The Burning Wire

the complicated route he was taking. And the rumble filling the halls was getting louder with every step.
    She was totally lost. Up stairways, down stairways. As she followed him she sent and received several text messages on her BlackBerry but as they moved lower and lower she had to concentrate on where she was walking; the hallways became increasingly visitor-hostile. Cell reception finally turned to dust and she put her phone away.
    The temperature rose higher.
    Sommers stopped at a thick door, beside which were a rack of hard hats.
    “You worried about your hair?” he asked, his voice rising, since the rumbling from the other side of the door was very loud now.
    “I don’t want to lose it,” she called back. “But otherwise, no.”
    “Just getting mussed a bit. This is the shortest way to my office.”
    “Shorter’s better. I’m in a hurry.” She grabbed a hat and squashed it onto her head.
    “Ready?”
    “I guess. What’s through there exactly?”
    Sommers thought for a moment and said, “Hell.” And nodded her forward.
    She recalled the seared polka-dot wounds that covered Luis Martin. Her breath was coming fast and she realized that her hand, moving toward the door handle, had slowed. She gripped and pulled the heavy steel portal open.
    Yep, hell. Fire, sulfur, the whole scene.
    The temperature in the room was overwhelming. Well over a hundred degrees and Sachs felt not only a painful prickle on her skin but a curious lesseningof the pain in her joints as the heat deadened her arthritis.
    The hour was late—it was close to eight p.m.—but there was a full staff at work in the Burn. The hunger for electricity might ebb and flow throughout the day but never ceased completely.
    The dim space, easily two hundred feet high, was filled with scaffolding and hundreds of pieces of equipment. The centerpiece was a series of massive light green machines. The largest of them was long with a rounded top, like a huge Quonset hut, from which many pipes and ducts and wires sprouted.
    “That’s MOM,” Sommers called, pointing to it. “ M-O-M . Midwest Operating Machinery, Gary, Indiana. They built her in the 1960s.” This was all shouted with some reverence. Sommers added that she was the biggest of the five electrical generators here in the Queens complex. He continued, explaining that when first installed, MOM was the biggest electrical generator in the country. In addition to the other electrical generators—they were only numbered, without names—were four units that provided superheated steam to the New York City area.
    Amelia Sachs was indeed captivated by the massive machinery. She found her step slowing as she gazed at the huge components and tried to figure out the parts. Fascinating what the human mind could put together, what human hands could build.
    Sommers added with some pride, it seemed to Sachs, that the output of the entire Queens facility—MOM plus several other turbines—was close to 2,500 megawatts. About 25 percent of the city’s entire usage.
    He pointed to a series of other tanks. “That’s where the steam is condensed to water and pumpedback to the boilers. Starts all over again.” Proudly he continued, shouting, “She’s got three hundred and sixty miles of tubes and pipes, a million feet of cable.”
    But then, despite her fascination and the massive scale, Sachs found herself gigged in the belly by her claustrophobia. The noise was relentless, the heat.
    Sommers seemed to understand. “Come on.” He gestured her to follow and in five minutes they were out the other door and hanging up their hats. Sachs was breathing deeply. The corridor, while still warm, was blessedly cool after her minutes in hell.
    “It gets to you, doesn’t it?”
    “Does.”
    “You all right?”
    She diverted a tickling stream of sweat and nodded. He offered her a paper towel from a roll kept there for mopping faces and necks, it seemed, and she dried off.
    “Come on this way.”
    He led her down more corridors and into another building. More stairs and finally they arrived at his office. She stifled a laugh at the clutter. The place was filled with computers and instruments she couldn’t recognize, hundreds of bits of equipment and tools, wires, electronic components, keyboards, metal and plastic and wood items in every shape and color.
    And junk food. Tons of junk food. Chips and pretzels and soda, Ding Dongs and Twinkies. And Hostess powdered sugar doughnuts, which explained the