Alan Glynn 1 страница

Alan Glynn

The Dark Fields aka Limitless

First published as The Dark Fields in 2001 by Little Brown & Company

First published as Limitless in 2011

For Eithne

I wish to thank the following people for their help and support, both moral and editorial: Eithne Kelly, Declan Hughes, Douglas Kennedy, Antony Harwood, Andrew Gordon, Liam Glenn, Eimear Kelly, Kate O’Carroll and Tif Eccles.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

PART ONE

IT’S GETTING LATE.

I don’t have too sharp a sense of time any more, but I know it must be after eleven, and maybe even getting on for midnight. I’m reluctant to look at my watch, though – because that will only remind me of how little time I have left.

In any case, it’s getting late.

And it’s quiet. Apart from the ice-machine humming outside my door and the occasional car passing by on the highway, I can’t actually hear a thing – no traffic, or sirens, or music, or local people talking, or animals making weird nightcalls to each other, if that’s what animals do. Nothing. No sounds at all. It’s eerie, and I don’t really like it. So maybe I shouldn’t have come all the way up here. Maybe I should have just stayed in the city, and let the time-lapse flicker of the lights short-circuit my now preternatural attention span, let the relentless bustle and noise wear me down and burn up all this energy I’ve got pumping through my system. But if I hadn’t come up here to Vermont, to this motel – to the Northview Motor Lodge – where would I have stayed? I couldn’t very well have inflicted my little mushroom-cloud of woes on any of my friends, so I guess I had no option but to do what I did – get in a car and leave the city, drive hundreds of miles up here to this quiet, empty part of the country…

And to this quiet, empty motel room, with its three different but equally busy d& #233; cor patterns – carpet, wallpaper, blankets – vying, screaming, for my attention – to say nothing of the shopping-mall artwork everywhere, the snowy mountain scene over the bed, the Sunflowers reproduction by the door.

I am sitting in a wicker armchair in a Vermont motel room, everything unfamiliar to me. I’ve got a laptop computer balanced on my knees and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor beside me. I’m facing the TV set, which is bolted to the wall in the corner, and is switched on, tuned to CNN, but with the sound turned right down. There is a panel of commentators on the screen – national security advisers, Washington correspondents, foreign policy experts – and although I can’t hear them, I know what they’re talking about… they’re talking about the situation, the crisis, they’re talking about Mexico.

Finally – giving in – I look at my watch.

I can’t believe that it’s been nearly twelve hours already. In a while, of course, it will be fifteen hours, and then twenty hours, and then a whole day. What happened in Manhattan this morning is receding, slipping back along all those countless, small-town Main Streets, and along all those miles of highway, hurtling backwards through time, and at what feels like an unnaturally rapid pace. But it is also beginning to break up under the immense pressure, beginning to crack and fragment into separate shards of memory – while simultaneously remaining, of course, in some kind of a suspended, inescapable present tense, set hard, un breakable… more real and alive than anything I can see around me here in this motel room.

I look at my watch again.

The thought of what happened sets my heart pounding, and audibly, as if it’s panicking in there and will shortly be forcing its way, thrashing and flailing, out of my chest. But at least my head hasn’t started pounding. That will come, I know, sooner or later – the intense pin-prick behind the eyeballs spreading out into an excruciating, skull-wide agony. But at least it hasn’t started yet.

Clearly, though, time is running out.

So how do I begin this?

I suppose I brought the laptop with me intending to get everything down on a disk, intending to write a straightforward account of what happened, and yet here I am hesitating, circling over the material, dithering around as if I had a couple of months at my disposal and some sort of a reputation to protect. The thing is, I don’t have a couple of months – I probably only have a couple of hours – and I don’t have any reputation to protect, but I still feel as if I should be going for a bold opening here, something grand and declamatory, the kind of thing a bearded omniscient narrator from the nineteenth century might put in to kick-start his latest 900-pager.

The broad stroke.

Which, I feel, would go with the general territory.

