Limitless (8 page)

B
ACK IN MY APARTMENT
, I printed out the notes and rough draft of the introduction I’d written for the book. I sat down on the couch to read through them – to check again that I hadn’t been imagining it all – but I was so exhausted that I fell asleep almost at once.

I woke up a few hours later with a crick in my neck. It was dark outside. There were loose pages everywhere – in my lap, on the couch, spread out on the floor around my feet. I rubbed my eyes, gathered the pages up and started reading them. It only took a couple of minutes to see that I hadn’t been imagining anything. In fact, I was going to be sending this material to Mark Sutton at K & D the next morning, just to remind him that I was still doing the project.

And after that, after I’d read all of the notes, what then? I tried to keep busy by sorting through the papers on my desk, but I couldn’t settle down to it – and besides, I’d already done a perfectly good job of sorting through the papers on my desk the previous night. What I had to do – and clearly there was no point in pretending I could avoid it, or even put it off – was go back to Linden Tower and pick up the envelope. I was fairly apprehensive at the prospect, so I started thinking about some form of disguise – but what?

I went into the bathroom, took a shower and shaved. I found some gel and worked it into my hair for a while, flattening it and forcing it straight back. Then I searched through the closet in my bedroom for something unusual to wear. I had one suit, a plain grey affair, which I hadn’t worn in about two years. I also took out a light grey shirt, a black tie and black brogues. I laid them all on the bed. The only problem I could see with the suit was that the trousers
mightn’t fit me any more – but I managed to squeeze into them, and then into the shirt. After I’d done up the tie and put on the shoes, I stood and inspected myself in front of the mirror. I looked ridiculous – like some overfed wiseguy who’s been too busy eating linguine and clipping people to update his wardrobe – but it was going to have to do. I didn’t look like me, and that was the general idea.

I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in the closet. I checked myself one more time in the mirror by the door, and left.

Down on the street, there were no cabs in sight, so I walked over to First Avenue, praying that no one I knew would see me. I got a cab after a couple of minutes and started in on the journey uptown for the second time that day. But everything about it was different – it was dark now and the city was lit up, I was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase in my lap. It was the same route, the same trip, but it seemed to be taking place in an alternative universe, one where I felt unsure of who I was and what I was doing.

We arrived at Linden Tower.

Swinging my briefcase, I walked briskly into the lobby area, which was even busier than it had been earlier on. I skirted around two women carrying brown-paper grocery bags and went over to the
elevators
. I stood waiting among a group of about twelve or fifteen people, but I was too self-conscious to really look at any of them closely. If I was walking into anything here, a trap or an ambush, then that’s just what was going to happen – I would walk right into it.

On the way up in the elevator, I could feel the rate of my pulse increasing. I had pressed the button for the twenty-fifth floor, intending to take the stairs back down to the nineteenth. I was also hoping that after a certain point I might be left alone in the elevator car, but it wasn’t to happen. When we arrived at the twenty-fifth floor there were still six people left and I found myself getting out behind three of them. Two went to the left and the third one, a middle-aged guy in a suit, went to the right. I walked behind him for a few steps
and willed him to go straight on, willed him not to turn the corner.

But he did turn the corner, so I stopped and put my briefcase down. I took out my wallet and made a show of going through it, as though I were looking for something. I waited a moment or two, then picked up my briefcase again. I walked on and turned the corner. The corridor was empty and I breathed a sigh of relief.

But almost immediately – behind me – I heard elevator doors opening again, and someone laughing. I walked faster, eventually breaking into a run, and just as I was going through the metal door that led to the emergency stairs, I looked back and caught a glimpse of two people appearing at the other end of the corridor.

Hoping I hadn’t been seen, I stood still for a few seconds and tried to catch my breath. When I felt sufficiently composed, I started walking down the cold, grey stairs, taking them two at a time. On the landing of the twenty-second floor I heard voices coming from a couple of flights below me – or thought I heard voices – so I slowed my pace a little. But when I heard nothing else, I picked up speed again.

At the nineteenth floor I stopped and put my briefcase down on the concrete. I stood looking at the stack of unmarked cardboard boxes in the alcove.

I didn’t have to do this. I could just walk out of the building right now and forget the whole thing – leave this little package for someone else to find. If I did go ahead with it, on the other hand, nothing in my life would ever be the same again. I knew that for sure.

I took a deep breath and reached in behind the cardboard boxes. I pulled out the plastic A & P shopping bag. I checked that the envelope was still inside it and that the stuff was still inside the envelope. I then put the plastic bag into the briefcase.

