The Glass Factory by Kenneth Wishnia Read Free Book Online

wedding, huh? You know, for you, it’d almost be worth it.”
    I laugh. It sounds forced to me, but I think I’m supposed to be quivering with anticipation, so I guess it fits. Shit, I might as well go the whole hog, here. Trick #17-B from the Old Book: I start imitating him. He takes a drink of wine, I take a drink; he adds salt, I add salt; he cuts his meat, I cut mine. Take it from me, it’s subliminal, and it drives men wild. Guilt? Sure—but there’s that “good cause” clause in the contract.
    He does a fair job on the bottle of wine (I remain resolute and stick to water after one glass) then orders two espressos, without asking me, and the check while I leave a breadcrumb trail to my groin wide enough for a blind ox to follow.
    “But not if you work for Morse,” I say.
    “Huh?” His credit card clatters drily in the tray.
    “Workplace flings leave me flat.”
    “Oh, that.” I’ve succeeded in constructing an elaborate network of unspoken complexities between his sex organ and mine, and he tramples recklessly through it like a half-rutting boar to reach his goal: “Morse Techtonics is just one of my clients.”
    “How many others do you have?”
    “Hundreds. We’re a big firm. I usually have a dozen or so at a time.”
    “So what are you doing for Morse?”
    A smirk crosses his lips. He chuckles at my no-nonsense business talk.
    “I’m trying to help make the zoning for the Kim site more profitable.”
    “Oh. That’s not going to be too easy, with all those environmental problems they’ve got.”
    All traces of the smirk have vanished.
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know that smell?” I say.
    “Do I ever. I’ve had my nose right over those vats.”
    “Really? Tell me about it.”
    “Why?”
    He’s getting cagey. It’s time to act up a bit.
    “I’m just very sensitive to office conditions,” I say, leaning forward and putting my hand near his. “My last administrative position was in one of those ‘sick buildings.’ I got a headache every single day.”
    “Aww, you poor thing. Well, the air quality in their offices is pretty damn good. Way above EPA standards. That’s the advantage of being in the same building as Mr. Morse. He knows what kind of poison he’s got in those vats, and he ain’t about to let any of it get near him.”
    “So what is making that smell?”
    “Well, it’s not one thing that’s doing that. That’s a couple of hundred chemicals, and two dozen are bona fide killers.”
    “Go on,” I slide a finger over his hand as I reach for my water.
    “Ninety percent of Morse Techtonics’s profit is PVC computer casings and wiring. PVC: Polyvinyl chloride?”
    “Yeah, I know about that stuff.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Those guys in the molding room are breathing in enough parts per million to flambé their livers over the next couple of years.”
    “What’s the lethal dosage?”
    “In the air? You’d have to breathe in a thousand ppm for a couple of weeks. Not very likely.”
    “How about ingesting it?”
    “Oh sure, with a side of fries?”
    “I mean by accident.”
    “By accident? You’d have to take a swim in the molding vat.”
    “So humor me.”
    “Well, let’s say you weigh about a hundred twenty pounds—”
    “Thanks.”
    “So we’re talking roughly fifty kilos, which means fifty thousand milligrams of vinyl chloride, or about two ounces.”
    “Two fluid ounces?”
    “Yeah. But it’d be pretty noticeable. You can’t exactly hide the taste with oregano.”
    “But I mean if someone fell into the vat, they could easily swallow that much.”
    “Oh sure.”
    “And it’d be fatal?”
    “Look: Taking a header off the Hoover Dam would be fatal, too, but you don’t see people selling tickets to that, do you?”
    I laugh again. His credit card, his jokes. My plan.
    “What about Kim Tungsten?”
    “What about them?”
    “It’s the same smell.”
    “Oh, that? Sure, they use a lot of PVC. Everybody uses PVC. But the Tungsten