The Lava in My Bones (39 page)

Word got out that a pee-thrower was on board, and I became terrified of getting caught. I made more use of the ship's inner skeleton and changed clothes three times a day. I'd hide Mary's vials in my socks, amongst the curls in my hair. Sometimes she protruded against my bandannas like a tumour or bulged like
strange growths on my hips or buttocks. As I spilled each vial without finding Mary, my frustration was balanced by the knowledge that I was getting closer. The odds were one in a hundred, then one in ninety-nine, ninety-eight, and eventually I'd strike gold and have the power of pure Mary in my hands.

I dumped so many clothes overboard that travellers now showed up for dinner half-dressed. Pot bellies bulged against undershirts as men tightened imaginary ties; women adjusted bra straps before stepping to the podium to speak. By the fifth day, nearly all the conference attendees were half-naked or wore clothes with pee stains on them. I'd eye the dark sphere on the crotch of a man's pants or the exclamation-mark-shaped shadow on a woman's dress and know these clothes would be in the dry cleaner's tonight and on my body tomorrow.

As wrath at both the pee-thrower and the clothes-stealer mounted, accusations flew and paranoia took hold of the ship. I watched as a young girl with daisies pinned in her braids was cornered by a mob of fist-waving men in boxer shorts.

“Those aren't bobby pins in your hair,” they cried. “You stole our tie clips.”

One night I shivered in terror as feet stamped in the hall and Sue shrieked.

“She's the one,” men yelled. “Why else would she be hiding down here!”

When she didn't return, I correctly guessed she'd been locked up and was being interrogated. I performed a record thirty pee-throws in two hours. My strategy worked. No one can be in two places at once, and at three in the morning, Sue was released.
Back in her hiding place, she wept until daybreak. How wonderful it was to have her near me again. I wanted to enter her cubbyhole and embrace her.

Most passengers blamed the first man I'd baptized, the greasy-haired loser who now wandered the ship shouting, “Hallelujah,” or “Praise God. Let us bless His Holy Name.” He sat alone at the breakfast table twisting croissants into the shapes of crosses. He'd say to the waiter, “You saved the toast from burning just as Christ keeps our souls from sinning.” He had been interrogated several times, yet the thefts and pee-throwing continued. Many believed that he was using spiritual powers to ruin the conference.

“I betcha he's an anti-free-trader. I can tell by the shirt he's wearing. If you flutter your eyelids, it looks tie-dyed.”

“If I find out he stole my Armani, I'll crack his head open with the No Blood for Oil placard he's probably got hidden in his closet.”

Luckily Sam was never accused of stealing because he always wore the same now-filthy sheet and was assumed to be a clothing victim himself. Ever since we'd crossed the ocean midpoint, he'd stationed himself at the ship's bow where he lay outstretched on the bowsprit that pointed toward Europe. He wrapped his arms around it, his eyes focussed on the horizon as the wind whipped and billowed his sheet. In the evenings he'd relax on deck with Sue. One evening I heard her say, “My honey started flowing the day you left Cartwright, Sam. And it increased when I turned sixteen, but it stopped when I met you on the beach. I guess that means I'm still dependent on you somehow—which I think isn't good. I'm really attached to you, Sam, deep down, in a way that
is bad, probably. I've got to start finding something important in myself, whatever that is, and I'll never find it if I'm always hanging around you. So I'm going to move out and sleep in that closet at the end of the hall.”

“You're not going to leave me alone? What happens if someone finds me there at night?”

“Then scream. I'll hear you and run from my room and boot them out.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I keep thinking of those stories you told me. I wish I'd never heard them.”

“You mean Estelle's tale about how Jimmy couldn't pull his penis from my body and had to chop it off? Or how his penis disappeared into his body? All because of little old me.” She chuckled. “I used to be upset by these stories, but now I see they're a joke. The most important things in life are the most hilarious.”

“I think having one's penis recede into one's body would be horrible. I sure hope it never happens to me. When I'm sleeping, could you check on me from time to time to make sure my penis is still there?”

