I met him at Logan. In the airport lounge I relaxed for the first time since the Poyzen Boyzen thing started. No heavy-metal dustheads here.
Then I remembered those footprints in the hallway: dress shoes. The whole operation couldn't be run by burnouts. It took capital to build a PCP lab, some chemical expertise. Maybe I had an Evil Twin. Somewhere there was a higher, suit-wearing echelon. So I couldn't make assumptions as to what these guys looked like. High-tech yuppies, maybe. People who knew chemistry. Or Mafia.
We didn't get abducted and mutilated on the way home, though. I took Tom to our house and we sat down with a six-pack. “There's two ways you can help,” I said. “First, by diving. Helping us get samples off the floor.”
“I thought you already did that, man.”
“I got one sample and a bunch of oily lobsters. But if I'm going to make the kind of noise I want to make, I need more. At least a dozen samples, preferably forty or fifty, distributed around the area, so I can show a pattern.”
“One time around is enough for me. I don't need no more chloracne.”
“That brings me to the second thing. You can be a witness for us. A victim of the same poisoning.”
Tom frowned and shook his head. Then he finished his beer. As soon as I brought up the subject, his beer consumption jumped to the chug-a-lug level. “Not the same. Remember? Agent Orange, man. That's what I have. This is PCBs.”
To Tom and most everyone else, Agent Orange was a different thing from PCBs. But the underlying problem was the same, and I'd have to explain how in a press release. Just another goddamn thing to get working on. This was turning into a paper-shoveling operation, more time spent at my desk than on my Zodiac.
If this was the kind of house that had napkins, I'd have sketched it out for Tom. But Tess, Laurie, and Ike were all recycling maniacs and I usually had to wipe up spills with my shirt sleeves. Cloth towels were very nice if you had someone doing your laundry for you, but they sucked when all you had was a washing machine with a burned-out engine, and a landlord who filled the basement with water whenever he laid hands on a pipe wrench.
“I want you to explain all this shit to me anyway,” Tom confessed.
“Okay, first of all, the bad thing about Agent Orange wasn't the Agent Orange. It was an impurity that got into it during the manufacturing process: dioxin. That's what you had, dioxin poisoning. But dioxin is just a shortened version of the full name. The full name is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. Also known as TCDD.”
“This doesn't mean shit to me, man.”
“Just hang on. TCDD belongs to a class of similar compounds that are known as polychlorinated dibenzodioxins.”
“And that's related to polychlorinated biphenyls?”
“More or less. In both cases you've got a bunch of chlorine atoms, which is why it's called polychlorinated, and an organic structure that they're carried around on. In one case it's a biphenyl, in the other case a dibenzodioxin. You know what a benzene ring is? Ever take any chemistry?”
“No.”
I looked around for six similar objects I could arrange in a ring. Of course, they were right in front of me. “A benzene ring is a six-pack of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together with this little plastic holder. That's like a benzene ring. It's stable. It's strong. The six-pack stays together. It takes some effort to pull one of the cans away. There's a couple different kinds: benzenes and phenyls. Both six-pack holders, but the phenyl has one less hydrogen atom.”
“Okay.”
I went and pulled another six-pack out of the fridge. “If you put two six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. If the six-packs are phenyls, then it's called a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes, it's a dibenzodioxin - because the connection between six-packs is made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But it's basically similar to a biphenyl. So polychlorinated biphenyl and polychlorinated dibenzodioxin are structurally similar compounds.”
“So these six-pack things, they're the toxic part?”
“No. The toxic part is the chlorine. That's what gets you.”
“Well, shit, you should get chloracne from being in a swimming pool then, right? That's full of chlorine. Hell, drinking water's full of chlorine.”
“Yeah. That's why half of the people in GEE drink spring water. Because they've heard about chlorine and don't know shit about chemistry.”
Tom noticed the saltshaker on our table, laughed, and dumped a little salt out onto the table. “Shit, man! Sodium chloride, right? Isn't that in seawater? Hey, maybe that's why I got sick. It wasn't Agent Orange at all, man, it was the sodium chloride in that seawater.”
“Okay, you're asking me: why is chlorine so incredibly toxic in dioxin and not in table salt?”
“I guess that's what I'm asking.”
“Two reasons. First, what it's attached to. That biphenyl or dibenzodioxin structure - the twelve-pack - dissolves easily in fat. Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves.”
“That's what they said about the Agent Orange, that it sits in your body forever.”
“Right. That's the first bad thing. The second bad thing is, the chlorine there is in covalent form, it's got the normal number of electrons, whereas the chlorine in salt is in ionic form. It's got an extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more reactive, it has these big electron clouds that can fuck up your chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic chlorine doesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it.”
“So the six-packs are like the vehicle, the gunboat, and the chlorines are like the soldiers with the machine guns who ride on it.”