Limitless

by Alan Glynn

  I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.

  The place wasn’t too crowded, though it would probably be filling up fairly soon. There were some people to my left, two women sitting at stools – but facing away from the bar – and three men standing around them. Two of these were doing the talking, with the others sipping drinks, pulling on cigarettes and listening carefully. The subject of conversation was the NBA and Michael Jordan and the huge revenues he’d generated for the game. I don’t know at what point it started again, exactly, that trip-switching forward thing, or click-clicking forward like on a faulty CD, but when it did I had no control whatsoever and could only observe, witness, each segment and each flash, as though each segment and each flash – as well as the greater, unrevealed whole – were happening to someone else and not to me. The first jump was very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or movement, I found myself on the other side of the group, standing very close to one of the women – a thirtyish brunette in a short green skirt, not excessively slim, distinctive blue eyes … my left hand hovering somewhere in the airspace above her right thigh …

  … and I was in mid-sentence …

  ‘… yeah, but don’t forget that ESPN was set up in 1979, and with $10 million of seed money from Getty Oil for Christ’s sake …’

  ‘What’s that got—’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with it. It changed everything. Because of a shrewd business decision college basketball players were suddenly becoming household names overnight …

  For a split second I was aware that one of the men – a chubby guy in a silk suit – was glaring at me. He was tense and sweaty and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to my left hand – but then … click, click, click … the barman was in front of me, waving his arms around, blocking my view. He looked Irish and had tired eyes that said pleeease, enough. Meanwhile, behind him – and only partially visible now – the chubby guy in the silk suit was holding a hand up to his face, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose …

  ‘Fuck you, pal …

  ‘Fuck you …’

  The cool evening air touched the hairs on the back of my neck as I staggered away from the barman and out on to the street. The woman in the short green skirt was there too, just inside the door, pushing away someone who was behind her. She said something I didn’t catch and then quickly manoeuvred herself around the barman, dodging his arms, but half a second later – inexplicably – she was linking arms with me a couple of blocks down the street.

  Then we were in a cubicle together, a stall in the bathroom of a nightclub or a bar, and I was pulling away from her, withdrawing – her legs spread out against a backdrop of chrome, and white porcelain, and black tiles … her green skirt torn and dangling from the toilet seat, her blouse open, beads of sweat glistening between her breasts. As I leant back against the door, hurriedly doing up my trousers, she remained in position, with her eyes closed and head swaying rhythmically from side to side. In the background, there was some kind of pulsating music, as well as the periodic roar of electric hand-dryers and raised voices and manic laughter, and from the next cubicle what sounded like the flicking of lighters followed by sharp, rapid inhalations of smoke …

  I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at them. In another few moments, I was out on the street again, negotiating my way through more crowds and through heavy streams of traffic. Soon after that I seem to remember climbing into the familiar comfort of a yellow cab, sinking into the cheap plastic upholstery of the back seat and gazing out at the tawdry streaks of neon that stretched the city out, pulled it this way and that, like so many strands of multi-coloured chewing-gum. I also remember being acutely aware of my right hand, which was sore, throbbing in fact, from having punched that guy back at the Congo – something, incidentally, I couldn’t believe I’d done. At any rate, the next thing I knew I was in the lobby of an Upper West Side restaurant – a place I’d read about called Actium – insinuating, pushing, my way into another conversation with another set of complete strangers, this time half a dozen members of some local art-gallery crowd. Posing as a collector, I introduced myself as Thomas Cole. Like before, I perpetually seemed to be in mid-sentence – ‘… and already in eighteen hundred and four the Noble Savage has become the Demonic Indian, it’s there in Vanderlyn’s Murder of Jane McCrea, the dark, rippling musculature, the ogre’s raised tomahawk ready to strike at the woman’s head …’ I was probably as surprised by what I was saying as anyone else, but I couldn’t press pause, couldn’t do anything except endure it, and watch. Then it was click, click, click again and all of a sudden we were sitting around a table together having dinner.

  To my left was an intense guy with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a carefully crumpled linen jacket, probably an art critic, and to my right was a Bernice-bobs-her-hair type of woman with bony bits sticking out of her every time she moved. Directly opposite me was a heavy Latino guy in a suit who was talking non-stop. He spoke in English, but it was norteamericano this and norteamericano that, and in a fairly disparaging tone. I realized after a few moments that the man I was looking at was Rodolfo Alvarez, the celebrated Mexican painter who’d recently moved to Manhattan and undertaken to recreate, from notebooks, the destroyed Diego Rivera mural originally destined for the lobby of the RCA Building in 1933.

  Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future.

  The dark-haired and very beautiful woman in a black dress, sitting to his left, was the sultry Donatella, his wife.

  I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.

  How the fuck had I ended up with these people?

  ‘That’s ironic,’ the salt-and-pepper guy was saying to someone, ‘the choosing of a better future.’

