Receptor

by Alan Glynn

  This makes it sound like I was invited. I reach out to shake his hand and nearly answer with a reflexive Not at all or My pleasure, but stop myself short. I decide to stick with objective reality. “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

  “Yes, yes. Now, let’s take a walk. Mitzi here needs to get out for a bit. We’ll go to the park.”

  Proctor heads for the exit, I follow, and the security guy, at a discreet distance, follows me.

  We make our way over to Peter Detmold Park, which runs along the East River from Forty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Second. The main entrance is a steep brownstone staircase at the end of Fifty-First. Proctor takes his time negotiating the steps and insists on holding Mitzi under his arm. The security guy gets out in front of them and seems quietly attentive to the old man’s needs.

  “You ever been to this park?” Proctor asks.

  “No, but I’ve read about it.”

  “It’s terrific. I come here every day.”

  There is silence for a moment, as Proctor puts Mitzi down. Then the three of us stand there awkwardly, waiting.

  “Come on, Mitzi,” Proctor says. “Make! Make!”

  The dog looks back up at him, and Proctor sighs. “Okay, Dean,” he says, handing the leash over to the security guy. “You take her, will you? I gotta sit down. Come on, Ray.”

  Dean silently takes the leash and wanders off with Mitzi. Proctor and I go a few yards farther along the walkway by the railings and find a bench under the cover of some trees. Facing the East River, we sit down, the traffic humming as it passes below us on the FDR Drive. It’s a nice day, and this is a relatively peaceful setting, but I’m nervous. I don’t have my bearings. There’s a strange, skewed quality to the situation—again, almost like that of a dream—and I’m not sure where it goes from here.

  We sit without speaking for maybe a minute.

  Then Proctor begins. “It’s a funny thing, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “Being in your nineties. There are a few of us—me, Kissinger, 41, Andrew Marshall. I was just seven years old when the Wall Street Crash happened. And I remember it. Think about that. People my age have witnessed more rapid change than any other generation in the whole history of the human race. It’s quite something.”

  “I guess.”

  “Oh, really? Well, wait till you’re ninety-two. Maybe they’ll finally have flying cars by then. But the point is, it’s a long time to be alive.” He raises a finger and taps the side of his head. “It’s a long time up here.”

  He pauses, and I wait.

  “You know, for the longest time the world seems one way, it’s got fixed parameters, American exceptionalism, us versus them”—he holds a hand up and starts checking things off—“containment, capitalism as the least worst option, ditto democracy, all the tenets, and then it’s like you wake up one day and everything has changed, it’s all different. I mean, not everyone agrees. Look at Henry—there he is, still trying to map out the world order, still operating as if there’s some Grand Strategy that will keep us out in front. He’ll never let go. But I already have.”

  Let go of what exactly? I’m thinking. “That must be … a relief?”

  Proctor turns to look at me, his eyes deep and rheumy. “No, there’s no relief, Ray. Just confusion and regret. You see, I’ve lived long enough to understand that maybe we’ve blown it. And I don’t just mean my generation, the so-called best and the brightest. I mean humanity.” He pauses. “Oh, but listen to me, going on.” He stops and claps his hands together. “So. Ray Sweeney. What do you think happened to your grandfather?”

  I didn’t expect this to loop around so fast. “I really don’t know. I grew up hearing that he’d killed himself.” There’s a tremor in my voice. “It was just common knowledge. No one in our family talked about it.”

  “Well, that’s not surprising.”

  I continue and keep my gaze straight ahead, “You said last night that he didn’t kill himself. What did you mean by that?”

  Proctor hunches forward on the bench. “What do you know about me, Ray? About my background. You run an oppo shop, you must have done some research.”

  I glance to the right. Twenty yards away Dean is busy scooping up Mitzi’s poop into a bag. “Well, in the fifties you worked at the RAND Corporation, and at some point you were recruited by the CIA, where you got involved in MK-Ultra.”

  “Yes. And what conclusion did you draw from that?”

