by Alan Glynn
“We won’t be disturbed in here,” he says and sits on the lower level. He holds out a hand. “Please, sit.”
I put myself directly opposite Proctor. Molly sits further in and a level up.
It’s hot, and I’m already sweating profusely. We all are. Which I know is the point, but—
“So, Ray Sweeney,” Proctor says, “we should talk all of this out, am I right? We may not get another chance. And we have a witness.” He does a half bow in Molly’s direction. “This charming young lady here.”
My head is spinning now, but I manage to zero in. “Why would we not get another chance to talk? I don’t understand.”
“Oh, let’s park that for the moment. It’s not so important. I’m sure you have much more interesting questions to put to me.”
I do.
But am I willing to just blurt them out in front of Molly Boyd? Who I barely knew this time yesterday? I turn to look at her for a second—and yes, it would appear that I am. There’s nothing rational about this, or calculated. It’s her pale skin, glistening now with sweat, that I can still taste, and her blue eyes, closer to sapphire without the glasses, that I don’t want to look away from.
“Mr. Proctor,” I say, “Eiben-Chemcorp has been developing a drug for geriatrics, a derivative of MDT-48, for some years now. Are you … taking it?”
“Ha. You’ve done your homework. But no, not exactly. That’s been abandoned. It was never going to work. They couldn’t control it. They couldn’t ratchet it down sufficiently.”
I’m puzzled, and must look it.
“So what am I taking?” he says. “Because I’m clearly taking something, right? Well, I’m taking MDT-48 itself. The real thing. The original.”
I sit back. Even though I want to, I don’t so much as glance at Molly.
“Now, you have to remember,” Proctor goes on, “I was starting from a very low base. I was what, eighty-nine at the time, or ninety, and I had dementia. Or at least it had started. Then, boom, one dose, and the fog lifted. It was incredible. And let me tell you, for one reason or another, I’d been putting off taking that one dose for nearly sixty years.” He slaps his right hand on the tiled surface. “Carpe diem. That may be a cliché, but believe me, they’re the wisest goddamned words you’ll ever hear.” He shakes his head slowly. “Anyway. Next day the fog was back, so I guess I was hooked.” He smiles. “Luckily, I had a permanent supply.”
“Eiben?” I say, my voice sounding brittle, even to me.
“Yes. They’ve been sitting on this thing for decades and they don’t know what to do with it. They never have.”
“They?”
“Very well, Counselor, we.”
“So why not sell it,” I say. “Or give it to the hundreds of thousands of people, the millions of people, suffering from Alzheimer’s?”
Proctor shrugs. “Say you do that, fine, but how long you think before people start getting curious about what’s in that little bottle in the medicine cabinet? Suddenly Grandpa’s all focused and knows where he left his keys? Well, damn, you think—maybe I’ll try a little of that, and before you know it you’re speaking five languages, contradicting Stephen Hawking and dating Jessica Chastain. Then it gets out there, it’s on the street, and there’s no way to control it.”
I’m sweating so hard now and my head is throbbing, but again I have to ask him the obvious question.
“So what? Why does it have to be controlled?”
It’s a while before he answers. “You know what, Ray? After all these years, I’m not sure I can tell you. But it’s always been the operating principle—as in, don’t let this stuff get into the hands of ordinary people. I mean, look what happened with LSD, right?”
“But some ordinary people, as you call them, have gotten their hands on it. Eddie Spinola, for instance.”
“Yeah, okay. Deke Tauber, too. And there have been others.” He pauses. “Spinola was a wake-up call, that’s for sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy was extraordinary.” He pauses. “You see, not everyone reacts the same way to it, so a few more like him, a few more Eddie Spinolas, and the entire fabric of society would start to mutate and bend in ways we can’t even imagine.”
I stare across at this little old man, with his tanned and mottled skin, his bony frame, his searching eyes, and I wonder what he’s up to. Why is he talking to me?
At this point, Molly clears her throat.
We both turn.
