Limitless

After that, I cleared a space on the desk, pushing the keyboard of my computer to one side, and started counting the tablets. I put them into little piles of fifty, of which there were nine when I’d finished, with seventeen loose ones left over. Using a folded piece of copy paper, I shovelled the 467 tablets back into the plastic container. I sat staring into it for a while, undecided, and then counted out ten of them again. These I put into a small ceramic bowl on a wooden shelf above the computer. I replaced the rest of the cash and the container of tablets in the large brown envelope and took it with me into the bedroom. I put the envelope into an empty shoe-box in the bottom of the closet, and then covered the shoe-box with a blanket and a pile of old magazines.

After this, I toyed with the idea of taking one of the tablets and of getting down to some work straightaway. I decided against it, however. I was exhausted and needed to rest. But before I went to bed, I sat on the couch in the living-room and drank another beer, all the time looking up at the ceramic bowl on the shelf above the computer.

PART TWO

[ 8 ]

ALTHOUGH THINGS BEGAN to get a little blurry later on, looking back now – from my wicker armchair in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can remember the next day, which was a Thursday, and the two days after it, as just that … days – distinct entities of time that had beginnings and endings … you got up and then x number of hours later you went to bed. I took a dose of MDT-48 on each of these mornings, and my experience of it was pretty much the same as it had been during the first session, which is to say that I came up on it almost immediately, remained in my apartment the whole time and worked productively – very productively – until its effects wore off.

On the first day, I fielded a couple of invitations to go out with friends, and actually cancelled something I’d had on for the Friday evening. I finished the introduction – a total of 11,000 words – and planned out the remainder of the book, in particular the approach I was going to take with the captions. Naturally, I couldn’t write these until I had a clear idea of which illustrations I’d be using, so I decided to get the laborious process of selecting the illustrations out of the way as well. This took me several hours to do. It should have taken me about four to six weeks, of course, but at the time I thought it best not to dwell on such matters. I gathered the relevant material – cuttings, magazine spreads, album covers, boxes of slides, contact sheets – and arranged it all on the floor in the middle of the room. I started sifting through it and made a sustained series of confident, resolute decisions. Before long I had a provisional list of illustrations and was in a position to start writing the captions.

But when I’d got that done, it suddenly occurred to me – and I didn’t envisage it taking more than another day – wouldn’t I then have the whole book done? A complete draft, and in only something like two days? OK, but I’d been thinking about it for months, gathering the material, turning it over in my mind. I’d devised a scheme for it – of sorts. I’d done a certain amount of research. I’d thought of the title.

Hadn’t I?

Maybe. But there was no getting around the fact that for an endomorphic slug like me – central to whose belief system was the notion that a severe lack of discipline was somehow a thing to be cherished – accomplishing this much in two days was extraordinary.

But why fight it?

On the Friday morning I continued writing the captions and by about lunchtime I could see that I was indeed going to get them finished that day, so I decided to phone Mark Sutton at Kerr & Dexter to tell him what stage I was at. The first thing he wanted to know about was the telecommunications manual I was supposed to be copywriting.

‘How’s it coming along?’

‘It’s almost done,’ I lied. ‘You’ll have it on Monday morning.’

Which he would.

‘Great. So what’s on your mind, Eddie?’

I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.

‘Well—’

‘It’s in good shape. Possibly needs a little editing in parts, not much, but—’

‘Eddie, the deadline on that’s not for another three months.’

‘I know, I know, but I was thinking that if there are any other titles in the series up for grabs, maybe I could do … another one?’

‘Up for grabs? Eddie, they’ve all been assigned, you know that. Your one, Dean’s, Clare Dormer’s. What is this?’

He was right. A friend of mine, Dean Bennett, was doing Venus, a most-beautiful-women-of-the-century thing, and Clare Dormer, a psychiatrist who’d written a few popular magazine articles about celebrity-associated disorders, was doing Screen Kids, about the way children were portrayed on classic TV sit-coms. There were three others in the pipeline, as well. Great Buildings, I think, was one.

I couldn’t recall the others.