Looking me straight in the eyes, she replied, ‘Well, MDT will certainly do that to you.’
‘Yeah, I suppose it will.’
In as quiet and circumspect a voice as I could muster, I then asked, ‘So, what do you know about all of this?’
‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘here’s the bottom line, Eddie. MDT is lethal, or can be, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll do serious damage to your brain, and I’m talking about permanently.’ She then pointed to her own head with the index finger of her right hand, and said, ‘It fucked my brain up – which I’ll go into later – but the point I want to make now is, I was one of the lucky ones.’
I swallowed.
The barman appeared with a tray. He placed a glass of beer down in front of me and exchanged the ashtray on the table with a clean one. When he’d gone, Melissa continued. ‘I only took nine or ten hits, but there was one guy who took a lot more than that, over a period of weeks, and I know he died. Another unfortunate shmoe ended up as a vegetable. His mother had to sponge him down every day and feed him with a spoon.’
My stomach was jumping now, and a mild headache had started up.
‘When was this?’
‘About four years ago.’ She paused. ‘Vernon didn’t tell you any of this stuff?’ I shook my head. She seemed surprised. Then, as though great physical effort were required for what she was doing, she took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she went on, ‘so about four years ago Vernon was hanging out with a client of his who worked at some pharmaceutical plant and had access that he shouldn’t have had to a whole range of new drugs. One of them in particular, which didn’t have a name yet and hadn’t been tested, was supposed to be… amazing. So, in order to test it, because of course they were too goddamned shrewd to test it themselves, Vernon and this guy started getting people – their friends basically – to take it.’
‘Even you?’
‘Vernon didn’t want me to take it at first, but he talked it up so much that I insisted. You know what I was like, curious to a fault.’
‘It wasn’t a fault.’
‘Anyway, a few of us found ourselves in on this – I don’t know – let’s call it an informal trial period.’ She paused and took a sip from her beer. ‘So what do you want, I took it and it was amazing.’ She paused again, and looked at me for confirmation. ‘I mean, you’ve taken it, you know what I’m talking about, right?’
I nodded.
‘Well. I did it a few more times and then I got scared.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because… I wasn’t stupid. I knew no one could maintain that level of mental activity for very long and survive. It was nonsense. Let me give you an example, one day I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe… superstring theory, yeah? I read it in forty-five minutes, and understood it.’ She took a last drag from her cigarette. ‘Don’t ask me about it now, though.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Then I had this thing I was supposed to be working on at the time, a series of articles about self-organizing adaptive systems – the research that’s been done into them, their wider applicability, whatever. My work-rate increased ten-fold overnight, I’m not kidding you. My boss at Iroquois magazine thought I was pitching for his job as Features Editor. So I guess I just chickened out. I panicked. I couldn’t handle it. I stopped taking it.’
She shrugged her shoulders a couple of times.
‘And?’
‘And – eh – I started getting sick, after a few weeks, headaches, nausea. Talk about panic. I went back to Vernon to see if I maybe shouldn’t take another hit, or half a hit, see if that would make any difference. But that was when he told me about this other guy who’d just died.’
‘How had he died?’
‘Rapid two-day deterioration – headaches, dizziness, loss of motor skills, blackouts. Boom. He was dead.’
‘How much had he taken?’
‘One hit every day for about a month.’
I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
‘How much have you been taking, Eddie?’
She was looking directly at me now, with those remarkable deep brown eyes. She was biting on her lower lip.
‘I’ve been taking a lot.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘More than that guy.’
‘Jesus.’
There was a long pause.
‘So you must still have a supply, then,’ she said eventually.
‘Not exactly, I’ve got some left, a stash, but… I got it from Vernon. He supplied it to me and now he’s gone. I don’t know anyone else.’
She looked at me, slightly puzzled. Then she said, ‘That guy I told you about died because they didn’t know what they were doing, they had no idea about dosage or strength, or anything – and as well, people reacted to it differently. But it didn’t take them long to work all of that stuff out.’ She paused, took in another deep breath, and continued. ‘Vernon was making a lot of money dealing MDT, and I haven’t heard of anyone else dying since the early days, so presumably whatever he gave you or told you was right for you. I mean, the dosage was worked out, right? You do know what you’re doing?’
‘Hmm.’
Did I tell her at this point that Vernon had only given me a sampler, and that he hadn’t had a chance to tell me anything?
What I said was, ‘So what happened with you, Melissa?’
She lit up another cigarette and seemed to be considering for a moment whether or not she was going to let me sidetrack her.
I took a cigarette, too.
Then she began. ‘Well, naturally after me getting sick and that guy dying I didn’t go near it again, I didn’t touch it. But I was really scared. I mean I was married and had two small kids.’ When she said this, she almost flinched, as though reacting to a threatened slap in the face – as though she felt that articulating this level of irresponsibility should instantly have provoked a violent reaction from someone. After a moment, she went on. ‘Anyway, it never seemed to get much worse than bad headaches and occasional nausea. But over a period of months I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than ten minutes at a stretch without getting a migraine. I missed deadlines. I became sluggish, lazy. I put on weight.’ She pulled contemptuously at her sweater. ‘My memory was shot to bits. That series of articles? Forget it – the whole thing just disintegrated. Iroquois magazine let me go. The marriage fell apart. Sex? Get out of here.’ She leant back and shook her head. ‘That was four years ago and I haven’t been the same since.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I live in Mahopac and waitress four nights a week at a place called Cicero’s. Now I can’t read any more – I mean, what, the fucking New York Post?’
I felt as though sulphuric acid were being secreted into the pit of my stomach.
‘I can’t deal with stressful or emotional situations any more, Eddie. I’m wired up now because I’m seeing you, but after this meeting I’m going to have a headache for three days. Believe me, I’m going to pay dearly for this.’
She half stood up and eased her way out of the booth.
‘And I’ve got to pee. Which is another thing.’ She stood there, looking down at me, one hand scratching the back of her head. ‘But Jesus, you don’t need to know about that, right?’