The Lava in My Bones (22 page)

Eins, zwei, drei, vier.

Kraut-talk. The manly language. You wanted it, Sam. You wanted my tongue.
Wunderbar! Guten Tag! Raus!

Swishity-swash,
the sound of my paintbrush sweeping across canvas.
Clickity-clack,
my pen drumming a tabletop. These two actions now define my life.

I treated you like crap, Sam. I see that. Do I accept my behaviour? I've had to accept a lot of shitty things. I accept that I'm a second-rate artist. My face will never be on the cover of
Tagesspiegel.

Scheiss! Verdammung!

Television commentators will never discuss my work's influence on the shape of NASA rocket ships. I live in one of the world's smallest countries, and get diarrhea whenever I near a border-crossing.

Swishity-swash.

What's worse, my hair grows in ripples and won't lie flat on my head even when I use specialized gel. I want my head to be bullet-shaped, Sam, because bullets are associated with power, and I want to express my power through the shape of my head. There should be a connection between a man's hairstyle
and what matters to him in life.

You think I'm vain, Sam?
Zum Donnerwetter!

My hair puffs out like airplane wings, and this grieves me, dude. I've explained this to friends at Wu-Wu Disco; they nod and say they understand, and I believe them. A few years ago in the Zurich gay community, American baseball caps were in vogue because anxiety about hairstyle quality was at an all-time fever pitch.

Clickity-clack.

Yet the most difficult thing to accept, dear Sam, was my heartless treatment of you. Remember the evening I told you about my uncooperative hair? You reacted differently than everyone else. We were wasting our time lined up outside Wu-Wu's, and you were babbling incomprehensibly about geology. “The ground shifts and the shale compounds collide with rhyolite …” I couldn't listen because I was mesmerized by the fantastic shirt I was wearing, a form-fitting Spandex-cotton blend. All at once you cried, “Continents are separate, but the Earth's rotation is the same for all of us!” Your white forehead lit up like a movie screen before the film starts. You'd said something personal, so I told you my hair story. Yet halfway through my speech—“I've tried hot oil treatments, but I'm at a loss …”—you stared at me, and your eyes took on that look that would penetrate, infect, exasperate, and torment me for the rest of my life. How did you fucking do that? Was it something you ate? Did you clench your buttocks so tightly your eyeballs bulged? Your pupils didn't move and your eyes darkened. Then they glazed over with a film—the way the surface of Lake Zurich freezes over and becomes flecked with
interlocking bars of silver and white.

Swishity-swash, swishity-swash!

The rest of your time in Zurich, your eyes had that glazed look and it infuriated me. I felt you weren't seeing into me but covering me over—but with what, I couldn't tell.

Du bist ein scheusslicher Mann!

I began to notice you everywhere. Even when you weren't physically present (out lost in some silly library), I felt your eyes on me. I sensed hands reaching into my skull, tinkering with my thought patterns as you seeped into my bloodstream,
clickity!,
travelled through my veins,
flickity!,
crept soft-footed through my pancreas,
strickity!
, nestled in my spleen, sprawled out in my small intestine, then my large, and invaded every bit of sinew, bone, marrow, and tissue—until one day I looked down at my erect penis and thought you were inside holding it up and glaring back at me through the eye-hole of my urethra.

Fick!
Christ, you freaked me out!

You made me do things I never do. I touched you gently (I'm not gentle, Sam; I'm a take-charge guy). I confessed I liked you and,
Scheiss,
asked you to move in! I longed to protect you from the bad haircuts of the world. When I fingered you, you'd shiver, then I'd shiver, you'd shiver again, and that damned snow never stopped falling. Winds blew and icicles dripped in every room of my house. I wished the universe would close up like an eye. I wanted to return to a life where the hairbrush before me was everything.

The day I asked about your family, I meant to shrink you into a pint-sized person, but you talked of mermaids and your mother
praying to the sky. Sam, scientists are rational, but you made me believe miracles were the root of everything.

Swishity-shit!

In truth, I did not want you, Sam. I wanted the space that surrounded you. You came from a place larger than I could imagine, a country so empty I feared I'd vanish inside it. I longed to vanish. I wanted to run into the space around you and keep running. I wanted to raise my hands to a sky growing more distant by the minute. I wanted to fall in love with distance.

You were possessed of a solidity I envied. So I became nasty. I insulted you, changed the locks on my door, dumped ice cream on you at the gala.

Why were you so skilled at overlooking my meanness?

At the airport when the roaring plane at last took you away, I clenched my eyes shut and thought: he's gone, be glad he's gone, be glad he's gone, be …
Er liebt mich, aber ich liebe ihn nicht.
(The German language is so damned sexy; just hearing it gives me a hard-on; no wonder you wanted me, Sam.)

