Kicking, Sam murmurs, mutters, babbles, his voice crescendos into a high-pitched falsetto of terror. “What if Franz doesn’t want me anymore? Will he be there when I arrive? What if my desire doesn’t last the journey and I’m indifferent when I meet him?” No, Sam will fight the forces within himself that could destroy his desire. Each phase of his journey is not a chapter but a book. It seems years since he was trapped in that asylum, decades since he writhed in a garden, his stomach full of stones, centuries since that pterodactyl-winged airplane snatched him from Zurich’s runway and dumped him onto Toronto’s cruel streets, and though he ran non-stop from his country’s centre to its circumference, the journey, when viewed from this rocking stick of wood on the North Atlantic, seems to have lasted since the dawn of time. Every wave that slaps the plank is a passing second in the interminable epoch before he meets Franz again. The time-line of life, though elastic, only stretches so far before it snaps.
Why is returning so much more difficult than leaving? His body points like a rifle at his lover’s homeland. But the water against his skin is too warm (Sam estimates it’s thirteen degrees Celsius), an effect of global warming.
Though the ocean depths are opaque, Sam knows he’s paddling over underwater mountains, buried volcanic islands, and vast landslides. The sea floor holds particles from distant deserts as well as volcanic ash and dissolved fragments of fish skeletons, whale ear-bones, and sediments from icebergs that melted. Along the sea bottom scuttle blind shrimp, eyeless crabs, and mute clams that live off white smokers. Is Mother enjoying her new neighbours?
The waves ascend and descend with a hypnotising monotony. Sam swears he won’t stop kicking until he smells baked bread and sees cobblestone streets. At mid-day, the sun’s rays blaze into his skull, and images of Franz fill his mind: Franz throwing a snowball, Franz wearing a bowler hat, Franz smiling on a merry-go-round horse—wait a minute! Franz was never on a merry-go-round horse! At some point the Franz in Sam’s mind separated from the real Franz and spins in a self-enclosed circle. What happens if Sam arrives in Europe and the imaginary and real Franz don’t match? Will the two Franzes have a fight? Which one would win? Sam worries that if Franz doesn’t believe he’s returning, he’ll find someone else. Sam should’ve sent him a postcard the day he left Sonny and Cher, but he had no idea his journey back would last an eternity.
Sam tells himself to remember his sister. She was strong and conquered insurmountable obstacles. Recalling the profundity of her pain, the arduous road she travelled, he promises that he’ll never feel sorry for himself again. He tries not to think about her or he’ll start weeping, and the ocean is wet enough. He marvels at how much power people can have inside themselves. As he mounts the crest of a wave, he feels he’s being pulled by the hidden strength of all the people he’s ever known.
In the late afternoon, hunger claws at the inside of his stomach. When a school of blue fish flow beneath the plank like spilled paint, he shoves his claws into the sea, squeezes his fingers shut, and drags up two salmon that flap in the air like severed hands. Their eyes, round as globes, can’t blink; the lips throb, gills flutter like featherless wings. He stuffs their bodies between his lips, bites once, then rams their torsos into his mouth and munches. He gulps loudly as the trembling bone-crunchy mass slides down his gullet. He belches and all the horizons hear him.
Later shark fins break the water’s surface and circle Sam. Their lead-black eyes glimmer; their teeth, rows of jagged pyramids, gleam in lipless mouths. He leaps up and lands—baff!—on a slippery shark back and claws his fingers into its spongy surface. The fish buckles and thrashes but he holds tight as if to a rodeo horse, working one claw through the outer skin. Finally he shoves his whole hand into the hot mucus-like flesh. With one thrust, he rams his arm in right up to the shoulder; his fingers, trapped in a sticky pudding, graze the beating heart. He clutches and yanks it up through the opening and stuffs the bloody, dripping mess between his lips. The other shark flees.
The wooden plank floats in a lily pad of shark blood, drifting sticks of cartilage, and masses of porridge-like flesh. The shark gristle gets stuck between Sam’s teeth; the cartilage is wiry and must be bent into curlicues before swallowing; the outer skin has a sticky membrane that’s tricky to peel off. The shark’s organs, especially the pancreas and gall bladder, taste spicier than the outer extremities. The fins take a lot of chewing, and the eyes explode like grapes between Sam’s teeth.