“I have a question,” she says. “What the fuck are you guys talking about?”
Proctor looks at me. “You didn’t explain any of this to her?”
What does he think? “No, Mr. Secretary, I didn’t get around to it.”
“Ha. Is the heat getting to you, son? I can see you’re not used to it.”
Molly clears her throat again.
“Okay, listen,” the old man says, “you’ve heard of smart drugs, right? Well, this is a smart drug on steroids. MDT-48. It was discovered in 1912 in the Amazon jungle. It was extracted from a fungus that grew on the bark of the Bawari tree. The compound was later synthesized by a Swiss chemist and it first showed up in the U.S. around 1932 or 1933. But no one seemed to know what to do with it, so it languished in an Eiben Laboratories test tube until the early 1950s. That was when MDT and dozens of other compounds were tried out as potential weapons for use against our enemies in the Cold War. LSD was the front-runner, but it didn’t take in the end, and most of the others were just forgotten about, including MDT.”
“Forgotten about?” I say. “How is that possible?”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Molly leans forward. “What is this stuff? You said it’s some kind of a smart drug, and I get that, but—”
“No, listen,” Proctor says, holding up a hand to stop her. “I know that’s what I called it, but I meant the phrase as a kind of shorthand, because actually ‘smart drug’ is a hopelessly inadequate name for what this is.”
Lowering his hand, he goes silent for a moment.
Then Molly says, “And that would be…?”
“It’s like … an entheogen. I suppose that’s what you’d call it.” He stops and looks down at the steaming wooden slats on the floor. He seems confused, or maybe embarrassed. I turn to Molly. Her eyes widen.
I widen my own in response.
Proctor looks up. “You know what that is, right, an entheogen? It’s a psychoactive substance used in religious or shamanic rituals. It can be obtained from natural sources or it can be synthesized. It’s like … peyote or ayahuasca. There’s a ton of them—fly agaric, African dream root, Bolivian torch cactus. The food of the gods.” He looks at me. “See, I’ve done my homework, too, Ray. I haven’t had much else to do these last couple of years. So here’s the thing, MDT is different from all of these other substances. Entheogen literally translates as ‘generating the divine within,’ which means you go off on a trip, you get lost inside yourself, and then you come back, maybe with a different understanding or insight on things. You learn, and you put what you learned into practice. Fine, but there’s this binary aspect to it—here, there, inside, outside. If you’re on ayahuasca, you’re not going to be able to sit down and do your taxes, or go into a store and buy a pair of shoes, or teach a class on Lacanian semiotics. But on MDT, you could not only do all of that stuff, and exceptionally well, you could simultaneously observe and record every flutter of every atom in the space around you, see the patterns and understand them, trace their paths of origin and extrapolate their forward trajectories. And in that class you’re teaching on Lacan? Or in the mall where you’re buying those shoes? You could read the face of every single person you encounter and know them all as intimately as you know yourself. And it would feel so natural. It’s not binary, it’s integrated. It’s the essence of maximal human intelligence.”
As I look down at the floor, licks of sweat drip from my forehead. I’ve done LSD a few times in my life and it can certainly turn weird—oppressive, threatening, un
ending. A bit like this. I’m also anxious about Molly, but I can’t look at her. If I’m clinging to anything here, anything fact-based, it’s the anomaly of this man sitting in front of me set against his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s from a couple of years ago.
But she doesn’t know that.
“Now,” Proctor goes on, “those aren’t things that I can do, because strictly speaking I should be six feet under the fucking ground at this stage. So believe me, I’m good.” He looks at Molly. “But that’s what MDT is.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t believe this. You’re a ninety-year-old hippy.”
“Ninety-two. And it’s a little different.”
I stare at the floor again and repeat my earlier question. “So if people knew it was that powerful back in the fifties, how did it get forgotten?”
“Maybe not forgotten, then,” Proctor says. “Suppressed is a better word.”
This immediately raises so many questions that I’m unable to formulate a single one.
