David Milley

Scorched

Halfway through the second semester of organic chemistry, Dr. Beiler's lab lessons  progressed from simple, one-step demonstrations to more challenging, multi-week syntheses that called upon us to use the lab techniques we had already acquired in the weeks before. At the end of March, he introduced the class to the synthesis of sulfathiazole, an antibiotic used in World War II to treat burned soldiers, a treatment which had fallen out of use when less toxic treatments became available. This lab assignment was designed to be completed over six weeks.

Already two weeks behind – common for me in those days – I raised my hand, "Can we stay late tonight to catch up?"

Dr. Beiler smiled tightly, "Yes."

I had enrolled at the university the year before, over the objections of Dr. Beiler and his chemistry department staff, although I didn't know this then. I had a champion in the chair of the math department, who'd overseen my work in Stetson University's new programming classes in my summer after tenth grade: charting out algorithms, typing punchcards to calculate trigonometric functions, then running them through the massive minicomputer at the end of the hall. Dr. Medlin was delighted to have a student who shared his passion for computers.

Also, Dad had always fought for me to jump ahead. Dad threw all the force of his will behind getting me into college at age fourteen and into a chemistry major. My father demanded excellence from me as long as I could remember. He pushed my older brother and sister, too, but he indulged them sometimes. With me, he was always stern, always remote, never content with what I gave him. I met Dad's demands, but I feared the result if I didn't. "You don't want to wind up digging ditches," Dad would tell me. Not a week passed, but Dad made a joke about disowning disobedient children.

Halfway through college by the second semester of Dr. Beiler's organic chemistry class, I had never really managed to get on board with the program.  Always wanting more time to complete assignments, never working enough hours to get the work done, never getting enough sleep, I met the low expectations of my chemistry professors. I found refuge in elective courses in other departments, but my accomplishments there never found their way back to my work in my major.

At the end of the third-week lab, unhappy with the way the synthesis was going so far, unhappy with the mistakes I made during the first two weeks – miscalculating the initial proportions of the initial reagents, washing some of my first precipitated crystals down the drain – I started over during that day's lab session with the first step in the sequence. It went much better. By late afternoon, I started on the second week's lab and finished it, too, a little after I missed suppertime at the student union. The third step, I knew, would take longer, but I stayed in the lab to work on it after everyone else had gone home. I could hear only one other student on the floor, someone in the lab next door, just beyond the short hallway lined with the glass-enclosed hoods that were vented for carrying off toxic gases.

By midnight, I had caught up, halfway through the third step. I figured, if I stayed a little longer, I could get ahead, take it easier in the upcoming labs. So I began work on the fourth stage, finishing at about two in the morning. I pushed through, achieved step five quickly, around three-thirty. All that remained was that final step, one last round of solution, precipitation, purification, and re-precipitation, to get to the clean final yield. I could finish three weeks ahead of schedule.

All went well, until it was time to dissolve the nearly completed yield of light yellow powder. Insoluble in water, it needed an organic solvent to be taken up completely by the liquid. The instructions prescribed the aromatic solvent benzene; it needed to be hot.

Into the round-bottomed flask went some three hundred milliliters of benzene and the yellow powder. I swirled the flask, but the powder would not dissolve. As I'd been taught, I mounted the flask in a stand over an asbestos pad, hooked a Bunsen burner up to the gas line and lit it. I turned down the flame, so that the liquid would heat slowly, and applied the heat. Every so often, I removed the burner and swirled the liquid. And slowly, slowly, the powder dissolved in the hot benzene. Until it stopped.

For ten minutes, the remaining powder stubbornly refused to disappear. Finally, it occurred to me that maybe the powder would completely dissolve in more benzene. I reached for the big reagent bottle, still half-full, and carefully began to pour the liquid into the flask.

Benzene, like gasoline, creates vapor in the open air. And, like gasoline would, over that open flame, it ignited in my hands. It set fire to the flask, inside and out, exploding it, then setting fire to the bench, and to ceiling, floor, and me.

My cries of  "oh shit! oh shit! oh shit!" brought the other student – he was someone I knew, his name was Alex – over on the run from the quantitative analysis lab next door. Alex sized things up, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and put out the flames. But not before my hands had blackened and started to peel.

I knew I was in trouble. I ran from the lab, ran from the science building, ran across the campus, hands not on fire, but burning more with every second. "oh shit oh shit oh shit," I wailed as I passed the student union and ran up to the nurses' office, "oh shit" I wept as the nurse opened the door and gestured me in. Alex trailed in after.

