Alan Glynn: The Dark Fields aka Limitless

He took a sip from his drink and another hit from his cigarette. Then he said, ‘You know the way drugs fuck you up? You have a good time doing them but then you get all fucked up afterwards? And eventually everything in your life… falls apart, yeah? Sooner or later it happens, am I right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, not with this.’ He indicated the pill in my hand. ‘This little baby is the diametric opposite of that.’

I eased the pill from the palm of my hand on to the surface of the table. Then I took a sip from my drink.

‘Vernon, please – come on, I’m not some high-school kid here looking to score my first dime bag. I mean, I’m not even-’

‘Believe me, Eddie, you’ve never done anything like this. I’m serious. Just take it and see.’

I hadn’t done any drugs in years, and for the exact reasons Vernon had given in his little sales pitch. I did have longings now and again – cravings for that taste in the back of the throat, and for the blissful hours of rapid-fire talk, and for the occasional glimpses of a godlike shape and structure to the conversation of the moment – but none of that was a problem any more, it was like a longing you might have for an earlier phase in your life, or for a lost love, and there was even a mild, narcotic feeling to be had by just entertaining these thoughts, but as for actually trying something new, getting back into all of that, well – I looked down at the tiny white pill in the centre of the table and said, ‘I’m too old for this kind of thing, Vernon-’

‘There are no physical side-effects if that’s what you’re worried about. They’ve identified these receptors in the brain that can activate specific circuits and…’

‘Look,’ I was becoming exasperated, ‘I really don’t-’

Just then a phone started ringing, a cellphone. Since I didn’t have one myself, I figured it had to be Vernon’s. He reached into a side pocket of his jacket and pulled it out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re having with this book of yours.’

As he raised the phone to his ear and spoke into it, I looked at him in disbelief.

‘Gant.’

He really had changed, and in a way that was quite curious. He was the same guy, clearly, but he appeared to have developed – or grown – a different personality.

‘When?’

He picked up his drink and swirled the contents of the glass around a bit.

‘I know, but when ?’

He looked over his left shoulder and then, immediately, back at his watch.

‘Tell him we can’t do that. He knows that’s out of the question. We absolutely can’t do that.’

He waved a hand in the air dismissively.

I took a sip from my own drink and started lighting up a Camel. Here I was – look at me – pissing the afternoon away with my ex-brother-in-law. I’d certainly had no idea when I left the apartment an hour or so before, to go for a walk, that I’d be ending up in a bar . And certainly not with my ex-brother-in-law, Vernon fucking Gant.

I shook my head and took another sip from my drink.

‘No, you better tell him – and now .’ He started getting up. ‘Look, I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.’

Straightening out his jacket with his free hand, he said, ‘No way, I’m telling you. Just wait, I’ll be there.’

He turned off the phone and put it back into the side pocket of his jacket.

‘ Fucking people,’ he said, looking down at me and shaking his head, as if I’d understand.

‘Problems?’ I said.

‘Yeah, you better believe that.’ He took his wallet out. ‘And I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here, Eddie. I’m sorry.’

He took a business card from his wallet and placed it carefully down on the table. He put it right beside the little white tablet.

‘By the way,’ he said, nodding down at the tablet, ‘that’s on the house.’

‘I don’t want it, Vernon.’

He winked at me. ‘Don’t be ungrateful now. You know how much those things cost?’

I shook my head.

He stepped out of the booth and took a second to shimmy his loose-fitting suit into position. Then he looked directly at me. ‘Five hundred bucks a pop.’

‘ What? ’

‘You heard me.’

I looked down at the tablet. Five hundred dollars for that ?

‘I’ll take care of the drinks,’ he said and wandered over towards the bar. I watched him as he paid the waitress. Then he indicated back in the direction of our booth. That probably meant another drink – compliments of the big man in the expensive suit.

On his way out of the bar, Vernon threw me a sidelong glance that said, Take it easy, my friend , paused, and then added, and make sure you call me now .

Yeah, yeah.

I sat there for a while pondering the fact that not only did I not do drugs any more, I didn’t drink in the afternoons any more either. But here I was, doing just that – at which point the waitress arrived over with the second whiskey sour.

I finished up the first one and started in on the new one. I lit another cigarette.

The problem I suppose was this: if I was going to be drinking in the afternoon, I would have preferred it to be in any of a dozen other bars, and sitting at the bar, shooting the breeze with some guy perched on a stool just like myself. Vernon and I had chosen this place because it was convenient, but as far as I could see it didn’t have any other redeeming features. In addition, people had started trickling in now, probably from surrounding offices, and were already getting noisy and boisterous. A party of five took the next booth up from mine and I heard someone ordering Long Island Iced Teas. Don’t get me wrong, I had no doubt that Long Island Iced Teas were good obliterators of work-related stress, but they were also fucking lethal and I had no desire to be around when that gin-vodka-rum-tequila thing started kicking in. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.

Besides, I had work to do. I had thousands of images to pore over and select – to order and re-order and analyse and deconstruct. So what business did I have being in a Sixth Avenue cocktail lounge in any case? None. I should have been at home, at my desk, inching my way through the Summer of Love and the intricacies of microcircuitry. I should have been scanning all those magazine spreads I had from the Saturday Evening Post and Rolling Stone and Wired , as well as all the photocopied material that was stacked on the floor and on every other available surface in my apartment. I should have been huddled in front of my computer screen, awash in a blue light, making silent, steady progress on my book.

But I wasn’t, and despite these good intentions I didn’t seem to be showing any signs of making a move to leave either. Instead, giving in to the numinous glow of the whiskey and letting it override my impulse to get out of there, I went back to thinking about my ex-wife, Melissa. She was living upstate now with her two kids, and doing… what? Something . Vernon didn’t know. What was that all about? How could he not know? I mean, it made sense that I wasn’t a regular contributor to the New Yorker or Vanity Fair , or that I wasn’t an Internet guru or a venture capitalist, but it didn’t make any sense at all that Melissa wasn’t.

The more I thought about it, in fact, the stranger it seemed. For my part, I could easily retrace my steps back through the years, through all the twists and turns and taste atrocities, and still make a direct, plausible link between the relatively stable Eddie Spinola sitting here in this bar, with his Kerr & Dexter book contract and his monthly health plan, and, say, some earlier, spindlier Eddie, hungover and vomiting on his boss’s desk during a presentation, or raiding his girlfriend’s underwear drawer looking for her stash. But with this domesticated, upstate Melissa that Vernon had sketched, there didn’t seem to be any connection – or the connection had been broken, or… something, I don’t know.