  ‘What’s so ironic about that?’ I heard myself saying, and then sighing impatiently. ‘If you don’t choose your future, who the hell’s going to do it for you?’

  ‘Well,’ said Donatella Alvarez, smiling across the table – and smiling directly at me – ‘that is the North American way, isn’t it, Mr Cole?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, a little taken aback.

  ‘Time,’ she said calmly. ‘For you it is in a straight line. You look back at the past, and can disregard it if you so wish. You look towards the future … and, if you so wish, can choose it to be a better future. You can choose to become perfect …’

  She was still smiling, and all I could say was, ‘So?’

  ‘For us, in Mexico,’ she said very deliberately, as though explaining something to a small child, ‘the past and the present and the future … they co-exist.’

  I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.

  From this point on things got more and more fragmented, disjointed – jagged. Most of it I can’t remember at all – apart from a few strong sense impressions, the weird colour and texture of mussels in white wine, for instance … swirls of dense cigar smoke, thick, glistening daubs of colour. I seem to recall seeing hundreds of tubes and brushes laid out in lines on a wooden floor, and dozens of canvases, some rolled, others framed and stacked.

  Soon, painted figures, lurid and bulging, were mingling with real people in a terrifying kaleidoscope, and I found myself reaching out for something to lean against, but quickly focusing instead – across a crowded loft space – on the deep, earthy pools that were the eyes of Donatella Alvarez …

  Next, and in what seemed like a flash, I was walking down an empty corridor in a hotel … having been in a room, quite definitely been in a room, but with no recollection of whose room, or of what had happened in that room, or of how I’d wound up there in the first place. Then, another flash and I wasn’t in a hotel corridor any more but walking acros
s the Brooklyn Bridge, quickly, and in time to something – in time, I soon realized, to the suspension cables flickering in geometric patterns against the pale blue of the early morning sky.

  I stopped and turned around.

  I looked back at the familiar postcard view of downtown Manhattan, aware now that I couldn’t properly account for the last eight hours of my life – but aware, too, that I was fully conscious again, and alert and cold and sore all over. I quickly decided that whatever reasons I’d had for walking to Brooklyn had surely atrophied by now, seized up, been lost to some fossilized energy configuration that could never be re-animated. So I headed back over the bridge towards downtown, and walked – limped, as it turned out – all the way home to my apartment on Tenth Street.

  [ 14 ]

  I SAYLIMPED, because I had obviously sprained my left ankle at some point during the night. And when I was getting undressed to take a shower, I saw that there was extensive bruising on my body. This explained the soreness – or partly explained it – but in addition to these leaden blue patches on my chest and ribs, there was something else … something that looked curiously like a cigarette burn on my right forearm. I ran a finger over the small reddish mark, pressed it, winced, then circled it slowly – and as I did so, I felt a deep sense of unease, an incipient terror, tightening its grip around my solar plexus.

  But I resisted, because I didn’t want to think about this – didn’t want to think about what may or may not have gone on in some hotel room, didn’t want to think about any of it. I had a meeting with Carl Van Loon and Hank Atwood in a few hours’ time and what I needed more than anything else – certainly more than I needed a debilitating panic attack – was to get myself organized.

  And focused.

  So I took two more pills, shaved, got dressed and started going over the notes I’d made the previous day.

  The arrangement with Van Loon was that I’d show up at his office on Forty-eighth Street at around 10 a.m. We’d have a talk about the situation, compare notes and maybe devise a provisional gameplan. Then we’d go to meet Hank Atwood for lunch.

  In the cab on the way to Forty-eighth Street, I tried to concentrate on the intricacies of corporate financing, but I kept being appalled anew at what had happened and at the degree of recklessness I was clearly capable of.

  An eight-hour blackout?

  Might that not just have constituted a warning sign?

  But then I remembered getting sick in a bathroom once, years ago – actually throwing up blood into the washbasin – and immediately afterwards going back out to the living-room, to the little pile of product in the centre of the table … and to the cigarettes and to the vodka and to the elastic, malleable, untrackable conversation …

  And then – twenty minutes later – having it happen again.

  And again.

  So … obviously not.

  I stopped the cab at Forty-seventh Street and walked the remaining block to the Van Loon Building. By the time I got into the lobby, I had just about managed to suppress my limp. I was greeted by Van Loon’s personal assistant and taken up to a large suite of offices on the sixty-second floor. I noticed that in the general design of the place – in the corridors and in the enormous reception area – there was an impeccable though slightly bewildering blend of the traditional and the modern, the stuffy and the streamlined – a sumptuous, seamless fusion of mahogany, ebony, marble, steel, chrome and glass. This made the company seem, at once, like an august, venerable institution and a pared-down, front-line operation – staffed mostly, I have to say, by guys about fifteen years my junior. Nevertheless, I had a keen sense that nothing here was beyond me, that it was all for the taking, that the corporate structure of a place like this was delicate and gossamer-thin and would yield to the slightest pressure.

