by Alan Glynn
I got out on the seventeenth floor. I checked Vernon’s card again and then looked for his apartment. It was down the hall and around the corner to the left, third door on the right. I didn’t encounter anyone on the way.
I stood for a moment at his door, and then rang the bell. I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to him if he answered, and I’d thought even less about what I was going to do if he didn’t, if he wasn’t home, but standing there I realized that either way I was extremely apprehensive.
I heard some movement inside, and then locks clicking.
Vernon must have seen that it was me through the spyhole because I heard his voice before he’d even got the door fully open.
‘Shit, man, that was fast.’
I had a smile ready for when he appeared, but it fell off my face as soon as I actually saw him. He stood before me wearing only boxer shorts. He had a black eye and bruises all down the left side of his face. His lip was cut, and swollen, and his right hand was bandaged.
‘What ha—’
‘Don’t ask.’
Leaving the door open, Vernon turned around and motioned back at me with his left hand to come in. I entered, closed the door gently and followed him down a narrow hallway and into a large open living-room. It had a spectacular view – but then, in Manhattan, virtually anywhere with a seventeenth floor is going to have a spectacular view. This one looked south, and took in the city’s horror and glory in about equal measure.
Vernon flopped down on to a long, L-shaped, black leather couch. I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found it hard to look directly at him, so I made a show of glancing around.
The room was sparsely furnished, given its size. There was some old stuff, an antique bureau, a couple of Queen Anne-type chairs, a standard lamp. There was also some new stuff, the black leather couch, a tinted-glass dining table, an empty metal wine-rack. But you couldn’t exactly call it eclectic, because there didn’t seem to be any order or system to it. I knew Vernon had been big into furniture at one time, and had collected ‘pieces’, but this seemed like the place of a person who had given up collecting, who had let his enthusiasm wane. The pieces were odd and mismatched, and seemed left over from another time – or another apartment – in their owner’s life.
I stood in the middle of the room now, having seen everything there was to see. I looked down at Vernon, in silence, not knowing where to begin – but eventually he managed to say something. Through the pained expression on his face and the ugly distortion of his features, of his normally bright greenish eyes and high cheekbones, he cracked a smile and said, ‘So, Eddie, I guess you were interested after all.’
‘Yeah … it was amazing. I mean … really.’
I blurted this out, just like the high-school kid I’d invoked sarcastically the previous day, the one looking to score his first dime bag, and who was now coming back for another one.
‘What did I tell you?’
I nodded my head a few times, and then – unable to go on without referring again to his condition – I said, ‘Vernon, what happened to you?’
‘What do you think, man? I got in a fight.’
‘Who with?’
‘You don’t want to know, believe me.’
I paused.
Maybe I didn’t want to know.
In fact, thinking about it, he was right, I didn’t want to know. Not only that, I was also a little irritated – part of me hoping that this business of his having had the shit kicked out of him wasn’t going to get in the way of my scoring from him.
‘Sit down, Eddie,’ he said. ‘Relax, tell me all about it.’
I sat down on the other side of the couch, got comfortable and told him all about it. There was no reason not to. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’
I immediately said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it works on what’s there, you know. It can’t make you smart if you’re not smart already.’
‘So what are you saying, it’s a smart drug?’
‘Not exactly. There’s a lot of hype about smart drugs – you know, enhance your cognitive performance, develop rapid mental reflexes, all of that – but most of what we call smart drugs are just natural diet supplements, artificial nutrients, amino acids, that kind of thing – designer vitamins if you like. What you took was a designer drug. I mean, you’d have to take a shitload of amino acids to stay up all night and read four books, am I right?’
I nodded.
Vernon was enjoying this.
But I wasn’t. I was on edge and wanted him to cut the crap and just tell me what he knew.
‘What’s it called?’ I ventured.
‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet, it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48.’
The boys in the kitchen?
‘Who are you working for?’ I asked. ‘You said you were doing consultancy for some pharmaceutical outfit?’
Vernon put a hand up to his face at that point and held it there for a moment. He sucked in some air and then let out a low groan.
‘Shit, this hurts.’
I leant forward. What should I do here – offer to get him some ice in a towel, call a doctor? I waited. Had he heard my question? Would it be insensitive to repeat it?
About fifteen seconds passed and then Vernon lowered his hand again.
‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, still wincing, ‘I can’t answer your question. I’m sure you can understand that.’
I looked at him, puzzled. ‘But you were talking to me yesterday about coming on-stream with some product at the end of the year, and clinical trials, and being FDA-approved. What was that all about?’
‘FDA-approved, that’s a laugh,’ he said, snorting with contempt and side-stepping the question. ‘The FDA only approves drugs that are for treating illnesses. They don’t recognize lifestyle drugs.’
‘But—’
I was about to pull him up here and say, ‘Yeah, but you said …’ when I stopped myself short. He had said it was FDA-approved, and he had talked about clinical trials, but then had I really been expected to believe all of that?
