FOURTEEN
CHAPTE R
Jonah worked all the next morning at the hot shop.
He came back for me around noon, and we grabbed some lunch at a Chinese place, talking and laughing about everything and nothing.
After two lunches and a cupcake, I felt a little bit like I’d become part of Jonah’s routine.
It wasn’t true, but it made me happy to think so.
He drove us out to an industrial part of town on the outskirts of Vegas.
The scenery outside my window was filled with more desert than civilization.
Lots of warehouses and ramshackle buildings with aluminum siding.
He parked the truck in front of what looked like a small airline hangar with three chimneys.
The heavy metal door creaked as he slid it open sideways, and he ushered me inside the space.
Jonah laughed to see my expression. “I know it’s not much to look at.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. The hot shop was about a thousand square feet of cement and steel, hotter than the midsummer Nevada heat outside and smelling of burnt wood.
An air conditioning unit was waging a losing battle against two furnaces—one large and one small—that lined a single wall.
In front of one raging furnace was a bench that had rails on either side, like high armrests made out of stainless steel.
Next to the bench was a table upon which sat a thick, charred dictionary, and tools soaking in a bucket of water: tongs and cups and strange-looking ladles.
“You leave the furnaces on?” I asked, fanning myself as the heat wrapped around me and squeezed.
“I turn them down at night,” Jonah said, “and fire them back up for the day. It takes too long to get them hot enough otherwise. Alarm system over there”—he nodded his head at a wall unit with blinking lights—“alerts my phone if there’s a problem.”
I meandered past a rack of stainless-steel pipes on the near wall, each about three feet long. Beside that was a small metal table with nothing on it.
“So this is where the magic happens,” I said.
“On a good day.”
“What makes a bad day? You break something?” My feet crunched shards of glass on the cement floor as I walked between the furnaces and the metal table.
“Breaking a finished piece would definitely suck, yes.” Jonah rapped his knuckles on the wooden table with the strange-looking tools. “Mostly a bad day is one where I haven’t gotten enough done.”
“The gallery has you on a pretty tight deadline?”
Jonah wore a strange expression on his face, a thin smile that didn’t touch his warm brown eyes. “You could say that.” He glanced at his watch. “Tania’s on her lunch break. She’ll be back soon and you can meet her.”
“Does it always take two people to make a piece?”
“Not always,” Jonah said. “I make most of the individual pieces myself—those that are going to be for sale at the gallery. But for the larger sections of the installation, I need help.”
I glanced around. “Where’s your installation?”
“Through that door.” Jonah indicated a door on the far wall. “That’s where I keep all the finished pieces.”
“So…” I rocked back on my heels. “Can I get a sneak peek? Se eing as how I won’t be here in October for the gallery opening, it’s only fair.”
“I’ll show you but it’s not going to look very impressive.”
He led me to the back room. Dim light streamed in from the windows, illuminating dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, some open and overflowing with packaging bubbles or the little curls of Styrofoam my grandmother called ‘ghost poop.’ Other boxes were sealed up tight and stacked, no more than three feet high, with FRAGILE stamped all over.
Other flattened cardboard boxes were stacked in piles or leaned against the cement walls, waiting to be filled.
On one long worktable—easily twenty feet long—were pieces of Jonah’s installation.
I moved slowly toward the table, paranoid I would break something even without touching it.
Long curls of yellow and orange glass were laid out next to ribbons of blue and green, infused with gold flecks and dark purple swirls.
White, frothy glass took up another section of the table, pearly with incandescence.
The last section held glass sculptures that took my breath away: delicate sea horses and sea dragons, glowing white jellyfish suspended in black spheres, and even an octopus, its tentacles curling a good foot and a half long and its skin rippling with ribbons of color.
Carefully, I let my fingers trace the blunt edge of a piece of glass that looked like a large ice cube with coral fronds. Within swam a sea turtle—perfectly rendered.
I looked at Jonah, so many questions trying to pour out of my open mouth that none did.
He jammed his hands down the front pockets of his jeans. “Not much to look at right now. Most of it is already packed away.”
I shook my head. “These are amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“Thanks.”
“The rest is in the boxes? To send to the gallery?”