Proctor continues, “Later, in the mid-sixties, there was an attempt to revive interest in it. They tried to make tweaks, you know, to water it down. Because they figured it had to be a gold mine, right? Something that powerful.”
“Who’s they?”
“The guy that biography was about—you remember, Raoul Fursten? His whole crew. But they couldn’t do it, because as these next-generation versions were developed and tested, it quickly became apparent that the drug simply couldn’t be tamed, that its charisma, so to speak, couldn’t be routinized. Then Eiben developed Phenalex and Triburbazine, and later Narolet, and MDT just sort of got put on the back burner again.”
“Were those drugs derivatives of MDT in some way? Did Fursten, I don’t know … break open the compound and—”
“What? Break it open? No. That’s not how it works. Though maybe old Raoul was taking MDT, who knows. It wouldn’t surprise me. In any case, he died in ’73 and it wasn’t until well after the Church Committee Hearings that MDT resurfaced—that was Operation Mandrake, but it didn’t go anywhere, either. Then Jerome Hale came along in the mid-eighties and it was under him that things got a little … well, leaky, let’s call it. So you get Deke Tauber, Vernon Gant, and then Spinola.”
“Isn’t that when you were CEO?”
“For a time, yes, but I was busy with other stuff. Narolet had taken off, and there were a couple of high-profile liability trials going on.”
“And then?”
“Then Arnie Tisch took over R&D in the early 2000s, and with our big patents due to expire in the next couple of decades, a lot of money was poured into looking for something new, maybe something with a splash of MDT in the mix? Maybe.” He exhales. “But so far no dice.”
I think about this for a second.
“So how come you get a supply? What’s that about?”
Proctor leans forward and rubs a hand over his moist head. “I’ve been around MDT for more than half a century,” he says. “But I’d never taken it, not once. Never even considered it. Then I’m faced with literally losing my mind. I made a fool of myself on TV, and I could see it happening.” He pauses, breathing slowly, staring at the floor. “In fact, Arnie Tisch approached me. It was his suggestion. Having tried everything else, Eiben was now interested in exploring MDT’s potential as a life-extension drug.” He laughs. “Can you believe it? It was all unofficial, of course, but I said sure, sign me up.” He displays his wrist with the black band around it. “That was two years ago.”
“Oh my God,” Molly says. “I had no idea.”
“I’m being monitored all the time, because it’s clearly working. I mean, look at me. I’m alive. I’m healthier than I’ve been in fifteen or twenty years.” He points to his head. “But what they’re not monitoring, what they’re not even aware of—at least I don’t think they have been until recently—is the extension that’s going on up here. The expansion.”
I wipe my brow again, loose droplets of sweat hitting the tiles. “Are they worried?”
“I think they’re beginning to worry—that I might go rogue, that is. And they’re right, they should worry.”
I don’t know what to say to this. I just stare at him.
“You see, I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I only really opened my eyes for the first time in my life two years ago. When I was ninety. Isn’t that something?” He smiles. “And once I understood what MDT was,” he continues, “you know what I did next, Ray?”
“No.”
“I came looking for you.”
15
Sweeney drives to Washington, D.C. It takes him about six hours, and when he gets there, he abandons his neighbor’s car on Connecticut Avenue. He checks into a room at the Mayflower Hotel and has dinner at the Colony restaurant, where he gets talking to a Rhode Island Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This fellow confesses to Sweeney that over the course of twenty years he reckons he’s attended more than eight thousand cocktail parties and he doesn’t think he can face another one. Later, Sweeney finds himself at a Georgetown soirée where he receives three separate but very different job offers: an advisory position with the Federal Communications Commission, deputy Washington bureau chief at Newsweek magazine, and the part of a Roman general in an upcoming sword-and-sandals epic at MGM.
Lying awake that night in his hotel room, the MDT wearing off, Sweeney has a sort of panic reaction—sweating, shortness of breath, accelerated heart rate.
What is he doing?