OK, what had we got here? Something called MDT-48. An unknown, untested, possibly dangerous pharmaceutical substance scammed out of an unidentified laboratory somewhere, and by an unreliable person I hadn’t seen in a decade.
‘So,’ said Vernon, looking directly at me, ‘you want some more of this?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘definitely.’
*
With that established, and in the hallowed traditions of the civilized drug deal, we immediately changed the subject. I asked him about the furniture in the apartment, and if he was still collecting ‘pieces’. He asked me about music, and if I still listened to eighty-minute symphonies by dead Germans at full volume. We chatted about these things for a while, and then filled each other in on some details about what we’d been doing for the last few years.
Vernon was fairly cagey – as he had to be in his line of work, I suppose – but as a result I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. I did get the impression, however, that this MDT business had been occupying him for quite some time, and possibly even for a number of years. I also got the impression that he was anxious to talk about it, but since he wasn’t sure if he could trust me yet, he kept stopping himself in mid-sentence, and any time he seemed on the point of revealing something he would hesitate and then quickly revert to a kind of pseudo-scientific sales patter, mentioning neurotransmitters, brain-circuits and cell-receptor complexes.
He shifted quite a bit on the couch as well, continually raising his left leg and stretching it out, like a football player – or maybe a dancer – I couldn’t decide.
As he spoke, I sat relatively still and listened.
For my own part, I told Vernon how in 1989 – soon after the divorce
– I’d had to get out of New York. I didn’t mention the fact that he himself had done his bit to drive me out, that his all-too-reliable supply of Bolivian Marching Powder had led to some severe health and money problems – drained sinuses, drained finances – and that these in turn had cost me my job as the production editor of a now defunct fashion and arts magazine, Chrome. But I did tell him about the miserable year I’d spent unemployed in Dublin, chasing some elusive, miasmal notion of a literary existence, and about the three years in Italy teaching and doing translations for an agency in Bologna, as well as learning interesting things about food that I’d never known … like, for instance, that vegetables weren’t necessarily designed to be available all year round, Korean deli-style, but had their seasons, and came and went in maybe a six-week period, during which time you furiously cooked them in different ways, such as – if it was asparagus, say – asparagus risotto, asparagus with eggs, fettuccine with asparagus, and that two weeks later you didn’t even think about asking your greengrocer for asparagus. I was rambling here, and could see that Vernon was getting restless, so I moved things on and told him about how I’d eventually come back from Italy to find the technology of magazine production utterly transformed, making any skills I might have acquired in the late ’80s more or less redundant. I then described the last five or six years of my life, and how they’d been very quiet, and uneventful, and had drifted by – flitted by – in a haze of relative sobriety and comfort eating.
But that I had great hopes for this book I was currently working on.
I hadn’t meant to bring the conversation so neatly back around to the matter in hand, but Vernon looked at me and said, ‘Well, you know, we’ll see what we can do.’
This irked me a little, but the feeling was simultaneously muted and exacerbated by the realization that he actually could do something. I smiled at him and held my hands up.
Vernon then nodded at me, slapped his knees and said, ‘OK, in the meantime, you want some coffee, or something to eat?’
Without waiting for an answer, he pulled himself forward and struggled up out of the couch. He walked over to the kitchen area in the corner, which was separated from the living-room by a counter and stools.
I got up and followed him.
Vernon opened the refrigerator door and looked in. Over his shoulder I could see that it was almost empty. There was a Tropicana orange juice carton, which he took out and shook and then replaced.
‘You know what?’ he said, turning around to face me. ‘I’m going to ask you to do me a favour.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m in no shape to go out right now, as you can see, but I do have to go out later … and I need to pick up a suit at the drycleaner’s. So could I ask you to run down and pick it up for me? And maybe while you’re there you could pick us up some breakfast, too?’
‘Sure.’
‘And some aspirin?’
‘Sure.’
Standing there in front of me, in his shorts, Vernon looked skinny and kind of pathetic. Also, up close like this, I could see lines in his face and grey streaks in the hair around his temples. His skin was drawn. Suddenly, I could see where the ten years had gone. Doubtless, looking at me, Vernon was thinking – with suitable variations – the same thing. This gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach, and was compounded by the fact that I was trying to ingratiate myself with him – with my dealer – by agreeing to run down and pick up his suit and get him some breakfast. I was amazed at how quickly it all slotted back into place, this dealer-client dynamic, this easy sacrificing of dignity for a guaranteed return of a dime bag or a gram or an eightball or, in this case, a pill that was going to cost me the best part of a month’s rent.
Vernon walked across the room to the old bureau and got his wallet. As he was going through it – looking, presumably, for money and the dry-cleaning stub – I noticed a copy of the Boston Globe lying on the tinted-glass dining table. Their lead story was Defense Secretary Caleb Hale’s ill-advised comments about Mexico, but why – I asked myself – was a New Yorker reading the Boston Globe?
