The Lava in My Bones (26 page)

I am back in Zurich and am waiting. I've renewed my gym membership and bought a new wardrobe of skin-hugging spandex you'll love. You are on my mind every second. Lifting barbells, I observe my vein-pulsing biceps and think of you licking your lips. I finger the curves of my calf muscles and feel your delight. Your eyes are on me always and, for you, my northern
Romeo, I do cartwheels in city parks, pop ping-pong balls from my right thigh to my left, pull coins out from behind an ear and pretend it's magic, or clench and unclench my abdominal muscles to the rhythm of Bolero. Your eyes make my hair shine with more lustre and my spray-on tan look authentic. Your eyes make me hand tips to street cleaners, compliment women on scarf-belt sets, give my credit card number to the homeless, or walk into elevators and for no reason press every button. Your eyes make cash registers ring and customers place francs into hands that are like mouths opening and closing. Your eyes make news vendors cry out headlines in voices that—when the breeze is blowing from the north—sound like music.

Your eyes make the wind blow down the stone streets of Zurich, the sun move from one corner of the sky to the other, the moon go crimson and once every twenty-five days angrily turn its back on us; your eyes make cold fronts move while snow collects in my eyebrows as I stare up into a uniform sky that stretches away from me on all sides forever.

At night I hear, from every corner of the Earth, the voices of people gazing skyward and humming melodies they'd long forgotten. Sam, I feel your eyes on me this instant.

Please. Never stop looking.

Rock

In the psychiatric hospital, the tests performed on Sam are
endless. Never has he endured examinations so exhausting. Never has he been analyzed so obsessively. Every thought in his head is dragged out and chopped into chunks that are then diced into miniscule slivers. Hands lunge down his throat to yank up strings of sausage intestine, only to stuff them back down again and then drag them back up. He throws himself screaming onto the asylum floor or weeps into the cotton smocks of doctors who, shuddering, push him away.

He was sent to the hospital after arriving four times at Emergency with a rock in his throat. The first time, everyone believed his story. Walking in his garden, he'd felt hungry because the full moon reminded him of his life's emptiness. He saw a rock, thought it was a candied apple—what the hell, Halloween was two months off—and stuffed it into his mouth.

The second time, he claimed he was on the beach. It was still the high tourist season and he was surrounded by Americans nasally accentuating the diphthongs of their every word. He observed a row of rocks caked with dirt. If cleaned they'd be beautiful spheres reflecting the face of anyone looking into them. He had no handkerchief so he knelt and polished the rocks with
his shimmying tongue. In the process, he accidentally swallowed one, two, three—damn—four rocks. “But I did it for the Americans,” he explained on the stretcher, “and for the health of our city's tourist industry.”

The third time the interns were sceptical. He said his body needed extra zinc. “Dieticians claim it's important. They should explain that the zinc in fossils isn't the same as in broccoli.”

The fourth time in Emergency, no one believed anything he said. “I thought the scoops of a very hard ice cream cone had fallen to the ground and preferred they melt in my mouth rather than into the earth, which is already saturated with acid-rain.” … “I always wondered how I'd look chubby-cheeked and once they were in my mouth, my Adam's apple called, ‘Come on down!'”

We are allowed a limited number of fictitious stories on this Earth, and after they're told, nothing else we say is believed. Sam's rocks were too heavy to be held up by the gossamer threads of language, and he was transported to this cell where everything, the mattress, padded floor and walls, even the apples he gets for dessert, are soft as pudding.

He spends his time looking out the asylum window. The white lawn below is a perfect rectangle. Sometimes a dog walks out, urinates, moves on; its signature in the snow is an inane dot or squiggle, as meaningless as a punctuation mark without a sentence, a body without a head. An old man often chases scraps of paper across the blinding white. One day a boy and girl step into the blank space. They both wear green coats and are holding hands. Sam watches carefully as they lie down on their backs and flutter their arms and legs. When they stand and see the
angels they made, they leap onto them, stamp and kick with their rubber boots, then run off the field. Sam peers into the bumpy, crater-filled blurs that were once torsos with skirts and wings and feels satisfied. The dog trots out and pees on the spot where a head had been.

The Earth is still in danger. There isn't enough snow on the lawn, and though it is January, rain drops crawl down his windowpane. Yet Sam rarely thinks anymore about that enigmatic force that moves the world. How can he solve large problems when his own life is a catastrophe? He collapsed merely because he met a man in Europe. He understands now that his fascination with Franz was partly a fascination with himself being fascinated by Franz. Yet the man contained a diamond. Or so Sam thought. Or the man would become one. There was a crack in logic, and now Sam is imprisoned in this palace of psychology where Reason dominates everything.

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.”