Limitless

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.

[ 5 ]

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 Café.

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.