Limitless

Looking around the room, though, I suspected that I hadn’t. Clothes were folded neatly on a chair at the foot of the bed and shoes were lined up in perfect formation along the floor beneath the window. I quickly got out of bed and went into the bathroom to take a leak. After that I threw cold water on my face, and plenty of it.

When I felt sufficiently awake, I stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It wasn’t the usual bathroom mugshot. I wasn’t bleary-eyed or puffy, or dangerous-looking, I was just tired – as well as all the other things that hadn’t changed since the day before, the fact that I was overweight, and jowly, and badly in need of a hair-cut. There was another thing I needed, too, but you couldn’t tell it from looking at me in the mirror – I needed a cigarette.

I tramped into the living-room and got my jacket from the back of the chair. I took the pack of Camels out of the side pocket, lit one up and filled my lungs with rich, fragrant smoke. As I was exhaling, I surveyed the room and reflected that being untidy was less a lifestyle choice of mine than a character defect, so I wasn’t about to argue with this – but I also felt quite strongly that this wasn’t what counted, because if I wanted tidy, I could pay for tidy. What I’d keyed into the computer, on the other hand – at least what I remembered keying in, and hoped now I was remembering accurately – was definitely something you couldn’t pay for.

I went over to it and flicked on the switch at the back. As it booted up and hummed into life, I looked at the neat pile of books I had left on the desk beside the keyboard. I picked up Raymond Loewy: A Life and wondered how much of it I would actually be able to recall if I were put on the spot. I tried for a moment to conjure something up from memory, a couple of facts or dates, an anecdote maybe, an amusing piece of designer lore, but I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think of anything.

OK, but what did I expect? I was tired. It was as if I’d gone to bed at midnight, and now I was up at three in the morning trying to do the Harper’s Double Acrostic. What I needed here was coffee – two or three cups of java to reboot my brain – and then I’d be fine again.

I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling down through it. I remembered each paragraph as I read it, but couldn’t have anticipated, at any point, what was going to come next. I had written this, but it didn’t feel like I had written it.

Having said that, however – and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit it – what I was reading was clearly superior to anything I might have written under normal circumstances. Nor, in fact, was it a rough draft, because as far as I could see, this thing had all the virtues of a good, polished piece of prose. It was cogent, measured, and well thought out – precisely that part of the process that I usually found difficult, even sometimes downright impossible. Whenever I spent time trying to devise a structure for Turning On, ideas would flit around freely inside my brain, OK, but if I ever tried to box any of them in, or hold them to account, they’d lose focus and break up and I’d be left with nothing except a frustrated feeling of knowing each time that I was going to have to start all over again.

Last night, on the other hand – apparently – I had nailed the whole goddamned thing in one go.

I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.

Then I turned and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee.

As I was filling the percolator and preparing the filter, and then peeling an orange, it struck me that I felt like a different person. I was self-conscious about every movement I made, as if I were a bad actor doing a scene in a stage drama, a scene set in a kitchen that was improbably tidy and where I had to make coffee and peel an orange.

This didn’t last for very long, though, because there was an incipient old-style mess in the trail of breakfast spoor I left behind me across the work-top spaces. Ten minutes saw the appearance of a milk carton, an unfinished bowl of soggy Corn Flakes, a couple of spoons, an empty cup, various stains, a used coffee filter, bits of orange peel and an ashtray containing the ash and butt-ends of two cigarettes.

I was back.

Concern about the state of the kitchen, however, was merely a ploy. What I didn’t want to think about was being back in front of the computer. Because I knew exactly what would happen once I was. I would attempt to move on to the rest of the introduction – as though this were the most natural thing in the world – and of course I’d freeze up. I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Then in desperation I’d go back to the stuff I’d done last night and start picking at it – pecking at it, like a vulture – and sooner or later that, too, would all come apart.