Limitless

I lay down on the couch again and stretched out. I gazed over at the window and could see the roof of the building opposite, as well as a section of sky that had a tinge of early morning light slowly filtering through it. I listened for sounds, too – the lurching dementia of passing garbage trucks, the occasional police-car siren, the low, sporadic hum of traffic from the avenues. I turned my head in against the cushion and eventually began to relax.

This time there was no unpleasant prickly sensation, and I remained on the couch – though after a while I realized that something was still bothering me.

There was a certain untidiness about crashing out on the couch – it blurred the dividing lines between one day and the next, and lacked a sense of closure … or at least that was my line of reasoning at the time. There was also, I was pretty sure, a lot of actual untidiness lurking behind my bedroom door. I hadn’t been in there yet, having somehow managed to avoid it during the frantic compartmentalizing of the previous twelve hours. So I got up off the couch, went over to the bedroom door and opened it. I’d been right – my bedroom was a sty. But I needed to sleep, and I needed to sleep in my bed, so I set about getting the place into some kind of order. It felt more like work than before, more of a chore than when I’d done the kitchen and the living-room, but there were definitely still traces of the drug in my system and that kept me going. When I’d finished, I had a long, hot shower, after which I took two Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets to stave off my headache. Then I put on a clean T-shirt and boxer-shorts, climbed under the covers and fell asleep within, I’d say, about thirty seconds of my head hitting the pillow.

[ 4 ]

HERE IN THE NORTHVIEW MOTOR LODGE everything is drab and dull. I glance around my room, and despite the bizarre patterns and colour schemes there’s nothing that really catches the eye – except of course the TV set, which is still busily flickering away in the corner. Some bearded, bespectacled guy in a tweed suit is being interviewed, and immediately – because of the central casting touches – I assume he is a historian, and not a politician or a national security spokesman or even a journalist. I am confirmed in my suspicion when they cut to a still photograph of bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa, and then to some very shaky old black-and-white footage from, I’d guess, about 1916. I’m not going to turn the sound up to find out, but I’m pretty sure that the spectral figures on horseback riding jerkily towards the camera from the middle of what seems like a swirling cloud of dust (but is more probably the peripheral deterioration of the actual film stock itself) are incursionary forces all riled up and hot on Pancho Villa’s tail.

And that was 1916, wasn’t it?

I seem to remember knowing about that once.

I stare at the flickering images, mesmerized. I’ve always been something of a footage junky, it never failing to strike me as astonishing that what is depicted on the screen – that day, those very moments – actually happened, and that the people in them, the extras, the folks who passed fleetingly before a camera and were captured on film, subsequently went on about their daily lives, walked inside buildings, ate food, had sex, whatever, blissfully unaware that their jerky movements, as they crossed over some city street, for instance, or got off a tram, were to be preserved for decades, and then aired, exposed and re-exposed, in what would effectively be a different world.

How can I care about this any more? How can I even be thinking about it?

I shouldn’t let myself get so distracted.

Reaching down for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the floor here beside my wicker chair, it occurs to me that drinking whiskey at this time is probably not such a good idea. I lift the bottle up anyway and take a long hit from it. Then I stand up and walk around the room for a while. But the dreadful hush, underscored by the humming of the ice machine outside and the violent colours now swirling all around me, have a distinctly disorienting effect and I judge it best to sit down again and get on with the task in hand.

I must keep busy, I tell myself, and not get distracted.

OK – so, I fell asleep fairly quickly. But I didn’t sleep very well. I tossed and turned a lot, and had weird, disjointed dreams.

It was after eleven-thirty when I woke up – which was only about what, four hours? So I was still very tired when I got out of bed, and although I suppose I could have held on for another while longer, trying to get back to sleep, I knew I would have just lain there, wide awake, replaying the previous night over and over in my mind, and of course putting off the inevitable, which was to go into the living-room, switch on the computer and find out whether or not I had imagined the whole thing.