Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.

Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Twenty-two five.’

‘But I want to pay it all off.’

‘You can’t.’

‘But-’

‘ Twenty-two five .’

I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five. When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.

‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.

He sighed and shook his head.

‘No time. Too busy.’

He glanced over once more at the desk.

‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.

I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out – not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started drinking vodka Martinis.

Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.

The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the headlines.

‘Middle East peace-talks at Camp David break down after two weeks of intensive negotiations. Hurricane Julius arrives off the south coast of Florida, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. And Donatella Alvarez, who has been in a coma for two weeks after a brutal attack in a Manhattan hotel room, dies this afternoon – police say they are now conducting a full-scale murder investigation.’

I stared in shock at the screen as the newscaster went back to the details of the peace-talks story. I grabbed on to the side of the bar, and held it tightly. After a couple of seconds, I mumbled something – maybe audibly, maybe not – and swung around to get off my stool.

I stood there for a moment, swaying from side to side, very unsteadily. The room then began to spin, and I moved, staggering the few yards over to the door. I just about made it out into the street before splatting an evening’s worth of vodka, vermouth and olives up on to the sidewalk.

I CONTINUED DRINKING OVER the weekend, mostly vodka, and mostly at home. After all, what else was there to do? I’d just become the subject of a full-scale murder investigation – albeit, and very con veniently, under an assumed name – so surely, in the circumstances, a little drinkie or two could hardly be seen as anything other than appropriate. I wasn’t making any further pretense at reading ‘the material’ either, so I gave in for a while and went back to watching the news on TV. This quickly became all I wanted to watch and again I found myself wading through hours of mindless crap, shouting drunken abuse at the screen as I waited for the next bulletin to come on.

There wasn’t much for the media to say about Donatella Alvarez herself – the woman had died and that’s all there was to it. What most of the reports were focusing on now was the political fall-out from her death. This came in the form of renewed calls for the Defense Secretary to resign. The brouhaha over Caleb Hale’s original comments about Mexico had received a shot in the arm when the Alvarez story first broke, and another one now with her death. I hadn’t followed the story too closely, but I’d been aware of it in the background – aware of it as one of those bizarre developments that takes on a life of its own and enters the news-chain like some kind of virus.

Six weeks or so earlier, Caleb Hale was reported to have said at a private gathering that Mexico had become a liability for the US and that ‘we should just consider invading the damned place’. The source that leaked the story to the Los Angeles Times claimed that Hale had name-checked corruption, insurgency, the breakdown of law and order, the debt crisis and drug-trafficking as the five points on ‘the pentangle of Mexico’s instability’. The source went on to claim that Hale had even cited John O’Sullivan on our ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent’ and had mentioned an op-ed piece he’d once read called ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door’. Caleb Hale immediately issued a classic non-denial denial, but then proceeded, in an interview, to more or less justify precisely what he was claiming not to have said. The President was perceived to be weighing in behind Hale when he not only refused to demand the Secretary’s resignation but also refused to condemn his alleged remarks – which of course opened the floodgates of comment and speculation. Everyone was initially shocked and incredulous, but as the days passed certain influential quarters appeared to warm to the idea, and early conclusions about the Defense Secretary being seriously out of touch softened a little, with some even transforming into a broad endorsement for, at the very least, a tougher line on foreign policy.

Now, with what was perceived as a racially motivated killing tossed into the mix, the debate had gone into overdrive. There were interviews, panel discussions, sound bites, one-liners, earnest reports from dusty border towns, aerial shots of the Rio Grande. I watched from my couch, glass in hand, and got caught up in it all as though I were watching a prime-time soap – continually forgetting in my alcoholic euphoria that I was perhaps just a fingerprint or DNA test away from full involvement in this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.

As the weekend progressed, however, and euphoria degenerated into numbness, and then anxiety, and then dread – my viewing patterns shifted. I cut down drastically on news shows, and towards Sunday evening found myself skipping them altogether. Increasingly, it was easier to switch over to channels where there were re-runs of Hawaii Five-O to be found – and Happy Days and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea .

On the Monday I tried to stay sober, but didn’t do too well. I had a few beers during the afternoon, and then opened a bottle of vodka in the evening. I spent most of the time listening to music, and eventually crashed out on the couch that night in my clothes. It had been getting steadily warmer over the previous week and I’d been leaving the window open most nights, but when I jolted awake from a confused dream at about 4 a.m., I noticed immediately that the temperature had dropped. It was a good deal chillier than when I’d fallen asleep, so I got off the couch, shivering, and went over to the window to close it. I sat back on the couch, but as I stared into the blue darkness of the night, the shivering continued. I realized, as well, that my heart was palpitating, and that the unpleasant tingling sensation I had in my limbs wasn’t normal. I tried to identify what was happening to me. One possibility was that my system needed more alcohol, in which case I quickly scrolled down through the options – I could get dressed and go out to a bar, or I could go to a Korean deli down the street and buy a couple of six-packs, or I could just drink the cooking sherry I had in the kitchen. But I didn’t really think booze was the problem, because the very idea now of going outside, to the street, to a neon-lit deli with other people in it, struck terror into me.