The more I thought about it, in fact, the stranger it seemed. For my part, I could easily retrace my steps back through the years, through all the twists and turns and taste atrocities, and still make a direct, plausible link between the relatively stable Eddie Spinola sitting here in this bar, with his Kerr & Dexter book contract and his monthly health plan, and, say, some earlier, spindlier Eddie, hungover and vomiting on his boss’s desk during a presentation, or raiding his girlfriend’s underwear drawer looking for her stash. But with this domesticated, upstate Melissa that Vernon had sketched, there didn’t seem to be any connection – or the connection had been broken, or… something, I don’t know.
Back then, Melissa had been akin to a force of nature. She’d had fully worked-out opinions about everything, from the origins of the Second World War to the architectural merits, or demerits, of the new Lipstick Building on Fifty-third Street. She would defend these opinions vigorously and always talked – intimidatingly, as if she were wielding a blackjack – about going back to first principles. You didn’t mess with Melissa, and she rarely, if ever, took prisoners.
On the night of the Black Monday stock market crash, for instance – 19 October, 1987 – I was with her in a bar down on Second Avenue, Nostromo’s, when we got talking to a party of four depressed bond-salesmen doing shots of vodka at the next table. (I actually think Deke Tauber might have been one of them, I seem to have a clear picture of him in my mind, at the table, glass of Stoli clenched tightly in his fist.) But in any case, the four of them were all shell-shocked and scared and pale. They kept asking each other how it had happened, and what it meant, and went on shaking their heads in disbelief, until finally Melissa said, ‘Shit, fellahs, don’t let me hold you back from the window-ledge there or anything, but couldn’t you see this thing coming?’ Sipping a frozen margarita and pulling on a Marlboro Light, she then launched – ahead of all the newspaper editorials – into a rapid-fire Jeremiad which deftly attributed Wall Street’s collective woes, as well as the country’s multi-trillion-dollar debt, to the chronic infantilism of Dr Spock’s Baby Boomer generation. She bludgeoned the four guys into an even deeper depression than they’d probably bargained for when they agreed, back in the office, to go for a quick drink – for a quick, innocent little post-crash post-mortem.
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.
I got to the door of my one-bedroom apartment and fumbled for the key – fumbled because suddenly the idea of avoiding people, or of not avoiding people, or of even having to consider the question one way or the other, was making me feel apprehensive, and vulnerable. It also occurred to me for the first time that I had no idea how this situation was going to develop, and that potentially it could develop in any direction. Then I was thinking to myself, oh shit, if something weird happens here, if anything goes wrong, if bad stuff happens, if things get ugly…