The Lava in My Bones (33 page)

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.

He notices the statue of Mary whose clothes and skin are the same white stone, making it impossible to tell if her clothes are part of her body or her body part of her clothes. At his feet, broken steel animal traps lie like severed jawbones.

He climbs down the hill and hurries across a wooded lot. Through the foliage he glimpses the rows of clapboard houses on sloping streets, his mother's white-washed church with its delicate needle-like steeple, the red-bricked library. Somehow he expected to be horrified, furious, or mournful, but Cartwright stands silent and unreal, as if behind glass.

He discovers a boulder covered with dead bees. At the end of Maple Road, he scurries into his parent's backyard. Right away he knows no one's home. At this hour, his father is usually listening to fiddle music on the radio and his mother clanging pots and pans. He warily approaches the house, glances through a window. His room hasn't changed; there is his poster of a windmill on one wall, his stack of
Scientific Americans
in the corner. His bed's been left unmade, as if time stopped when he left home. His family refused to believe he'd grow up. That was always the problem. Through the living room window, he sees a cylindrical glass containing a yellow liquid. Its presence bothers him, so he leaps over
to the tree and begins digging. He still feels guilty for burying his mother's damned crucifix. He lifts up Christ, brushes dirt from his eyes, and drops him in the mailbox. Sam patters back into the bush, glad he didn't have to confront his mother.

Nearby, he hears a man's voice: “Caesar ran barking in here and I never seen him since.”

Sam races into the woods, runs in the direction of the beach. He pauses by his old school, observes the track, the football fields. He hears music, sees men in blue jackets milling in the parking lot. One of their silly dances. Sunlight catches the golden hair rising on top of a woman's head and Sam feels a tug at his heart. In his mind, wooden-legged men do can-cans.

He finally arrives at the cold windy beach, but no one is there.

He has been waiting behind the hardwood shrub for hours. Fuzz-dappled leaves tickle his cheeks. Waves crash rhythmically, hypnotically. Before Sam are the bare components of the universe: water, sky, and earth. Yet whatever the universe contains, it does not include his sister. He decides to sneak back into town and find her. Then he hears a distant roar, rumblings, the sound of an avalanche, screams. A percussive pounding like fingers on a tabletop—and like a bullet, an object shoots into his line of vision.

Not having seen Sue for eight years, he has no idea what she'll look like, but he quickly concludes that this tall naked woman covered with red dots and black needles isn't her. The woman
crouches at the ocean's edge, pulls at her hair, and pounds the earth so savagely, Sam is terrified. Best to head back into the woods, but then he hears a voice. “Sam, you forsook me … you forsook me.” My God—Sue's voice? It's Sue?

His whole body convulses. Steadying himself he calls out, “Sue, is that you?”

The woman stops moving.

“It's me. Sam.” His voice is clearer than he expected. “I'm here.”

She darts around but sees only a quivering bush.

“Please don't be afraid. I look different, but I feel great.” He takes a deep breath and steps forward.

Sue shrieks once, covers her mouth with both hands.

“I've had an eventful trip. I see you've had your own adventures. You'll have to tell me about them when we get on the ship.”

She bats her eyelids twice. The wrinkles on her forehead smooth out. Sue takes one step and embraces the monster. The side of her head presses against his furry ears. Sam feels her fingertips nestling in the small of his back. The high-pitched ringing in his ears has stopped and a syrup-scented silence descends to drown out all but the sound of their breathing.

Water

When Sam and Sue boarded the ship, they didn't know that
their Mother was waiting inside. They thought they could sever their links to the past and remake themselves completely. They thought they could simply look in the mirror and say, “I want a thinner face, a more aquiline nose, eyebrows that don't join like Boris Karloff's but are lightly sketched curves.” They didn't realize that their Mother was crouching in the darkness at the bottom of the ship and would unexpectedly spring up like the monster in an amusement-park funhouse and, with razor-tipped fingers, shred the tender buds of their freedom. How do I know? Hearken, Reader! Their Mother is narrating this section!

