Limitless (5 page)

I
WENT DOWN TO THE STREET
, hailed a cab and told the driver Ninetieth and First. Then I sat back and gazed out of the window. It was a bright, crisp day and the traffic, as we cruised uptown, wasn’t too heavy.

Since I work at home and hang out with people who mostly live in the Village and the Lower East Side and SoHo, I don’t often have occasion to go uptown, and especially not uptown on the East Side. In fact, as the cross streets flitted past and we moved up into the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d been this far north. Manhattan, for all its size and density of population, is quite a parochial place. If you live there, you
establish
your territory, you pick out your routes, and that’s it. Certain neighbourhoods you just might never visit. Or it might be that you go through a phase with a neighbourhood – which could depend on work, relationships, food preferences even. I tried to think when it had been … maybe the time I went to that Italian place with the
bocce
court, Il Vagabondo, on Third and something – but that’d been at least two years ago.

Anyway, as far as I could see, none of it had changed that much.

The driver pulled up at the kerb just opposite Linden Tower at Ninetieth Street. I paid him and got out. This was Yorkville, old Germantown – old because there wasn’t much trace of it left, maybe a few businesses, a liquor store, a dry cleaner’s, a delicatessen or two, certainly quite a few residents, and
old
ones, but for the most part, or so I’d read, the neighbourhood had been Upper East-Sided over with new apartment buildings, singles bars, Irish ‘pubs’ and
theme restaurants that opened and closed with alarming frequency.

At a quick glance, I could see that it certainly looked that way. From where I was standing I was able to pick out an O’Leary’s, a Hannigan’s, and a restaurant called the October Revolution Café.

Linden Tower was a dark red-bricked apartment building, one of the many built over the past twenty or twenty-five years in this part of town. They had established their own unarguable, monolithic
presence
, but Linden Tower, like most of them, was out-sized, ugly and cold-looking.

Vernon Gant lived on the seventeenth floor.

I crossed over First Avenue, took the steps down on to the plaza and went over towards the big revolving glass doors of the main entrance. By the looks of it, this place had people going in and out of it all the time, so these doors were probably always in motion. I looked upwards just as I got to the entrance and caught a dizzying glimpse of how high the building was. But my head didn’t make it back far enough to see any of the sky.

I walked right past the reception desk in the centre of the lobby and turned left into a separate area where the elevators were. A few people stood around waiting, but there were eight elevators, four on either side, so no one had to wait for very long. An elevator went
ping
, its doors opened and three people got out. Six of us then herded into it. We each hit our numbers and I noticed that no one besides me was going higher than the fifteenth floor.

Based on the people I’d seen coming in, and on the specimens standing around me now in the elevator car, the occupants of Linden Tower seemed like a varied bunch. A lot of these apartments would be rent-controlled from a long way back, of course, but a lot of them would also be sub-let, and at exorbitant rates, so that would create a fair bit of social mix right there.

I got out on the seventeenth floor. I checked Vernon’s card again and then looked for his apartment. It was down the hall and around the corner to the left, third door on the right. I didn’t encounter anyone on the way.

I stood for a moment at his door, and then rang the bell. I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to him if he answered,
and I’d thought even less about what I was going to do if he didn’t, if he wasn’t home, but standing there I realized that either way I was extremely apprehensive.

I heard some movement inside, and then locks clicking.

Vernon must have seen that it was me through the spyhole because I heard his voice before he’d even got the door fully open.

‘Shit, man, that was fast.’

I had a smile ready for when he appeared, but it fell off my face as soon as I actually saw him. He stood before me wearing only boxer shorts. He had a black eye and bruises all down the left side of his face. His lip was cut, and swollen, and his right hand was bandaged.

‘What ha—’

‘Don’t ask.’

Leaving the door open, Vernon turned around and motioned back at me with his left hand to come in. I entered, closed the door gently and followed him down a narrow hallway and into a large open
living-room
. It had a spectacular view – but then, in Manhattan, virtually anywhere with a seventeenth floor is going to have a spectacular view. This one looked south, and took in the city’s horror and glory in about equal measure.

Vernon flopped down on to a long, L-shaped, black leather couch. I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found it hard to look directly at him, so I made a show of glancing around.

The room was sparsely furnished, given its size. There was some old stuff, an antique bureau, a couple of Queen Anne-type chairs, a standard lamp. There was also some new stuff, the black leather couch, a tinted-glass dining table, an empty metal wine-rack. But you couldn’t exactly call it eclectic, because there didn’t seem to be any order or system to it. I knew Vernon had been big into
furniture
at one time, and had collected ‘pieces’, but this seemed like the place of a person who had given up collecting, who had let his
enthusiasm
wane. The pieces were odd and mismatched, and seemed left over from another time – or another apartment – in their owner’s life.

I stood in the middle of the room now, having seen everything
there was to see. I looked down at Vernon, in silence, not knowing where to begin – but eventually
he
managed to say something. Through the pained expression on his face and the ugly distortion of his features, of his normally bright greenish eyes and high
cheekbones
, he cracked a smile and said, ‘So, Eddie, I guess you were interested after all.’

‘Yeah … it was
amazing
. I mean … really.’

I blurted this out, just like the high-school kid I’d invoked
sarcastically
the previous day, the one looking to score his first dime bag, and who was now coming back for another one.

‘What did I tell you?’

I nodded my head a few times, and then – unable to go on without referring again to his condition – I said, ‘Vernon, what
happened
to you?’

‘What do you think, man? I got in a fight.’

‘Who with?’

‘You don’t want to know, believe me.’

I paused.

Maybe I didn’t want to know.

