by Alan Glynn
She looks around. “Did you…?”
21
Mike Sutton looks down at his shoes in disbelief.
“Aw, Sweeney … Jesus.”
He rushes over to the bathroom in the corner.
Sweeney, for his part, gazes down at the small pool of vomit on the floor, any immediate relief he feels drowned out by the wider horror of what’s happening.
He sits up straight and looks around. George Blair, the FBI agent, is standing guard by the door. Clay Proctor wears a look of disdain on his face and keeps his distance.
“Sorry about the mess, Clay,” Sweeney says, mustering a grain of sarcasm from somewhere.
Proctor looks away.
Apart from the sound of running water in the bathroom, there is silence. Then Sutton reemerges. His shoes are clean again. He’s carrying a towel, which he throws on the floor to cover the vomit.
“Okay, let’s get moving,” he says.
“But—”
“What?”
“My … my stuff.”
“What stuff? You just came in, your bag is already packed.”
Sweeney takes a moment. “My work.”
“What?” Sutton indicates the loose pages strewn about the floor. “This crap? Are you kidding?”
Sweeney glares at him.
“All right.” Sutton shakes his head. “Clay, George, gather this stuff up, would you?”
Sweeney reaches over to get his travel bag. He opens it and removes a few items.
When the other two have gotten all of the pages together into a single pile and placed it on the bed, Sweeney starts carefully transferring the pages into his bag. He zips the bag closed. A part of him realizes that this is utterly pointless, but then again, what has he got left? The MDT is gone. It’s mingling there on the wooden floor with the crushed glass and the vomit, slowly being absorbed by that cheap towel he bought in Henshey’s.
He can’t believe it. The fucking San Francisco Chronicle.
He remembers the photographer that night, blowing flashbulbs like his life depended on it.
“Okay, come on.” Sutton claps his hands together. “Let’s go. We’ve got a train to catch.”
* * *
Proctor disappears at the station.
Sutton and Blair take Sweeney on the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on the 20th Century Limited from Chicago to New York.
The glamour of it all is lost on him. He spends most of his time handcuffed to a metal post in one of the sleeping cars. He feels awful in any case and has no interest in moving about the train, in visiting the observation lounge or even the diner. On the first day he’s in a sort of daze and from then on he just feels weak. Blair hardly speaks a word and spends most of his time reading twenty-five-cent novels with titles like Jealous Nights and Out of Nowhere. Sutton talks now and again, usually to taunt or insult Sweeney, and he smokes incessantly.
Once in a while, it occurs to Sweeney that he should speak up and object. If he’s not under arrest here, then what right have they got to … to …
Or is it that …
Or …
Doesn’t he have a right? To walk away? To disembark when they get to Chicago, for instance? To go about his own business?
He’s pretty sure he does.
He just can’t ever quite summon the energy or focus to put the thought into words.
* * *
By the time they get to New York, Sweeney has regained a certain degree of equilibrium. He is able to acknowledge that MDT-enhanced levels of intelligence are now beyond his reach, but he also no longer feels as if he has just had a lobotomy.
Still, resisting Sutton seems futile.
“Where are we going?” he asks at one point.
Sutton ignores him.
A car is waiting for them outside Penn Station. Sweeney and Sutton get in the back and Blair takes the front passenger seat.
The driver remains silent. They head uptown and are soon leaving the city.
“Where are we going?” Sweeney asks again.
“Shut up.”
He wonders about Laura and Tommy. He is physically closer to them now than he has been since late last year, which feels strange. He knows that he has sent a lot of money to Laura, in weekly or biweekly installments, though he doesn’t know—or can’t remember—exactly how much. He does remember going to casinos and attending private poker games in and around Santa Monica, and casually, effortlessly, amassing a small fortune. But the strange thing is, right now, although he can remember this stuff, he can’t actually imagine it.
Back in Santa Monica, Sutton said that there were some people in New York who wanted to ask him a few questions. He wonders who these people are. And what they want to ask him. It’s early evening when they approach what looks like some sort of an institution, a large gray building set in landscaped grounds.
They can’t be far from Albany, he thinks. As the car pulls in through entrance gates, Sweeney—slumped back in his seat—glimpses a sign silhouetted against the darkening sky. They’ve arrived at the New York State Psychopathic Hospital.
* * *
When they get inside, to the reception area, Sutton and Blair disappear.
Sweeney hasn’t been in a hospital since he was a kid, and he’s never been in a hospital like this one. He is led to a room. It’s bare and dank, with a cot and a stained washbasin in the corner.
The orderly is a lumbering man with ginger hair and enormous hands. He doesn’t utter a word and when he leaves he locks the door behind him.
Sweeney can hear muffled voices talking and, occasionally, distant screams.
One good thing: he’s able to sleep, and he wants to, pretty much more than anything else.
The door opens early the next morning and a man in a white coat enters. Tall and distinguished-looking, he’s about sixty years of age and is wearing glasses. He seems kindly.
“Hello. I’m Dr. Bill Cordell.”
They shake hands. Dr. Cordell offers Sweeney a cigarette.
“No, thank you.”