But the plain truth is, there was nothing broad-stroke-ish about it, nothing grand and declamatory in how all of this got started, nothing particularly auspicious in my running into Vernon Gant on the street one afternoon a few months ago.

And that, I suppose, really is where I should start.

VERNON GANT.

Of all the various relationships and shifting configurations that can exist within a modern family, of all the potential relatives that can be foisted upon you – people you’ll be tied to for ever, in documents, in photographs, in obscure corners of memory – surely for sheer tenuousness, absurdity even, one figure must stand towering above all others, one figure, alone and multi-hyphenated: the ex-brother-in-law.

Hardly fabled in story and song, it’s not a relationship that requires renewal. What’s more, if you and your former spouse don’t have any children then there’s really no reason for you ever, ever to see this person again in your entire life. Unless, of course, you just happen to bump into him in the street and are unable, or not quick enough, to avoid making eye contact.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, about four o’clock, sunny and not too cold. I was walking along Twelfth Street at a steady clip, smoking a cigarette, heading towards Fifth Avenue. I was in a bad mood and entertaining dark thoughts about a wide range of subjects, my book for Kerr & Dexter – Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley – chief among them, though there was nothing unusual about that, since the subject thrummed relentlessly beneath everything I did, every meal I ate, every shower I took, every ballgame I watched on TV, every late-night trip to the corner store for milk, or toilet-paper, or chocolate, or cigarettes. My fear on that particular afternoon, as I remember, was that the book just wouldn’t hang together. You’ve got to strike a delicate balance in this kind of thing between telling the story and… telling the story – if you know what I mean – and I was worried that maybe there was no story, that the basic premise of the book was a crock of shit. In addition to this, I was thinking about my apartment on Avenue A and Tenth Street and how I needed to move to a bigger place, but how that idea also filled me with dread – taking my books down off their shelves, sorting through my desk, then packing everything into identical boxes, forget it. I was thinking about my ex-girlfriend, too – Maria, and her ten-year-old daughter, Romy – and how I’d clearly been the wrong guy to be around that situation. I never used to say enough to the mom and couldn’t rein in my language when I was talking to the kid. Other dark thoughts I was having: I smoked too much and had a sore chest. I had a host of companion symptoms as well, niggly physical things that showed up occasionally, weird aches, possible lumps, rashes, symptoms of a condition maybe, or a network of conditions. What if they all held hands one day, and lit up, and I keeled over dead?

I thought about how I hated the way I looked, and how I needed a haircut.

I flicked ash from my cigarette on to the sidewalk. I glanced up. The corner of Twelfth and Fifth was about twenty yards ahead of me. Suddenly a guy came careering around the corner from Fifth, walking as fast as I was. An aerial view would have shown us – two molecules – on a direct collision course. I recognized him at ten yards and he recognized me. At five yards we both started putting the brakes on and making with the gestures, the bug-eyes, the double-takes.

‘Eddie Spinola. ’

‘Vernon Gant. ’

‘How are you? ’

‘God, how long has it been? ’

We shook hands and slapped shoulders.

Vernon then stood back a little and started sizing me up.

‘Jesus, Eddie, pack it on, why don’t you? ’

This was a reference to the considerable weight I’d gained since we’d last met, which was maybe nine or ten years before.

He was tall and skinny, just like he’d always been. I looked at his balding head, and paused. Then I nodded upwards. ‘Well, at least I still have some choice in the matter. ’

He danced Jake La Motta-style for a moment and then threw me a mock left hook.

‘Still Mr Smart-ass, huh? So what are you up to, Eddie? ’

He was wearing an expensive, loose-fitting linen suit and dark leather shoes. He had gold-rimmed shades on, and a tan. He looked and smelt like money.

What was I up to?

All of a sudden I didn’t want to be having this conversation.

‘I’m working for Kerr & Dexter, you know, the publishers. ’

He sniffed and nodded yeah, waiting for more.

