Limitless (31 page)

I arrived at Fifty-seventh Street, and as I was crossing it I looked around. I remembered that one of my earliest blackouts had occurred here, after that first night in Van Loon’s library. It’d been a couple of blocks over, on Park. I’d been overcome with dizziness, and had stumbled, and without any explanation found myself a block further down, on Fifty-sixth Street. Then I thought about the major blackout I’d had the following evening – punching that guy in the Congo down in Tribeca, then that girl in the cubicle, then Donatella Alvarez, then the fifteenth floor of the Clifden …

Something had gone seriously wrong that night, and just thinking about it now caused a stabbing sensation in the pit of my stomach.

But then it struck me … the whole sequence here – MDT,
cognitive
enhancement, blackouts, loss of impulse control, aggressive behaviour, Dexeron to counteract the blackouts, more MDT, more cognitive enhancement – it was all tinkering with brain chemistry. Maybe the reductionist view of human behaviour that Morgenthaler was going to pitch to his jury was right, maybe it was all down to molecular interaction, maybe we
were
just machines.

But if that was the case, if the mind was simply a chemical-software program running in the brain – and pharmaceutical products such as Triburbazine and MDT were simply rewrite programs – then what was to stop me from learning how all of that stuff worked? Using the supply of MDT-48 I had left, I could focus my powers of
concentration
for the next few weeks on the mechanics of the human brain. I could study neuroscience, and chemistry, and pharmacology, and even – goddammit – neuropsychopharmacology …

What would there then be to stop me from making my own MDT? There had been plenty of underground chemists in the old LSD days, people who had sidestepped the need to cultivate supply sources in the medical or pharmaceutical communities by setting up their own labs in bathrooms and basements all around the country. I was no chemist, for sure, but before I took MDT I hadn’t been a stock-market trader, either – far from it, in fact. Excited now at the prospect of getting started on this, I quickened my pace. There was
a Barnes & Noble at Forty-eighth Street. I’d stop in there and pick up some textbooks and then get a cab straight back to the Celestial.

Passing a news-stand I saw a headline on a paper referring to the proposed MCL–Abraxas merger and remembered that I still had my cellphone powered off. As I walked along, I took it out and checked it for messages. There were two from Van Loon, the first puzzled, the second slightly irritated. I would have to talk to him soon and come up with some pre-emptive excuse for my absence over the coming weeks. I couldn’t just ignore him. After all, I owed the man nearly ten million dollars.

I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, browsing through college
textbooks
– enormous tomes in fine print, with charts and diagrams and a blizzard of italicized Latin and Greek terminology. Finally, I picked out eight books with titles like
Biochemistry & Behaviour, Vol. 1., Principles of Neurology
and
The Cerebral Cortex
, paid for them by credit card and left the store weighed down with two extremely heavy bags in each hand. I got a cab out on Fifth Avenue, just as it was starting to rain. By the time we pulled up at the Celestial, it had turned into a downpour, and in the ten or so seconds it took me to hobble across the plaza to the main entrance of the building, I got soaked. But I didn’t care – I was excited and dying to get up to the apartment so I could make a start on these textbooks.

When I was inside, walking across the lobby, the guy on the desk, Richie, waved over at me.

‘Mr Spinola. Hi. Yeah … I let those guys in.’

‘What?’

‘I let them in. They just left about twenty minutes ago.’

I walked over towards the desk.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Those guys you said were delivering something. They were here.’

I put the bags down, and looked at him.

‘I didn’t say anything to you about any guys delivering … anything. What are you talking about?’

He swallowed and looked nervous all of a sudden.

‘Mr Spinola, you … you called me about an hour ago, you said
some guys were coming to deliver something and that I was to give them a key …’

‘
I
called you?’

‘Yes.’

Water was dripping now from my hair down into the back of my shirt collar.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, as though to reassure himself. ‘The line was bad, you said so yourself, it was your cellphone …’

I picked up the bags and started walking very quickly towards the elevators.

‘Mr Spinola?’

I ignored him.

‘Mr Spinola? Are… are we OK about this?’

I got into an elevator, pressed the button and as the car climbed up to the sixty-eighth floor, I could feel my heart beating so hard that I had to take deep breaths and bang my fist on the side panels of the car a couple of times to steady myself. Then I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. Drops of water sprayed
everywhere
.

At sixty-eight, I picked up the two bags and slid out of the car before the elevator door was even fully open. I rushed along the corridor to my apartment, dropped the bags on the floor and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. When I got the key out, I had a hard time getting it into the keyhole. I eventually managed to get the door open, but the second I stepped inside the apartment I knew that everything was lost.

I’d known it downstairs in the lobby. I’d known it the second I heard Richie say the words,
I let those guys in
…

I looked around at the damage. The boxes and wooden crates in the middle of the living-room had been knocked over and smashed open, and everything was strewn about the place. I rushed over and searched through the mess of books and clothes and kitchen
implements
for the holdall bag where I’d been keeping the envelope with the stash of MDT pills in it. After a while I found the bag – but it was empty. The envelope with the pills in it was gone, as was Vernon’s little black notebook. In the vain hope that the envelope was still
around somewhere – that it had maybe just fallen out of the bag – I searched through everything, and then I searched through
everything
again. But it was no use.

The MDT was gone.

I went over to the window and looked out. It was still raining. Seeing the rain from this high an angle was weird, as though a couple more floors up and you’d be clear of it, looking down through sunshine at grey blankets of cloud.

