin cubby-holes. A baker with a white cylinder on his head is swinging a rolling pin in the air. Farther along, the boiler room; next, the humid laundry room, the security office, and finally, in the hall’s dead end, the mailroom. He stands at the open doorway. Inside is a silent counter with a button-bell on top. If he goes in and rings it, will what is rightfully his be given him?

  Back in his room, Sam lies on the bed, not in foetal position, but for the first time in months, flat on his back.