He has a family, a house, a job. He has a future. This is madness and he should put a stop to it immediately, or at least cut back. There’s one problem, though. Whatever this is, it feels more real to him now, more vivid and intense, than anything in his normal life, anything in what he’s increasingly coming to regard as his old life. It’s just that he’s already spent most of the money he had with him (on the hotel room, on dinner, on drinks), so how is he supposed to move forward? Does he look for a job, one he has an actual prospect of holding down? Why did he come to Washington in the first place?
As he stares up at the ceiling, Sweeney realizes he can’t answer any of these questions. But he knows someone who will be able to.
In a few hours’ time.
That other guy.
The one he becomes when he takes MDT.
* * *
Solving the money problem—where and how to get some—proves to be fairly straightforward. The “where” part is easy. It’s in other people’s pockets, in their wallets, in their bank accounts. The “how” part is a little more complicated. As he strolls through the lobby of the Mayflower, Sweeney recalls an article he read a few months ago in Reader’s Digest about “confidence tricksters.” The piece described common techniques these people use and it advised members of the public to be on their guard against them. At the time, Sweeney was horrified by the article. But now he needs money, and he needs it in a hurry.
So how hard can it be?
Not very, as it turns out.
In a quiet part of the lobby, Sweeney carefully drops his wallet and immediately becomes engaged in an activity, checking a number in the telephone directory or selecting a magazine at the newsstand. A concerned citizen sees what has happened, picks up the wallet, and brings it to Sweeney. During the brief dialogue that ensues, Sweeney takes a casual look inside his wallet and stops cold.
“What is the meaning of this?” he says.
“Come again?” the mark responds, flustered.
“This is outrageous,” Sweeney says, raising his voice slightly. “I had sixty dollars in my wallet, three twenties … and now there is only one.” Glancing around, surveying the lobby, he mutters the words “house detective” and “manager.”
“But—”
Apply enough psychological pressure and the whole transaction can be over in a couple of minutes.
Or he goes into a nearby Western Union office, where, in a state of apparent agitation, he repeatedly asks the clerk at the counter if his money has arriv
ed. Identifying a likely mark, Sweeney then starts up a conversation—stories are exchanged, a bond is forged, and eventually a pact is entered into: whoever’s money arrives first will see right by the other fellow.
In this way, and in the space of a couple of hours, he pulls off a few of these so-called “short cons” and amasses over two hundred dollars in cash.
The second issue Sweeney faces is D.C. itself. Why here? He remembers a feeling he had on the road yesterday, a sense of purpose, of moving toward the center of things, and he liked it. But does he want to get involved in politics? Is that it? He doesn’t think so. He suspects his purpose here may be larger than that. He may want to understand politics. Everyone he met last night, the senator at the Colony, and the others later, the lobbyists and diplomats and businessmen, these were all pieces in the mosaic, each interesting in their own way. But Sweeney is aware that MDT demands more, that it seeks out clarity and strives to make connections, that it hungers after the bigger picture, the whole equation. At the same time, he’s not unaware that it can also induce a certain degree of impatience in the user, not to mention a tendency toward grandiose thought patterns. But these are things he can temper—in the same way, depending on circumstances, that he can now regulate the sharpness and intensity of his sensory perceptions. If he chooses to, and without losing his train of thought, he can surrender himself momentarily to the mystery and richness of a color—the cerulean blue, say, of the late-afternoon D.C. sky, or the purple dye of an individual strand of carpet fiber in the corridor of his hotel. He can lose himself in the thousand sounds on K Street—shoe leather on asphalt, the rattle of streetcars, the symphony of human voices. Or he can simply dial these things down to zero and focus exclusively on some interior concern, the unspooling of a childhood memory, the retrieval of submerged data, the calculation of a looming risk.
So, on reflection, no, he won’t be putting a stop to this, or even cutting back. In any case, each dose is so impossibly tiny that it still seems as if nothing has come out of the bottle at all. In fact, at this rate, Sweeney suspects that his supply of MDT might just last forever.