“You're a riot, Sam.”

“I'm serious. I'm going to get rid of this rock, though. You're right about that; it's just another thing I use to avoid having contact with real life. I fixate and put these things between me and what I love, and then I can't be open to what's around me. I've just got to find the best way to get rid of it.”

Security guards were finally stationed at the dry cleaner's. I lost access to the clothes and began wearing a sheet like Sam's. This costume was actually better than any disguise. So many people
now wore sheets that I blended in beautifully. After tossing a vial of urine, I could run into a crowded room and be indistinguishable from everyone else.

Sue spent less time with her brother and would only wave at him lying at the bow. She preferred standing at the stern and looking westward, toward home. I took this as a positive sign. She wanted to return to her old life, to Cartwright, to me. Oh, I felt such a rush of love for her then.

One morning I spied Sue doing can-can kicks to the rising sun. Then she leaned on the railing and peered, transfixed. Her eyes, face, her whole body was glowing. At lunchtime I asked, “Mind if I sit with you?”

“Yes, of course. I love having company.” Her habitual paranoia had vanished.

A man in red underpants was speaking at the microphone. “We must strive for the free flow of goods. Imagine a world with Chinese broccoli and Guatemalan cheese on every table. Produce has its own mysteries and we should let it flow where it must. Money is the motor of the world. Let's respect that!”

What foolish men. Money doesn't move the world, even in this atheistic century. It's hard to believe that so many people that live on the Earth's surface today are such complete and utter morons.

Sue crunched a burnt bacon slice between her teeth and giggled.

“You're in a very good mood today,” I commented.

“Oh yes, yes, yes!” Watching her pop grapes into her mouth, I believed I could ask her any question at all and she'd answer honestly.

“Are you happy because you're no longer living with your friend?”

“Leaving him changed everything in me.”

“Changed everything? What do you mean?”

Sue tittered, jumped up, began dancing, then sat down again. Was she on drugs?

“Well, you see,” she said. “I had some friends. Once upon a time.” She yelled, “Once upon a time,” then sing-songed, “very special friends who visited me regularly. They gave me great pleasure. But I didn't appreciate them.” She looked straight into my eyes. “Everybody said it was wrong, and I sort of believed them.” She became very quiet. “But I loved them dearly. Really, I did. I couldn't understand it all then because everything was—strange, so wonderful, beautiful, and strange.” Her hand absentmindedly caressed the table top. “There was nothing wrong with me at all. I never needed to leave the place I was born because the best thing I had I carried with me wherever I went. I mean, I
am
my body. That's what I've been looking for. My body has been with me since birth and will be with me for the rest of my life. I'll never be able to get rid of it—even if I wanted to. And it'll never abandon me, the way, for example, Sam did. So I don't need to worry. My own skin supplies me with more pleasure than I've ever known.” She let out a tinkling peel of laughter. “It's like a fairy tale I heard about, where Mr. Potato Head people could shift around their body parts. I define my own body and make it do what I want.” What was she talking about? Her speech was becoming as cryptic as her brother's. Was I the only person here aware of more than herself? “In
the end, my friends turned against me, but that was because I was afraid to show the world how much I really loved who I was. That won't happen a second time. I refuse to feel shame ever again.”

What a blabbering, mindless freak! Still, her vulnerability touched me. Nervously, I said, “What you say isn't true. Only your soul is important. The body is not a means to salvation but a distraction, unless, as a mother, it creates something.” But Sue wasn't listening. A minute later she said, “Ta-ta!,” lifted both arms like airplane wings, and glided out of the room. She spent the afternoon at the stern, standing in the cusp of the V, one elbow on top of each railing. The wind ruffled her hair, flicked at her dress. Her head didn't turn but remained straight like a stuck weather-cock.

Mine two children are stone gargoyles at the head and foot of a ship crossing the ocean. I am the energy moving between them. I imagined Sue's body hardening to stone as she gazed westward toward a long-vanished continent. When the dinner bell sounded, she stepped back. Passing me, she smiled dreamily. I marched to where she'd been standing and, like her, put each elbow on the railings. Looking ahead, I tried to see what she saw. But the sky was clear, the horizon bare.

