Limitless

by Alan Glynn

  She nodded. Maybe she had noticed – but again, even if she had, what could she do?

  Outside on Spring Street we said goodbye and embraced. Melissa got a taxi to Grand Central Station and I walked back to Tenth Street.

  [ 18 ]

  THE FIRST THING I DID when I got into the apartment was take a couple of Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets for my headache. Then I lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, hoping that the pain – which was concentrated behind my eyes and had got steadily worse on the walk home from Spring Street – would subside quickly and then fade away altogether. I didn’t often get headaches, so I wasn’t sure if this one had come about as a result of my conversation with Melissa, or if it was a symptom of my sudden withdrawal from MDT. Either way – and both explanations seemed plausible at the time – I found it extremely unsettling.

  In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds. Again and again, I went over Melissa’s story, my thoughts vacillating between horror at what had happened to her and fear about what might be happening to me. I was haunted by the notion of how easily and irreversibly a careless decision, a mood, a whim, can change the direction of a person’s life. I thought about Donatella Alvarez and found it harder than before to simply dismiss the idea that I’d been in any way responsible for what had happened to her – for the easy, irreversible way her life had changed. I thought about my time with Melissa, and worried, agonized, about those things I might have done differently.

  But this was clearly an intolerable situation. I had to take some action soon, or before I knew it I’d be getting sick – sliding into a clinical swamp, developing a whole syndrome of conditions, passing some awful point of no return. So at the very first glimmer of relief from the Excedrin – and this was only the merest dulling of the pain – I got up from the couch and started walking around the apartment, vigorously, as though in some literal sense trying to shake myself into good health.

  Then I remembered something.

  I went into the bedroom and over to the closet. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my head, I bent down and pulled out the old shoe-box from under the blanket and the pile of magazines. I opened it and lifted out the big brown envelope where I’d hidden the cash and pills. I put my hand into the envelope and felt around, ignoring the sealed plastic bag containing the more than 350 pills that were still left. What I was searching for was the other thing I’d hidden in the envelope – Vernon’s tiny black notebook.

  When I found it, I started thumbing my way through it page by page. There were dozens of names and phone numbers in it, quite a few of which had been crossed out, sometimes with new numbers written in above or below the old ones. I recognized Deke Tauber’s name this time, and I vaguely recognized a few other names, but annoyingly – and I checked several times – I didn’t find anyone listed in the notebook whose name was Tom or Todd.

  But still, there had to be someone in amongst all these names who could help me, someone I could contact and maybe get some information from.

  After all, I thought, who were these people?

  Obvious as it was, and even though I’d had the notebook lying in my closet for weeks, it only dawned on me now – this, of course, had been Vernon’s list of clients.

  The realization that these people had all used MDT at one time or another, and were maybe still using it, came as quite a shock to me. It also bruised my ego a little, because although it was clearly irrational to think that no one besides myself had ever ex perienced the amazing effects of MDT, I nevertheless felt that my experience of it was in some way unique and more authentic than that of anyone else who might have tried it. This slightly indignant sense of ownership lingered in my mind as I read through the names in the notebook one more time, but then something else of significance occurred to me. If all of these people were on MDT, then surely that meant it had to be possible to do MDT without succumbing to headaches or blackouts, not to mention permanent brain damage.

  *

  I took another two Excedrin tablets and continued studying the notebook. The more I looked at the names the more familiar some of them seemed, until eventually about half of them had emerged from their earlier obscurity and I started being able to place them. A lot of the names that I recognized were from the business world, people who worked for new or medium-sized companies. There were several writers and journalists, and a couple of architects. Apart from Deke Tauber, none of these people was particularly well-known to the public at large. They all enjoyed some small measure of celebrity, but would be much better-known in their specific fields, so I decided it might be useful to do a little background research into some of them. I booted up my computer and went online.

  Deke Tauber was the obvious one to start with. He had been a bond salesman on Wall Street in the mid-1980s – making lots of money, but spending considerably more. One or other of the Gants had known him in college, so he was often around, at parties, in bars, at openings, wherever there was premium quality blow to be had. I’d met him once or twice and found him to be arrogant and fairly objectionable. After the crash in 1987, however, he lost his job, moved out to California and that appeared to be the end of him.

  Then about three years ago Tauber showed up in New York again, leading a dubious self-improvement cult – Dekedelia – that he had set up in LA. After a slow start, Dekedelia’s membership grew dramatically and Tauber started producing best-selling books and videos. He set up his own software company, opened a chain of cybercafés and moved into real estate. Soon, Dekedelia was a multimillion dollar business, employing over two hundred people, most of whom were also cult members.