I turned around and started walking down the stairs.

When I got to the eleventh floor, I decided it was probably safe enough to go out and take an elevator the rest of the way down. Nothing happened in the lobby or out on the plaza. I walked over to Second Avenue and hailed a cab.

Twenty minutes later I was standing outside my building on Tenth Street.

Back upstairs, I immediately took the suit off and had a quick
shower to wash the gel out of my hair. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt. Then I got a beer from the fridge, lit a cigarette and went into the living-room.

I sat at my desk and emptied the contents of the envelope on to it. I picked up the tiny black notebook first, deliberately ignoring the drugs and the thick wad of fifty-dollar bills. There were names and phone numbers in it. Some of the numbers had been crossed out – either completely or with new numbers written in directly above or below them. I flicked backwards and forwards through the pages for a few moments, but didn’t recognize any of the names. I must have seen Deke Tauber’s name, for instance, and a few others that should have been familiar, but at the time none of them
registered
with me.

I put the notebook back into the envelope, and then started counting the money.

Nine thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars.

I took six of the fifties and put them into my wallet.

After that, I cleared a space on the desk, pushing the keyboard of my computer to one side, and started counting the tablets. I put them into little piles of fifty, of which there were nine when I’d finished, with seventeen loose ones left over. Using a folded piece of copy paper, I shovelled the 467 tablets back into the plastic container. I sat staring into it for a while, undecided, and then counted out ten of them again. These I put into a small ceramic bowl on a wooden shelf above the computer. I replaced the rest of the cash and the container of tablets in the large brown envelope and took it with me into the bedroom. I put the envelope into an empty shoe-box in the bottom of the closet, and then covered the shoe-box with a blanket and a pile of old magazines.

After this, I toyed with the idea of taking one of the tablets and of getting down to some work straightaway. I decided against it, however. I was exhausted and needed to rest. But before I went to bed, I sat on the couch in the living-room and drank another beer, all the time looking up at the ceramic bowl on the shelf above the computer.

A
LTHOUGH THINGS BEGAN
to get a little blurry later on, looking back now – from my wicker armchair in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can remember the next day, which was a Thursday, and the two days after it, as just that … days – distinct entities of time that had beginnings and endings … you got up and then x number of hours later you went to bed. I took a dose of MDT-48 on each of these mornings, and my experience of it was pretty much the same as it had been during the first session, which is to say that I came up on it almost immediately, remained in my apartment the whole time and worked productively –
very
productively – until its effects wore off.

On the first day, I fielded a couple of invitations to go out with friends, and actually cancelled something I’d had on for the Friday evening. I finished the introduction – a total of 11,000 words – and planned out the remainder of the book, in particular the approach I was going to take with the captions. Naturally, I couldn’t write these until I had a clear idea of which illustrations I’d be using, so I decided to get the laborious process of selecting the illustrations out of the way as well. This took me several hours to do. It should have taken me about four to six weeks, of course, but at the time I thought it best not to dwell on such matters. I gathered the relevant material – cuttings, magazine spreads, album covers, boxes of slides, contact sheets – and arranged it all on the floor in the middle of the room. I started sifting through it and made a sustained series of confident, resolute decisions. Before long I had a provisional list of illustrations and was in a position to start writing the captions.

But when I’d got that done, it suddenly occurred to me – and I didn’t envisage it taking more than another day – wouldn’t I then have the whole book done? A complete draft, and in only something like two days? OK, but I’d been thinking about it for months,
gathering
the material, turning it over in my mind. I’d devised a scheme for it – of sorts. I’d done a certain amount of research. I’d thought of the title.

Hadn’t I?

Maybe. But there was no getting around the fact that for an
endomorphic
slug like me – central to whose belief system was the notion that a severe lack of discipline was somehow a thing to be cherished – accomplishing this much in two days was extraordinary.

But why fight it?

On the Friday morning I continued writing the captions and by about lunchtime I could see that I was indeed going to get them finished that day, so I decided to phone Mark Sutton at Kerr & Dexter to tell him what stage I was at. The first thing he wanted to know about was the telecommunications manual I was supposed to be copywriting.

‘How’s it coming along?’

‘It’s almost done,’ I lied. ‘You’ll have it on Monday morning.’

Which he would.

‘Great. So what’s on your mind, Eddie?’

I explained about the status of
Turning On
, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.

‘Well—’

‘It’s in good shape. Possibly needs a little editing in parts, not much, but—’

‘Eddie, the deadline on that’s not for another three months.’

