Limitless (21 page)

Before long, tears were gathering behind my eyes and I could feel a rawness in my throat. Then my hands started shaking. What was happening to me? It’d only been something like twenty-four hours since I’d taken my last dose of MDT and already it seemed that small cracks were appearing on the hard chemical shell that had formed around me in recent weeks. Seeping through these cracks, in turn, were some strong emotions, and I wasn’t sure how well I
was going to be able to handle them. I pictured myself crying, sobbing, crawling across the floor,
climbing up the walls
, all of which seemed to make perfect sense for a while, as though it would be an exquisite relief. But then in the next moment Melissa was on her way back from the bathroom and I had to make some kind of an effort to pull myself together.

She sat down opposite me again and said, ‘You OK?’

I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t
look
fine?’

‘It’s just … I’m happy to see you again, Melissa, I really am. But I feel so bad about … you know … I mean, I can’t believe that you’ve …’

The tears I’d been trying to hold back came into my eyes at this point. I clenched my fists and stared down at the table. ‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment, and then smiled – but the expression on my face was probably so demented that it didn’t come across as a smile. I said ‘sorry’ again and as I wiped my eyes with one hand, I ground the knuckles of the other one into the surface of the wooden bench I was sitting on.

Without looking directly at her, I could tell that Melissa was now engaged in a damage limitation exercise of her own, one which involved taking deep breaths and whispering the word
shit
to herself every couple of seconds.

‘Look, Eddie,’ she said eventually, ‘this isn’t about me anymore, or about us – it’s about
you
.’

That statement had a steadying effect on me and I tried to focus on the implications of it for a moment.

She went on, ‘The reason I called you was because I thought … I don’t know, I thought if you were doing MDT, or
had
done it, that you should at least know what had happened to me. But I’d no idea you were so …’ she shook her head, ‘…
involved
. And then when I read that thing in the
Post
…’

I looked down into my glass of beer. I hadn’t touched it and didn’t think I was going to.

‘I mean, day-trading? Short-selling biotech stocks? I just couldn’t believe it. You must be doing a
lot
of MDT.’

I nodded, in tacit agreement.

‘But what happens when your supply runs out, Eddie? That’s when the real trouble’s going to start.’

Almost thinking aloud, I said, ‘Maybe I could stop taking it
now
. Or I could try weaning myself off it.’ I paused briefly to consider these options, but then said, ‘Of course there’s no guarantee that by doing either of those things I’d be doing the
right
thing, right?’

‘No,’ she said, looking quite pale and tired all of a sudden, ‘but I wouldn’t just
stop
. Not outright. That’s what I did. You see, it’s about dosage – how much you take, when you take it. That’s what they worked out after I started getting sick, and after that other guy died.’

‘So I should cut down? I should cut
back?
’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Jesus, I can’t believe that Vernon didn’t
tell
you about any of this stuff.’

I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.

‘Melissa, Vernon never told me anything.’

As I said this, I realized that for my story to
make
sense – without being the full truth – I was going to have to lie to her, and in a fairly elaborate way. Certain obvious and very awkward questions
naturally
posed themselves at this point, and I was dreading her asking them – questions such as: How many times had I actually seen Vernon? How had I come to have such a large supply of MDT? Why hadn’t I bothered to find out more about it? But to my surprise, Melissa didn’t put any of these questions to me, or any others for that matter, and we both fell silent for a while.

I studied her face as she lit up another cigarette. I would have expected the Melissa I’d known ten years before to pursue me on every point here, to seek clarification, to have me piece it all together for her. But the woman sitting opposite me now had clearly run out of that kind of steam. I could see that she was curious, and wanted to know why I wasn’t being straight with her, but on another level it was also plain that she didn’t have the time or energy for this sort of thing any more. Vernon was dead. She’d said her piece to me about MDT. She was undeniably concerned about my predicament.
But what else could she do or say? She had two kids at home and a life to cope with that was radically different from anything she might ever have envisaged for herself, or felt entitled to. She was
tired
.

I was on my own.

Melissa looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie.’

‘One question,’ I said, ‘that client of Vernon’s you mentioned? The one who worked for the pharmaceutical plant? I suppose I should be talking to him? That would make sense, wouldn’t it?’ But I
immediately
saw from the expression on her face that she wasn’t going to be able to help me out.

‘I only met him once, Eddie – four years ago. I don’t remember his name. Tom something – or
Todd
. That’s the best I can do. I’m really sorry.’

I began to feel panicky now.

