The Lava in My Bones (11 page)

Then he threw a stone into another river and started dating hermaphrodites, transsexuals, men who were women, and women who were men or both or neither or who didn't know. He dated people dressed as animals and animals dressed as people, and spent an entire evening chatting with a panty-clad blow-up doll that he deflated and inflated for variety.

But amidst the myriad faces of the world's people who sat across the table from him in ten-star restaurants where vichyssoise and shark flambé were just the appetizers, where the table was piled high with long-stemmed roses, where Valentine's Day came twice a week, the violinist never left your side, and champagne bottles popped non-stop, always as Sam finished his drink, he found an ice cube bouncing against his lips, colliding with his
teeth, chilling his tongue, skull, and body until, shivering, he had to run to the washroom, where every solid object—the cubicle walls, gleaming chrome taps, tin wastepaper basket—seemed a part of Franz's body.

If only the world would stop spinning and he be released from its centrifugal forces! But no. There was the ground forever beneath his feet, the fire burning at the Earth's centre, winds blowing one way, then another. The problem was the looking-glass: his country and Franz's were the same but opposite. Sam was Franz, and he wasn't. No one else in his home country had the same merging of fire and ice. Sam tried to order
Fairy Tales of Flesh,
but it wasn't distributed on his side of the Atlantic.

Then he drew Franz's jewel-flashing eyes on a piece of paper that he tried to burn, but it wouldn't catch fire. He flushed the sheet down the toilet, but the next day it returned, diamonds flowing through his taps, swirling over the plates he ate from, shooting from the showerhead to saturate his body. He was regularly surprised by mid-summer snowstorms in supermarket parking lots, in dentists' waiting rooms, on lonely beaches where he pulled up rocks from the earth.

Sam was not made for such drama. He was meant to live out his seventy-odd years in quiet obscurity and then be buried a mere two metres below the Earth's surface. He did not expect the world's subterranean plates to shift and collide. He did not expect the oceans to conspire against him. He gazed into horizons. He shouted into windstorms.

Finally one night he raced out into his landlady's garden, hurled himself onto the ground, clawed his fingers into the
earth, and dug up limestone, shale pebbles, dolomite, sandstone, gypsum, travertine, and rammed it all down his throat.

The next morning, he woke up in Emergency.

Air

My body was changing. This happens to girls my age, so I wasn't
surprised. In health class I'd learned how our breasts would swell, our hips billow, and patches of hair appear on our bodies. I expected everything and, despite Mother's warnings, revelled in the new flesh covering my bones, the rounding-out of what had once been level.

One thing that I didn't expect—and couldn't stand—was the stickiness. A glue-like residue coated my skin, veneered my armpits, the tips of my breasts, and the space between my legs. It was clammy and viscous, made my thighs cling together and stuck my arms to my torso. My toes melded into one solid, beak-like protuberance. I perspired daily, but I did not perspire as other sixteen-year-old girls did for, you see—
I sweated honey.
This is not a metaphor but true life. From my pores came liquid, golden honey such as bees make, such as Father puts on his toast every morning before he slices it into strips.

“Tests show that your perspiration has the normal levels of sodium and chloride,” said Dr Merton, his voice level, “but its unusually high levels of sugar make its composition similar to”—he gulped—“bee-honey.”

Mother raised one hand and cried, “God, don't let me lose my
daughter just as I lost my son!”

That's you, Sam. She considers you lost.

Although you can not hear my thoughts, Sam, I imagine I'm talking to you. Prayers to the brother who abandoned me. The day after you left Labrador, my honey started flowing. Is my body weeping for your loss?

At home Mother removed my clothes and coated me with sea salt, driftwood shavings, baking soda, coral dust—anything to staunch the flow. She forbade me to eat corn syrup, caramel squares, or Jujubes; she uprooted all the flowers in our garden fearing they'd attract honey-making bees, though bees hadn't been seen in this part of Labrador for decades (the only thing for them here is rock stained with sea salt). One night Mother sneaked into our neighbour's yard and gutted their tiny tulip bed. “I don't know who did it,” she said into the phone the next morning. Mother even drove me to Mary's Harbour to get a second opinion, but the doctor there agreed with Dr Merton. “Your perspiration has the standard levels of protein and fatty acids, but there's all that unmetabolized sugar! I've never seen anything like it.”

Mother threatened to leave Labrador to get help. Of course, she's afraid to leave. She doesn't want what happened to you, Sam, to happen to me.