  But as I sat down in the reception area, beneath a huge Van Loon & Associates company logo, my mood shifted again, lurched a little closer to the edge, and I was assailed by queasiness and doubt.

  How had I ended up here?

  How had I come to be working for a private investment bank?

  Why was I wearing a suit?

  Who was I?

  I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions even now. In fact, a few moments ago – in the bathroom of the Northview Motor Lodge – staring into the mugshot-sized mirror above the stained wash-basin, with the hum and occasional rattle of the ice-machine outside penetrating the walls, and my skull, I struggled to see even a trace of the individual that had begun to form and crystallize out of that mass of chemically-induced impulses and counter-impulses, out of that irresistible surge of busyness. I searched, too, in the lines of my face for any indications of the individual I might eventually have become – a big-time player, a destroyer, a spiritual descendant of Jay Gould – but all there was in my reflection, all I recognized, with no real indications of anything the future might have held, was me … the familiar face of a thousand shaves.

  I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was extremely friendly and smiled over at me every now and again. When Van Loon finally arrived, he strolled across reception with a broad smile on his face. He slapped me on the back and ushered me into his office, which was about half the size of Rhode Island.

  ‘Sorry for the delay, Eddie, but I’ve been overseas.’

  Flicking through some documents on his desk, he then explained that he’d flown in direct from Tokyo on his new Gulfstream V.

  ‘You’ve been to Tokyo and back since Tuesday evening?’ I asked.

  He nodded and said that having waited sixteen months to get the new jet, he’d wanted to make sure that it was worth its not inconsiderable price tag of $37m and change. His delay in arriving this morning, he added after a pause, had had nothing to do with the jet, but was rather the fault of gridlocked Manhattan traffic. It seemed to matter to him that I understood this.

  I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.

  ‘So, Eddie,’ he said, sitting down behind the desk, and indicating that I should sit down too, ‘did you have a chance to look at those files?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They were interesting.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t think you should really have much difficulty justifying the price that MCL is asking,’ I began, shifting in the seat, aware suddenly of how tired I was.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because there are some very significant options embedded in this deal, strategic stuff that isn’t evident in the existing numbers.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, the biggest option value lies in the build-out of a broadband infrastructure, which is something Abraxas really needs …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To defend itself against aggressive competition – some other portal that might be in a position to develop faster downloads, streaming video, that kind of thing.’

  As I spoke – and through the almost hallucinatory quality of my exhaustion – I was becoming conscious of how large a gap there was between information and knowledge, between the huge amount of data I’d absorbed in the last forty-eight hours and the arrangement of that data into a coherent argument.

  ‘The thing is,’ I went on, ‘building-out broadband is a big cash drain and highly risky, but since Abraxas has a leading portal brand already, all it really needs is a credible threat to develop its own broadband.’

  Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.

  ‘So, by buying MCL, Abraxas gets that credibility, without actually having to complete the build-out, at least not straightaway.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘MCL owns Cableplex, yeah? That puts them directly into twenty-five million homes, so even though they might need to upgrade their systems they’re ahead of the game. Meanwhile, Abraxas can slow down MCL’s spend on the broadband build-out, thereby delaying any nega
tive cashflow, but retaining the option to develop it later should they need to …’ I was having a sensation I’d had a couple of times before on MDT – one of walking on a verbal tightrope, of speaking to someone and clearly making sense, but at the same time of having no idea at all what I was talking about. ‘… and remember, Carl, the ability to delay an investment decision like that can have enormous value.’

  ‘But it still remains risky, doesn’t it? I mean, developing this broadband thing? Regardless of whether you do it now or later?’

  ‘Sure, but the new company that comes out of this deal probably won’t have to make the investment in any case, because I think they’d actually be better off negotiating a deal with another broadband player, which would have the added advantage of reducing potential overcapacity in the industry.’

  Van Loon smiled.

  ‘That’s pretty fucking good, Eddie.’

  I smiled too.

  ‘Yeah, I think it works. It’s basically a win-win situation. And there are other options as well, of course.’

  I could see Van Loon looking at me and wondering. He was obviously unsure of what to ask me next … in case it all fell apart and I somehow revealed myself to be an idiot. But he eventually asked me the only question that made any sense in the circumstances.

  ‘How do the numbers add up?’

  I reached out and took a legal pad from his desk, and a pen from my inside jacket pocket. I leant forward and started writing. After I’d gotten a few lines down on the page, I said, ‘I’ve used the Black–Scholes pricing model to show how the option value varies as a percentage of the underlying investment …’ – I stopped, flipped over the page and continued writing at the top of the next one – ‘… and I’ve done it over a range of risk profiles and time-frames.’

  I wrote furiously for the next fifteen minutes or so, copying from memory the various mathematical formulae I’d used the previous day to illustrate my position.