‘What about the police investigation?’ I said, ‘No one ever got back in touch with me after that first day. Did they get in touch with you? I mean – did they find out who killed Vernon, and why?’

‘No, but they knew he’d been a coke-dealer at one point, so I guess they’re working on the assumption that it was … a coke thing.’

I paused here, a little thrown by the phrase, ‘a coke thing’. After a moment of reflection, and with the merest hint of sarcasm in my voice, I repeated it, ‘a coke thing’. This was a phrase Melissa had once used to describe our marriage. She picked up on the reference immediately and seemed to deflate even further.

‘That still rankles, does it?’

‘Not really, but … it
wasn’t
a coke thing—’

‘I know that. Me making the comment was.’

I could have said a hundred different things in response to that, but all I could come up with was, ‘It was a strange time.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Whenever I look back on it now – I don’t know – it feels …’

‘What?’

‘It’s futile thinking about it, but there’s so much of it that I would do differently.’

The obvious follow-up question –
like what?
– hung in the air
between us for a moment or two. Then Melissa said, ‘So would I.’

She was visibly drained now, and my headache was getting worse, so I decided it was time to extricate us both from the
embarrassment
and pain of a fraught conversation we’d wandered into
carelessly
, and which, if we didn’t watch it, could lead us into messy and very complicated territory.

Bracing myself, I then asked her to tell me something about her children. It transpired that she had two daughters, Ally, eight, and Jane, six. They were great, she said, I’d love them – quick-witted, strong-willed tyrants who didn’t miss a trick.

That was it, I thought,
enough
– I had to get out of there.

We spent a few more minutes chatting and then we brought it to a close. I promised Melissa that I’d keep in touch, that I’d let her know how I was getting on and that maybe I’d even come up someday to see her and the girls in Mahopac. She wrote down her address on a piece of paper, which I looked at and put into the pocket of my shirt.

Seeming to draw on some final reserve of energy, Melissa then held my gaze and said, ‘Eddie, what are you going to do about this?’

I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be OK, that I had quite a few MDT pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually and see how that worked out. I’d be fine. Since I hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the blackouts, however, this felt like a lie. But I didn’t think that under the circumstances Melissa would notice.

She nodded. Maybe she had noticed – but again, even if she had, what could she do?

Outside on Spring Street we said goodbye and embraced. Melissa got a taxi to Grand Central Station and I walked back to Tenth Street.

T
HE FIRST THING
I
DID
when I got into the apartment was take a couple of Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets for my headache. Then I lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, hoping that the pain – which was concentrated behind my eyes and had got steadily worse on the walk home from Spring Street – would subside quickly and then fade away altogether. I didn’t often get headaches, so I wasn’t sure if this one had come about as a result of my conversation with Melissa, or if it was a symptom of my sudden withdrawal from MDT. Either way – and both explanations seemed plausible at the time – I found it extremely unsettling.

In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and
multiplying
since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds. Again and again, I went over Melissa’s story, my thoughts vacillating between horror at what had happened to her and fear about what might be happening to me. I was haunted by the notion of how easily and irreversibly a careless decision, a mood, a whim, can change the direction of a person’s life. I thought about Donatella Alvarez and found it harder than before to simply dismiss the idea that I’d been in any way
responsible
for what had happened to
her
– for the easy, irreversible way
her
life had changed. I thought about my time with Melissa, and worried, agonized, about those things I might have done differently.

But this was clearly an intolerable situation. I had to take some action soon, or before I knew it I’d be getting
sick
– sliding into a clinical swamp, developing a whole syndrome of conditions, passing some awful point of no return. So at the very first glimmer of relief
from the Excedrin – and this was only the merest dulling of the pain – I got up from the couch and started walking around the apartment, vigorously, as though in some literal sense trying to shake myself into good health.

Then I remembered something.

I went into the bedroom and over to the closet. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my head, I bent down and pulled out the old
shoe-box
from under the blanket and the pile of magazines. I opened it and lifted out the big brown envelope where I’d hidden the cash and pills. I put my hand into the envelope and felt around, ignoring the sealed plastic bag containing the more than 350 pills that were still left. What I was searching for was the other thing I’d hidden in the envelope – Vernon’s tiny black notebook.

When I found it, I started thumbing my way through it page by page. There were dozens of names and phone numbers in it, quite a few of which had been crossed out, sometimes with new numbers written in above or below the old ones. I recognized Deke Tauber’s name this time, and I vaguely recognized a few other names, but annoyingly – and I checked several times – I didn’t find anyone listed in the notebook whose name was Tom or Todd.