‘I’ve been a copywriter with them for about three or four years, text-books and manuals, that kind of thing, but now they’re doing a series of illustrated books on the twentieth century – you know, hoping to cash in on an early boom in the nostalgia trade – and I’ve been commissioned to do one about the design links between the Sixties and the Nineties…’

‘Interesting. ’

‘… Haight-Ashbury and Silicon Valley…’

‘Very interesting. ’

I hammered it home, ‘Lysergic acid and personal computers. ’

‘Cool. ’

‘It’s not really. They don’t pay very well and because the books are going to be so short – only about a hundred pages, a hundred twenty – you don’t have much latitude, which actually makes it more of a challenge, because…’

I stopped.

He furrowed his brow. ‘Yeah? ’

‘… because…’ – explaining myself like this was sending unexpected stabs of embarrassment, and contempt, right through me and out the other side. I shuffled from one foot to the other. ‘… because, well, you’re basically writing captions to the illustrations and so if you want to get any kind of angle across you have to be really on top of the material, you know. ’

‘That’s great, man. ’ He smiled. ‘It’s what you always wanted to be doing, am I right? ’

I considered this. It was, in a way – I suppose. But not in any way he’d ever understood. Jesus, I thought, Vernon Gant.

‘That must be a trip, ’ he said.

Vernon had been a cocaine dealer when I knew him in the late 1980s, but back then he’d had quite a different image, lots of hair, leather jackets, big into Tao and furniture. It was all coming back to me now.

‘Actually I’m having a hard time with it, ’ I said, though I don’t know why I was bothering to pursue the matter.

‘Yeah? ’ he said, pulling back a little. He adjusted his shades as though he were surprised to hear what I’d said, but was nevertheless ready to start doling out advice once he’d nailed down whatever the problem might be.

‘There are so many strands, you know, and contradictions – it’s just hard to work out where to start. ’ I settled my gaze on a car parked across the street, a metallic-blue Mercedes. ‘I mean you’ve got the anti-technology, back-to-nature Sixties, the Whole Earth Catalogue – all that shit… windchimes, brown rice and patchouli. But then you’ve got the pyrotechnics of rock music, sound-and-light, the word electric and the very fact that LSD itself came out of a laboratory…’ I kept my gaze on the car. ‘… and also that – get this – the prototype version of the Internet, the Arpanet, was developed in nineteen sixty-nine, at UCLA. Nineteen sixty-nine. ’

I stopped again. The only reason I’d come out with this, I suppose, was because it was on my mind and had been all day. I was just thinking out loud, thinking – what angle did I take?

Vernon clicked his tongue and looked at his watch. ‘What are you doing now, Eddie? ’

‘Walking down the street. Nothing. Having a smoke. I don’t know. I can’t get any work done. ’ I took a drag from my cigarette. ‘Why? ’

‘I think I can help you out. ’

He looked at his watch again and seemed to be calculating something for a moment.

I stared at him in disbelief and was on the verge of getting annoyed.

‘C’mon, I’ll explain what I mean, ’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a drink. ’ He clapped his hands. ‘Vamos. ’

I really didn’t think my heading off with Vernon Gant was such a good idea. Apart from anything else, how could he possibly help me with the problem I’d just outlined to him? The notion was absurd.

But I hesitated.

I’d liked the sound of the second part of his proposition, the going for a drink part. There was also, I have to admit, a slight Pavlovian element to my hesitation – the idea of bumping into Vernon and heading off spontaneously to another location stirred something in my body chemistry. Hearing him say vamos, as well, was like an access-code or a search-word into a whole phase of my life that had been closed off now for nearly ten years.

