Limitless

Then we were in a cubicle together, a stall in the bathroom of a nightclub or a bar, and I was pulling away from her, withdrawing – her legs spread out against a backdrop of chrome, and white porcelain, and black tiles … her green skirt torn and dangling from the toilet seat, her blouse open, beads of sweat glistening between her breasts. As I leant back against the door, hurriedly doing up my trousers, she remained in position, with her eyes closed and head swaying rhythmically from side to side. In the background, there was some kind of pulsating music, as well as the periodic roar of electric hand-dryers and raised voices and manic laughter, and from the next cubicle what sounded like the flicking of lighters followed by sharp, rapid inhalations of smoke …

I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at them. In another few moments, I was out on the street again, negotiating my way through more crowds and through heavy streams of traffic. Soon after that I seem to remember climbing into the familiar comfort of a yellow cab, sinking into the cheap plastic upholstery of the back seat and gazing out at the tawdry streaks of neon that stretched the city out, pulled it this way and that, like so many strands of multi-coloured chewing-gum. I also remember being acutely aware of my right hand, which was sore, throbbing in fact, from having punched that guy back at the Congo – something, incidentally, I couldn’t believe I’d done. At any rate, the next thing I knew I was in the lobby of an Upper West Side restaurant – a place I’d read about called Actium – insinuating, pushing, my way into another conversation with another set of complete strangers, this time half a dozen members of some local art-gallery crowd. Posing as a collector, I introduced myself as Thomas Cole. Like before, I perpetually seemed to be in mid-sentence – ‘ … and already in eighteen hundred and four the Noble Savage has become the Demonic Indian, it’s there in Vanderlyn’s Murder of Jane McCrea, the dark, rippling musculature, the ogre’s raised tomahawk ready to strike at the woman’s head …’ I was probably as surprised by what I was saying as anyone else, but I couldn’t press pause, couldn’t do anything except endure it, and watch. Then it was click, click, click again and all of a sudden we were sitting around a table together having dinner.

To my left was an intense guy with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a carefully crumpled linen jacket, probably an art critic, and to my right was a Bernice-bobs-her-hair type of woman with bony bits sticking out of her every time she moved. Directly opposite me was a heavy Latino guy in a suit who was talking non-stop. He spoke in English, but it was norteamericano this and norteamericano that, and in a fairly disparaging tone. I realized after a few moments that the man I was looking at was Rodolfo Alvarez, the celebrated Mexican painter who’d recently moved to Manhattan and undertaken to recreate, from notebooks, the destroyed Diego Rivera mural originally destined for the lobby of the RCA Building in 1933.

Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future.

The dark-haired and very beautiful woman in a black dress, sitting to his left, was the sultry Donatella, his wife.

I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.

How the fuck had I ended up with these people?

‘That’s ironic,’ the salt-and-pepper guy was saying to someone, ‘the choosing of a better future.’

‘What’s so ironic about that?’ I heard myself saying, and then sighing impatiently. ‘If you don’t choose your future, who the hell’s going to do it for you?’

‘Well,’ said Donatella Alvarez, smiling across the table – and smiling directly at me – ‘that is the North American way, isn’t it, Mr Cole?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, a little taken aback.

‘Time,’ she said calmly. ‘For you it is in a straight line. You look back at the past, and can disregard it if you so wish. You look towards the future … and, if you so wish, can choose it to be a better future. You can choose to become perfect …’

She was still smiling, and all I could say was, ‘So?’

‘For us, in Mexico,’ she said very deliberately, as though explaining something to a small child, ‘the past and the present and the future … they co-exist.’

I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.