Under the Night

by Alan Glynn

  ‘I’m not looking to buy it. I just want to know that it’s real, that it isn’t some bullshit story.’

  ‘Oh, it’s real all right.’

  ‘How do you know that, Kasper? You haven’t told me a single thing that would stand up to scrutiny.’

  Kasper gives a slow shake to his head, as if to imply that I am sadly deluded, that I’m missing the bigger picture here.

  It’s an impasse we’ve arrived at before. It’s also usually the point at which Kasper, unwilling to concede, digs his heels in.

  ‘Okay, I can’t actually prove this, Ray, not to your high standards anyway, but I’m going to tell you something that I heard – it was maybe a year ago, two at the outside – from a guy who knows a guy who works at Eiben.’

  He actually uses the phrase ‘a guy who knows a guy’. In my head, I have already moved on. I start sliding to the edge of the booth. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘One of the reasons they’re so desperate to develop a new product is that in the next couple of years the patents for both Triburbazine and Narolet will expire. That means Eiben is going to have to come up with fresh revenue streams, and the word is that they’ve been working for nearly a decade now on a new drug for geriatrics.’

  I stop.

  ‘It’s a derivative of MDT that supposedly reverses dementia, that fast-tracks neurogenesis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And apparently that’s just for starters.’

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Yeah, and I mean, if you’re talking about the biggest money-maker of all time, that’s your target demographic right there, surely, the eighty-is-the-new-thirty crowd. They have all the fucking money in the world and boy are they willing to spend it, because when you—’

  I hold up a hand to stop him. ‘This is in development now?’

  ‘Yep.’ Kasper is clearly gratified by this new urgency in my voice. ‘That’s my understanding.’

  ‘Have they done any trials?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Having reeled me in, to some degree, he can now afford to dial things back a little. ‘We’d have to assume.’

  I put my hand on the table, poised to leave. I look at the drinks and the untouched plate of pickled green tomatoes. ‘Let me get this.’

  ‘You’re not leaving?’

  ‘I have to. But listen, thanks.’ As I’m standing up, I pull out my wallet.

  ‘Oh, put your money away,’ Kasper says. ‘I’ve got an account here. I don’t understand, though. What’s going on? What did I say?’ He pauses. ‘What did I tell you?’

  I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’ I turn to go.

  ‘Come on. What is it? You can’t leave me in the dark.’

  I glance back. ‘You just connected a couple of dots for me, Kasper, that’s all.’

  11

  The next morning, Sweeney doesn’t even consider not taking another dose. He uses the same method, the one with the safety pin, but maybe he goes a little heavier this time, on account of how tired he is, on account of how he needs a boost. It still seems like an infinitesimal amount, because it’s barely visible, but at the same time he’s not under any illusions here.

  He gets out of the house as fast as he can. On the train, he doesn’t read the newspaper, but instead looks out the window. The vibrant green of Long Island soon morphs into the dirty gray of Manhattan, and before he knows it the train is pulling into Penn Station. Instead of taking the subway on to 42nd, as he usually would, Sweeney skips up to the street and starts walking. He goes south. Any anxiety he may have felt about simply not showing up for work today has already lifted.

  There’s a lot of noise and bustle and traffic on the streets, and the air is dense with smells – from exhaust pipes, ventilation grilles, papaya stands, hotdog carts, from people. These last are the most intense, the various body odors and perfumes all appearing in the atmosphere before him as colored streaks, endlessly swirling, looping, intertwining.

  He really needs to tamp this down.

  Ditto the cacophony of car horns, sirens, jackhammers, creaking steel frames in nearby buildings. Ditto the relentless chatter of innumerable human voices.

  The weird thing is, though, he can tamp it down. It feels like a skill, but one he continually has to remind himself he has. Because a barrage of sense impressions like this could easily induce a feeling of panic. The key is to redirect his attention, and now he finds it landing somewhere around his feet, or beneath his feet, on the very sidewalk he’s pounding. As he moves along, down Seventh Avenue, unexpected time-lapse images flash before him of Manhattan’s layered history … of its once-pristine salt marshes and streams, of its unspoiled valleys and woods. He sees the great leveling, then the etching out of the grid, the wide north–south avenues, the narrow east–west cross-streets, followed by the buildings themselves, the mansions, the brownstones, the apartment houses, and finally, the skyscrapers. These burst through the sidewalks, and with their steel frames and hoisting cables, stack up, story by story, decade by decade.

