by Alan Glynn
She half got up as I arrived and we kissed awkwardly. She sat back down on her side of the booth. I slid into the opposite side to face her.
My heart was pounding.
I said, ‘How are you doing?’ and it immediately seemed odd to me that I wasn’t commenting on how she looked, because she looked so different.
‘I’m OK.’
Her hair was short and dyed a kind of reddish brown. She was heavier – generally, but especially in the face – and had lines around her eyes. These made her look very tired. I was one to talk, of course, but that didn’t make it any less of a shock.
‘So, Eddie, how are you?’
‘I’m OK,’ I lied, and then added, ‘I suppose.’
Melissa was drinking a beer and had a cigarette on the go. The place was almost empty. There was an old man reading a newspaper at a table near the door and there were two young guys on stools at the bar. I caught the eye of the barman and pointed at Melissa’s beer. He nodded back at me. The normality of this little routine belied how strange and unsettled I was feeling. A few weeks earlier I’d been sitting opposite Vernon in a booth of a cocktail lounge on Sixth Avenue. Now, thanks to some unaccountable dream-logic, I was sitting in a booth opposite Melissa in this place.
‘You look good,’ she said. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, she added, ‘And don’t tell me I look good, because I know I don’t.’
It occurred to me that despite the changes – the weight, the lines, the weariness – nothing could eradicate the fact that Melissa was still beautiful. But after what she’d said I couldn’t think of any way to tell her this without sounding patronizing. What I said was, ‘I’ve lost quite a bit of weight recently.’
Looking me straight in the eyes, she replied, ‘Well, MDT will certainly do that to you.’
‘Yeah, I suppose it will.’
In as quiet and circumspect a voice as I could muster, I then asked, ‘So, what do you know about all of this?’
‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘here’s the bottom line, Eddie. MDT is lethal, or can be, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll do serious damage to your brain, and I’m talking about permanently.’ She then pointed to her own head with the index finger of her right hand, and said, ‘It fucked my brain up – which I’ll go into later – but the point I want to make now is, I was one of the lucky ones.’
I swallowed.
The barman appeared with a tray. He placed a glass of beer down in front of me and exchanged the ashtray on the table with a clean one. When he’d gone, Melissa continued. ‘I only took nine or ten hits, but there was one guy who took a lot more than that, over a period of weeks, and I know he died. Another unfortunate shmoe ended up as a vegetable. His mother had to sponge him down every day and feed him with a spoon.’
My stomach was jumping now, and a mild headache had started up.
‘When was this?’
‘About four years ago.’ She paused. ‘Vernon didn’t tell you any of this stuff?’ I shook my head. She seemed surprised. Then, as though great physical effort were required for what she was doing, she took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she went on, ‘so about four years ago Vernon was hanging out with a client of his who worked at some pharmaceutical plant and had access that he shouldn’t have had to a whole range of new drugs. One of them in particular, which didn’t have a name yet and hadn’t been tested, was supposed to be … amazing. So, in order to test it, because of course they were too goddamned shrewd to test it themselves, Vernon and this guy started getting people – their friends basically – to take it.’
‘Even you?’
‘Vernon didn’t want me to take it at first, but he talked it up so much that I insisted. You know what I was like, curious to a fault.’
‘It wasn’t a fault.’
‘Anyway, a few of us found ourselves in on this – I don’t know – let’s call it an informal trial period.’ She paused and took a sip from her beer. ‘So what do you want, I took it and it was amazing.’ She paused again, and looked at me for confirmation. ‘I mean, you’ve taken it, you know what I’m talking about, right?’
I nodded.
‘Well. I did it a few more times and then I got scared.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because … I wasn’t stupid. I knew no one could maintain that level of mental activity for very long and survive. It was nonsense. Let me give you an example, one day I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe … superstring theory, yeah? I read it in forty-five minutes, and understood it.’ She took a last drag from her cigarette. ‘Don’t ask me about it now, though.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Then I had this thing I was supposed to be working on at the time, a series of articles about self-organizing adaptive systems – the research that’s been done into them, their wider applicability, whatever. My work-rate increased ten-fold overnight, I’m not kidding you. My boss at Iroquois magazine thought I was pitching for his job as Features Editor. So I guess I just chickened out. I panicked. I couldn’t handle it. I stopped taking it.’
She shrugged her shoulders a couple of times.
‘And?’
‘And – eh – I started getting sick, after a few weeks, headaches, nausea. Talk about panic. I went back to Vernon to see if I maybe shouldn’t take another hit, or half a hit, see if that would make any difference. But that was when he told me about this other guy who’d just died.’
‘How had he died?’
‘Rapid two-day deterioration – headaches, dizziness, loss of motor skills, blackouts. Boom. He was dead.’
‘How much had he taken?’
‘One hit every day for about a month.’
I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
‘How much have you been taking, Eddie?’
She was looking directly at me now, with those remarkable deep brown eyes. She was biting on her lower lip.
‘I’ve been taking a lot.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘More than that guy.’