All night Sam lies flat on his back, listens to his breathing, the creaking of wood, and the endless start and finish of sentences that will never be spoken. Above, the stars are spread across the sky like a million unblinking eyes. The moon is a half-crescent. Sam can make out the beige dot of Venus, the ghost-planet.
He’s come to love his own planet deeply. He loves its colours, its multitude of landforms, the way mountains are hidden under the ocean but visible and garishly ice-capped on land. He loves the Earth’s sensuality, its dripping stalactites, river-rumbling gorges, hot and cold regions, wet and dry spots. There are many people like Sue on Earth. He will not just sit back passively and watch the world turn into a monochrome cinder devoid of the opposites that keep energy circulating. If he reaches Europe, he’ll fight to preserve the ice and fire that maintain life. He’ll find that source that fuels the world and discover a way to reinforce it. Then the Sues on Earth will be saved.
The next morning, the sun rises shyly above the eastern horizon. The sky is the grey-green colour of a gall bladder. He sits up, and the plank descends and then bounces up as if on springs. He scratches his salt-crusty armpits, rotates onto his stomach, shoves his legs into the mouth of the sea, and begins egg-beatering.
Occasionally flying fish fly over him. Pods of dolphins pass, their bodies arching like horses’ necks. A seagull swoops and scoops a fish from the water. Sam gasps—birds mean land. Or did this one follow the ship and is now lost? He stares hard into the blank horizon, tries to will into existence a blue cliffside curving like an elbow. Waves lift and drop, his plank lifts and drops, his body lifts and drops. The sky is an azure expanse stretching from one horizon line to the other. He sprawls face-down on his plank, pummelling his callused feet into the dark skin of the sea. But he remembers the bird, its sudden drop and quick ascent.
Later that day, he sees a second seagull. “Tell Franz I’m coming,” Sam shouts. The sun warms his cheeks and the wind ruffles his hair; he hears his sister encouraging him, “Kick, brother, kick …” He remembers the wonderful movement of body parts in Fairy Tales of Flesh, and how penises could be interchanged with the tips of toes, how Velcro-backed nipples could be stuck onto kneecaps. Now he knows that tale is true, as nothing is stable in this world.
More fish swim in the water beneath him now. Eels flap like trailing bits of streamers amongst the rows of plankton reaching up like fingers. Sudden splashing as out of nowhere, sturgeons leap in parallel arches. Schools of silver fish race through the striped shadows, their scales winking, as overhead, pelicans fly with fish dancing in their beaks, the beat of their wings like laundry flapping on a line. He paddles over glimmering mazes of boulders, through swamps of seaweed. In the late afternoon, a whale surfaces beside him, and a rainbow-coloured geyser spurts from the top of its head. Sam quenches his thirst by grabbing and sucking blood from a tuna.
The next night, he endures a storm at sea. He desperately grasps the plank, terrified it will slip out from beneath him. Waves spin him like a poker wheel, fling him skyward like a Frisbee. Whirlpools rage in his ears and eyeballs; enswathed in flying streams of brine, breaking whitecaps, somersaulting salmon, boomeranging driftwood shards, and air bubbles that pop like fire crackers, he feels he’s never been so close to the core of nature and senses that chaos is the root of everything. Chaos is the transition point as forms change into each other. Where there’s chaos, there’s movement and energy, and what has energy is most alive. Chaos is creating Franz’s diamond. Sam kicks his feet, and a kinetic jolt shoots from his soles
to his cranium. If he survives, he won’t return to his civilized, over-planned life. How he loves the disorganized present in which he’s a free radical ricocheting with an energy all his own. Waves breaking sound like whips cracking the air, and Sam is ecstatic. He longs for mayhem, confusion, extremity of all forms, a destruction of limits, and the explosive energy released when systems break down. For a moment, he wants to become the sea.
In the morning, the ocean is as still as a pane of glass. The surface of his board is coated with seaweed slime and barnacles. Sam kicks, and his body crawls slug-like across the glimmering expanse. On his fifth day alone at sea, Sam notices his body is changing. His matted coat of fur sheds to reveal his old pink skin; his claws have started to recede into fingers, his snout shrivels into the blunt bump of his nose. The rippling muscles of his shoulders, thighs, chest, and biceps dissolve to taut violin strings, and his ribcage and skull shrink.