  “I didn’t draw any conclusion. I’m seeing a lot of dots, but I don’t have any reason to connect them. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because I wanted you here.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Stephanie’s campaign people aren’t interested in me. I asked her to set something up so I could meet with you.”

  I close my eyes for a second. I should have known. None of this ever made sense. “She doesn’t know why, though, right?”

  “No.”

  “I think it might be driving her crazy.”

  “She’ll survive. Look, Ray, I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time. It was me who steered Stephanie in your direction in the first place. That was nearly two years ago.”

  I lean back and gaze up at the sky. Little wisps of cloud drift past. I don’t have anything to lose now, do I? “I did draw one conclusion,” I say. “It was more of a supposition, really. Not based on anything concrete. And I didn’t believe it for a second. Now I don’t know.”

  “What was it?”

  I sit forward again. Dean is on his phone. Mitzi is next to him, panting busily. “I wondered something,” I say quietly. “I wondered if Ned Sweeney might have been a casualty of MK-Ultra, one of its guinea pigs. I wondered if someone—you maybe—might have slipped him some LSD, the way it appears you guys used to do back then. And after that, who knows. All bets would have been off, right? So … he freaked out, he got depressed, he jumped. Or, for some reason, he was pushed.”

  Proctor slumps back. “I’m sorry I got you to say all of that, Ray. I really am. It should have been me saying it.”

  “Why?”

  He turns to look at me. “Because what you just described? It’s essentially what happened.”

  “What?”

  “Except for a couple of important details. One, it wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, and two—”

  “Sir!”

  We both look up. Dean is approaching, Mitzi in tow. He seems agitated.

  Proctor raises a hand.

  Dean stops in his tracks, but stands there, waiting.

  “What is it, Dean?”

  “I have instructions to take you back to the apartment, sir. Immediately.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Proctor stands up. So do I.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it.” The old man pulls back the sleeve of his jacket and shows me a thick black band on his wrist. “I’m being monitored remotely. So I’m guessing that my blood pressure has shot up, or my pulse is going haywire. Who knows. This hasn’t been easy.”

  “Sir!”

  “I’m coming.” He turns to me. “We’ll talk again.”

  I don’t need a wearable monitor to know what’s going on with my own blood pressure.

  “When?” I ask.

  Readjusting his sleeve, Proctor says, “When what?” After a second, he adds, “Oh. Yes.” He reaches out and takes Mitzi’s leash from Dean. “Soon, soon.”

  Feeling the opportunity slip away, I lean in toward him. I also half turn my back on Dean—though I’m acutely aware of his physical presence, his watchful eye, his cologne, even. “What were you saying there? What was the second thing?”

  With his free hand, Proctor takes me by the elbow. “It wasn’t LSD,” he says, in a whisper. “Not in Ned’s case. Look it up. It was called MDT-48.”

  9

  It takes Sweeney a few more days.

  He keeps making excuses, or finding them—urgent telephone calls, meetings with
clients, commitments at home. But if he’s going to administer another dose of this stuff he needs to carve out an appropriate chunk of time in which to do it. The most obvious one is Friday evening after work, like that first time, but on Friday they have dinner with the Rogans, their new best friends, so that’s out. The weekend is a possibility, he supposes. It’s just that he’s nervous. He remembers being in control the whole time, and it was a level of control he’d never experienced. But experiencing it from this perspective? That’s a little scary. Plus, he’s unsure about how much, or how little, he should take.

  He spends his lunchtime on Friday at the New York Public Library and does a bit of research on units of measurement and dosage calculations. He reads about active ingredients and oral solutions and half-life cycles, but it’s all too technical and he comes away understanding less than when he started. The one thing he does get is that seventy-five micrograms is a tiny amount and that without specialist equipment it might be next to impossible for him to administer with any degree of accuracy.

  What gets him in the end, though, is a mixture of curiosity and impatience—as well as a tincture of boredom. When he wakes up on Monday morning, he lies in bed for a while, thinking. The prospect of going to work, of what’s on his desk at the office, the grind of it all, just kills him. Before this, he would have been excited to work on new accounts, bigger ones, with major clients.

