The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  Sam smells something sour, hears rasping, and feels a tickle on the top of his head. He raises his chin, and peers into the bloodshot eyes of a snorting rat, its tongue flickering. Sam bangs his hands against the metal and the animal scurries away but reappears at the other end of the tunnel where it grunts and shuffles.

  Sam instinctively puts his hand in his torn pants to feel the edges of Franz’s letter. It is still there. No one will take it from him.

  The sun sets and the drain darkens. Sam crawls out of the hole. He stares down at his feet; the moonlight makes them appear thicker and wider. He lifts each foot and notices his swollen soles have hardened into inch-thick calluses and his toenails are now hooked talons. Opening his mouth, he places his fingertip against the incisors that are now surprisingly long and sharp. A stab of pain. He examines his finger, marvelling at the pearl of blood on its tip. He uses his teeth to gnaw a hole in the airport fence. Crouching, he watches a staircase on wheels drift onto the runway, float about indecisively, then veer toward a small parked plane. When the stair lip touches the plane’s shell, a jolt goes through Sam’s body. He races out onto the lit-up tarmac, but just before he reaches the stairs, a herd of pot-bellied security guards stampede out of a wooden hut and surround him. Some men have batons in their hands, others carry lemon donuts and a few, crullers. All are chewing. Sam kicks one man in the stomach, hoofs another in the balls, then joins his raised arms like a hatchet and hacks a third man on the head. He turns and charges up the staircase. At the top—that same damned high-pitched ringing! It’s not an alarm but a shrill throbbing coming from the eastern forests, from the direction of—Labrador. The plane’s steel door closes against his face.

  He dashes back down and races through the sea of writhing security guards wiping jelly off their faces and babbling into walkie-talkies. Sam knows he can’t come to this airport again. Next time surely the entire police force will be here, and as strong as his body was becoming, there are limits to what it can do.

  So he runs all night and all the next day. Outside Belleville’s small airport, he encounters and challenges the same floating staircase, the same guards, the same flight and escape. And again in Kingston, Gananonque, and Smith Falls. When Sam reaches the Perth airport, he peers through the wire-mesh fence to see the armed guard assembled on the runway. He resigns himself: he’ll have to travel to Zurich by sea.

  The closest Atlantic port is Ogunquit, Maine, but Sam could get caught crossing the US border. Percé, Québec has too few ships. Halifax, too many people. The best bet seems to be Sydney, Nova Scotia. Beneath the cover of night, he’ll sneak into the cargo hold of a Europe-bound ship.

  Suddenly the constant ringing sound pops, sputters once, twice, and forms syllables. “Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run!” His sister’s words extort him to approach the future by returning to the past. Cartwright has a port, and he knows the schedule of departing ships by heart. But he does not want to return to Labrador. It’s too far out of the way. The detour will take too much time. He’s spent his life extricating himself from the fires of Cartwright. Why return to a place he so desperately wanted to leave? He’s not responsible for his sister’s welfare. Let Sue save herself. But strands of guilt thread themselves through his whole body.

  “Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run …”

  The next week he sleeps by day and runs by night. His sister’s voice continues to call across a great distance. There it is beneath the sound of his feet thumping the earth, leaves shushing, tree branches creaking, and the roar of cars passing on the nearby highway. Should he really go to Cartwright?

  He passes dried-up streams, brittle forests about to burst into flame. Global warming has wreaked its havoc here. Is Sam strong enough to return to the town of his birth?

  He finds soiled newspapers and, curious, reads them. One morning he discovers a piece of newspaper with a photo of his own face glowering below the words, “Escaped Mental Patient Attacks Airport Staff. Sam Masonty, a schizophrenic psychotic has escaped from the York Mental Institution. Doctors Browning and Silversen say he is a threat to public safety …”

  Sonny and Cher. Those assholes. After all he’d done for them. Sam knows he has difficulty trusting people, and now Sonny and Cher made his worst fear come true. He reads on: “Joe Baxter, an orderly, was fired because he witnessed the patient’s escape but waited hours before reporting it.” Sam can’t bear to read more. He crumples up the paper and buries it. He will have to steer clear of all human habitation.