At first he thinks this is due to non-stop physical activity, lack of rest, and an unbalanced diet. He is losing his hunger and some days eats very little. If you love something, you put it in your mouth. If he feeds on anything, he feeds on himself. Yet as he moves farther away from his time in the woods and closer to Franz, his sparrow-like body is returning. He remembers Franz’s buff fashion-obsessed friends who took steroids and spent hours in gyms. He scrutinizes the gentle curve on his sparse thighs, his button-like kneecaps, the sensitive gully of his stomach, his delicate fingers. He puts a hand on the skin on the inside of his thigh and it seems the softest thing he’s ever touched. So this is what it means be to be human. This is what everyone has been afraid of all along.
Only Sam’s penis doesn’t change but retains the serpentine form it developed in the forest. When it’s erect, Sam uses it as a rudder so he can travel straight east and not on a diagonal. He drapes the flaccid penis across his shoulders or over his tender nipples to prevent sunburn.
If you don’t truly live in your body, he knows now, you’re not truly on the Earth and can’t feel the fire at its centre. The people who believe that we’re souls without bodies are the ones who damage the world. Has Franz learned to possess the skin he lives in or is he still observing himself from the outside?
Days pass and no land appears. Any seagulls Sam meets are as lost as he is. The horizons are purple with the pollutants that now roam across the globe. In his third week at sea, he loses the power to count days and panics. He sees his famished, shrinking body, and in his head a thousand bells chime. The sun ascending is like a rotating clock-hand. His legs thrash at the mercilessly flat sea face, and his arms flail like feather-shorn wings. The moon chases the sun across the sky, and then the sun chases the moon; by studying their angles, he estimates he’s at forty degrees north, the same latitude as Portugal.
Staring east, he prays for a bulge, a hillside, a slight dribble of land, but there is only that agonizingly straight line with the sun peeking over it. Knowing he’s closer to Europe than North America torments him—he can almost smell Franz’s spicy cologne, is sure he hears Zurich’s tram-cars clattering; squinting, he can see the Matterhorn peak. Whatever Franz has become is within reach: the splish-splash of waves sounds like Franz’s laughter; the moaning wind is Franz’s sigh after he ejaculates; the darkening horizon is the shadow he makes when he steps in front of the bedroom window.
One morning Sam wakes, his head dangling over the plank like that of a doll with a broken neck. The sea grazes the tip of his nose, a sliver of air separates him from the depths. In the clear water, a pencil-thin fish darts once, twice, as if jerked along a wire. It is then that he lifts his head and sees the Portuguese coast. Mountains of umber rock undulate between ragged peaks above a beach across which groves of shaggy palm trees shake their heads in the wind.
A wave swells, lifts him skyward, and it seems everything that ever happened in his life has been for this moment. The sky is an azure dome and the burning sun blazes in its eastern corner. The seawater somersaults around itself, its farthest reaches bathing edges of prone continents. Far below, the ocean floor is unfissured and deeper still, the Earth’s core is safely encased in its protective stone ring. Switzerland rests snug inside its borders, its mountains as hard as steel thrones, and Canada sprawls across its paralyzing mantle of ice. For the first time in Sam’s life, the world’s principal substances, those main building-blocks of life—Rock, Ice, Air, and Water—are locked in a perfectly balanced tension. Then he hears that distant roar, the fire burning at the Earth’s centre.
Nearing the shore, he sings out Franz’s name at the top of his lungs when immediately he is caught in a fast-flowing coastal rivulet; waves foam, lash and whip, and his board seesaws wildly like a bucking stallion. Sam clamps his hands around the seaweed-slippery edges and presses his cheek against the wood when, to his horror, the plank slides forward and leaps skyward as if shot from a cannon. He is pulled down into a raging torrent; bubble-flecked water pummels his eye sockets, roars in his ears, and arms of water ram their fists into his mouth, down his throat, and into his lungs. The undertow catches his ankles, and as he hurtles head-first toward boulders looming on the sea floor, he is gripped by a fear of death, all the more ridiculous because he’s just about to see Franz and fulfill his most profound desire, a desire that is itself ridiculous because Franz is ridiculous, and their relationship is ridiculous. All at once the ridiculousness of everything—his impending death, Franz, ships exploding, girls sweating honey, supernatural urine, the Dairy Queen, men loving mermaids, summertime snowstorms, skies full of bees, Pentecostals at sea bottoms, giant spinning wheels, steel dresses, earthquakes on the far side of the world, and this Earth spinning so blindly on an axis without oil—assaults him, and the wonderful illogicalness of Life stares him in the face like God. The Earth was formed by driving forces, fire, wind, granite melting—yes, for one golden moment rocks and fire were exactly the same thing; Sam realizes his obsession with Franz is as strong as these thrashing currents and central to life’s beautiful implausibility. Desire fuels the world, dissolves the edges of our selves so that we’re freed into formlessness and releases a potent energy that makes plants grow, rain fall, planets go off-course, stars explode, the sun harden, lava drip, and volcanoes open their mouths to the sky.
