Limitless

by Glynn, Alan

  And yet, strange as it seemed, here I was … happy to be swanning and gliding …

  The maître d’ led us to one of the tables under the balcony, and just as we’d settled down and ordered some drinks Van Loon’s cellphone went off. He answered it with a barely audible grunt, listened for a couple of moments and then flicked it closed. As he was putting it away, he looked at me with a thin, slightly nervous smile.

  ‘Hank’s running a little late,’ he said.

  ‘But he’s coming, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Van Loon fiddled with his napkin for a moment, and then said, ‘Listen, Eddie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about.’

  I swallowed, unsure of what was coming next.

  ‘You know that we have a small trading floor at Van Loon & Associates?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, we have, and I was thinking – that run of trades you made at Lafayette?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That was pretty impressive, you know.’

  A waiter arrived over with our drinks.

  ‘I didn’t really think so when Kevin told me about it at first, but I’ve looked into it since, and well …’ – he held my gaze as the waiter laid out two glasses on the table, plus two half-bottles of mineral water, a Tom Collins and a vodka Martini – ‘ … you certainly seem to know what you’re doing.’

  I took a sip from the Martini.

  Still staring at me, Van Loon added, ‘And how to pick them.’

  I could see that he was burning to ask me how I’d done it. He kept shifting in his seat and glancing directly at me, unsure of what he had in his possession, tantalized at the prospect that maybe I did have some system after all, and that the Holy Grail was right here in the Four Seasons restaurant, sitting at his table. He was tantalized, and at the same time a little apprehensive, but he held off, skirted around the issue, tried to act as if the whole thing wasn’t that big a deal. There was something pathetic and awkward about the way he did this, though – it was ham-fisted, and I began to feel a mild contempt for him stirring inside me.

  But if he had asked me straight out, what would I have said? Would I have been able to bluff my way through some yarn about complexity theory and advanced mathematics? Would I have leant forward in my chair, tapped my right temple and whispered un-der-stand-ing, Carl? Would I have told him that I actually was on special medication, and that I had occasional visions of the Virgin Mary, to boot? Would I have told him the truth? Would I have been able to resist?

  I don’t know.

  I never got the chance to find out.

  A few moments later, a friend of Van Loon’s appeared from across the room and sat at our table. Van Loon introduced me and we all engaged in small talk for a few moments, but pretty quickly the two older men got to discussing Van Loon’s Gulfstream, and I was happy to fade into the background. I could see that Van Loon was agitated, though – torn between not wanting to let me out of his immediate sphere of attention and not wanting to disengage from the conversation with his billionaire crony. But I was already gone, my mind drifting into a contemplation of the impending arrival of Hank Atwood.

  From the various profiles I’d read of him, something had become clear to me about the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus. Even though he was a ‘suit’, a grey corporate executive who mainly concerned himself with what most people thought of as the tedious business of numbers and percentage points, Henry Bryant Atwood was a glamorous figure. There had been larger-than-life ‘suits’ before him, of course – in newspapers, and in the early days of Hollywood, all those cigar-toting moguls who couldn’t speak English, for example – but it hadn’t taken long, in the case of Hollywood, for the ivy-league accountants on the East Coast to step in and take the reins. What most people didn’t understand, however, was that since the full-steam-ahead corporatization of the entertainment business in the 1980s, the centre of gravity had shifted again. Actors and singers and supermodels were still glamorous, sure, but the rarefied air of pure glamour had quietly wafted its way back in the direction of the grey-suited moneymen.

  Hank Atwood was glamorous, not because he was good-looking, which he wasn’t, and not even because the product he pedalled was the very stuff of people’s dreams – the genetically modified food of the world’s imagination – Hank Atwood was glamorous because of the unimaginably huge amounts of money he made.

  And that was the thing. Artistic content was dead, something to be decided by committee. True content now resided in the numbers – and numbers, large numbers, were everywhere. Thirty-seven million dollars for a private jet. A lawsuit settled for $250 million. A $30 billion leveraged buyout. Personal wealth amounting to something in excess of $100 billion …

  And it was at that point – while I was in the middle of this reverie of infinite numerical expansion – that things started to unravel.

  For whatever reason, I suddenly became aware of the people sitting at the table behind me. They were a man and a woman, maybe a real-estate developer and an executive producer, or two trial lawyers – I didn’t know, I wasn’t focused on what they were saying – but there was something in the tone of the man’s voice that cut through me like a knife.

