Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

I stayed in that position for the next eight hours.

Normally, I would have taken a dose of MDT in the afternoon, but since that hadn’t been possible, I was overtaken with fatigue by late evening – something I identified as the earliest stage of the withdrawal process. As a result of this, I actually managed to get some sleep – even if it was fitful and disturbed. I had no bed, so I stacked up some blankets and a duvet on the floor and used that to sleep on. When I awoke – at about five in the morning – I had a dull headache and my throat was dry and raspy.

I made a cursory effort to tidy the mess up, just for something to do, but my mind was too clogged with anxiety and fear, and I didn’t get very far.

Before I went to the bank, I took two Excedrin tablets. Then I rooted out my answering machine from one of the smashed wooden crates. It didn’t look as if it had sustained too much damage, and when I connected it up to the phone on the floor, it appeared to be working. I got my briefcase from another crate, put on a coat and left – avoiding eye-contact with Richie at the desk down in the lobby.

In the cab on the way to the bank, with the empty briefcase resting on my lap, I experienced a wave of despair, a sense that the hope I was clinging to was not only desperate, but clearly – and absolutely – unfounded. As I looked out at the traffic and at the passing, streaming façade of Thirty-fourth Street, the notion that things could somehow be reversed, at this late stage, suddenly seemed, well… too much to hope for.

But then at the bank, as I watched an official stack my briefcase full with solid bricks of cash – fifty and hundred dollar bills – I regained a certain amount of confidence. I signed any relevant documents there were, smiled politely at the fawning Howard Lewis, bid him good morning and left.

In the cab on the way back, with the now full briefcase resting on my lap, I felt vaguely excited, as if this new scheme couldn’t fail. When the guy phoned, I’d be ready with an offer – he’d have a proposal… we’d negotiate, things would slip neatly back into place.

As soon as I got up to the apartment, I put the briefcase down on the floor beside the telephone. I left it open, so I could see the money. There were no messages on the answering machine, and I checked my cellphone to see if there were any on that. There was one new one – from Van Loon. He understood I needed a break, but this was no way to go about taking one. I was to call him.

I powered off the phone and put it away.

By midday, my headache had become quite severe. I continued taking Excedrin tablets, but they no longer seemed to have any effect. I took a shower and stood for ages under the jet of hot water, trying to soothe the knots of tension out of my neck and shoulders.

The headache had started as a band across my forehead and behind my eyes, but by mid-afternoon it had worked its way out to every part of my skull and was pounding like a jackhammer.

I paced around the room for hours, trying to absorb the pain – glaring at the phone, willing it to ring. I couldn’t understand why that guy hadn’t called me back yet. I looked at the money. That was half a million dollars there, lying on the floor, just waiting for someone to come along and take it…

By early evening, I found that walking around didn’t help much any more. I was having intermittent bouts of nausea now and was shivering all over, fairly constantly. It was easier, I decided, to lie on the makeshift bed of stacked blankets and a duvet, tossing and turning, and occasionally clutching my head in a vain attempt to ease the pain. As it got dark, I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. At one point, I woke up retching – desperately trying to empty my already empty stomach. I coughed up blood on to the floor and then lay flat on my back again, staring up at the ceiling.

That night – Thursday night – was interminable, and yet in one sense I didn’t want it to end. As the veil of MDT lifted further, my sense of horror and dread intensified. The torment of uncertainty gnawed away at the lining of my stomach and I kept thinking, What have I done ? I had vivid dreams, hallucinations almost, in which I repeatedly seemed to come close to an understanding of what had happened that night at the Clifden Hotel – but then, since I was unable to separate what my fevered mind was concocting from what I was actually remembering, it was never close enough . I saw Donatella Alvarez calmly walking across the room, like before, in a black dress, blood pouring down the side of her face – but it was this room, not the hotel room, and I remember thinking that if she’d taken such a serious blow to the head, she wouldn’t be calm, or walking around. I also dreamt that the two of us were on a couch together, entangled in each other’s arms, and I was staring into her eyes, aroused, excited, engulfed in the flames of some nameless emotion – but at the same time it was my old couch we were on, the one from the apartment on Tenth Street, and she was whispering in my ear, telling me to short-sell tech stocks now, now, now . Later, she was sitting across the table from me in Van Loon’s dining-room, smoking a cigar and talking animatedly, ‘… because you norteamericanos don’t understand any thing, no thing…’ – and then I seemed to be reaching out in anger for the nearest wine bottle…

Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle, but a cane or a statuette – each one like a shard of coloured glass hurtling in slow-motion through space after an explosion, each one vainly promising to form into a solid memory, into something objective and recollectable… and reliable …

At one point, I rolled off the duvet, holding my stomach, and crawled across the floor through the glistening darkness to the bathroom. After another fit of retching, this time into the toilet bowl, I managed to get up on to my feet. I leant over the wash-basin, struggled with the faucets for a moment and then threw some cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection in the mirror was ghostlike and barely visible, with my eyes – clear and moving – the only sign of life.

I dragged myself back into the living-room, where the dim shapes on the floor – the smashed boxes, the crumpled clothes, the open briefcase full of money – looked like irregular rock formations on some strange and dusky blue terrain. I slumped back against the wall nearest to the telephone and slid down into a sitting position on the floor. I stayed there for the next couple of hours, as daylight seeped in around me, allowing the room to reconstitute itself before my eyes, unchanged.

And I came to some accommodation with the pain in my head, as well – so long as I remained absolutely still, and didn’t move, didn’t flinch, it obligingly receded into a dull, thumping, mindless rhythm…

WHEN THE PHONE RANG BESIDE ME, just after nine o’clock, it felt like a thousand volts of electric current piercing my brain.

I reached over – wincing, my hand shaking – and picked up the receiver.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Spinola? It’s Richie, at the desk.’

‘Hhhn.’

‘There’s a Mr… Gennady here to see you? Shall I send him up?’

Friday morning.

This morning. Well, yesterday morning by now.

I paused.

‘Yeah.’

I put the phone down. He might as well see me – see what he would be in for shortly.

I struggled to get up off the floor – each movement I made like another charge of electric current through my brain. When I eventually got up I noticed that I was standing in a small pool of my own piss. There were blood and mucus stains on my shirt and I was trembling all over.