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BO DREW IN AS MUCH air as he could, stuck a plastic pipe in his mouth, and exhaled into the machine. Once his chest emptied, he tightened his abs and rounded his shoulders forward in a desperate push to squeeze out every last molecule of air into the instrument.
“Good, good,” the respiratory technician said as the machine beeped. “Let me save the data, and your physician will be with your shortly.” She smiled. “There’s a gown-“
“Yeah I know the drill,” he cut her off, not giving her any excuses to linger and get high hopes for a lunch invitation.
She, left, shutting the industrial, putty-colored door behind her. Bo breathed a sigh of relief. As he stripped and struggled into the too-small paper hospital gown, the gray walls of the small examination room began to close in on him. The narrow windows was covered with a strip of closed venetian blinds, the overhead fluorescent bulbs cast their pallid glow on the neutral tone furniture.
Office putty, they called the color. He’d seen it in a catalog.
The plain, institutional walls and lights seemed to have sucked all the color out of everything, washing the cheer even off the the educational posters on the walls. Bo felt all washed out and pallid himself. This was so different from the heated glow of molted glass and the amazing, vibrant colors of the objects they made every day.
Two days in the hospital and two weeks on prescribed home rest just made him fidgety and uncertain. He couldn’t even visit Eli every day, and Eli’s concussion and headaches didn’t allow him to text, although they did speak on the phone before Eli’s bedtime.
Bo wanted to get back home and write a new song. The pressure was on now – it wasn’t just fun and beer money anymore. The structural damage under the big furnace would take a while to get repaired, and both OSHA and EPA descended on Zimm Glass in droves, checking each and every code violation on their tablets.
He hoped the factory would open again. He liked the work. Glass was addictive, and they made useful things that helped the world run on time. His guys jibed him a bit about that parking-lot death scene drama over Eli and the subsequent kiss, but all in all it could’ve gone worse.
There was a knock on the door. “Yeah,” Bo said, knowing the drill. The doctor walked in, a short woman with light brown hair and tired eyes. He nodded. “Hi, Doctor Cook!”
“Hi, Bo,” she said, sat on the rotating stool, and brought Bo’s test results up with few keystrokes. “Okay...” she nodded, frowned, then nodded again. She spun toward him.
“So the good news is, you’re all done with the dialysis and the transfusions. Your heavy metal levels are approaching normal. That will go away with time. We got most the junk out of your system and your kidneys now won’t shut down. We’ll let you go as long as you come back for a few follow-up treatments.”
Bo didn’t like her expression. “So what’s the bad news?”
“Bad news?” He saw her face harden as not to give anything away. “None for you. That’s good, right? Your lung volume is close to your baseline, and I expect to see your body heal and regain what you’ve lost. You’re still not smoking, right?”
“Yeah.” His body was fucked up from the explosion as it was.
“Good, keep it that way. You need any prescription items that would help you quit? The patch, the gum, hypnosis... here.” She fished a card out of a stack on the counter behind her. “This is contact information for a smoking cessation group. Some people find it helpful.”
That wasn’t so bad. “So I can go back to work?”
“As soon as the factory opens again, you’re cleared for all regular activities. Although,” she wrinkled her nose, “I sure hope OSHA leans heavily on your employer to limit everyone’s heavy metal contact. Your cobalt and tellurium levels were alarming, and your cadmium was pretty high, too. That’s where the diarrhea was from.” She gave him an expectant look. “How is your GI tract now?”
He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”
“Good.” She made a note. “Some of these metals are known or suspected carcinogens, so you want to limit exposure wherever possible.”
Her slow, serious voice wasn’t reassuring, and Bo stirred impatiently. “Look, we all know not to breathe the shit that comes out of melting glass. Once it’s melted it’s fine, but while it’s melting, we just avoid that pot.”
The glass whose colorant batch exploded was so dark it looked black, designed to let just a band of ultraviolet light slip through. When he once asked Paul what it was for, Paul had said, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Okay, then. A special project.
He knew better than trying to pump her on Joe’s cause of death again, or on Halloran’s status. Starved for any kind of information, Bo tried a different tack. “So where did the explosion come from?”
“Ah, that I can tell you.” A satisfied glow illuminated her face – Bo almost imagined she had smiled. “The colorants in the mixer contained aluminum powder. Maybe it was just bad luck, or maybe it was the fact that the powders were being mixed for such a long time – but there was a lot of dust in the air, I expect?” She looked at him expectantly.
“Yeah, there was.”
“Aluminum dust is explosive, just like flour dust can explode a whole silo. There must’ve been a spark. We’re thinking maybe an electric short in the mixer might’ve done it. They say the equipment was made in-house and wasn’t up to code.”
