Chapter 2
Hooked on a Feeling
The phone rang again.
Alone in his stables, Alex Kramer tended the two horses. He insisted on ignoring the ache, no matter how much the leukemia tortured him. He had plenty of experience with pain.
The telephone extension he had wired out to the barn sounded tinny, invasive. He hated it.
Alex looked up, but didn’t move. The ringing phone seemed to cut through him. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. In happier days, Jay or Erin would have rushed to grab the call—Jay expecting his college buddies, Erin a high-school boyfriend. If his wife Maureen didn’t get the phone first. Alex never had to worry about answering it before.
But in one disastrous year, he had lost his entire family—Maureen and Erin killed when a gasoline truck slammed into them on a winding road, Jay a casualty of the latest Middle East conflict. Cocking his head to look behind him at the large, empty ranch house, Alex wondered why he bothered to stay behind in such a hollow place.
Because I don’t ever want to leave those ghosts behind.
The phone kept ringing. Let the answering machine in the house get it.
Finally, after four rings, the phone fell silent. The only noises were the restless stirring of the horses, the morning breeze rustling through the live oaks and pines, and the birds in the wooded hills of Marin County, California. Alex turned back to the horses, feeling numb relief. Dealing with people, even trivial matters, was too much effort. Too much effort.
He gathered the tack for his ritual ride. Moving cautiously from the pain in his body, and reverently with his memories, he saddled his daughter’s mare, Stimpy, a chocolate quarter-horse with a blond mane. Tomorrow he would take Ren, his own horse, for a ride. The two horses loved their exercise, and Alex needed the excuse to get out.
Holding the bridle, Alex hooked an arm between the horse’s ears, then slid the bit into Stimpy’s mouth. After settling the headstall, he buckled it. Lifting the bulky western saddle required most of his remaining strength, but the horse waited graciously. Alex rested a moment, holding himself up by the saddle horn; it even hurt to breathe. He reached under Stimpy’s belly to tighten the cinch strap. Finally, brushing himself off, he levered himself up into the saddle.
Without prodding, Stimpy walked out of the stables into the sunshine. In the fresh air, Alex’s lethargy cleared. For longer than he could remember, he had used the unpaved fire roads in the wooded hills north of San Francisco for morning rides; he and Erin had explored them years before, racing, picnicking, eating the sloppy “secret recipe” peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches she always made before a ride.
Under the stands of oaks, surrounded by an ocean of rustling grass, Alex found it quiet, peaceful … a far cry from the nightmarish hell of the Oilstar refinery where he worked. He drove to his office three days a week—management’s concession “until you recover from your grief,” as if that were possible.
Oilstar had forced him to go for five sessions with their “psychological fitness and health” counselor, a flinty-eyed young woman with short blonde hair that seemed a mass of cowlicks. She had tapped a red-enameled fingernail as she explained the stages of severe grief to him: shock, then disbelief, anger, and finally resignation. Alex had listened to her politely, contributing as little as possible. Each time he left a session, he felt no different, understood no more about why his family had been taken from him, and felt no more fit for work. At least it proved that Oilstar considered his bioremediation research valuable.
As Alex rode out, the morning was so bright and fresh, it mocked him.
O O O
At noon, Alex returned to his echoing house, drawing the curtains to shield him from the cheery sunlight. He noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine, but decided he didn’t want to deal with it at the moment. He went past the living room and wet bar, down the hall where the kids’ rooms stood empty and silent, to the master bedroom. He showered, turning the water hot enough to scald away his body aches for a while, then dressed slowly as if his clothes were made out of glass. He thought about eating lunch, but his stomach wasn’t ready for it. He finally played the telephone message.
Resting one elbow on the tile countertop, he listened to the voice of Mitchell Stone, his deputy project manager in the microbiology lab. “Alex, where are you? Don’t you watch the news, for God’s sake! With the Zoroaster thing, the execs are scrambling for any way to save their butts. Maybe we can pull Prometheus out of the closet. Give me a call and get in here as soon as you can, okay?”
As the message ended, Alex frowned at the machine, upset at the intrusion. No, he did not watch the news, and it surprised him that Mitch assumed he did. He hadn’t even turned on the TV in a month. Prometheus? That work was over a year old, merely a precursor to the bacterial strains they were developing now.
