by Greg November

Purpose: To determine the amount of water in the hydrated form of cupric sulfate.

Qualitative Data: We left soon after it all went down. Jane remained inconsolable, so I, being a man, went about consoling her. An irrepressible grappler with sticky circumstances, I said to Jane, “Look on the bright side: now we have the rest of our afternoon free.” Our host, someone I had known for quite a long time and who had recently reentered my life after a moratorium on friendship, among other things, of many years, though Jane had met him only that afternoon, stood aside as Jane leapt into her coat (held in the hand of our host’s pretty new wife) and in the same motion stepped through the yawning front door. A teary dervish, she left the house at half sprint and when she hit the street it was in full run.

“Two things,” our host said to me, as his wife left the room, utterly, I saw, unperturbed. “Two things you should have done differently in that situation.”

I caught up to Jane at the corner of This and That and took her by the elbow. “What,” I said, “was all that running about?”

Jane said, “Oh stuff your bright sides! Didn’t you see the look on his face?”

“Hold on just one moment,” I said. “The look of whose face?”

“Derwyn’s face. Who else’s face could be an issue here?”

This is the logic of Jane and like many other things it is irrefutable.

“I suppose Derwyn’s face as the central face in this situation is irrefutable,” I said. “And I do not mean to discredit the shocking nature of the things his wife declared, but I do think there are two things we could have done differently back there.”

“I feel like I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m your husband.”

“But you — But she said — ” Jane could not finish the thought.

“I swear I only met her tonight.”

Jane received this statement with the strangeness of expression that it deserved. What matter was it that I’d met her tonight? The stories had been about me.

I tried again: “It was all so long ago, I’ve — ”

Jane was off again. While I’d been talking the light turned green and there she went, jogging now, across the street and, never the fastest reactor to circumstances (a contributing feature in my need to control them), I watched her go for maybe four or five seconds before I took off myself, into the street. Jane hopped the curb and dodged from the path of an old woman with a cane. I came up two or three seconds later, having made up some time due to the greater muscle mass of my legs, but was unable to spin the way Jane had from the path of the octogenarian rattling along. We both toppled and I heard a crunch, but no crying out. I felt something squish beneath my elbow and realized the way we’d both fallen had brought my elbow down into the old woman’s mouth, which of course was toothless and squishy. This old woman’s tongue made a circle on my elbow and then began to suck on it like it was a peach. I recoiled, snatched my elbow from the old woman’s mouth and looked up, though I was too late. Jane was gone, disappeared around a corner or into a store. I don’t know which. I heard a car honk as I stood. The old woman remained on the ground, her eyes closed. The car that honked stopped and from the backseat stepped our host. Who was driving the car?

“Derwyn,” I said. “Jane is scandalized.”

“Naoko sends her apologies. She thought the old stories had lost their ability to torment.”

“Jane never heard the stories before.”

“Naoko knows that now.”

“Help me find her,” I said.

“The weathermen don’t know shit,” Derwyn said, holding out his palm.

I bent to help the old woman stand but she was dead.

More Qualitative Data: While holding the test tube filled with hydrated cupric sulfate in the flame, the color of the hydrate (blue) changes gradually to a light whitish color. The color change begins at the edges of the powder, and spreads to the middle. While the hydrate is heating, beads of water form near the mouth of the test tube, and steam rises from the opening. The test tube is now filled with anhydride, all the trapped water within the cupric sulfate released.

After the anhydride has been re-heated, and 1 mL of water added, the bright blue color returns to the powder. When the outer wall of the test tube is touched, it is extremely hot. Steam once again rises from the mouth of the test tube, though there is now no flame near, culminating in a wicked haze that eclipses our will to deflect unsettling details from the past. Jane flees the house amidst an early dinner with an old, hitherto estranged friend and his second wife and I follow, only to see Jane run off again once I’ve caught up. What happens is I topple an old woman and, apparently, render her no longer living. This is what’s known as cause and effect.

