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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.
    I paused, and swivelled around in the chair to survey the room. Everywhere my eyes rested there were reminders of my book project for Kerr & Dexter – illustrated tomes, boxes of slides, piles of magazines , a photograph of Aldous Huxley pinned to a noticeboard on the wall.
    Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley .
    Although I was fairly sceptical about anything Vernon Gant might have to say, he had been adamant that the pill would help me overcome any creative problems I was having, so I thought, OK, why not try focusing some attention on the book – at least for a while anyway?
    I switched on the computer.
    Mark Sutton, my superior at K & D, had thrown me the proposal about three months before and I’d been tossing the idea around eversince – circling over it, talking it up to friends, pretending to be doing it, but looking at the notes I’d made on the computer, I realized for the first time just how little actual work on it I’d done. I had lots of other work to do, proof-reading, copywriting, and I was busy, sure, but on the other hand this was exactly the kind of work I’d been nagging Sutton for since I’d started with K & D in 1994 – something substantial, something with my name on it. I saw now, however, that I was in serious danger of blowing it. To do the job properly, I was going to have to write a ten-thousand-word introduction and about another ten to fifteen-thousand words in extensive captions, but as of now, judging by these notes, it was clear