‘Jesus.’
There was a long pause.
‘So you must still have a supply, then,’ she said eventually.
‘Not exactly, I’ve got some left, a stash, but … I got it from Vernon. He supplied it to me and now he’s gone. I don’t know anyone else.’
She looked at me, slightly puzzled. Then she said, ‘That guy I told you about died because they didn’t know what they were doing, they had no idea about dosage or strength, or anything – and as well, people reacted to it differently. But it didn’t take them long to work all of that stuff out.’ She paused, took in another deep breath, and continued. ‘Vernon was making a lot of money dealing MDT, and I haven’t heard of anyone else dying since the early days, so presumably whatever he gave you or told you was right for you. I mean, the dosage was worked out, right? You do know what you’re doing?’
‘Hmm.’
Did I tell her at this point that Vernon had only given me a sampler, and that he hadn’t had a chance to tell me anything?
What I said was, ‘So what happened with you, Melissa?’
She lit up another cigarette and seemed to be considering for a moment whether or not she was going to let me sidetrack her.
I took a cigarette, too.
Then she began. ‘Well, naturally after me getting sick and that guy dying I didn’t go near it again, I didn’t touch it. But I was really scared. I mean I was married and had two small kids.’ When she said this, she almost flinched, as though reacting to a threatened slap in the face – as though she felt that articulating this level of irresponsibility should instantly have provoked a violent reaction from someone. After a moment, she went on. ‘Anyway, it never seemed to get much worse than bad headaches and occasional nausea. But over a period of months I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than ten minutes at a stretch without getting a migraine. I missed deadlines. I became sluggish, lazy. I put on weight.’ She pulled contemptuously at her sweater. ‘My memory was shot to bits. That series of articles?
Forget it – the whole thing just disintegrated. Iroquois magazine let me go. The marriage fell apart. Sex? Get out of here.’ She leant back and shook her head. ‘That was four years ago and I haven’t been the same since.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I live in Mahopac and waitress four nights a week at a place called Cicero’s. Now I can’t read any more – I mean, what, the fucking New York Post?’
I felt as though sulphuric acid were being secreted into the pit of my stomach.
‘I can’t deal with stressful or emotional situations any more, Eddie. I’m wired up now because I’m seeing you, but after this meeting I’m going to have a headache for three days. Believe me, I’m going to pay dearly for this.’
She half stood up and eased her way out of the booth.
‘And I’ve got to pee. Which is another thing.’ She stood there, looking down at me, one hand scratching the back of her head. ‘But Jesus, you don’t need to know about that, right?’
Waving an arm dismissively, Melissa walked off towards the bathroom.
I gazed out across the bar now, reeling from what she’d told me, barely able to comprehend it. First of all, it seemed incredible to me that we were actually in the same place together, sharing a drink, talking – and that right now she was over there in the bathroom, in jeans and a baggy sweater, peeing. Because any time I’d thought of her over the past ten years, the person I’d automatically visualized had been the thin shiny Melissa of circa 1988, the one with long black hair and prominent cheekbones, the Melissa I’d seen hike up her skirt a thousand times and pee and continue talking about whatever she’d been talking about. But the Melissa of those days, apparently, had unravelled in time and space and was a ghost now. I was never going to see her again, never going to bump into her in the street. She’d been supplanted by the Melissa I hadn’t kept up with, the one who’d gotten married again and had kids, who’d worked for Iroquois magazine, the one who’d allowed her teeming, tumultuous brain to be damaged, and permanently so, by some untried, untested and previously unknown pharmaceutical product …
Before long, tears were gathering behind my eyes and I could feel a rawness in my throat. Then my hands started shaking. What was happening to me? It’d only been something like twenty-four hours since I’d taken my last dose of MDT and already it seemed that small cracks were appearing on the hard chemical shell that had formed around me in recent weeks. Seeping through these cracks, in turn, were some strong emotions, and I wasn’t sure how well I was going to be able to handle them. I pictured myself crying, sobbing, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, all of which seemed to make perfect sense for a while, as though it would be an exquisite relief. But then in the next moment Melissa was on her way back from the bathroom and I had to make some kind of an effort to pull myself together.
She sat down opposite me again and said, ‘You OK?’
I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look fine?’
‘It’s just … I’m happy to see you again, Melissa, I really am. But I feel so bad about … you know … I mean, I can’t believe that you’ve …’
The tears I’d been trying to hold back came into my eyes at this point. I clenched my fists and stared down at the table. ‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment, and then smiled – but the expression on my face was probably so demented that it didn’t come across as a smile. I said ‘sorry’ again and as I wiped my eyes with one hand, I ground the knuckles of the other one into the surface of the wooden bench I was sitting on.
Without looking directly at her, I could tell that Melissa was now engaged in a damage limitation exercise of her own, one which involved taking deep breaths and whispering the word shit to herself every couple of seconds.
‘Look, Eddie,’ she said eventually, ‘this isn’t about me anymore, or about us – it’s about you.’
