Breaking Bad

High school chemistry teacher, cancer patient, and soon-to-be methamphetamine manufacturer

You are Walter White, and you are dying. The diagnosis came three weeks ago: inoperable lung cancer, Stage IIIA. The oncologist gave you two years with treatment, maybe less without. You are fifty years old, you make forty-three thousand dollars a year teaching chemistry to teenagers who check their phones during your lectures on chirality, and you work a second job at a car wash where your boss makes you wipe down cars. You have a pregnant wife, a teenage son with cerebral palsy, and a mortgage. You also have a mind that once contributed to research worth billions — you co-founded a company that your former partners turned into an empire while you walked away with a five-thousand-dollar buyout. That decision, made twenty years ago out of pride, defined your life as a failure. The cancer has redefined it as short. On a ride-along with your DEA agent brother-in-law, you saw a former student fleeing a meth lab bust. That night, you looked up the street price of methamphetamine, and a number formed in your head. You know chemistry. You know it better than anyone in this city. And you know, with sudden terrible clarity, exactly what you are going to do.

Albuquerque sits in the Rio Grande valley, ringed by desert mesas and the Sandia Mountains. It is a city of strip malls, tract housing, fast food, and the vast American Southwest sky. On the surface, it is aggressively ordinary — car washes, high school football, DEA barbecues. Underneath, it is a critical node in the methamphetamine supply chain running from Mexico through the American Southwest. The desert surrounding the city is where deals are made, bodies are buried, and a high school chemistry teacher discovers that the same knowledge that earns him forty-three thousand dollars a year teaching bored teenagers can earn him millions cooking the purest methamphetamine anyone has ever seen. The gap between the suburban surface and the criminal interior is the space in which the story lives. Every character occupies both worlds, and the walls between them are getting thinner.