Receptor_A Novel by Alan Glynn

Author:Alan Glynn [Glynn, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07C7BKJ17
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

11

The next morning, Sweeney doesn’t even consider not taking another dose. He uses the same method, the one with the safety pin, but maybe he goes a little heavier this time, on account of how tired he is, on account of how he needs a boost. It still seems like an infinitesimal amount, because it’s barely visible, but at the same time he’s not under any illusions here.

He gets out of the house as fast as he can. On the train, he doesn’t read the newspaper, but instead looks out the window. The vibrant green of Long Island soon morphs into the dirty gray of Manhattan, and before he knows it the train is pulling into Penn Station. Instead of taking the subway on to Forty-Second, as he usually would, Sweeney skips up to the street and starts walking. He goes south. Any anxiety he may have felt about simply not showing up for work today has already lifted.

There’s a lot of noise and bustle and traffic on the streets, and the air is dense with smells—from exhaust pipes, ventilation grilles, papaya stands, hot dog carts, from people. These last are the most intense, the various body odors and perfumes all appearing in the atmosphere before him as colored streaks, endlessly swirling, looping, intertwining.

He really needs to tamp this down.

Ditto the cacophony of car horns, sirens, jackhammers, creaking steel frames in nearby buildings. Ditto the relentless chatter of innumerable human voices.

The weird thing is, though, he can tamp it down. It feels like a skill, but one he continually has to remind himself he has. Because a barrage of sense impressions like this could easily induce a feeling of panic. The key is to redirect his attention, and now he finds it landing somewhere around his feet, or beneath his feet, on the very sidewalk he’s pounding. As he moves along, down Seventh Avenue, unexpected time-lapse images flash before him of Manhattan’s layered history … of its once-pristine salt marshes and streams, of its unspoiled valleys and woods. He sees the great leveling, then the etching out of the grid, the wide north–south avenues, the narrow east–west cross streets, followed by the buildings themselves, the mansions, the brownstones, the apartment houses, and finally, the skyscrapers. These burst through the sidewalks, and with their steel frames and hoisting cables, stack up, story by story, decade by decade.

He needs to tamp this down, too.

What he really needs is to talk to someone, to engage. It’s how he felt that first night. He looks around, but who is he going to talk to? That guy at the stand on the corner turning hot dogs? This movie barker behind him under the marquee, in the epaulets and braided great coat? The traffic cop over there on horseback? The bangled crone in the doorway next to the jewelry store? Fine. Why not? Why not any one of them? But how does he propose modulating the out-of-control dynamo that’s currently running inside his brain? Because what

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