“Don’t you smoke, Ned?”
“No.”
“Did you ever smoke?”
Sweeney has to think about this.
“Well yes, actually, I did. I smoked Camels. All the time.”
“Good.” Dr. Cordell takes a cigarette himself and lights it up. “Why did you stop smoking, Ned?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like you to think about it for a while.”
He places the pack of cigarettes and the lighter on the little bedside table and leaves.
Sweeney knows why he stopped smoking. And when. But he doesn’t want to talk about it to Dr. Bill Cordell.
Later, he takes some of the typed pages out of his travel bag and looks at them. He recognizes individual words, but they’re packed into long, convoluted sentences, and when he tries to read them, the whole thing becomes a blur. He gets a headache, so he gives up and puts the pages back in the bag. As he stuffs them in, a few rip, but he doesn’t care. Or, rather, he’s too angry.
What’s happening to him?
It’s bad enough that Sutton took back the MDT and then destroyed it, but this subsequent degrading of his cognitive abilities is alarming, even terrifying.
What do these people want?
* * *
Later on, Dr. Cordell comes back with a clipboard and a pen. Sweeney sits on the edge of the bed and Cordell sits facing him in a chair. He asks Sweeney a series of questions, most of them fairly standard. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Do you have any known medical conditions? Have you ever used narcotics?
Sweeney answers the questions truthfully, except for the last one. Would MDT be classed as a narcotic anyway? He doesn’t know. But he’s not going to mention it. If it’s going to be brought up, let them do it.
Cordell records all of the answers on his clipboard and at the end he points to the pack of cigarettes on the bedside table and asks Sweeney to take one out and smo
ke it.
“No.” A pause. “I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come now, Ned.”
Sweeney shakes his head.
“I’m afraid in that case,” Cordell says, “I’m going to have to insist.”
“How can you insist? That’s ridic—”
Cordell slaps him hard across the face.
Sweeney reels backward, holding his head, glaring at Cordell in horror.
“That’s it,” he says, his voice trembling. “I’ve had enough. I want to leave this place. I want to go home. You can’t detain me here.”
“Oh really?”
“Who the hell are you?” Sweeney shouts, a surge of anger rising in him. He clambers off the bed and is about to lunge at Cordell when the door opens and two orderlies come rushing in. They quickly overpower Sweeney, holding him down on the bed. One of them, the ginger-haired guy, sticks a needle in his side. Seconds later, everything slows down, becomes heavy, and dissolves to black.
When he opens his eyes again, he feels groggy and has a headache. It’s the middle of the night.
* * *
Cordell comes back in the morning and tells Sweeney to smoke a cigarette.
Numb and exhausted now, he lights one of them and smokes it. The whole experience is horrible, but he decides to get it over with as quickly as he can.
Cordell takes notes as Sweeney is smoking.
“Good work,” Cordell says at the end. Standing up, he points at the pack of cigarettes, and then leaves.
Sweeney sits on the bed, waiting, but nothing else happens and the hours pass. The ginger-haired orderly brings him meals and escorts him to the bathroom. He hears distant screams again, sporadically, throughout the day. The place smells of disinfectant and boiled cabbage.
He wonders if he’s allowed any visitors. Or phone calls.
Cordell is angry the next morning when he arrives and sees that Sweeney hasn’t smoked any more of the cigarettes.
“What do you think they’re there for?” he says. “Are you stupid?”
“Okay, Doc, okay, fine!”
He smokes five during the course of the day and nearly gets sick each time.
Cordell takes more notes the next morning, but doesn’t say anything.
Sweeney finishes the pack, and it gets a little easier. Partly driven by boredom, he finishes another two packs over the course of the next three days. He spaces them out, as a way of breaking the days down into psychologically manageable chunks.
The next time Cordell visits, he doesn’t bring any more cigarettes with him, and Sweeney is relieved. But he’s also puzzled. Cordell inspects the full ashtray on the bedside table. Then he sits down and begins to chat.
“How are we feeling?” … “The weather’s nice out there in that Santa Monica, I’d say.” … “So how did you first get into the advertising game?”
Sweeney plays along. He doesn’t know what else to do. Then it hits him—what’s going on, what Cordell wants from him.
“Say, Doc,” he says, at what seems like a natural break in the conversation, “do you happen to have any smokes on you?”
Cordell looks at his watch and makes a note on his clipboard. Without answering the question, he stands up and leaves.
Exhaling loudly, Sweeney falls back on the bed. He rolls over and groans. Is all of this really happening? How long is it going to last?
Ten minutes later, Cordell returns. He’s carrying a small glass of clear liquid. It looks like water. He hands it to Sweeney. “Drink this, please.”
“What is it?”
Cordell doesn’t answer. He waits.
Sweeney considers flinging the liquid at Cordell and taking the consequences. But he’s tired. He drinks it, knocking it back in one go. It is water, but it has a weird, vaguely familiar taste.
Cordell takes the glass back from Sweeney, turns, and leaves again.
Ten minutes go by before Sweeney’s suspicion is confirmed.
He has just been given a dose of MDT-48.