Our town, Cartwright, was similar to many other villages along the shore, full of the smell of bonfires and rotting flounder, the cry of seagulls and the thump of wood hitting the earth. Every day fishermen shuffled their feet along the boards of the once-busy port. Gales blew everywhere, wailing up one street
and down another. Wind rattled our windows at night, splattered bugs on our walls, and whipped telephone wires. I'd always feared the Cartwright wind but lately would flee our clapboard house to run into it. Some things are greater than fear, and I wanted to know what they were.

Every night, doing my homework I felt honey drops crawling down my neck, beading in the small of my back, collecting in creases around my waist, and dropping in globules from my vagina. Honey seeped through my hair, darkened the fabric of my shirts. Each time Mother threw my clothes in the washer, the agitator got clogged and the machine stopped running. When I took a shower, my sweat flowed down the drain and blocked the pipes in the basement, and Father had to phone the plumber. I was blamed for the pipes cracking beneath the sidewalk, the sewers backing up on our street, and a fire-hydrant that exploded.

School, however, was where things were the worst. When classes started in September, I thought I could hide my affliction, but Mr Schmidt soon noticed syrup beads clinging to my forehead and said, “Sue, are you feeling ill? Do you want to go home?” Whenever I raised my hand to answer a question, my arm made a loud
ffffflit
sound and everyone turned toward me. One day when I flung back my hair, a honey-drop flew off and landed on the open textbook of Estelle Beaverbank, Esther's younger sister. Like Esther, she had a mountain of blonde hair lacquered into a complex series of curlicues and a slot-like mouth you wanted to slip a nickel into. She cried out, “Oooh, gross! Sue's a filthy
glue-girl!
”

At that moment, all was lost. “So that's what it is,” said Mr Schmidt.
“I wondered why the doorknobs were sticky.”

Over the next weeks, my honey flow increased and soon my residue was everywhere—on the edges of chairs I sat on, the side of a doorjamb I'd brushed past, on hall walls I'd leaned against, on the edges of toilet seats, and on the piece of chalk I'd used on the blackboard. Small glue footprints ran up and down the aisles between our desks and along the hallway's square tiles. In Home Ec, the sewing machine needles became jammed and wouldn't budge. In the library, when I put a book on the shelf, students had trouble removing it and when they did, they couldn't open it. A steadily increasing puddle grew beneath my chair in homeroom, and during gym class my honey was splattered everywhere, across the gymnastics bar, along the hobbyhorse, all over the somersault mats. The shot-putts became so coated, no one would throw them. The school had to hire an extra janitor to deal with the clean-up.

Mr Schmidt treated me with the condescending tolerance one accords a physically challenged student who, through no fault of her own, is a complete nuisance. “We'll have to delay the geography test until tomorrow,” he sighed. “I need to unroll the map of Europe, but it's stuck shut.”

After the initial shock, people became fascinated with my physical condition. Groups of girls invited me to walk part-way home with them. Brows creased, they'd glare at the skin on my neck.

“It's all through your hair. Can you comb it?”

I couldn't.

“Is it true you can't wear a pretty formal dress? Estelle says your sweat would wreck anything nice.”

“I guess that's true.”

I wasn't used to making conversation, but now the pattern of dialogue consisted of a series of simple questions I had only to answer.

“When did you start getting it?”

“It started just a bit seven years ago, the day after my brother left home. But last month on my birthday, it really started flowing.”

“Wow,” the girls would say in unison. They were my first “friends.” When you lived with us, Sam, I didn't see the point in socializing. Now I wanted to meet people.

The boys started inviting me to hang out with them at the end of the school day. Sometimes I'd escape down the alley beside the portables, but one Friday, feeling curious, I shrugged and followed. For a minute I thought I was being led to “the bushes”—a spot at the end of the football field where people hung out or “got friendly”—but they turned the opposite way, toward a large oak tree. We sat in a circle on the shaded grass while the boys eyed me solemnly. No one spoke. Boys up close seemed alarming. Unlike you, Sam, they had dirt-like moustaches and grubby hands, and their clothes smelled like sour milk. The sun hung high in the sky; a dragonfly circled my forehead. Then the boys dared each other to touch me. I studied my legs draped in wrinkled trousers that resembled their own. I felt embarrassed without knowing why.

“Put your finger on the drop on the end of her chin and put it
in your mouth. Here's two bucks you won't.”

“Touch her ankle and lick it, shitface. If you do, I'm the one who steals cigs from Variety Plus tonight.”

“Ten bucks if you put your tongue in her ear; there's a whole poolful in there.”

None of them touched me. They leered at a honey drop clinging to the end of my elbow. As they waited for it to fall, their faces stopped twitching, their eyes darkened, and they became stone still. One boy accidentally got some on his hand but didn't put it in his mouth. When he got up to go home—it was dinnertime by then—he just wiped it on the grass and sauntered off, trying to look courageous.