In fact, thinking about it, he was right, I didn’t want to know. Not only that, I was also a little irritated – part of me hoping that this business of his having had the shit kicked out of him wasn’t going to get in the way of my scoring from him.

‘Sit down, Eddie,’ he said. ‘Relax, tell me all about it.’

I sat down on the other side of the couch, got comfortable and told him all about it. There was no reason not to. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’

I immediately said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it works on what’s there, you know. It can’t make you smart if you’re not smart already.’

‘So what are you saying, it’s a smart drug?’

‘Not exactly. There’s a lot of hype about smart drugs – you know, enhance your cognitive performance, develop rapid mental reflexes, all of that – but most of what we call smart drugs are just natural diet supplements, artificial nutrients, amino acids, that kind of thing – designer vitamins if you like. What you took was a designer
drug
.
I mean, you’d have to take a shitload of amino acids to stay up all night and read four books, am I right?’

I nodded.

Vernon was enjoying this.

But I wasn’t. I was on edge and wanted him to cut the crap and just tell me what he knew.

‘What’s it called?’ I ventured.

‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet, it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48.’

The boys in the kitchen?

‘Who are you working for?’ I asked. ‘You said you were doing consultancy for some pharmaceutical outfit?’

Vernon put a hand up to his face at that point and held it there for a moment. He sucked in some air and then let out a low groan.

‘Shit, this hurts.’

I leant forward. What should I do here – offer to get him some ice in a towel, call a doctor? I waited. Had he heard my question? Would it be insensitive to repeat it?

About fifteen seconds passed and then Vernon lowered his hand again.

‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, still wincing, ‘I can’t answer your
question
. I’m sure you can understand that.’

I looked at him, puzzled. ‘But you were talking to me yesterday about coming on-stream with some product at the end of the year, and clinical trials, and being FDA-approved. What was that all about?’

‘FDA-approved, that’s a laugh,’ he said, snorting with contempt and side-stepping the question. ‘The FDA only approves drugs that are for treating illnesses. They don’t recognize lifestyle drugs.’

‘But—’

I was about to pull him up here and say, ‘Yeah, but you
said
…’ when I stopped myself short. He
had
said it was FDA-approved, and he
had
talked about clinical trials, but then had I really been expected to believe all of that?

OK, what had we got here? Something called MDT-48. An unknown, untested, possibly dangerous pharmaceutical substance scammed out of an unidentified laboratory somewhere, and by an unreliable person I hadn’t seen in a decade.

‘So,’ said Vernon, looking directly at me, ‘you want some more of this?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘definitely.’

With that established, and in the hallowed traditions of the civilized drug deal, we immediately changed the subject. I asked him about the furniture in the apartment, and if he was still collecting ‘pieces’. He asked me about music, and if I still listened to eighty-minute symphonies by dead Germans at full volume. We chatted about these things for a while, and then filled each other in on some details about what we’d been doing for the last few years.

Vernon was fairly cagey – as he had to be in his line of work, I suppose – but as a result I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. I did get the impression, however, that this MDT
business
had been occupying him for quite some time, and possibly even for a number of years. I also got the impression that he was anxious to talk about it, but since he wasn’t sure if he could trust me yet, he kept stopping himself in mid-sentence, and any time he seemed on the point of revealing something he would hesitate and then quickly revert to a kind of pseudo-scientific sales patter, mentioning neurotransmitters, brain-circuits and cell-receptor complexes.

He shifted quite a bit on the couch as well, continually raising his left leg and stretching it out, like a football player – or maybe a dancer – I couldn’t decide.

As he spoke, I sat relatively still and listened.

For my own part, I told Vernon how in 1989 – soon after the divorce – I’d had to get out of New York. I didn’t mention the fact that he himself had done his bit to drive me out, that his
all-too-reliable
supply of Bolivian Marching Powder had led to some severe health and money problems – drained sinuses, drained finances – and that these in turn had cost me my job as the production editor of a now defunct fashion and arts magazine,
Chrome
. But I did tell
him about the miserable year I’d spent unemployed in Dublin, chasing some elusive, miasmal notion of a literary existence, and about the three years in Italy teaching and doing translations for an agency in Bologna, as well as learning interesting things about food that I’d never known … like, for instance, that vegetables weren’t necessarily designed to be available all year round, Korean deli-style, but had their seasons, and came and went in maybe a six-week period, during which time you furiously cooked them in different ways, such as – if it was asparagus, say – asparagus risotto, asparagus with eggs, fettuccine with asparagus, and that two weeks later you didn’t even think about asking your greengrocer for asparagus. I was rambling here, and could see that Vernon was getting restless, so I moved things on and told him about how I’d eventually come back from Italy to find the technology of magazine production utterly
transformed
, making any skills I might have acquired in the late ’80s more or less redundant. I then described the last five or six years of my life, and how they’d been very quiet, and uneventful, and had drifted by – flitted by – in a haze of relative sobriety and comfort eating.

But that I had great hopes for this book I was currently working on.

I hadn’t meant to bring the conversation so neatly back around to the matter in hand, but Vernon looked at me and said, ‘Well, you know, we’ll see what we can do.’

This irked me a little, but the feeling was simultaneously muted and exacerbated by the realization that he actually could do
something
. I smiled at him and held my hands up.

Vernon then nodded at me, slapped his knees and said, ‘OK, in the meantime, you want some coffee, or something to eat?’

Without waiting for an answer, he pulled himself forward and struggled up out of the couch. He walked over to the kitchen area in the corner, which was separated from the living-room by a counter and stools.

I got up and followed him.

Vernon opened the refrigerator door and looked in. Over his shoulder I could see that it was almost empty. There was a Tropicana orange juice carton, which he took out and shook and then replaced.