Alan Glynn 3 страница

HERE IN THE NORTHVIEW MOTOR LODGE everything is drab and dull. I glance around my room, and despite the bizarre patterns and colour schemes there’s nothing that really catches the eye – except of course the TV set, which is still busily flickering away in the corner. Some bearded, bespectacled guy in a tweed suit is being interviewed, and immediately – because of the central casting touches – I assume he is a historian, and not a politician or a national security spokesman or even a journalist. I am confirmed in my suspicion when they cut to a still photograph of bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa, and then to some very shaky old black-and-white footage from, I’d guess, about 1916. I’m not going to turn the sound up to find out, but I’m pretty sure that the spectral figures on horseback riding jerkily towards the camera from the middle of what seems like a swirling cloud of dust (but is more probably the peripheral deterioration of the actual film stock itself) are incursionary forces all riled up and hot on Pancho Villa’s tail.

And that was 1916, wasn’t it?

I seem to remember knowing about that once.

I stare at the flickering images, mesmerized. I’ve always been something of a footage junky, it never failing to strike me as astonishing that what is depicted on the screen – that day, those very moments – actually happened, and that the people in them, the extras, the folks who passed fleetingly before a camera and were captured on film, subsequently went on about their daily lives, walked inside buildings, ate food, had sex, whatever, blissfully unaware that their jerky movements, as they crossed over some city street, for instance, or got off a tram, were to be preserved for decades, and then aired, exposed and re-exposed, in what would effectively be a different world.

How can I care about this any more? How can I even be thinking about it?

I shouldn’t let myself get so distracted.

Reaching down for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor here beside my wicker chair, it occurs to me that drinking whiskey at this time is probably not such a good idea. I lift the bottle up anyway and take a long hit from it. Then I stand up and walk around the room for a while. But the dreadful hush, underscored by the humming of the ice machine outside and the violent colours now swirling all around me, have a distinctly disorienting effect and I judge it best to sit down again and get on with the task in hand.

I must keep busy, I tell myself, and not get distracted.

OK – so, I fell asleep fairly quickly. But I didn’t sleep very well. I tossed and turned a lot, and had weird, disjointed dreams.

It was after eleven-thirty when I woke up – which was only about what, four hours? So I was still very tired when I got out of bed, and although I suppose I could have held on for another while longer, trying to get back to sleep, I knew I would have just lain there, wide awake, replaying the previous night over and over in my mind, and of course putting off the inevitable, which was to go into the living-room, switch on the computer and find out whether or not I had imagined the whole thing.

Looking around the room, though, I suspected that I hadn’t. Clothes were folded neatly on a chair at the foot of the bed and shoes were lined up in perfect formation along the floor beneath the window. I quickly got out of bed and went into the bathroom to take a leak. After that I threw cold water on my face, and plenty of it.

When I felt sufficiently awake, I stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It wasn’t the usual bathroom mugshot. I wasn’t bleary-eyed or puffy, or dangerous-looking, I was just tired – as well as all the other things that hadn’t changed since the day before, the fact that I was overweight, and jowly, and badly in need of a hair-cut. There was another thing I needed, too, but you couldn’t tell it from looking at me in the mirror – I needed a cigarette.

I tramped into the living-room and got my jacket from the back of the chair. I took the pack of Camels out of the side pocket, lit one up and filled my lungs with rich, fragrant smoke. As I was exhaling, I surveyed the room and reflected that being untidy was less a lifestyle choice of mine than a character defect, so I wasn’t about to argue with this – but I also felt quite strongly that this wasn’t what counted, because if I wanted tidy, I could pay for tidy. What I’d keyed into the computer, on the other hand – at least what I remembered keying in, and hoped now I was remembering accurately – was definitely something you couldn’t pay for.

I went over to it and flicked on the switch at the back. As it booted up and hummed into life, I looked at the neat pile of books I had left on the desk beside the keyboard. I picked up Raymond Loewy: A Life and wondered how much of it I would actually be able to recall if I were put on the spot. I tried for a moment to conjure something up from memory, a couple of facts or dates, an anecdote maybe, an amusing piece of designer lore, but I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think of anything.