* * *
As the room begins to pulsate, Sweeney’s first reaction is to panic. He welcomes the rising flood of sensations, the widening field of perception, the lifting of the fog, the surge of energy … but the prospect of being confined to this awful space is intolerable to him. Agitated, he paces back and forth, trying to figure out if there is any way he can escape.
Panicking will only make things worse, though. He sits down on the edge of the bed.
Keeping his back straight, he regulates his breathing. He looks at the bag in the corner. Those pages inside—he remembers them now, the shape of what he wrote, the rhythm and scale of it all. But he doesn’t need to take the manuscript out. He knows he could stand up and recite the whole thing from memory. Why would he, though? For whose benefit? So in the absence of any external stimuli—unless you count the dramatic, swirling daubs of thick beige paint on the walls, or the veined map of cracks that is the ceiling—Sweeney closes his eyes and retreats into a state of profound stillness.
After about an hour, he hears footsteps approaching along the hallway outside.
He opens his eyes.
Cordell enters the room.
“Hello, Doctor,” Sweeney says, almost in a whisper.
Cordell closes the door behind him. He has the clipboard in his hand. He takes a pack of Camels from the pocket of his white coat and places it on the bedside table next to the lighter and the ashtray. Then he sits down in his usual position, opposite Sweeney.
“How are we feeling, Ned?”
“Interesting question. If you mean, how am I feeling, then fine, I guess, under the circumstances. But how are we feeling? That’s a bit of an ontological conundrum, wouldn’t you say, Doc? Because I don’t think you’re feeling that well at all.”
Cordell looks at him, his brow furrowed.
“I mean, you’re what, sixty, sixty-one, and look at you. You’ve got that gray complexion, those bags under your eyes. I don’t think you’ve had a good night’s sleep in—”
“Ned?”
“What?”
“Be quiet. You asked if I had any smokes.” He nods at the bedside table. “There they are. Now smoke one.”
“Uh-uh.” Sweeney shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. And besides, I don’t like the odds.”
“What does that mean?”
“In 1950 alone, five epidemiological studies were published that showed smokers of cigarettes were more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers.” He glances at the bedside table, then back at Cordell. “You know, Doc, you might consider quitting yourself.”
Cordell sighs impatiently.
“Look, Ned,” he says, “if you don’t smoke one of those damn cigarettes, I’m going to call Glenn and Brad in here. They’ll put you in a straitjacket and give you another injection. Then we’ll start this whole thing over again tomorrow. Is that what you want?”
This time Sweeney sighs.
He reaches over for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter. The first thing he does is offer a cigarette to Cordell.
“Ned.”
“Fine.”
He takes one out, puts it in his mouth, and flicks the lighter. He really doesn’t want to do this. He brings the yellow flame to the tip of the cigarette, makes contact, and inhales. He immediately feels the black, chemical heat of the smoke enter his mouth, move through his trachea, his esophagus, and reach down into his lungs with its sticky, resinous coating.
“Oh shit.” He starts coughing and spluttering.
Cordell glares at him before making a note on his clipboard. “Okay,” he says, “again.”
Sweeney hesitates, then takes another drag from the cigarette. He tenses up and puts a hand over his mouth. He gets off the bed, rushes over to the sink in the corner, and throws up in it.
“Goddammit,” Cordell yells. He stands up, stares at Sweeney for a moment. Then, muttering under his breath, he leaves.
* * *
The MDT effect lasts for the rest of the day and into the night. At a certain point, Sweeney feels that if given the opportunity he could easily talk his way out of the New York State Psychopathic Hospital—or even talk his way into a job running the damn place. But he never gets that opportunity. No one comes near him. On several occasions, he tries to get someone’s attention by calling out, but he also decides early on that he isn’t going to shout or bang on the door or act like a crazy person.
Eventually, he has to take a piss in the sink.
By the time Glenn or Brad, whichever one it is, comes in the following morning, Sweeney has slowed down at every level. He can barely even nod yes to an offer of food.
The day passes, and then more days pass. Dr. Bill Cordell never reappears. There are no more cigarettes, no more glasses of water.
Just long hours, sleepy ones, lonely ones, blank ones.
Eventually, after maybe a couple of weeks, someone does show up.
“My God, Ned,” Mike Sutton says, “you look awful. Come on, pack your bag. You’re leaving.”
And just like that, he leaves. No fuss, no forms, no signing out. Sutton drives him back to the city and talks the whole way, about himself mainly—his early days under Harry Anslinger at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, some of the big, high-profile busts he’s made, his time with the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and the top-secret Agency stuff he’s doing now, working with the likes of Eiben Laboratories and IBM. “Oh yeah, Ned, you picked the wrong guy to fuck with, let me tell you. But I’m going to let bygones be bygones. And you know why? Coz I got bigger fish to fry than some loser asshole like you.”
Sutton lets him out near Penn Station.
Standing on the sidewalk with his travel bag in hand, Manhattan popping and fizzing all around him, Sweeney wants to say something to Mike Sutton, but he can’t concentrate. He doesn’t know where to begin.
“Ned? Ned?”
“What?”
“Are you going to be all right?”