  I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large, predatory birds perched deep in some arid canyon – but ageing ones, with drooping heads and rheumy eyes, old buzzards. Van Loon was involved in a detailed explanation of how he’d been driven to sound-proofing his previous jet, a Challenger something-or-other, and it was during this little monologue that a curious thing happened in my brain. Like a radio receiver automatically switching frequencies, it closed out Carl Van Loon’s voice, ‘ … you see, to avoid undue vibrations, you need these isolator things to wrap around the bolts that connect the interior to the air-frame – silicone rubber isolators, I think they’re called …’ and started receiving the voice of the guy behind me, ‘ … in a big hotel downtown somewhere … it was on a news bulletin earlier … yeah, Donatella Alvarez, the painter’s wife, found on the floor of a hotel room, she’d been attacked apparently, blow to the head … and now she’s in a coma – but it seems they’ve got a lead already – a cleaner at the hotel saw someone leaving the place early this morning, someone with a limp …’

  I pushed my chair back a little.

  … someone with a limp …

  The voice behind me droned on, ‘ … and of course her being Mexican doesn’t help with all of this stuff going on …’

  I stood up, and for a split second it felt as if everyone in the restaurant had stopped what they were doing, had put their knives and forks down and were looking up, expecting me to address them – but they hadn’t, of course, and weren’t. Only Carl Van Loon was looking up at me, a mild flicker of concern in his eyes suddenly lurching into overdrive. I mouthed the word bathroom at him, turned away and started walking. I went quickly, moving between tables, and around tables, looking for the nearest exit.

  But then I noticed someone approaching from the other side of the room – a short, balding man in a grey suit. It was Hank Atwood. I recognized him from magazine photographs. A second later we were passing each other, shuffling awkwardly between two tables, grunting politely. For a brief moment we were so close that I could smell his cologne.

  I got outside on to Fifty-second Street and took in huge gulps of air. As I stood there on the sidewalk, looking around me, I had the sense that by joining the busy crowds out here I’d forfeited my right to be in the Grill Room, and that I wouldn’t be allowed back inside.

  But right now I had no intention of going back inside, and about twenty minutes later I found myself wandering aimlessly down Park Avenue South, consciously suppressing my limp, racking my memory to see if I could recall anything. But there was nothing … I had been in a hotel room and could even see myself walking down an empty hotel corridor. But that was it, everything else
was a blank.

  I didn’t really believe, though … I mean … I didn’t … I couldn’t …

  For the next half-hour, I walked – cutting left at Union Square, then right on First – and arrived back at my building in a complete daze. I walked up the stairs, holding on to the notion that perhaps I’d been hearing things in the restaurant, that I’d imagined it – that it had simply been another blip, a glitch. In any case, I was going to find out pretty soon, because if this thing really had happened, it would still be on the news, so all I had to do was tune in to the radio, or switch on one of the local TV channels …

  But the first thing I noticed when I got into the apartment was the little red light flashing on my answering machine. Almost glad of the distraction, I reached down at once and flicked the ‘play’ button. Then I just stood there in my suit, like an idiot, staring out across the room, waiting to hear the message.

  There was the low hum as the tape rewound, and then – click.

  Beeep.

  ‘Hi … Eddie. It’s Melissa. I’ve been meaning to call you, I really have, but … you know how it is …’ Her voice was a little heavy, and a little slurred, but it was still Melissa’s voice, still Melissa, disembodied, filling up my living-room – ‘Then something occurred to me, my brother … was he giving you anything? I mean – I don’t want to talk about this over the phone, but … was he? Because …’ – I heard ice-cubes clinking in a glass – ‘ … because if he was, you should know something … that stuff …’ – she paused here, as though composing herself – ‘that stuff – MDT-whatever – is really, really dangerous – I mean, you don’t know how dangerous.’ I swallowed, and closed my eyes. ‘So look, Eddie, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong – but … just call me, OK … call me.’

  PART THREE

  [ 15 ]

  A TV NEWSCAST AT TWO O’CLOCK confirmed that Donatella Alvarez, the wife of the Mexican painter, had received a severe blow to the head and was now in a coma. The incident had taken place in a room on the fifteenth floor of a midtown hotel. There were few details given, and no mention was made of any man with a limp.

  I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control hanging limply in my hand was actually doing something, but what else was I going to do that would be any better? Phone up Melissa and ask her if this was the kind of thing she’d had in mind?

  Dangerous?

  What – as in severe blow to the head dangerous? Hospitalization dangerous? Coma dangerous? Death dangerous?

  Obviously, I had no intention of phoning her up with questions like these, but a part of me was riddled with anxiety none the less. Had I really done it? Was the same thing – or something like it – going to happen again? Did Melissa’s ‘dangerous’ mean dangerous to others, or simply dangerous to me?

  Was I being hugely irresponsible?

  What the fuck was going on?

