American Wheatley Expansion Tank Bladder Replacement
by Eric Kong Angal
He shuts the isolation valve and hooks up the drain in line with a Milwaukee transfer pump using a three-quarter inch hose and then directs the pump’s arrowed discharge to the floor drain. When he opens the drain valve, the hosereel constricts and the tank gets vacuum-locked immediately, so he starts the pump and watches as green fluid comes rushing through the tygon’d length of still-coiled tubing, creating a great verdant ring of motion. He can see where the air is caught in the line, and he kicks the hose (here and there) to disturb these pockets of translucence until the line is entirely green.
Eventually the pump’s frequency begins to upshift, and the noise turns from guttural to whining. He unscrews the schrader at the top of the expansion tank to a hiss of trapped air. Then, the pump begins to chug along again. The bladder is accessible from the bottom of the tank, so he has to get the tank unmounted and on its side to gain access to the flange and the baseplate. It’s mounted to the concrete, secured to anchored threading on three hinges spaced evenly around the tank’s base. He works the hinge’s nuts off with an impact wrench and then places the nuts and their respective washers on top of a nearby bucket of corrosion inhibitor for safekeeping; he makes a mental note of their location. Then he uses two pipe wrenches to undo the union connecting the tank to the supply valve. He has to lean all the way over the tank to access the union. The countertorque he provides with the left-hand wrench isn’t commensurate to the force he gives with his right, which causes the jaws of both wrenches to keep slipping off the union, continually clattering against the concrete floor. The veins in his forehead pulse.
Eventually, he breaks the union and is caught in its arterial spray of glycolated discharge. He rushes to grab his shopvac and sucks the umber fluid off the concrete and then eventually lifts the nozzle of the shopvac directly up to the hole created by the union’s breakage and drains the remainder of the line. The pump begins to whine again.
When he’s finished cleaning up the leakage he runs over and turns off the pump. The tygon is spumed with the frothy white of the tank’s airbound effluent. He sniffs and walks back over to the tank and puts his weight against its side. It budges. A judgement is made regarding the tank’s weight. He squats down into his ass and attempts to deadlift the tank from its lower side-mounted handles. He huffs and strains and pushes with everything he’s got until the hinges come an inch off their floorbound threading. Eventually, his grip gives, and the tank comes crashing back down. He’s begun to sweat in earnest now. He takes the pipe wrench out of the carpenter’s loop in his pants and hits at the tank to try and gauge how much water is still left in it, but the dull ringing of the tank’s epoxied sidewall doesn’t give too accurate an indication of water level. There’s a chainfall resting behind him on the doorsill, but he doesn’t want to use it. He takes a short break before he decides to give it another go.
He squats again at the tank’s base and uses his legs to drive all his weight up into the handles. Over the course of the next few minutes, he slowly manages to push the tank off two of its three anchors. Now, the tank’s lifted hinges are resting atop the exposed threading. This cocks the tank toward the wall about a degree or two. In order to get the last hinge off the tank, he’ll have to sidle between the tank and the wall, but he has concerns about getting himself pinched in there.
His dream was of broken skin. Purpled forearms resting against him as if he could alleviate what had gone wrong with her. A dragon looks back at him. “You hate it,” she said.
No. He decides to try for it anyway. Screw it if he gets pinched. He takes his watch off and rests it on the bucket of corrosion inhibitor with the nuts and the washers and then makes himself skinny and gets between the tank and the wall. In order to squat here, he has to angle his feet outward and slide his ass straight down against the wall like he’s assuming some sort of karate stance. His chin grazes the cold steel of the tank, and the disfiguration of his posture requires he look straight ahead, neither up nor down. His hands are clasped around where he knows the tank’s carry handle is; he pulls upwards with his weight against the tank, his center of gravity low. His thighs and feet and core all burn with effort, and he sweats freely now into the dense cotton of his hoodie. He can feel the report of the baseplates getting stuck on the threading through the sidewall and thinks fuck it and pushes still. After an excruciating ten or fifteen seconds, the tank’s hinges clear the threading, and he manages to shove the tank forward (just a hair) until the whole of it is plumb with the floor again. Then he rests there like this. Spots flutter in his vision, symbols vacant of meaning. The rain is going outside. The mind pilfered from scattered memories to create an image in her likeness. Everything about her seemed right except for her color—everything in the dream was brighter than it had been in life. And another thing. She’d had her glasses on, and this surprised him because he’d almost forgotten about her glasses. The glasses made her eyes look smaller, and he remembers trying them on one time and seeing the world warped and made minute and far away, and he marveled that somehow her eyes could make sense of this madness, that this is what it took to let her see what he saw.