Quantitative Data:
Test tube mass: 19.51 grams
Hydrated cupric sulfate mass: 4 grams
Test tube/anhydride mass: 23.21 grams
Re-heated test tube/anhydride mass: 23.20 grams
Jane’s mass: 242,506 grams
The old woman’s mass: presumably less, though her age is more
The mass of what only this afternoon Jane discovered: unknown

Calculations:
23.51 grams – 23.21 grams = 0.30 grams (mass of the water in the hydrated cupric sulfate)
0.30 grams ÷ 4 grams = .075 grams

More Qualitative Data: For six days while she lay in a coma I visited the old woman at John Dempsey Hospital. Her name was Jane and she was 86 years old, from Strawberry Mansion, Pennsylvania, the wife of an eye surgeon (now deceased) she was half blind and now only half alive. Death, it turns out, is not always as fast on the draw as it may seem, or, rather, life (sometimes) is steadier than it seems. This Jane was flabby and wispy-haired, and for some reason sucked up whatever solution they fed her from an IV at twice the rate of a normal human being.

“We all store water in our bodies,” her attending physician, Dr. Pelly – a man thin to the point of concern, with the jawbone of a orangutan – told me, (I’d said I was her nephew) “but it’s like your aunt is partly anhydride.”

Dr. Pelly grinned at his science joke.

“Is that water?” I said, pointing to the IV bag slung above the torpid body of a woman I’d begun to think of as Aunt Jane.

“Partly.”

Later, in a dictionary I keep on my desk, I looked up the word anhydride.

*

On the second day I’d gone back to the hospital I said to Dr. Pelly, “My aunt is like the compound obtained by removing the elements of water from a particular acid, isn’t she?”

“Partly,” Dr. Pelly said.

“And now it’s like she wants her water back, right?”

Dr. Pelly explained to me the hydrate-anhydride cycle, and then he pointed to various readings on the various machines to which Aunt Jane was hooked, conveying as he did so such a sense of absurd compassion that I felt him entirely suited to be having this conversation. This man was well placed in the universe. I, on the other hand, there under false pretenses and from a sense of attachment and guilt at the fact that my inability to maneuver suitably on the sidewalk at medium to high speeds had in fact put this woman in this situation, as well as the not-entirely-unrelated misfortune of my wife having gone MIA, and that this other, older Jane seemed utterly without legitimate family to visit her, this particular collection of circumstances rent my balance in such a way as to miss whole gobs of what Dr. Pelly explained to me.

“Does your aunt like bananas?” Dr. Pelly asked, breaking from a rather lengthy and technical, though entirely sympathetic, explanation of something medical.

“I believe she does,” I said, looking with guilt at the dormant expression of Aunt Jane’s face, the folds of flesh from ears to neck.

“Well, if she comes out of this she should make sure to get plenty of potassium.”

“So you think she’ll come out of it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I returned the next day and the day after that, but Aunt Jane’s conditioned remained unchanged. On that day, day three, Dr. Pelly regarded me with what I felt was genuine admiration. He had the habit of protruding his chin when talking, hands clasped at his groin. “You are a good nephew,” he said.

I had to look away as I answered, “She’s our beloved aunt. It’s too bad everyone else lives so far away.”

Each day I returned Dr. Pelly explained to me something new about science and medicine. It was like we each filled a certain spot, empty for some time, in each other’s day. My self-imposed period of multiple moratoria recently ended, it was like heat returned to certain areas of my life. It had not gone to perfection with Derwyn and Naoko, though with Dr. Pelly I experienced a pleasant buzzing sensation. Among the elements I’d cut from my life was the learning of new things. Friendship, sex, dairy, caffeine, gluten had also been gone for some time. Jane, my Jane, was the first straw; we made love and then I re-introduced gluten to my diet, called Derwyn the following day.

“Is it done with?” he said.

“I’m getting married.”

“I admit,” he said. “I broke it some time ago.”

“What’s left?” I said, proud and overwhelmed and somewhat sad that I’d kept at it where my friend had broken.

“Gluten,” Derwyn said. “That’s all I kept out for the duration. Come to my place for dinner and bring your new wife-to-be. We’ll feast on pasta and garlic bread. It’s supposed to storm and we can watch it from inside my living room. Naoko – that’s my wife’s name – loves when it storms.”

