Chapter 3: Spirit Baron The transition from the salt spray of the Mediterranean to the soot stained skies of Pennsylvania was a slow death of Baron's spirit. After his mother succumbed to the horrible disease, Baron found himself standing on the edge of a life he didn’t recognize. He was eighteen, a high school dropout, with eyes that matched the kelp and hands that had forgotten the touch of anything soft. The apartment they had shared felt larger than it had when Mara was alive, yet the air was thinner. The peeling paint and the low, bizarre ceilings were no longer quirks of a sad little place, they were now the boundaries of a cage. Baron had gone to the Navy to attempt to join, in doing so finding that his eyes were not up the Navy's standards. Instead of the navy, Baron was forced to descend into the very life his mother had feared for him; mindless, grinding, tiresome labor. He took a job at the local factory, a place where the smokestacks lined the horizon like the bars of a cell. The work was a rhythmic torture of clashing metal and steam, a clashing contact that left his ears ringing hours after he had left the factory. Baron’s hand grew calloused and stained with the grease of machines. He spoke to no one. The whole day, he would nod or shake his head, still devastated by the death of his mother. He became the tall and quiet figure that his father had once been at the docks, but without the quiet dignity. He was just a ghost in a blue collar uniform, moving through the bleak charcoal smoke of the industrial graveyard. The heat of the furnaces reminded him of the sun in
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