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.

He was amazed, and I had to tell him I’d been taking intensive lessons.

When I got off the phone with Giorgio, I continued reading I promessi sposi and had it finished by midday. After that I plundered a book on Italian history – a

general survey – and got caught up in a trail of references and cross-references about emperors, popes, city states, invasions, cholera, unification, fascism … This, in

turn, led me to a series of more specific questions about recent history, most of which I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have the relevant reading material – questions

about Mussolini’s deal with the Vatican in 1929, CIA involvement in the elections of 1948, the P2 Masonic lodge, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and

murder in the late 1970s … Bettino Craxi in the ’80s, Di Pietro and tangentopoli in the ’90s. I had a visceral sense of the huddled, eventful centuries rapidly

succeeding one another, then toppling like pillars, crashing helplessly down towards the present and breaking up into the anxious, fevered decades, years, months. I

could feel the webs of conspiracy and deceit – the stories, the murders, the infidelities – spindling back and forth across time, spindling back and forth, virtually, across

my skin. I was convinced, too, that with an intense enough concentration of will all of this could be held together in the mind, and understood, perceived as a physical

entity with an identifiable chemical structure … seen almost, and touched, even if only for a fleeting moment …

By early on Saturday evening, however, as I sensed the MDT beginning to wear off, it has to be said that my zeal for understanding the complex polymers of history

became somewhat muted. So I took another tablet. But by doing this, of course, I changed the dynamic of the whole thing and fragmented any sense of time or structure

I had in my life at that point. Taking the drug again without a break also seemed to have the effect of increasing its intensity, with the result that I soon realized I couldn’t

stay in the apartment any longer and simply had to go out.

I phoned Dean and met him an hour later at Zola’s on MacDougal. It took me a while to modulate my voice, to modulate the rate at which I was producing

labyrinthine syntax, to modulate myself, basically – because apart from the couple of telephone conversations I’d had, this meeting with Dean was my first serious

encounter with anyone since I’d started taking the MDT, and my first face-to-face encounter, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, or how I’d be coming across.

Over drinks we quickly got on to discussing Mark Sutton and Artie Meltzer, and I threw out my ideas for the expanded twentieth-century series. But I could see

Dean looking at me oddly. I could see his eyebrows furrowing, as doubts about my current state of mental well-being formed in his mind. Dean and I were both

freelancers at K & D, having met there a couple of years earlier. We had a healthy disrespect for everything about the company and shared a kind of slacker work

ethic, so this talk on my part of editorial proposals and sales projections was unusual to say the least of it. I backed off somewhat, but then found myself expounding

paranoid theories about Italian politics to him, and with a little more passion and detail than he would have been used to receiving from me on any subject. The other

thing I saw him catching me out on – but which I think prevented him from accusing me of being coked up to my eyeballs – was the fact that I wasn’t smoking. I then

decided to add to his confusion by taking a cigarette from him, but just one.

After a while, a few friends of Dean’s arrived and we all had dinner together. There was a middle-aged couple I’d met once before, called Paul and Ruby Baxter,

who were both architects, and a young Canadian actress called Susan. Over dinner, we discussed lots of subjects, and it quickly became apparent to everyone present,

myself included, that elaborate, scarily articulate views on just about everything were going to be emanating from my end of the table. I got into a protracted argument

with Paul about the relative merits of Bruckner and Mahler. I gave them my ’60s spiel, including a brief aside on Raymond Loewy and streamlining. I followed this with

further ruminations on Italian history and the nature of time, which in turn developed into a lengthy expostulation on the inadequacies of Western political theory in the

face of rapid global change. Once or twice – and it was as though from outside my body, as though from above – I became acutely aware of myself sitting at the table,

talking, and for those fleeting moments, as I went on hacking a path through the knotty thickets of syntax and Latinate vocabulary, I had no real sense of what I was

saying, no real idea if I was being coherent. Nevertheless, it all seemed to go down quite well – whatever it was – and despite being a bit worried that I was coming on

too strong, I detected in Paul the same thing I’d detected earlier in Artie Meltzer, a kind of agitated need to keep talking to me, as though I were buoying him up

somehow, empowering him, supplying him with regenerative energy waves. Neither was it my imagination, a bit later, when Susan started flirting with me, casually

brushing her arm against mine, holding my gaze. I was able to side-track her by returning to the Bruckner-Mahler debate with Paul – though don’t ask me why, because

I was certainly getting bored with that subject, and she was strikingly beautiful.