OK, but what did I expect? I was tired. It was as if I’d gone to bed at midnight, and now I was up at three in the morning trying to do the Harper’s Double Acrostic. What I needed here was coffee – two or three cups of java to reboot my brain – and then I’d be fine again.

I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling down through it. I remembered each paragraph as I read it, but couldn’t have anticipated, at any point, what was going to come next. I had written this, but it didn’t feel like I had written it.

Having said that, however – and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit it – what I was reading was clearly superior to anything I might have written under normal circumstances. Nor, in fact, was it a rough draft, because as far as I could see, this thing had all the virtues of a good, polished piece of prose. It was cogent, measured, and well thought out – precisely that part of the process that I usually found difficult, even sometimes downright impossible. Whenever I spent time trying to devise a structure for Turning On, ideas would flit around freely inside my brain, OK, but if I ever tried to box any of them in, or hold them to account, they’d lose focus and break up and I’d be left with nothing except a frustrated feeling of knowing each time that I was going to have to start all over again.

Last night, on the other hand – apparently – I had nailed the whole goddamned thing in one go.

I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.

Then I turned and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee.

As I was filling the percolator and preparing the filter, and then peeling an orange, it struck me that I felt like a different person. I was self-conscious about every movement I made, as if I were a bad actor doing a scene in a stage drama, a scene set in a kitchen that was improbably tidy and where I had to make coffee and peel an orange.

This didn’t last for very long, though, because there was an incipient old-style mess in the trail of breakfast spoor I left behind me across the work-top spaces. Ten minutes saw the appearance of a milk carton, an unfinished bowl of soggy Corn Flakes, a couple of spoons, an empty cup, various stains, a used coffee filter, bits of orange peel and an ashtray containing the ash and butt-ends of two cigarettes.

I was back.

Concern about the state of the kitchen, however, was merely a ploy. What I didn’t want to think about was being back in front of the computer. Because I knew exactly what would happen once I was. I would attempt to move on to the rest of the introduction – as though this were the most natural thing in the world – and of course I’d freeze up. I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Then in desperation I’d go back to the stuff I’d done last night and start picking at it – pecking at it, like a vulture – and sooner or later that, too, would all come apart.

I sighed in frustration and lit up another cigarette.

I looked around the kitchen and considered tidying it again, returning it to its pristine state, but the idea stumbled at the first post – the soggy bowl of cereal – and I dismissed it as forced and unspontaneous. I didn’t care about the kitchen anyway, or the arrangement of the furniture, or the alphabetized CDs – all of that was sideshow stuff, collateral damage if you like. The real target, and where the hit had landed, was inside there in the living-room, right in the middle of my desk.

I extinguished the cigarette I’d lit only moments earlier – my fourth of the morning – and walked out of the kitchen. Without looking over at the computer, I crossed the living-room and went into the bedroom to get dressed. Then I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I came back into the living-room, took the jacket I’d left draped on a chair and searched through the pockets. I eventually found what I was looking for: Vernon’s card.

Vernon Gant – it said – consultant. It had his home and cellphone numbers on it, as well as his address – he lived on the Upper East Side now, go figure. It also had a tacky little logo in the top right corner. For a moment I considered phoning him, but I didn’t want to be fobbed off with excuses. I didn’t want to take the risk of being told he was busy or that I couldn’t meet him until the middle of next week – because what I wanted was to see him immediately, and face to face, so I could find out all there was to know about this, I suppose, smart drug of his. I wanted to find out where it came from, what was in it, and – most important of all – how I could get some more.

I WENT DOWN TO THE STREET, hailed a cab and told the driver Ninetieth and First. Then I sat back and gazed out of the window. It was a bright, crisp day and the traffic, as we cruised uptown, wasn’t too heavy.

