Limitless (20 page)

I was staring down at a knot in one of the floorboards. I rallied all of my strength and managed, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Melissa.’

Then, without waiting for an answer, I put the phone down.

I staggered over to the couch and lowered myself on to it. It was the middle of the afternoon and I’d just drunk a whole bottle of cough syrup. I laid my head on the armrest and stared up at the ceiling. Over the next half an hour or so, I was aware of various sounds drifting in and out of my consciousness – the door-buzzer, possibly someone
banging
on the door, voices, the phone ringing, sirens, traffic. But none of it was clear enough, or compelling enough, to rouse me from the torpor I was in, and gradually I sank into the deepest sleep I’d had for weeks.

O
UT COLD UNTIL FOUR O’CLOCK
the next morning, I spent a further two hours struggling to emerge from the other side of this paralysing blanket of drowsiness. Some time after six, aching all over, I dragged myself off the couch and slouched into the bathroom. I had a shower. Then I went into the kitchen and put on a large pot of coffee.

Back in the living-room, smoking a cigarette, I found myself glancing continually over at the ceramic bowl on the shelf above the computer. But I didn’t want to get too close to it, because I knew that if I went on taking MDT, I would just end up having more of these mysterious and increasingly scary blackouts. On the other hand, I didn’t really believe that I’d had anything to do with putting Donatella Alvarez into a coma in the first place. I was prepared to accept that
something
had happened, and that during these
blackouts
I continued functioning on one level or another, moving about, doing stuff, but I refused to accept that this extended to me striking someone over the head with a blunt instrument. I’d had a similar thought a few minutes earlier in the bathroom, while I was having my shower. There were still bruises on my body, as well as that small circular mark, fading now, of what had seemed to be a cigarette burn. This was incontrovertible evidence, I’d concluded, of
something
, but hardly of anything to do with
me
…

I wandered reluctantly over to the window and looked out. The street was empty. There was no one around – there were no
photographers
, no reporters. With any luck, I thought, the mystery trader of the tabloids had already become yesterday’s news. Besides, it was Saturday morning and things were bound to be a little quieter.

I sat on the couch again. After a couple of minutes, I got back into the position I’d been in all night, and even started to doze a little. I felt pleasantly drowsy now, and kind of lazy. This was
something
I hadn’t felt for ages, and although it took me a while, I
eventually
linked it in with the fact that I hadn’t taken an MDT pill in nearly twenty-four hours, my longest – and only – period of
abstinence
since the beginning. It had never occurred to me before to just stop, but now I thought – well, why not? It was the weekend, and maybe I deserved a break. I would need to be charged up for the meeting with Carl Van Loon on Monday, but until then there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to chill out like a regular person.

However, by eleven o’clock I didn’t feel quite so relaxed about things, and as I was getting ready to go out a vague sense of
disorientation
crept over me. But since I’d never really given myself the chance to let the drug wear off properly, I decided to stick to my plan of temporary abstinence – at least until I’d spoken to Melissa.

Down on Spring Street I left the sunlight behind me and stepped into the dim shadows of the bar where we’d arranged to meet. I looked around. Someone gestured to me from a booth in the corner, a raised hand, and although I couldn’t see the person clearly from where I was standing, I knew that it had to be Melissa. I walked over towards her.

On my way to this place from Tenth Street, I’d felt very weird indeed, as if I
had
taken something after all and was coming up on it. But I knew it was actually the reverse, that it was more like a curtain being lifted on raw, exposed nerves, on feelings that hadn’t seen the light of day for some time. When I thought about Carl Van Loon, for example, or Lafayette, or Chantal, I was first struck by how unreal they seemed, and then by a kind of retrospective terror at my involvement with them. When I thought about Melissa, I was overwhelmed –
blinded
by a pixel-storm of memories …

She half got up as I arrived and we kissed awkwardly. She sat back down on her side of the booth. I slid into the opposite side to face her.

My heart was pounding.

I said, ‘How are you doing?’ and it immediately seemed odd to me that I wasn’t commenting on how she looked, because she looked so different.

‘I’m OK.’

Her hair was short and dyed a kind of reddish brown. She was heavier – generally, but especially in the face – and had lines around her eyes. These made her look very tired. I was one to talk, of course, but that didn’t make it any less of a shock.

