Limitless

I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been channelled so … narrowly. This is not to denigrate the joys of parenthood or anything, don’t get me wrong … but Melissa had been a very ambitious person.

Then something else occurred to me. Melissa’s way of looking at things, her kind of informing, rigorous intelligence was exactly what I needed if I was going to be whipping this Kerr & Dexter book into shape.

Needing something, however, and being able to acquire it were of course two different things. Now it was my turn to be depressed.

Then suddenly, like an explosion, the people in the next booth all started laughing. It went on for about thirty seconds and during it that numinous glow I had in the pit of my stomach flickered, sputtered and went out. I waited for a while, but it was no use. I stood up, sighing, and pocketed my cigarettes and lighter. I eased my way out of the booth.

Then I looked down at the small white pill in the centre of the table. I hesitated for a few moments. I turned to go away, and then turned back again, hesitating some more. Eventually, I picked up Vernon’s card and put it in my pocket. Then I picked up the pill, put it in my mouth and swallowed it.

I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.

[ 3 ]

OUTSIDE ON THE STREET it was noticeably cooler than it had been. It was also noticeably darker, though that sparkling third dimension, the city at night, was just beginning to shimmer into focus all around me. It was noticeably busier, too – a typical late afternoon on Sixth Ave, with its heavy flow uptown out of the West Village of cars and yellow cabs and buses. The evacuation of offices was underway as well, everybody tired, irritable, in a hurry, darting up and down out of subway stations.

What was really noticeable, though, as I made my way through the traffic and over to Tenth Street, was just how quickly Vernon’s pill – whatever the hell it was – appeared to be taking effect.

I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue A it gathered in intensity, and I became acutely focused on everything around me – on minute changes in the light, on the traffic crawling by to my left, on people coming at me from the other direction and then flitting past. I noticed their clothes, heard snatches of their conversations, caught glimpses of their faces. I was picking up on everything, but not in any heightened, druggy way. Rather it all seemed quite natural, and after a while – after only maybe two or three blocks – I began to feel as if I’d been running, working out, pushing myself to some ecstatic physical limit. At the same time, however, I knew that what I was feeling couldn’t be natural because if I had been running I would be out of breath, I would be leaning against a wall and panting, gasping for someone to call an ambulance. Running? Shit, when was the last time I’d done that? I don’t think I’d run any distance at all at any time over the last fifteen years, never had occasion to, and yet that’s how I felt – no head stuff, or buzz, or tingling, or racing heart, or paranoia, no particular awareness of pleasure, I simply felt alert and well. Certainly not like I’d just had two whiskey sours, and three or four cigarettes, and a cheeseburger and fries at lunchtime in my local diner – not to mention all the other unhealthy options I’d ever taken, options flicking backwards now through my life like a greasy deck of cards.

And then in the space of what, eight, ten minutes, I am suddenly healthy?

I don’t think so.

It’s true that I respond pretty quickly to drugs – everyday medicines included, be it aspirin or paracetamol or whatever. I know straightaway when something’s in my system, and I go all the way with it. For instance, if it says on a packet ‘may cause drowsiness’, then that usually means I’ll find myself slipping into something like a mild coma. Even at college I was always first out of the hatch with hallucinogenics, always the first one to come up, to detect those subtle, rippling shifts in colour and texture. But this was something else again, this was a rapid chemical reaction unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

By the time I reached the steps outside my building, in fact, I strongly suspected that whatever I’d ingested was already close to operating at full tilt.

I entered the building and walked up to the third floor, passing buggies and bicycles and cardboard boxes on the way. I didn’t meet anybody on the stairs, and I’m not sure just how I would have reacted if I had, but neither did I detect in myself any sense of wanting to avoid people.