The thing about Tank was, the kid paid attention. Most people, they were so busy chattering back and forth that they missed most of what was going on. And then there was Tank—always around, always paying attention, and so quiet that you forgot all about him.
“Hell. I don’t know. Probably going on the road,” Moses said finally. “Vegas or something, eventually.” Even to himself, it sounded like he was talking a line.
Tank peered up from under his tangled black hair. “Uh-huh.”
Moses had the uncomfortable feeling that the kid could see right through him. His uncle had been like that. You can’t con a con, his uncle liked to say whenever Moses was trying to be sneaky. Moses found himself avoiding Tank’s eyes. He made himself meet the boy’s gaze. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” Tank said.
“Stupid?” Moses gave the kid his best thousand-watt, trust-me smile. “Nah. I always make the smart move, don’t you know?” He waved toward the car. “Go on. Kook’s waiting.”
Tank looked like he was going to argue. “You could come with us, you know.”
“Crunchy-granola aunts aren’t my thing.”
“It’s near Boulder, I guess. The place is crazy white.” Tank sounded bummed.
“Better than juvie. Couple years, and you’re living wherever you want.” Moses nodded at the car. “Kook’s good people. No bullshit. Be glad she’s practicing mother hen on your ass.”
Tank smiled self-consciously. “Yeah.” He turned away, then stopped and looked back. “Thanks, Moses. Seriously.”
“Nothing to thank. I thought…” Moses blew out his breath. “Thought I’d make some kind of difference. Crazy, right?”
“Made a difference for me,” Tank said. He gave a little wave. “See you around.”
“Yeah. For sure.”
And then they were driving away, and Moses was alone. His throat felt tight as he watched them go.
He turned back to study the factory.
Have to get the lawyers to see if you can even unload this heap of junk.
And then?
He didn’t have any answers.
Inside, the factory gleamed with the scrub-down they’d done on it. No sign that they’d ever been there. Like they’d never existed. History hadn’t happened. No fights and no jokes and no scream of Sawzalls cutting iron, spitting sparks. No big bass beats while they tested paint squirt guns and control software. No coffee- and energy-drink-fueled plotting on how to bust into a testing lab and steal a whole eighteen-wheeler full of rats along with vats and vats of Azicort. No more rats. It was all scrubbed clean.
They’d done so much, and they’d done nothing.
Just like rats on an exercise wheel. You could sure look busy, but you didn’t get anywhere. You didn’t accomplish shit. All you did was sweat awhile.
Moses’s throat felt tight.
“I tried,” he said to the empty space. He didn’t like how his voice echoed. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the warehouse, hard concrete against his ass. His chest constricted and his eyes burned.
He put his head in his hands. “I tried,” he said again, and, finally, with everyone gone and him alone with no one to watch or judge or give a damn if he showed how weak he felt, he let go of his control and cried.
I tried.
He went to where he’d collected his own belongings. He didn’t even want what was there. Just couldn’t muster the need to care.
I tried.
And what did you get? You didn’t manage shit. Not in the end. Didn’t put together a single thing.
It had been a fantasy—and fun for a while. A way to push back against the horror of being alone, to push back against the terror that had enveloped him ever since his parents had died. A kid game, playing pretend. Pretending he mattered. Pretending he could change things. Pretending he could do something people three times his age had never managed.
The machine was just too damn big.
Time to go. Way past time.
“It was a nice idea,” he muttered.
The machine was too damn big.
30
IT BECAME A SECRET VICE. Every night, after everyone went to bed, Alix would boot up her laptop and dig deeper into her father’s world. She wondered if Dad and Mom caught her whether this would qualify as “Anything Inappropriate.” Would they rather catch her doing research like this, or would they be happier if they just caught her flashing someone on a live cam?
She kept digging, and the deeper she dug, the more dirt she found. At some point, she stopped feeling like she was digging and started feeling like she was slipping.
And then, at some point, she was falling.
Down the rabbit hole.
She hadn’t felt it coming until it was too late.
She’d plummeted into a strange land where everything she’d known and understood was now strange and distorted, as though she’d been sucking on the hookah of the caterpillar among the toadstools in Alice in Wonderland. Everyday labels and brands she readily recognized now all started feeling like rocks with worms and centipedes and rot underneath.
A day after her trip down memory lane with the product defense of aspirin, she went spelunking again into painkillers, this time with Tylenol.
Tylenol had its own warning label. Overdoses from that one could kill you, apparently. Not just hurt you, but kill you dead.
Oops, too much acetaminophen.
Dead.
That was what NPR said, though the label on Tylenol only warned of severe liver damage if you took over three thousand milligrams—which seemed like a little bit of an understatement, in comparison with THIS PRODUCT WILL KILL YOUR ASS IF YOU TAKE TOO MUCH. Apparently even the version of the label she was reading was relatively new. Before then, it had been even more vague. Tylenol had managed to avoid putting an explicit warning about death on the label for over thirty years.
Alix couldn’t help wondering if Dad had helped out with that. Moses said he was the best. Keeping a product from being labeled as a potential killer for thirty years would be a pretty good trick.
You’re being paranoid, Alix thought. Not everything is a plot.