I rubbed my nose and said, ‘OK. ’

‘Good. ’ He paused, and then said – like he was trying it out for size – ‘Eddie Spinola. ’

We went to a bar over on Sixth, a cheesy retro cocktail lounge called Maxie’s that used to be a Tex-Mex place called El Charro and before that had been a spit-and-sawdust joint called Conroy’s. It took us a few moments to adjust to the lighting and the d& #233; cor of the interior, and, weirdly, to find a booth that Vernon was happy with. The place was virtually empty – it wouldn’t be getting busy for another while yet, not until five o’clock at least – but Vernon was behaving as though it were the small hours of a Saturday morning and we were staking our claim to the last available seats in the last open bar in town. It was only then, as I watched him case each booth for line of vision and proximity to toilets and exits, that I realized something was up. He was edgy and nervous, and this was unusual for him – or at any rate unusual for the Vernon I’d known, his one great virtue as a coke dealer having been his relative composure at all times. Other dealers I’d been acquainted with generally behaved like adverts for the product they were shifting in that they hopped around the place incessantly and talked a lot. Vernon, on the other hand, had always been quiet and businesslike, unassuming, a good listener – maybe even a little too passive sometimes, like a dedicated weed smoker adrift in a sea of coke-fiends. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought that Vernon – or at least this person in front of me – had done his first few lines of coke that very afternoon and wasn’t handling it very well.

We settled into a booth, finally, and a waitress came over.

Vernon drummed his fingers on the table and said, ‘Let me see – I’ll have a… Vodka Collins. ’

‘For you, sir? ’

‘A whiskey sour, please. ’

The waitress left and Vernon took out a pack of ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarettes and a half-used book of matches. As he was lighting up a cigarette, I said, ‘So, how’s Melissa? ’

Melissa was Vernon’s sister; I’d been married to her for just under five months back in 1988.

‘Yeah, Melissa’s all right, ’ he said and took a drag from the cigarette. This involved drawing on all the muscle power in his lungs, shoulders and upper back. ‘I don’t see her that often, though. She lives upstate now, Mahopac, and has a couple of kids. ’

‘What’s her husband like? ’

‘Her husband? What are you, jealous? ’ Vernon laughed and looked around the bar as if he wanted to share the joke with someone. I said nothing. The laughter died down eventually and he tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. ‘The guy’s a jerk. He walked out on her about two years ago, left her in the shithouse. ’

I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As a consequence, I couldn’t really make a personal connection to the news, not yet at any rate, but what I could picture now – and vividly, intrusively – was Melissa, tall and slender in a creamy silk sheath dress on our wedding day, sipping a Martini in Vernon’s apartment on the Upper West Side, her pupils dilating… and smiling across the room at me. I could picture her perfect skin, her shiny straight black hair that went half-way down her back. I could picture her wide, elegant mouth not letting anyone get a word in edgeways…

The waitress approached with our drinks.

Melissa had been smarter than anyone around her, smarter than me, and certainly smarter than her older brother. She’d worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate.

After the waitress had gone, I lifted my drink and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. ’

‘Yeah. It’s a shame. ’

But he said it like he was referring to a minor earthquake in some unpronounceable Asian republic, like he’d heard it on the news and was just trying to make conversation.

‘Is she working? ’ I persisted.

‘Yeah, she’s doing something, I think. I’m not sure what. I don’t really talk to her that much. ’

I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been having photo-album flashes of me and Melissa, and of our little slice of time together – like that one of our wedding day in Vernon’s apartment. It was psychotronic, skullbound stuff… Eddie and Melissa, for example, standing between two pillars outside City Hall… Melissa doing up lines as she gazes down into the mirror resting on her knees, gazes down through the crumbling white bars at her own beautiful face… Eddie in the bathroom, in various bathrooms, and in various stages of being unwell… Melissa and Eddie fighting over money and over who’s a bigger pig with a rolled-up twenty. Ours wasn’t a cocaine wedding so much as a cocaine marriage – what Melissa had once dismissively referred to as ‘a coke thing’ – so, regardless of whatever real feelings I may have had for Melissa, or she for me, it wasn’t at all surprising that we’d only lasted five months, and maybe it was surprising that we’d even lasted that long, I don’t know.

But anyway. The point here and now was – what had happened with them? What had happened with Vernon and Melissa? They had always been very close, and had always played major roles in each other’s lives. They had looked out for each other in the big bad city, and been each other’s final court of appeal in relationships, jobs, apartments, d& #233; cor. It had been one of those brother-sister things where if Vernon hadn’t liked me, Melissa probably would have had no hesitation in just dumping me – though personally, and if I’d had any say in the matter, as the boyfriend, I would have dumped the older brother. But there you go. That hadn’t been an option.

