Full Tilt (Full Tilt #1)(38)

He laughed. “I don’t remember much except the ceiling was spinning. But holy shit, what a ceiling. Seventy feet of blown glass art. A riot of colors that was somehow harmonized. Planned chaos, if that makes sense.”

I rested my chin in my hand. “It does.”

“I honestly thought I was hallucinating,” he said. “I’d learned from my classes at UNLV about Dale Chihuly, a master glass blower, and that his work was here in Las Vegas. But I’d never been into glass. Or even into the Bellagio. But that night, even drunk off my ass, the installation stayed with me. I wanted to know how it was possible to make glass do that. Make it look like a flower garden had erupted out of the ceiling.

“I came back to the Bellagio the next day. Hungover as hell, to see if that ceiling was impressive as I’d remembered, or if I’d just been a drunken idiot, mesmerized by pretty colors.”

“You weren’t a drunken idiot.”

“The jury’s still out on that,” Jonah said with a grin, rising to re-fire the piece. “But I wasn’t mesmerized, I was obsessed. I read everything I could about Dale Chihuly. He became my idol, and still is. I changed my focus from lights to glass that week, and the first time I held a blowpipe and watched a piece come to life, I knew it was what I would do for the rest…” He coughed and wiped his sweaty chin on his shoulder. “For the rest of my studies.”

“I love hearing how someone finds their passion,” I said. “Or how it finds them.” I glanced around the space. “But this isn’t like painting where you can just pick up a brush and a canvas. Can I be nosy?”

“You want to know how one affords this space, the tools, an assistant, and all the glass a guy could want on a limo driver’s salary?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t pay for any of it. I won a grant from Carnegie Mellon.” He returned to the bench and took up the damp, burnt dictionary to roll the glass in, as if he were polishing it. The smell of burnt paper filled the space, and even though molten hot glass was mere inches from his bare hand, it didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. He rolled and shaped with the practiced ease of someone who had done it thousands of times.

He’s a professional, I thought. A master. I felt strangely proud watching him. “It doesn’t surprise me that you won a grant.”

“It was kind of a consolation prize, actually,” Jonah said. “I got sick in my third year at Carnegie and couldn’t graduate. I was in the hospital about five months, and when I got out…I didn’t go back. My parents wanted me to stay here. My mother especially.”

“I can imagine,” I said quietly, just above the constant hiss-roar of the fire.

“But I had a full scholarship at CM, and when I told them I couldn’t stay to earn my degree, they gave me a grant to do this installation. Sort of like a thesis project.”

“You must be something special, Fletcher, for them to throw so much money at you.” I tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “But it’s too bad you had to leave Carnegie. Can I ask…?”

“How I got sick?” He went to the furnace for another re-fire.

I nodded. “I don’t understand how a twenty-five-year-old guy winds up needing a heart transplant.”

Jonah nodded, and when he spoke his voice was flat. “A bunch of us took a trip to South America last summer. Peru, Colombia, Venezuela. I caught a virus while camping outside Caracas. They think it was from swimming in a river, though my friends and girlfriend at the time all swam too. I later learned I had a genetic disposition that made me susceptible to the virus.”

He returned to the bench, rolling and polishing.

“I also learned I have a rare tissue type, which made finding a donor heart a little tricky. I was in a pretty bad way when we got the call that one was found, as close a match as they could get. I had the transplant, and… All’s well that ends well, right?”

“I’m glad it ended well,” I said softly.

He said nothing but hung the blowpipe upside down from a hook on the ceiling above him. It looked as though it had a glowing light bulb on the end. He took a second pipe to the big furnace that held the glass and came back with a small gather.

“What’s that going to be?” I asked, glad to be able to ask something harmless for a change.

“The neck of the bottle.” He sat on the bench, rolling the pipe, and took up a pair of what looked like oversized tweezers. He pressed one tong into the small piece glass, hollowing it out, and then began to pull the glass, forming a lip.

“It’s like taffy,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

He worked for a bit, stretching the neck out, then cutting off the end to make a perfectly round opening.

“Awful quiet in here,” Jonah said, and his smile was warm again. “I’m sitting with a soon-to-be world famous guitarist in front of me, but I don’t hear music. Makes no sense.”

I swung my legs out in front of me to examine my boots. “My acoustic is in a truck with the other band equipment. I think.”

“If I turn on the radio, will I hear one of your songs?”

“Probably,” I said. “‘Talk Me Down’ is kind of big right now.”

“I’ve heard it. I’m not a fan of the music, to be honest, but the lyrics were pretty good.”