Except, it was sort of starting to seem like everything really was a plot.
Everywhere she looked she found more household brands and more respected companies, and everywhere she looked, she found more disturbing things.
It was like in a horror movie when the pretty guy suddenly pulled off his rubber mask and revealed a rotten corpse. She started out on the computer and then started making notes because she couldn’t keep all the files straight. She wanted to see the scope of what she was discovering.
There was Merck and Vioxx, the painkiller that turned out to cause heart attacks.
There was Philip Morris, fighting to claim that tobacco wasn’t all that bad, with the help of Hill & Knowlton and The Weinberg Group.
There was BASF and Dow Chemical and a chemical called bisphenol A, which seemed to act like estrogen and had all kinds of interesting side effects. It was in everything from tin cans to the ink on newsprint.
There was DuPont and 3M and a chemical compound called perfluorooctanoic acid, i.e., PFOA, i.e., C8. Also known as a key ingredient needed to manufacture Teflon.
That one kind of bummed her out. Alix liked 3M. It made sticky notes.
“How ironic,” she muttered as she noted down the information on PFOA on her own sticky notes.
How could the maker of sticky notes also have been involved in manufacturing a chemical that screwed up the liver and caused birth defects and cancer? Apparently, 3M had gotten out of the game after pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency, but DuPont had stuck with it, so to speak, to make its Teflon products.
Her lists just kept growing.
Every night Alix stayed up late, searching deeper and deeper. She found books in the library that helped jump-start new lines of questioning for her. It started with books like Doubt Is Th
eir Product and Merchants of Doubt, but it quickly expanded to old newspaper articles and long-ago magazine exposés.
Once she stayed up all night reading what she came to think of as the tobacco files, a massive public archive of tobacco-industry documents kept by the University of California, San Francisco. It documented how Big Tobacco had managed to keep on selling its cancer sticks despite decades of challenges. She stopped reading only when the sun started poking through her windows to tell her it was morning.
As her research deepened, Alix started finding more and more connections. But often she wasn’t sure if it was from her own work or things 2.0 had told her.
Deep in the middle of the night, Alix found herself working through the thick sheaves of notes that she had compiled, hunting for a connection that was just at the edge of her conscious brain. Something about one of the doubt companies, as she was coming to think of these PR specialists. Something important… Exponent, maybe? Or was it The Weinberg Group again? Some connection to her father? Or maybe to George?
Alix couldn’t help thinking of Moses and 2.0 as she laid out another row of stickies on the floor.
“I should have taken some photos of those banners,” she muttered. “I’m reinventing the whole frigging wheel, just to catch up to everything they already know.” She frowned at her collected information. If only she had access to what 2.0 had already researched…
Maybe the TV crews had the footage. Could she get that?
She sat back, surveying the arrayed notes. Something important was here; she just couldn’t quite pick it out.…
“Um, Alix?”
Jonah was standing in the doorway in his sweats with tousled hair, squinting in the light. “Do you know it’s, like, three AM?” he asked blearily.
“Why, am I making too much noise?” she asked.
Jonah shook his head, started to leave, then came into the room instead. He was still blinking in the light but seemed to be waking up. He sat down on the floor with her and surveyed her work. “Are you doing okay?”
“Sure,” Alix snapped. She wished he’d leave so that she could get back to the puzzle, but Jonah wasn’t leaving. He picked up a sticky note on beryllium. “So… what are you up to?”
“Oh, nothing… just… you know… research.”
But now, as she looked at her work spread out across the floor, her laptop open, printed website articles and news clippings with sticky notes attached to them, long lists of chemicals, companies, and product-defense firms (all in different color pens so she could keep track of where the pieces fit—pink, blue, green, red)… Alix swallowed, suddenly seeing her work through Jonah’s eyes.
Wow. You really are nuts, she realized. You have completely lost it.
Jonah was watching her warily. “You’re kind of acting strange, Alix.”
“I’m fine.” But even as Alix said it, she herself wasn’t completely convinced. “I mean,” she amended, “I’m crazy, but I’m starting to figure some things out.”
“This is about 2.0, isn’t it? They got in your head somehow.”
Alix frowned, looking around at the sweep of papers and sticky notes and documents, along with some plates that she’d brought up from the kitchen and a surprising number of venti-sized coffee cups that had accumulated in the room.
“Does Dad know?” she asked.
“Well, you’re not exactly acting normal. We’re all kind of talking about it. Mom and Dad keep asking about you.” He lowered his voice to a serious, parental-caring tone. “‘How is Alix doing?’” He made a face. “That kind of thing.”
“Shit. I have to hide this stuff.” She’d been so involved in the search that she hadn’t realized what it would look like if Dad saw it. “Help me clean up.”
“Um. Okay. Now?”
“Yes, now! I shouldn’t have all this out.”
“Okay…” He started stacking the papers.
“No!” Alix stopped him. “Those are product-defense companies. They’re coded red. These ones”—she took the papers out of Jonah’s hands—“are client companies. They’re green. Put all the green inks together.”
