There are windows in the lab room beyond my office. I praise them now; they still me. The windows don’t look out to an enlarging world: they look in and down. To the factory floor of X-Pando Corp., where old ritual thumps and grinds. I see that a mixer has been tonguing cement over its round iron palate. Automatic can fillers dole out honest weight, nod, and prepare the next recipient. A thing will be made: one pound or five of useful powder. Writing, by comparison, is a conniver’s trade: simile dickered away for idea: sound or meter sold out to sense. I am cheapened daily by the haggling. But, through my window, I can see that four dozen cases of pipe joint compound have been created: on first draft. For all my bargain-driving here I cannot express to you the heartdeep pleasure it will give me. There is a sweet finishedness that this ungainly paragraph can never have.
And, looking down, I would associate what was congruous and serviceable and whole with Eddie Brandon. Even at age six I did: when he taught me to run the can capper without making my thumb an ingredient. Our querulous pre-Truman machinery was complaisant, even servile, with him: maybe steel talks to steel in a gruff, chiding still-some-what-Jamaican accent. Ed alone really knew the formulas (well, the recipes’) through which our magic powder is inspirited. I might have been taller, yet Ed Brandon rose in front of me. It was his fashion to stare up, head far back, amiable yet cocky, the way some master electrician might from a manhole—you thought he would climb out and be six-foot-four and you got respectful just in case. And his strength, Lord, was imponderable. At age 71, after serious double-hernia surgery, he could throw hundred-pound bags of magnesium oxide as teenage children pillow-fight.
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