Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

“Hell, yes ,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, and took a drink of coffee. He put the mug back down on the table. “I’ve been taking it for the past six months, on and off. I know it’s not dangerous.”

I was appalled, which with my current clarity of mind was even worse than it might normally have been. “You had no right to do that,” I said. “But thank you.”

He inclined his head.

“And thanks for cleaning up.” I could smell the individual ingredients of the soap and disinfectant he’d used to clean the mess I’d made.

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

I said, “If you’ve been taking it for six months, you must have a steady supply.”

“Jarek,” he said, “ stop it . That was your last dose until it goes into production. I only brought a couple of tabs out of the lab, and that was my last one. You’ll have to be patient.”

I looked around the flat. It seemed as if I had never looked at it properly before. “This is genuine doors of perception stuff, isn’t it,” I said wonderingly.

“Jarek,” he said. “Jarek. Look at me, Jarek.”

I looked at him.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel marvellous ,” I told him. “I thought we’d established that.”

He shook his head irritably. “No, no. Do you have any urges? Do you feel as if you have to capture how you feel in verse or prose? Do you need to draw something? Is there a tune going through your head?”

I shrugged. “No.”

“No urge to jot down some brilliant ideas for new houses?”

I shook my head.

Marcin scowled and drank some more coffee.

“ What ?” I said. “I’ve never felt so well in my entire life, you tell me it’s only going to last another…” I looked at the clock on the microwave “…hour and a quarter, and I’m wasting it answering stupid questions. I should be…” I stood up. “Fuck you, Marcin. I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.”

Down the years, I have blamed Marcin for many things, with justification. But I will always thank him for that hour and a quarter, because the city of my birth had never looked as beautiful as it did on that autumn morning.

We walked along the river for a while, then turned through the gateway into the Long Market. It was a miracle we made it that far; I couldn’t stop smelling the air and looking at things and touching things, rejoicing in the pure sensory signals. Imagine suffering a minor eye problem all your life, something you could easily overcome in your everyday life, and then one day you have surgery to correct it and for the first time you see the world properly. That’s what it was like, for all my senses. I was torn between standing very still and looking very carefully at everything I could see, and rampaging along ulica Mariacka and looking at everything .

In the end, I compromised. We went up Mariacka towards the Cathedral and I couldn’t stop smiling. The designs of the old Hanseatic buildings made sense to me in a way they never had before, and they sparked off a cascade of ideas for new designs. It was the loveliest day.

All the time, Marcin was talking, but I was barely listening. I checked my watch. “Restaurant,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“Restaurant. I’ve only got forty minutes left.” I looked around me. Crowds of tourists from all over northern Europe, tall old buildings, stall after stall selling amber jewellery and knickknacks, coffee bars.

Marcin sighed. “Have you been listening to me?” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and grabbed me by the sleeve. “Here,” he said, and he dragged me down a side street.

“No,” I said, realising where we were going. “That’s a terrible place. No, I’ve got a better idea.”

As it turned out, my better idea was closed for renovations, so we wound up in a little Ukrainian restaurant on a square just beside the Cathedral. The place was dark and quiet and down two flights of stairs and to me it felt like descending into a warm, velvety bath of sensory impression, intense cooking smells, buttery lamplight shining off porcelain and silverware, the weave of the tablecloth under my fingertips. I could have sat there all day, but instead I ordered quickly for both of us and then I sat drumming my fingers on the table top and checking my watch waiting for the food to arrive.

Marcin sat watching me with a sour look on his face. “You know,” he said, “I wish I’d never given you that stuff.”

“I don’t,” I told him. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me in… oh, ever such a long time. When are you going to put it on the market?”

“It probably won’t be all that widely available,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Have you any idea how much it cost to develop that tab?” he asked. “No, you don’t, and you’d never be able to guess. It’s not meant to be a hangover tablet. It’s a cognitive enhancer; it’s meant for fighter pilots, battlefield troops, astronauts. The hangover thing’s a side-effect, that’s all.”

“I think your employers need some tips on marketing,” I told him.

He shrugged. Then he leaned forward slightly and said, “Have you ever wondered where creativity comes from?”

I was looking at my watch again. “Sorry?”

He sat back. “Am I going to have to come over to that side of the table and shake you by the ears, Jarek?”

I put on an attentive expression.

Marcin started to say something, thought again, started to say something else, closed his mouth. Then he said. “You remember Mirosław Sierpiński?”

“Mirek? Sure.” Mirek Sierpiński had been in the same year as me at school. “Hey, did you hear he’s up for a Pulitzer Prize?”

Marcin rubbed his eyes. “He won the Pulitzer Prize, Jarek. Last year. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Last year was really busy for us,” I said.

“Admit it. You didn’t even know he’d gone to New York until you heard he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer.” He shook his head. “I despair of you, Jarek. I know where every one of my classmates is right now, and what they’re doing. I have done ever since I left school. How many of yours have you seen in the past fifteen years?”

I put my hands up in surrender. “Point taken. Okay.”

He shook his head again. “Mirek’s dad was a fitter at the shipyard. His mum cleans offices. Both of them barely finished school; I don’t think either of them ever wrote anything more complicated than a shopping list.”

“Mirek’s dad wasn’t stupid,” I told him. “Big union man, very smart. I went to his funeral,” I added, to make a point. “Lots of old Solidarity guys were there.”

Marcin was nodding. “Fine, fine. He was well-respected. But not a literary giant, I think we can agree.”

It was impossible to argue with that. “Okay,” I said.

“And nobody else in the family ever showed the slightest inclination to write, or paint, or play the piano.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is what I’ve been doing , Jarek,” he said in an exasperated voice. “I’ve been researching the nature of creativity — and if you’ve just opened your mouth to tell me you thought I was working on a hangover cure, I swear to God I’ll come round there and put my fist down your throat.”

I closed my mouth.

Marcin put a hand to his forehead and muttered, “Jesus Maria.” He took a breath. “Okay. So we have Mirek’s family, who are not creative at all. And we have Mirek, who is being talked about, quite seriously, as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. How does that happen?”

I shrugged.

“And then there’s Kasia Gadomska and Andrzej Chlebowski, what does their daughter call herself?”