Jonah looked at her quizzically. “You’re really getting into this.” He picked up another note and started reading a list of acronyms that Alix had collected. “OMB. FDA. EPA. OSHA. NIOSH. CIAR. OMFG. STFU.”
“Cut it out. Those are serious.” She took the list back.
Jonah let her take it, frowning thoughtfully. “You know how you’re always telling me there’s a fine line between clever and stupid?”
Alix eyed him warily. “Yeah. Why? Are you going to tell me that I’ve crossed that line?”
“Actually, I was just thinking there might be another line: the fine line between brilliant and crazy.”
“I know I’m crazy,” she said as she continued sweeping her papers and notes into piles. “You don’t need to rub it in.”
“I was actually leaning toward brilliant.”
Alix glanced up at her brother, surprised.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Jonah rushed on, “you’re acting weird as hell, but this is actually kind of brilliant.”
Alix flushed and looked down. “I’m not, really.” For some reason, she felt embarrassed at the compliment. She stared at the papers spread around her. “I mean, it’s just research. You start doing it, and you get all this information. Mostly, it’s just about focusing and doing the work. Anyone could do it.”
“Yeah, but most people don’t. Most people don’t worry about what”—he picked up the sticky note of acronyms again—“CIAR is.”
“Center for Indoor Air Research,” Alix said promptly. “That was a front group for Big Tobacco. There are a ton of front groups.” She cast about, irritated that all her files weren’t spread out for easy searching. “I’ve got a list just of front organizations somewhere.…” She started hunting again.
“Front organizations?”
“Sure. It works better if someone like CIAR funds research that says secondhand smoke is safe. And then it looks even better if they can get some legitimate news organization or scientific journal to report their results. It makes it look like there are more perspectives on the debate, and it keeps your brand out of the fight. So you make up some kind of neutral-sounding nonprofit like CIAR or the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, and you have them do the dirty work.…”
She trailed off as she realized Jonah was still looking at her.
“What now?”
“Just remember the line, Alix. Brilliant or crazy. It’s a superfine line.”
But he was smiling as he said it.
They started gathering up the rest of her papers and putting them in stacks, with Jonah being surprisingly good about taking her directions as they cleaned up. Alix yawned. 3:30 AM. She really was tired.
Jonah paused on his way out the door.
“Are you okay? I mean otherwise?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” She made herself nod definitively. “I’m good.” She hesitated. “Don’t tell Dad, though, okay?”
“Are you kidding? He’d lose it. Just don’t go running off to join the resistance without telling me, okay?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not that brilliant.”
“Well, at least stick around until tomorrow night.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
Jonah gave her an annoyed look. “The party? The stupid company party Dad’s making us go to? The Kimball-Geier shindig? The one on the ginormous boat that Mom’s been talking about for the last week, about how I have to be on good behavior and not do anything inappropriate that would embarrass Dad? Any of this ringing a bell?”
Alix looked at him blankly. “I don’t remember.…”
“Gah!” Jonah threw up his hands. “You really are as bad as Dad now. You act like you’re listening, but you aren’t. Everyone hassles me about all this—Jonah do this, Jonah don’t do that—but at least I listen to people when I’m looking right at them.…”
Alix stopped
listening. Kimball-Geier. Why did that name ring a bell? She started digging back through her notes. Kimball-Geier…
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Sure, I’m listening.” She lifted up a venti Starbucks cup. No. Not there. She lifted a plate. God, I really do need to clean up—Ha! There you are!
“Kimball-Geier!” She shook crumbs off the sticky note and held it up to Jonah, grinning triumphantly. “I knew I had something!” It had a coffee ring on it, but the ink was still legible. “Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals,” she read, feeling pleased. “They make Azicort, the asthma drug. They’re one of Dad’s clients. Dad and George work with Kimball-Geier.” She frowned. “They actually do a lot of work with Kimball-Geier.”
“I take it back,” Jonah said. “You are nuts.”
“Alix! Are you ready?” Mom called from downstairs. “Alix!”
“Coming!”
Kimball-Geier Pharmaceuticals was throwing a party with the CEO, board of directors, major shareholders, and other important colleagues and their families, and Alix’s parents expected her and Jonah to attend. She stood in front of her closet, trying to choose a dress and not think about the skate rat, Tank. Funny name for such a little kid…
They were going to be on the ocean. She chose a Rag & Bone flared dress, letting it slip over her shoulders. Fun Jimmy Choo heels. A Michael Kors shrug, because the ocean air would probably be cool.
She turned sideways in the mirror, smoothing the dress over her hips. Well, at least the outside is nicely packaged.
Inside, though? Her mind was a tangle of chemicals and products and government acronyms. EPA, C8, FDA, PCB, BPA… her brain wouldn’t stop working.
Alix started applying her lipstick. NARS. She looked down at the tube and was struck by the purple bruise color she’d been about to apply. Who lobbied for lipstick? Was there a Cosmetic Beauty Lobby? Probably. Only they wouldn’t call themselves a lobby. They’d probably call themselves the Consumer Beauty Resource Council. Or the Cosmetic Color Association, or something equally friendly and neutral. For sure, some group ensured that they could keep selling lipstick and that nobody looked too closely at where their colors came from or how they kept lipstick from melting.