  He travels northward through the deep wilderness, and his body continues to change each day. By the time he reaches Hyndford, his torso is a tree trunk of pulsating muscle. The last patch of clothing falls from him, and hair now sprouts from every pore in his skin, claws protrude from his fingertips, and the centre of his face expands outward to form a very definite, cone-shaped snout. The wilderness affects him in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Sam doesn’t mind his new body—the fur keeps him warm at night, and his claws are particularly good for digging up acorns and peeling off tree bark. He subsists on a diet of swamp grasses, berries, birch branches, and squirrels that he catches, places between his lips, and decapitates with a quick, downward thrust of his upper jaw.

  His penis has grown particularly long. He has to lift it up when he walks over logs or sharp-tipped rocks. Sam grows tired of it slapping against his shins and calves. While he climbs hills, it drags along the ground; when he crouches to drink from streams, his penis becomes coated with mud. If he rotates his body too quickly, it swings out at a ninety-degree angle and thwacks an adjacent tree trunk, causing a storm of leaves, acorns, and irate chipmunks to land on his head. Still, his penis reassures him. He realizes he can clutch and pull at it violently, but it will never come off; it is attached to his body for good. His erect penis can crack open nutshells or overturn rocks. Walking through close-set rows of trees with a hard-on is awkward, and he’s glad his penis’s default setting is flaccid. He once had a dream that through the strength of his will he could make his penis rise and fall, just as he can raise and lower a leg. Now he understands that would kill the most meaningful part of him because things that happen outside our volition are truly mysterious and important.

  Everywhere in the forest, sunlit rocks leer brazenly, and he thinks about sex more than ever. Some days he feels he’s nothing but a giant whirling mass of testosterone. Franz’s body, Esther’s labyrinth of hair, and the giant legs of the wooden kicking man ricochet about his brain and he ejaculates every half-hour. His semen glitters on rocks, fills gopher holes, sticks tree branches together, and rushes downstream to clog the sanitary systems of riverside villages.

  But each night lying on the forest floor, he sees Sue’s hovering, grief-creviced face. Igneous, metamorphic, and basalt rock towers around him on all sides, each containing layers of sediment accumulated over centuries. He recalls how the phantoms of his family sabotaged his relationship with Franz. “Run, brother, run …”

  As he watches fish leaping through rapids, bears galloping down mountains, deer circling him nervously, or hoards of flies attacking his moist snout, he begins to think about the force that fuels the world. Perhaps it’s not only in inanimate geology, but here in wild animals and in him. Is that power present in his outstretched arm, in his fur bristling in the cold, in his jaws crunching berries, in his vocal cords when they make unconscious exclamations out of fear or delight, or in his penis filling with blood that then drains upwards like nutrients flowing from the roots of a plant?

  One night when the moon is full, Sam falls asleep in the mouth of a gigantic stone cavern. He dreams that he meets Franz at last by the Alfred Escher statue. The two men fall to the ground and have constant sex for seven days and seven nights. The dream images become so vivid and passion-infused that he sleepwalks out of the cave and across meadows, in and out of babbling brooks, his eyes shut, lips murmuring, penis pointing like a wand, as he ejaculates non-stop.

  In the morning when Sam
wakes, every inch of the forest is covered with foot-high piles of semen that twinkle in the sun like manna descended from heaven or some primeval pus oozing up from the deepest pores of the skin of the Earth. The gleaming whiteness rises in glorious, undulating mounds about the feet of trees, hangs in dripping cobwebs from drooping branches, clings in a sheen on the smooth surfaces of rocks, engulfs low-lying bushes, foams on the banks of clogged rivers where cum-toupéed frogs belch spunk-bubbles. A torrid crushed-apple scent suffuses his nostrils. Leaping fish leave ivory arcs that slowly collapse, folding into themselves with balletic grace. Everywhere Sam senses transformation and fecund life while a billion invisible sperm-tadpoles snap their tails as they whip up and down the shining roller-coaster hills that have changed a dull, muddy forest into this alive, frenetic, gleaming paradise.