  He needs to tamp this down, too.

  What he really needs is to talk to someone, to engage. It’s how he felt that first night. He looks around, but who is he going to talk to? That guy at the stand on the corner turning hotdogs? This movie barker behind him under the marquee, in the epaulets and braided greatcoat? The traffic cop over there on horseback? The bangled crone in the doorway next to the jewelry store? Fine. Why not? Why not any one of them? But how does he propose modulating the out-of-control dynamo that’s currently running inside his brain? Because what if the only thing anyone wants to talk about is the game or the weather or what’s showing at the Roxy? And why shouldn’t they? Did you see Stalag 17? Is it going to rain? What about that Roy Campanella?

  He just doesn’t know if he’d be able to cope. Or if they’d be able to cope with him.

  As he walks on, block after block, he scans the ever-approaching tide of new faces for any flicker of light or connection. But they’re all preoccupied, all caught up in their own affairs – as he would be. At 23rd Street, he looks right and sees the sign for the Hotel Chelsea. He crosses the street at an angle and walks alongside the mammoth building, gazing up at its redbrick façade and wrought-iron balconies. This place is a regular dive by all accounts, home to vagrants and countesses, anarchists and poets, and was built – he somehow finds himself knowing – by an architect called Philip Hubert in the 1880s. Originally an apartment house, it was later converted into a residential hotel. More recently, the place has been run by a couple of Hungarian émigrés.

  Sweeney reckons there’d definitely be a few people in here he could talk to, or that he could get to listen to him, at least – if it weren’t for the fact that they’re all probably still asleep, being night owls and vampires and such, by reputation at any rate. As he gets closer to the hotel entrance, he eyes it with curiosity. What is he going to do, though? Storm past the desk, head up the central staircase, and knock on someone’s door?

  Hey, wake up, TALK to me!

  He might not have a choice. But then, weaving slightly and approaching from the opposite direction, comes a smallish man with round eyes and matted curly hair. He’s wearing a tweed jacket and a polka-dot bow tie. He seems to be muttering, or cursing, and is making gargoyle-like faces into the air.

  Sweeney slows his pace.

  The man slows down, too. He’s at the entrance to the hotel, clearly about to turn and go inside, but he has noticed Sweeney looking at him.

  They stare at each other for a few seconds.

  Sweeney knows who this man is, but can’t remember his name. Then it comes to him, along with random fragments of poetry.

  ‘Mr Thomas, please,’ he says. ‘Do not go—’

  ‘What? Gentle into that good hotel? Ha! I’m afraid I must. Or would you have me shit myself here on the pavement?’ He waves a dismissive hand in the air. ‘The sidewalk.’ He sniffs loudly. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘We haven’t met.’ Sweeney steps forward and extends his hand.
‘My name is Ned Sweeney.’

  They shake.

  ‘Sweeney? The mad king, the mad, lost, wandering king, flying from tree to tree. Are you mad, Mr Sweeney? Are you a king?’

  ‘No, Mr Thomas, I’m afraid I’m not. I work in advertising.’

  ‘Ah, then you will no doubt be able to lend me twenty dollars. And please, call me Dylan.’

  ‘Sure.’ Sweeney pats his jacket pocket. ‘I could write you a check?’

  ‘A check? With a q-u-e? Why, that would be splendid.’

  Sweeney reaches for his pocket.

  ‘But not here in the street, surely.’ Beckoning Sweeney to follow him, the man turns and heads for the entrance to the hotel. ‘Besides, my need for the lavatory is more pressing – temporarily, I assure you – than my need for the filth of your lucre.’

  Sweeney follows him inside and they make their way up to the second floor.