Soon I found the words Dr Pelly used in his explanations could not be found in the dictionary I keep on my desk, so I located a medical dictionary in the used bookstore. The dictionary was dusty and bore on its inside flap the inscription, “To the only woman I know who enjoys,” though the sentence was not finished. I read each night whole swaths of word entries in this medical dictionary, so that upon going to John Dempsey the next day I would have some common vocabulary to share with Dr. Pelly.

By the end of the week he became suspicious.

“Were you able to get in touch with your other family members?” he asked on day six, jaw protruding, arms crossed over a clipboard pinned at his chest.

I fumbled as I explained how far away everyone lived, how busy they all were.

“Yes,” Dr. Pelly said. “You’ve said all that before.”

“The truth does not whither with repetition,” I said. I’d heard that phrase a bunch in my youth.

“Do you have a job, Mr. Atwater?”

I’d told Dr. Pelly that my name was Richard Atwater, a name I remembered from a lecture in high school chemistry; Atwater had been a New England Quaker and a chemist in the Eighteenth century. I hoped Dr. Pelly didn’t also recall the name.

“I work, here and there, when I can,” I said. “I’m a painter and I’m available for commission.” The painter part, at least, was true.

“Mr. Atwater,” Dr. Pelly said. “You aunt’s condition has not changed in six days. I appreciate your concern, though your time is probably better spent elsewhere.”

I planned to stay away from the hospital, and Dr. Pelly assured me he would call should anything change with Aunt Jane’s condition. Good lord, I thought as I left the hospital that day, I wonder who’s paying for all this?

*

My wife Jane came home after six days of being gone. She said she had returned because after thinking about it for nearly a week she decided the past could not be outrun if it were allowed to fester in the background; it could be either left behind entirely or taken along forthwith, but never outrun. Jane was raised by psychologists and to her parents’ she always went for escape and this is why she’d returned speaking about the past in such a way.

“I will stay with you,” Jane said. “But understand I mean to leave the past behind.”

I began to answer my agreement but Jane held up a hand to stop me.

“This is not a conversation,” she said.

The phone rang and I knew it was Dr. Pelly calling to tell me Aunt Jane was either awake or dead. There was no one else who knew this number because in a fit of indignation I had our phone number changed after I lost Jane in the street. The phone rang again and Jane kept speaking. Could I answer it? She was saying something more about all the thinking she’d done at her parents’ house and the earnestness in her expression kept me rooted to the chair in which I’d been reading the medical dictionary when she entered. The phone rang again and Jane saw me eyeing it. Her expression darkened, and then she spotted the medical dictionary in my lap.

“Why do you have that?” she said

The phone rang again and then it stopped.

“Jane,” I said. “Do you remember the old woman you dodged in the street after you ran from the house six days ago?”

Questions:
1.Could you use the anhydride form of this blue hydrate to indicate whether the humidity in the atmosphere were high or low? Yes. Set a sample of the anhydride on a tray in the room and see if the powder turns blue. If it does, there is high humidity in the atmosphere. The darker the blue, the higher the humidity. This is because when the anhydride combines with water it turns back to the hydrate it was before, hence the blue color.

2. Design a solar-powered system that uses the heat-releasing and heat-absorbing properties of this anhydride/hydrate system to keep a room warm after sunset, or in the absence of trust. Set a large sample of hydrated cupric sulfate out in the sun all day. After a time in the sun, the cupric sulfate will turn into anhydride, as it did in the lab. You can then keep the anhydride for as long as you like, it will store the heat within it. So whenever you are ready to heat the room, run water over the anhydride. This will turn the anhydride extremely hot. Then fan a current of air over the heated anhydride, and throughout the room. The room will then be supplied with a warm current of air as long as the water flows over the anhydride, and as long as the anhydride remains hot. Please note this will only warm the chill in the air. The effect an anhydride/hydrate system will have on the chill in the marriage in the room is indeterminate at this time.

3. For what other practical purpose(s) might the anhydride be used?
You could use it to heat a pool. Through some kind of vent, the anhydride could be dispersed in the water. Or you could attempt to revivify an 86-year-old woman in a coma, though this is not recommended, and is in fact something of a stretch, a lark, sheer improbability.

Conclusion: 7.5% of the hydrated cupric sulfate is water.

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