Limitless

He went out into the hallway, leaving the door open. I remained sitting in the chair and listened to him clumping down the stairs. When I heard the door of the building banging closed I stood up and went over to the window. I looked out and saw Gennady pacing along Tenth Street towards First Avenue. From the little I knew of him, the lightness in his step seemed, to say the least, uncharacteristic.

Looking back now – from the dead stillness of this room here in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can see that Gennady’s intrusion into my life, his attempt to muscle in on my supply of MDT, had quite an unsettling effect on me. I had lost nearly everything and I resented the idea that someone could so easily destroy what little there was left. I hadn’t wanted to take MDT at full throttle any more because I was scared of surrendering myself to another blackout, scared of being open again to that same level of darkness and unpredictability. But neither did I want to just give up and leave everything behind – and especially not for a circling vulture like Gennady to pick at and tear apart. Besides, the idea of Gennady on MDT seemed a complete waste to me. Suddenly the guy was able to speak comprehensible English? Big fucking deal. He was still a bonehead, a zhulik. MDT wasn’t going to change someone like him. Not the way it had changed me …

On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.

What harm could it do?

I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it

‘Yep?’

I paused for a second and then rushed into it.

‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please … five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you …’ – this came to me on the spur of the moment – ‘ … I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me …’

I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.

He released a long sigh. ‘Jeesus!’

I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes.’

‘Thank you … very much.’

He gave me the address of a café on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain yellow T-shirt.

I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.

The café was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso. Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a few different blocks at that.

‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’

I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd.’

He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.

I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already way over time.

‘About three years ago,’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo. And we toured a lot.’

I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for the long haul.

I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.

‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead in. And direct.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing Shakespeare and this guy is offering me … well, you know what he was offering me.’