Limitless (3 page)

Needing something, however, and being able to acquire it were of course two different things. Now it was
my
turn to be depressed.

Then suddenly, like an explosion, the people in the next booth all
started laughing. It went on for about thirty seconds and during it that numinous glow I had in the pit of my stomach flickered,
sputtered
and went out. I waited for a while, but it was no use. I stood up, sighing, and pocketed my cigarettes and lighter. I eased my way out of the booth.

Then I looked down at the small white pill in the centre of the table. I hesitated for a few moments. I turned to go away, and then turned back again, hesitating some more. Eventually, I picked up Vernon’s card and put it in my pocket. Then I picked up the pill, put it in my mouth and swallowed it.

I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well,
you
certainly haven’t changed. 

O
UTSIDE ON THE STREET
it was noticeably cooler than it had been. It was also noticeably darker, though that sparkling third dimension, the city at night, was just beginning to shimmer into focus all around me. It was noticeably busier, too – a typical late afternoon on Sixth Ave, with its heavy flow uptown out of the West Village of cars and yellow cabs and buses. The evacuation of offices was underway as well, everybody tired, irritable, in a hurry, darting up and down out of subway stations.

What was really noticeable, though, as I made my way through the traffic and over to Tenth Street, was just how quickly Vernon’s pill – whatever the hell it was – appeared to be taking effect.

I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue A it gathered in intensity, and I became acutely focused on everything around me – on minute changes in the light, on the traffic crawling by to my left, on people coming at me from the other direction and then flitting past. I noticed their clothes, heard snatches of their conversations, caught glimpses of their faces. I was picking up on everything, but not in any
heightened
, druggy way. Rather it all seemed quite natural, and after a while – after only maybe two or three blocks – I began to feel as if I’d been running, working out, pushing myself to some ecstatic physical limit. At the same time, however, I knew that what I was feeling couldn’t be natural because if I
had
been running I would be out of breath, I would be leaning against a wall and panting, gasping for someone to call an ambulance. Running? Shit, when was
the last time I’d done that? I don’t think I’d run any distance at all at any time over the last fifteen years, never had occasion to, and yet that’s how I felt – no head stuff, or buzz, or tingling, or racing heart, or paranoia, no particular awareness of pleasure, I simply felt alert and well. Certainly not like I’d just had two whiskey sours, and three or four cigarettes, and a cheeseburger and fries at lunchtime in my local diner – not to mention all the other unhealthy options I’d ever taken, options flicking backwards now through my life like a greasy deck of cards.

And then in the space of what, eight, ten minutes, I am suddenly
healthy
?

I don’t think so.

It’s true that I respond pretty quickly to drugs – everyday
medicines
included, be it aspirin or paracetamol or whatever. I know straightaway when something’s in my system, and I go all the way with it. For instance, if it says on a packet ‘may cause drowsiness’, then that usually means I’ll find myself slipping into something like a mild coma. Even at college I was always first out of the hatch with hallucinogenics, always the first one to come up, to detect those subtle, rippling shifts in colour and texture. But this was something else again, this was a rapid chemical reaction unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

By the time I reached the steps outside my building, in fact, I strongly suspected that whatever I’d ingested was already close to operating at full tilt.

I entered the building and walked up to the third floor, passing buggies and bicycles and cardboard boxes on the way. I didn’t meet anybody on the stairs, and I’m not sure just how I would have reacted if I had, but neither did I detect in myself any sense of wanting to avoid people.

I got to the door of my one-bedroom apartment and fumbled for the key – fumbled because suddenly the idea of avoiding people, or of not avoiding people, or of even having to consider the question one way or the other, was making me feel apprehensive, and
vulnerable
. It also occurred to me for the first time that I had no idea how
this situation was going to develop, and that potentially it could develop in
any
direction. Then I was thinking to myself, oh shit, if something weird happens here, if anything goes wrong, if bad stuff happens, if things get ugly …

But I stopped myself short and stood motionless for a while, staring at the brass inset on the door with my name on it. I tried to gauge how I was reacting to all of this, tried to calibrate it in some way, and I decided pretty quickly that it wasn’t the drug at all, it was me. I was just panicking. Like an idiot.