Oilstar had funded Alex’s work as a showpiece, their nod to the popular “green” movements. Bioremediation was the catchword, cultivating natural microbes that had an appetite for the swill man wanted to destroy. Already, many companies were developing microbes that would digest toxic wastes, PCBs and PCPs, even break down garbage.
When his daughter Erin turned seventeen and suddenly awakened to political causes, she had first railed at Alex about working for a big oil company, spouting phrases she had memorized from leaflets; but then Erin had beamed with pride and relief when she learned he was attempting to get rid of the tons of Styrofoam and non-biodegradable plastics clogging the nation’s landfills.
“Prometheus” had been just a step along the way, a strain that could metabolize certain components of crude oil, primarily octane and a few aromatic ring molecules. Not terribly useful, according to Oilstar.
What could Mitch have in mind now? And what on Earth was a Zoroaster? He clicked on the dusty television, but saw without surprise that his cable service had been cut off. The only stations he could get through the sur-rounding hills showed a soap opera and a grainy image of talking heads.
Resigned, Alex tried calling in, but the lines were busy. He listened to the buzzing signal, then returned the phone to its cradle. He felt like telling Mitch to solve his own damned problems and then hang up on him. By the time he finished the long drive to the refinery, maybe his thoughts would have cleared.
He slowly tugged on an old jacket against the spring chill and started for his four-wheel drive Ford pickup. Out in the corral, the horses nickered at him, and several crows rattled at him from up in the pine trees. He paused for a second, just breathing the air and thinking nothing, before getting into his truck. He drove along the winding road toward the freeway and the Richmond Bridge.
He rode in silence, but then he switched on the radio to see if he could find out what Mitch had been talking about. Zoroaster. Thumbing the dial, he found only stations that had music or advertisements, but National Public Radio had a long discussion about the aftereffects of the Exxon Valdez spill, the Torreycanyon, the Shetland Islands spill, and other tanker accidents. Alex wondered why that had become so topical after all this time. Must be an anniversary of one of the disasters or something. He moved along at exactly the speed limit, other cars passing him regularly.
Alex was primarily an idea man at the bioremediation lab, leaving Mitch and the others to take care of bothersome details with management and record-keeping. Mitch panicked about deadlines at least once a month.
Half an hour after leaving home, Alex exited the freeway and turned toward the sprawling Oilstar refinery. As he approached the chain-link fence, he saw a crowd of protesters in front of the guard gate. TV camera crews stood on the sidelines. The demonstration seemed orderly; Oilstar had brought in extra rent-a-cops, along with a handful of California Highway Patrol officers.
Alex raised his eyebrows. One group or another found reason to rail at Oilstar several times a year, but whenever somebody planned a protest, they usually informed Oilstar in advance, along with the local media. He was so tired of all this, angry at the demonstrators for tossing more unpleasantness in his lap. He just wanted to sit at home and rest.
As his pickup crawled past the protesters, he saw the usual signs depicting oil-covered sea birds and otters, the skull-and-crossbones; the word Zoroaster was repeated over and over. Well, he thought, maybe it was something important after all. Maybe there had been another spill somewhere. He had worked for Oilstar long enough to know there would always be oil spills … and the oil companies would always swear that it would never happen again.
At another time, his daughter Erin might have been among the protesters. Erin had become outspoken whenever she found a cause, “Save the Whales” or “Don’t Use Colored Toilet Paper.” Though he had not always understood Erin’s drive, he had never been scornful or disdainful. She was a smart girl and full of questions, many of which Alex had not been able to answer. He was just glad she felt such a passion for things.
But Erin would never grow up to join these demonstrators at the Oilstar gate, and he felt inexplicably annoyed at the protesters for that.
He drove past the crowd without incident, then worked his way across the refinery grounds, driving past a wasteland of pipes and tanks, fraction-ating towers and steam, with huge oil-storage tanks riding the surrounding hills. The place looked like an Escher industrial nightmare, amplified by hissing noises and foul smells.
Eventually, he found himself by his office on the second floor of Oilstar’s research annex. Fumbling with his keys, he opened the door and went inside, ignoring the yellow telephone messages taped to his door. His office looked too clean, too neat. He had never taken the time to be tidy when he was swallowed up in work; now he did little else but rearrange his papers into neat piles.
