The Accidental Chemist

The Accidental Chemist

By Hoang Samuelson

MONDAY AFTERNOON.

Why is it so bright, the little girl asks, pushing aside the debris. Daylight peeked through the rumble, and we found ourselves facing the sun—it’s bright, dazzling, and uninvited.

I don’t know who this girl is, or why she is next to me. She’s a stranger who landed upon the same fate as I did—lost in the aftermath of what just happened. A fallen building, but I don’t know why. A little girl of no more than seven, perhaps eight, standing next to me asking me questions I have no answer to.

I look around me and see destruction. Airplanes fly above, alarms and horns blare in the distance. I look at my body and see that my clothes are now in shreds, and so are the little girl’s. She looks as haphazard as I do, with wild hair, matted and tangled, blood dripping down her chin. She points to my face, as if I can see myself.

Suddenly, a man appears and grabs the little girl’s arms and asks her, “Are you Sarah Jane?”

“No,” the little girl replied. “I’m Alaina Surrey. Where are we?”

The man looks at me then back at the girl. “There’s been an accident, and you two are the main victims.”

I'm confused. An accident? “I’m sorry, what?” I blubbered.

“There was a lab accident, where a certain chemical was believed to have been mixed together. Unfortunately, it blew up the building,” said the man. He’s wearing a polyester white button up shirt and navy slacks, and a name tag that says, “Dan Wiley, EMT.” I wonder what an EMT is.

I look at the little girl. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

The girl shook her head. “I just want my Mama,” she replied. “Where’s Mama?”

The man asks the girl a few more probing questions. What’s your mother’s name, where does she live, what area do you live in, that sort of thing. And it seems as though the girl’s responses made the man appear to be more perplexed.

No, the girl says, she lives on Brooklyn Street. It is 1945, and she’s heading off to school with her Mama. Susan is her mother’s name, her father is named Fred. She doesn’t know why this man is asking her questions, and why her mother is not here with her.

As the man continues to ask the girl more questions, I look around again. The buildings are very tall, very tall indeed. How is this possible, I thought. Our neighborhood is an eclectic mix of cape cod, Tudor, and even some Spanish style homes. Certainly, there are no tall buildings such as the one we just escaped from. The street signs are different too. There are signs that says, “Public Library,” and “Fire Station,” and “Ridgeview Hospital,”—none of these are familiar.

Where are we, I ask the man. Or more accurately, when are we?

The man looks at me strangely. “It’s 2003, don’t you know that?”

“No, it’s September 1945, and Hitler is dead, and I’m waiting for my students to come back,” I said. “You see, I’m a teacher. I teach at the high school down the street. I was in my classroom…”

I trail off. The memory is slowly reappearing.

***********

SATURDAY AFTERNOON.

I don’t know what I’m doing here on a Saturday, but I know I have a mission. After the bombing of Hiroshima, I became fascinated with explosive chemicals. As a chemistry teacher, I’m always curious about substances. Not in the way that you’d expect, not sinisterly, anyway. I was fascinated with the elements that made up the bomb and I wanted to study it in greater detail.

Lately, I’d been listening to the radio religiously, where reports have been circulating around the area, promulgating on the state of our country’s affairs. What will happen now that the war is over? More so than the political side, what will happen to the future of science? I wanted to meet people who might be interested in new ideas so I formed a new club—the Society for Future Chemical Scientists and hosted my first meeting last Monday night. Several people attended, some only to criticize what I was doing. As a woman who taught science, I had no place to talk about such matters, but I dismissed these frivolous critiques. After all, a woman’s place can be anywhere she wants, even in science.

I’d been teaching chemistry for two years now. It was not easy to get this job. Nobody wanted to hire a woman to teach, let alone teach science. And so I waited three years after I received my graduate degree in chemistry. After countless rejections, I knew I couldn’t give up. I’d gone too far, gave up too much. I couldn’t stop now.

So I begged and pleaded and inched my way into a position at the Wayfair Academy on Princess Street. It was where I met Ted, a fellow Society member. We bonded over whiskey sours (he drank them better than I can) and pontifications of what the future in science would look like. We both dreamed of working for DuPont, but if you weren’t a genius or didn’t know anyone, then your luck is nonexistent.

One afternoon in June, before Hiroshima happened, Ted and I stopped by our local jaunt, Bailey’s Bar, named after Bailey Montgomery—a scruffy looking man with an ever-expanding mustache and messy black hair who inherited the bar from his father, Bailey Senior—and ordered our usual.

“The problem with these assholes,” said Ted, “is that it’s all so secretive.”

“Assholes” is what Ted calls the government. He’s not a fan of Roosevelt.

He continued, taking a sip of his whiskey. “I mean, we know that it’s uranium, but what I don’t understand is how they managed to pull it off on such a magnificent scale.”

What I love about Ted is that he’s so inquisitive. What I hate about Ted is that he’s so inquisitive.

“Maybe it’s supposed to be a secret,” I said. “The general public doesn’t know much, and maybe that’s the way they want to it to be.”

Ted looks at me strangely. “Ellie, you and I both know that this bombing was massive, and it’s only just the beginning. Imagine what they’re going to do next!” He threw his hands in the air in resignation.

At the time, this was what we thought. That the war would never end. Somehow, it would go on, even after Hiroshima. I didn’t know that in just a matter of days—after we had our first meeting of the Society we’d formed—that the bombing would take place, and that shortly thereafter, we’d create a new experiment in our lab, combining certain elements to test which chemicals would be the most reactive if one were to make an at-home bomb.

No, it’s not what you think. It was simply for observation and teaching purposes. In another week, our students would be back in school, so we wanted to start the year off with new discoveries and lesson plans.

