SODIUM:2 Apocalypse

by Arseneault, Stephen

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

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

  Her father Frank had 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 that was only concerned 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 had 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 had managed to pass myself off as a well to do up and comer at many a function.

  Renee loved spending the money on me and I was all too willing a recipient of it. After three months of paychecks at the factory I finally went out and bought my first car. Even though I had everything I wanted with Renee, there was still a spot of pride left in me that needed a car of its own. It was a black sixty-nine Camaro. It needed a paint job and the exhaust was loud, but it ran good... and it was mine.

  It only took a couple trips to pick up Renee in it before Frank loaned me his Ferrari to drive. I was sure it was at the urging of Eunice who didn’t want the neighbors seeing my junker pulling in the drive, but I wasn’t about to complain. So, the Camaro stayed parked at my parent’s house and a few months later I gave it to my ratty little brother for his sixteenth birthday.

  With Renee’s help I moved out of my parent’s home and into a fairly plush apartment building. The guys at the factory would always accuse me of being a bank robber or mafia hit man. Here I was at 18 years of age, I was driving a Ferrari and living in a high end apartment, not to mention the beautiful girlfriend that I took to the company Christmas party. I was the envy of every guy there and I knew it.

  The Ferrari was really a dream car; the bright red paint, the handling and of course the speed. The lawmen in Detroit got to know me well. I had been pulled over repeatedly for speeding and otherwise just reckless driving in general, but I had not received a single ticket, that is, until a rookie pulled me over one evening.

  He had no idea that Frank and Eunice had been hosting the Policeman’s Ball for each of the last three years and that I was pretty much untouchable as far as petty crimes went. He gave me three citations that evening and threatened me with arrest because of my cocky attitude. The next day he got an earful from his chief and I’m sure he got quite the drubbing from his fellow officers too. You don’t mess with the golden goose unless you’ve had your fill of golden eggs. And his fellow officers had not had their fill.

  He caught up to me a few weeks later weaving in and out of traffic and when he pulled me over he apologized profusely for his previous disrespect. I remember in my arrogant state telling him that I would let him off with a warning that time, but he had better stay alert and on his toes from then on. I left the scene squealing my tires and speeding away and I'm quite sure there was steam coming out his ears. I spent most of the fall flying around west Detroit in that car without a care in the world.

  It was a cold January night when I crashed the Ferrari. Renee had been at home in bed when I had decided to go out looking for some fun. The kids in my old neighborhood were all too willing to gather up fifty bucks for a race just to see what the Ferrari would do. An easy win also fed my ego so I was all too happy to take their money.

  Frank had been fully insured, but after the accident and with Renee’s urging my Ferrari 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. I wasn’t driving anywhere anyway with my arm still in a full cast and was happy to have Renee once again being my chauffeur.

  My recovery was easy compared to the things that would come. Life can have so many twists and turns as nobody knows what may lie just around the corner. But life had been really good to me at the time, so I had little motivation to better myself. My only real incentive to change in fact, was to take steps to keep the status quo going as long as possible.

  The following spring with wanting to move up in Eunice’s eyes I had 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 had occasionally occurred to me that I hadn’t brought much to my current relationship.

  I had contemplated a degree in finance at Frank’s urging, but I really had no interest in school anyway, so I picked a subject that I thought might at least offer a little excitement. I had been a good student who had been blessed with common sense intelligence, but I had never had the motivation to actually dig into 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 sure that 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's time had come to go 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 19 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 300 miles away. It just couldn’t get any better. I guessed that he had felt more at ease with someone he knew being there with her. And I was sure 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 that their oldest boy was being bought and paid for.

  Over the course of a couple of years I had become very arrogant and conceited and that had not set 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 and I never had to lift a finger.

  In my home we had been 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 pay the bills". And not just pay the bills, but provide you with the means to really live it up. It was a dream come true for any young man and I had done everything in my power to exploit it.

  Once at college I could not disappoint my ego so I had 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 was 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 nothing to be proud of, but I c
ontinued onward none the less.

  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 also the egomaniac, 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 that 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 pig skin that we had removed from the carcass. We left his head sticking out, but with his arms sewn inside he was quite the frat football until the few remaining sober brothers took control and let him go. The college life was an endless circuit of parties, football and frat events.

  The next fall I had a class in metallurgy. I had a frat buddy who was also in Mechanical Engineering who was book smart in every way possible, but lacked in practical common sense. Being that I was the opposite we had decided to pool our talents and make the best of our combined abilities.

  Once the metallurgy class had begun I remembered the item the crazy old man had shoved in my hand so many years before. On my next trip home I retrieved the device so my friend 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 become obsessed with it.

  We wondered if it was from some secret government lab or stolen from some high tech firm. I would have to admit, I had a bit of obsession with it myself as we were both just cutting our teeth on metallic properties. We surmised that 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 that 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 many hours that semester trolling through books in the library, but he was unsuccessful in turning up anything that explained the object we had in our possession.