I took a deep breath, put the key in the lock and opened the door. I flicked on the light-switch and gazed in for a few seconds, gazed in at the cosy, familiar, slightly cramped living space I’d occupied for more than six years. But in the course of those few seconds
something
in my perception of the room must have shifted, because all of a sudden it felt
un
familiar,
too
cramped, a little alien even, and certainly not a place that was very conducive to work.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

Then, with my jacket barely off and draped on a chair, I found myself taking some books down from a shelf above the stereo system
– a shelf where they didn’t belong
– and putting them on to another shelf, one where they did belong. Next, I was surveying the room, feeling edgy, impatient, dissatisfied about something – though what exactly I didn’t know. I soon realized that I was looking for a starting point, and I eventually found one in my collection of nearly four hundred classical and jazz CDs, which were strewn everywhere about the apartment, some out of their cases, and of course in no
particular
order.

I alphabetized them.

In one go, in one uninterrupted burst. I gathered them all on to the floor in the middle of the room, divided them into two separate piles, each of which I then subdivided into further categories, such as swing, be-bop, fusion, baroque, opera and so on. I then put each category into alphabetical order. Hampton, Hawkins, Herman. Schubert, Schumann, Smetana. When that was done I realized that there was nowhere for them all to fit, no one place that would hold four hundred CDs, so I set about re-arranging the furniture.

I moved my desk over to the other side of the room, creating a whole new storage area where I could put boxes of papers that had previously occupied shelf space. I then used this space to house the CDs. Next, I repositioned various free-standing items, a small table I used as a dining area, a chest of drawers, the TV and VCR unit. After that, I reshelved all of my books, weeding out about a hundred and fifty: cheap-edition crime, horror and science-fiction novels that I would never read again and could easily get rid of. These I put into two black plastic sacks, which I got from a cupboard out in the hallway. Then I took another sack and started going through all of the papers on my desk, and in the drawers of the desk. I was fairly ruthless and threw out things I’d been keeping for no good reason, stuff that if I died my unfortunate executor would have no hesitation in throwing out either, because what was he going to do with it … what was he going to do with old love letters, pay slips, gas and electric bills, yellowed typescripts of abandoned articles, instruction manuals for consumer durables I no longer possessed, holiday brochures the
holidays
of which I hadn’t gone on …
Jesus
, it occurred to me – as I stuffed all of this garbage into a bag – the
shit
we leave behind us for other people to sort out. Not that I had any intention of dying, of course, but I did have this overwhelming impulse to reduce the clutter in my apartment. And in my life too, I suppose, because I then set about organizing my work materials – folders full of press cuttings, illustrated books, slides, computer files – the underlying idea being to get the project moving in order to get it
finished
, and finished in order to make room for something else, something more ambitious maybe.

When my desk was all tidied up, I decided to go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I was thirsty and hadn’t had anything to drink since I got in. It didn’t occur to me at that point that I rarely drank water. In fact, it didn’t occur to me at that point that the whole
set-up
was odd – odd that the kitchen hadn’t been my first port of call on arriving home, odd that there wasn’t already a can of beer in my hand.

But neither did it occur to me as odd that on my way across the living-room floor I should stop briefly to re-align the couch and the armchair.

Anyway, when I pushed the kitchen door open and switched on the light, my heart sank. The kitchen was long and narrow, with
old-style
Formica-and-chrome cupboards and a big refrigerator at the back. Every available space, including the sink, was covered with dishes and dirty pots and empty milk cartons and cereal packets and crushed beer cans. I hesitated for about two seconds and then got down to the job of cleaning it all up.

As I was putting the last scrubbed pot away I glanced at my watch and saw what time it was. I felt like I hadn’t been home that long – maybe what, thirty, forty minutes? – but I now realized that I’d actually been back here in the apartment, and working busily, for over
three and a half hours
. I looked around the kitchen, barely recognizing it any more. Then, feeling increasingly disoriented, I wandered back into the living-room and stood gazing in shock at the extent of the transformation I’d wrought there, too.

And something else – in the whole three and a half hours I’d been back I hadn’t smoked a single cigarette, which was unheard of for me.