"I'll 'oh shit' you if you don't stop screaming," she barked.  As I whimpered, Alex explained what had happened. The nurse called an ambulance. I begged her to put my hands in cold water – I knew this would slow the burning – but she refused: "It's a chemical burn, it might make it worse."

The ambulance ride to the hospital was swift, but felt endless. I moaned and begged for cold water for my hands. When I reached the emergency room, they gave me painkillers, which did not work. They wrapped my hands in plastic bags – garbage bags? They set my wrapped hands in a tray, and packed ice cubes around the bags. The sharp edges of the ice felt like they were slicing through the dry plastic. They wheeled me to my room and left me there, whimpering.

The candy-striper came in, an old woman, moving slowly, to tend to the old man coughing in the other bed. When he quieted, I begged her to pour some water into the ice. She took one look at the plastic and the tray and the ice cubes and pursed her lips. She took the clean bedpan she'd brought into the room to the sink and filled it. She gently poured the water against the inside of the tray in my lap. Ice floated softly away from the plastic wrapping my hands. She touched my left forearm gently, smiled reassurance, and then she left. I slept.

The next thing I remember, another nurse put a pill to my lips and held up a cup of water. "Take this," she instructed, "It will help you sleep through the operation." And this pill did work to block the pain, along with the shot they gave me as they wheeled me into the operating room. But I remained awake while they cut away the plastic bags and the scorched skin that adhered to them, awake when they pulled away, sometimes clipped away, the charred, slimy skin that remained. I stayed awake and strangely chatty, commenting on the goings-on. At some point, I remember, the surgical nurse gasped, put her hand to her mouth and left the room. I hushed then. Silently, fascinated, I observed the doctor as he finished stripping off my skin, saw the doctor smear goo on my hands and fingers, and watched as they wrapped bandages over everything from my wrists to my fingertips. I fell asleep on the gurney back to my room.

When I awoke again, I was lying on my back in the hospital bed, bandaged hands suspended in the air above me, held there by tan elastic bandages around my wrists. Another nurse came in to check my chart, told me not to take my hands down, or my hands would swell and never heal.

*     *     *

Four decades later, several years after Dad had passed away, Mom and I sat after breakfast at the enormous dining table they'd brought down to Florida all the way from the parsonage in Connecticut. We lingered over morning coffee, laid over the lace tablecloth her mother had crocheted for Mom as a wedding present. Plastic placemats protected the tablecloth where we sat. We chatted, our habit when I came down to Florida to visit her from my home in New Jersey. She and Dad had always talked for hours over a cup of coffee. It's a habit I share now at home with my husband Warren, who drinks tea.

Mom set down her cup. "I always felt bad about your Dad pushing you so hard. I wonder what would have been if you'd waited another year. Dad always jumped without thinking."

"Don't feel bad; I never minded. It was my superpower. It protected my secret identity. And in those days, it sure needed protecting."

"But I feel bad that I wasn't there to help."

"Don't." I touched Mom's hand where it lay on the table. "If you'd known what was going on, all the options you had in those day for dealing with a gay kid would have been worse. What could you have done? Taken me to a psychiatrist? Medicated me? Electroshock? Back then, doing the 'right' thing would've meant torturing me."

*     *     *

Visitors came to see me in the hospital. Dr. Beiler came by, looking sad. He told me not to worry about things and went away again. My roommate, Dick, and a couple of guys from the dorm stopped in, big-eyed, to ask if I was okay. And, after making their way over from Daytona, my parents were there, too. Mom, comforting and kind as always, told me to be brave, that everything was under control, that everything would be okay.

Dad looked at me and, for the first time I could ever remember, he was crying, weeping silently, tears running down both cheeks.

*     *     *

As I looked into my coffee cup, Mom recalled her friend Elsie. Elsie's gay son, Danny, had died from AIDS complications some years before, and so, in the years after I came out to Mom, Elsie had become her guide to coming to terms with her own gay son.

"I can't get over that I never knew you were gay. Even when you never married."

"Even after I'd been with Warren for twenty years?"

"Even then." She winced. "I'm the psychologist. I'm the one who's supposed see these things. Elsie told me she always knew Danny was gay, even when she didn't want to admit it. But I never had a clue that you were." Mom took a slow sip. "But your Dad always knew."

"What?" I set down my mug.

"In that time when he was sick before he passed away, while he could still speak, he and I talked about it. He told me that he knew, even when you were a little boy, that you reminded him so much of someone in his family. Christopher, I think his name was."

"But I don't have an Uncle Christopher."