‘I know, I know, but I was thinking that if there are any other titles in the series up for grabs, maybe I could do … another one?’

‘Up for grabs? Eddie, they’ve all been assigned, you know that. Your one, Dean’s, Clare Dormer’s. What
is
this?’

He was right. A friend of mine, Dean Bennett, was doing
Venus
, a most-beautiful-women-of-the-century thing, and Clare Dormer, a psychiatrist who’d written a few popular magazine articles about
celebrity-associated disorders, was doing
Screen Kids
, about the way children were portrayed on classic TV sit-coms. There were three others in the pipeline, as well.
Great Buildings
, I think, was one.

I couldn’t recall the others.

‘I don’t know. What about phase two?’ I asked him. ‘If these things do well—’

‘No plans for phase two yet, Eddie.’

‘But if these do well?’

I heard a quiet sigh of exasperation at this point. He said, ‘I suppose there
could
be a phase two.’ There was a pause, and then a polite, ‘Any suggestions?’

I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I was anxious to have another project on hand, so cradling the receiver on my shoulder I cast an eye over the bookshelves in my living-room and started reeling off some ideas. ‘How about, let me see …’ I was staring at the spine of a large grey volume on a shelf above the stereo now, something Melissa’d given me after a visit to a photography thing at MoMA, and a fight. ‘How about one on great
news
photos? You could start with that amazing shot of Halley’s Comet. From 1910. Or the Bruno Hauptmann picture – remember … at the execution? Or the train crash in Kansas in 1928?’ I had a sudden flash of the mangled railway carriages, the dark billowing clouds of smoke and dust. ‘Also … what else? … there’s Adolf Hitler sitting with Hindenburg and Hermann Goering at the Tannenberg Monument.’ Another flash, this time of a distracted Hermann Goering holding something in his hands, gazing down at it, something that looks curiously like a laptop computer. ‘And then you’ve got … stick bombs over Paris. The
D-Day
landings. The kitchen debate in Moscow, with Khrushchev and Nixon. The napalm kid in Vietnam. The Ayatollah’s funeral.’ Still staring directly at the book’s spine, I could literally see these images now, and vividly, one after the other, scrolling down as they would on a microfiche. I shook my head and said, ‘There must be
thousands
of others.’ I looked away from the bookshelves and paused. ‘Or, I don’t know, you could do
anything
, you could do movie posters, advertisements, twentieth-century gadgets like the can opener or the calculator or the camcorder. You could do automobiles.’

As I threw out these suggestions – reaching over to the desk at the same time to steady myself – I also became aware of a second tier of ideas forming in my mind. Up until that point I’d only ever been concerned about my own book. I hadn’t thought about the series as a whole, but it struck me now that Kerr & Dexter were really being quite slapdash about it. Their twentieth-century series was probably only a response to a similar project that was being done by a rival publishing house – something they’d gotten wind of and didn’t want to be trounced on. But it was as if once they’d decided to do it, they felt that was it – they’d done the work. To survive in the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, K & D’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but off-loading a project like this on to Mark’s division was just paying lip-service to the idea. Mark didn’t have the resources, but Artie knew he’d take it anyway, because Mark Sutton, who was incapable of ever saying no, took everything. Then Artie could forget about it until the time came to apportion blame after the series had flopped.

What Artie was missing out on here, however, was the fact that the series was actually a good idea. OK, others would be doing similar stuff, but that was always going to be the case. The thing was to do it first, and better. The material – the iconography of the twentieth century – was there, after all, ready-made and waiting to be
window-dressed
, but as far as I could see Sutton had only managed to put together half a package, at best. His ideas lacked any focus or
structure
.

‘Then you’ve got, I don’t know, great sporting moments. Babe Ruth. Tiger Woods. Fuck, the space programme. There’s no end to it.’

‘Hhmm.’

‘And shouldn’t all of these books have similar titles?’ I went on. ‘Something identifiable – mine for instance is
Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley
, so Dean’s could be, instead of just
Venus
, it could be …
Shooting Venus: From … Pickford to Paltrow
, or
From Garbo to Spencer
, something along those lines. Clare’s, if she confined it to boys, could be …
Raising Sons: From 
Beaver to Bart
. I don’t know. Give it a formula, make it easier to sell.’

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then, ‘What do you want me to say, Eddie? It’s Friday afternoon. I’ve got
deadlines
today
.’