Vernon turned around and walked towards me.
‘Get me a toasted English with scrambled eggs and Swiss, and a side of Canadian bacon, and a regular coffee. And whatever you want yourself.’
He handed me a bill and a small blue stub. I put the stub in the breast pocket of my jacket. I looked at the bill – at the sombre, bearded face of Ulysses S. Grant – and handed it back to him.
‘What, your local diner’s going to break a fifty for an English muffin?’
‘Why not? Fuck ’em.’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘Whatever. The drycleaner’s is on the corner of Eighty-ninth and the diner’s right beside it. There’s a paper store on the same block where you can get the aspirin. Oh, and could you get me a Boston Globe as well?’
I looked back at the paper on the table.
He saw me looking at it and said, ‘That’s yesterday’s.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and now you want today’s?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK,’ I said and shrugged. Then I turned and went along the narrow hallway towards the door.
‘Thanks,’ he said, walking behind me. ‘And listen, we’ll sort something out when you get back up, price-wise. Everything is negotiable, am I right?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, opening the door, ‘see you in a few.’
I heard the door close behind me as I made my way down the hall and around the corner to the elevators.
On the ride down I had to resist thinking too much about how bad all of this was making me feel. I told myself that he’d had the shit kicked out of him and that I was just doing him a favour, but it brought me back to the old days. It reminded me of the hours spent waiting in various apartments, pre-Vernon, for the guy to show up and of the laboured small talk and of all the nervous energy invested in holding things together until that glorious moment arrived when you could hit the road, split … go to a club or go home – eighty bucks lighter, OK, but a whole gram heavier.
The old days.
Which were more than ten years ago.
So what the fuck was I doing now?
*
I left the elevator car, walked out through the revolving doors and on to the plaza. I crossed Ninetieth Street and headed in the direction of Eighty-ninth. I came to the paper store about half-way along the block and went inside. Vernon hadn’t said what brand he wanted, so I asked for a box of my own favourites, Extra-Strength Excedrin. I looked at the newspapers laid out on the flat – Mexico, Mexico, Mexico – and picked up a Globe. I scanned the front page for anything that might give me a clue as to why Vernon was reading this paper, and the only possible item I could find related to an upcoming product liability trial. There was a small paragraph about it and a page reference for a fuller report inside. The international chemical corporation, Eiben-Chemcorp, would be defending charges in a Massachusetts court that its hugely popular anti-depressant, Triburbazine, had caused a teenage girl, who’d only been taking the drug for two weeks, to kill her best friend and then herself. Was this the company Vernon had said he was working for? Eiben-Chemcorp? Hardly.
I took the paper and the Excedrin, paid for them, and went back out on to the street.
Next, I headed for the diner, which I saw was called the DeLuxe Luncheonette and was one of those old-style places you find in most parts of the city. It probably looked exactly the same thirty years ago as it did today, probably had some of the same clientele, as well, and was therefore, curiously, a living link to an earlier version of the neighbourhood. Or not. Maybe. I don’t know. In any case, it was a greasy spoon and being around lunchtime the place was fairly crowded, so I stood inside the door and waited for my turn to order.
A middle-aged Hispanic guy behind the counter was saying, ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I mean, what is this all about? They don’t have enough problems here, they’ve got to go down there making more problems?�
�� Then he looked to his left, ‘What?’
There were two younger guys at the grill speaking Spanish to each other and obviously laughing at him.
He threw his hands up.
‘Nobody cares any more, nobody gives a damn.’
Standing beside me, there were three people waiting for their orders in total silence. To my left, there were some other people sitting at tables. The one nearest to me had four old guys at it drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. One of them was reading the Post and I realized after a moment that the guy behind the counter was addressing his remarks to him.
‘Remember Cuba?’ he went on. ‘Bay of Pigs? Is this going to turn into another Bay of Pigs, another fiasco like that was?’
‘I don’t see the analogy,’ the old guy reading the Post said. ‘Cuba was because of Communism.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the paper during this, and he also spoke with a very faint German accent. ‘And the same goes for US involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In the last century there was a war with Mexico because the US wanted Texas and California. That made sense, strategic sense. But this?’
He left the question hanging and continued reading.
Very quickly the guy behind the counter wrapped up two orders, took money for them and some people left. I moved up a bit and he looked at me. I ordered what Vernon had asked for, plus a black coffee, and said that I’d be back in two minutes. As I was going out, the guy behind the counter was saying, ‘I don’t know, you ask me, they should bring back the Cold War …’
I went to the dry-cleaner’s next door and retrieved Vernon’s suit. I lingered on the street for a few moments and watched the passing traffic. Back in the DeLuxe Luncheonette, a customer at another table, a young guy in a denim shirt, had joined in the conversation.
‘What, you think the government’s going to get involved in something like this for no reason? That’s just crazy.’
