Limitless

He looked back at me, breathing out slowly through his nose, as if what I’d said confirmed his worst fears about me.

His phone rang, and he scooped it up, a muscle on his face quivering slightly by way of apology. As he dealt with the call, I glanced around. Until that point, I’d been feeling quite indignant, but this cooled somewhat when I saw my reflection in the back panel of a silver photo-frame on Lewis’s desk. It was a partially distorted image, but nothing could conceal how scruffy I looked. I hadn’t shaved that morning and I was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt – implausible for a senior trader at Van Loon & Associates, even on a day off.

Howard Lewis finished his call, pressed another button on his phone, listened for a moment and then looked at me with a blank expression on his face.

‘Your withdrawal is ready, Mr Spinola.’

Gennady arrived at nine-thirty the following morning. I’d just woken up about twenty minutes before he arrived and I was still feeling groggy. I’d intended to be up earlier, but from about seven on I’d kept waking and then falling back to sleep again, slipping in and out of dreams. When I finally managed to get out of bed, the first thing I did was take my MDT pill. Then I removed the bowl from the shelf above the computer. After that, I put on a pot of coffee and just stood around in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, waiting.

There were two possibilities. Either Gennady had done the pills – and if he’d done one he’d have done them all. Or, for some reason, he hadn’t done the pills. I reckoned that when I saw him I would know fairly quickly which one it was.

‘Morning,’ I said, studying him closely as he made his way in from the hallway.

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then I watched him as he silently surveyed my apartment. At first, I thought he was looking for the missing ceramic bowl, but then I realized that he was just registering how different the place was from the last time he’d been here. Looking around with him, following his eye, I registered the changes for myself. The apartment was a mess. Papers and documents and folders were strewn about the place. There was an empty pizza box on the couch and there were a couple of Chinese take-out cartons on my desk beside the computer. There were beer cans and coffee mugs everywhere, and full ashtrays and CDs and empty CD covers and shirts and socks.

‘You some kind of fucking pig?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’

He furrowed his brow at this, slightly puzzled, and I knew straightaway that he wasn’t on MDT – not right now at any rate.

‘Where the money?’

After he said this I noticed him glancing over at the shelf above the computer. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he stepped a little closer to the desk and continued his discreet search.

‘I want to pay off the whole thing now,’ I said.

This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.

Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Twenty-two five.’

‘But I want to pay it all off.’

‘You can’t.’

‘But—’

‘Twenty-two five.’

I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five. When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.

‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.

He sighed and shook his head.

‘No time. Too busy.’

He glanced over once more at the desk.

‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.

I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out – not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started drinking vodka Martinis.

Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.

The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the headlines.