The Last Kiln

The kiln had been cooling since the power died at sunset; I checked the pyrometer and it read one thousand two hundred and forty degrees when the elements went dark. I stood there with my coffee going cold and watched the numbers on the controller blink out one at a time, like a hotel at closing time. The exit sign over the door glowed green. Somewhere in the wall between us and the commissary, a compressor sighed and stopped.

My name is Rodney Maddox, I am sixty-two years old, and I have been throwing pots for two years. Before that I spent three decades on the line at the commissary down the hill, feeding the food trucks that work the port. Retired on a Tuesday, had a bad Wednesday, and by Friday I had signed up for a community clay class because a man cannot stand in his own kitchen stirring soup for eight hours a day without going strange. The class met in a church hall with a linoleum floor and a radiator that clanked. My first bowl came out looking like a hat someone had sat on. I loved it anyway.

Now I rent a corner of this studio, out on the edge of the port district where the rents are cheap and the trucks outside never fully stop. The commission on my bench is a bowling ball. An actual bowling ball, thrown hollow, for the Athena Lanes league, their fortieth anniversary. A sphere in clay is a fight. It slumps, it sweats, it wants to be an ashtray. I had gotten mine to the leather-hard stage twice and ruined it once. The third one went into the kiln this morning for its final firing, with a practice sphere left on the bench, and then the district grid went down at sunset just like the power company warned on the radio, and the kiln was cooling toward nothing.

I wedged clay anyway. It is what I do with my hands when my head is misbehaving. The clay was a warm gray mass and I pushed it against itself, over and over, cutting the spiral with the wire, slamming it down on the canvas. Wedging is honest work. The clay does not care that you are sixty-two, or that your knees sound like someone walking on gravel, or that your ex-girlfriend manages the commissary one thin wall away.

Which is the thing I had not let myself think about all evening.

Tilly. Tilly Frankenstein, and yes that is her real name, her grandfather came over from somewhere colder than here and the name came with him. She is fifty-three now. We were together for two years, met her at a food truck rally when I still cooked for a living, and she ended it twelve years ago, cleanly, with no hard feelings on either side that I could find. I had not stood in a room with her since. Tonight the power was out and her commissary's generator was my problem, because the kiln, the compressor, and half my studio run off that generator, and I had been over there at four o'clock to check the fuel line, and she had been behind the counter with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she had said hello as if twelve years was twelve days.

I wedged. The clay forgave me for thinking about her.

* * *

A knock at the studio door, around eight, once the dark had settled in for good. I opened it and there she was, holding a phone with the flashlight on, and behind her the whole street was black except for the yellow smear of one emergency lamp down by the harbor road.

She did not come in at first. She stood on the step and explained her problem, quick and practical, the way she explains everything. The commissary had six trucks prepping for the morning market, the walk-in was holding, but her prep cook had chipped the blade on the floor polisher and, no, that made no sense either, the point was she needed to use a wheel. Not a pottery wheel. The grinding wheel mounted on the stand in my studio's back corner, the one the raku guy left behind when he moved to Thessaloniki. She remembered it from when she'd toured the space two years ago, before I rented my corner. She needed it for an hour to true up the blade.

I stepped aside and let her in. She came in and I gave her one of my beers, the cheap ones I keep in the old mini-fridge for no reason I can defend, and she took it, and we stood in the dark studio with the battery lamp making everything the shade of weak tea, and we caught up. Awkward is the word. Two adults, fifty-three and sixty-two, both of us knowing exactly how the other one takes coffee and neither of us able to find one sentence that got past the weather and the generator.

She asked about the pottery. I showed her the practice sphere, half-finished on the bench, its surface furred over where the cooling had stopped it. She said it looked like a planet. I said it was supposed to resemble a bowling ball and she laughed, and the laugh was the same laugh, and I took a long drink of cheap beer to have something to do with my mouth.

She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said no, and asked her the same, and she said no, and then there was a silence with a lot of history standing in it, and we both looked at the bowling ball like it was going to say something.

* * *

The others arrived at half past eight. Mika Blackwell first, thirty-seven, artist assistant at the studio, a friend of Tilly's from that same community clay class where I got my start, which is a small city, this scene, everybody knows everybody through somebody. She had a crate of her raku pieces balanced on one hip and a battery lantern in the other hand. Behind her came Aldo Atkins, twenty-eight, freelance art handler, a tall careful young man who talks like everything he says is a contract clause. He had worked with Tilly before, on freight and comms, and he greeted her like a colleague and me like a client, which I suppose I was.

They had a shipment of Mika's raku ware going out on the morning boat and the power cut had stranded the pallet halfway loaded. They came to fetch the rest, wrap it, and get it out before the port shut the gates. Fine. Business first. Aldo checked his manifest under the lantern and muttered about customs forms.