  We contemplated asking one of our ME instructors, but decided it was something that we wanted to make discoveries of on our own. After some study we had determined that two metallic points on the object were where an electric current could be applied. 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 further 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 that could be used to do mechanical work with electricity far more efficiently 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 and that was how could we possibly produce more. It was decided that 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 instructor 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 wrapped the cylinder. What we discovered 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 of my energy and all of the joy away from the coil discovery. I could not look upon the object without tearing up about Pete, so it once again went back into the box in my closet at home. I also lost interest in mechanical engineering and switched my major to electrical. I had hoped that a change would somehow remind me less about 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 getting depressed. It took time, but time heals all wounds and with Renee by my side and with the lifestyle we lived, it didn't take 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 object again.

  Frank’s firm had been heavily involved in large mergers and acquisitions and his bonuses alone that year had topped ten million Dollars. That fact alone made me obviously eager for Renee to get finished with school and to get started at Frank’s firm. Every time I blinked I had big Dollar signs in my eyes.

  The remaining college years went by fast with Renee finishing with a Master’s degree in only four years. I in the meantime, had managed to finish only my first two years of coursework. So, I did what any sensible, bought and paid for man would do, I asked Renee to marry me.

  We were wed on her twenty second birthday which was fine by me as it meant one less date I had to worry about forgetting in the future, thinking of others was not one of my finer traits. I had not once cheated on Renee nor had I had the urge to do so. It wasn’t because I didn’t have opportunities thrown at me all the time, quite the opposite, I was after all a handsome young man and I certainly had the appearance of big money.

  But aside from all the obvious benefits, I really loved that girl and she knew it. But having everything handed to me so easily I had developed a real sense of entitlement and with my loyalty to Renee, I felt that I was deserving of every dime that was spent on me. Yes, I was a schmuck… but at least I was a loyal schmuck.

  As a wedding gift Frank bought us a really nice first palace on the other side of Detroit from where my parents lived. The place had a stone wall with wrought iron spikes on top that went all the way around the five acres of property. An automatic gate let you in to a circular drive that fronted the brick and ivy colonial style home with four large columns.

  I’ll have to say it really was a spectacular place. It had a five car garage, an indoor lap pool and a large heated outdoor pool surrounded by marble pavers, benches, statues and pillars. It was a fantastic place for entertaining and with Eunice’s guiding hand we had a number of extravagant affairs there. To top it off we had a permanent house staff of three.

  We spent seven happy years in that home before our big move to Florida. As time went on I saw less and less of my parents as they no longer were a good fit for my lifestyle. My father was always uncomfortable when he came to the house and that in turn made me uncomfortable. My mother was a chain smoker and since Renee didn’t allow smoking in our home, my Mom was somewhat put off at having to go outside. She really liked Renee, but she just had to have her cigarettes.

  I spent most of my spare time at the country club playing tennis and golf and hanging out with my society crew. My younger brother Rex had left Detroit just after high school and was last known to be somewhere in California. He had been a trouble maker since becoming a teen, having been repeatedly suspended from school, having had minor brushes with the law and he was constantly getting drunk or high with his friends.

  I tried once to talk some sense into him, but he wasn’t interested. And who was I to say anything to him while I was still milking off of Renee and her father. I know we both br
oke my parent’s hearts as neither one of us had turned out anything like I know they had hoped for. I had turned into the rich elitist snob and my brother a lazy California doper.

  Chapter 4

  Just before our Florida move my mother had passed away from a stroke. It was probably from hardened arteries from all those years of smoking. Four months after my mother passed my father went to. I think his was from a broken heart from being lost without my mother. He would just sit in the house all day staring out the front window towards the porch where he and my mother had spent many an evening relaxing after the day’s toils.

  I believe it was their passing that planted the idea of a move away from Detroit in my head. I was feeling guilty about not having been the son that I thought they had envisioned. That guilt gnawed at my soul to the point where I thought about it constantly. My self-centered attitude had led me to believe that my life would somehow be better, or the guilty feeling at least reduced, if I could get far far away from Detroit.

  So, I convinced Renee that we needed a winter place in Florida where we could escape the unforgiving cold of Detroit. We found a small ranch on the east side of a large central Florida lake. It offered warm winters, stunning sunsets, space from any neighbors or traffic congestion and of course it was a long way from Detroit.

  Our first stay was for a Christmas break with Frank and Eunice. It was sunny and seventy degrees for most of the week we were there. A cool breeze blew through the row of palms that fronted the lake in the back yard. Frank really enjoyed the warmth and outdoors part of it, but Eunice was not impressed. I believe her only consolation was that it gave her something to go home and bicker about with her snobby friends.