Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

BEFORE LEO HAD time to propose a talk, our Wednesday sessions were swamped by our need to talk about the war, which President Wilson had just brought us into. A munitions plant had blown up in Pennsylvania and Miles, who knew the plant’s owner, was pale with fury; a hundred workers had been killed, he said, and most of the plant destroyed in what was obviously a reaction against the declaration of war, another example of blatant sabotage. None of us can remember now who was meant to speak that Wednesday. Instead, Miles talked about the need for all of us to do our share, despite being unable to fight, and then Sean and Frank started arguing about conscription.

By the time the session ended Leo was ready for supper, tired of our conversation and also of the way, each time he turned his head, he found Naomi staring at him. Afraid to embarrass her further — what had been wrong with her, he wondered, the afternoon she was in his room? — he tried to avoid her, but no matter where he looked, she seemed to be there. As he left the room he passed Eudora, who stopped him with a touch and said, “How are you doing with your chemistry books?”

“Pretty well,” he said. “I’ve been working every day.”

“Me too,” she said with a smile. “You should see what I’ve been doing in the X-ray laboratory.”

“I’d love to, if you have the time.”

The supper bell rang just as she was saying, “Why don’t you let me show you?” Bodies, our bodies, streamed through the corridor. “It’s too late today, I guess,” she added. “Maybe tomorrow?”

“If you think it would be all right.” He stepped into the stream, narrowly missing Pietr, and as the current caught him said, “Four o’clock?”

The next day they met in the basement. Irene was absent and the laboratory door was closed, but Eudora let herself in with her own key, so at home that Leo couldn’t help but envy her. Moving past Irene’s apparatus, sternly modern and encased in dark metal, she led him down the rear wall of shelves and into a shadowy corner. Outside, the late afternoon sun was still shining, but here it was dark until Eudora turned a switch.

“What do you think?” she said.

The discarded X-ray apparatus looked almost new in the glare, the metal caps gleaming where the electrodes entered the delicate transparent tube. The tube itself, grapefruit-sized, was stained a yellowish brown by the discharge. A long protuberance sprouted like a stalk from one end, with two shorter ones opposite, like roots. The cup-shaped cathode and the slanted disk of the target glittered inside. She’d remounted the whole arrangement on a new stand and placed, between the apparatus and the spot where she stood to control the current, a wooden screen faced with sheet lead. “That screen seems sensible,” he said.

“Irene’s suggestion,” Eudora said. “The shielding on her appliance is built right around the tube, but this is a decent substitute.”

A cable snaked from the apparatus across the floor and toward the Snook transformer. On the wall a wooden rack cradled more handblown gas tubes, each shaped a bit differently but all sprouting cylindrical thumbs. “Also Irene’s,” Eudora said. “Some are ten years old, while others have never been used. They’re obsolete now that she has her new Coolidge tube, but for me — it’s a wonderful way to learn. What she can do with a single tube and a rheostat, I can do a little more clumsily by finding a tube with the right amount of vacuum. The ones with the most vacuum need a higher voltage to activate them, and produce more penetrating rays.”

“So, a shorter exposure time,” Leo said. The tiny singed spots dotting her blue wrapper made him wonder just how well she knew her way around the wiring.

She nodded. “The low-vacuum ones take less voltage and give a less penetrating ray. So those take a longer exposure, but then I get finer detail with soft tissue.”

The peculiar sensation he felt as she was talking was, as he’d tell Dr. Petrie later, a compound of admiration, envy, delight, and pure curiosity. He’d been working very hard to relearn his old chemistry, but still he could fit only a few hours of study each day into our rigid routine, and even then he didn’t have the energy he’d had before getting sick. She’d obviously accomplished far more, despite having only nights and weekends to spare.

He followed her as she moved away from the machine and toward the shallow, glass-topped wooden box mounted on the wall like a picture frame. She’d designed this herself, she said proudly. Irene’s handheld contraption allowed only a single image to be viewed at a time, by a single person. But this — she flipped a switch, lighting up the glass within the frame — let them to look at a film together, or at several films mounted side by side.

Among the hanging negatives he recognized the dead hawk he’d seen her bring in some weeks ago: skull, spine, wing bones, heart. Another was clearly a rabbit — he could see not only the tiny bones of the feet but also the shadowy outlines of its ears, veined like dragonflies’ wings — while others, empty of organs and threaded through with wire and screws, looked like mounted specimens. “Squirrel?” he asked.

“Opossum!”

“Not a Russian animal,” he said as she laughed. Six in a row — or not six opossums, but six images of the same creature, identifiable by the pair of scissors trapped inside. The foggiest images were on the left; the sharpest, to the right.

“Different tube for each image,” she explained. “I took that last one with the tube that’s mounted now.”

“Very nice,” he said. Did she know how much she’d already learned on her own, or how inventively she’d arranged her results? His teacher in Odessa, who’d had a great passion for laboratory demonstrations, claimed that the best way to remember ideas was by solving practical problems on our own. Because of him, Leo had learned chemistry not in a lecture room but standing with his classmates at a long bench, surrounded by glassware, happily setting fires and shattering beakers and shooting fumes toward the open skylights. Here Eudora, alone except for Irene, seemed to have been going through the same process, which he now remembered as the most absorbing experience of his life.

Gently, as if any false word or move might disturb her work, he said, “How did you get the scissors in there?”

“I didn’t — they’re stuffers, not scissors, which probably my father left in there by mistake. He made this specimen when he was a little boy.”

Leo leaned closer to the sixth and sharpest image, which wasn’t perfect but still impressed him. “You’ve got this apparatus working as well as a new one.”

“Almost,” she said. “I think Irene will be pleased.”

“You haven’t shown her yet?”

“I wanted to wait until I could reliably get a good image, and then surprise her.”

“Try it out on me,” he begged. Suddenly the idea of standing there, a living demonstration into which she could peer, was what he most desired.

She shook her head. “What if I don’t have something calibrated correctly?”

“But you already do. Obviously.” He pointed at the last of the opossums. “I’ve been feeling better — maybe we can see what’s healed on the films.”

Not since the day she and Irene had taken radiographs of each other’s chests had she examined the inside of another person. But she knew more now; she’d arrange the exposure as she had with the rabbit, she thought, a soft ray beautifully revealing the blood vessels and the lungs.

“Fine,” she said, gesturing to him to stand with her behind the shield. “Take off your shirt.”