Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

I swallowed. ‘Do I look like I have any more?’

He paused for a moment and stopped moving the knife, but didn’t withdraw it. I went on, ‘You’ve taken it, right? You know what it’s like, and what it does to you.’ I swallowed again, louder than before. ‘Look around you, does this strike you as the place of someone who’s taking the drug you took?’

‘Well, where did you get it from then?’

‘I don’t know, some guy I met in a-’

He jabbed the knife sharply against my neck and withdrew it quickly.

‘Ow!’

I put my hand up to the point where he’d jabbed me and rubbed it. There wasn’t any blood, but the jab had really hurt.

‘Don’t lie to me, Eddie, because – and make sure you understand this – if I don’t get what I want I’m going to kill you anyway…’ Then he set the point of the knife to just under my left eye, and pressed it in, gently but firmly. ‘And in stages.’

He continued pressing the knife, and when I could feel my eyeball starting to protrude, I whispered, ‘ OK .’

He held the knife in place for a moment and then withdrew it.

‘I can get them,’ I said, ‘but it’ll take a few days. The guy who deals them is very… security conscious.’

Gennady clicked his tongue, as if to say go on .

‘I phone him, and he arranges a pick-up.’ I paused here and rubbed my left eye, but it was really to give me a moment to work out what I was going to say next. ‘If he catches a whiff of someone else getting involved in this, by the way – someone he doesn’t know – that’s it, we’ll never hear from him again.’

Gennady nodded.

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘they’re expensive .’

I could tell that he was excited at the prospect of scoring. I could also tell that despite his heavy-handed tactics he would go along with whatever I proposed, and would pay whatever I asked.

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred a pop…’

He whistled, almost with glee.

‘… which is why I’m out of them. Because we’re not talking dime bags here.’

He looked at me, and then pointed at the money on the table. ‘Use that. Get me… er…’ – he paused, and seemed to be doing some calculations in his head – ‘… get me fifty or sixty of them. For starters.’

If I did end up giving him any, they would have to come from my stash, so I said, ‘The most I can get in one go is ten.’

‘Fuck that-’

‘Gennady, I’ll talk to the guy, but he’s very paranoid. We’ve got to take this slowly.’

He turned around and walked over to the desk, and then back again.

‘OK, when?’

‘I should be able to get them by next Friday.’

‘Next fucking Friday? You said a few days.’

‘I leave him a message. It takes a few days for him to get back to me. Then another few days to set it up.’

Gennady held the knife out again and pointed it directly in my face. ‘If you fuck with me, Eddie, you’ll be sorry.’

Then he put the knife away and walked over to the door.

‘I’m going to phone you Tuesday.’

I nodded.

‘OK. Tuesday.’

Standing in the doorway, and as though it were an afterthought, he said, ‘So what is this shit anyway? What’s in it?’

‘It’s a… smart-drug,’ I said, ‘I don’t really know what’s in it.’

‘It makes you smart?’

I held out my hands. ‘Well, yeah. Hadn’t you noticed?’ I was going to say something to him about his English and how it had improved, but I decided against it. He might get offended at the idea that I hadn’t thought his English was good to start with.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s amazing . What’s it called?’

I hesitated. ‘Er… MDT. It’s called MDT. It’s a chemical name, but… yeah.’

‘MDT?’

‘Yeah. You know, score some MDT. Do some MDT.’

He looked at me for a moment, dubiously, and then said, ‘Tuesday.’

He went out into the hallway, leaving the door open. I remained sitting in the chair and listened to him clumping down the stairs. When I heard the door of the building banging closed I stood up and went over to the window. I looked out and saw Gennady pacing along Tenth Street towards First Avenue. From the little I knew of him, the lightness in his step seemed, to say the least, uncharacteristic.

Looking back now – from the dead stillness of this room here in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can see that Gennady’s intrusion into my life, his attempt to muscle in on my supply of MDT, had quite an unsettling effect on me. I had lost nearly everything and I resented the idea that someone could so easily destroy what little there was left. I hadn’t wanted to take MDT at full throttle any more because I was scared of surrendering myself to another blackout, scared of being open again to that same level of darkness and unpredictability. But neither did I want to just give up and leave everything behind – and especially not for a circling vulture like Gennady to pick at and tear apart. Besides, the idea of Gennady on MDT seemed a complete waste to me. Suddenly the guy was able to speak comprehensible English? Big fucking deal. He was still a bonehead, a zhulik . MDT wasn’t going to change someone like him . Not the way it had changed me…

On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.

What harm could it do?

I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it

‘Yep?’

I paused for a second and then rushed into it.

‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please … five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you…’ – this came to me on the spur of the moment – ‘… I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me…’

I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.

He released a long sigh. ‘ Jeesus ! ’

I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes.’

‘Thank you… very much.’

He gave me the address of a café on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain yellow T-shirt.

I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.

The café was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso. Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a few different blocks at that.

‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’

I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd.’

He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.