There it is! Ha! I spit in your eye! You think that everyone shall have a story but me? You think I want to be the sourpuss everyone laughs at? “I may not be perfect,” you say, turning to the next chapter, “but at least I'm not like
her
.”

A pox on thee! I am not a bitter old hag and refuse to play the villain. My desires are as real as anyone's, my needs as legitimate, and if you think I'm but a stuck-up Jesus-freak, then it's you who wear horse-blinders to bed. Remove them and behold! Realize there's more than meets the eye! Read between the lines for a change, you stupid little ass wipe!

I am not the wicked stepmother in this fairy's tale. Sam and Sue were once in mine body and of mine body, for mine body created them. I gave birth to all the major characters in this book (except Franz, that perverted cockatoo; if he ever poked his hairsprayed head out of my vagina, I'd ram him back in again crying, “He's not mine! Wait a few minutes and somebody else will come out.”)

Everything on Earth cometh of me. I am the salt of our springs and the rock of this Earth. My blood floweth in my children's veins and the arc of my bone is the contour of their skulls. I am their Mother, and God is our Father, our
real
Father, not that silly man tangled up in nets on the ocean.

How horrid to be marooned, as we all are, in this atheistic century!

May Mary shower us with sweet milk from her tender swollen breasts!

When thou standest on the ground, thou art standing upon mine body. Put thy head into the sky and thou brushest against mine cerebral cortex. Each breath thou takest is of oxygen from mine nostrils; the food thou eatest was plucked from dirt wet with mine sweat, and the water thou drinkest is but mine urine that evaporated to the sky to return like God's rain into our open mouths.

You laugh at me, reader? Yea, I know you do. Yet I say hallelu. I cry, praise ye the Lord. “No one speaks like you,” you whine. “You're not real; you're a stereotype, like someone on
Saturday Night Live.”
Lo, each subculture hath its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don't believe me? Get with the program,
crackpot! Take thine head out of thine arse.

Oh, I have tried to restrain my desires to mould my children. Yes, my own hands have maimed them. But I cannot help it. A Monster rises within me and I give in.

Twenty-eight years ago, I spread my legs and Sam fell from my vagina like a rock. He had a hard head and left a dent in our linoleum that endures to this day, but I picked him up (Lord, he was heavy), washed him off, and as his lips closed over my breast, he sucked so loudly that everyone, my husband, the midwife, and Pastor Benson, gasped. Praise God and Jesus whose golden hair gleams in the sunlight and contains no dandruff whatsoever! I didn't know the Lord back then. My husband—what a wiener he is—still gave me flowers for my hair and sat on bended knees to sing me “The Sailor's Hornpipe.” He said I was beautiful and I beheld him, a warm fluid flooding my limbs. The angle of his hat set off his butcher's-knife jawbone; his eyes flashed like sunlight on fishing tackle.

Yet as my husband examined the baby swaddled in my arms, I noticed he had a crevice in his forehead, which I resented, for it divided a space that should be unbroken. Also, his head was spherical—I prefer cube-heads—and his hairline had receded, so his face resembled a swollen cabbage. What had happened to my husband?

I feared he would claw this new life from my hands and hurl it into the sea or place it amongst forest rocks so similar in shape to it that Sam would be lost to me forever. Perhaps I should have offered love, not complaints. Regrets follow regrets, but I had to feed the Monster within. I turned my back to him.

The next day he went out in his rowboat and, though he'd return for meals, he never leered at me again. Pastor Benson said that he'd found a mermaid—could that happen? Outside, the sky was so vast, I felt tinier than a freckle on my dear boy's face. God descended to comfort me. He filled me; my bone marrow stirred like a sludge-filled river flowing, blood pooled in tight knots beneath my skin, and my vocal chords, long clenched tight as fists, unknotted, and I sang. How glorious to hear one's own voice for the first time! Yea, the mind of Jesus is a gleaming jewel and the mind of Satan is a mushy turd!