After dinner, in any case, we went to a string of nightclubs – first to the Duma, then to Virgil’s, then to the Moon and later to Hexagon. I don’t remember exactly

when, but I took another dose of MDT in a bathroom somewhere. What I do remember is that harsh, neon-bright toilety atmosphere, people reflected in mirrors all

around me, some locked into teeth-grinding, out-of-focus conversations, others slumped up against white tiles, staring at themselves – drunk, wired, bewildered – as

though they’d accidentally fallen out of their own lives.

I remember feeling electric.

*

An increasingly bewildered Dean went home some time after two, as did Susan. Other friends of Paul and Ruby’s arrived, followed a while later by friends of theirs.

Then Paul and Ruby dropped out. Another hour or two passed and I found myself in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side with a bunch of people I’d never met

before. They were all sitting around a glass table doing lines of coke – but still, I was the one out-talking them. Standing up and walking around at a certain point, I

caught sight of myself in a large ornate mirror that was hanging above a fake marble fireplace, and realized that I was the centre of attention, and that whatever I was

talking about – and God knows it could have been anything – everyone in the room, without exception, was listening to me. At around five o’clock in the morning, or

five-thirty, or six – I don’t remember – I went with a couple of guys to a diner on Amsterdam for breakfast. One of them, Kevin Doyle, was an investment banker with

Van Loon & Associates and seemed to be saying that he could throw some information my way, good information, and that he could help me set up a portfolio. He

kept insisting that we meet during the week, in his office, for lunch, even for coffee, any day that suited.

The other guy just sat there the whole time staring at me.

Eventually – because sooner or later everyone had to go to bed – I found myself alone again. I spent the day criss-crossing the city, mostly on foot, looking at stuff

I’d never really paid that much attention to before, like those mammoth apartment buildings on Central Park West, with their roof-towers and Gothic cornices. I

wandered down to Times Square, over to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. I went back in the direction of Chelsea and then down to the Financial District and Battery

Park. I did the Staten Island Ferry, standing out on the deck to let the fresh, invigorating wind cut right through me. I caught a subway back uptown, and went to

museums and galleries, places I hadn’t been to in years. I went to a recital of chamber music at Lincoln Center, ate brunch at Julian’s, read the New York Times in

Central Park and caught two Preston Sturges movies in a revival theatre in the West Village.

Later on, I hooked up with a few people back in Zola’s and got home to bed, finally, some time in the early hours of Monday morning.

[ 9 ]

AFTER THAT, THE FOLLOWING three or four weeks fused into one another, into one long stretch of … elasto-time. I was permanently … what? Up? High? Stoned? Out

of it? Tripping? Buzzed? Wired? Chillin’? None of these terms is appropriate, or adequate, to describe the experience of being on MDT. But – regardless of what term

you use – I was a certified MDT user now, taking one, sometimes two, doses of the stuff a day, and just about managing to snatch the odd hour of sleep here and

there. I had a sense that I – or, rather, my life – was expanding exponentially and that before long the various spaces I occupied, physical and otherwise, were not going

to be sufficient to contain me, and would consequently be put under a great deal of strain, maybe even to breaking point.

I lost weight. I also lost track, so I don’t know over what period of time I lost the weight exactly, but it must have been about eight or ten days. My face thinned out

a little, and I felt lighter, and trimmer. It’s not that I wasn’t eating, I was – but I was eating mostly salads and fruit. I cut out cheese and bread and meat and potato-chips

and chocolate. I didn’t drink any beer or sodas, but I did drink lots of water.

I was active.

I got my hair cut.

And bought new clothes. Because it was as much as I could bear to go on living in my apartment on Tenth Street, with its musty smells and creaky floorboards, but I

certainly didn’t have to put up with a wardrobe that made me feel like an extension of the apartment. So I took out two thousand dollars from the envelope in the closet

and wandered over to SoHo. I checked out a few stores, and then took a cab up to Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In the space of about an hour, I bought a charcoal wool

suit, a plain cotton shirt and an Armani silk tie. Then I got a pair of tan leather shoes at A. Testoni. I also got some casual stuff at Barney’s. It was more money than I’d

ever spent on clothes in my entire life, but it was worth it, because having new, expensive things to wear made me feel relaxed and confident – and also, it has to be

said, like someone else. In fact, to get the measure of myself in the new suit – the way you might test-drive a car – I took to the streets a couple of times, and walked up

and down Madison Avenue, or around the financial district, weaving briskly in and out through the crowds. On these occasions, I would often catch glimpses of myself

reflected in office windows, in dark slabs of corporate glass, catch glimpses of this trim-looking guy who seemed to know precisely where he was going and, moreover,

precisely what he would be doing when he got there.