I turned around and leant back against the window. The room was so large and bright, and there was such a small amount of stuff in it, that the mess in the centre wasn’t even that much of a mess. The room hadn’t been trashed, because there was so little in it to trash – just my few belongings from Tenth Street. They’d done a much better job on Vernon’s place.

I stood there for quite a while – in shock, I suppose – not thinking anything. I glanced over at the open door. The two Barnes & Noble bags were still outside in the hallway, sitting on the floor next to each other, looking as though they were patiently waiting to be carried inside.

Then the phone rang.

I wasn’t going to answer it, but when I noticed that they hadn’t yanked the phone cable out of the wall, as they had with the computer and the TV, I went over to it. I bent down and picked it up. I said
hello
, but it went dead immediately.

I stood up again. I went over and edged the two bags inside the door with my foot. Then I shut the door and leant back against it. I took a few deep breaths, swallowed, closed my eyes.

The phone rang again.

I went over and answered it as before, but – as before – it went dead. Then almost immediately it rang again.

I picked it up but didn’t say anything.

Whoever it was didn’t hang up this time.

Eventually, a voice said, ‘So, Eddie, this is it.’

‘Who is this?’

‘You went too far talking to Dave Morgenthaler.
Not
a good idea—’

‘Who the fuck
is
this?’

‘—so we’ve decided to pull the plug. But … just thought we’d let you know. Seeing as how you’ve been such a sport and all.’

The voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. There was no emotion in it, no hint of an accent.

‘I shouldn’t be doing this, of course – but at this stage, I almost feel that I
know
you.’

‘What do you mean
pull the plug
?’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed already that we’ve taken the stuff back. So, as of now, you can consider the experiment terminated.’

‘
Experiment
?’

There was silence for a moment.

‘We’ve been monitoring you ever since you showed up that day at Vernon’s, Eddie.’

My heart sank.

‘Why do you think you never heard back from the police? We weren’t sure at first, but when it became obvious to us that you had Vernon’s supply, we decided to see what would happen next, to conduct a little clinical trial, as it were. We haven’t had that many human subjects, you know …’

I stared out across the room, trying to cast my mind back, trying to identify signs, tells …

‘… and boy, what a subject you turned out to be! If it’s any consolation to you, Eddie, no one has ever done as much MDT as you have, no one’s ever taken it as
far
as you have.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I mean, we knew you really must’ve been hitting it hard when you cleaned up at Lafayette, but then when you moved in on Van Loon … that was amazing.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Of course, there was that little incident at the Clifden—’

‘Who are you?’ I repeated, dully now, almost mechanically.

‘—but tell me, what exactly
did
happen there?’

I put the phone down, and kept my hand on it, hard, as though by pressing it like that, he – whoever
he
was – would go away.

When the phone rang again, I picked it up at once.

‘Look, Eddie, no hard feelings, but we can’t risk having you talking to private detectives – not to mention Russian loansharks. Just know that you’ve been … a very useful subject.’

‘Come on,’ I said, a sense of desperation welling up in me all of a sudden, ‘is there no way … I mean, I don’t have to …’

‘Listen, Eddie—’

‘I didn’t give Morgenthaler anything,
I didn’t tell him anything
…’ – there was a crack in my voice now – ‘… couldn’t I just get …some kind of supply, some …’

‘Eddie—’

‘I’ve got money,’ I said, clutching the receiver tightly to stop my hand from trembling. ‘I’ve got a
lot
of money in the bank. I could—’

The line went dead.

I kept my hand on the receiver, just like I had the last time. This time, however, I waited a full ten minutes. But nothing happened.

I finally lifted my hand away and stood up. My legs were stiff. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, back and forth for a while. It felt like I was doing something.

Why had he hung up?

Was it because I had mentioned money? Would he be calling back in a while with a figure? Should I be ready?

How much
did
I have in the bank?

I waited another twenty minutes or so, but nothing happened.

Over the next twenty minutes again, I convinced myself that his hanging up on me had been some kind of a coded message. I’d offered him money, and now I was going to have to sweat it out until he called me back with a figure – which I’d better have ready.

I stared down at the phone.

I didn’t want to use it, so I took out my cellphone and rang Howard Lewis, my bank manager. He was on another call. I left a message for him to call me back on this number. I said it was urgent. Five minutes later, he returned the call. Between what I’d made trading recently and money I’d borrowed from Van Loon for the decorating and furnishing of the apartment, there was just over $400,000 in the account. Since Van Loon had gotten involved in my financial affairs
on a personal level, Lewis had reverted to his earlier obsequious mode, so when I told him that I needed half a million dollars in cash – and as quickly as possible – he was flustered but at the same time so eager to please that he promised to have the money ready for me first thing in the morning.

I said OK, I’d be there. Then I closed up the phone, switched it off and put it back in my pocket.

Half a million dollars. Who could turn that down?

I paced around the room, avoiding the mess in the centre. Every now and again, I glanced over at the phone on the floor.

When it started ringing again, I leapt towards it, bent down and picked it up in what seemed like a single movement.

‘Hello?’

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

Shit
.

‘
What
? I’m busy.’

‘I just wanted to check that everything was all right. I mean, about that—’

‘Yes, yes, everything’s fine. There’s no problem.’

I hung up.

My heart was pounding.

I stood up again and continued pacing around the room. I
considered
tidying up the mess, but decided against it. After a while I sat down on the floor, with my back to the wall and just stared out across the room, waiting.

I stayed in that position for the next eight hours.

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

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

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