The Lava in My Bones

by Barry Webster

  “Do you think you can defy me, who gave you love and life? Thou hast wandered far from thy home in Cartwright, and thy bodies have become infected with poisons. Yet I shall heal thy flesh, re-sanctify thy souls, and take thee back to the place where thou belongest. From now on, thou shalt be on the side of God, yea God, the true force that moveth the world. He is in thee, as I am in thee, for He is me, and I am Him, and so we are, forever more! Satan,” I bellowed, “be gone!”

  Yet it was here that I made a fatal mistake. Just as Sue, out of shame, had once pulled a dress up and over her streaming body, just as my husband leapt into an ocean yearning to grasp a vision he hoped would save him, just as Sam boarded a plane in Zurich before realizing that Franz truly loved him, just as Franz raised his arms beside a lake and called, “You inspire me, Liebhaber,” though Sam was too far away to hear him, just as all these things shouldn’t have happened but did, so did I, caught up in the moment and yearning for a liberation from the relentless calculations of measurements and numbered vials, so did I risk all on one moment and throw care to the wind—I greedily tossed not one vial, then the other, but my two vials at exactly the same time, one from my right hand and the other from my left. The twin streams joined to form a golden river that hung in the air like a wraith between me and my children for one perilous second.

  Yet just when my elbows leapt forward from the sides of my body, so did a swordfish with silver scales bright as flashing eyes and a bill pointing not east or west but north, shoot up from the watery depths and travel in a perfect arc between me and my offspring. At the highest point of its trajectory, it shielded Sue and Sam long enough for the rushing stream of urine to splash across its body, saturate its skin, seep into its gills, and spurt off its bill, before completing its half-circle and re-entering the sea. The gash made in the water closed like a healed wound.

  Immediately all around us, the ocean burst forth with the Glory of God. Leaping salmon sang the Hallelujah chorus. Schools of dolphins passed wearing choir gowns. A whale rose spurting the water of Lourdes, as on its forehead a preaching mackerel clung. Starfish changed into crosses. Shark fins were adorned with scripture verses, “For God so loved the world” and “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” The sea was of God, but this boat and my children were still of Man.

  “No!” I screamed. “Nooooooo!”

  The empty vials fell, rolled and knocked together on the floorboard of the atheist ship. Sue’s laughter was so high-pitched and cruel, I felt wires were being driven into my eardrums. She leapt down onto the deck and clapped her hands together. Darkness fell as the black swath of scrabbling legs and multi-sectioned torsos closed over the ship like a massive hand. If I could not save my children through the power of God, then my body would suffice. I grabbed Sue by the hair and pulled her toward the cabin entrance that gaped like the maw of a huge mouth.

  “Let me go!” she screeched.

  How small and frail she seemed then, with her sparrow bones and spaghetti-noodle muscles. She thinks she’s so fantastic, but she’s a stick-girl, not a real person at all. As I dragged her, honey splattered across my face, neck, lips; I tasted the horrid sweetness on my tongue. I pushed her down the staircase, wrapped both arms round her chest, and hauled her, while she pleaded to be let go. Her legs thrashed on the carpet. She tried to hook her feet around the guardrail. In vain she struck her head against my chest. Her honey flowed in waves over both of us, melding our bodies together. I was horrified yet excited. “You want to stick to everything,” I gasped—I shoved her into my room—“but that everything includes me.” I locked the door behind us. “We’re going to wait until the bees pass and then, holding hands, we’ll pray for the Holy Spirit to descend and fill us. Then we and your brother shall return to Cartwright.”

  Honey flowed from her bent knees and splattered loudly on the floor.

  “I want to be … like a friend to you from now on,” I said. The floor lurched and we heard the deafening roaring of power drills all around us; another jolt and a furious whining. The floor, walls, ceiling began to shake. A light bulb popped from the ceiling and hung swinging on its wire. Amidst the deafening roar was a ghastly creaking sound.

  Sue’s eyes were lit as with a thousand torches. She cried, “Yes, Drooper, Snagglepuss, Einstein, come, come, come!”

