Limitless

I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time as I waited. It would be the middle of the afternoon over there.

‘Pronto.’

‘Ciao Giorgio, sono Eddie, da New York.’

‘Eddie? Cazzo! Come stai?’

‘Abbastanza bene. Senti Giorgio, volevo chiederti una cosa …’ – and so on. It wasn’t until we were about half an hour into the conversation – and had discussed the Mexico situation in some depth, and Giorgio’s marriage break-up, and this year’s spumante – that Giorgio suddenly realized we were speaking in Italian. We’d nearly always spoken in English, with whatever conversations we might have had in Italian being about pizza toppings or the weather.

He was amazed, and I had to tell him I’d been taking intensive lessons.

When I got off the phone with Giorgio, I continued reading I promessi sposi and had it finished by midday. After that I plundered a book on Italian history – a general survey – and got caught up in a trail of references and cross-references about emperors, popes, city states, invasions, cholera, unification, fascism … This, in turn, led me to a series of more specific questions about recent history, most of which I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have the relevant reading material – questions about Mussolini’s deal with the Vatican in 1929, CIA involvement in the elections of 1948, the P2 Masonic lodge, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder in the late 1970s … Bettino Craxi in the’80s, Di Pietro and tangentopoli in the’90s. I had a visceral sense of the huddled, eventful centuries rapidly succeeding one another, then toppling like pillars, crashing helplessly down towards the present and breaking up into the anxious, fevered decades, years, months. I could feel the webs of conspiracy and deceit – the stories, the murders, the infidelities – spindling back and forth across time, spindling back and forth, virtually, across my skin. I was convinced, too, that with an intense enough concentration of will all of this could be held together in the mind, and understood, perceived as a physical entity with an identifiable chemical structure … seen almost, and touched, even if only for a fleeting moment …

By early on Saturday evening, however, as I sensed the MDT beginning to wear off, it has to be said that my zeal for understanding the complex polymers of history became somewhat muted. So I took another tablet. But by doing this, of course, I changed the dynamic of the whole thing and fragmented any sense of time or structure I had in my life at that point. Taking the drug again without a break also seemed to have the effect of increasing its intensity, with the result that I soon realized I couldn’t stay in the apartment any longer and simply had to go out.

I phoned Dean and met him an hour later at Zola’s on MacDougal. It took me a while to modulate my voice, to modulate the rate at which I was producing labyrinthine syntax, to modulate myself, basically – because apart from the couple of telephone conversations I’d had, this meeting with Dean was my first serious encounter with anyone since I’d started taking the MDT, and my first face-to-face encounter, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, or how I’d be coming across.

Over drinks we quickly got on to discussing Mark Sutton and Artie Meltzer, and I threw out my ideas for the expanded twentieth-century series. But I could see Dean looking at me oddly. I could see his eyebrows furrowing, as doubts about my current state of mental well-being formed in his mind. Dean and I were both freelancers at K & D, having met there a couple of years earlier. We had a healthy disrespect for everything about the company and shared a kind of slacker work ethic, so this talk on my part of editorial proposals and sales projections was unusual to say the least of it. I backed off somewhat, but then found myself expounding paranoid theories about Italian politics to him, and with a little more passion and detail than he would have been used to receiving from me on any subject. The other thing I saw him catching me out on – but which I think prevented him from accusing me of being coked up to my eyeballs – was the fact that I wasn’t smoking. I then decided to add to his confusion by taking a cigarette from him, but just one.