Burnout

The burnout kiln at Fonderia Mariani was a steel box the size of a small room, lined with firebrick, heated by gas burners that ran along the floor and that could raise the interior temperature from ambient to thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in four hours, holding it there for eight more hours while the wax inside the ceramic shells melted and ran and vaporized and was gone, and the shells emerged as hollow ghosts of the forms they had contained, ready to receive the bronze that would fill the voids and give them weight and permanence and the illusion of having always existed.

Oren brought the memorial sculpture to the foundry on a Monday morning.

He carried it himself, wrapped in a blanket in the back of the Fiat Panda, because the piece was small enough to carry and because he did not trust the foundry's delivery van, which was driven by Marco, Giuseppe's nephew, who drove the way he did everything, with enthusiasm and without precision, and the ceramic shell was vulnerable at this stage, strong enough to hold bronze but not strong enough to survive Marco's relationship with potholes.

Fonderia Mariani occupied a large corrugated steel building on Via Aurelia, on the industrial edge of Pietrasanta where the sculpture studios and foundries gave way to marble yards and mechanical workshops and the autostrada that connected the town to the rest of Italy. The foundry had been in operation for sixty years, founded by Emilio Mariani, who was dead, and now run by his son Roberto, who was sixty-three and who had the particular weariness of a man who has spent his entire adult life doing something he inherited rather than chose, a weariness that manifested not as complaint but as a deep and apparently permanent resignation to the reality that he would die in the same building in which he had been born, surrounded by the same materials — bronze, ceramic, wax, sand — and that this was his life and it was not a bad life but it was the only life and he had never had the chance to discover whether he would have preferred another.

Roberto met Oren at the loading dock.

He looked at the shell and said, The memorial.

Oren said, Yes.

Roberto said, It is a clean shell. Good thickness. Not too heavy.

This was high praise from Roberto, who praised the way Giuseppe chased — sparingly, precisely, and only when the work justified it.

They placed the shell in the kiln on a bed of firebrick, the pouring cup facing down so that the wax would drain out through the sprue channels as it melted, and beneath the shell they placed a catch pan, a flat steel tray that would collect the liquid wax as it ran out, and this wax — Oren's wax, the Victory Brown that his hands had shaped and smoothed and hollowed and that had been, for the past two weeks, the form of the memorial — would pool in the catch pan as an undifferentiated puddle, all its shape and detail and intention reduced to liquid, and Oren thought about this every time he placed a shell in the kiln, thought about the extravagance of the destruction, the fact that the most important step in the creation of a bronze was the annihilation of the thing that had defined it.

Roberto closed the kiln door and lit the burners.

The blue flames appeared along the floor of the kiln with a sound like a large inhalation, a sucking rush of air into the burners, and the temperature gauge on the control panel began its slow climb — one hundred degrees, two hundred, three hundred — and Oren watched the needle rise the way he used to watch the speedometer when he was learning to drive, with a mixture of attention and anxiety that he knew was excessive but could not suppress.

He left the foundry at nine.

Lina was waiting at the apartment, dressed and ready, her bag packed with the things the oncologist's office had told her to bring — a book, a water bottle, a blanket in case the treatment room was cold, a list of her medications, the insurance documents — and she was standing in the kitchen in a blue dress, not the blue dress she had been wearing when she told him about the lump, a different blue dress, darker, more formal, the dress she wore to important appointments, and Oren understood that she had chosen this dress deliberately, had armored herself in the way that women armored themselves, in the language of fabric and color and the careful presentation of a surface that contradicted the interior.

They drove to Pisa in the Fiat Panda.

The drive took forty minutes on the autostrada, and they drove in a silence that was not uncomfortable but was dense, packed with the things they were not saying the way a ceramic shell was packed with the negative space of the wax, and Oren drove with both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and the landscape passed — the marble quarries, the coastal plain, the industrial outskirts of Viareggio, the Arno valley — and none of it registered because his attention was on the woman in the passenger seat and on the kiln at Fonderia Mariani where the temperature was now, by his estimate, around six hundred degrees and the wax was beginning to soften.

The hospital in Pisa was a complex of buildings that ranged from the historic — a Renaissance palazzo that had been converted to medical offices with the typical Italian disregard for the contradiction between ornate plaster ceilings and fluorescent lighting — to the modern — a glass and steel addition that housed the oncology department and that had the antiseptic anonymity of hospitals everywhere, the architecture of crisis management, designed not for beauty but for function, and the function was the administration of chemicals to the bodies of people who were, in various stages and with various prognoses, dying.