He nodded. “I won’t be able to wire them together until I’m in the gallery space itself.”
“But how do you know what to work on if you can’t see the whole thing? That’s like…writing a song but never playing it through until show time.”
Jonah shrugged and tapped his temple. “I have it up here.”
I think he mistook my shocked expression because he waved his hand like he was getting rid of a bad smell. “God, that sounds pretentious as hell.”
“No, I think I get it.” I gestured to the table. “This looks like an archaeological dig of Atlantis. Like you’re finding the pieces one at a time and can’t put them all together yet.”
“Yeah, I like to think so.” His eyes roved over the scattered pieces of his art.
“I think part of working with glass is that you don’t know exactly how it will turn out.
The shape and flow of it… The fire dictates so much of what the glass does, how it changes the color and form.
With some pieces, like the sea life, I design it from top to bottom, obviously.
But for the installation as a whole, I try to follow it, instead of forcing it to be what it doesn’t want to be. ”
A short silence fell. He glanced down at me and the eyebrow went up. Laughter burst out of me and I elbowed his side. I loved hearing him talk about his art. Art I knew nothing about, but was so incredibly beautiful, even strewn all over a table in pieces.
“Okay, show me,” I said. “I’m dying to see how you do this. You can work and entertain me at the same time.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute, then nodded, as if answering a private thought.
We went back to the main floor of the hot shop. Jonah grabbed one of the stainless-steel pipes from a rack on the wall and I took a seat on the bench with the two rails.
“I’m going to need that,” he told me. He pulled a chair from the opposite wall and set it up for me near the bench.
“Are you going to make something for the installation?”
“No,” he said. “A small piece. To sell at the gallery. I think a perfume bottle. ”
“I love pretty perfume bottles.”
“Do you?” he asked, his face turned away, as he put one end of the pipe into the larger of the two furnaces, spinning it in his hands, back and forth, all the while.
When he pulled the pipe from the furnace, a small molten sphere clung to the end, about the size of a tennis ball.
He went to the stainless-steel table and rolled the glass over it, back and forth until it resembled a thick arrowhead, then put it into the smaller furnace, like he was roasting a marshmallow over a campfire.
The fire inside this smaller furnace glowed ten times as hot as the larger one that held all the melted glass.
Jonah rolled the pipe in his palms over and over. Sweat had broken out over his neck and biceps, and I watched those muscles move as he worked.
“Kacey?”
I tore my eyes from his arms. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Color?” He carried the pipe with its glowing arrow of glass to a shelf full of trays. I kept a safe distance from the torch in his hands and saw that each tray was filled with crushed bits of glass in various colors.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Purple,” I said solemnly. “For Prince.”
“Good choice.”
Jonah pressed one narrow side of the glowing arrowhead shape into the tray of violet-colored crushed glass.
Deftly, he turned the pipe, and pressed the heated glass down on the other side.
It looked spongy as it picked up the glass bits.
With two streaks of purple crumbles now clinging to the melted glass, Jonah took the pipe to the small furnace, always rolling the pipe in his hands.
When he pulled it back out, the crushed glass was melted down.
“Why do you roll the pipe back and forth?” I asked.
“If I don’t keep it moving at all times, the glass explodes into a searing hot mess of liquid pain that scorches all it touches within a twenty-foot radius. ”
I crossed my arms and gave him a dirty look.
“It keeps the gather centered.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a smartass?”
He grinned. “A few people. Once or twice.”
I had to agree with Lola—he was pretty damn adorable.
I took my seat in the chair and Jonah put the far end of the pipe to his mouth and blew a short breath into it.
“That glass is blown,” I said, laughing.
“If you think that’s funny, the small furnace is called a glory hole.”
“For real?”
“For real.” He sat on the bench with the metal rails. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Dawson.”
“Can’t. It likes it there.”
Jonah smirked at me, his eyes warm. He sat facing forward on the bench, like sitting a horse, and set the blowpipe along the rails so the glowing ball of glass was in front of him.
He used the rail to roll the pipe with one hand and took up a wooden ladle from the bucket of water.
The glass hissed and sent up steam as he cradled it in the wooden ladle, rolling them together so the arrowhead shape became a small sphere.