Title The Geology of Love
Author Bernie
Rating R.
Pairing Pavel Bure / Alexander Mogilny.
Disclaimer. This is all lies.
Dedication Frala, because I know she has Alex-love as
well.
PART ONE
PavelÕs POV.
There is a certain amount of manoeuvring that occurs
by both of us before we get together. As we have gotten older and the distances
between us have grown, in geography, in time, in time zones, in divisions, in
conferences, in our understanding of what this relationship is, the shuttle
diplomacy, the jockeying for position, between the two of us has become more
intricate, more detailed.
There are the rules that we have always obeyed. We
have been quiet and we have been discrete; we have muffled our moans, and we
have stared at walls so our gazes never inadvertently locked in mixed company.
We have married, and dated, and hidden from the world. We have lied, to
ourselves, to each other, to his wife, and to my girlfriends. And we have
gotten old. And now I want to tell him this; I will tell him this: that dear
these rituals will exhaust us, I want you to come to me, in the gentle
darkness, like we did when we were young.
I know that is impossible. When we were young is
another country, one that does not exist anymore. One that doesnÕt appear on
any road maps. As I drive forward in the dark night, I remind myself you canÕt
go back. And yet, always I return to him.
It begins as a message on my cell when he knows I am
playing. I respond with a brief hello to his when I know he is cooling down
after a game. Knowing that he will go from the warm comradeship of the locker
room to my curt, Ôcall me backÕ. I call him in Russian; he calls me back in
English.
Our childish games; IÕll leave a brief message with
his wife. We have a lovely chat. We talk about his children, we laugh, and she
tells me to call him. And that is my permission to do so; I stand in my
hallway, even my body language betraying the half and half man that I have
become. Part of me babbling on the phone like an American teenage girl,
twirling the cord around my finger, but my other hand, the hand not holding the
receiver, the Russian side of me, talking with my hand. Tracing circles and
spirals in the air; creating crazy jotterings in the air. There are vague plans
made, partial promises to catch up, to connect. I donÕt see her though, only
him, only Alex. I promise myself that this is the last time, that this cracked
sea-bridge between my past and the future will crumble, fall into the crevasses
of time and forgotten loves. There have been others, beautiful girls, beautiful
boys, but still, but still I know I will reach out to him.
I canÕt have all of him, you would think that I would
treasure the time we have, not drag out the moments before we see each other.
But instead of flying I am driving. Taking some back roads before getting onto
the highway, stopping to drink coffee inside of anonymous chain stores instead
of using the drive through. Once upon a time I fled to his side as quickly as I
could.
ÒWe lost.Ó I can still taste game seven on my tongue,
still feel the air of the arena on my body.
ÒYes, Pavel, I saw the game on television.Ó
AlexÕs voice is so dry, I wonder if he cares how much
this loss means to me. I wonder if a married American man can remember what it
feels like to be a Russian boy who has lost a game.
He looks up at me then, and his eyes are the green
shards of diamond they always were, they swing across my face, he opens his
arms and I go to him, as always, curling myself against his heartbeat.
But now I think in my paranoid moments that this is
all a game to him, and that these games, who will visit who, who will call
first, will surely exhaust our love. In my dark untrusting thoughts I believe
that he has strung me along since I was sixteen years old.
Alex has all the outward signs of progress; of moving
on from a childhood infatuation, I do not. He has a wife, children, house, and
country club membership. And me; pretty, blonde, devoted lover. Or maybe I
believe him, that I am the only man he has ever been with, the only person that
he will ever really love. That is all I have, the pledge of long love and this
long drive in the dark night.
I think that it has been a decade and more, that I
should know him better, see him better. I donÕt know who he voted for, where he
banks. I know what colour his dreams are though, what his skin smells like
after making love, the taste of Vodka and me on his tongue. I know him as well
as I know myself.
It is easy enough to get to him. The roads here are
very new and well maintained, there are few corners and tarseal unfolds blackly
before me. It seems to easy, I want to be challenged, to prove my love by
scaling mountain ranges, fording streams, nothing so banal, so boring as
driving blankly across flatlands. But then what does it matter what type of
terrain this is? Because this time, will be the last time. The final time. I
drag it out, slow down slightly. ArenÕt I allowed this? To set the pace for the
ending, the curtain call. I wonÕt think about him at all, I visualise the
landscape instead, what is unfolding around me.
As I drive I pass our landmarks, historical,
geological, geographical. The fields that we could see from the hotel room
where we made love, the river we watched flood its banks one soft dreamy
afternoon, the rises of the old rock that were left when the sea receded
millions of years ago. I know this area, the geology; the layers under the road
I am driving on. I once thought about becoming Canadian instead of American,
instead of Russian. And I have watched a million television shows about this
area when I lay awake at night. Waiting for him, to call, to come to me.
The History of North America, this part, the only part
I care about right now, is six hundred million years old today. I feel that
this day is important, important enough to be the anniversary of the earth of
itself. Why not? Every thing in the world has a birthday, a definitive start
date. We do, we started 15 years ago. We spin on, like the earth spins around
the sun. So today is the birthday of the Earth, why not? I raise my Styrofoam
cup in silent toast.
When the world began this area was hot, blighted and
black. Much like it looks now that a highway has been plonked upon it, with no
regard for aesthetics, no thought to the history that unfolded upon this spot.
The rocks underneath me, creating a stable base for this straight, flat,
highway in the dark, are the Canadian Shield. It is an inverted shield, a
saucer-shaped base for this continent. His continent: mine; our continent. Even
when we were on different sides of North America we were both still cradled in
the bowl of the Canadian Shield.
The world barely changed for a hundred million years.