Mika put her crate down, looked at my practice sphere, and started in. She had been needling me about this commission for three weeks, every Tuesday when I came in for open studio. A bowling ball, she would say, on a kick wheel, at sixty-two, for an actual league that expects an actual sphere. She picked it up, or tried to, four kilograms of leather-hard clay, and staggered under it with theatrical exaggeration, and Tilly laughed again.

Then Mika issued the dare. She had been carrying a strip of blue fabric in her toolbox for wrapping, of all things, and she held it up and said it plainly, no hedging. She dared me to center a fresh four-kilogram lump on the kick wheel, blindfolded, right now, in front of all three of them, with the battery lamp for light and the district dark outside.

I told her she was out of her mind. Centering is feel, yes, but the eyes do half the work and everyone knows it. Four kilos is a fight even sighted. Tilly set her beer down on the shelf and looked at me, and there was the old gleam in her face, the one I remembered from the rally the night we met, the one that always meant she wanted to see what I would do.

Aldo said nothing, which from Aldo is a form of encouragement.

I picked up the lump of clay and weighed it in my hands, and it was heavy and alive and it did not care about my pride, and I thought, well. The power is out. The kiln is dead. The night is already ruined. There was a blindfold in the room and a dare on the table and three people watching, and one of them had once loved me and had ended it well, and I am sixty-two years old and I have been throwing pots for two years.

I put the lump down on the canvas and reached for the blue fabric.

The fabric was soft and it smelled faintly of machine oil, which is the smell of every toolbox in the world, and Mika tied it herself from behind because she said she didn't trust me not to cheat. I didn't argue. Cheating at your own dare would be a special kind of pathetic, and at sixty-two you learn which humiliations you can live with and which you can't.

Darkness, then. Full darkness, the kind that has a texture to it. I could hear the battery lamp buzzing somewhere to my left, and I could hear Tilly breathing, and I could hear Aldo shuffling papers because apparently the man could not stop working even for a spectacle. I wedged the clay once more, mostly for show, and dropped it onto the wheel head with what I hoped was confidence and probably was not.

The kick wheel is an old one, cast iron, heavier than sin. You get it spinning with your foot and then the momentum carries you and your whole body becomes part of the machine. My knees announced themselves the way they always do, gravel underfoot, and I settled the lump dead center by feel, palms flat, and started to push.

Centering blind is a conversation you have with a thing that does not speak. The clay wobbles, you feel the wobble in your wrists, you correct, it wobbles the other way, you correct again. With your eyes open you cheat, you read the silhouette against the light, you cut corners. Blind, there is only the pressure in your palms and the rhythm of the wheel and the little voice in your head that says you are sixty-two years old and this is a fool's errand. I told that voice to shut up. It has been telling me similar things since I retired from the line on a Tuesday and had the bad Wednesday and signed up for clay class by the Friday, and it has been wrong more often than right.

The clay centered. I knew it had centered because the fight went out of it all at once, the way it does, the lump going from an argument to a single quiet spinning thing under my hands. I opened my eyes to the dark behind the blue fabric and Mika cheering and Tilly saying something I couldn't make out through the blindfold, and then Mika untied me and the studio came back, weak tea colored, small, warm.

I will admit I stood there a bit longer than necessary, hands still on the centered lump, enjoying the applause of three people. A man my age takes his victories where he finds them. Two years ago I could not center four kilos with a laser level and a prayer. My first bowl had looked like a hat somebody sat on. Now I had a league waiting on a sphere and I had just proven, to an audience, that my hands knew something my eyes didn't need to know. It went to your head. Beer helped.

* * *

That was when I finally made myself look at the kiln.

The controller had been dead for hours, and the whole studio had lost its background noise the way a room does when a refrigerator quits. The elements still glowed. They held a dull orange down there in the dark chamber like coals in a banked fire, but they were coasting, not heating, and every one of us knew what a firing interrupted at temperature does to a load. The district grid had gone out at sunset and apparently it intended to stay out.

My bowling ball commission was in that kiln. The Athena Lanes ball, hollow, for the fortieth anniversary, the thing I had thrown and trimmed and fussed over for six weeks. I walked to the kiln and looked through the peep hole at the glowing elements and did the arithmetic I did not want to do. If the power stayed off for more than an hour the firing was ruined. Thermal shock. Cracks from the inside out. Six weeks of work turning into a yard sale item.

Aldo, being Aldo, went looking for resources. He came back from the supply room with two more battery lamps, the fat rubber kind that facilities managers buy in six packs, and he set them up on the benches without being asked, and then he said something about liability and premises being nonconforming with emergency lighting codes, which was his way of being helpful. The studio got a little brighter. The kiln got no healthier.

Tilly stood next to me at the kiln. She had her arms crossed and she was looking through the peep hole too, and I was aware of her shoulder about four inches from mine, and four inches is nothing and four inches is everything, depending on the decade.

She said the generator next door had enough juice for the coolers and the lights in the office, but nothing for the grinding wheel. She