But still, there had to be someone in amongst all these names who could help me, someone I could contact and maybe get some information from.

After all, I thought, who
were
these people?

Obvious as it was, and even though I’d had the notebook lying in my closet for weeks, it only dawned on me now – this, of course, had been Vernon’s list of clients.

The realization that these people had all used MDT at one time or another, and were maybe still using it, came as quite a shock to me. It also bruised my ego a little, because although it was clearly irrational to think that no one besides myself had ever
ex perienced
the amazing effects of MDT, I nevertheless felt that my experience of it was in some way unique and more authentic than that of anyone else who might have tried it. This slightly
indignant
sense of ownership lingered in my mind as I read through the names in the notebook one more time, but then something
else of significance occurred to me. If all of these people were on MDT, then surely that meant it had to be possible to
do
MDT without succumbing to headaches or blackouts, not to mention permanent brain damage.

I took another two Excedrin tablets and continued studying the notebook. The more I looked at the names the more familiar some of them seemed, until eventually about half of them had emerged from their earlier obscurity and I started being able to place them. A lot of the names that I recognized were from the business world, people who worked for new or medium-sized companies. There were several writers and journalists, and a couple of architects. Apart from Deke Tauber, none of these people was particularly well-known to the public at large. They all enjoyed some small measure of celebrity, but would be much better-known in their specific fields, so I decided it might be useful to do a little
background
research into some of them. I booted up my computer and went online.

Deke Tauber was the obvious one to start with. He had been a bond salesman on Wall Street in the mid-1980s – making lots of money, but spending considerably more. One or other of the Gants had known him in college, so he was often around, at parties, in bars, at openings, wherever there was premium quality blow to be had. I’d met him once or twice and found him to be arrogant and fairly objectionable. After the crash in 1987, however, he lost his job, moved out to California and that appeared to be the end of him.

Then about three years ago Tauber showed up in New York again, leading a dubious self-improvement cult – Dekedelia – that he had set up in LA. After a slow start, Dekedelia’s membership grew dramatically and Tauber started producing best-selling books and videos. He set up his own software company, opened a chain of cybercafés and moved into real estate. Soon, Dekedelia was a
multimillion
dollar business, employing over two hundred people, most of whom were also cult members.

When I trawled through what information I’d managed to find
on other people named in Vernon’s client list, I saw the first of two distinct patterns emerging. In each case I looked at, there was – over the previous three or four years – a sudden and unexplained leap forward in the career of the person concerned. Take Theodore Neal. After two decades of churning out unauthorized showbiz
biographies
and hack magazine work, Neal suddenly produced a
brilliant
and compelling life of Ulysses S. Grant. Described as ‘a breathtaking and original work of scholarship’, it went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Or Jim Rayburn, the chief of struggling record-label, Thrust, who in one six-month period
discovered
and signed up hip-hop artists J. J. Rictus, Human Cheese and F Train – and then within another six months had a full
mantelpiece
of Grammy and MTV awards to his name.

There were others – middle management grunts fast-tracking it to CEO, defence attorneys mesmerizing juries to achieve unlikely acquittals, architects designing elaborate new skyscrapers over lunch, on the backs of cocktail napkins …

It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: MDT-48 was
out there in society
. Other people were using it in the same way that I’d been using it. What I didn’t know was how much they were taking, and how often.
I’d
been taking MDT indiscriminately, one, two, occasionally even three at a pop, but I had no idea if I really needed that many, and if taking that many actually rendered the hit more intense or made it last any longer. It was like with cocaine, I supposed, in that after a while it was just a question of gluttony. Sooner or later, if the drug was there, gluttony became the controlling dynamic in your
relationship
to it.

So the only way I was going to find out about dosage was to contact someone on the list – just phone them up and ask them what they knew. It was when I did this that the second and more disturbing pattern began to emerge.

I put it off until the following day – because of my headache, because I was reluctant to call up people I didn’t know, because I was scared of what I might find out. I kept popping Excedrin tablets
every few hours, and although they took the edge off the pain, there was still a dull and fairly constant thumping sensation behind my eyes.

I didn’t imagine I’d have any luck getting through to Deke Tauber, so the first name I selected from the list was that of a CFO in a medium-sized electronics company. I remembered his name from an article I’d read in
Wired.

A woman answered the phone.

‘Good morning,’ I said, ‘may I speak to Paul Kaplan, please?’