‘So, Eddie, how are
you
?’

‘I’m OK,’ I lied, and then added, ‘I suppose.’

Melissa was drinking a beer and had a cigarette on the go. The place was almost empty. There was an old man reading a newspaper at a table near the door and there were two young guys on stools at the bar. I caught the eye of the barman and pointed at Melissa’s beer. He nodded back at me. The normality of this little routine belied how strange and unsettled I was feeling. A few weeks earlier I’d been sitting opposite Vernon in a booth of a cocktail lounge on Sixth Avenue. Now, thanks to some unaccountable dream-logic, I was sitting in a booth opposite Melissa in
this
place.

‘You look good,’ she said. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, she added, ‘And don’t tell me
I
look good, because I know I don’t.’

It occurred to me that despite the changes – the weight, the lines, the weariness – nothing could eradicate the fact that Melissa was still beautiful. But after what she’d said I couldn’t think of any way to tell her this without sounding patronizing. What I said was, ‘I’ve lost quite a bit of weight recently.’

Looking me straight in the eyes, she replied, ‘Well, MDT will certainly do that to you.’

‘Yeah, I suppose it will.’

In as quiet and circumspect a voice as I could muster, I then asked, ‘So, what do you know about all of this?’

‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘here’s the bottom line, Eddie. MDT is lethal, or can be, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll do serious damage to your brain, and I’m talking about permanently.’ She then pointed to her own head with the index finger of her right
hand, and said, ‘It fucked
my
brain up – which I’ll go into later – but the point I want to make now is, I was one of the lucky ones.’

I swallowed.

The barman appeared with a tray. He placed a glass of beer down in front of me and exchanged the ashtray on the table with a clean one. When he’d gone, Melissa continued. ‘I only took nine or ten hits, but there was one guy who took a lot more than that, over a period of weeks, and I know
he
died. Another unfortunate shmoe ended up as a vegetable. His mother had to sponge him down every day and feed him with a
spoon
.’

My stomach was jumping now, and a mild headache had started up.

‘When was this?’

‘About four years ago.’ She paused. ‘Vernon didn’t tell you any of this stuff?’ I shook my head. She seemed surprised. Then, as though great physical effort were required for what she was doing, she took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she went on, ‘so about four years ago Vernon was hanging out with a client of his who worked at some
pharmaceutical
plant and had access that he shouldn’t have had to a whole range of new drugs. One of them in particular, which didn’t have a name yet and hadn’t been tested, was supposed to be …
amazing
. So, in order to test it, because of course they were too goddamned shrewd to test it themselves, Vernon and this guy started getting people – their friends basically – to take it.’

‘Even
you
?’

‘Vernon didn’t want me to take it at first, but he talked it up so much that
I
insisted. You know what I was like, curious to a fault.’

‘It wasn’t a fault.’

‘Anyway, a few of us found ourselves in on this – I don’t know – let’s call it an
informal
trial period.’ She paused and took a sip from her beer. ‘So what do you want, I took it and it
was
amazing.’ She paused again, and looked at me for confirmation. ‘I mean, you’ve taken it, you know what I’m talking about, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well. I did it a few more times and then I got scared.’

‘Why?’

‘
Why?
Because … I wasn’t stupid. I knew no one could
maintain
that level of mental activity for very long and survive. It was nonsense. Let me give you an example, one day I read Brian Greene’s
The Elegant Universe
… superstring theory, yeah? I read it in
forty-five
minutes, and
understood
it.’ She took a last drag from her
cigarette.
‘Don’t ask me about it now, though.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Then I had this thing I was supposed to be working on at the time, a series of articles about self-organizing
adaptive
systems – the research that’s been done into them, their wider applicability, whatever. My work-rate increased
ten
-fold overnight, I’m not kidding you. My boss at
Iroquois
magazine thought I was pitching for his job as Features Editor. So I guess I just chickened out. I panicked. I couldn’t handle it. I stopped taking it.’

She shrugged her shoulders a couple of times.

‘And?’

‘And –
eh
– I started getting sick, after a few weeks, headaches, nausea. Talk about panic. I went back to Vernon to see if I maybe shouldn’t take another hit, or half a hit, see if
that
would make any difference. But that was when he told me about this other guy who’d just died.’

