The Lava in My Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

continents have shifted and readjusted themselves many times. The Earth is so altered from what it once was and has become so multifarious that it’s impossible to find an organism aligned with every element in its habitat. Yet that’s the way Sam still remembers his first week in Zurich. He is sure Franz remembers too.
    Although Switzerland has closed its borders to him, the caféawnings are folded up, and the bankers’ briefcases locked tighter than ever, Sam is sure there are moments when Franz sees his friend’s face in a flash of light reflected in a shop window or in the blurred flutter of wings as pigeons fly from the fountain beside the statue of Alfred Escher, and at times, in darkest night, when Zurich is engulfed in its tomb-like silence, Franz can hear the faint, barely perceptible sound of Sam weeping on the far side of the world.
    If Sam could forget how they wandered arm-in-arm down the city streets as snow banks rose on all sides, growing higher and higher, glittering beneath a crystal sun in a subzero cold he could no longer feel. Sam forgot calendars existed. He was deaf to the sound of the Swiss time-pieces ticking in the windows of every shop, on the wall of every restaurant, on the wrists of people who glanced at the two men in the streets. The silent snow, the rise and fall of its knolls and dales, was everything to him, the laughing children throwing snowballs across the street, the water dripping down the steamy insides of café windows, the icicles hanging like metallic spears that everyone feared woulddrop. And that day Sam made a magnificent, life-sized snowman of Franz right there in the middle of the financial district, and it lasted two days before a plough came.
    Sam could press handfuls of snow against his cheeks and feel no pain, and when he touched the nylon surface of Franz’s winter coat, though it seemed as thick as the internal layers of the Earth, he could feel Franz’s heart beating deep inside. How he came to know Franz’s body in that short time, its stone ridges and hidden valleys. He knew it as he once knew the mall at the end of his street, the grey walls of his Toronto apartment, his trays full of rocks, and the night-black computer screen.
    How glorious Franz looked feasting in that Italian restaurant, his hands stuffed with bread. He could chatter so in the cinema where they saw a terrible movie about bank robbers stranded in the Sahara desert, but Franz could be serious too. He told Sam about his father’s death; he’d been young and it was unexpected. His dad had always wanted to be a deep-sea diver, but had ended up living his life here in Switzerland, the most land-locked country in the world. Franz would press his face into Sam’s shoulder and let him stroke his hair as Sam described wind-swept glaciers, flowers that bloomed once a century in the sun-starved tundra, and the vast outer reaches of the Arctic Ocean covered with ice that he hoped would never melt.

    On his fifteenth day in Zurich, Sam was horrified to discover he didn’t want to leave. Toronto now seemed a place of exile.He’d only tolerated it because his Labrador childhood had been worse. Here the Alps undulated like roller-coaster hills, and Franz’s body rose on the bed like a mountain range beside him. He no longer obsessed over global warming; there was snow in every street, and the weather was simply too cold.
    At the conference, the shocked scientists had no choice but to defend themselves. “This uncharacteristic cool spell is exceptional and doesn’t contradict the forward progression of global warming.”
    Everywhere Sam heard the sound of the fire roaring at the Earth’s centre. It roared when he slept, and it roared when he woke. There it was, thundering beneath the blare of the kitchen radio, behind the shout of the newspaper delivery boy, under the chirping of birds in the park and the rumbling of street traffic. The sound