The Lava in My Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the ground.
    Sam wondered if anyone saw the kiss, concluded this was irrelevant. He crouched on a stone outcropping.
    Franz pulled out a knife and cut an apple. “Are you still hungry?” He handed Sam a slice. “We could’ve gotten to my place a lot faster, but the scenic route is better.” He looked straight at Sam and said, “Or maybe I’m delaying ’cause I’m scared.” He held Sam’s gaze for a long time and Sam felt he was being offered something. “Sometimes I pretend I’m far from Zurich.” He pointed his knife-tip south. “But in that direction another town begins. Head in any Richtung, and you’ll hit a border, the German, Italian, or Austrian. I’m surrounded by borders. Unlike yours, my country is so small, some days it seems I know everyone in it.” Franz fingered an apple slice. Again he stared directly at Sam. He said, “I feel trapped.”
    How strange to talk about sentiments. What should Sam say? He’d mirror Franz. “I’ve been feeling peculiar lately too. It’s one reason I came to Europe. I thought if I corrected my own life, the world would fix itself as well. Funny, eh?”
    Then the conversation shifted, rose like a wave, and the twomen started talking about a thousand things: hiking boots, airplane tickets, the difficulty of tying sailor’s knots, ice cream that’s been refrozen, fire extinguishers, and the hard pit at the centre of avocadoes they both always wanted to eat but couldn’t. Franz kept saying, “You’re right,” while Sam responded, “Yes. Yes, yes.”
    Winds swept softly through the underbrush. Light-flecks scuttled over Sam’s thighs. A cool breeze brushed his eyelashes. He thought that everything was normal in his life and nothing was changing. He didn’t know that on the far side of the world, earthquakes were happening in the country where he lived, granite mountains were imploding, and shale cliffs were falling into the sea.
    He lifted the piece of apple Franz gave him, put it into his mouth.
    Franz pointed at the dark cleft in the centre of the limestone pit. “Fall in that, and you’ll keep falling and never stop.”
    And for the first time Sam heard it, the sound that would follow him for the rest of his life: the fire burning at the Earth’s centre. Molten lava separated to join swelling masses that broke apart to meld with other shifting masses …
    Sam looked at Franz and Franz looked at Sam and their apples cracked between their teeth. A bird flew overhead. Somewhere, water trickled. The forest was dark and then light and then dark. Franz took Sam’s hand in his—a hairy, rough-skinned hand—and led him the rest of the way down the twisting trail until they stood in the clearing where, years ago, Franz had built his sculpture garden. Studded about the square yard was artwork that would remain in Sam’s mind for a lifetime: large stone circleswith lines through them and clay spheres penetrated by steel rods that went in one side and out the other; everything round was divided yet connected by lines that criss-crossed at multitudinous angles, and everything was chopped into segments that fit into a framework that was spherical. Plastic slatted wheels rotated on metal axles, wooden hoops adorned with streamers whirled round iron poles, as huge metallic disks spun in the wind, their styrene spokes clattering against out-thrusting metal prongs. Everything had an axis as well as an outer surface, and suddenly Sam realized that if you drew a line from Canada to the Earth’s centre, it joined a similar line from Switzerland and the two countries were connected in an obvious, logical, not-even-mysterious way. All at once Sam saw himself in his own barren field studying the crystal-flecked surface of a rock, and as Franz’s words pushed relentlessly against his eardrums, “Now tell me about your country,