- •Vernon gant.
- •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,
- •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
- •I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been
- •I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of
- •I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
- •It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
- •In. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.
- •I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been
- •I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.
- •I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue a it
- •I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city,
- •I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling
- •I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
- •I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and
- •I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just
- •I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
- •I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in
- •I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.
- •In the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, k & d’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but
- •I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.M., and lay in bed for about an hour before I
- •I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I
- •I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time
- •I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly –
- •I laughed. ‘I might be.’
- •I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently
- •I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant,
- •I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back
- •I nodded.
- •I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and
- •I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading
- •I resolved to begin the following morning.
- •I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out
- •It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
- •I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d
- •I paused, and then nodded yes.
- •I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
- •I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
- •I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
- •It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
- •It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to mdt-48, was conducted
- •Its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless
- •I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and
- •I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my
- •I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the
- •Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing
- •Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’
- •It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than
- •I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
- •Very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or
- •I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at
- •I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
- •I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.
- •I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was
- •I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.
- •Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.
- •I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large,
- •I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control
- •Vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of mdt –
- •If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
- •I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass
- •I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
- •I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the
- •I nodded.
- •I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
- •I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
- •I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
- •I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be ok, that I had quite a few mdt pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually
- •In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds.
- •It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: mdt-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the
- •I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about
- •I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got
- •I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
- •In this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
- •I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing
- •Involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as
- •I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I
- •Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.
- •Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I
- •I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I
- •I stared at him, nodding my head.
- •I took a tiny plastic container with ten mdt pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into
- •I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next
- •I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.
- •I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.
- •I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but
- •Information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
- •I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to
- •In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the
- •I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.
- •I left the office at around 4 p.M. And went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my
- •I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to
- •I half smiled, and he was gone.
- •I glared at him.
- •I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
- •It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
- •Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle,
- •I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’
- •I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the
I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
‘What is it?’ I said again.
‘It doesn’t have a name yet – I mean it’s got a laboratory tag, but that’s just letters and a code. They haven’t come up with a proper name for it yet. They’ve done
all the clinical trials, though, and it’s FDA-approved.’
He looked at me as though he’d answered my question.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t have a name yet and they’ve done all the clinical trials and it’s FDA-approved, but what the fuck is it?’
He took a sip from his drink and another hit from his cigarette. Then he said, ‘You know the way drugs fuck you up? You have a good time doing them but then you
get all fucked up afterwards? And eventually everything in your life … falls apart, yeah? Sooner or later it happens, am I right?’
I nodded.
‘Well, not with this.’ He indicated the pill in my hand. ‘This little baby is the diametric opposite of that.’
I eased the pill from the palm of my hand on to the surface of the table. Then I took a sip from my drink.
‘Vernon, please – come on, I’m not some high-school kid here looking to score my first dime bag. I mean, I’m not even—’
‘Believe me, Eddie, you’ve never done anything like this. I’m serious. Just take it and see.’
I hadn’t done any drugs in years, and for the exact reasons Vernon had given in his little sales pitch. I did have longings now and again – cravings for that taste in the
back of the throat, and for the blissful hours of rapid-fire talk, and for the occasional glimpses of a godlike shape and structure to the conversation of the moment – but
none of that was a problem any more, it was like a longing you might have for an earlier phase in your life, or for a lost love, and there was even a mild, narcotic feeling
to be had by just entertaining these thoughts, but as for actually trying something new, getting back into all of that, well – I looked down at the tiny white pill in the centre
of the table and said, ‘I’m too old for this kind of thing, Vernon—’
‘There are no physical side-effects if that’s what you’re worried about. They’ve identified these receptors in the brain that can activate specific circuits and …’
‘Look,’ I was becoming exasperated, ‘I really don’t—’
Just then a phone started ringing, a cellphone. Since I didn’t have one myself, I figured it had to be Vernon’s. He reached into a side pocket of his jacket and pulled
It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
having with this book of yours.’
As he raised the phone to his ear and spoke into it, I looked at him in disbelief.
‘Gant.’
He really had changed, and in a way that was quite curious. He was the same guy, clearly, but he appeared to have developed – or grown – a different personality.
‘When?’
He picked up his drink and swirled the contents of the glass around a bit.
‘I know, but when?’
He looked over his left shoulder and then, immediately, back at his watch.
‘Tell him we can’t do that. He knows that’s out of the question. We absolutely can’t do that.’
He waved a hand in the air dismissively.
I took a sip from my own drink and started lighting up a Camel. Here I was – look at me – pissing the afternoon away with my ex-brother-in-law. I’d certainly had
no idea when I left the apartment an hour or so before, to go for a walk, that I’d be ending up in a bar. And certainly not with my ex-brother-in-law, Vernon fucking
Gant.
I shook my head and took another sip from my drink.
‘No, you better tell him – and now.’ He started getting up. ‘Look, I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.’
Straightening out his jacket with his free hand, he said, ‘No way, I’m telling you. Just wait, I’ll be there.’
He turned off the phone and put it back into the side pocket of his jacket.
‘Fucking people,’ he said, looking down at me and shaking his head, as if I’d understand.
‘Problems?’ I said.
‘Yeah, you better believe that.’ He took his wallet out. ‘And I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here, Eddie. I’m sorry.’
He took a business card from his wallet and placed it carefully down on the table. He put it right beside the little white tablet.
‘By the way,’ he said, nodding down at the tablet, ‘that’s on the house.’
‘I don’t want it, Vernon.’
He winked at me. ‘Don’t be ungrateful now. You know how much those things cost?’
I shook my head.
He stepped out of the booth and took a second to shimmy his loose-fitting suit into position. Then he looked directly at me. ‘Five hundred bucks a pop.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
I looked down at the tablet. Five hundred dollars for that?
‘I’ll take care of the drinks,’ he said and wandered over towards the bar. I watched him as he paid the waitress. Then he indicated back in the direction of our
booth. That probably meant another drink – compliments of the big man in the expensive suit.
On his way out of the bar, Vernon threw me a sidelong glance that said, Take it easy, my friend, paused, and then added, and make sure you call me now.
Yeah, yeah.
*
I sat there for a while pondering the fact that not only did I not do drugs any more, I didn’t drink in the afternoons any more either. But here I was, doing just that – at
which point the waitress arrived over with the second whiskey sour.
I finished up the first one and started in on the new one. I lit another cigarette.
The problem I suppose was this: if I was going to be drinking in the afternoon, I would have preferred it to be in any of a dozen other bars, and sitting at the bar,
shooting the breeze with some guy perched on a stool just like myself. Vernon and I had chosen this place because it was convenient, but as far as I could see it didn’t
have any other redeeming features. In addition, people had started trickling in now, probably from surrounding offices, and were already getting noisy and boisterous. A
party of five took the next booth up from mine and I heard someone ordering Long Island Iced Teas. Don’t get me wrong, I had no doubt that Long Island Iced Teas
were good obliterators of work-related stress, but they were also fucking lethal and I had no desire to be around when that gin-vodka-rum-tequila thing started kicking