Limitless

Before long, tears were gathering behind my eyes and I could feel a rawness in my throat. Then my hands started shaking. What was happening to me? It’d only been something like twenty-four hours since I’d taken my last dose of MDT and already it seemed that small cracks were appearing on the hard chemical shell that had formed around me in recent weeks. Seeping through these cracks, in turn, were some strong emotions, and I wasn’t sure how well I was going to be able to handle them. I pictured myself crying, sobbing, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, all of which seemed to make perfect sense for a while, as though it would be an exquisite relief. But then in the next moment Melissa was on her way back from the bathroom and I had to make some kind of an effort to pull myself together.

She sat down opposite me again and said, ‘You OK?’

I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look fine?’

‘It’s just … I’m happy to see you again, Melissa, I really am. But I feel so bad about … you know … I mean, I can’t believe that you’ve …’

The tears I’d been trying to hold back came into my eyes at this point. I clenched my fists and stared down at the table. ‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment, and then smiled – but the expression on my face was probably so demented that it didn’t come across as a smile. I said ‘sorry’ again and as I wiped my eyes with one hand, I ground the knuckles of the other one into the surface of the wooden bench I was sitting on.

Without looking directly at her, I could tell that Melissa was now engaged in a damage limitation exercise of her own, one which involved taking deep breaths and whispering the word shit to herself every couple of seconds.

‘Look, Eddie,’ she said eventually, ‘this isn’t about me anymore, or about us – it’s about you.’

That statement had a steadying effect on me and I tried to focus on the implications of it for a moment.

She went on, ‘The reason I called you was because I thought … I don’t know, I thought if you were doing MDT, or had done it, that you should at least know what had happened to me. But I’d no idea you were so …’ she shook her head, ‘ … involved. And then when I read that thing in the Post …’

I looked down into my glass of beer. I hadn’t touched it and didn’t think I was going to.

‘I mean, day-trading? Short-selling biotech stocks? I just couldn’t believe it. You must be doing a lot of MDT.’

I nodded, in tacit agreement.

‘But what happens when your supply runs out, Eddie? That’s when the real trouble’s going to start.’

Almost thinking aloud, I said, ‘Maybe I could stop taking it now. Or I could try weaning myself off it.’ I paused briefly to consider these options, but then said, ‘Of course there’s no guarantee that by doing either of those things I’d be doing the right thing, right?’

‘No,’ she said, looking quite pale and tired all of a sudden, ‘but I wouldn’t just stop. Not outright. That’s what I did. You see, it’s about dosage – how much you take, when you take it. That’s what they worked out after I started getting sick, and after that other guy died.’

‘So I should cut down? I should cut back?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Jesus, I can’t believe that Vernon didn’t tell you about any of this stuff.’

I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.

‘Melissa, Vernon never told me anything.’

As I said this, I realized that for my story to make sense – without being the full truth – I was going to have to lie to her, and in a fairly elaborate way. Certain obvious and very awkward questions naturally posed themselves at this point, and I was dreading her asking them – questions such as: How many times had I actually seen Vernon? How had I come to have such a large supply of MDT? Why hadn’t I bothered to find out more about it? But to my surprise, Melissa didn’t put any of these questions to me, or any others for that matter, and we both fell silent for a while.

I studied her face as she lit up another cigarette. I would have expected the Melissa I’d known ten years before to pursue me on every point here, to seek clarification, to have me piece it all together for her. But the woman sitting opposite me now had clearly run out of that kind of steam. I could see that she was curious, and wanted to know why I wasn’t being straight with her, but on another level it was also plain that she didn’t have the time or energy for this sort of thing any more. Vernon was dead. She’d said her piece to me about MDT. She was undeniably concerned about my predicament. But what else could she do or say? She had two kids at home and a life to cope with that was radically different from anything she might ever have envisaged for herself, or felt entitled to. She was tired.

I was on my own.

Melissa looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie.’