Lina checked in at the reception desk.

She gave her name and her codice fiscale and her tessera sanitaria and the receptionist, a young woman with elaborate nail art and an expression of professional compassion, directed them to the second floor, room 214, and they took the elevator and walked down the corridor and the corridor smelled the way all hospital corridors smelled, of disinfectant and something else, something organic and unnameable that Oren associated with the interior of the body made external, the private chemistry of living flesh exposed to air and fluorescent light.

Room 214 was an infusion room.

It contained six reclining chairs arranged in a row along the window, each chair with its own IV pole and its own small table and its own curtain that could be drawn for privacy but that was usually left open because the patients, Oren would learn, preferred to see each other, preferred the company of strangers who were undergoing the same process, the same slow drip of chemicals into the bloodstream, the same waiting, the same watching of the bag as it emptied one milliliter at a time.

Three of the chairs were occupied.

An elderly man in the first chair, asleep, his mouth open, his face the color of parchment. A woman of about forty in the third chair, reading a magazine, her head wrapped in a scarf that was bright yellow and that was, Oren thought, a patina of its own — a surface of color applied to the evidence of the treatment's side effects, the hair loss, the scalp exposed, the rawness covered with brightness. A young man in the fifth chair, headphones on, eyes closed, his foot tapping to music that only he could hear.

Lina took the fourth chair.

A nurse came — a man, middle-aged, with the calm efficiency of someone who had administered thousands of infusions and who understood that his job was not to comfort but to competently deliver the chemicals and to monitor the body's response, and the comfort, if it came, was a byproduct of the competence — and he checked Lina's name and her chart and explained the protocol: FOLFIRINOX, which was a combination of four drugs — leucovorin, fluorouracil, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin — administered intravenously over a period of approximately six hours, every two weeks, for as long as the body tolerated it and the tumor responded.

Oren sat in the visitor's chair beside Lina's recliner.

He watched the nurse insert the IV — the needle finding the vein in the back of Lina's hand with a precision that Oren appreciated professionally, the way one craftsman appreciates the skill of another — and the first bag went up on the pole and the drip began, and the chemicals started their journey from the bag through the tube through the needle into Lina's vein and from there into her bloodstream and from there to every part of her body, including the mass in her pancreas that had rearranged their lives.

The infusion was slow.

Oren sat beside Lina and the time passed in the particular way that hospital time passed, which was to say heavily, each minute weighed down by awareness, each hour an hour in the way that hours outside the hospital were not, because outside the hospital time was invisible, was the medium through which life moved without noticing, and inside the hospital time was visible, was the drip rate, was the number on the infusion pump, was the slow emptying of the bag on the pole.

He thought about the kiln.

At this moment the temperature in the kiln at Fonderia Mariani would be approaching twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and at that temperature the wax would be entirely liquid, running out through the sprue channels into the catch pan, and the interior of the ceramic shell would be a void, an empty space in the exact shape of the sculpture he had made, and this void would be glowing with the heat of the kiln, the ceramic shell radiating inward the same heat that was burning out the last traces of the wax, and the void would be clean and ready and waiting.

Lina read her book.

She read the Solstad novel, which she had nearly finished, and she read with the same composure with which she did everything, the book held in her free hand — the hand without the IV — and her eyes moving steadily across the pages, and the chemicals dripped into her other hand and traveled through her body and began their work, which was to kill cells, all cells, the cancerous ones and the healthy ones alike, the indiscriminate destruction that was the only available response to the indiscriminate growth, and this indiscriminate destruction was the opposite of Oren's work, which was selective, controlled, applied to specific areas for specific effects, and he thought that the difference between patina chemistry and chemotherapy was the difference between a brush and a flood, between intention and desperation.

At noon Lina said, You should eat something.

He said, I am not hungry.

She said, You are not hungry because you are watching me. Go to the bar across the street and eat a sandwich and come back in thirty minutes and you will feel better.

He said, I feel fine.

She said, in a tone that was Lina's tone, the tone that brooked no argument, the tone that had organized their tax documents and negotiated the rent on the apartment and managed the logistics of their daughter's childhood with the efficiency of a military campaign, You are sitting in a hospital watching chemicals go into my arm and you are not fine, and I am not fine, and neither of us will be fine for a long time, but we will be more not-fine if you do not eat, so go.