We barely changed. We played hockey in Russia, skating around a rink a hundred
million times, every time we dug our blades into the ice we would spin up a
fine spray of mist, snow and water. On the rink this material was carted away,
smoothed over to make fresh ice. Here on the Canadian Shield it was allowed to
pile up. Soft dust and sediment, layered onto the rigid shell of Precambrian
rock underneath.
We were never allowed to forget that despite how easy
we were allowed it, in our cosseted part of the fading Russian empire, there
lurked underneath the Gold-Red future predicted for these hockey boys the other
Russia: the shadow of losing, of falling from grace, to failure, to factory
work, and the slow starvation of life in the crumbling remnants of the USSR we
once knew. It was the fuel that pushed us around the rink. Why we worked so
hard. Oh I had my own demons, to beat my father, to win gold. Even just to be
rich, to be respected and admired, I had simple dreams. And in all my dreams I
was alone, or with just a shadowy presence beside me. But still, those were
days of sameness; they were days before love.
A carÕs headlights dazzle my eyes and I am dragged
into the present, and I remember it is the birthday of the world and what
happens next. Suddenly, the Earth shook, pushing forth the Appalachian
Mountains. Rivers flowed in new patterns, and where they intermingled enormous
mud deltas formed, sprawling over six hundred kilometers, from east of Lake
Ontario to beyond the shores of Lake Huron. This was the Great Sea, covering
the land. Smothering everything within its reach. Life became aquatic, it was
under the water that creation was occurring, changing, setting the scene;
creating the base for the land that I drive on now. Out of sight of players,
teammates, coaches, changes occurred between Alex and I.
I looked up from training one day and he was standing
at the bench. I had never seen him before that day; I swear I had not. I poked
my head above the warm waters of the Great Sea to meet his eyes. My lungs
threatened to explode with the first breath of sweet oxygen, I locked my eyes
with his, my heart threatened to explode. I had never known of him before him
before, he was walking above and I was swimming underneath. I donÕt know if it
was the way that he stood, or if it was the way to light glanced off his eyes,
they reflected the light like shards of green gemstone.
All those millions of years ago, the space where I am
now, just beyond Niagara Falls, was tropical; Northern Ontario was near the
equator then. So this puddle stretching for six hundred kilometers over the
layers of sediment atop the Precambrian rock of the Canadian Shield was a warm
sea. A terrible joke in CanadaÕs winters. In this warm sea, tiny creatures
built massive honeycombed reefs, huge structures that were laced, linked and
locked together as they spread across the base of the warm Great Sea.
These reefs, made of a type of grey coral, blended
into the Grey and White waters of the Great Sea, all-encompassing structures
that could barely be seen with the naked eye. You had to be underneath the
water, up close, you had to look hard. As the coral makers died, the rhythms,
tides, and seasons of the warm sea, the churning of water, broke up their
homes, and the bridges between the reef-builders were shattered and the
fortresses of coral were tumbled into powder, and sent in a rain of lime dust
to the sea floor. The caprock of the Niagara Escarpments, the Lockport
Dolomite, consists mostly of these ground up coral reefs.
There is a lesson there for me. That although the
links that lace you together may seem to break, they simply lie on the bed of
the warm sea, over time forging a new type of connection, building the caprock
for a new type of relationship. I could not just stare at Alex on the bench; I
had to have more.
We met again, I saw him with new eyes. I touched his
hand, the open palm of his hand as he leaned against the bench. We began again;
we met that day like we were strangers. We sent out tendrils of love, of need,
on the air to each other. Vapor trails of our breath froze in the air, creating
bridges to each other, locking a coral honeycomb around us. Laces, links,
locks, bridges to each other; they could not be seen by the naked eye, but
still were there. We were those tiny creatures, unrecognizable on earth now,
their shape unusual, their colour uncommon, their bodies mostly faded from the
world, but their dust, makes up part of our world. I drive across their
limestone bones. I had not been alive before I touched him. This was the
beginning of love.
By three hundred million years ago, the inland sea had
drained away. Its legacy: layers of sediments atop the Precambrian shield
nearly five kilometers deep. I count out five kilometers driving in my car,
five closer to him. Fifty million years later, while the first reptiles were
slowly establishing their dominion over the planet, great rivers crisscrossed
central North America, etching patterns into this soft, sandy rock and
undermining the harder limestone.
This random erosion formed the basins for Lakes
Michigan and Huron, and later, Erie and Ontario. And what role did chance play
with us? By luck we were born in the same country at the same time. The wheel
of fortune spun once and we were rooming together, spun again and we were in
Vancouver together, spins again tonight predicting a new future for me as I go
to him to end this.
We were both unsure of what to do with each other. Our
need translated into soft fumblingÕs, groping hands, dry close-mouthed kisses.
So chaste now. The world was reduced to our moments in the gentle darkness
where we explored each other. Archeological digs that bore through the layers
of sediment to reveal the unyielding base of love underneath. Slowly our mouths
opened to each other, our tongues touched, then clashed. Hands, which had pawed
at each other through clothing, slid below shirts, underneath waistbands,
creating ripples in the breathing of boys, our inhibitions drained away, as
surely the water of the Great Sea drained away.
I scrub my hand across my face; I can smell the coffee
that I have spilled on my hands as I have been driving. I rub the tears into
the stubble across my jaw. Once we were smooth skin, no marks, god now we both
ache. I never knew how sensitive the skin around scars is though, how beautiful
is the contrast of white lines on fair skin, the sweet relief from aching that
a lovers touch can give you. We are old now; I smile at myself in the
windscreen, going to him for the last time. I slow down some more, back then
was all first times, all skin untouched, all hearts unscarred.
