Nelson usually aced pop quizzes. Even in dreams.
While Nelson was capable of dreaming when his serotonin-saturated brain reveled in its latest dose of Peritriptan, he found himself hanging, instead, on the verge of sleep, the knife-edge between conscious and subconscious, as Tim carted him into the office, tossed Javier off the fold-out sofa sleeper, and tucked him in beside Marianne. In this state of floaty, semi-high lucidity, Nelson found himself chewing through his problems of the day.
That thing with Tim had taken a weird turn, but considering the fact that talking it out with him wasn’t an option at the moment, there was nothing to be done about it now.
The bizarre hydrogen-carbon chain that had been introduced into the existing manna formula was another matter. Nelson took a look around. He was lying in a field of alfalfa. The horizon stretched for miles and miles and miles in each direction. It was impossibly flat. It should have been green, but there was something off-kilter about it, discolored and red. The horizon listed to one side.
Was it possible to really connect with the field, to figure out what was wrong? He closed his eyes and reached toward the alfalfa with his mind, and when he opened his eyes again, he was naked. He’d heard that other people were embarrassed when they discovered their subconscious selves had no clothing to hide behind. Nelson felt no shame over being naked. He plucked a few hydrogen atoms from a chain around his biceps, and some carbon from the top of his thigh, and floated them in the air, allowing them to configure themselves the way the brain trust at Canaan Products had arranged them before they inserted the compound, secretly, into the existing manna supply.
Vaguely, he was aware that the pain in his head was excruciating. Hooray for serotonin.
Which was a hormone.
Well, duh. That was like saying “red” was a color.
The hydrogen-carbon chain lit up red, and revolved slowly as it hung there in front of Nelson’s eyes. It was a lot prettier now in serotonin-land than it had been on paper. It wasn’t a very long chain, either. Maybe he could have it tattooed around his ring finger. That’d be cool. And if he ever needed to go on a hoity-toity job interview, he could wear his dumb Columbia class ring over it. Unless he’d already sold it. Thanks to the serotonin, some real-world details were a little fuzzy.
The red hydrogen-carbon chain appeared around Nelson’s finger. He held up his hand to admire it, but found it didn’t look half as cool as he’d thought it would. Damn. It wouldn’t be the first bad decision he’d ever made in his life, but by and large, he’d had pretty good luck with tattoos.
His finger began to throb. Not in the way a new tattoo itches and stings, either, but a sort of pulsing pain, like a migraine. He felt his temple pound sympathetically.
As if the hydrogen-carbon chain had something to do with his headache.
Could the chain be the trigger? Maybe so. He didn’t eat much manna, usually. The things bà ngoai cooked were a hell of a lot more interesting than those jellied slabs of alfalfa, plus it honored her to have that strange American boy chowing down beside her daughter and her grandson and appreciating the actual food she went through such great effort to procure and prepare. Lately, though, his intake of manna had been a lot higher than usual. He’d been eating manna all day long at the job fair, and not just any kind of manna. Canaan Products manna. Experimental Canaan Products manna.
Okay, so that explained the first headache, but what about the second one, so close on its heels? That was Park Avenue manna. The tattoo on his ring finger throbbed harder, and even started to pinch, as if it was cutting off the circulation.
How much did Nelson know about Park Avenue manna? Admittedly, not much. Maybe they were a subsidiary of Canaan. Or maybe they bought their raw manna from Canaan, where it was processed cheaply, on a large scale. Then they could simply flavor it with their bizarre attempt at umami, mark it up a few hundred percent, and put the Park Avenue name on it. The details were unimportant. What mattered was the trigger. And Nelson knew in his gut that he’d just polished off yet another damn plate of trigger.
Serotonin. Hormones. The hydrogen-carbon chain. Squeezing his finger. Blocking his circulation. Blocking. Hormone.
Blocking.
