SODIUM Trilogy Part One

by Stephen Arseneault

  I knew my way around an engine block even if, as a teenager, working on cars never really appealed to me. At the time, I had no car of my own, and other than hanging out with friends, I didn’t really need one. Lucky for me, the factory was only a three-block walk from our house.

  Every six months or so, my dad would get the bug or save enough cash to continue his work on Suzie. It took his friends in the auto business most of a year before to locate one particular used part. After some dealings over the phone, he had it shipped to a man named Delmar at the Mercedes dealership across town. It arrived on a Friday, and I was given the task of picking it up, and that errand would affect my heart for the rest of my life.

  Before I left the house for the dealership, my dad forced me to put on a nice set of clothes. Apparently my raggedy old jeans and tank top weren’t adequate for picking up a part at the Mercedes dealership. It was as if he thought the parts-counter people were going to turn me away. But I had learned long before it just wasn’t worth the arguing, so on the nice clothes went. Besides, I was happy to get out of the house, even if it was just behind the wheel of the old Rambler. It had seen its better days on the outside, but it purred like a kitten under the hood.

  I arrived at the dealership around 10:00 a.m. only to find out that Delmar wasn’t going to be in until noon. So, with a couple hours to kill, I thought I would take a stroll through the showroom and look at the latest models I could not ever dream of affording.

  It was there where I had chanced upon the love of my life. Her name was Renee. I was the handsome young buck without a clue, and she was the carefree daughter of a well-to-do businessman. Her father was a partner in a financial services company, and her family wanted for nothing.

  It was her summer to run wild before her senior year in high school, and it was my summer to hang out with my buddies, drink beer, and chase tail before beginning the second-shift grind at the auto-parts factory in August, when the new union contract kicked in.

  I had my eye on a shiny, white show car when Renee came hopping through the front door with her father. For her seventeenth birthday, it seemed she was getting a new Mercedes, and it was a convertible to boot. Her father had accompanied her and made a beeline straight to the sales manager to start working on his deal. Renee had been left alone to look over the showroom queen when I decided to make my bold move.

  She was just a petite little thing, but she had a great figure and a killer smile. I casually walked up beside her and asked if there was anything I could help her with that day. She said I looked rather young for a salesman, so I decided maybe she should be educated on the latest feature set of the convertible.

  I began naming off fictitious features while waving my arms around like I knew what I was talking about. We sat in the car, turned on the radio, pushed various buttons and twisted knobs. I managed two minutes with my charade before a real salesman made his way over and busted me.

  Renee was actually amused and giggling as I made my way out of the car while apologizing profusely to the salesman. I had just enough time to give her a wink before returning to the parts-counter waiting room to once again wait on Delmar.

  To my surprise, a few minutes later, Renee made her way in, swishing from side to side as she walked and then sitting down beside me with a big grin on her face. We talked for almost an hour before her father came in with the keys to that very same convertible. A chance encounter in the showroom that morning had started us on a journey of fun that would eventually lead us down the path to marriage.

  I had come from a lesser neighborhood, and it wasn’t long before the association with her father’s wealth went to my head. He was generous, especially when it came to his baby girl.

  That fall, work at the factory placed paychecks in my hand. Not wanting to be chauffeured by my girlfriend, I had gone out and purchased a used car. It was a Camaro that had seen its better days, but it was mine.

  Renee's mom could not stand the thought of anyone seeing me drive onto their property in the beat-up old muscle car. So she saw to it I had the keys to one of Renee's father's sports cars. This one was a beauty: a bright red Ferrari with all the trimmings. This was not the proper auto for an eighteen-year-old male with an already inflated ego. And to prove such, I would often challenge the local folk to the midnight expressway drag. It was laughably easy to humiliate them with the monster Ferrari—that’s where the thrill came in. With Renee, I had all the spending cash I could want; winning money from drags was just the icing on the cake.

  One particular night, I selected a fool and his Oldsmobile. For fifty bucks, I was willing to humiliate him in front of his friends.

  We made our way out onto the now largely empty freeway around 3:00 a.m. I was in the left lane, the kid in the Olds in the right. His friends had followed in their car and hopped out and gave us an arm-drop start. Immediately the Ferrari lurched ahead.

  I was giddy over the ease with which I pulled away from him—so much so that as I reached and passed 100 mph and shifted into third, I decided to add to his embarrassment by swerving into his lane and then back into my own. There was no danger of a collision; I was easily five car lengths ahead of him at the time.

  I was not counting on how hard the road surface was or how hard my own tires were. It was eight degrees that cold Detroit night, and the hard tires and road surface, along with my foolishness at that speed, spelled out disaster. Everything seemed to move in slow motion in my head, but it happened in seconds. It was almost as though I was watching it all happen from a position outside of and just behind the car.

  The Ferrari spun wildly off the side of the interstate, over a berm, and into a sleeping neighborhood.

  I opened my eyes to the sight of flashing blue lights and to the sound of an approaching ambulance. I didn't know at what point I had been knocked cold. Blood dripped from my broken and throbbing nose, and through my teary eyes, I could see my left arm was bent where it should not have been.