  When I trawled through what information I’d managed to find on other people named in Vernon’s client list, I saw the first of two distinct patterns emerging. In each case I looked at, there was – over the previous three or four years – a sudden and unexplained leap forward in the career of the person concerned. Take Theodore Neal. After two decades of churning out unauthorized showbiz biographies and hack magazine work, Neal suddenly produced a brilliant and compelling life of Ulysses S. Grant. Described as ‘a breathtaking and original work of scholarship’, it went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Or Jim Rayburn, the chief of struggling record-label, Thrust, who in one six-month period discovered and signed up hip-hop artists J. J. Rictus, Human Cheese and F Train – and then within another six months had a full mantelpiece of Grammy and MTV awards to his name.

  There were others – middle management grunts fast-tracking it to CEO, defence attorneys mesmerizing juries to achieve unlikely acquittals, architects designing elaborate new skyscrapers over lunch, on the backs of cocktail napkins …

  It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: MDT-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the same way that I’d been using it. What I didn’t know was how much they were taking, and how often. I’d been taking MDT indiscriminately, one, two, occasionally even three at a pop, but I had no idea if I really needed that many, and if taking that many actually rendered the hit more intense or made it last any longer. It was like with cocaine, I supposed, in that after a while it was just a question of gluttony. Sooner or later, if the drug was there, gluttony became the controlling dynamic in your relationship to it.

  So the only way I was going to find out about dosage was to contact someone on the list – just phone them up and ask them what they knew. It was when I did this that the second and more disturbing pattern began to emerge.

  *

  I put it off until the following day – because of my headache, because I was reluctant to call up people I didn’t know, because I was scared of what I might find out. I kept popping Excedrin tablets every few hours, and although they took the edge off the pain, there was still a dull and fairly constant thumping sensation behind my eyes.

  I didn’t imagine I’d have any luck
getting through to Deke Tauber, so the first name I selected from the list was that of a CFO in a medium-sized electronics company. I remembered his name from an article I’d read in Wired.

  A woman answered the phone.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, ‘may I speak to Paul Kaplan, please?’

  The woman didn’t respond, and in the brief silence that followed I considered the possibility that we’d been disconnected. To check, I said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Who is this, please?’ she said, her tone both weary and impatient.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ I said, ‘from Electronics Today magaz—’

  ‘Look … my husband died three days ago.’

  ‘Oh—’

  My mind froze. What did I say now? There was silence. It seemed to go on for ever. I eventually said, ‘I’m very sorry.’

  The woman remained silent. I could hear muffled voices in the background. I wanted to ask her how her husband had died, but I was unable to form the words.

  Then she said, ‘I’m sorry … thank you … goodbye.’

  And that was that.

  Her husband had died three days ago. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. People died all the time.

  I selected another number and dialled it. I waited, staring at the wall in front of me.

  ‘Yes?’

  A man’s voice.

  ‘May I speak to Jerry Brady, please?’

  ‘Jerry’s in …’ He paused, and then said, ‘who’s this?’

  I’d chosen the number at random and realized now that I didn’t know who Jerry Brady was – or who I should be, calling him up on a Sunday morning like this.

  ‘It’s … a friend.’

  The man hesitated, but then went on, ‘Jerry’s in the hospital …’ – there was a slight shake in his voice – ‘… and he’s really sick.’

  ‘Oh my god. That’s awful. What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘That’s just it, we don’t know. He started getting these headaches a couple of weeks ago? Then last Tuesday – no … Wednesday – he collapsed at work …’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘… and when he came to he said he’d been having dizzy spells and muscular spasms all day. He’s been in and out of consciousness ever since, trembling, throwing up.’

  ‘What have the doctors said?’

  ‘They don’t know. I mean, what do you want, they’re doctors. All the tests they’ve done so far have been inconclusive. I’ll tell you something, though …’

  He paused here, and clicked his tongue. I got the impression from his slightly breathless tone that he was dying to talk to someone but at the same time couldn’t quite ignore the fact that he had no idea who I was. For my part I wondered who he was – a brother? A lover?

  I said, ‘Yeah? Go on …’

  ‘OK, here’s the thing,’ he said, obviously judging it immaterial at this stage of the proceedings who the fuck I was, ‘Jerry’d been weird for weeks, even before the headaches. Like he was really preoccupied with something, and worried. Which wasn’t Jerry’s style at all.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Oh my god I said wasn’t.’

  I felt faint and put my free hand up to lean against the wall.

  ‘Look,’ I said quickly, ‘I’m not going to take up any more of your time. Just give Jerry my best, would you?’ Without saying my name, or anything else, I put the phone down.

  I staggered back towards the couch and fell on to it. I lay there for about half an hour, horrified, replaying the two conversations over and over in my mind.

  I eventually got up and dragged myself back to the telephone. There were between forty and fifty names in the notebook and so far I’d only called two of them. I picked another number – and then another one, and then another one after that.

  But it was the same story each time. Of the people I tried to contact, three were dead and the remainder were sick – either already in the hospital, or in varying states of panic at home. In other circumstances, this might have constituted a mini-epidemic, but given that these people displayed quite a wide range of symptoms – and were spread out over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island – it was unlikely that anyone would make a connection between them. In fact, the only thing that did connect them, as far as I could see, was the presence of their phone numbers in this little notebook.