Since I work at home and hang out with people who mostly live in the Village and the Lower East Side and SoHo, I don’t often have occasion to go uptown, and especially not uptown on the East Side. In fact, as the cross streets flitted past and we moved up into the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d been this far north. Manhattan, for all its size and density of population, is quite a parochial place. If you live there, you establish your territory, you pick out your routes, and that’s it. Certain neighbourhoods you just might never visit. Or it might be that you go through a phase with a neighbourhood – which could depend on work, relationships, food preferences even. I tried to think when it had been… maybe the time I went to that Italian place with the bocce court, Il Vagabondo, on Third and something – but that’d been at least two years ago.

Anyway, as far as I could see, none of it had changed that much.

The driver pulled up at the kerb just opposite Linden Tower at Ninetieth Street. I paid him and got out. This was Yorkville, old Germantown – old because there wasn’t much trace of it left, maybe a few businesses, a liquor store, a dry cleaner’s, a delicatessen or two, certainly quite a few residents, and old ones, but for the most part, or so I’d read, the neighbourhood had been Upper East-Sided over with new apartment buildings, singles bars, Irish ‘pubs’ and theme restaurants that opened and closed with alarming frequency.

At a quick glance, I could see that it certainly looked that way. From where I was standing I was able to pick out an O’Leary’s, a Hannigan’s, and a restaurant called the October Revolution Caf& #233;.

Linden Tower was a dark red-bricked apartment building, one of the many built over the past twenty or twenty-five years in this part of town. They had established their own unarguable, monolithic presence, but Linden Tower, like most of them, was out-sized, ugly and cold-looking.

Vernon Gant lived on the seventeenth floor.

I crossed over First Avenue, took the steps down on to the plaza and went over towards the big revolving glass doors of the main entrance. By the looks of it, this place had people going in and out of it all the time, so these doors were probably always in motion. I looked upwards just as I got to the entrance and caught a dizzying glimpse of how high the building was. But my head didn’t make it back far enough to see any of the sky.

I walked right past the reception desk in the centre of the lobby and turned left into a separate area where the elevators were. A few people stood around waiting, but there were eight elevators, four on either side, so no one had to wait for very long. An elevator went ping, its doors opened and three people got out. Six of us then herded into it. We each hit our numbers and I noticed that no one besides me was going higher than the fifteenth floor.

Based on the people I’d seen coming in, and on the specimens standing around me now in the elevator car, the occupants of Linden Tower seemed like a varied bunch. A lot of these apartments would be rent-controlled from a long way back, of course, but a lot of them would also be sub-let, and at exorbitant rates, so that would create a fair bit of social mix right there.

I got out on the seventeenth floor. I checked Vernon’s card again and then looked for his apartment. It was down the hall and around the corner to the left, third door on the right. I didn’t encounter anyone on the way.

I stood for a moment at his door, and then rang the bell. I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to him if he answered, and I’d thought even less about what I was going to do if he didn’t, if he wasn’t home, but standing there I realized that either way I was extremely apprehensive.

I heard some movement inside, and then locks clicking.

Vernon must have seen that it was me through the spyhole because I heard his voice before he’d even got the door fully open.

‘Shit, man, that was fast. ’

I had a smile ready for when he appeared, but it fell off my face as soon as I actually saw him. He stood before me wearing only boxer shorts. He had a black eye and bruises all down the left side of his face. His lip was cut, and swollen, and his right hand was bandaged.

‘What ha-’

‘Don’t ask. ’

Leaving the door open, Vernon turned around and motioned back at me with his left hand to come in. I entered, closed the door gently and followed him down a narrow hallway and into a large open living-room. It had a spectacular view – but then, in Manhattan, virtually anywhere with a seventeenth floor is going to have a spectacular view. This one looked south, and took in the city’s horror and glory in about equal measure.

Vernon flopped down on to a long, L-shaped, black leather couch. I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found it hard to look directly at him, so I made a show of glancing around.