That statement had a steadying effect on me and I tried to focus on the implications of it for a moment.
She went on, ‘The reason I called you was because I thought … I don’t know, I thought if you were doing MDT, or had done it, that you should at least know what had happened to me. But I’d no idea you were so …’ she shook her head, ‘… involved. And then when I read that thing in the Post …’
I looked down into my glass of beer. I hadn’t touched it and didn’t think I was going to.
‘I mean, day-trading? Short-selling biotech stocks? I just couldn’t believe it. You must be doing a lot of MDT.’
I nodded, in tacit agreement.
‘But what happens when your supply runs out, Eddie? That’s when the real trouble’s going to start.’
Almost thinking aloud, I said, ‘Maybe I could stop taking it now. Or I could try weaning myself off it.’ I paused briefly to consider these options, but then said, ‘Of course there’s no guarantee that by doing either of those things I’d be doing the right thing, right?’
‘No,’ she said, looking quite pale and tired all of a sudden, ‘but I wouldn’t just stop. Not outright. That’s what I did. You see, it’s about dosage – how much you take, when you take it. That’s what they worked out after I started getting sick, and after that other guy died.’
‘So I should cut down? I should cut back?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. Jesus, I can’t believe that Vernon didn’t tell you about any of this stuff.’
I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
‘Melissa, Vernon never told me anything.’
As I said this, I realized that for my story to make sense – without being the full truth – I was going to have to lie to her, and in a fairly elaborate way. Certain obvious and very awkward questions naturally posed themselves at this point, and I was dreading her asking them – questions such as: How many times had I actually seen Vernon? How had I come to have such a large supply of MDT? Why hadn’t I bothered to find out more about it? But to my surprise, Melissa didn’t put any of these questions to me, or any others for that matter, and we both fell silent for a while.
I studied her face as she lit up another cigarette. I would have expected the Melissa I’d known ten years before to pursue me on every point here, to seek clarification, to have me piece it all together for her. But the woman sitting opposite me now had clearly run out of that kind of steam. I could see that she was curious, and wanted to know why I wasn’t being straight with her, but on another level it was also plain that she didn’t have the time or energy for this sort of thing any more. Vernon was dead. She’d said her piece to me about MDT. She was undeniably concerned about my predicament. But what else could she do or say? She had two kids at home and a life to cope with that was radically different from anything she might ever have envisaged for herself, or felt entitled to. She was tired.
I was on my own.
Melissa looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie.’
‘One question,’ I said, ‘that client of Vernon’s you mentioned? The one who worked for the pharmaceutical plant? I suppose I should be talking to him? That would make sense, wouldn’t it?’ But I immediately saw from the expression on her face that she wasn’t going to be able to help me out.
‘I only met him once, Eddie – four years ago. I don’t remember his name. Tom something – or Todd. That’s the best I can do. I’m really sorry.’
I began to feel panicky now.
‘What about the police investigation?’ I said, ‘No one ever got back in touch with me after that first day. Did they get in touch with you? I mean – did they find out who killed Vernon, and why?’
‘No, but they knew he’d been a coke-dealer at one point, so I guess they’re working on the assumption that it was … a coke thing.’
I paused here, a little thrown by the phrase, ‘a coke thing’. After a moment of reflection, and with the merest hint of sarcasm in my voice, I repeated it, ‘a coke thing’. This was a phrase Melissa had once used to describe our marriage. She picked
up on the reference immediately and seemed to deflate even further.
‘That still rankles, does it?’
‘Not really, but … it wasn’t a coke thing—’
‘I know that. Me making the comment was.’
I could have said a hundred different things in response to that, but all I could come up with was, ‘It was a strange time.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Whenever I look back on it now – I don’t know – it feels …’
‘What?’
‘It’s futile thinking about it, but there’s so much of it that I would do differently.’
The obvious follow-up question – like what? – hung in the air between us for a moment or two. Then Melissa said, ‘So would I.’
She was visibly drained now, and my headache was getting worse, so I decided it was time to extricate us both from the embarrassment and pain of a fraught conversation we’d wandered into carelessly, and which, if we didn’t watch it, could lead us into messy and very complicated territory.
Bracing myself, I then asked her to tell me something about her children. It transpired that she had two daughters, Ally, eight, and Jane, six. They were great, she said, I’d love them – quick-witted, strong-willed tyrants who didn’t miss a trick.
That was it, I thought, enough – I had to get out of there.
We spent a few more minutes chatting and then we brought it to a close. I promised Melissa that I’d keep in touch, that I’d let her know how I was getting on and that maybe I’d even come up someday to see her and the girls in Mahopac. She wrote down her address on a piece of paper, which I looked at and put into the pocket of my shirt.
Seeming to draw on some final reserve of energy, Melissa then held my gaze and said, ‘Eddie, what are you going to do about this?’
I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be OK, that I had quite a few MDT pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually and see how that worked out. I’d be fine. Since I hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the blackouts, however, this felt like a lie. But I didn’t think that under the circumstances Melissa would notice.