  But not anymore.

  While Laura is in the bathroom, he gets the old shoe box down from the top of the wardrobe and takes out the small bottle. He sits on the edge of the bed and examines it. He removes the tiny cork top and gives it a quick sniff. There’s a faint scent. Or odor. He’s not sure if it’s his imagination, but this immediately brings to mind, Proust-style, the taste of that martini he had in Mike Sutton’s apartment. He looks at the bottle again. It’s full. So what does he do? Or what does he take? A drop in some water? Two drops? More? Less? After a moment’s hesitation, he puts the bottle down. He rummages around in the drawer of his bedside table and finds a safety pin. He dips the pin into the bottle and withdraws it. On the head of the pin, barely visible, there’s a glisten of something, a tiny residue. He then dips the pin into the glass of water on the table and shakes it around. He puts the pin down, takes up the glass of water and drinks it. He replaces the small bottle in the shoe box and puts the box back on top of the wardrobe.

  What has he done? Is he insane?

  He really has no idea. He does feel slightly better, though.

  He’s no longer waiting.

  Sweeney’s early morning routine follows its normal course—shower, coffee, a few minutes with Tommy, a peck on the cheek for Laura, and then he’s out the door. Since nothing happens, he almost forgets that he expects something to happen, and as he gets on the train and sits down, newspaper in hand, he concludes that he has erred on the side of caution. He has underestimated the dose. But this is okay. He’ll try again tomorrow. He’s happier to proceed slowly rather than jump in at the deep end and maybe lose his bearings, or worse.

  With the clapboard houses and lawn sprinklers of the new suburbs gliding past, he settles down and starts to read the paper.

  The first story he looks at is a call for “ailing” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to resign. Opposition leader Aneurin Bevan made the call at a Labour Party conference in Margate amid growing concerns that because of Churchill, East–West relations could be compromised. It doesn’t say in the article, but just how old is Churchill? He was born in 1874, so that must make him seventy-eight or seventy-nine.

  And Margate. That’s an English seaside town. On the east coast. In Kent.

  Isn’t it?

  The next story that catches Sweeney’s eye is about the Millinery Workers International Union and their strike against the Hat Corporation of America. The union has seemingly issued $500,000 in three-cent bonds to be sold to its beleaguered members, all 35,000 of them. Then there’s a report on the project to plug weep holes in the spandrels of the United Nations Secretariat Building. He reads about how the Iranian government hasn’t settled on a date yet for the trial of ousted premier Mossadegh, about how Senator Richard Russell Jr. of Georgia hopes that Spain can become a “full and complete” member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and about how President Tito of Yugoslavia has condemned so-called “priest-baiting”—violence carried out by Communist-led mobs against certain Roman Catholic bishops.

  He reads through all of the sections, Editorial, Financial, Society, Sports, Obituaries, Weather, even the classifieds. He doesn’t feel any different from normal—not physically, not like he did coming out of Sutton’s apartment that night, his senses tingling at first, then on fire—but when the train pulls in at Penn Station, he does realize something significant: he’s read the entire New York Times, from cover to cover, every word. Which he’s never done before, mainly because it’s not really possible, certainly not in forty minutes, plus who’d want to do that anyway?

  Still, he wonders how much of it he’s retained.

  On the subway ride to Forty-Second Street, he tries to call up ads, anything that might have caught his eye. There was one for the Executone Intercom System (“Just push a button and talk!”), another for the latest Dale Carnegie course in Leadership Training (“Sessions start at 6.30 p.m., air-conditioned rooms, no dinner”), and another for Howard Johnson’s (“The Landmark for Hungry Americans: Chicken Fricassee on Toast Points, $1.65”); others for Bonwit Teller, for De Pinna on Fifth Avenue, for North American. This may seem random and useless, and it is (he could just as easily be scrolling through the death notices: “Abernathy, Norville J., loving husband to Dorothy Cartwright, father to Philip, Janis, and Grace”), but he also has to believe that if the situation demanded it he could apply some sort of a selection filter here. Otherwise, he doesn’t get the point of being able to retain this much information. And all he did was read a newspaper.

