Free The Lava in My Bones by Barry Webster Page A

deserted squares, garish over-lit fountains, gleaming windowsfull of merchandise that appeared and vanished like hallucinations. In an empty intersection he stopped running and shouted, “Why should the Earth be saved? What’s so fucking great about it?” To Sam, the only choices were suffocating isolation or pain-fraught involvement in life. “Let the ice-caps melt and flood the coasts! Let jungles turn to deserts! Let hurricane winds strip every bit of foliage from the Earth so our planet becomes a peach pit spinning in space. Who cares? The universe is vast, and there are so many other planets to worry about if we won’t worry about ours. And as for that fucking force that moves the world, whatever it is, it’s misguided. It should go somewhere else, to a place where it’s wanted rather than wasting its time here!” Sam realized these thoughts had long been buried in his mind. He’d worked manically on his research to avoid his true feelings.
    At the chalet, he washed himself and threw the soiled clothes into the garbage where, he thought, they belonged. He fell asleep and had a nightmare. He dreamt his mother raised her ballgown to show she had a giant wood pencil for a penis. She shoved it into a hole in the top of Franz’s head and began grinding, grinding, filling his head with sawdust. “He never had any brains to begin with,” she yelled, “so what difference does it make?” Sam woke in a cold sweat, ran his hand over his body, chest, genitals, kneecaps to make sure everything was still there.
    The next morning Sam opened his eyes; his lover was leaning over him. Right away Franz said, “Es tut mir Leid. I’m sorry for what I did last night. I don’t know what came over me, I just … You don’t know how sorry I am. You can stay here as long as you want, just tell me, sag mir… ” Franz wanted what he hated.
    Sam did the best he could. He described wind-swept glaciers and flowers that bloomed once a century in the sun-starved tundra. Snow fell silently in the summer streets of Zurich and a distant fire roared.
    Again Sam’s genitals became rock, and this astonished him as much as anything. Through Franz, he was becoming the stone Earth; the final border separating him from the planet was disappearing. And this transformation to rock was fuelled by desire, the most ephemeral thing on Earth.
    Sam got up and sadly prepared his lunch and backpack. He left a note. “Gone to Zermatt. Be back in two days.”

    Diamonds are created at a great depth, between 300 and 400 kilometres below the Earth’s surface. The deeper a diamond is buried, the greater it grows. Diamonds are brought to the Earth’s surface through volcanic eruption. What form would Franz’s final eruption take? Sam hoped he’d be present to see the result.

    The Matterhorn is a massive crooked finger angling skyward. Sam was conscious of it everywhere in Zermatt and wasn’t sure if he was watching it or it was watching him. By a lake at its foot, he studied a sheet of gabbro protruding from the ground. He fingered the angular lumps and pulverized fragments from 300 million years ago, when the continents were united. He ran hisfingers over the bulbous rock veins and sniffed the dust on his fingertips. He intoned lines from a speech he could give. “The North American and Eurasian plates were once joined. Present-day Canada touched Switzerland but broke away. Then Spain rotated downward while Italy, protruding like a unicorn’s horn from Africa’s forehead, rammed upwards into Europe.” Staring into the greenish xenoliths, Sam realized that Franz’s country and his own contained the same crystalline rock. The gabbro sheet stood before him like a mirror. He could be in Canada now, but he was on the other side of the ocean. Things were the same and different. He’d gone through a looking-glass and out the other side. Feeling