Blood burst from his throbbing fingertip. It sprayed into the air and hovered there in tiny globules that shifted into the shapes of the formulas he’d been hashing out all day—and he saw the hydrogen-carbon chain. And he saw how it could fit itself over a hormone receptor—a leptin receptor—and stop people from getting full.
And maybe, for people like Nelson, people with tweaky brains, it didn’t do the serotonin receptors any favors, either.
***
Sleep was out of the question for Javier. The first time Nelson had drugged away his migraine, they’d been practically strangers. But now? Now, what were they? Co-conspirators? Friends?
Lovers?
Nelson said something in Vietnamese that sounded like, “umami,” and poked his forefinger at the air above him as if he was trying to write on it. His eyes were half-open. Maybe he saw, maybe he didn’t.
“That’s creepy,” Marianne said. She lay on one side of Nelson and Javier on the other. He almost reached out to stroke Nelson’s hair, but then second-guessed the gesture. He’d ingrained it in himself not to show affection for other men in front of women. But Marianne wasn’t poor Beatriz. He wouldn’t be betraying her by touching Nelson.
He reached for Nelson’s hair and stopped himself again. The migraine. It would be selfish of him to go making it worse just to worry at Nelson’s blond hair like a superstitious villager stroking a charm vial.
He settled for resting his hand on Nelson’s shoulder, which hardly seemed enough.
Nelson mumbled something else, and Marianne said, “Is he talking about carbon?”
Javier glanced down toward the allotrope tattoo on Nelson’s hip he’d traced so tenderly with his tongue. Funny, how quickly things changed. Though he supposed if a smoldering hunk of shrapnel in the eye hadn’t yet taught him that, nothing would.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Marianne said. “I mean, it’s kind of like being drunk. Right?”
“Most people can choose whether they want to take a drink. And how many.”
They’d found a decorative throw in the closet. It still smelled like the plastic bag it had been stored in. Marianne tucked it more securely around Nelson’s shoulders. “I know. I just thought it might make us feel better to think of it like—”
Music startled them so suddenly that they both flinched away from Nelson in shock. It came from Nelson’s pocket, a ringtone made up of a few distorted power chords. After a brief moment of disorientation, both Javier and Marianne yanked down the blanket and attempted to grab the phone. It was in the pocket on Javier’s side, so he caught it. The name that showed on the readout was “Stinkfoot,” but the small picture that popped up was the man from the morgue, Kevin—smiling, with a beer in his hand. So happy and relaxed Javier wouldn’t have recognized him, but for his crooked glasses, and his wedding ring.
Javier took the call. “Kevin—it’s Javier. We met…at your job, yesterday. With Nelson.” He’d almost lost his cool with the word morgue on the tip of his tongue, and the thought that Kevin might very well be calling to tell them Tuyet’s body was in the latest shipment.
“Where’s Nelson?” Kevin said.
Javier’s stomach sank. Kevin sounded like he was on the verge of losing it, too. “He got another migraine and he took his—”
“Oh God.” A pause, in which Javier waited for Kevin to expand on whatever he meant to say. And then, “Oh God,” again.
Javier pitched his voice low and sure, and said, “What happened?”
“It’s…oh God.” Kevin started crying.
Well. Now they knew what had happened to Tuyet. Who would tell Nelson? Javier would be the logical one. Kevin probably wouldn’t be much more coherent once Nelson woke up, and since Javier had been the one to visit the lab with Nelson, he seemed to be the
only other logical choice. Nelson might hate Javier for saying the words, but that was fine. Maybe it would serve as some small part of his penance.
Still, Javier wanted to spare Nelson whatever cruelty he could. “What should I tell him?”
“It’s all over the TV—Chinatown—there was a gas explosion.”
Tuyet hadn’t shown up at the morgue after all?
“I don’t know how it happened,” Kevin said. “Nobody knows.”
Plenty of buildings had boiler heat, and given that so many immigrants insisted on cooking traditional food over flames on stoves, Javier wasn’t too surprised that an accident like that would happen. If it even was an accident.
