The Unknowns Read Online Free PDF Page B

fulfillment and tagging the competitor, by implication, with death. But ignore this newfangled persuasory superstructure; focus on the nuts and bolts. What does the beverage industry
do
? What is its business?
It trucks sugar water around the country
. Production costs are marginal; the main ingredient is good old H 2 O, cheaply available on demand anywhere—and yet bottlers spend billions driving it to stores. Listen: Put a machinein the supermarket that adds syrup and carbon to tap water. Make the soda at the point of sale, like restaurants do. You’re selling the exact same product, and your prime costs are lower than the big boys’ by more than 30 percent!
    He gazed wistfully into the middle distance, and it was clear that this was what he’d been looking for his entire life: the main chance, the shortcut no one else had seen.
    “So you’re going to start a soda company?” I asked him.
    “We’re going to launch it locally first,” he said. “Use Denver as a trial market. Once it catches on here, we can attract some investors, maybe go public. And then we take it national.”
    I imagined America putting down its Coke and drinking instead from a can with my dad’s face on it.
Barry-Cola
, it said on the can. I laughed.
    Dad looked hurt. “This is going to be paying your college tuition,” he said, and I felt bad.
    “I don’t think I get it,” I said, although this was not true. “How do you lower the costs?” And so he told me again.
    When she picked me up on Sunday night, my mom was in one of her wanting-to-talk-about-Dad moods. “So what did you guys do?” she asked me. I never told her the truth: that I had played Arkanoid and Super Mario Brothers and Castlevania III and maybe Excitebike, although Excitebike was kind of juvenile, while my dad watched golf on TV, each of us with the shades drawn to keep the glare of the afternoon sun off our respective screens. There was something about the way men behaved without women around that I already knew to be ashamed of.
    “The usual,” I said.
    She pulled onto the freeway. My mom gets anxious when she has to merge into traffic; her impulse is to slow down, which is not a helpful impulse in a merging situation. When she was securely inthe middle lane, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “So,” she said, “are there any girlfriends around?” She was trying to sound casual. At first I thought she was talking about me, partly because the pursuit of a girlfriend was a problem I thought of as specific to me, and partly because the idea of my dad with a girlfriend was almost inconceivable.
    “I don’t think he has time for a girlfriend,” I said.
    “Oh yeah?” she said. “What’s keeping him so busy?”
    I didn’t want to tell her about the soda thing. I didn’t feel like hearing my mom laugh at my dad when I was the one who had to go spend every other weekend with him. “I think he mostly works on articles,” I said. Dad had once had an article in a journal of management theory.
    That seemed to work. We were going home, and I started to feel better. I would still have to do my homework, which I always brought to my dad’s in a backpack and then neglected until I got home Sunday night. But at least I’d be in my own room, with my mom lying in bed on the other side of the wall reading one of her thick paperbacks, listening to a tape of the music she liked, the Carpenters or America or Bread.
    In an attempt to provide a family atmosphere, my mom had arranged for us to go out to dinner with the Oberfells once a month. At the restaurant I always chose the seat farthest from Bronwen, to disguise my interest. This typically put me next to her brother Pete, a pale, fearful nine-year-old.
    Bronwen’s father Gary was talking about the challenges his dental practice faced. “There’s just too many dentists in the area,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re all supposed to make a living.” Gary had massive hands, and watching him bring