Then I felt on my elbows a mucus-like viscidity pressing into my skin. I lifted my arms, saw thin dangling threads. I gasped: it was there, honey-drops in a row on the railing, honey on the metal post she'd pressed her pelvis against and, on the floor, honey footprints glistening in the sunlight! In horror, I looked up and stared hard at the western horizon. Was it my imagination or did
I hear, from the direction of North America, a subtle, distant buzzing?

Clutching my sheet I hurtled down to the cabin, burst through my door, slammed it shut, and exploded into a torrent of weeping. I banged my fists on the floor, screamed at the porthole, kicked the walls of the room. Had it all come to this? In racing ahead was my course but a circle, and we were back where we started? The vials stood like soldiers in a depleted army.

The twenty-first century is the problem, so detached from the Christian past. My children must not live in an era where science is all that's left or they will be cut off from their roots. Without God the world becomes a mechanistic whirligig, and you can be as exposed as those businessmen's bodies, but there's nothing to see but rows of pimples and birth-marks. Without God, ye deny the mystery of life and mine womb. There are huge parts of myself that even I don't understand. The womb is all and I accept no other truth. The ability to desire cometh from me. Sam thinks he loves Franz, but that's simply my love that's flowed into him and which he's twisted. Sue believes that the bees are an extension of herself, but her pleasure is but the energy that at her birth flowed from my body to hers.

I admit it now: I am a selfish, bitter shrew. I am our civilization's suffocating past whose presence still lingers and is despised. I know my domineering ways have damaged those I love. I recognize my personality's limits but can't escape them. It's the way God made me and I am too weak to change. Applaud me for my insight. This is my epiphany. It's not much but it's all I shall get. Not everyone has the chance to see the Matterhorn in one's
lifetime. We know about Biblical floods. The Earth was born in catastrophe and shall end in catastrophe. I surrender to the Monster. What pleasure at last to give way to the strongest force in oneself!

Tomorrow I shall throw all of the remaining vials, find the magic talisman, and bring my children back to me before this foul century swallows them for good. That they had been born before Newton imagined his first light bulb!

I could not sleep all night. The infernal buzzing filled the air, the boat was rocked by strange winds, and dark waves lashed the porthole. I got up on my bed and besought the Holy Sprit to descend, but the accursed droning kept Him locked in the sky. When I finally slept—nightmares. I dreamt that I threw Mary's urine, but the wind shifted and it was I who was splattered. My body grew before my astonished children's eyes and I became as tall as the statue of Mary. But I was not happy because this made me more separate from my offspring than before. Then I dreamt I doused my children, but it was they who grew large. Next I dreamt that, after a perfect baptism, Sam and Sue's faces transformed to resemble mine. At first I was delighted, but in public no one could tell us apart. People called our names and Sam turned or I turned or we all turned at once until we were moving frenziedly like doors flapping in a windstorm.

By morning the buzzing was so loud that the cabin walls were vibrating and the sea covered with trembling goose bumps. I snatched the page of Franz's letter from under the mattress and stuffed it into the cleft under my breast. Sheet-swathed and armed with every remaining vial, I, for the last time, marched
down the hallway and up the stairs.

Everyone on the ship stood on deck half-dressed or blanketed, staring at a sky half-covered with a steadily oozing inky blotch.

“Mother of God,” I whispered. “Help me in my hour of need.”

The bees were sliding like a car sun-roof over the world, slicing in half that wonderful space between Heaven and Earth. People cried and wailed. “What is it?” “What's happening?” The man who'd praised CEO Benson crouched in his stained undies, pounded his fists on the floor, and screamed, “Eight months of preparation for what?!” In the ocean, swordfish leapt in bright silver arcs. My grip closed tighter around the ten vials concealed beneath my sheet. I pushed through the crowds. Women thrashed against walls, shrieking men pulled at the hair on their heads.