A picture of Alex’s family sat on the desk, all four of them smiling, a frozen moment from the past. His own image faced him, wire-rimmed glasses and graying hair above a neat peppery beard; beside him sat Maureen, strong and slender. Jay, twenty-one years old, reddish hair cropped short since entering the army, his sparse mustache all but invisible against his skin; petite Erin with strawberry-blond hair, striking dark eyebrows and flawless skin, a beauty that was lost on the high-school boys. Erin would have shattered hearts had she lived to enter college.
“About time, Alex!” Mitch Stone leaned on the door frame. “I’ve already set up a meeting for us tomorrow morning with Emma Branson and the other mucky-mucks. We’ve got to move on this right away.”
At twenty-eight and rising fast, Mitch concerned himself with dressing impeccably. He got his hair razor cut every other week, wore stylish clothes, even sported a tie in the lab. In public, Mitch toed the Oilstar party line and talked fast. He didn’t try to annoy Alex, but his skewed priorities, office bullpen politics, and his constant “emergencies” had drained away all of Alex’s respect for him. Alex remembered when he had been filled with so much ambition.
Mitch ticked off points on his fingers. “The engineering folks are getting lightering operations underway to pump the rest of the oil out of the cargo holds. The tides are playing hell with the wreck. Boat teams are rigging booms around the spill, but there are pleasure boats and protesters up the wazoo, maritime rubberneckers in everyone’s way. Best estimates are that a quarter of a million barrels have already dumped into the Bay and it’s still gushing out. Zoroaster—”
Alex held up a hand to stop the other man. He noticed his fingers trembling. “Mitch, I don’t know what on Earth you’re talking about. Tell me what a Zoroaster is before you go on.”
Mitch goggled at him. “You mean you don’t know? Oh, come on!” Tugging on Alex’s sleeve, Mitch marched him down the carpeted halls into the lunchroom.
A sour, burnt smell drifted up from a puddle of coffee in the bottom of the pot. Washed coffee cups—no two alike—sat upended in wet spots on brown paper towels between the sink and microwave oven. The television was turned on and loud. Four people straddled uncomfortable plastic chairs at the wood-grain tables, watching CNN. Alex had not seen such rapt expressions on viewers’ faces since the coverage of the first Gulf War.
“Could be the biggest spill ever,” Mitch said. “Far bigger than the Exxon Valdez. Only this time it’s not up in Alaska, it’s right here in San Francisco Bay!”
From a helicopter, the TV camera looked down at the wreck of the Oilstar Zoroaster, its side ripped open by the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. A montage of shots, beginning with pictures at dawn, traced the growth of the spill during the day. Boats hovered on the edges of the slick.
Alex’s knees went weak, appalled at himself for belittling Mitch’s reaction, the protesters’ outrage. The sharp thorns of pain in his bones felt suddenly overwhelming.
The broadcast showed seagulls blanketed with tarry residue, floating corpses of sea otters. Crowds stood anxiously on Fisherman’s Wharf, staring out at the approaching oil. Alex’s breath quickened; his head ached, starting with a pressure in his temples that wouldn’t go away. The program played a long sequence of archival footage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
Mitch clapped a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “The bozos over at Admin Gardens are in a state of panic. They’re willing to try anything for some positive publicity. We can cash in on it if we get approval to release Prome-theus to help the cleanup efforts!”
Mitch didn’t seem affected by the images on the television. He lowered his voice. “We’ll be heroes even if it doesn’t work!”
Alex shook off Mitch’s hand and stared at the oil spilling across the water, the thick liquid lapping against the shore. He remembered the times he and his son Jay had spent days hiking on the rocky headlands. Especially the time when Jay had told him he wanted to drop out of college and join the army.…
“What’s the matter, Alex?” Mitch frowned. “Don’t you see what an opportunity this is?” He pressed closer.
“An opportunity?” Alex said in a voice that came out as a low growl. Time and again, since the death of his family, he had shielded his emotions behind a wall of weariness and apathy; at rare times, though, the wall cracked to expose a furnace blazing inside. He had never been a violent man, but he had been walking on the thin ice of intensely charged emotions for months.
Alex flexed his right hand; the pain inside made his breath like ice knives, and Mitch stood just too damned close. Suddenly lashing out, he shoved Mitch backwards—not hard, but enough to knock the other man over a chair, sprawling to the floor.
“You’re right, Mitch,” Alex said, “but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it.