  “Who’s Drooper?” I yelled, shaking her. “What’s happening?” I abruptly slapped her across the face as hard as I could. She collapsed onto the floor, a red crescent-moon glowing on her cheek.

  She moaned, “Come, come!”

  Before I could stop myself, I grabbed her head, struck it once, twice against the wall. “Make this stop,” I shouted. “Whatever’s happening, make it stop!”

  Weeping, she murmured, “Drooper …”

  On the wall, beside her cut cheek, appeared a rotating spiral that bulged into a spinning anthill, another whirling sawdust circle grew beside it, then one in the ceiling and another on the wall; two, four, five, seven, ten above my head, rows on every wall. We were trapped in a horrid room of spinning eyes shedding sawdust tears.

  What happened next was so sudden, unexpected, and of such magnitude, I would not have believed it possible and had neither the time nor ability to assess its significance. The pulverizing realization that what one most wishes for in life has been irretrievably lost, mixed with the horror of death and transformed the sad body I lived in into a writhing avatar of blind terror and panic; the ship, now hole-ridden as cheesecloth, exploded into a thousand fragments.

  I was plunged down into the frigid sea; my body thrashed and flailed in the icy water; blank greyness pushed into my eye sockets and down my throat. My arms and leg muscles cramped. My lungs shrieked for oxygen. Flapping my hands like featherless wings, I slowly rose until eventually my head burst up through the sea’s surface. I coughed as I inhaled air and my lungs ballooned. Above, in the insanely blue sky, the sun bounced up and down like a yo-yo. A flap of drenched hair hung over one of my eyes.

  Debris danced on the ocean waves. Dismembered sofas bobbed like gigantic buoys and enormous wood beams rocked back and forth. Plastic lawn chairs spun in whirlpools, crepe-paper streamers flowed amidst the debris like strings of multi-coloured blood. Shrieking businesspeople clung to seesawing boards, floating wood rails, and severed tabletops. Some men wore life jackets upside-down or inside-out; they paddled around shouting and angrily pushing people off boards.

  Small waves smacked my face like hands; I tasted blood on my tongue, and salt burned in my eyes and on my cheeks. “Sam!” I cried. “Sue!” The horrific buzzing still filled the air.

  A man shouted, “Give me your life-jacket, asshole.”

  Off to the side, a swarm of flickering bees hovered in a perfect oval above the water. A growth swelled on its top; the whole vibrating form looked like a giant, wavering hat. A section of the upper growth separated itself and stuck out like a tree branch. It was an arm. A person sat upon it and had turned toward me.

  It was Sue, her long honey-hair dripping down her back, her wide open lips melting as they formed first an O, then a crescent-moon smile. Her arm moved, waving lugubriously like seaweed under water and she let out a laugh, but even it, normally bright-pitched and metallic, faded the moment it sounded. The bee canopy rose and shot up into the sky, carrying my daughter farther from the Earth than she’d ever been. I watched the oval shrink, become half its size, then a third, a quarter, an eighth. Before it disappeared completely, a giant, gold-threaded spinning wheel flashed for a split second, revolving in the endless blue like a Ferris wheel. The mother in the sky. The mother in the sky existeth!

  A wave swelled, and I was submerged. Wood specks and salt water flowed up my nostrils. I re-emerged into the sunlight, coughing and weeping. I cried out, “Sam!” He was all I had left. “Sam, where are you?!”

  I paddled through a mass of cellophane-wrapped dry cleaner’s clothes flapping on the water. My thighs and shoulder muscles were stiffening; my jaw had taken on a will of its own, and my t
eeth clattered together like dice in a jar. “Sam!” I screamed. I passed two men grappling on a floating door and realized it’d been my door. Sam clung to a piece of wood and sobbed. His sheet had fallen off, and his wolfish body was completely exposed. Wet fur clung to his skin.

  Swimming towards him, I shouted, “Sam!” I took a breath. “Sue’s gone.” I was still weeping. “She’s gone … for good. And now it’s just us together. I so want to be with … my intelligent son. Oh, Sam, let’s find a way back to Labrador. Let’s try to make things work this time.”

  For the first time in years, Sam looked straight at me. His eyes were a network of red veins tipped with soot-black pupils. Frizzed hair framed his face and sprouted from the creases in his cheeks. He was not the beautiful boy I’d known.