The room was sparsely furnished, given its size. There was some old stuff, an antique bureau, a couple of Queen Anne-type chairs, a standard lamp. There was also some new stuff, the black leather couch, a tinted-glass dining table, an empty metal wine-rack. But you couldn’t exactly call it eclectic, because there didn’t seem to be any order or system to it. I knew Vernon had been big into furniture at one time, and had collected ‘pieces’, but this seemed like the place of a person who had given up collecting, who had let his enthusiasm wane. The pieces were odd and mismatched, and seemed left over from another time – or another apartment – in their owner’s life.

I stood in the middle of the room now, having seen everything there was to see. I looked down at Vernon, in silence, not knowing where to begin – but eventually he managed to say something. Through the pained expression on his face and the ugly distortion of his features, of his normally bright greenish eyes and high cheekbones, he cracked a smile and said, ‘So, Eddie, I guess you were interested after all. ’

‘Yeah… it was amazing. I mean… really. ’

I blurted this out, just like the high-school kid I’d invoked sarcastically the previous day, the one looking to score his first dime bag, and who was now coming back for another one.

‘What did I tell you? ’

I nodded my head a few times, and then – unable to go on without referring again to his condition – I said, ‘Vernon, what happened to you? ’

‘What do you think, man? I got in a fight. ’

‘Who with? ’

‘You don’t want to know, believe me. ’

I paused.

Maybe I didn’t want to know.

In fact, thinking about it, he was right, I didn’t want to know. Not only that, I was also a little irritated – part of me hoping that this business of his having had the shit kicked out of him wasn’t going to get in the way of my scoring from him.

‘Sit down, Eddie, ’ he said. ‘Relax, tell me all about it. ’

I sat down on the other side of the couch, got comfortable and told him all about it. There was no reason not to. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right. ’

I immediately said, ‘What do you mean? ’

‘Well, it works on what’s there, you know. It can’t make you smart if you’re not smart already. ’

‘So what are you saying, it’s a smart drug? ’

‘Not exactly. There’s a lot of hype about smart drugs – you know, enhance your cognitive performance, develop rapid mental reflexes, all of that – but most of what we call smart drugs are just natural diet supplements, artificial nutrients, amino acids, that kind of thing – designer vitamins if you like. What you took was a designer drug. I mean, you’d have to take a shitload of amino acids to stay up all night and read four books, am I right? ’

I nodded.

Vernon was enjoying this.

But I wasn’t. I was on edge and wanted him to cut the crap and just tell me what he knew.

‘What’s it called? ’ I ventured.

‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet, it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48. ’

The boys in the kitchen?

‘Who are you working for? ’ I asked. ‘You said you were doing consultancy for some pharmaceutical outfit? ’

Vernon put a hand up to his face at that point and held it there for a moment. He sucked in some air and then let out a low groan.

‘Shit, this hurts. ’

I leant forward. What should I do here – offer to get him some ice in a towel, call a doctor? I waited. Had he heard my question? Would it be insensitive to repeat it?

About fifteen seconds passed and then Vernon lowered his hand again.

‘Eddie, ’ he said eventually, still wincing, ‘I can’t answer your question. I’m sure you can understand that. ’

I looked at him, puzzled. ‘But you were talking to me yesterday about coming on-stream with some product at the end of the year, and clinical trials, and being FDA-approved. What was that all about? ’

‘FDA-approved, that’s a laugh, ’ he said, snorting with contempt and side-stepping the question. ‘The FDA only approves drugs that are for treating illnesses. They don’t recognize lifestyle drugs. ’

‘But-’

I was about to pull him up here and say, ‘Yeah, but you said …’ when I stopped myself short. He had said it was FDA-approved, and he had talked about clinical trials, but then had I really been expected to believe all of that?

OK, what had we got here? Something called MDT-48. An unknown, untested, possibly dangerous pharmaceutical substance scammed out of an unidentified laboratory somewhere, and by an unreliable person I hadn’t seen in a decade.