  As the afternoon progressed, I concentrated intently on each news bulletin, as though by sheer force of will I could somehow alter a key detail in the story – have it not be a hotel room, or have Donatella Alvarez not be in a coma. Between the bulletins, I watched cookery shows, live courtroom broadcasts, soaps, commercials, and was aware of myself – unable to help it – processing and storing random bits of useless information. Lay the chicken strips flat on a lightly oiled baking tray and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Call toll-free NOW for a 15 per cent markdown on The GUTbuster 2000 home work-out system. On several occasions during the afternoon, I glanced over at the phone and considered calling Melissa, but each time some override mechanism in my brain kicked in and I immediately found myself thinking about something else.

  By six o’clock, the story had begun to flesh out considerably. After a reception at her husband’s Upper West Side studio, Donatella Alvarez had made her way to a midtown hotel, the Clifden, where she received a single blow to the head with a blunt instrument. The instrument had not as yet been identified, but a key question that remained unanswered was this: what had Señora Alvarez been doing in a hotel room in the first place? Detectives were interviewing all the guests who’d attended the reception, and were especially interested in speaking to an individual named Thomas Cole.

  I stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, perplexed, barely recognizing the name myself. Then the report moved on, and so did I. They gave personal information about the victim, as well as photographs and interviews with family members – all of which meant that before long a very human picture of the 43-year-old Señora Alvarez had begun forming itself in the viewer’s mind. Here, apparently, was a woman of rare physical and spiritual beauty. She was independent, generous, loyal, a loving wife, a devoted mother to twin baby girls, Pia and Flor. Her husband, Rodolfo Alvarez, was reported to be distraught and at a complete loss for any explanation as to what might have happened. They showed a black-and-white photograph of a radiant, uniformed schoolgirl attending a Dominican convent in Rome, circa 1971. They also showed some home-movie footage, flickering images in faded colour of a young Donatella in a summery dress walking through a rose garden. Other images included Donatella on horseback, Donatella at an archeological dig in Peru, Donatella and Rodolfo in Tibet.

  The next phase in the reporting consisted of political analysis. Was this a racially motivated attack? Was it connected in some way to the current foreign policy débâcle? One commentator expressed the fear that it could be the first in a series of such incidents and blamed the attack squarely on the President’s bewildering failure to condemn Defense Secretary Caleb Hale’s intemperate remarks – or alleged remarks, since he was still denying that he’d actually made them. Another commentator seemed to feel that this was collateral damage of a kind we were simply going to have to get used to.

  All through the afternoon, as I watched these reports, I clocked up a bewildering number of reactions – chief among them disbelief, terror, remorse, anger. I vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of MDT – the only discernible thing I could feel was mild boredom.

  By mid-evening, I was quite detached from everything and whenever I heard a reference to the story, my impulse was to say enough, already, as though they were talking about a new mini-series on a cable channel, something adapted from an over-hyped magic-realist pot-boiler … The Dreadful Ordeal of Donatella Alvarez …

  A little after 8.30, I called Carl Van Loon at his apartment on Park Avenue.

  Although the disbelief, terror, etc. of earlier had been uppermost in my mind for a good deal of the afternoon, another part of me had been riddled with anxiety of a different kind – anxiety about having blown my chances with Van Loon, about the extent to which this glitch, this operational malfunction, was going to interfere with my plans for the future.

  As a result – and waiting for Van Loon to come to the phone – I was quite nervous.

  ‘Eddie?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Mr Van Loon.’

  ‘Eddie, I don’t understand. What happened?’

  ‘I got sick,’ I said – the excuse coming to me automatically – ‘there was nothing I could do about it. I had to leave like that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You got sick? What are you, in first grade? You rush off without saying a word? You don’t come back? I’m left there looking like a jerk, making excuses to Hank fucking Atwood?’

  ‘I have a condition, a stomach condition.’

  ‘Then you don’t even bother to call?’

  ‘I needed to see a doctor, Carl. In a hurry.’

  Van Loon was silent for a moment.

  Then he sighed. ‘Well … how are you now?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s taken care of.’

  He sighed again. ‘Are you … what? … I don’t know … are you getting proper treatment for this thing? You want the names of some top consultants? I can …’

  �
��I’m fine. Look, it was a once off. It’s not going to happen again.’ I paused for a moment. ‘How did the meeting go?’

  This time Van Loon paused. I was out on a limb now.

  ‘Well it was a little awkward, Eddie,’ he said eventually, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. I wished you’d been there.’

  ‘Did he seem convinced?’

  ‘In outline, yeah. He says he feels it’s something he can bring to the table, but you and me are going to have to sit down with him and go over the numbers.’

  ‘Great. Sure. Of course. Whenever.’

  ‘Hank’s gone to the coast, but he’ll be back in town on … Tuesday I think, yeah, so why don’t you come into the office some time on Monday and we can set something up.’

  ‘Great – and listen, Carl, I’m sorry again, I really am.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want to see my doctor? He’s—’

  ‘No, but thanks for the offer.’