  As he passes along the platform now and makes his way up to street level, he notices everything—signs, transit maps, magazine covers, buttons, window displays, faces. It’s intense, close to overwhelming, but he quickly discovers that with a little effort he can put the brakes on, slow it down, redirect his attention. In this respect, he guesses, it’s a little less intense than the first time. But it’s still extraordinary. Which must mean he got the dose right after all.

  Or maybe it’s too soon to tell. There’s no way to know.

  In the elevator, two guys in front of him are talking about Morton Sobell, a co-conspirator in the Rosenberg espionage case, and one of them mentions that as far as he knows Sobell is currently doing life in Sing Sing. Okay, not that it matters or anything, but it’s thirty years and it’s Alcatraz, so naturally he’s tempted to point this out to the guy, tempted to tap him on the shoulder and … well, who knows where that might go. In any event, he resists. Then, as he’s walking through reception, past desks and open doors, he picks up on other conversations, snatches of phone calls, snippets of gossip—it’s like being caught in a blizzard of different radio frequencies—and he resists here, too, but as he arrives at the door of his own office, he catches a quick exchange between two copywriters standing a few feet away and he can’t help getting involved.

  “A one-bedroom … anything. Even a studio.”

  “Jeff, don’t panic, let me ask around.”

  Sweeney stops and turns toward them. “Where are you thinking of, Jeff?” he says. “Where are you living now?”

  They both look over, a little surprised. Jeff’s about twenty-one, tall, with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses. The other guy, Al—or Abe, Al—is thirtyish, also tall, but heavyset and kind of tired-looking.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Sweeney,” Jeff says. “Upper West Side?”

  Al’s brow is furrowed.

  “Let’s see,” Sweeney says. ‘There’s a furnished one-bedroom on West Seventy-Third. Kitchenette, tile bath, elevator, seventy dollars a month.”

  They both stare at him.

 
“Or, on Eighty-Second Street, there’s an immaculate two-room apartment, utilities included, for twenty-six dollars a week. I can give you the numbers, but … what?” He indicates the folded paper under his arm. “I just saw the listings.”

  “Oh, sure,” Jeff says. “Thanks.”

  Al seems impressed now.

  Sweeney extracts the paper with his free hand and flings it in Jeff’s direction. “Take a look.”

  Once inside his office, coat off and at his desk, Sweeney feels a real sense of urgency. There’s a lot to do, as there always is, but his impulse is to burn through it, to clear it all away, to get out ahead of it. Within about an hour, he’s reduced the pile of memos and carbon copies on his desk to nothing and his new secretary to a state of near nervous exhaustion. He sends out a bunch of copy leads to be typed up, and some reworked headlines to the art department. Then he gets on the phone to call a couple of clients whose accounts he has concerns about. He feels that RRB is doing both Hamble Carpets and Paradise Royal Pet Foods all wrong, and he quickly outlines some new approaches that he thinks might work. In talking to his counterparts he soon comes to the conclusion that Matt Drake was actually on shaky ground with these accounts and may well have been on the point of losing them. But now, after a few minutes on the phone with Sweeney, their executives are all fired up again and want to make appointments to come in and talk or have lunch. He says sure and bounces them back to Miss Bennett.

  Just before noon, Dick Blanford appears in the doorway of Sweeney’s office. Sweeney looks up from a notepad where he’s sketching out a strategy for G. C. Barrett’s girdles and corsets.

  “Slow down there, cowboy,” Blanford says, with a big smile on his face. “You’re not getting my job, not yet at least.”

  “Sorry.” Sweeney puts his pen down. “What?”

  “I just got off the phone with Bud Hamble. It seems you suggested to someone over there that they restructure their entire advertising budget, is that right?”

  “Well, I—”

  “It’s okay. He likes your ideas. In fact, I’ve never heard the guy more excited in fifteen years of working with him.”