  Still, I could get used to it.

  I spun my arms like propeller blades, and my body rose out of the water and up to him. Sam opened his mouth wide and his green tongue swept over jagged teeth. He closed his lips. Was he going to kiss me? For a second I wished he would. Instead he said, “For fuck sakes, Mother. Do you always have to bloody well wreck everything?” He lifted a closed fist above my face, opened his hand, and let drop a stone into my open mouth.

  Without thinking, I swallowed it. The rock lodged in the space between my Adam’s apple and windpipe. Sam didn’t smile or frown. No light shone in his eyes. The rock lingered for a moment between my head and my torso, then sunk down like a comet falling to the earth. The weight of the rock pulled me into the ocean; I raised both arms to my son and the vanishing sky and cried silent words to the boy, sky, and world, which I saw were all, at long last, leaving me. “Everything cometh of me! I am the root of thy entire civilization. Mine body conceived this world and gave birth to it. I am the rock surface thou walkest on, the salt springs thou drinkest from. I am the foam in thy mouth and the spittle on thy lips. I am the solidity of thy bones, the wetness of thy kidneys, and the dog-ear aorta-flaps of thy heart. In my absence, no wind whips ember into flame, water leaves no pattern on rock; ice hardens not, and clouds are pinned like prisoners to a sky they cannot cross. I am the electricity that floweth through nuclei. I am the eye that never closeth, the finger that forever points, the wheel that spinneth relentlessly, and the axle that runneth from the North Pole to the South. Trying to escape me is trying to climb from the skin that encaseth thee. The walls of mine womb are the furnace that forged the world, are of the world and are the world. Abandon me and thee abandonest thyself, for I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the Beginning and I am the End!” Descending into the sea, I shut my mouth and accepted everything.

  Light faded.

  The waters closed above my head, and I was gone forever.

  PART SIX

  Rock

  Sam clutches the slippery edge of a bobbing wooden plank as waves swell like lungs inflating. Flicking fingers of water slap the plank’s edge and dissolve into sunlit spray that showers his cheeks with bullet-bright drops. The pungent seaweed scent shoots up his nostrils, and fur shines slick against his body. His legs dangle in the water, the hard plank edge thrusting into the soft folds of his stomach.

  Amidst bobbing chunks of splintered wallboard, sofas spinning in circles, wood pillars chugging like pistons, thousands of dancing Styrofoam balls, the wreckage is dotted with the swaying bodies of people wailing.

  “Somebody save us!”

  “Help me! He-elp!”

  Their exclamations are punctuated by the creak and groan of wood and what sounds like giant billiard balls clacking together.

  Sam glares into the whirlpool where his mother vanished and wonders how she could have so successfully concealed herself from him and Sue. He’d thought her incapable of functioning outside Cartwright, yet she’d lived incognito in the clothes of more than a hundred people. He imagines the terrific stress of her non-stop camouflage, the constant threat of being discovered. Her God must have given her something. The energy that moves the world can’t only be in rocks. Whatever the Earth’s vital power is, his mother had possessed it.

  Feeling exhausted, Sam mutters to the sea, “Mother, it’s not your fault you were the way you were. You were limited; I’m limited; we all are. But I refuse to feel guilt. Sorry, but you deserve what you got. Of course you raised us, and I will never forget that.” There is sadness in his voice. He slowly paddles past a drifting chest of clothes and gets momentarily stuck in a mound of gluey foam.

  Sam beholds the blue sky where his sister vanished and feels such a rush of love that he chokes on salt water. He’s touched by her kindness. She offered him a strength that she’d once expected from him but which he couldn’t provide. Sam didn’t save Sue; Sue saved Sam. Reversal is a cornerstone of life. How wonderful it was to depend on someone. He wishes Sue were here to help him now. Amazing that he could be deeply affected by someone other than Franz. He never suspected such strength in his sister or mother. Why does he continue to look only at life’s surface? From now on, he won’t trust a fraction of what he sees. His sister’s flight to the sky fills him with wonder. Wherever she is now, Sue has found happiness; Sam’s sure of it, and is delighted for her.

