The Dark Fields aka Limitless Read online

  The Dark Fields aka Limitless

  Alan Glynn

  Imagine a drug that makes your brain function in a fantastically efficient way, tapping in to your fundamental resources of intelligence and drive. Imagine a drug that could make you read and remember entire books in a matter of hours, or learn a foreign language in a day. Imagine a drug that could make you process information so fast you can see the patterns on the stock market. Eddie Spinola is on such a drug. It's a pill called MDT-48. It's a Viagra for the brain, a designer drug that's redesigning his life. Eddie's not the only one doing MDT, but with his dealer shot dead and Eddie escaping with a large stash, he's the only one with a supply. And while the drug is helping Eddie make the sort of money he's only dreamed about, he's also beginning to suffer its side-effects. The Dark Fields is a high-concept, highly original thriller, a pharmaceutical Faust that is page-turning and thought-provoking in equal measure.

  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

  1

  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 décor 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, unbreakable… 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.

  2

  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 – an
d 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 décor 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 – mayb
e 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…