Kevin had stopped explaining and fell into crooning sobs.
“Go on,” Javier said, a bit more gently.
In between gulps of air, Javier made out the words, “It’s a building on Nelson’s block. Maybe even their building. I recognized the jewelry shop.”
“All right. We’ll tell him when he wakes up.” There was silence on the other end. “Kevin?” He’d already hung up. Javier disconnected and turned to Marianne, who was watching him intently. “We need to see what’s streaming on the online news. There’s been an explosion in Chinatown.” Javier considered the explosions he’d personally witnessed in Gaza. “Probably a fire, too.”
“Okay,” Marianne said. “Chinatown. That doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“Nelson’s building. Or near it.”
Marianne closed her eyes and collected herself, then opened them again, stood up briskly, and said, “We’ll look at the news.” She limped over to the computer, typed for a few moments, then called out into the conference room, “Tim? Do you have some kind of program running? The computer’s really slow.”
Tim looked bleary as he shuffled into the office, though he probably looked the most like himself of any of them, since he’d always had a short beard and casual clothes. Javier had first met everyone else freshly groomed and styled, wearing suits and ties, or makeup and pumps. Tim sat at the computer, clicked a few times, then crawled under the desk and began checking the connections.
Javier’s stomach sank further.
Randy followed Tim into the office, face half-green with bruising, hair sticking up and shirt untucked, and Marianne told both of them as much as she knew about the latest development, which wasn’t much.
Tim crawled back out from under the desk and said, “Internet’s out.”
It’s all over the TV…maybe there was a television set somewhere on the site. Not in Alejandro’s office—he’d never had much use for American TV, where the Spanish-language channels played trashy telenovelas all day. Maybe the site supervisor’s office had a set—the office Javier continued to violate, despite his intention to leave it intact.
He went and checked. The nameless supervisor had no television either. The guards? They weren’t supposed to…but they might, a small portable set, easily hidden. “I’ll be right back,” Javier told nobody in particular.
It was early. The sky outside was just beginning to glow through the slim gaps between the tenements and the parking ramps, and Javier’s breath, as visible as cigar smoke, streamed out on the chilly air. He crammed his hands in his pockets and turned toward the security trailer.
That was when the flashing strobe of a police light caught his eye.
Raul and the other remaining employee were at the gate, which was still locked. They spoke to a pair of uniformed officers on the other side. It could just be a routine check. Or maybe the cops were relaying some sort of news. Not that Javier believed it—not after he’d seen the American police clubbing down civilians, out there in the street. They were as corrupt here as they were in Turkmenistan, though they were usually less obvious about it, while a complacent public was happy to look the other way.
Javier kept to the shadows between the trailers and crept closer, until he heard, “Does anybody here speak English?”
He could have sworn Raul did. Well enough, anyway.
“English,” the cop repeated more loudly—since volume was always so helpful in matters of translation. Javier eased as close as he dared, and then he heard, “Tim Foster. Is. He. Here?”
Why would anyone be searching for Tim, unless they knew he was the Voice of Reason?
And worse, how would anyone know the Voice of Reason was here…unless someone had betrayed him? Marianne had been with Javier all day and all night. That left Randy…or Nelson.
Marianne and Randy knew they were hacking through Canaan Products’ records, obviously, since both of them were helping with the search. But neither of them knew Tim was the Voice of Reason.
Only Nelson did.
And only Nelson had a working phone.
Javier swayed, and allowed the trailer to hold him up for that single, brief moment that his world came crashing down all around him. He’d always told himself that if he ever trusted anyone again, they would need to damn well earn it.
It was his own fault for giving Nelson the opening to stab him through the heart.
But knowing he was, in some small sense, to blame didn’t make it hurt any less.
Javier gathered his will, hardened his heart, and strode out across the gravel lot with his head held high. The two cops both looked up suddenly, and as Raul turned and saw Javier coming, he said in rapid Spanish, “Don’t worry about it—they can’t come in without the right paperwork.”