  Below him, sharks circle, flashing scissor-sharp teeth; manta rays’ magic-carpet bodies undulate like severed wings filmed in slow motion. As Sam contemplates his sister’s generosity, he feels the range of his concern for the world expanding outward. When a sobbing woman tries to clamber onto a nearby banquet table, Sam paddles over and says, “I’ll hold the table steady while you climb on.” But all around him there are gasps, screams, shrieks—he’s forgotten about his appearance. Flying bars of wood strike his forehead, a camera smacks him on the mouth, and two teeth fall out. “It’s him!” people shout. “He caused all this!” In a torrent of whizzing plastic balls and wood chips, he swims away. Sam is not angry at the business people; they look only at the world’s exterior, and need to learn what his mother and Sue have taught him about what lies beneath.

  He fingers his cut lip, paddles past seesawing wooden panels and somersaulting barrels. Soon he can no longer hear the frenzied moaning as the ship vanishes behind waves. Gurgling sounds rise from the depths below; the wind sighs. Sam tries not to panic. The edge of the plank repeatedly jabs like a blunt sabre blade beneath his ribs. He pulls himself up onto it, but the plank sinks slightly, and the strands of his fur splay outward like the hairs on a Venus flytrap. He listens to the wheezing of his lungs as he pants. Before his eyes, foam-tipped waves gather, curl, and crash forward, over and over, steadily, rhythmically, like a million sentences beginning and ending.

  The sky into which his sister vanished is as clear as a pupil-less eye.

  What the hell is he supposed to do now? The ship voyage had already lasted six days, and they’d travelled past the midpoint of the Atlantic. How far is the European coast from here? He could linger near the wreckage until help arrives. A helicopter will surely be sent. But if he’s taken to Europe, he’ll be put in a zoo. If he’s returned to North America, Sonny and Cher will get him, and he’ll never see Franz again. By studying the angle of the sun to the sea, Sam determines which way is east. He scrutinizes the horizon, which looks like the line across a 1950s television screen about to explode into moving images.

  Again he feels a flash of anger at his mother for wrecking everything. But he bravely intones, “On your mark! Get set! Go!” He starts paddling, the bald sun beating onto his skull. It occurs to Sam how ridiculous his situation is. Logic clearly has no place in life. He, a scientist who loved logic, has ended up a monster paddling a board in the middle of the ocean. The truest things in life, he sees, are the most ludicrous. He and Franz were ludicrous; two men—a fact Sam still finds peculiar—from the two most unromantic countries in the world, and they weren’t opposite (opposites attract, don’t they?) but similar; they ate rocks amidst summer snowstorms; one of them was a nerd, the other a narcissist, and their social worlds didn’t overlap. Logic is a house that’s burning, and nothing remains solid for long. Nature’s fra
yed edges keep evolution happening. Sam believes now that people repeatedly collide with each other swiftly, brutally—not to produce children but to shatter their sense of self, and be thrust into a creative space beyond reason, where anything can happen. Only through the destruction of psychological borders is freedom possible. That must be, Sam concludes at last, why other people exist on Earth.

  He glances into the sea. If only there was the flash of a fin or a bubble ascending to the surface, but the relentless grey water is as blank as the blue sky overhead. Sam says out loud, “What if I don’t make it? What if I never get to Europe? Or, if I arrive, will things be as I expect?” How many days has it been since Franz sent his letter from the base of the Matterhorn? He’d changed so quickly from wanting Sam to turning against him and then wanting him again. He could turn against Sam if he thought he’d never show up. Maybe he’s forgotten him already. Perhaps the diamond stopped forming.

  Sam kicks his legs in the water and is soon puttering up and down the roller-coaster waves. He will not stop paddling until he sees the European cliffs rise like herds of blue dinosaurs lifting their heads into the sky. His skin could turn green, his muscles dissolve to skipping ropes of tendon, and his dehydrated torso become a solid lump of salt, but his thighs will pummel like fists into the face of the grey, unrelenting sea. Somewhere on the ocean floor, he knows, runs the seam marking the meeting point of the North American and Eurasian plates.