‘So, ’ said Vernon, looking directly at me, ‘you want some more of this? ’

‘Yes, ’ I said, ‘definitely. ’

With that established, and in the hallowed traditions of the civilized drug deal, we immediately changed the subject. I asked him about the furniture in the apartment, and if he was still collecting ‘pieces’. He asked me about music, and if I still listened to eighty-minute symphonies by dead Germans at full volume. We chatted about these things for a while, and then filled each other in on some details about what we’d been doing for the last few years.

Vernon was fairly cagey – as he had to be in his line of work, I suppose – but as a result I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. I did get the impression, however, that this MDT business had been occupying him for quite some time, and possibly even for a number of years. I also got the impression that he was anxious to talk about it, but since he wasn’t sure if he could trust me yet, he kept stopping himself in mid-sentence, and any time he seemed on the point of revealing something he would hesitate and then quickly revert to a kind of pseudo-scientific sales patter, mentioning neurotransmitters, brain-circuits and cell-receptor complexes.

He shifted quite a bit on the couch as well, continually raising his left leg and stretching it out, like a football player – or maybe a dancer – I couldn’t decide.

As he spoke, I sat relatively still and listened.

For my own part, I told Vernon how in 1989 – soon after the divorce – I’d had to get out of New York. I didn’t mention the fact that he himself had done his bit to drive me out, that his all-too-reliable supply of Bolivian Marching Powder had led to some severe health and money problems – drained sinuses, drained finances – and that these in turn had cost me my job as the production editor of a now defunct fashion and arts magazine, Chrome. But I did tell him about the miserable year I’d spent unemployed in Dublin, chasing some elusive, miasmal notion of a literary existence, and about the three years in Italy teaching and doing translations for an agency in Bologna, as well as learning interesting things about food that I’d never known… like, for instance, that vegetables weren’t necessarily designed to be available all year round, Korean deli-style, but had their seasons, and came and went in maybe a six-week period, during which time you furiously cooked them in different ways, such as – if it was asparagus, say – asparagus risotto, asparagus with eggs, fettuccine with asparagus, and that two weeks later you didn’t even think about asking your greengrocer for asparagus. I was rambling here, and could see that Vernon was getting restless, so I moved things on and told him about how I’d eventually come back from Italy to find the technology of magazine production utterly transformed, making any skills I might have acquired in the late ’80s more or less redundant. I then described the last five or six years of my life, and how they’d been very quiet, and uneventful, and had drifted by – flitted by – in a haze of relative sobriety and comfort eating.

But that I had great hopes for this book I was currently working on.

I hadn’t meant to bring the conversation so neatly back around to the matter in hand, but Vernon looked at me and said, ‘Well, you know, we’ll see what we can do. ’

This irked me a little, but the feeling was simultaneously muted and exacerbated by the realization that he actually could do something. I smiled at him and held my hands up.

Vernon then nodded at me, slapped his knees and said, ‘OK, in the meantime, you want some coffee, or something to eat? ’

Without waiting for an answer, he pulled himself forward and struggled up out of the couch. He walked over to the kitchen area in the corner, which was separated from the living-room by a counter and stools.

I got up and followed him.

Vernon opened the refrigerator door and looked in. Over his shoulder I could see that it was almost empty. There was a Tropicana orange juice carton, which he took out and shook and then replaced.

‘You know what? ’ he said, turning around to face me. ‘I’m going to ask you to do me a favour. ’

‘Yeah? ’

‘I’m in no shape to go out right now, as you can see, but I do have to go out later… and I need to pick up a suit at the drycleaner’s. So could I ask you to run down and pick it up for me? And maybe while you’re there you could pick us up some breakfast, too? ’

‘Sure. ’

‘And some aspirin? ’

‘Sure. ’

Standing there in front of me, in his shorts, Vernon looked skinny and kind of pathetic. Also, up close like this, I could see lines in his face and grey streaks in the hair around his temples. His skin was drawn. Suddenly, I could see where the ten years had gone. Doubtless, looking at me, Vernon was thinking – with suitable variations – the same thing. This gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach, and was compounded by the fact that I was trying to ingratiate myself with him – with my dealer – by agreeing to run down and pick up his suit and get him some breakfast. I was amazed at how quickly it all slotted back into place, this dealer-client dynamic, this easy sacrificing of dignity for a guaranteed return of a dime bag or a gram or an eightball or, in this case, a pill that was going to cost me the best part of a month’s rent.