‘How had he died?’

‘Rapid two-day deterioration – headaches, dizziness, loss of motor skills, blackouts. Boom. He was dead.’

‘How much had he taken?’

‘One hit every day for about a month.’

I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.

‘How much have
you
been taking, Eddie?’

She was looking directly at me now, with those remarkable deep brown eyes. She was biting on her lower lip.

‘I’ve been taking a
lot
.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘More than
that
guy.’

‘
Jesus.
’

There was a long pause.

‘So you must still have a supply, then,’ she said eventually.

‘Not exactly, I’ve got some left, a stash, but … I got it
from
Vernon.
He
supplied it to me and now he’s gone. I don’t know anyone else.’

She looked at me, slightly puzzled. Then she said, ‘That guy I told you about died because they didn’t know what they were doing, they had no idea about dosage or strength, or anything – and as well, people reacted to it differently. But it didn’t take them long to work all of that stuff out.’ She paused, took in another deep breath, and continued. ‘Vernon was making a lot of money dealing MDT, and I haven’t heard of anyone else dying since the early days, so
presumably
whatever he gave you or told you was right for
you
. I mean, the dosage was worked out, right? You
do
know what you’re doing?’

‘Hmm.’

Did I tell her at this point that Vernon had only given me a sampler, and that he hadn’t had a chance to tell me
anything
?

What I said was, ‘So what happened with
you
, Melissa?’

She lit up another cigarette and seemed to be considering for a moment whether or not she was going to let me sidetrack her.

I took a cigarette, too.

Then she began. ‘Well, naturally after me getting sick and that guy dying I didn’t go near it again, I didn’t touch it. But I was really scared. I mean I was married and had
two small kids
.’ When she said this, she almost flinched, as though reacting to a threatened slap in the face – as though she felt that articulating this level of
irresponsibility
should instantly have provoked a violent reaction from
someone
. After a moment, she went on. ‘Anyway, it never seemed to get much worse than bad headaches and occasional nausea. But over a period of months I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than ten minutes at a stretch without getting a migraine. I missed deadlines. I became sluggish, lazy. I put on
weight
.’ She pulled contemptuously at her sweater. ‘My memory was shot to bits. That series of articles? Forget it – the whole thing just disintegrated.
Iroquois
magazine let me go. The marriage fell apart. Sex? Get out of here.’ She leant back and shook her head. ‘That was four years ago and I haven’t been the same since.’

‘And now?’

‘
Now
I live in Mahopac and waitress four nights a week at a place called Cicero’s.
Now
I can’t read any more – I mean, what, the fucking
New York Post
?’

I felt as though sulphuric acid were being secreted into the pit of my stomach.

‘I can’t deal with stressful or emotional situations any more, Eddie. I’m wired up now because I’m seeing
you
, but after this meeting I’m going to have a headache for three days. Believe me, I’m going to pay dearly for this.’

She half stood up and eased her way out of the booth.

‘
And
I’ve got to pee. Which is another thing.’ She stood there, looking down at me, one hand scratching the back of her head. ‘But Jesus, you don’t need to know about
that
, right?’

Waving an arm dismissively, Melissa walked off towards the
bathroom
.

I gazed out across the bar now, reeling from what she’d told me, barely able to comprehend it. First of all, it seemed incredible to me that we were actually in the same place together, sharing a drink, talking – and that right now she was over there in the bathroom, in jeans and a baggy sweater, peeing. Because any time I’d thought of her over the past ten years, the person I’d automatically visualized had been the thin shiny Melissa of circa 1988, the one with long black hair and prominent cheekbones, the Melissa I’d seen hike up her skirt a thousand times and pee and continue talking about
whatever
she’d been talking about. But the Melissa of those days,
apparently
, had unravelled in time and space and was a ghost now. I was never going to see
her
again, never going to bump into
her
in the street. She’d been supplanted by the Melissa I hadn’t kept up with, the one who’d gotten married again and had kids, who’d worked for
Iroquois
magazine, the one who’d allowed her teeming, tumultuous brain to be damaged, and permanently so, by some untried, untested and previously unknown pharmaceutical product …