Free Saving St. Germ by Carol Muske-Dukes

.”
    “Jesse? I’m sorry, really. I’ve got to go home and pack .”
    He nodded at me, then signaled the waitress, who tiptoed over to whisper that there was absolutely no MSG in our food tonight. We thanked her. After she’d collected some plates and disappeared, Jesse covered my hand with his.
    “I want to thank God for what little chemistry there is left that you don’t know about.”
    “In that case, thank you, God, for Jesse,” I said, and raised my glass with my other hand. But even as I looked at him, then shyly away, certain we’d sleep together one last time before I got into my car the next morning and drove west — I felt the sense of stasis, the torpor certain expectations of intimacy evoke. His hand on mine implied that there had been something more than heat between us. I wanted to believe it had just been heat. I had to. However, I’d have to collaborate, at least for tonight, in this revised version of our history. I winked and put the hibiscus back in my hair. I smiled. I drank my drink.
    Then the bill came and I watched him pay, thinking about nothing at all except starting my car, turning the corner for the last time, thinking about what the light would look like in the early morning. In my mind, I saw the shadows part; then I drove into them. They stretched, then covered my car like black, moving water.

Chapter 5
    M Y AFTERNOON LAB students were at work on the Grignard Effect (named for the illustrious chemist Victor Grignard)—trying to make it happen in the lab. It was a synthetic reaction requiring some sophistication of technique; the task was to make a large molecule out of two smaller ones. The difficulty was always the same: getting the thing started. The reaction is very sensitive to moisture; traces of water in the flask or solvent will stop it cold. I looked around the lab; light filtered in from above and there was this insistent green ringing sound: fifty glass rods beating inside fifty glass tubes, mixing up the reagents.
    I love Organic lab, I love coming down the hall, past the ice makers, the balance room with its computerized scales, the heavy solid melting-point apparatus—and waltzing into the lab, wearing the clear goggles everyone wears to protect the eyes from corrosive vapors, chemical splashes. The air stinks gently of sulfur and acetone and a hundred other chemicals, a sweet rotten smell circulating around and through the ducts, up to the roof and out. Even the make-up air system, pumped through the air-conditioning and heating ducts, can’t get rid of that musty odor. Each work space under its fume hood looks like some kind of kitchen altar, with its bright silver fittings for steam and cold water, each with a vacuum line, thermal well, heating mantle, Claisen reactor, rack of tubes, microscope. I love enumerating the lab’s infinitely patient, self-contained components: the centrifuge, the big cupboards filled with large brown bottles of butanol, chloroform, chlorobenzene, nitrophenol, the sink with its gallon jugs of acetone for cleaning hands and glass fittings, the flameproof vacuum-storage cabinet, the safety shower. I would never compare entering the lab to entering a church, yet the lab glows with an unmistakable aura of prefigurement and awe—the ducts and tall flasks stand like holy effigies, the distillation apparatus and rubber tubing swing from hooks like ornate censers; it is a sealed-off world touched by grace. A place of reverse miracles—miracles happening in a controlled state.
    I paused under the fume hood of Albert Chang, one of my best students. He had completed the experiment and documented the reaction with remarkable speed. There before our goggled eyes was a round-bottomed flask in which ether boiled below the core temperature of the human body at ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. We stood staring at the murky low-level bubbling and I patted Albert on the shoulder. He smiled at me shyly, one side of his mouth turned up.
    “Nice work,