  Dylan Thomas’s room is a mess. There is dirty laundry strewn about the place, as well as empty liquor bottles and discarded candy wrappers. The poet disappears at once into the bathroom and shortly afterwards Sweeney is treated to a symphony of farting and sphincteral spluttering. As this plays out, Sweeney stands by the window, gazing down at 23rd Street, trying to retrieve whatever information is stored inside his brain about this curious little man. More fragments of poetry come to him, although he has no recollection of ever having read them. He recalls facts a little more clearly, stuff he must have absorbed, details: the wife, bad-tempered, fiery-haired Caitlin, the extensive reading tours, the endless, Benzedrine-fueled boozing. And isn’t there a libel case? Didn’t the Welsh bard threaten to sue Time magazine for calling him ‘a trial to his friends and a worry to his family’?

  Good luck with that.

  And there’s more, much more. It’s just that Sweeney feels dizzy all of a sudden, woozy, as the room starts to melt around him, shapes losing their definition, colors dripping like wax …

  Shit.

  He shuts his eyes, as tight as he can, and keeps them closed. After a few seconds, maybe longer, he opens them again. To his relief, everything has pulled back into focus. But then he turns around to find that at the very least several minutes must have passed. Dylan is on the bed now, propped up with pillows, and looking extremely unwell. A dark-haired young woman is sitting on the edge of the bed, talking on the telephone.

  ‘Yes, I’m holding for Dr Feltenstein, and please hurry.’

  Elsewhere in the room, a man and a woman are seated at a small table, smoking cigarettes. They’re in their forties, well groomed and elegantly dressed. They look like money.

  Sweeney wonders if he wrote that check.

  ‘Oh, but Ned, really,’ the woman is saying, as she looks up at him, ‘what are we supposed to make of it all? Wasn’t this Mossadegh character Time’s Man of the Year for 1951?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not necessarily a tribute,’ Sweeney says, continuing a conversation he doesn’t recall starting. ‘They gave it to Hitler, after all – it’s more an indication of someone’s impact on the national or international scene, and Mossadegh certainly ruffled a lot of feathers when he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.’

  ‘But the fellow’s a damn communist,’ the man says.

  ‘Not exactly. He’s a populist, which makes him singularly unpopular over here.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Well …’ Sweeney turns and glances over at Dylan. He seems to be in distress now, his breathing slow and irregular. The woman on the telephone is sitting very still, staring at the floor, waiting. Sweeney turns back. ‘What it means is, we don’t like popular uprisings because they’re bad for business, they’re bad for the big corporations, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this happening again, somewhere else—’

  The woman on the phone sits up. ‘Dr Feltenstein? Yes, it’s Liz Reitell. Can you get here right away?’

  ‘—in Guatemala, say, because I don’t imagine the United Fruit Company can be too happy with that agrarian reform program Arbenz is currently implementing.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Dr Feltenstein, thank you.’

  ‘But hang on, Ned, are you suggesting—’

  Liz puts the receiver back on the cradle. ‘Come on, everybody,’ she says, clapping her hands. ‘We need to clear the room.’

  The man and the woman stub out their cigarettes. ‘Poor Liz,’ the woman says. ‘Come along, Jack. And Ned, darling, you’re coming to lunch with us, I insist.’ She faces the bed. ‘Dylan, Dylan, what can—’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ned stays here. I insist.’ The poet’s voice, both stentorian and mellifluous, brooks no argument.

  Liz seems a little put out by this, but says nothing.

  Once the others have left, Sweeney stands at the end of the bed. As Dylan talks, his voice subdued now – ‘I have seen the gates of hell’ – Sweeney is busy finishing an earlier thought … Shukri al-Quwatli in Syria, 1949, another coup d’état … is there a pattern here? Even the Italian elections in ’48, in retrospect, seem a little, well, convenient. He’s not sure. There’s something here, though – he senses it, a complex subterranean web of cause and effect, but it’s ill-defined at the moment, it’s elusive. His mind on MDT-48 is a sort of looping combination of information and intuition – and on this particular question he simply needs more information, more data. It’s a little different looking at Dylan, however. Sweeney’s got all the data he needs, and has, in any case, seen this before, or something like it, with Marilyn. He’s felt it, the unbearable, raw-nerved intolerance of the very business of being alive, and especially being alive in those moments that aren’t acutely heightened in some way, by acting or alcohol or adulation.

  And even those moments – all of them, sooner or later – can wear pretty thin.

  ‘You know, Ned, I haven’t written a bloody poem in over two years.’