  “Run, brother, run! Run, brother, run!”

  Then Sam realizes his body created all of this. This glittering paradise came from him. He studies his own body, this powerful, hulking, heaving, massive, sperm-exploding body, and wonders how he could ever fear anything.

  “I will go to Cartwright,” he says confidently. Surely he can confront the town and all it represents. He shudders and a warm liquid floods his veins. He has never felt such relief. He will heal the world. Things are not so difficult in the end.

  “Run, brother, run, my wonderful brother, my wonderful brother …”

  He stumbles across the soft-sticky mounds and, standing completely still, opens his mouth to let out a laugh so loud, it echoes among the distant cliffs. What is he laughing at? He is laughing at Sonny and Cher, Veronika, Franz’s obsession with hairstyle, his mother’s glossolalia, Sue’s honey-sweat—he laughs at everything that is life, his laughter celebrating all the illogical things that don’t fit into a system and never will.

  He changes the trajectory of his journey; instead of southeast, he heads northeast, toward Labrador. Over the following weeks, Sam races through the forests laughing at the top of his lungs. The sound fills the still air above empty meadows, vibrates the outstretched branches of pines, drowns out the roar of waterfalls, wakes grizzly bears from slumber, and makes coyotes cock their ears to the wind. The cry of “Run, brother, run” grows louder until Sue’s voice and Sam’s laughter intermingle, become one and the same sound.

  In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practises kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair. In Zurich, with Franz beside him in bed, Sam slept poorly, so now he builds sleep tolerance by spending nights on rocky ground where chipmunks repeatedly scamper over him and acorns fall on his forehead. To improve oral sex skills, he shoves arm-thick tree branches down his throat to destroy his gag reflex. Then he grabs and twists his own genitals into a myriad of fascinating forms: sailor’s knot, mandrake root, ballerina tutu, ticking metronome; and he ejaculates in lassoes, rainbow arcs, or machine-gun fire. Franz will be amazed by Sam’s new prowess.

  Sam is troubled that Franz’s letter is becoming soiled and frayed. These sheets of paper are the scientific proof he lacked in Zurich, the incontrovertible facts written in Franz’s own hand, without which he’d again be unanchored and drifting in conjecture. By the time he reaches Labrador, the writing will be illegible. He decides to briefly re-enter civilization.

  Fent’s Landing is a hamlet accessible only by floatplane. Sam arrives at dawn and creeps down an empty gravel road flowing between prim, wooden houses. In front of the general store, a cat stretches, yawns, and claws the air once with a paw. Sam glances into the window of the Blue Star restaurant; a waitress in a yellow jumpsuit has her back to him. He’s startled by how attractive she looks, with her hourglass figure. He begins running, his wide feet slapping the ground; his breathing is loud and hoarse; he makes occasional grunts. What will he sound like if he speaks? He thinks of the lectures he once gave, those insipid balloons full of air.

  He notices a hand-written sign taped to the inside of a storefront window: “Photocopies ten cents a sheet.” The door is cheap plywood and easy to break down. Sam finds the copier at the back of the store. He nimbly presses the on button with his right claw. The machine hums to life. Sam unwrinkles the sheet and presses it against the glass. He reads a sign: “E-mail stations coming in June.” So the world wide web, which he’d used for research at the university, would now be utilized by the general public; it will kill the romance of letter writing.

  Sam snatches a plastic bag from the garbage can and puts his eight backup copies in it. He turns and sees, in a cracked mirror, his grinning wolf’s head. His black eyes glitter like polished marbles, his triangular ears are raised, and steam streams through his snout’s nostrils. Not a bad face, though unusual. He spreads his cracked lips and a tongue creeps out that dangles a foot long.

  He’s enjoying himself here. The stacks of paper remind him of his old life. As he picks at lice crawling in his stomach hair, he remembers his Bunsen burners, microscopes, plastic cubes, and books—walls of books within which every dimension of the world’s surface was recorded. All that is beyond him now. He is running into a world without numbers and the obsessive analysis of details. The world is spinning, but he can put one foot forward and walk without falling. Gravity is his friend. It keeps us from touching the sky, yet without it, we would drift helplessly in a sea of air. Such seems his sister’s fate. Reminded of her, he finds a fax machine in the shop and sends the Cartwright post office a fax for Sue.