When I woke the next morning, two eyeballs hovered above my dresser like twin helium balloons. They had that glazed expression that set my blood on fire, made me smash my fist against the bedpost and shout,
“Scheiss!
” Their gaze would follow me and change the way I lived, dear Sam. The eyes watched me during breakfast as I lifted a spoonful of muesli to my lips. They studied a drop of milk dribbling down my chin.

“Get lost,” I yelled. “Pick on someone your own size.”

The eyes didn't tremble or blink. I decided to ignore them.

Swishity-swash.

I approached my easel, picked up my charcoal pencil. Now that you'd gone, I could open myself up and do art without fearing you'd invade me. But as I shakily sketched a flowerpot outline, I could feel you studying every motion of my hand, judging this line, speculating on that curve, examining my fingers curling when I rubbed my nose, scrutinizing my cuticle as I brushed a hair off my forehead. After fifteen minutes, my canvas was a morass of crooked lines and jagged-edged blotches, as if I'd been drawing during an earthquake.

I flung down my charcoal and scurried into the washroom. I removed all my clothes, stepped into the shower, turned on the water, grabbed my soap-on-a-rope, and started scrubbing my chest. I noticed the parallel dots beaming through the translucent curtain.
Miststück!
I washed my armpits and stomach. While I soaped my genitals, the eyeballs expanded. I leapt from the shower, dried myself, dressed. But your cobalt-blue eyes stayed with me. They hovered above the fire-extinguisher nestled in the wall. I darted away, but they followed me, down the staircase, across the lobby. I hurtled out the front door, slammed it shut, and shouted, “If I can't have privacy at home, I'll have it on the streets of Zurich. Take a long walk on a short dock.”

Outside, the air smelled of grass and wet cement. The eyes had vanished. I exhaled loudly and yelled,
“Fantastissimo!
”

Then I tilted my head and saw, up in the sky, your eyes blazing down like two horrible suns. I boarded the tramway, got off downtown, raised my coat collar, and hurried into the fast-moving crowd. The suns remained motionless like satellites frozen in orbit. I stepped into the shade of the huge tower of Urania
Sternwarte. At last you were hidden behind an edifice of steel and concrete.

“Ha-ha!” I shouted out loud.

Right away your eyes glared back at me from the eye sockets of people passing in the street: an old lady hobbling by on a cane, a pink-cockatooed teenager on a skateboard, businessmen swinging briefcases like cleavers, a skipping child blowing bubbles—even a baby in a pram, a pacifier stuck like a sink plug in his mouth, watched me with your still set eyes.

I ducked into Jelmoli where I'd always enjoyed shopping, but as I fingered Dada Damani shirts of speckled cotton or held five-pocketed painter's pants across my waist, I sensed salespeople watching. Every mannequin had his head turned in my direction. Your eyes were everywhere, Sam. They glistened in the plastic heads of dolls I raced past, shone in the flashing sapphire in the jewellery display, and gleamed chakra-like in tie clips on salesmen's chests.

I dashed out onto the street and shrieked at the top of my lungs when a grizzle-furred terrier charged toward me, its mouth barking syllables that sounded like language as its eyes stared the same cobalt glare as yours. I'm going crazy, I thought, staring at the dog who stopped before me and licked his lips.

That evening I walked straight home, drank a full bottle of cognac, and went to bed. I ducked under the covers but sensed you somewhere in my blankets. I took three sleeping pills and fell asleep. When I felt a spongy, wet object slithering up the inside of my leg, I woke screaming.

I went to a psychiatrist, hoping he'd rid me of delusions, but
your eyes in his head glared so intensely, my stomach churned. His eyebrows peaked like a chalet roof, and his eyes intensified their regard, blackening like the tips of machine guns. I ran from his office in hysterics.

Der, die, das, dem, den, des.
German's six ways of saying “the,” like six sexual positions you never knew existed. Hey, I just sprung a boner.

Listen,
Liebhaber,
to hide from you, I knew I had to transform myself. I had to appear to be somebody else. I started dressing in sailor suits, nurse outfits, army uniforms, terrorist balaclavas, and cat costumes, and once went to Wu-Wu Disco in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. I became a plaid-suited car salesman, a street vendor with a twirling bowtie, a soot-cheeked waif sucking popsicle sticks beside a garbage can. Yet the day I left my apartment in a baby bonnet and diapers, looked up and saw your eyes still in the sky, I realized that no matter how much I shook my rattle at them, they would never close. You could see me in every form I took.
Mein Freund,
you put the piss in piss off! Still, I continued to search for a disguise that would save me.

I remembered that horrible book you'd loved,
Fairy Tales of Flesh.
The Mr. Potato Head people could detach and exchange body parts. People wore each other's shoulder blades as if they were mink wraps or sported testicles like brooches on collar bones. Everything shifted and nothing was fixed. I should've thrown that book out long before I met you.