The Lava in My Bones (25 page)

I braced myself and pushed through the steel-rimmed door. Entering the Dairy Queen was like stepping into the cavern of your skull. I was closer to the centre of you than ever before. My stomach churned. The walls were frosted white, and paper
snowflakes dangled on strings attached to hanging fluorescent lights. Somewhere violins were playing a finger-snapping melody against a catchy cha-cha-cha rhythm. Mysterious messages hung on the walls—“Pecan Surprise. We're as Nutty as they come” and “Choco-Avalanche—Drown in a Landslide of Cocoa”—accompanied by photos of multi-coloured ice creams towering like skyscrapers from transparent cups or blooming like orchids in lava-coloured cones.

I stepped to the counter, stuck my chin forward, and spoke, the force of nature making my voice gravelly and hoarse. “I want a Brownie Delight.”

Almost immediately, a gigantic mound of whiteness dripping with tar-coloured sauce and haloed by ruffled skirts of whipped cream was handed to me. Tiny nuts winked like eyes. I sat down on a plastic seat that couldn't move forward or backward but pivoted from side to side. I put a spoonful of ice cream into my mouth, tasted the sweetness of vanilla, and instantly thought of other ice creams: the cone we'd shared at the Zurich fairground; the cherry sundae that, laughing, we tried to eat with chopsticks; and the ice cream I dumped in your hair at the
vernissage
gala.
Ich schäme mich!

Here in the Dairy Queen, I'd make amends. I'd do what was necessary to make me understand what I'd put you through. I must destroy my self to become part of something larger. In one swift movement, I lifted the plastic cup directly over my head and turned it upside down. I felt a numbing coolness as chocolate sauce streamed down my forehead and filled my eyebrows; vanilla rivers flowed into my ears carrying nuts like little rafts;
icy liquid cascaded down my cheeks, over my half-open lips, and chunks dappled with whipped cream did suicide leaps past my earlobes and onto my shoulders. One blob rushed along the ski jump of my nose and splattered in my lap. An unfamiliar coldness crowned my skull and seeped into my groin.

Across the aisle an elderly lady holding a snowcone stared motionless. I heard a child laugh and a woman hiss, “Be quiet!”

Damned philistines!

Finally I rose to my feet and stood statue-still there in the centre of Dairy Queen, my whole body dripping with desire for you, Sam. The music had changed to a snappy waltz; a merry clarinet sang against a crisply stuck snare drum. I became riveted by my reflection in the mirror, my head engulfed in a swirling river of striped darkness and light while ovals of whipped cream drifted like ambulatory clouds down across my torso, pelvis, and legs. Like a demigod, I marched toward the exit and pushed through the glass door that for one second held my image.

In the parking lot, I raised my dripping head and beheld your two eyes blazing in the sky. They melted the ice cream that now flowed fast and fiercely over all the surfaces of my body. (Oh, laugh, Sam! I know you find me ridiculous. Veronika finds it hilarious too! Laugh with her!)

I re-entered the forest and reclaimed my natural essence. Birds fluttered overhead. Snakes slithered between my feet. I cried, “Fly high, birds. Enjoy your freedom. Slide fast, snakes. Hope your stomachs are slippery. Run fast, squirrels. Don't fall into any holes.” Three chipmunks bobbed on a quivering tree branch. A raccoon's head popped out from a bush like a jack-in-the-box.
Encircling my face, a halo of darting flies delighted in the taste of melting ice cream.
Freheit, mein Sam. Ich habe Freiheit gefunden.
I have found freedom.

Darkness fell and I slept on a soft bed of grass beneath a sky of precisely etched stars.

Early the next morning when I woke, the ground felt like a block of ice against my back. I got up, brushed dirt from my clothes, and started walking south. The sun was rising when I reached the small lake at the foot of the Matterhorn; its stone wall of pink wrinkled rock shot skyward. Clusters of scraggly pines clung perilously to its stone cliffs.

Lifting my head and straining my eyes, I scrutinized the dazzling summit, a snow-frosted, pyramid-tipped rock finger curling into an endless blue and haloed by frail wisps of cloud. My whole personality would soon be pulverized. Who would be the “I” about which I constructed my new self? I yearned to find out.

Down the mountain's face, a glacier rippled in grey and white like the foam-crested waves of a raging river that had frozen there. At the mountain's base the glacier thrust forward like an outstretched tongue whose tip touched the edge of a slate-grey lake. Twigs cracked and earth crunched beneath my feet. A stone tumbled into a rock-rimmed cavern and the
pop
sound struck my eardrums violently. I passed squat currant bushes with dense, impenetrable foliage and climbed onto a flat-topped boulder standing by the water's edge. Just above the eastern mountain summit, the sun huddled like a sniper; it bathed the opposite
peaks in a hallucinatory glow, yet the valley below was in complete shadow. No breeze ruffled my hair or shook tree branches. I felt I was the first man in the world's history to come and stand at this spot. The surface of the turquoise lake was as flat and still as my washroom mirror. I held my breath for fear that my exhalation would ripple the water surface and bring to life a world suspended in an unearthly yet intoxicating slumber.

But I finally exhaled, and mountaintops didn't tumble into the lake, trees didn't fall against each other like bowling pins. Rock remained solid. Ice was ice. I breathed in the frigid air, imagined my lungs becoming bright pink as they expanded and shrank. Somewhere water dripped. In the forest, I heard the ascending call of the snowfinch. Below, in the lake, were swirling clouds of dirt specks. I couldn't see the bottom; the lake was guarding its secrets. It was a perfect oval, the oval of an eye or, as you would say, Sam, the oval of the Earth's orbit around the sun.