  Sitting on the couch again, massaging my temples, I stared up at the ceramic bowl on the wooden shelf above the computer. I had no choice now. If I didn’t go back on MDT, this headache would intensify and soon be joined by other symptoms, the ones I’d repeatedly heard described on the telephone – dizziness, nausea, muscular spasms, impairment of motor skills. And then, apparently, I would die. It certainly looked as if all the people on Vernon’s client list were going to die, so why should I be any different?

  But there was a difference, and a significant one. I could go back on MDT if I chose to. And they couldn’t. I had a fairly substantial stash of MDT. And they didn’t. Forty or fifty people were out there suffering severe and very probably lethal withdrawal symptoms because their supply had dried up.

  And mine hadn’t.

  In fact, mine had only started, because clearly their supply – or what would have been their supply if Vernon hadn’t died – was the stuff I’d been taking for the past few weeks. I had dreadful guilt feelings about this, but what could I do? There were over three hundred and fifty pills left in my closet, which gave me considerable breathing space, but if I were to share these out among fifty other people no one would benefit. Instead of us all dying this week, we’d all die next week.

  In any case I decided that if I drastically reduced my own intake of MDT, it would have the effect of prolonging my supply, and might also, possibly, stop the blackouts, or at least curtail them.

  *

  I got up and went over to the desk. I stood for a moment, gazing at the ceramic bowl on the shelf, but before I even reached out to touch it I knew that something wasn’t right. I had a sense of fore-boding, of alarm. I took the bowl in my left hand and looked into it. The alarm quickly turned to panic.

  Unbelievably, there were only two tablets left in the bowl.

  Very slowly, almost as if I’d forgotten how to move, I sat down in the chair at my desk.

  I’d put ten tablets into the bowl a couple of days before, and I’d only taken three of them out since then. So where were the other five?

  I felt dizzy, and gripped the side of the chair to steady myself.

  Gennady.

  When I’d finished on the phone with my bank manager the other day, Gennady had been standing here at the desk, with his back to me.

  Could he have taken some of the tablets?

  It didn’t seem possible, but I racked my brains trying to visualize what had gone on, what the exact sequence of movements had been. And then I remembered – when I’d picked up the phone to call Howard Lewis, I’d turned my back on him.

  A couple of minutes drifted by, during which the mind-bending notion of Gennady on MDT sank in. How long would it be, I thought, before the stuff made its way on to the streets, before someone worked out just what it was, reproduced it, gave it a marketable name and started dealing it in clubs, in the backs of cars, on street corners … micro-doses cut with speed at ten bucks a pop …? I didn’t really imagine things would go that far, I suppose – not yet, not if Gennady only had five doses. But given the nature of the MDT hit, it would be safe to assume that once he’d tried it out the first time he’d be unlikely to exercise much restraint with the rest of it. He’d also be unlikely to forget where he’d come across the stuff in the first place.

  I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about how my situation had changed so radically over the previous three or four days, how it had started to fall apart at the seams, to convulse and haemorrhage and slip towards the recurring, the chronic, the terminal.

  Then, about twenty minutes
after that again, in the slipstream of this downward moodswing, I noticed out of the blue that my headache had lifted completely.

  [ 19 ]

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, therefore, I only took half a pill each morning with breakfast. This dosage brought me as close to ‘normal’ as it was probably possible to get under the circumstances. I was apprehensive at first, but when the headaches didn’t come back, I relaxed somewhat and allowed myself to think I might have found a way out, or, at the very least – with a stash of nearly seven hundred such doses in prospect – plenty of time in which to look for a way out.

  But of course it wasn’t that simple.

  I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got dressed. I put on my new suit – which wasn’t that new any more – and stood in front of the mirror. I had to go into Carl Van Loon’s office, but all of a sudden I felt extremely uncomfortable about having to go anywhere dressed like this. I thought I looked strange. A while later, as I made my way into the lobby of the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street, I was so self-conscious that I half expected someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me it had all been a terrible mistake, and that Mr Van Loon had left instructions to have me escorted from the building if I happened to show up.

  Then, in the elevator to the sixty-second floor, I started thinking about the deal I was supposed to be brokering with Van Loon – the Abraxas buyout of MCL-Parnassus. I hadn’t given any thought to it for days – but now, as soon as I tried to recall any of the specifics, the whole subject became a blur. I kept hearing the phrase ‘option value pricing-model’ in my head, hearing it over and over – option value pricing-model, option value pricing-model – but I had only the vaguest notion any more of what this meant. I also knew that ‘the build-out of a broadband infrastructure’ was important, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. It was like waking up after a dream in which you’ve been speaking a foreign language only to find out that you don’t speak the language at all, and barely even understand a word of it.