Anyway, this was ten years later. This was now. Things had obviously changed.

I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarettes, but I just couldn’t get Melissa out of my head now. I wanted to ask him questions about her, I wanted a detailed up-date on her situation, and yet I wasn’t sure what right I might have – if any – to information here. I wasn’t sure to what extent the circumstances of Melissa’s life were any of my business any more.

‘Why do you smoke those things? ’ I said finally, fishing out my own pack of unfiltered Camels. ‘Isn’t it just a lot of effort for almost no return? ’

‘Sure, but it’s about the only aerobic exercise I get these days. If I smoked those things, ’ he said, nodding at my Camels, ‘I’d be on a life-support machine by now – but what do you want, I’m not going to give up. ’

I decided I would try and get back to talking about Melissa later on.

‘So, what have you been doing, Vernon? ’

‘Keeping busy, you know. ’

That could only mean one thing – he was still dealing. A normal person would have said I work for Microsoft now or I’m a short-order cook at Moe’s Diner. But no – Vernon was keeping busy. Just then it struck me that maybe Vernon’s idea of helping me out was going to be an offer of some cut-price blow.

Shit, I should have known.

But then, had I really not known? Wasn’t it nostalgia for the old days that had prompted me to come here with him in the first place?

I was about to make some wisecrack about his obvious aversion to respectable employment, when he said, ‘Actually, I’ve been doing some consultancy work. ’

‘What? ’

‘For a pharmaceutical corporation. ’

My eyebrows furrowed and I repeated his words with a question mark at the end.

‘Yeah, there’s an exclusive product range coming on-stream at the end of the year and we’re trying to generate a client base. ’

‘What is this, some sort of new street language, Vernon? I’ve been out of the scene for a long time, I know, but…’

‘No, no. Straight up. In fact’ – he looked around the bar for a moment, and then went on in a slightly lower tone – ‘that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, this… creative problem you’re having. ’

‘I-’

‘The people I work for have come up with an amazing new substance. ’ He reached into his jacket pocket and took out his wallet. ‘It’s in pill form. ’ From the wallet he produced a tiny plastic sachet with an air-lock seal across the top. He opened it, held the sachet with his right hand and tapped something out into the palm of his left hand. He held this hand up for me to see. In the centre of it was a tiny white unmarked tablet.

‘Here, ’ he said. ‘Take it. ’

‘What is it? ’

‘Just take it. ’

I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.

‘What is it? ’ I said again.

‘It doesn’t have a name yet – I mean it’s got a laboratory tag, but that’s just letters and a code. They haven’t come up with a proper name for it yet. They’ve done all the clinical trials, though, and it’s FDA-approved. ’

He looked at me as though he’d answered my question.

‘OK, ’ I said, ‘it doesn’t have a name yet and they’ve done all the clinical trials and it’s FDA-approved, but what the fuck is it? ’

He took a sip from his drink and another hit from his cigarette. Then he said, ‘You know the way drugs fuck you up? You have a good time doing them but then you get all fucked up afterwards? And eventually everything in your life… falls apart, yeah? Sooner or later it happens, am I right? ’

I nodded.

‘Well, not with this. ’ He indicated the pill in my hand. ‘This little baby is the diametric opposite of that. ’

I eased the pill from the palm of my hand on to the surface of the table. Then I took a sip from my drink.

