But I stopped myself short and stood motionless for a while, staring at the brass inset on the door with my name on it. I tried to gauge how I was reacting to all of this, tried to calibrate it in some way, and I decided pretty quickly that it wasn’t the drug at all, it was me. I was just panicking. Like an idiot.
I took a deep breath, put the key in the lock and opened the door. I flicked on the light-switch and gazed in for a few seconds, gazed in at the cosy, familiar, slightly cramped living space I’d occupied for more than six years. But in the course of those few seconds something in my perception of the room must have shifted, because all of a sudden it felt unfamiliar, too cramped, a little alien even, and certainly not a place that was very conducive to work.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
Then, with my jacket barely off and draped on a chair, I found myself taking some books down from a shelf above the stereo system - a shelf where they didn’t belong – and putting them on to another shelf, one where they did belong. Next, I was surveying the room, feeling edgy, impatient, dissatisfied about something – though what exactly I didn’t know. I soon realized that I was looking for a starting point, and I eventually found one in my collection of nearly four hundred classical and jazz CDs, which were strewn everywhere about the apartment, some out of their cases, and of course in no particular order.
I alphabetized them.
In one go, in one uninterrupted burst. I gathered them all on to the floor in the middle of the room, divided them into two separate piles, each of which I then subdivided into further categories, such as swing, be-bop, fusion, baroque, opera and so on. I then put each category into alphabetical order. Hampton, Hawkins, Herman. Schubert, Schumann, Smetana. When that was done I realized that there was nowhere for them all to fit, no one place that would hold four hundred CDs, so I set about re-arranging the furniture.
I moved my desk over to the other side of the room, creating a whole new storage area where I could put boxes of papers that had previously occupied shelf space. I then used this space to house the CDs. Next, I repositioned various free-standing items, a small table I used as a dining area, a chest of drawers, the TV and VCR unit. After that, I reshelved all of my books, weeding out about a hundred and fifty: cheap-edition crime, horror and science-fiction novels that I would never read again and could easily get rid of. These I put into two black plastic sacks, which I got from a cupboard out in the hallway. Then I took another sack and started going through all of the papers on my desk, and in the drawers of the desk. I was fairly ruthless and threw out things I’d been keeping for no good reason, stuff that if I died my unfortunate executor would have no hesitation in throwing out either, because what was he going to do with it… what was he going to do with old love letters, pay slips, gas and electric bills, yellowed typescripts of abandoned articles, instruction manuals for consumer durables I no longer possessed, holiday brochures the holidays of which I hadn’t gone on… Jesus, it occurred to me – as I stuffed all of this garbage into a bag – the shit we leave behind us for other people to sort out. Not that I had any intention of dying, of course, but I did have this overwhelming impulse to reduce the clutter in my apartment. And in my life too, I suppose, because I then set about organizing my work materials – folders full of press cuttings, illustrated books, slides, computer files – the underlying idea being to get the project moving in order to get it finished, and finished in order to make room for something else, something more ambitious maybe.
When my desk was all tidied up, I decided to go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I was thirsty and hadn’t had anything to drink since I got in. It didn’t occur to me at that point that I rarely drank water. In fact, it didn’t occur to me at that point that the whole set-up was odd – odd that the kitchen hadn’t been my first port of call on arriving home, odd that there wasn’t already a can of beer in my hand.
But neither did it occur to me as odd that on my way across the living-room floor I should stop briefly to re-align the couch and the armchair.
Anyway, when I pushed the kitchen door open and switched on the light, my heart sank. The kitchen was long and narrow, with old-style Formica-and-chrome cupboards and a big refrigerator at the back. Every available space, including the sink, was covered with dishes and dirty pots and empty milk cartons and cereal packets and crushed beer cans. I hesitated for about two seconds and then got down to the job of cleaning it all up.
As I was putting the last scrubbed pot away I glanced at my watch and saw what time it was. I felt like I hadn’t been home that long – maybe what, thirty, forty minutes? – but I now realized that I’d actually been back here in the apartment, and working busily, for over three and a half hours. I looked around the kitchen, barely recognizing it any more. Then, feeling increasingly disoriented, I wandered back into the living-room and stood gazing in shock at the extent of the transformation I’d wrought there, too.
And something else – in the whole three and a half hours I’d been back I hadn’t smoked a single cigarette, which was unheard of for me.
I went over to the chair where I’d left my jacket. I took out the pack of Camels from the side pocket and held it in my hand to look at. The familiar pack, with the eponymous desert beast in profile, suddenly seemed small, shrunken, unconnected to me. It didn’t feel like something I lived with every day, didn’t feel like a virtual extension of myself, and that’s when things really started seeming odd, because this was already the longest period of my waking life, probably since the late 1970s, that I had gone without a cigarette – and I still, as yet, had absolutely no desire to smoke. I hadn’t eaten anything either, since lunchtime. Or pissed. It was all very weird.
I put the pack of cigarettes back where I’d found them and just stood there, staring down at my jacket.
I was confused, because there was no doubt that I was ‘up’ on whatever Vernon had given me, but I couldn’t get a handle on what kind of a hit it was supposed to be. I had been abstemious and had tidied my apartment, OK – but what was that all about?
I turned around, went over to the couch and sat down very slowly. The thing is, I felt normal… but that didn’t really count, did it, because I was a natural slob so my behaviour, to say the least of it, was clearly uncharacteristic. I mean, what was this – a drug for people who wanted to be more anal-retentive? I tried to remember if I’d heard of anything like it before, or maybe read about it, but nothing came to mind and after a couple of minutes I decided to stretch out on the couch. I put my feet on the armrest at the far end and burrowed my head in against a cushion, thinking that perhaps I could take this thing in some other direction, shift the parameters, float a little. Almost immediately, however, I began to detect something – a tense, prickly sensation, an acute feeling of discomfort. I swung my legs back off the couch at once, and stood up.
Apparently, I had to keep busy.
Navigating the choppy waters of an unknown, unpredictable and more often than not proscribed chemical substance was an experience I hadn’t had in a long time, not since the distant, bizarre days of the mid-1980s, and I was sorry now that I had so casually – and stupidly – allowed myself open to it again.
I paced back and forth for a bit, and then went over to the desk and sat down in the swivel-chair. I looked at some papers relating to a telecommunications training manual I was copywriting, but it was tedious stuff and not really what I wanted to be thinking about right now.