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‘It doesn’t have a street-name and that’s because, as yet, it doesn’t have any street profile – which is incidentally the way we want it to stay. The boys in the kitchen are keeping it low-key and anonymous. They’re calling it MDT-48.’

The boys in the kitchen?

‘Who are you working for?’ I asked. ‘You said you were doing consultancy for some pharmaceutical outfit?’

Vernon put a hand up to his face at that point and held it there for a moment. He sucked in some air and then let out a low groan.

‘Shit, this hurts.’

I leant forward. What should I do here – offer to get him some ice in a towel, call a doctor? I waited. Had he heard my question? Would it be insensitive to repeat it?

About fifteen seconds passed and then Vernon lowered his hand again.

‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, still wincing, ‘I can’t answer your question. I’m sure you can understand that.’

I looked at him, puzzled. ‘But you were talking to me yesterday about coming on-stream with some product at the end of the year, and clinical trials, and being FDA-approved. What was that all about?’

‘FDA-approved, that’s a laugh,’ he said, snorting with contempt and side-stepping the question. ‘The FDA only approves drugs that are for treating illnesses. They don’t recognize lifestyle drugs.’

‘But—’

I was about to pull him up here and say, ‘Yeah, but you said …’ when I stopped myself short. He had said it was FDA-approved, and he had talked about clinical trials, but then had I really been expected to believe all of that?

OK, what had we got here? Something called MDT-48. An unknown, untested, possibly dangerous pharmaceutical substance scammed out of an unidentified laboratory somewhere, and by an unreliable person I hadn’t seen in a decade.

‘So,’ said Vernon, looking directly at me, ‘you want some more of this?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘definitely.’

With that established, and in the hallowed traditions of the civilized drug deal, we immediately changed the subject. I asked him about the furniture in the apartment, and if he was still collecting ‘pieces’. He asked me about music, and if I still listened to eighty-minute symphonies by dead Germans at full volume. We chatted about these things for a while, and then filled each other in on some details about what we’d been doing for the last few years.

Vernon was fairly cagey – as he had to be in his line of work, I suppose – but as a result I couldn’t make much sense of what he was saying. I did get the impression, however, that this MDT business had been occupying him for quite some time, and possibly even for a number of years. I also got the impression that he was anxious to talk about it, but since he wasn’t sure if he could trust me yet, he kept stopping himself in mid-sentence, and any time he seemed on the point of revealing something he would hesitate and then quickly revert to a kind of pseudo-scientific sales patter, mentioning neurotransmitters, brain-circuits and cell-receptor complexes.

He shifted quite a bit on the couch as well, continually raising his left leg and stretching it out, like a football player – or maybe a dancer – I couldn’t decide.

As he spoke, I sat relatively still and listened.

For my own part, I told Vernon how in 1989 – soon after the divorce – I’d had to get out of New York. I didn’t mention the fact that he himself had done his bit to drive me out, that his all-too-reliable supply of Bolivian Marching Powder had led to some severe health and money problems – drained sinuses, drained finances – and that these in turn had cost me my job as the production editor of a now defunct fashion and arts magazine, Chrome. But I did tell him about the miserable year I’d spent unemployed in Dublin, chasing some elusive, miasmal notion of a literary existence, and about the three years in Italy teaching and doing translations for an agency in Bologna, as well as learning interesting things about food that I’d never known … like, for instance, that vegetables weren’t necessarily designed to be available all year round, Korean deli-style, but had their seasons, and came and went in maybe a six-week period, during which time you furiously cooked them in different ways, such as – if it was asparagus, say – asparagus risotto, asparagus with eggs, fettuccine with asparagus, and that two weeks later you didn’t even think about asking your greengrocer for asparagus. I was rambling here, and could see that Vernon was getting restless, so I moved things on and told him about how I’d eventually come back from Italy to find the technology of magazine production utterly transformed, making any skills I might have acquired in the late’80s more or less redundant. I then described the last five or six years of my life, and how they’d been very quiet, and uneventful, and had drifted by – flitted by – in a haze of relative sobriety and comfort eating.

But that I had great hopes for this book I was currently working on.