In a world where phones and Internet functioned, where spike strips weren’t landmining the streets, the hospital wasn’t overflowing and the morgue wasn’t full of bloody bodies…maybe. But here, and now, Javier suspected all it would take was a reciprocating saw with a diamond bit to cut through the chains on the gate—and then DLR Construction would be fair game for every looter or thug who wanted to come in and help themselves to some equipment.
“Are you in charge?” One of the cops barked at Javier. “Do you speak English?”
Javier replied with an imperious half-shrug.
“We’re looking for Tim Foster.” In reply, Javier stared at the cop blandly, so he repeated louder, and more deliberately, “Tim - Foster.”
While Javier did actually care what happened to the DLR site, he cared far more about Tim. In fact, if they planned on hauling off Tim, they’d do it over Javier’s dead body…and then an idea came upon him all at once, a realization so profound, it felt divinely inspired. Javier might not know how to read formulae or spreadsheets. He might not be able to program a computer or organize a plan to attack all that data. But he’d certainly be worth a lot more to Tim alive than dead.
There hadn’t been time to get a fake I.D. together with his Canaan Products credentials, so Javier hadn’t brought anything to the job fair with his real name on it. Even his prepaid Visa was an anonymous gift card. If ever there was a time Javier could be a hero, that time was now. He looked one officer up and down, and then the other. And in the coldest, most arrogant voice he’d learned at his mother’s knee, said, “I am Timoteo Foster.”
It wouldn’t work. How could it? Foster? No one in their right mind would believe Foster was Javier’s surname. But it might have been the fact that the policemen were overworked and overtired, or it was still too dark out to properly see—or maybe all credit could be given to the tone of voice Javier had channeled from Felicidad. Whatever the reason, neither cop thought twice of it.
“Tim Foster, you’re under arrest.”
“That’s ridiculous. With what crime am I being charged?”
“Inciting to riot.”
Chapter 26
Tim yawned. Though it was ridiculously early, everyone was awake thanks to Nelson’s latest headache. Since there was really nothing they could do for Nelson, Randy dragged Tim back into the conference room where they’d been sleeping not half an hour before, and attempted to show him the financial spreadsheets. Normally, Tim would have been curious about whatever it was Randy was trying to explain to him—even though he didn’t know much about budgeti
ng, and found numbers in the millions and billions to be quite abstract unless they signified gigs or terabytes. Randy, though, was positive he’d found something significant, and he seemed to know what he was talking about.
But focusing on Randy was like picking out a decent outfit from his closet. Tim wanted to get it right. He gave it his very best shot. But when all was said and done, he made sense of Randy’s budget numbers no more than he’d matched any shirt he owned with any pair of pants…which was to say, not very successfully at all.
“And when the manna that’s just about to expire goes to the food banks, they get a tax break, see?” Randy said, too excited to realize that Tim was not following him whatsoever. “I mean, shit. Some tax break. It’s almost as much as they make selling the stuff.”
Nelson, pale and muttering, with that freakish blue vein pulsing at his temple—how could Tim ever hope to comprehend what tax breaks were supposed to signify when he couldn’t stop thinking about that awful vein?
“But look at last week,” Randy continued. “There’s a dip here, where they donate their half-rotten stuff and claim their fat write-off. The numbers are low—like maybe they pulled Manhattan’s leftovers out the mix.”
Tim looked down at the column Randy was pointing at. Completely meaningless. “Why?”
“I dunno. What if they didn’t donate the old manna, so they couldn’t claim it? What if they destroyed it? Tossed it, buried it, locked it up and threw away the key? If we can find a memo related to the missing stuff, maybe you’ll have your answers. Maybe Marianne can think of some more keywords we could use to pull up anyth—”
The front door slammed open, and papers fluttered off the table. Javier’s foreman stood framed in the doorway, giving both of them a hard look. “Which one of you is Tim Foster?” he demanded in heavily accented, but perfectly understandable, English.
The Starving Years Page 22