"I don't think he was your Dad's brother – a cousin, perhaps, or an uncle? Evidently, his family disowned him and he left home before your father went into the ministry. Your Dad said he never heard anything about him after. No one else in Dad's family ever talked about him, either, so it was a mystery to me, too. But that's why Dad was always so hard on you, why he pushed you so much harder than the other two kids. It's why, when the chance came, he wanted to get you away to college, to get you away from the kids in high school, safely away from the people here in town. He was terrified of what he thought life would be like for you."

*     *     *

When I was released from the hospital, both hands bandaged but for my fingertips, I returned to the lab to find that nearly all traces of the fire had been scrubbed away – only a gray stain remained on the ceiling tile above the sink at the end of the lab bench. And new safety posters had been hung, two on every wall, depicting a childish, bespectacled character named "Doofus," who'd been drawn engaging in every conceivable sloppy, careless, or dangerous error in lab protocol: dropping test tubes, heating poisons outside a vented chamber, pouring chemicals over open flames, juggling glassware. "Don't be like Doofus," said the posters. "Don't be like Doofus," smiled Dr. Beiler, hand gripping my shoulder. "Doofus," grinned the student working at the next bench over. Dr. Beiler told me I didn't need to worry about completing any more lab assignments for the rest of the year. I slunk back to my dorm room.

In the following weeks, my roommate helped. Dick brushed my teeth, carried my soap and shampoo when it was time to shower. He tied plastic bags over my bandaged hands so that I could wash myself – the tips of my fingers had been spared. Dick even helped me with my shirt buttons. I managed my own pants; I went without belts for a few weeks. I wore my sneakers untied. Twice a week for the first three weeks, I walked back across campus to the infirmary, where the daytime nurse, a pretty, friendly young woman, leaned me backward in a chair, my head hanging over a sink, and washed my hair.

When the time came to remove the bandages, the nurse snipped them away in small pieces, very careful with the tiny bits that wanted to stick. Underneath, the new skin was bright pink, the color of a crayon, on the backs of my hands, my knuckles, and my fingers.

Those hands shone pink a year later, when I crossed the stage to take my diploma. I escaped to graduate school in Gainesville, where the fire did not follow me.

*     *     *

Over the last of my morning coffee with Mom, I examined my knuckles, still pink after four decades. Some hair has grown back, except where the scar tissue formed. On cold winter days, in my own home up north, the backs of my hands still glow, almost fluorescent, and I tell Warren again about the burns that covered them so many years ago.

I showed the scarring pattern to Mom. She winced.

"I don't think I ever told you this," Mom said, "but you should know that your Dad's mother had a real temper. I always thought it was because she was so smart, and was never able to do anything with that brilliant mind."

"I remember that temper," I said, "I remember when we were visiting when I was ten. I overwhipped the cream meant for our dessert and it turned into butter. Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Ray had to restrain her. They sent me out to the living room, but I could still hear her screaming how stupid I was." I smiled wanly and leaned back. "Yep, I sure remember Grammy's temper."

"Oh dear. I didn't know that happened. I'm so sorry. So you knew. Grammy was very religious, too. Fanatical, really. And she hated being stuck at home, having baby after baby, never being able to escape." Mom paused again, a moment of reverie.

"Yes?"

"When he was still a toddler, a baby really, your grandmother scalded your father in the bathtub. The water was nearly boiling. She scrubbed his skin off when it blistered. He told me it was an accident, that she didn't realize what she was doing, but I've never really believed it." Mom shook her head. "He was in the hospital for weeks."

She slid her empty cup away from her. "Your father never could grow hair anywhere on his body. Like your hands, but all over."

I nodded slowly, remembering the day my father wept.

*     *     *

While I was still in the hospital, before the lab was cleaned up and the posters were mounted on the walls, my friend Marsha, who wanted to be a photojournalist, snuck into the lab with her good camera and took pictures. Afterward, near the end of the year, she showed me photographs of the damage. It was superficial, but spectacular: broken glass everywhere; soot on every surface.

She had also taken a photo of the broken, blackened round-bottom flask on the laboratory bench. In the photograph, the flask still contained several grams of pure white, perfect crystals of sulfathiazole, shining in the char.

David Milley has written and published since the 1970s, while working as a technical writer and web apps developer. His work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Bay Windows, Friends Journal, RFD, and Feral. Retired now, David lives in southern New Jersey with his husband and partner of forty-seven years, Warren Davy, who's made his living as a farmer, woodcutter, nurseryman, auctioneer, beekeeper, and cook. These days, Warren tends his garden and keeps honeybees. David walks and writes.