Limitless Read Online Free PDF Page A

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