The woman didn’t respond, and in the brief silence that followed I considered the possibility that we’d been disconnected. To check, I said, ‘Hello?’

‘Who is this, please?’ she said, her tone both weary and impatient.

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said, ‘from
Electronics Today
magaz—’

‘Look … my husband died three days ago.’

‘Oh—’

My mind froze. What did I say now? There was silence. It seemed to go on for ever. I eventually said, ‘I’m very sorry.’

The woman remained silent. I could hear muffled voices in the background. I wanted to ask her how her husband had died, but I was unable to form the words.

Then she said, ‘I’m sorry … thank you … goodbye.’

And that was that.

Her husband had died three days ago. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. People died all the time.

I selected another number and dialled it. I waited, staring at the wall in front of me.

‘Yes?’

A man’s voice.

‘May I speak to Jerry Brady, please?’

‘Jerry’s in …’ He paused, and then said, ‘who’s this?’

I’d chosen the number at random and realized now that I didn’t know who Jerry Brady was – or who
I
should be, calling him up on a Sunday morning like this.

‘It’s … a friend.’

The man hesitated, but then went on, ‘Jerry’s in the hospital …’ – there was a slight shake in his voice – ‘… and he’s
really
sick.’

‘Oh my god. That’s awful. What’s wrong with him?’

‘That’s just it, we don’t know. He started getting these
headaches
a couple of weeks ago? Then last Tuesday – no … Wednesday – he collapsed at work …’

‘
Shit
.’

‘… and when he came to he said he’d been having dizzy spells and muscular spasms all day. He’s been in and out of consciousness ever since, trembling, throwing up.’

‘What have the doctors said?’

‘They don’t know. I mean, what do you want, they’re
doctors
. All the tests they’ve done so far have been inconclusive. I’ll tell you something, though …’

He paused here, and clicked his tongue. I got the impression from his slightly breathless tone that he was dying to talk to someone but at the same time couldn’t quite ignore the fact that he had no idea who I was. For my part I wondered who
he
was – a brother? A lover?

I said, ‘Yeah? Go on …’

‘OK, here’s the thing,’ he said, obviously judging it immaterial at this stage of the proceedings who the fuck I was, ‘Jerry’d been weird for weeks, even before the headaches. Like he was really
preoccupied
with something, and
worried
. Which wasn’t Jerry’s style at all.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Oh my god I said
wasn’t.
’

I felt faint and put my free hand up to lean against the wall.

‘Look,’ I said quickly, ‘I’m not going to take up any more of your time. Just give Jerry my best, would you?’ Without saying my name, or anything else, I put the phone down.

I staggered back towards the couch and fell on to it. I lay there for about half an hour, horrified, replaying the two conversations over and over in my mind.

I eventually got up and dragged myself back to the telephone. There were between forty and fifty names in the notebook and so far I’d only called two of them. I picked another number – and then another one, and then another one after that.

But it was the same story each time. Of the people I tried to contact, three were dead and the remainder were sick – either already in the hospital, or in varying states of panic at home. In other circumstances, this might have constituted a mini-epidemic, but given that these people displayed quite a wide range of
symptoms
– and were spread out over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island – it was unlikely that anyone would make a connection between them. In fact, the only thing that did connect them, as far as I could see, was the presence of their phone numbers in this little notebook.

Sitting on the couch again, massaging my temples, I stared up at the ceramic bowl on the wooden shelf above the computer. I had no choice now. If I didn’t go back on MDT, this headache would intensify and soon be joined by other symptoms, the ones I’d
repeatedly
heard described on the telephone – dizziness, nausea, muscular spasms, impairment of motor skills. And then, apparently, I would die. It certainly looked as if all the people on Vernon’s client list were going to die, so why should I be any different?

But there was a difference, and a significant one. I could go back on MDT if I chose to. And they couldn’t. I had a fairly substantial stash of MDT. And they didn’t. Forty or fifty people were out there suffering severe and very probably lethal withdrawal symptoms because their supply had dried up.

And mine hadn’t.

In fact, mine had only started, because clearly
their
supply – or what would have been their supply if Vernon hadn’t died – was the stuff
I’d
been taking for the past few weeks. I had dreadful guilt feelings about this, but what could I do? There were over three hundred and fifty pills left in my closet, which gave me
considerable
breathing space, but if I were to share these out among fifty other people no one would benefit. Instead of us all dying this week, we’d all die next week.

In any case I decided that if I drastically reduced my own intake of MDT, it would have the effect of prolonging my supply, and might also, possibly, stop the blackouts, or at least curtail them.