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…and after!

These are my defenses against contamination by lead paint dust. The flight suit used to be my dad’s, and I found the gloves, glasses, and hat in the mudroom cabinets. The white strip across my throat is a piece of cloth I sewed in to cover a big v-shaped gap in the collar, above where the zipper ends. (The flight suit would be pretty pointless if the paint dust just went *inside* my clothes.) The respirator came from a box of emergency supplies back at home.

I usually get physically anxious when I wear anything that seals over my mouth and/or nose (the same is true of nose clips and those nebulizer tubes you have to suck air through when you’ve got pneumonia), and this was certainly true of the respirator at first. The thing looks and feels built for myriad nightmarish situations, and when I took my first couple breaths the scent of the air aroused that innate wariness of unnatural things I might be breathing. I didn’t realize until the second time I tried it on that it wasn’t a smell at all, though – it was a *complete lack of any odor whatsoever.* I’ll spare you the expletive this epiphany elicited.

I took the mask off after a minute or two, and was hit full-force by the smell of our kitchen. Before I put it on, I hadn’t realized there was any smell at all. I tried it again in the two currently unused bedrooms upstairs (which, because they have old things and closed doors, each have strong and unique scents). The two rooms smelled *exactly the same.* Taking this thing off is like taking out earplugs and being nearly knocked over by the cacophony of the quietest of rooms. It’s like peeling off a blindfold after a pack of pranking friends leads you somewhere unknown. It’s something not even those examples can describe, so foreign is their olfactory equivalent.

I should have guessed I wouldn’t be able to smell things with it on, as the labels on the side of the filter cartridges clearly reveal them to remove organic vapors (“OV”). Their complete removal of odor soundly confirmed this claim, and in so doing brought about an emotion even greater than surprise.

I don’t consider myself OCD (if it can be used as an adjective) when it comes to what enters my lungs, just very careful. When I started to realize that this respirator could completely protect me from pretty much anything I could encounter (paint and glue fumes, smoke, pathogens, vaporized flux…) I started to feel very safe wearing it. My initial, slightly anxious response was completely replaced by a calm sense of safety, and the quiet, synchronized flap of the valves each time I inhaled or exhaled became as natural a sound to me as the familiar ticking of the red Mickey Mouse clock in my room at home.

Every time you drag a paint scraper across an old, peeling board, it wails like a growling bear cub – scratching, rattling, screeching. After every stroke I made with it – out in the hot sunshine, breathing slowly through my respirator – a silent shower of lead paint dust twinkled away from the boards gracefully, illuminated against the shady side of the house by the sunlight. It’s a pretty eery sensation, watching that poisonous dust drift quietly (beautifully) past your masked face. If you had no mask on, after a while the lead you breathed would enter your blood, then your bones and organs and brain, where it would remain forever. You just have to trust that strange device on your face; trust that those pleated membranes and the activated carbon and rubber valves would all catch the dust, or keep it sealed outside, in that fraction of a second the air spends flowing through them. You’re so near something you’ve learned to fear, though. I can’t even find an appropriate analogy – watching sharks in a tank, or staring over a cliff from behind a railing, perhaps – they all involve something so clearly dangerous. It’s different when the poison is just dust drifting past in the sun. The sense of danger comes entirely from within.