  I shivered from the shock of the accident and the frigid Detroit air. Through what was left of my windshield, I could see the garage of a nearby home was in flames. The Ferrari had been cut in half after striking a phone pole at more than 100 mph.

  The tail-end of the sports car had crashed into the garage, setting it ablaze, while the front end, with me still inside, had slid just between two large oaks and into a chain-link fence. The fence had been ripped from every pole except for the corners and had acted like a giant net. This kept the cab and myself largely intact, which had undoubtedly saved my life. I wasn’t sure at the time if it was luck or if someone above had bigger plans for me, but either way, I was happy to still be counted among the living.

  The driver of the Olds and his friends had fled the scene, but I could hardly blame them. What kid wanted to end up in jail over some idiot's behavior on the streets?

  My life had been spared, but my days of racing had come to an abrupt end...

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Renee drove me everywhere in that convertible that summer—the one before I crashed the Ferrari. She spent countless dollars on clothing and expensive dinners. Our favorite spot was her father’s country club, where one of my former classmates worked in the kitchen; he would sneak me out the occasional mixed drink. Back then the booze was easily had; most people turned a blind eye to underage drinking. Unless you were involved in a fight or an accident, the lawmen usually had better things to do than to deal with teenage drunks.

  Renee never touched the booze, and as she was my designated driver, I was free to get plastered if I so desired. I often had her cruise through my old neighborhood hangouts so I could flaunt my newfound luck and wealth. I was so wrapped up in myself that I sometimes ignored old friends from school when they tried to come up to the car to say hi.

  After a high school knee injury, I had become somewhat angry at the world. Somewhere along the way, I developed a giant ego, too, and became very self-centered. Renee made it all too easy, of course. Here she was, th
is young, beautiful, intelligent rich girl her Daddy couldn’t say no to. I was the bad boy she was on one hand trying to tame and on the other using to piss off her snooty mother. Either way, she was enjoying it and so was I.

  Her father, Frank, never had issue with me, and in fact was a very likable guy. Her mother, Eunice, on the other hand, was a blue-hair socialite concerned only with other people's impressions of her status. A junior-grade factory-line apprentice was not her idea of a proper prospect for her daughter, so she initially disapproved of the relationship.

  No doubt I caused many hours of bickering at the ladies’ club that first year. But with Renee’s help, I did dress up quite handsomely. And with a little snobbery mentoring from Eunice, I managed to pass myself off as a well-to-do up-and-comer at many a function.

  With Renee’s help, I moved out of my parents’ home and into a plush apartment building. The guys at the factory always accused me of being a bank robber or Mafia hit man. Here I was, at eighteen years of age, driving a Ferrari and living in a high-end apartment, not to mention the beautiful girlfriend I took to the company Christmas party. I was the envy of every guy there, and I knew it.

  It was a cold January night when I had crashed the Ferrari. Renee was home in bed. Frank was fully insured, but my racing days were over. A few weeks later, a new Mercedes SEL was leased because Frank knew I would have been too embarrassed to try to race it. For several months, I wasn’t driving anywhere anyway. With my arm still in a full cast, I was happy to have Renee being my chauffeur.

  My months of recovery were easy compared what was coming. Life can have so many twists and turns; nobody knows what lies just around the corner. Life had been good to me until that time, so I had little motivation to better myself. My only real incentive to change, in fact, was keeping the status quo going as long as possible.

  The following spring, wanting to move up in Eunice’s eyes, I enrolled in the local community college and started coursework in mechanical engineering. It was not a big step, but I felt the need to advance myself in some way or another; the thought occasionally occurred to me that I hadn’t brought much to my relationship with Renee.

  I contemplated a degree in finance at Frank’s urging, but I really had no interest in school, so I picked a subject I thought might at least offer a little excitement. I was a good student who had been blessed with common-sense intelligence, but I never had the motivation to actually dig in or apply myself to anything. I managed to bring that same level of learning excitement to the community college, which showed up later as mediocre grades.

  When Renee graduated high school later that spring, I was already on top of the world. We were out every night for fine dining or at the posh dance clubs downtown. I had all the moves on the floor, and I was certain I quite often made a spectacle of myself, but I didn’t care because no one else's opinion mattered. That summer was all about me, and anyone who thought otherwise… well... they really didn’t matter.

  Our summer of fun ended that fall, when Renee went off to college in Chicago. I was suddenly faced with a five-hour drive, which limited us to weekend visits for most of the first semester. It didn't take long before Frank once again came through for me. He offered to foot my college tuition and dorm fees if I would attend there full time with Renee.

  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Here I was again, now all of nineteen years of age, and my girlfriend’s father was willing to pay for me to accompany her to an expensive school that was a good three hundred miles away. It just couldn’t get any better. He must’ve felt more at ease having someone he knew there with her. And I was certain she had put in the good word for me, too. Besides, whatever Renee wanted from Daddy, Renee got. My parents were thrilled for me, but at the same time, they were worried their oldest boy was being bought and paid for.

