Limitless

Before leaving the apartment, I forced myself to take a handful of diet-supplement pills and to eat some fruit. I also phoned Jay Zollo and Mary Stern, who I’d been fielding calls from all day. I told a distraught-sounding Jay that I’d been unwell and hadn’t felt like going in. I told Mary Stern that I didn’t want to talk to her, no matter who the hell she was, and that she was to stop calling me. I didn’t phone Gennady, or the old man.

On my way downstairs, I calculated that I hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours, and had probably, in any case, only slept a total of six hours in the seventy-two previous to that, so although I didn’t feel it and didn’t look it, I realized that at some level I must have been in a state of complete and utter physical exhaustion.

It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than taking a cab – floated, in fact – floated through the streets, and with a vague sensation of moving through a kind of virtual-reality environment, a screenscape where colours contrasted sharply and perception of depth was slightly muted. Any time I turned a corner the movements I made seemed jerky and angular and guided, so after about twenty-five minutes, when I found myself lurching sideways all of a sudden and entering a bar in Tribeca, a place called the Congo, it was as though I were entering a new phase of play in some advanced computer game, and one with pretty realistic graphics – there was a long wooden bar to the left, wicker stools, a railed mezzanine at the back and enormous potted plants everywhere that reached right up to the ceiling.

I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.

The place wasn’t too crowded, though it would probably be filling up fairly soon. There were some people to my left, two women sitting at stools – but facing away from the bar – and three men standing around them. Two of these were doing the talking, with the others sipping drinks, pulling on cigarettes and listening carefully. The subject of conversation was the NBA and Michael Jordan and the huge revenues he’d generated for the game. I don’t know at what point it started again, exactly, that trip-switching forward thing, or click-clicking forward like on a faulty CD, but when it did I had no control whatsoever and could only observe, witness, each segment and each flash, as though each segment and each flash – as well as the greater, unrevealed whole – were happening to someone else and not to me. The first jump was very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or movement, I found myself on the other side of the group, standing very close to one of the women – a thirtyish brunette in a short green skirt, not excessively slim, distinctive blue eyes … my left hand hovering somewhere in the airspace above her right thigh …

… and I was in mid-sentence …

‘ … yeah, but don’t forget that ESPN was set up in 1979, and with $10 million of seed money from Getty Oil for Christ’s sake …’

‘What’s that got—’

‘It’s got everything to do with it. It changed everything. Because of a shrewd business decision college basketball players were suddenly becoming household names overnight …’

For a split second I was aware that one of the men – a chubby guy in a silk suit – was glaring at me. He was tense and sweaty and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to my left hand – but then … click, click, click … the barman was in front of me, waving his arms around, blocking my view. He looked Irish and had tired eyes that said pleeease, enough. Meanwhile, behind him – and only partially visible now – the chubby guy in the silk suit was holding a hand up to his face, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose …

‘Fuck you, pal …’

‘Fuck you …’

The cool evening air touched the hairs on the back of my neck as I staggered away from the barman and out on to the street. The woman in the short green skirt was there too, just inside the door, pushing away someone who was behind her. She said something I didn’t catch and then quickly manoeuvred herself around the barman, dodging his arms, but half a second later – inexplicably – she was linking arms with me a couple of blocks down the street.