Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

‘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-derstand-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 airframe – 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…