Chapter 2 - The Six Hundred Seconds
The human mind, when subjected to extreme physical trauma, does not drift into poetic abstraction. It retreats into its oldest, most deeply grooved neural pathways.
For me, those pathways were actuarial tables and my father’s voice.
“Twelve seconds to reach the basement membrane,” I told myself, my teeth chattering against the edge of the drainboard as sixty gallons of municipal water per minute smashed into my left socket. “Mortality curves for caustic ingestion: forty-two percent within seventy-two hours if the laryngeal tissue perforates. Dermal exposure: thickness of the human epidermis over the zygomatic arch is point-zero-five millimeters. Tensile strength: zero once the pH crosses twelve.”
“Seventy-one... seventy-two... seventy-three...”
Above the roar of the water, the net loft was coming apart.
I could hear Kendall’s voice through the bar’s monitors, high and strained, competing with the feedback hum of the sound system.
“Jenna, cut the live feed! Cut the feed to the hub! Now!”
“We can’t!” a woman’s voice shouted back from the soundboard—Jenna Stroud, the producer. “The contract specifies an unedited stream to the production dashboard in Los Angeles! It’s in the development clause, Kendall! The platform has the API lock!”
“Shut it off! Pull the cable!”
“There are no cables, you idiot, it’s a bonded cellular array!”
“One hundred and ten... one hundred and eleven...”
Rafi’s thumbs were digging into the bone behind my ears, holding my head at a forty-five-degree angle so the caustic runoff wouldn't cross the bridge of my nose and blind my right eye.
“You’re doing great, Claire,” he grunted, his forearms soaked, his apron black with water. “I got you. The skin’s pinking up. It’s not sloughing anymore. Keep the eye open! Force it open!”
I used my own fingers—slippery with my own dissolving fats—to pry the swollen lids of my left eye apart.
The world was a blinding, refracted kaleidoscope of chrome, blood, and gray daylight. Through the torrent of water, I could see my mother standing five feet away on the other side of the mahogany bar.
She hadn't gone for help.
She was holding her canvas wedding binder against her stomach like a shield. Her face had set into a pale, terrifying mask of rage. She wasn't looking at my eye. She was looking at the small, square glass coupe that sat on the service mat two feet from the beer taps—the glass Kendall had used.
Beside the coupe lay the cloth napkin Kendall had used to cover it during the dinner.
Beverly took a step forward. Her hand reached out toward the glass.
“Don't touch that,” a voice barked.
Tyler.
Kendall’s husband had crossed the floor. He was six-foot-two, with the broad, stooped shoulders of a man who worked on thirty-ton commercial chillers in sub-basements, his tuxedo jacket bunching awkwardly around his lats. He stood between my mother and the bar, his hand dropping heavily onto the rim of the coupe.
“Tyler, sweetheart,” Beverly said, her voice instantly dropping into that sweet, honeyed register she used when she wanted my father to write a check for the country club assessment. “Give me that. I’ll clear it away. It’s broken glass. It’s dangerous.”
“Why is it slippery, Beverly?” Tyler asked.
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at his own fingers. He had touched the rim where the liquid had pooled.
He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. Once. Twice.
Tyler was an HVAC technician. He worked with coil cleaners, acidic descalers, and anhydrous ammonia refrigerants. He knew the feel of caustic salts as well as my father had.
His head snapped toward the sink where I was still retching under the water.
“Tyler!” Kendall was behind him now, her long ivory train dragging through the puddles of beer and melted ice on the floorboards, her makeup flawless, her chest heaving beneath the embroidered lace of her bodice. “Tyler, don't look at her! She’s doing this on purpose! She’s trying to humiliate me on my own stream! She knew the cameras were rolling!”
Tyler turned to his bride.
The expression on his face was not anger. It was something far worse: it was the total, structural collapse of an illusion. He looked at the girl he had driven ninety miles through an ice storm to comfort, the girl whose studio rent he had paid with his overtime checks for two years, and he saw, for the very first time, the absolute void behind the teeth.
“What was in the glass, Kendall?” he asked.
His voice was dead. Flat. It had the tone of an investigator speaking to a suspect across an aluminum table.
“It was a cocktail!” she screamed, her eyes darting toward the camera crew that was still filming from the edge of the dance floor. “A joke! An internet joke! It was supposed to be a gag for the show!”
“What chemical?” Tyler roared, stepping into her space until she had to tilt her head back to avoid his shoulder. “What did you put in it? Tell me right now or I swear to God I will hold your face under that tap!”
“Two hundred and forty... two hundred and forty-one...”
“Gloucester fire is rolling,” someone shouted from the dining room. “Engine Three and Medic One just cleared the bridge!”
The net loft was emptying now. The New York guests were retreating toward the coat check, whispering into their phones, their faces illuminated by the blue glare of screens as the live stream began to populate across social media. The ambient hum of the party had died completely, replaced by the distant, rising wail of a Federal Q siren coming down Rogers Street, echoing off the granite ledges of the harbor.
My mother made another move toward the glass.
Tyler didn't look at her. He reached out with his left hand, caught her by the shoulder of her fourteen-hundred-dollar dusty-rose gown, and shoved her backward three full feet until she hit the backbar display, sending twenty bottles of single-malt scotch crashing down behind her in an explosion of amber glass and alcohol fumes.
“Don't touch the evidence,” Tyler whispered.
He pulled a clean, dry bar towel from the rack, dropped it over the coupe without touching the glass, and slid it six inches back onto the stainless steel work surface.
“Three hundred and twelve... three hundred and thirteen...”
The skin on my cheek was numb now.
That was the danger point. Arthur had warned me about that, too: “When the burning stops, Claire, don't you dare think you're safe. That just means the nerve endings have cooked through. You keep the water running until the clock tells you to stop, not your face.”
“Hold on, Claire,” Rafi muttered, his thumbs trembling now with muscle fatigue as he held my head down against the spray. “You’ve got two hundred seconds left. Just two hundred.”
Through the open service door, two paramedics burst into the room carrying orange trauma bags and a portable suction unit. Behind them was a Gloucester police sergeant named Michael Connolly—a man who had played softball with my father for twenty years and had sat in our kitchen drinking black coffee while my father died.
Connolly took in the scene in half a second: the shattered scotch bottles, Beverly covered in single-malt on the floor, Tyler guarding the covered coupe, and me pinned into the third sink like a slaughtered hog.
He looked at Rafi. “What do we have, Raf?”
“Caustic lye,” Rafi shouted, not letting go of my skull. “Direct facial contact, left eye involvement, secondary tracking into the left clavicle. We’re at four hundred seconds of high-volume irrigation.”
Connolly didn't ask who did it.
He looked down at the floor, saw the yellow brass key tag lying in the puddle beside my mother’s spilled binder, and his face turned the color of wet slate.
“Arthur’s truck box,” Connolly whispered.
May you like
He looked up at Kendall, who was standing in her ruined silk dress, trembling, her phone now clutched in both hands as she desperately refreshed her analytics dashboard.
“Jesus Christ, Kenny,” Connolly said. His voice was thick with old Gloucester sorrow. “What did you do to your sister?”
