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 shrugged. “Thought I’d make some kind of difference. Crazy, right?”
“Made a difference for me,” Tank said. He shrugged again and 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 a while.
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 if 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 seemed to find. 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.
And 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 that if she picked up, she’d find 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 just 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 note cards 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 also seemed to act like estrogen and had all kinds of interesting side effects, and that 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 their 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 Their Product and Merchants of Doubt, but it quickly expanded to old newspaper articles and long-ago magazine exposés.
One night 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 only stopped reading when the sun started poking in through her windows to tell her it was morning.