Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

I turned back in towards the room.

The red light was flashing on my answering machine. I walked over to it, wearily, and pressed the ‘play’ button.

Seven messages.

I sat on the edge of the couch and listened. Jay Zollo, pleading with me to get in touch with him again. My father, puzzled, wanting to know if I’d seen that thing in the paper. Gennady, pissed, declaring that if I was yanking his chain he’d cut my fucking head off, and with a bread knife. Artie Meltzer, all pally, inviting me out to lunch. Mary Stern, telling me it’d be so much easier if I would just talk to her. A recruitment company, offering me an executive position in a major brokerage house. Someone from David Letterman’s office – a booking agent – saying if I agreed I could be on the show tonight .

I flopped back on to the couch and stared up at the ceiling. I had to stay calm. I certainly hadn’t wanted any of this attention or pressure, but if I was going to come through it in one piece, I really needed to keep my wits about me. I rolled off the couch, got up and went into the bedroom to lie down properly. Maybe if I could just sleep for part of the afternoon, for an hour or two, I might be able to think a bit more clearly. But the moment I lay down on the bed and stretched out I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I was wide awake and my mind was racing.

I got up again and went into the living-room. I paced back and forth for a while – from the desk to the phone, from the phone to the desk. Then I went into the kitchen. Then out again. Then into the bathroom, then out again to the living-room. Then over to the window. Then back again. But that was it, there was nowhere else to go – just these three rooms. Standing near my desk, I surveyed the apartment and tried to imagine what the place would be like with ten rooms, and high ceilings, and bare white walls. But I couldn’t do it, not without getting dizzy. Besides, that was somewhere else – the sixty-eighth floor of the Celestial – and I was here now, in my apartment…

I stepped back from the desk, a little unsteadily, and leant against the bookshelves behind me. I felt queasy all of a sudden, and light-headed.

I closed my eyes.

After a moment, I found myself floating – moving along an empty, brightly lit corridor. Sound was distant and increasingly muffled. The forward motion seemed to continue for ages, the pace slow and dreamy. But then I was gliding around a broad curve, moving into and across a room, towards a wide, full-length window. I didn’t stop at the window, but floated on – arms outstretched – through the window and out above the vast microchip of the city, while behind me, after a brief but inexplicable delay, the huge plate of bronzetinted glass shattered deafeningly into a million pieces…

I opened my eyes – and jolted backwards, recoiling in fright from the unexpected aerial view I was now getting of the sidewalk down on Tenth Street, of the trash cans and parked cars and photographers’ heads milling around like bacteria in a lab dish. I pulled myself in from the window ledge, struggling to keep my balance, and slumped down on to the floor. Then, taking deep breaths and rubbing the top of my head – which I had banged against the upper section of the window – I stared over in amazement at where I had been a moment before… and still should have been…

I got up slowly and walked back across the room towards the bookshelves, closely observing each step. I reached out to touch things as I passed them, to reassure myself – the side of the couch, the table, the desk. I looked back at where I had come from, and couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem real that I had been leaning out of that window, and leaning out so far …

With my heart still thumping, I went into the bathroom. If this thing was going to start up again, and develop, I had to find some way to stop it. I opened the medicine cabinet above the washbasin and quickly searched through all the bottles and packets and sealed containers, the accumulated toiletries, shaving things, soap products, non-prescription painkillers. I found a bottle of cough syrup I’d bought the previous winter but had never used. I scanned the label and saw that it contained codeine. I opened the cap, pausing for a second as I glanced at myself in the mirror, and then started chugging the stuff down. It was horrible, sickly and viscous, and I gagged between swallows, but at least I knew that whatever synaptic short-circuiting in my brain was causing these blackouts, the codeine would slow me down and make me drowsy, and probably sufficiently drowsy to keep me here, passed out on the couch or on the floor – I didn’t mind which, just so long as I wasn’t outside somewhere in the city, out and about and on the loose…

I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a while, clutching the sides of it tightly, and stared at the wall opposite, afraid even to close my eyes.

Over the next five minutes, before the codeine kicked in, there were two more occurrences, both brief as flickers in a slideshow, but no less terrifying for that. From the edge of the bathtub, and with no conscious movement on my part, I found myself standing in the middle of the living-room. I stood there, swaying slightly, trying to act unfazed – as if ignoring what had happened might mean it wouldn’t happen again. Soon after that – click, click – I was half-way down the stairs, sitting on the bottom step of the first landing with my head in my hands. I realized that another trip-switch forward like that and I’d be outside on the street, being mobbed by photographers and reporters – maybe in danger, maybe a danger to others, certainly out of control…

But I could feel the onset now of a heaviness in my limbs and a kind of general spaciness. I stood up, grabbing on to the banisters for support, and turned around. I made my way slowly back up to the third floor. Walking now was like wading through treacle and by the time I got to the door of my apartment, which was wide open, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

It then took me a couple of moments, standing in the doorway, to realize that the ringing sound I was hearing wasn’t just in my head. It was the telephone, and before I’d had time to reason that I shouldn’t be answering the telephone, given my present state, I was watching my hand floating down to pick up the receiver and then floating back up again towards my head.

‘Hello.’

‘Eddie?’

I paused for a moment, in shock. It was Melissa.

‘ Eddie? ’

‘Yeah, it’s me. Sorry. Hi.’

My voice felt heavy, slack.

‘Eddie, why did you lie to me?’

‘I didn’t… wh-what are you talking about?’

‘MDT. Vernon. You know what I’m talking about.’

‘But-’

‘I’ve just been reading the Post , Eddie. Short-selling stocks? Second-guessing the markets? You? Come on.’

I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, I came up with, ‘Since when do you read the New York Post ?’

‘These days the Post’s about all I can read.’

What did that mean?

‘I don’t under-’

‘Look, Eddie, forget the Post , forget the fact that you lied to me. MDT is the problem. Are you still taking it?’

I didn’t answer. I could barely keep my eyelids open.

‘You’ve got to stop taking it. Jesus .’

I paused again, but had no clear sense this time of how long the pause went on for.

‘Eddie? Talk to me.’

‘OK…

Now she paused, and then said, ‘Fine, when?’