He has to take another break just to get his breath back. Then he cuts open the box containing the thick and viscoelastic butyl bladder. He removes the bladder for installation and then presses the box flat. laying it on the floor before him. He approaches the tank from the top now, using the lifting rings welded into the pressure vessel to wrestle the tank to a cooperative position, and then he slowly lowers the tank to its side, walking it backwards to rest on the cardboard box he’d laid out. He can hear the muted swishing of the water in the tank now, and he wonders how it didn’t get pumped out.
He puts witness marks on the tank’s bottom flange with a sharpie and then uses the impact wrench to pull the bolts from the flange. The tank begins to leak before he can even get the flange off of it. The smell of the leakage is offensive, like the smell of something simultaneously rotting and burnt. The fluid, which dribbles from the orifice, is glaucous and thick and pools slowly on the concrete and travels nowhere. The flange comes off and carries with it the remnant of supply piping onto which it’s attached, and he sees the thin rim of the pinched rubber bladder flattened in an o right there on the unfinished metal of the tank’s underside, slick and so dark it appears dimensionless. He takes a flathead and works at prying off the bladder’s rim and then, when there’s clearance for his fingers, he jerks the rim from side to side until the black amniotic mass is freed from the tank’s innards. It’s coated in a caliginous mucilage and is flecked throughout with wafer-thin shavings of rust.
He sees the problem. The bladder is torn from top to bottom, a yawning wound. The cut is heavy with the fluid that the pump couldn’t get at. Could it have been that it even happened, he thinks. The night, blue. Not black like most nights, but blue. A shuttered window’s suggestion of light and nothing else, and yet there was still a good amount of light, or enough to see the shape of her. He removes a trash bag from his back pocket and works it around the bladder and then throws the bag toward the door where it hits the chainfall, which rattles an uncharacteristic tenor. He prepares the new bladder by sticking his hand up into it like he’s a cowhand working at calving. He works out its rubber until the deformities on its surface are unbound and smoothed. Then, he halves the bladder lengthwise and feeds it through the bottom of the tank until its sealing rim mates flush to the tank surface. He presses at the rim with his hands until the rubber is flattened true. Then he works at getting the flange lined up to the witness marks and he puts the bolts in finger-tight one at a time. He torques it wrench-tight with a box-end ratchet wrench, and he follows a star pattern to make sure the torque distribution is even.
With the tank completely drained, it’s considerably lighter, and lifting it back into place atop the anchors is definitively easier. He re-secures the union and tightens it with the pipe wrenches until he can’t get a lick of a flat out of it, and then he takes the nuts and washers off the bucket of corrosion inhibitor and bolts them back into the hinges with the impact wrench. Every time he brushes against the tank it sounds tinny, now that it’s empty. The dream is a memory. The nacreous marble of her naked stomach where his head came to rest as he listened very hard to the beating of her heart, pressing her to him, his hands at the small of her back. Maybe the rain has stopped, but he can’t tell anymore. He screws a schrader core into the fitting at the tank’s fore and then he walks over to the air compressor and fakes out its line and connects it to the tank. When he turns on the compressor it shakes against the concrete, and he clenches his jaw to prevent his teeth’s chattering. The gauge begins its slow, increscent climb. He starts to clean up, rolling up the ruined cardboard and throwing it in the trash bag, arranging his sockets and impact wrench and pipe wrenches in his workman’s backpack, setting the transfer pump on top of the chainfall to be collected on a subsequent trip. He yawns and wonders if he has time to get a cup of coffee from downstairs before the compressor will have to be shut off. Ultimately, he decides it’s not worth it.
When the pressure’s at the setpoint specified by the manufacturer he uncouples the air line from the schrader and replaces its protective vulcanized cap. Then he cracks open the supply valve and listens as the water hisses back into the tank. He vents the tank with a lifting lever from the downstream relief valve and watches as the atomized vapor is purged through the brass lines to the room’s medial floor drain. The drain line gurgles, and the vapor is soon replaced with foam, which itself prefixes the lime green of the glycol-impregnated water, and he releases the lever and does a final walkaround of the tank to ensure all the newly made connections are holding. They are. He sighs a satisfied sigh.
She had turned from him in that nothing light as if she were ashamed. She said, “Here is all of me.” When he told her to turn around, she refused and said she would not. When he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him, she recoiled and he didn’t press her any further. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s just me. I love you, I love you.” And then she turned. He knew she would. He thinks: She’d do anything for me. I see you, and I still love you. I’ll always love you, idiot, don’t you know. Always.
*Originally published by Don’t Submit!
BIO: Eric Kong Angal is a 28 year old writer from Seattle, WA. He has previously been published by Nut Hole Publishing, to include four individual short stories and one short story collection, which is available on their Gumroad. Eric goes by the handle @MrZoris on Twitter and @erickangal on Substack.