As his arms and legs flail in the fast-moving currents, he is confident that his body will save him, for it is matter, part of a universe that endures. One of his feet strikes a boulder; his head is above water, he wheezes, coughs, and vomits. The waves have stopped buckling. He sees a beach where people are running back and forth. Sam begins to cry. Kerchiefed men race into the water yelling words that are lost in the wind. The men approach, shouting, “Vindo! Vindo!” Their hands reach under Sam’s armpits and lift his body, which now seems as light as driftwood. He shivers uncontrollably and his teeth clatter like stones in a cup. The men lay him carefully on the wind-bitten earth. He rotates onto one side and instinctively curls into fetal position.
People holding nets mutter. “É surpreendente!” They are troubled by his protruding ribs, yet amazed by the length of his penis whose end trembles on the sand like a sniffling elephant snout. Someone throws a blanket over him.
Before his eyes, sand spins in miniature whirlpools. He smells damp earth, oil, barbecued chicken. A seagull cries overhead. The lost bird?
The day Sam leaves the Portuguese hospital, all the nurses, doctors, and nuns give him gifts for his voyage—sweet bread, caldeirada, chourico sausage, clean clothes, and some money. The employees had taken a liking to him and treated this mysterious man without a passport. Touched by their kindness, Sam wipes a tear from his cheek. How different they are from Sonny and Cher. He takes one last look at the crowd-thronged building. Dressed in the freshly pressed clothes of an orderly, he steps forward onto the cobbled streets of Europe.
But it is not the Europe he visited before. Everywhere, the sky is full of bees. They hover on top of mailboxes, shoot across open fields, circle the heads of monuments, and spin in kaleidoscopes b
efore the camera lenses of stunned tourists. The bees arrived on a wind from the West. Sam comes across hordes of bees lying dead in ditches or mounded in empty fields; their armoured bodies gleam, stingers like rusted rifles pointed skyward.
When Sam reaches the Portuguese-Spanish border, a strange frisson goes through him; it’s one of the last borders he’ll cross. He thinks of how he was once a science geek, then an awkward Romeo, a lunatic, a criminal, a beast, a sheik on a ship, a disaster survivor. Sue taught him to grow beyond the borders of himself. He recalls his mother’s transmogrifications on the ship as well as Franz’s letter describing his multiple identities. We were so many people at once. What will Franz be like when Sam arrives? This man of his, yes, this man. Now Sam accepts his own desire. “I’m a gayrod,” he shouts marching through crowded plazas. “I’m in love with a man, and I want men. That’s what I want. I want man, man, man!”
Spain fascinates Sam. Boys with betel-stained lips run chased by bulls down long, winding streets. Because he’s dressed as a hospital orderly, Sam’s often called upon to aid men lying gored in back alleyways. Women with riotously coloured flowers in their hair flamenco dance in sunlit squares, their torsos gliding as if on greased wheels. Pork flanks sizzle over crackling fires, girls throw tulips from balconies, matadors strut adjusting codpieces or flicking their Mickey Mouse ears. City centres are full of the clackity-clack of castanets; people wear them on their shoes, hands, armpits, and beneath their chins so that every syllable pronounced is accompanied by clackity-clack. It’s a nervous sound, like heels trembling against marble floors or rocks skipping down mountainsides. Sam shouts to the same rhythm, “Man-man, I want my man-man.” For the first time in his journey Sam doesn’t sense clocks ticking, time passing, and the world spinning. Walking through sun-baked tomato fields, he comes upon rivers that he has no urgent desire to cross. He rejoices in detours that increase the suspense leading up to the final meeting that hovers like a beautiful water drop about to fall. He lingers before windows displaying hazelnut candies like tiny chicks with ribbons on their heads. He is uncharacteristically complacent. Franz is in Switzerland, his body as solid as a glacier wedged into the Matterhorn’s stone flesh.
The Lava in My Bones Page 27