Full Tilt (Full Tilt #1)(36)
Jonah laughed to see my expression. “I know it’s not much to look at.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. The hot shop was about a thousand square feet of cement and steel, hotter than the midsummer Nevada heat outside and smelling of burnt wood. An air conditioning unit was waging a losing battle against two furnaces—one large and one small—that lined a single wall. In front of one raging furnace was a bench that had rails on either side, like high armrests made out of stainless steel. Next to the bench was a table upon which sat a thick, charred dictionary, and tools soaking in a bucket of water: tongs and cups and strange-looking ladles.
“You leave the furnaces on?” I asked, fanning myself as the heat wrapped around me and squeezed.
“I turn them down at night,” Jonah said, “and fire them back up for the day. It takes too long to get them hot enough otherwise. Alarm system over there—” he nodded his head at a wall unit with blinking lights—”alerts my phone if there’s a problem.”
I meandered past a rack of stainless steel pipes on the near wall, each about three feet long. Beside that was a small metal table with nothing on it.
“So this is where the magic happens,” I said.
“On a good day.”
“What makes a bad day? You break something?” My feet crunched shards of glass on the cement floor as I walked between the furnaces and the metal table.
“Breaking a finished piece would definitely suck, yes.” Jonah rapped his knuckles on the wooden table with the strange-looking tools. “Mostly a bad day is one where I haven’t gotten enough done.”
“The gallery has you on a pretty tight deadline?”
Jonah wore a strange expression on his face, a thin smile that didn’t touch his warm brown eyes. “You could say that.” He glanced at his watch. “Tania’s on her lunch break. She’ll be back soon and you can meet her.”
“Does it always take two people to make a piece?”
“Not always,” Jonah said. “I make most of the individual pieces myself—those that are going to be for sale at the gallery. But for the larger sections of the installation, I need help.”
I glanced around. “Where’s your installation?”
“Through that door.” Jonah indicated a door on the far wall. “That’s where I keep all the finished pieces.”
“So…” I rocked back on my heels. “Can I get a sneak peek? Seeing as how I won’t be here in October for the gallery opening, it’s only fair.”
“I’ll show you but it’s not going to look very impressive.”
He led me to the back room. Dim light streamed in from the windows, illuminating dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, some open and overflowing with packaging bubbles or the little curls of Styrofoam my grandmother called ‘ghost poop.’ Other boxes were sealed up tight and stacked, no more than three feet high, with FRAGILE stamped all over. Other flattened cardboard boxes were stacked in piles or leaned against the cement walls, waiting to be filled. On one long worktable—easily twenty feet long—were pieces of Jonah’s installation.
I moved slowly toward the table, paranoid I would break something even without touching it.
Long curls of yellow and orange glass were laid out next to ribbons of blue and green, infused with gold flecks and dark purple swirls. White, frothy glass took up another section of the table, pearly with incandescence. The last section held glass sculptures that took my breath away: delicate sea horses and sea dragons, glowing white jellyfish suspended in black spheres, and even an octopus, its tentacles curling a good foot and a half long and its skin rippling with ribbons of color.
Carefully, I let my fingers trace the blunt edge of a piece of glass that looked like a large ice cube with coral fronds. Within swam a sea turtle—perfectly rendered.
I looked at Jonah, so many questions trying to pour out of my open mouth that none did.
He jammed his hands down the front pockets of his jeans. “Not much to look at right now. Most of it is already packed away.”
I shook my head. “These are amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“Thanks.”
“The rest is in the boxes? To send to the gallery?”
He nodded. “I won’t be able to wire them together until I’m in the gallery space itself.”
“But how do you know what to work on if you can’t see the whole thing? That’s like…writing a song but never playing it through until show time.”
Jonah shrugged, and tapped his temple. “I have it up here.”
I think he mistook my shocked expression because he waved his hand like he was getting rid of a bad smell. “God, that sounds pretentious as hell.”
“No, I think I get it.” I gestured to the table. “This looks like an archaeological dig of Atlantis. Like you’re finding the pieces one at a time, and can’t put them all together yet.”
“Yeah, I like to think so.” His eyes roved over the scattered pieces of his art. “I think part of working with glass is that you don’t know exactly how it will turn out. The shape and flow of it… The fire dictates so much of what the glass does, how it changes the color and form. With some pieces, like the sea life, I design it from top to bottom, obviously. But for the installation as a whole, I try to follow it, instead of forcing it to be what it doesn’t want to be.”