I went over to the chair where I’d left my jacket. I took out the pack of Camels from the side pocket and held it in my hand to look at. The familiar pack, with the eponymous desert beast in profile, suddenly seemed small, shrunken, unconnected to me. It didn’t feel like something I lived with every day, didn’t feel like a virtual
extension
of myself, and that’s when things really started seeming odd, because this was already the longest period of my waking life, probably since the late 1970s, that I had gone without a cigarette – and I still, as yet, had absolutely no desire to smoke. I hadn’t eaten anything either, since lunchtime. Or pissed. It was all very weird.

I put the pack of cigarettes back where I’d found them and just stood there, staring down at my jacket.

I was confused, because there was no doubt that I was ‘up’ on whatever Vernon had given me, but I couldn’t get a handle on what kind of a hit it was supposed to be. I had been abstemious and had tidied my apartment, OK – but what was
that
all about?

I turned around, went over to the couch and sat down very slowly. The thing is, I felt normal … but that didn’t really count, did it,
because I was a natural slob so my behaviour, to say the least of it, was clearly uncharacteristic. I mean, what was this – a drug for people who wanted to be more anal-retentive? I tried to remember if I’d heard of anything like it before, or maybe read about it, but nothing came to mind and after a couple of minutes I decided to stretch out on the couch. I put my feet on the armrest at the far end and burrowed my head in against a cushion, thinking that perhaps I could take this thing in some other direction, shift the parameters, float a little. Almost immediately, however, I began to detect something – a tense, prickly sensation, an acute feeling of discomfort. I swung my legs back off the couch at once, and stood up.

Apparently, I had to keep busy.

Navigating the choppy waters of an unknown, unpredictable and more often than not proscribed chemical substance was an
experience
I hadn’t had in a long time, not since the distant, bizarre days of the mid-1980s, and I was sorry now that I had so casually – and stupidly – allowed myself open to it again.

I paced back and forth for a bit, and then went over to the desk and sat down in the swivel-chair. I looked at some papers relating to a telecommunications training manual I was copywriting, but it was tedious stuff and not really what I wanted to be thinking about right now.

I paused, and swivelled around in the chair to survey the room. Everywhere my eyes rested there were reminders of my book project for Kerr & Dexter – illustrated tomes, boxes of slides, piles of
magazines
, a photograph of Aldous Huxley pinned to a noticeboard on the wall.

Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley
.

Although I was fairly sceptical about anything Vernon Gant might have to say, he
had
been adamant that the pill would help me
overcome
any creative problems I was having, so I thought, OK, why not try focusing some attention on the book – at least for a while anyway?

I switched on the computer.

Mark Sutton, my superior at K & D, had thrown me the proposal about three months before and I’d been tossing the idea around ever
since – circling over it, talking it up to friends, pretending to be doing it, but looking at the notes I’d made on the computer, I
realized
for the first time just how little actual work on it I’d done. I had lots of other work to do, proof-reading, copywriting, and I was busy, sure, but on the other hand this was exactly the kind of work I’d been nagging Sutton for since I’d started with K & D in 1994 – something substantial, something with my name on it. I saw now, however, that I was in serious danger of blowing it. To do the job properly, I was going to have to write a ten-thousand-word
introduction
and about another ten to fifteen-thousand words in
extensive
captions, but as of now, judging by these notes, it was clear that I had only the vaguest notions about what I wanted to say.

I had accumulated plenty of research material, though –
biographies
of Raymond Loewy, Timothy Leary, Steve Jobs, political and economic studies, design source-books for everything from fabrics to advertising to album-covers to posters to industrial products – but how much of it had I actually read?

I reached over to a shelf above the desk for the Raymond Loewy biography and studied the photograph on the cover – a dapper,
moustachioed
Loewy posing in his very modern office in 1934. This was the man who had led the first generation of designer-stylists, people who could turn their hands to almost anything, Loewy himself having been responsible for those sleek Greyhound buses of the 1940s, and for the Lucky Strike cigarette pack, and for the Coldspot-Six
refrigerator
– all of which information I had gleaned from the blurb on the inside flap of the book as I stood in the shop on Bleeker Street trying to decide whether or not to actually buy it. But that
information
had been enough to convince me that I needed the book, and that Loewy was a seminal figure, someone I’d better bone up on if I intended to be serious.