Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already way over time.

‘About three years ago,’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo . And we toured a lot.’

I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for the long haul.

I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.

‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead in. And direct.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing Shakespeare and this guy is offering me… well, you know what he was offering me.’

Geisler’s delivery was slow and deliberate, his voice like gravel. It was an actor’s voice. I also got the impression, as he went on, that he had never spoken about this stuff to anyone before. His account of the early days of MDT was much fuller than Melissa’s had been but was essentially the same. In his case, he’d received the pitch from Vernon, been unable to resist and after a couple of 15mg doses had memorized the entire text of Macbeth – thoroughly intimidating his cast and crew in the process. He’d then gone on, over the early rehearsal period, to take a further dozen pills, an average of about three a week. The pills were unmarked, but Vernon’s partner, a guy called Todd, had shown up one day with Vernon and explained the dosage and something about what was in MDT and how it worked. This Todd character had also asked Geisler questions about how he was responding to the drug and if he’d been experiencing any adverse side-effects. Geisler had said that he hadn’t.

Two weeks before opening, and under intense pressure, Geisler had cleaned out what he had in the bank and upped his intake to six pills a week – ‘Nearly one a day ,’ he said.

I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.

‘Then, in the few days before we were due to open, it happened – my life fell apart. From a Tuesday to a Friday. It just… fell apart.’

Up to this point, Geisler had kept both his hands under the table and out of view. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now as he moved his right hand up and reached out to take his espresso cup, I saw that his hand had a slight but noticeable tremor. I thought at first that it might be a symptom of alcoholism, a morning-after shake, something like that, but when I saw him leaning forward, gripping the cup to make sure he got it up to his lips without spilling any of the coffee, I realized that he was probably suffering from some neurological disorder. He replaced the cup, very carefully, and then put himself through the laborious process of lighting a cigarette. He did this in silence, pointedly making no comment about the difficulty he was having. He knew I was watching, which almost turned it into a kind of performance.

Once he had his cigarette on the go, he said, ‘I was under a lot of pressure, rehearsing fourteen, fifteen hours a day… but then… before I know it, and out of the fucking blue, I’m having these periods of memory loss.’

I stared at him, nodding my head.

‘I lost track of what I was doing for hours at a time.’

Barely able to contain myself, I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, go on.’

‘I still don’t know what I got up to, exactly, during these… blackouts , I suppose you’d call them… all I know is that between the Tuesday and Friday of that week – and as a result of what I got up to – my girlfriend of ten years left me, the production of Macbeth was cancelled and I was thrown out of my apartment. I also ran over and nearly killed an eleven-year-old girl on Columbus Avenue.’

‘ Jesus .’

My heart was racing.

‘I went to Vernon to try and find out what was happening to me, and at first he didn’t want to know, he was scared, but then he contacted Todd and we met up. Todd was the technical one – he worked for a pharmaceutical company. I could never figure out what their story was, but it soon became clear that Todd was siphoning this stuff out of the labs where he worked and that Vernon was just the front man. It also emerged that Vernon had mixed up a batch of tablets and had been dealing me 30- instead of 15mg pills, which meant that my dosage had shot up dramatically without me knowing it. Anyway, I told Todd what had happened and he said that I needed to combine the MDT with something else, another drug, something to counteract the side-effects. That’s what he called these blackouts – side-effects …’

‘What was the na-’

‘… but I told him I wasn’t taking anything else, that I wanted to stop, and to get back to normal. I asked him if I could do that, if I could just stop – without there being any other adverse side-effects, and he said he didn’t know, he wasn’t the FDA, but that since I’d been on such a high dosage he wouldn’t recommend stopping outright. He said I should probably reduce my intake gradually.’

I nodded.

‘Which is what I did. But not systematically, not according to any known clinical procedure.’ ‘And what happened?’

‘I was fine for a while, but then this started…’ – he held up his hands – ‘… and then… insomnia, nausea, chest and sinus infections, loss of appetite, constipation, dry mouth, erectile dysfunction.’

He threw his hands up, this time in a gesture of despair.

I didn’t know what to say to him, and we were both silent for a while. I still wanted answers to my original two questions, but at the same time I didn’t want to be insensitive.

After a moment, Geisler said, ‘Look, I’m not blaming anyone but myself. No one forced me to take MDT.’ He shook his head, and went on. ‘I guess I was a guinea pig, though, because I bumped into Vernon about a year later and he told me they’d sorted out any dosage problems they’d been having, that dosage had to be individually adjusted – customized , he said.’ A sudden look of anger came into his face. ‘He even suggested I might like to try it again, but I told him to go fuck himself.’

I tried to nod sympathetically.

I also waited to see if he was going to say anything else. When it appeared that he wasn’t, I said, ‘This Todd guy, do you know his surname? Or anything about him? Which company he worked for?’

Geisler shook his head.

‘I only ever met him two or three times anyway. He was very circumspect, very careful. He and Vernon were some act, I’ll tell you – but Todd was definitely the brains.’

I fiddled with the pack of Camels on the table beside my espresso cup.

‘One more question,’ I said. ‘When Todd told you that you needed to combine the MDT with something else, with another drug, to counteract the side-effects, the memory loss… did he say what that drug might be?’

‘Yes.’

My heart jumped.

‘What was it?’

‘I actually remember it very well, because he kept on about it, telling me that it would take care of the problem, that he’d just worked it out. It was a product called Dexeron. It’s an antihistamine and is used for treating certain allergies. It contains some… thing , some agent, that reacts with a specific receptor complex in the brain and in a way, he claimed, that would prevent the blackouts from happening. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember the details of what he said. I don’t think I understood it at the time. But apparently you can get it over the counter.’