  ‘I believe it,’ Sweeney says. ‘I do. And you’ve obviously convinced yourself that you’ll never write another one.’

  ‘Who else would convince me?’ He closes his eyes, his voice trailing away. ‘Someone had to do it.’

  ‘Oh, enough of this,’ Liz says, steel in her voice. She has the demeanor and brusque efficiency of a physician herself, though it’s clear that she’s emotionally invested in what’s going on.

  Sweeney feels as if he’s gazing down at the scene from a great height now, observing these people, seeing their confusion and pain but helpless to intervene. Then the doctor arrives. It seems like seconds later, but Sweeney is learning to accept that his perception of time is elastic. Feltenstein is tall and rangy, with a professional manner verging on the sacerdotal. As he administers to Dylan, with Liz close by, Sweeney hovers in the background. Words are said, about cutting down on alcohol, about eating three square meals a day, and about getting a proper night’s sleep. It all sounds a bit cursory, but as he’s speaking, Feltenstein expertly prepares a syringe and needle, turns Dylan on his side and gives him an injection. He then takes a prescription pad from his leather bag, fills out a page, and hands it to Liz.

  ‘You know the drill,’ he says.

  Liz folds the prescription in half.

  The doctor leaves and almost immediately Dylan is sitting up in the bed. His breathing is more regular and his eyes are alert. He declares that he’s hungry and wants to go out.

  ‘Only beer,’ Liz says, a little too fast.

  ‘Of course, my dear. Or water even.’ He looks at Sweeney and winks. ‘Let’s go to Lüchow’s.’

  Liz says she has work to do back at the office, but will join them later. While Dylan is putting his shoes on, she makes a face at Sweeney, one that he interprets as a plea. I don’t know who you are, it says, a hanger-on, or a genuine friend, I can’t keep track, but please, please, look after him.

  Lüchow’s is a German place on 14th Street, and in the cab on the way there, Sweeney asks Dylan what was in that injection the do
ctor gave him.

  ‘Cortisone. Wonderful stuff. It’s a miracle drug. One shot and I’m free of the shackles of anxiety. Death takes a holiday, so to speak. From my mind, at any rate.’ He taps out an impatient drumbeat on his legs. ‘La morte in vacanza.’

  But in the movie, and in the Casella original, Sweeney thinks – and resists pointing out – it’s Death who falls in love with a mortal.

  Not the other way around.

  Sweeney looks out at the passing liquor stores and delicatessens on Seventh Avenue. He has read about this miracle drug. It’s a hormone – 17-hydroxy-11-dehydrocorticosterone – first synthesized for commercial use a few years ago by someone at Merck and initially thought to be effective in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. But subsequent reports showed it to have a dramatic analgesic impact on a host of other conditions – Addison’s disease, Hodgkin’s disease, Cushing’s syndrome, asthma, retinitis pigmentosa, even on gout and hay fever.

  This was in an article he saw in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He was in a waiting room somewhere, as he remembers, a clinic. He didn’t actually read the article, though. His eye barely passed over the page. And yet he somehow managed to retain the whole thing. Just as he must have flicked through a volume of Dylan’s poetry one time, perhaps in the Strand or the Gotham Book Mart, and could now, if he chose to, recite some of it back to him.

  ‘And death shall have no dominion …’

  ‘Ha! Quite so, Ned. Even on his holidays. But this afternoon, I am afraid, it is beer that shall have no dominion. I have a sudden thirst for whiskey.’ He leans forward in the cab. ‘Driver, let’s take a detour to Hudson Street, shall we?’

  They arrive at the White Horse Tavern, where Sweeney came with Matt Drake and Mike Sutton that night.

  This time it’s a little different. As Dylan slowly becomes embalmed in whiskey, shot after shot of Old Grand-Dad, it occurs to Sweeney that cortisone is no match for hard liquor, whereas the smallest tincture of MDT-48 would probably be enough to cure a whole roomful of alcoholics. Hangers-on soon arrive, and some genuine friends, too. Sweeney has no difficulty telling the difference, or keeping track, but what he can’t help himself from doing is losing interest and tuning out of various channels of conversation. The atmosphere in the Horse is thick with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, but there’s something else spiraling around in it as well – a desperate plume of longing for the finality of defeat.