But that’s not what happened. Not at all.

***********

SUNDAY MORNING.

I walked down the hallways of Wayfair Academy alone. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning, and there isn’t supposed to be anyone. Most are at church—not me, though. My atheism is a source of tension between my parents and me. They couldn’t understand why their little girl chose science over religion, but that’s a story for another day.

Ted is supposed to meet me here in about an hour. I am to go to my classroom, look up a science book that I kept in there for reference purposes, and do some research on what type of materials we might need to do our experiments.

Of course, Ted says I’m not supposed to call it a bomb. “It’s an observation,” he said. “We’re not there to blow things up—we’re simply there to find out which elements are the most explosive. And depending on which ones we discover, we’ll steer our kids away from those elements.”

We’ll study them on paper, but we must careful when it comes to actually doing the experiments.

At 9:30 sharp, Ted appeared, wearing a light blue polo, clean shaven, and apparently no longer hung over. He’s ready to go. He looked at me, decked out in goggles and my hair pulled back, with a lab coat, and smiles.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s too bad my mother won’t approve of you,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but now I know. His mother is very evangelical, just like my mother. Together, those two women would have a ball talking about why their children didn’t turn out like them and how if I wasn’t a woman in science, I’d be a perfect fit for Ted. I shudder at the thought. Ted likes me, and I like him, but only in a platonic way. I have no intention of ever getting married.

We spent the next hour diving into books in our lab. Then, in hushed tones, he takes me aside and introduces me to a new substance – it’s a white crystalline powder, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. He tells me that it has the potential to blow up if one were not careful. A slight mishap…well, one does not need to know.

This is fascinating, I thought. “How did you get this?” I asked him, excited.

“Geniuses never reveal their secrets,” he said, and winked. We spent the next few hours studying other powders Ted brought in under the microscope, marveling at their composition. Of course, we set the special white powder aside, on the bottom shelf of a cabinet, hidden behind other flasks and beaks so that no one could see it.

Finally, it was time for a break. I was filled with thoughts on lessons as we made our way to Bailey’s Bar. My excitement was palpable as Ted and I crossed the street. That was the last thing I remember.

***********

MONDAY MORNING, 8 a.m.

The little girl steps into the room, filled with horror. She’s stuck in a dream and knows it. In her dream, she’s in a dark room, and a mad scientist is studying her. His lab is uninviting and mostly empty, save for a chair and a table where materials were displayed. The mad scientist is studying her, but she doesn’t know why. He straps her down and hooks her up onto some futuristic machine and its contraptions strap her in tightly, so tightly she cannot move. Then he puts a helmet on her head and tells her to remain still.

I need to make sure he cannot do this to anyone else, she thinks to herself as she looks around the room. With a single dim lightbulb, the room appears smaller than it really is. So far, there does not appear to be a machine, but there are many books on the shelves. She walks over to a cabinet, opens the door, and is surprised to find a collection of flasks, beaks and powders and liquids that to a regular human eye, appears to be nothing more than just liquids and powders. But she knows it cannot be.

It must be part of the mad scientist’s experiment, she thought. She looks behind the flasks and beaks and discovers a small glass vial containing a white crystalline powder. Curious, she pulls out the vial and studies it.

A non-curious child would walk away at this point. But she is not one of those children. And so she picks up the powder with a tiny spoon and grinds it. The next thing she knew, everything was black.

***********

MONDAY AFTERNOON.

I do not understand why this man is telling me it’s 2003 when it is clearly not so. Alas, I resort to giving him the benefit of the doubt. He walks over to me and checks my arm with a peculiar looking contraption that wraps itself around my upper arm, then pumps it up to the point where I feel uncomfortable then releases itself, numbers flashing on a small pad the man is holding. The man asks me what my name is.

“Elle Marston,” I replied. “Where am I?”

“You’ve just stepped into an explosion,” he said. He looks irritated, as if he’s told me this before and I didn’t listen. Another man in the same uniform walks over to us. He tells this man that the damage is deep, and that we’re lucky we survived.

“You’re a miracle,” said the man—Dan Wiley, EMT. The other man had the same insignia on his name tag and uniform—“Thomas Buckley, EMT.” This is a rather interesting profession, if it is one, I thought. “Most of the time, explosions like these are disastrous, and nobody lives.”

And it occurred to me—Ted and I left some powders in a cabinet before we left for Bailey’s Bar. We’d forgotten to lock it up.

What have I done? I asked myself. A deep sense of dread is rising up inside of me, causing my throat to fill up. Suddenly, I feel like I cannot breathe.

I ask the two men, “Where is Ted?”

They look perplexed. “Who?”

“Ted, my friend and fellow teacher at Wayfair.”

Again, they look perplexed. “Ma’am, I think you’re in shock,” Dan Wiley, EMT, says to me. “We need to get you to the hospital.”

“No!” I exclaimed. “I have to find Ted!”

“Ma’am,” the man said again, this time more gently. He grabs my arm. I look around me and saw that the little girl is being led away by another man in uniform. She looks just as lost as I do. “You’ve just been in a major explosion that was intended to kill you,” he said. “The police think there might be a culprit behind this. We need to get you taken care of as soon as possible.”

No, this cannot be. I was sitting there with my friend Ted, having a drink, and now I am in an unfamiliar place, unable to discern why I’m in a different year. Things do not make sense at the moment. I do not understand why this man is telling me something’s happened. Did someone get into our lab without a key? Did I wreak more havoc than I intended to with my experiments? Could this be the result? Were we so careless that we induced destruction without knowing it?

“It’s me,” I finally said. “I’m the culprit.”