  Sam eyes the staff photo. How attractive everyone is in their green polyester uniforms. If they were here, he wouldn’t ignore them, as he’d once snubbed people like Heidi, but, surrounded by the hum and click of the photocopiers, would have an orgy with everyone. The more Sam hears the fire roar, the more insignificant people’s appearances become. Lips, toes, dicks, foreheads, anuses, and ear lobes are equally desirable to him now.

  On the street, a boy aims a slingshot at a telephone pole. He turns, sees Sam, drops his weapon, and runs away, wailing. Sam hurries along the road, the plastic bag flapping. If captured now, he’d be taken to a zoo. He finally feels safe hidden behind a protective wall of foliage.

  The day Sam crosses the border into Québec, everything changes. The air becomes full of the scent of baked ham and pea soup, the sound of laughter and fiddle music. People in toques sing around campfires; they hail his welcome and offer him drinks of Le caribou. They assume he’s costumed himself as Le Bonhomme Carnaval’s mythological cousin, Le Chien Fou Carnaval. When they realize it’s not a costume but his own flesh and hair, they’re impressed.

  “You really go to the end, hein?”

  “You take a party-time seriously.” His harsh voice so distorts his French that they think he’s from a faraway country.

  When he says he was in Ontario, they reply, “How sad. The people there are terrible. Here we may be poor but we’re friendly.” They offer him venison pie and maple syrup fudge and then hold hands with each other and dance in large circles. Afterwards, everyone takes off their clothes and has sex in the snow, all the while saying, “See, we’re not Puritan like in Ontario. We’re sensual ’cause we’re Latin. It’s so much better here.”

  The Québec countryside is dotted with gleaming crucifixes (his mother would like those), but people throw snowballs at them and say, “We hate the crucifixes but keep them for historical purposes. We express our hatred with snowballs because we’re not hypocritical and we’re sensual because we’re Latin.”

  In forest clearings, people scream and push each other about in the snow, outraged over the pronunciation of words.

  “It’s not ‘ee’, it’s ‘oo.’”

  “It’s not ‘oo’, it’s ‘ee.’”

  “But we’re not af
raid to fight openly,” they tell him, “because we’re sensual and we’re Latin.”

  Then they look at each other, take off all their clothes again, and have sex in the melting snow beside the roaring campfire. People are always having sex in this place, and Sam thinks that when he’s reunited with Franz, they can return and live here. Québec’s forests have more rock than he has ever seen.

  Finally he enters Labrador and comes upon a narrow cement road. On each side a person stands facing him. My God. Sonny and Cher. They are holding a large net between them. But the doctors are no longer singers. They’ve shed their sequined outfits and are wearing the same grey tunics they had on the first day Sam met them. In silence, they look him square in the eye.

  Sam studies Doctors #1 and #2 and sadly shakes his head. “No,” he says. “You want me to return so I can rechristen you Sonny and Cher and give you the identities you desire. But if you can’t imagine who you truly are, then no one else can do it for you.”

  The doctor who was once Cher has tears in his eyes. If he were wearing eye-liner, it would be running. Sam steps forward, swipes one clawed finger in the air, and slices their net in two. The strands fall and lay at their feet like piles of intestines. Sonny and Cher vanish into the air. Then Sam looks up and sees the ocean. The sea level is higher than it should be. Clouds are forming on the distant horizon. This coast is the spot where 200 million years ago the North American plate joined the Eurasian landmass. Sam falls to his knees and begins crying.

  The Earth does have value. He sees now that he should fight for its survival.

  Sam heads northward and one week later ascends a steep purple cliff and looks down at the town of his childhood. Cartwright’s white wooden cubes lie scattered across the rounded peninsula. To the north, the placid cove speckled with boats, and beyond is the curve of the beach where he’ll meet Sue.