Bo nodded. His mind flashed to Halloran lunging at him with the metal scoop, trying to bash his brains in. And he had smashed a metal crutch into that metal scoop as hard as he could – a split second before the explosion.
“So... suppose if I’d caused a spark I would’ve been responsible for Halloran’s injuries” Bo hated the way his voice wavered. “Then I’d be responsible, right?”
Dr. Cook gave him an odd look. “Well... no. See, when you burn aluminum and combine it with water, you get aluminum hydroxide. Aluminum is trivalent and burns fast, and any metal hydroxide is corrosive. So whoever installed those fire sprinklers in that particular area didn’t realize they were going to do more harm than good. Had your colleague stayed dry, he’d have...” she paused. “He would be in a lot better shape.”
“What shape is that? How’s he now?” Bo had to know. He’d never killed a man before, and not knowing what was going on was eating at him.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to ask his family. I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.” The big words dripped off her lips as though she had to say them a lot.
Bo gritted his teeth and waited for her to finish up and leave. He couldn’t wait to get back to work and hear the gossip on what happened in the mixing room. Furthermore, he wanted to know how Halloran managed to steal from the company.
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ELI GOT OUT OF THE shower with a sigh of relief. He was home, in his own apartment, and after the craziness of his leg’s recovery and yet another hospital stay, he was finally alone. His mom had come and gone, much like before. People from work had stopped by with a pie here or a pot roast there, being neighborly, and he appreciated that. Even Joe’s wife came over two days after the funeral. She had brought a trio of large, magenta orchids in a decorative pot, claiming she had more plants than she could take care of.
A pang of guilt ripped through Eli as he looked at the purple orchids. He felt responsible for Joe’s death. Had Eli not been there, Joe would’ve avoided the trolley cart instead of pushing Eli out of its way and into the cave. His widow had her hands full taking care of their three kids. Eli had offered to help, but she only shook her head and squeezed his hand, and Eli knew she’d distance herself as far from Zimm Glass as she possibly could.
When work started gain, Eli would miss Joe’s company as well as his expertise. The whole department would have to get restructured. Eli knew he wasn’t ready to take over. He didn’t even know if he wanted to stay.
Bo’s injuries had been appalling. The slow chemical burns on his chest left several small, red skin in patches on his arms. The heavy-metal poisoning had been unexpected, and it had Eli think back to all those times up in the lab, when he watched while Paul melted a small, experimental batch of glass in a little porcelain crucible.
There had always been the smell and the smoke, the nature of which varied from formula to formula. The renovated space didn’t have adequate exhaust controls, mostly because the electric furnaces were too large to fit inside a regular hood. Production lacked these controls as well. The guys just knew to shut the melting pot as tight as they could, and simply walked a bit wider around the billows of dark, stormy smoke that drifted between the cracks of the glory hole and its ceramic door, rising up toward the cavernous, sooty ceiling.
As fascinating as this job was, its hazards were, it appeared, more than just the danger of liquid glass dripping on his toe, or him getting in the way of an exploding piece of cullet. Eli wondered if Bo would stay. Maybe he didn’t have a choice. Maybe he was stuck doing a specialized task for a company whose safeguards remained a whole hundred years behind, even though they produced exotic and useful technology.
He dressed, taking in the vivid colors of Thai silk and Indian saris that decorated his walls. Red, orange, purple and turquoise played against each other in a life-affirming tapestry. When he had bought them back in Southeast Asia, that job wasn’t safe either. Mosquitoes, snakes, malaria. A corrupt police and legal system with no recourse, no personal lawyer. Just empty hands, waiting for someone to grease the wheels of justice.
Eli shook off the memories and pulled on a short-sleeve button-down shirt. He liked having his own place, he decided as he fastened the red buttons in the raw purple silk. He loved the décor that harkened to his travels, and he relished the privacy.
Being with Bo was nice in a dangerous sort of way. To Eli, it felt much like building a house on a sand foundation, and he was the sand. He was the weak point, the wanna-be partner who still hadn’t learned how to live on his own.
Bo had done all that and knew what he wanted out of life. He’d bought a house and he was restoring it. He had made his share of mistakes, Eli was sure, but he’d also learned a lot.
Eli had lived with keepers for too long. The college administration, his parents, the Peace Corps, his parents again. When he thought he’d finally be on his own, Matt and Jeff had seduced him with their offer of hospitality, convenience, and animal magnetism.
Fuck Matt and Jeff.
When he realized how truly done he was with those two, he smiled. Even his resentment and his half-baked desire for revenge didn’t materialize. All he wanted to think about right now was Bo. If he and Bo were going to build something good, something lasting, then Eli had to get a sense of firm ground under his feet once again.
Which meant one thing: he had to get Bo to talk.