‘Vernon, please – come on, I’m not some high-school kid here looking to score my first dime bag. I mean, I’m not even-’

‘Believe me, Eddie, you’ve never done anything like this. I’m serious. Just take it and see. ’

I hadn’t done any drugs in years, and for the exact reasons Vernon had given in his little sales pitch. I did have longings now and again – cravings for that taste in the back of the throat, and for the blissful hours of rapid-fire talk, and for the occasional glimpses of a godlike shape and structure to the conversation of the moment – but none of that was a problem any more, it was like a longing you might have for an earlier phase in your life, or for a lost love, and there was even a mild, narcotic feeling to be had by just entertaining these thoughts, but as for actually trying something new, getting back into all of that, well – I looked down at the tiny white pill in the centre of the table and said, ‘I’m too old for this kind of thing, Vernon-’

‘There are no physical side-effects if that’s what you’re worried about. They’ve identified these receptors in the brain that can activate specific circuits and…’

‘Look, ’ I was becoming exasperated, ‘I really don’t-’

Just then a phone started ringing, a cellphone. Since I didn’t have one myself, I figured it had to be Vernon’s. He reached into a side pocket of his jacket and pulled it out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re having with this book of yours. ’

As he raised the phone to his ear and spoke into it, I looked at him in disbelief.

‘Gant. ’

He really had changed, and in a way that was quite curious. He was the same guy, clearly, but he appeared to have developed – or grown – a different personality.

‘When? ’

He picked up his drink and swirled the contents of the glass around a bit.

‘I know, but when? ’

He looked over his left shoulder and then, immediately, back at his watch.

‘Tell him we can’t do that. He knows that’s out of the question. We absolutely can’t do that. ’

He waved a hand in the air dismissively.

I took a sip from my own drink and started lighting up a Camel. Here I was – look at me – pissing the afternoon away with my ex-brother-in-law. I’d certainly had no idea when I left the apartment an hour or so before, to go for a walk, that I’d be ending up in a bar. And certainly not with my ex-brother-in-law, Vernon fucking Gant.

I shook my head and took another sip from my drink.

‘No, you better tell him – and now. ’ He started getting up. ‘Look, I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes. ’

Straightening out his jacket with his free hand, he said, ‘No way, I’m telling you. Just wait, I’ll be there. ’

He turned off the phone and put it back into the side pocket of his jacket.

‘Fucking people, ’ he said, looking down at me and shaking his head, as if I’d understand.

‘Problems? ’ I said.

‘Yeah, you better believe that. ’ He took his wallet out. ‘And I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here, Eddie. I’m sorry. ’

He took a business card from his wallet and placed it carefully down on the table. He put it right beside the little white tablet.

‘By the way, ’ he said, nodding down at the tablet, ‘that’s on the house. ’

‘I don’t want it, Vernon. ’

He winked at me. ‘Don’t be ungrateful now. You know how much those things cost? ’

I shook my head.

He stepped out of the booth and took a second to shimmy his loose-fitting suit into position. Then he looked directly at me. ‘Five hundred bucks a pop. ’

‘What? ’

‘You heard me. ’

I looked down at the tablet. Five hundred dollars for that?

‘I’ll take care of the drinks, ’ he said and wandered over towards the bar. I watched him as he paid the waitress. Then he indicated back in the direction of our booth. That probably meant another drink – compliments of the big man in the expensive suit.

On his way out of the bar, Vernon threw me a sidelong glance that said, Take it easy, my friend, paused, and then added, and make sure you call me now.

Yeah, yeah.

I sat there for a while pondering the fact that not only did I not do drugs any more, I didn’t drink in the afternoons any more either. But here I was, doing just that – at which point the waitress arrived over with the second whiskey sour.

I finished up the first one and started in on the new one. I lit another cigarette.

The problem I suppose was this: if I was going to be drinking in the afternoon, I would have preferred it to be in any of a dozen other bars, and sitting at the bar, shooting the breeze with some guy perched on a stool just like myself. Vernon and I had chosen this place because it was convenient, but as far as I could see it didn’t have any other redeeming features. In addition, people had started trickling in now, probably from surrounding offices, and were already getting noisy and boisterous. A party of five took the next booth up from mine and I heard someone ordering Long Island Iced Teas. Don’t get me wrong, I had no doubt that Long Island Iced Teas were good obliterators of work-related stress, but they were also fucking lethal and I had no desire to be around when that gin-vodka-rum-tequila thing started kicking in. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.

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