Vernon walked across the room to the old bureau and got his wallet. As he was going through it – looking, presumably, for money and the dry-cleaning stub – I noticed a copy of the Boston Globe lying on the tinted-glass dining table. Their lead story was Defense Secretary Caleb Hale’s ill-advised comments about Mexico, but why – I asked myself – was a New Yorker reading the Boston Globe?

Vernon turned around and walked towards me.

‘Get me a toasted English with scrambled eggs and Swiss, and a side of Canadian bacon, and a regular coffee. And whatever you want yourself. ’

He handed me a bill and a small blue stub. I put the stub in the breast pocket of my jacket. I looked at the bill – at the sombre, bearded face of Ulysses S. Grant – and handed it back to him.

‘What, your local diner’s going to break a fifty for an English muffin? ’

‘Why not? Fuck ’em. ’

‘I’ll get it. ’

‘Whatever. The drycleaner’s is on the corner of Eighty-ninth and the diner’s right beside it. There’s a paper store on the same block where you can get the aspirin. Oh, and could you get me a Boston Globe as well? ’

I looked back at the paper on the table.

He saw me looking at it and said, ‘That’s yesterday’s. ’

‘Oh, ’ I said, ‘and now you want today’s? ’

‘Yeah. ’

‘OK, ’ I said and shrugged. Then I turned and went along the narrow hallway towards the door.

‘Thanks, ’ he said, walking behind me. ‘And listen, we’ll sort something out when you get back up, price-wise. Everything is negotiable, am I right? ’

‘Yeah, ’ I said, opening the door, ‘see you in a few. ’

I heard the door close behind me as I made my way down the hall and around the corner to the elevators.

On the ride down I had to resist thinking too much about how bad all of this was making me feel. I told myself that he’d had the shit kicked out of him and that I was just doing him a favour, but it brought me back to the old days. It reminded me of the hours spent waiting in various apartments, pre-Vernon, for the guy to show up and of the laboured small talk and of all the nervous energy invested in holding things together until that glorious moment arrived when you could hit the road, split… go to a club or go home – eighty bucks lighter, OK, but a whole gram heavier.

The old days.

Which were more than ten years ago.

So what the fuck was I doing now?

I left the elevator car, walked out through the revolving doors and on to the plaza. I crossed Ninetieth Street and headed in the direction of Eighty-ninth. I came to the paper store about half-way along the block and went inside. Vernon hadn’t said what brand he wanted, so I asked for a box of my own favourites, Extra-Strength Excedrin. I looked at the newspapers laid out on the flat – Mexico, Mexico, Mexico – and picked up a Globe. I scanned the front page for anything that might give me a clue as to why Vernon was reading this paper, and the only possible item I could find related to an upcoming product liability trial. There was a small paragraph about it and a page reference for a fuller report inside. The international chemical corporation, Eiben-Chemcorp, would be defending charges in a Massachusetts court that its hugely popular anti-depressant, Triburbazine, had caused a teenage girl, who’d only been taking the drug for two weeks, to kill her best friend and then herself. Was this the company Vernon had said he was working for? Eiben-Chemcorp? Hardly.

I took the paper and the Excedrin, paid for them, and went back out on to the street.

Next, I headed for the diner, which I saw was called the DeLuxe Luncheonette and was one of those old-style places you find in most parts of the city. It probably looked exactly the same thirty years ago as it did today, probably had some of the same clientele, as well, and was therefore, curiously, a living link to an earlier version of the neighbourhood. Or not. Maybe. I don’t know. In any case, it was a greasy spoon and being around lunchtime the place was fairly crowded, so I stood inside the door and waited for my turn to order.

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