  Over the course of those first two years with Renee, I had become very arrogant and conceited, and that did not sit well with my father. He was happy for my success but worried for my soul. Here I was being handed everything on a silver platter without lifting a finger.

  In my home, we were taught that if you were willing to work hard, you would be able to take care of yourself and your family. My parents had certainly proven that, but my thoughts at the time were "Why work at all when someone else is willing to foot the bills?" And not just foot the bills, but provide you with the means to really live it up. It was a dream come true for any young man, and in my selfishness, I had done everything in my power to exploit it.

  Once at college, I could not disappoint my ego, so I joined a frat and was "Mr. Party" while Renee studied finance. She had a good job waiting for her at Daddy’s firm and was eager to get started on her own fortune. She had big plans for her future: a career, marriage, a family, and eventually a partnership like Daddy. I, on the other hand, was on the gravy train and all too willing to let her pull that wagon as far and as fast as she wanted.

  I would sign up for a full load of coursework only to drop half of it a few weeks later and then pocket the refund for beer money. My progress was slow and my grades were nothing to be proud of, but I continued onward nonetheless.

  Several of my frat brothers were pre-med, and I got acquainted with a piglet's anatomy at many a dissection party in the basement of our frat house. Drunken students with scalpels was a really bad idea, but we somehow managed to never dissect one another. Always the competitor and even more of an egomaniac than ever, I became the best in the dorm at stitching up piglets. I didn't know at that time how much I would one day be thankful I had acquired that particular skill.

  One evening after a binge at the frat house, I began sewing a passed-out buddy up in a full-sized pigskin we had removed from a carcass. We left his head sticking out, but with his arms sewn inside, he was quite the frat football, being pushed from one group to another, until the few remaining sober brothers took control and let him go. The college life was an endless circuit of drinking, parties, and frat events.

  One of my frat buddies—Pete—was also in mechanical engineering. He was book smart in every way possible but lacked in practical common sense. Being that I was the opposite, we decided to pool our talents and make the best of our combined abilities.

  That fall, we had a metallurgy class together. Once it began, I remembered the item the crazy old man had shoved in my hand on that trip to Yellowstone so many years before. On my next trip home, I retrieved the device so Pete could have a look at it. It only took a few minutes after I placed the object in his hand and told him about the old man for him to be as obsessed with it as I had once been as a kid.

  Was it from some secret government lab or stolen from some high-tech firm? My own obsession with it returned. We were both just cutting our teeth on metallic properties, and we surmised the cylinder was a type of magnetic coil with a rod through the center, making it a solenoid. We tried in vain to pull the rod from the cylinder but gave up when we felt we were in danger of damaging the object.

  We could see around the edges of the rod; it was not mechanically connected. It was instead held in place by a very strong magnetic field. We could push or pull on the rod, and it would move slightly one way or the other but never all the way through. Pete spent hours and hours that semester trolling through books in the library, but he didn’t turn up anything that explained the object we had in our possession.

  We contemplated asking one of our ME professors, but decided it was something we wanted to discover on our own. After some study, we determined that an electrical current could be applied to two metallic points on the object. We tried a variety of voltages, currents, and frequencies before discovering a power setting with a frequency that would move the rod to a much farther point than we could by hand. An alternate frequency was then determined to move the rod in the opposite direction.

  What we had on our hands was an extremely powerful solenoid, far more efficient than anything we had previously seen. We began to imagine what electric motors built with this could do. But it was the thought of
robotics that really brought about that "eureka" moment. We soon began to make plans for our grand business that was going to wow the world.

  We had one big problem, though: how could we possibly produce more? We would have to dissect the object in order to get a look at its inner workings. We made use of the tools in one of our labs one evening after the other students had gone. Our professor had a hot date lined up and trusted us just enough to let us lock up on our own.

  We worked late into the night removing part of the outer shell that encased the cylinder. Inside was a coil made from three types of common metals with an oily powder surrounding them. The next day, we had a friend in chemical engineering analyze the oily powder, and it turned out to be a close match to baking soda infused with a lightweight motor oil.

  There was nothing magical about the makeup of the item other than the exact combination of the materials. The following evening, we were able to produce a similar coil of our own that functioned in a nearly identical manner. We jumped up and down, high-fived each other, and strutted around the lab like peacocks. The coils looked to be easily reproducible.

  It was only two days after our wondrous discovery that tragedy struck. Pete was killed in an auto accident on a weekend visit to his hometown in Indiana.

  The loss of my friend took all my energy and all the joy away from the coil discovery. I could not look upon the object without tearing up about Pete, so it went back into the box in my closet at home. I also lost interest in mechanical engineering and switched my major to electrical, hoping a change would somehow remind me less of the loss of my best friend.

  Pete was my first true friend after meeting Renee, and his passing was a tough loss. Renee was so wonderful and caring and always seemed to know what to say when I was depressed. It took time, but time heals all wounds, and with Renee by my side and with the lifestyle we lived, it wasn’t long before I was again fully distracted. Pete's loss and the object were both tucked neatly away in my mind, and it would be many years before I would think of Pete or the mysterious solenoid again.