I felt terrified and cried out,
“Erlöse mich!
,” my voice echoing through the valley. Forcing myself into direct contact with nature's potent force, I removed all my clothes—my shirt, boots, trousers, and underpants—complete exposure. I was now defenceless. Let the Matterhorn have its way with me. Oh,
Mein Gott, Ich habe Angst!
With your eyes blazing down, I stood naked on the boulder beside the Matterhorn lake and stared straight into the water.

Then the miracle happened.

The obscuring clouds of grey vanished and, on the flat water surface was reflected—stone-hard, stolid, and unconquerable—my own body. The reflection was astoundingly clear, stretching
across the entire lake, and my raised arms touched two shorelines. Yes, my body had at last seamlessly merged with nature. I observed my forehead, rectangular as a movie screen; my smooth skin, coloured a lustrous honey hue. My eyes gleamed with a steely brightness; my symmetrical nose jutted straight as a knife blade. My capacious, glistening lips throbbed with an iridescent sensuality; my jaw was crude-cornered, fierce in its unbreakable angularity. My shoulder muscles swelled outwards and dovetailed into my protruding, bulging biceps, solid as concrete while myriad forearm muscles twisted like the knotted cords of sailor's ropes. My pectorals flickered in an ivory chest studded with auburn hair in patterns once seen on Viking shields; below, the lower edge of my stone-solid ribs protruded, and the indentations between each fat-shorn abdominal muscle were like brutal-cut trenches in enemy battlefields.

Dummkopf
that I am! Why had I been afraid of the truth?

Directly below, my burgeoning penis loomed, monstrous in girth, leviathan in length, and with such an intensity of presence that, yes, Sam, it seemed not of this world but a fierce, feral extraterrestrial flown in from another planet, attached to my body and, though one-eyed and mute, able to command the universe. (The Veronika in me awoke and looked out through my eyes; she was especially impressed.) Its ample head ballooned toward the sides of the valley; the tree trunk stalk was covered with a network of clutching, claw-like, throbbing veins, behind which two testicles bulged like ears listening with a savage, annihilating intensity amidst a riotous profusion of pubic hair, twisting and interlocking like multiple passages of an endless labyrinth, all set against
the backdrop of two stone-pillar legs holding the whole massive structure in a high, rarefied air, out of the reach of mortal men and certain to endure for all time.

Language blossomed in my mind. Three simple words burst forth like the first words Man ever uttered, three words that fit together like the long-lost pieces of a Divine puzzle, three words containing the beginning and end of everything. A stone skipped down the side of the Matterhorn, leapt into the centre of the lake and at last exploded my reflection into a thousand pieces as three words, like rifle shots, blasted through my brain:
Ich—Bin—Fantastic!

(Oh, laugh now, Sam! I'm a crackpot! You can't hold back any longer. Yes, I can hear you—
ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
)

Bodies like this give sexual desire its meaning! It's for this that penises rise like drawbridges and vaginas become engorged with blood! It's for this that people throw snot-nosed kids into ravines, cross raging rivers, or ice-pick up the wrong side of frozen waterfalls! It's for this that politicians undo their flies in election season, porn magazines with their pages stuck together are found stacked in church basements, people chop off body parts and mail them to ex-lovers, risk hair on palms, stolen wallets, planes flying into buildings, and lice that hop like chess figurines on a board whose players are ever changing. It was for this that people do everything they have ever done, and my body was at the centre. And it was this I would offer you as my final act of generosity.

Why had I feared that I'd disintegrate? Some days I spoke English, other days German; I was an artist, then an ad designer,
Sam's lover, Veronika, a wandering vagabond. Though I changed, my body was constant; it was the stone monument that remains after an earthquake. And I realized it was this I deprived you of when I turned my back on you at the Zurich airport. It was this I took from your life with those three other words, “Please don't write.”

Of the six billion people in the world, you were the one who could most profoundly appreciate the masterpiece of my body. Your sallow face and hell-on-wheels fashion sense put you farther from me than anyone I'd ever met, and that distance awoke in you a desire for me greater than that possessed by any other being on this whole planet. (
Jawohl!
Of course Prince Charming is gorgeous!) Yet I had cast you aside.

My shoulders started shaking, my lungs heaved, and I collapsed sobbing on the boulder. I wept because I'd treated you badly. I wept because I'd refused to see life through your eyes. I wept because I'd forced you to leave Switzerland. That morning beneath the summit of the blessed Matterhorn, I realized that it was my destiny to give pleasure to the world through my body and that the person most capable of receiving all I have was you, Sam. (Sounds loony? Of course it is, Sam, but that's the guy I am!)

I looked up at the mountain peak and saw your eyes radiating like suns from which liquid gold poured. I stared unflinching into those searing eyes and said, as I say in this letter I'm writing now: Sam,
mein Liebling,
come back to Zurich. Put my body under a microscope and find the uncharted connections in the constellations of my pores, hairs, beauty spots, and pimples. Remove my
limbs and preserve them in your labelled jars. Cover my skin with angles and lines. I'll never be afraid again. Make graphs on my Adam's apple, tables over my cheekbones, and pie charts on my buttocks. Describe every atom of my body in sentences so long they'll reach right around the world, and their commas, periods, and exclamation marks will be like lights that flash on meteorites passing through outer space.

You never thought I could talk pretty, eh, Sam? You inspire me,
Liebhaber.
You make me greater than I've ever been.

Come meet me at my chalet. I'll expect you any day. And this time you won't leave, for my country's borders will become walls you can't cross. You'll be as trapped as I am, but you'll love it. A part of my bed is reserved for you. There is a plastic bowl with your name on it, and if we buy ice cream, this time it goes in my hair, not yours. I've got a wonderful Veronika inside me, but know that you like me best as a man.
Du bist fantastisch, Sam! Ich liebe dich! Swishity-swash! Klickity-klack! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

We will stand and laugh together, and once we start, we'll never stop.