I could picture Mark in his office now, lean and geeky, struggling to stay on top of his workload, an un- or half-eaten cheeseburger on his desk, a secretary he was in love with ritually humiliating him every time their eyes met. He had a windowless office on the twelfth floor of the old Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue, and spent most of his life there – including evenings, weekends and days off. I felt a wave of contempt for him.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘Look Mark, I’ll talk to you on Monday.’

When I got off the phone I started making some notes on a possible shape for the series and within about two hours had come up with a proposal for ten titles, including a brief outline and a list of key illustrations for each one. But then – what was the next step going to be? I needed to be commissioned to do this. I couldn’t just work in a vacuum.

Mark’s attitude and lack of interest was still bugging me, so I decided to call up Meltzer and put the idea to him. I knew Mark and Artie didn’t get along too well and that Artie would be happy for an opportunity to lean on Mark, but as to whether Artie would actually go for the proposal itself or not was another question.

I got through to him straightaway and started talking. I don’t know where it all came from but by the end of the conversation I practically had Meltzer restructuring the whole company, with the twentieth-century series the centrepiece of its new spring list. He wanted to meet me for dinner, but he and his wife had been invited to the Hamptons for the weekend, and he couldn’t get out of that – his wife would kill him. He seemed agitated, though, unwilling to hang up, as if he felt this great opportunity was already beginning to slip out of his hands …

Next week, I said, we’ll meet next week.

I spent the rest of the day copywriting the telecommunications manual for Mark and expanding on the notes for Artie – without
seeing any contradiction in this, without giving any thought to the fact that perhaps, just maybe, by my actions, I might have
endangered
Mark Sutton’s job.

In terms of the MDT hit itself, though – on that Thursday and Friday – there was nothing markedly different about it, no
particular
pleasure thing going on, but there was – as before – what I can only describe as this unrelenting fucking
surge
of having to be busy. There was nothing for me to do in the apartment, because all of that had been done – unless of course I wanted to redecorate the place, change the furniture, paint the walls, tear up the old floorboards, which I didn’t – so I had no choice but to channel all of my energy into the copywriting and notes. And you must bear in mind what that kind of work normally involves. It might, for instance, involve watching
Oprah
, or sitting idly on the couch with a magazine, or even being in bed, asleep. Work did get done,
eventually
, but not in any way that you’d notice if you were only around for a day or two, observing.

I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.m., and lay in bed for about an hour before I finally surrendered and got up. I put on a pot of coffee and took a dose of MDT – which meant that by 5 a.m. I was back in full gear, but with nothing concrete to do. Nevertheless, I managed to stay in all day and occupy myself. I pored over the Italian grammar books I’d bought but never studied when I lived in Bologna. I’d picked up enough Italian to get by on, and even enough to get away with doing simple translations, but I’d never studied the language in any formal way. Most Italians I’d known wanted to practise their English, so it had always been easy to skate along with minimal skills. But I now spent a few hours picking through the tense system, as well as other key grammatical stuff – the subjunctive, comparatives, pronouns, reflexives – and the curious thing was, I recognized it all, realized I knew these things, found myself continually going
Yeah, of course
, that’s
what that is
.

I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news
magazine
I had,
Panorama
, and as I scanned the snippets about local
politicians and fashion designers and soccer managers, and went through a lengthy article on Viagra, I could feel whole glaciers of passive vocabulary shifting loose and floating up to the forefront of my conscious mind. After that, I took down a copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel
I promessi sposi
that I’d bought with the best of intentions but had never tackled, never even opened. I wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it in any case, much like an
elementary
student of English trying to read
Bleak House
, but I started into it regardless, and was soon surprised to find myself enjoying its remarkably vivid reconstruction of early seventeenth-century life in Lombardy. In fact, when I put the book down after about 200 pages, I barely noticed at all that I’d been reading in a foreign language. And the reason I stopped wasn’t because I’d lost interest, but because I was continually being distracted by the notion that my spoken Italian might now be on a par with
this
– with my new level of reading comprehension.

I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time as I waited. It would be the middle of the afternoon over there.

‘
Pronto
.’

‘
Ciao Giorgio, sono Eddie, da New York
.’

‘
Eddie? Cazzo! Come stai?
’

‘
Abbastanza bene. Senti Giorgio, volevo chiederti una cosa
…’ – and so on. It wasn’t until we were about half an hour into the
conversation
– and had discussed the Mexico situation in some depth, and Giorgio’s marriage break-up, and this year’s spumante – that Giorgio suddenly realized we were speaking in Italian. We’d nearly always spoken in English, with whatever conversations we might have had in Italian being about pizza toppings or the weather.