He went.

The bar across the street from the hospital was a standard Italian bar, the kind of establishment that served everything from espresso to full meals and that functioned as the social infrastructure of Italian life, and Oren sat at a table by the window and ate a tramezzino — the triangular crustless sandwich that Italian bars served, this one filled with tuna and artichoke — and he drank a coffee and looked out the window at the hospital and thought about the kiln and thought about Lina and thought about the way both processes worked, the kiln and the chemotherapy, both of them using heat or chemicals to transform the interior of a shell, the kiln burning out the wax to create a void that would receive something new, the chemotherapy burning out the tumor to create — what? A void? A space? A chance? He did not know what the chemotherapy would create, or whether it would create anything, or whether it was simply destruction without creation, burning without casting, loss without replacement.

He went back to the hospital.

The infusion continued through the afternoon. The bag on the pole emptied and was replaced by another bag and then another, each one a different drug in the protocol, each one a different color — clear, yellow, clear again — and the nurse checked the drip rate and checked Lina's vital signs and made notes on the chart, and the other patients in the room underwent their own infusions in their own chairs with their own visitors or without visitors, and the room had the quality of a waiting room, which it was, not a waiting room for an appointment but a waiting room for an outcome that was months away and that could not be predicted and that would be determined not by the skill of the doctors or the will of the patient but by the chemistry, by the reaction between the drugs and the cells, by the molecular-level war between the treatment and the disease.

At four o'clock the last bag emptied and the nurse removed the IV and placed a small bandage on the back of Lina's hand, and Lina stood up from the recliner and put on her coat and picked up her bag and she looked, Oren thought, the same as she had looked that morning, which was remarkable because she had spent six hours having poison pumped into her body and yet the surface was unchanged, the patina of normalcy intact, and this was Lina's skill, her version of his skill, the ability to maintain the surface even as the interior was being transformed.

They drove home.

On the autostrada Lina was quiet, and the quiet was different from the morning's quiet, was not dense but thin, was not packed but emptied, as though the infusion had drained not only the bag but something in Lina herself, and Oren drove with both hands on the wheel and did not speak and the landscape passed again in reverse — the Arno valley, Viareggio, the marble quarries — and the late afternoon light was on the mountains and the marble was pink and the air through the open windows was warm and carried the smell of the coast and of the factories and of the particular chemistry of the Tuscan evening, the combination of pine and sea salt and diesel and cooling stone that Oren had been smelling for twenty-three years and that he never tired of because it was the smell of the place where his life happened.

At the apartment Lina went to bed.

She said, I am going to rest for a while, and this was the first time she had voluntarily gone to bed before dark in all the years Oren had known her, and the firstness of it struck him the way the diagnosis had struck him, as a change in the rhythm, a new pause in the sequence, and he said, Of course, and she went to the bedroom and closed the door and Oren stood in the kitchen and looked at the closed door and the door was a surface and behind the surface was his wife.

He went downstairs to the studio.

He called Fonderia Mariani and Roberto answered and said, The burnout is going well. Temperature is at twelve-fifty. The wax ran clean. No cracks in the shell. We will cool it overnight and it will be ready for the pour on Wednesday.

Oren thanked him and hung up.

He stood in the studio and looked at the worktable where the memorial sculpture had been and the worktable was empty and the emptiness was the same emptiness that was inside the ceramic shell at the foundry, the void left by the lost wax, the space waiting to be filled, and he stood in the empty studio and listened to the sound of his wife sleeping above him and the sound was silence and the silence was the most terrifying thing he had ever heard because it was the sound of a person who was always in motion being still, the sound of the rhythm stopping, the sound of the patina being stripped away to reveal the raw surface beneath.

He opened a jar of liver of sulfur and dissolved a pinch in warm water and the smell of rotten eggs filled the studio.

He was not making anything.

He was only mixing the solution because the smell was familiar and the familiarity was a kind of comfort and comfort was what he needed because his wife was upstairs sleeping at five in the afternoon and his daughter was in Copenhagen and the wax was gone and the shell was empty and the bronze had not yet been poured and the gap between the emptying and the filling was where he was, was where they all were, in the space between the loss and the replacement, the burnout and the pour, the diagnosis and whatever came after.

He sat on the stool at the workbench and breathed the sulfurous air and waited for the waiting to end.