The rush was disappointing. Although his hands were shaking and his heart was pounding, he had missed that blissful fainting sensation, that heartbreaking moment, as compressed as the autobiography of a drowning man, but as elusive and intimate as the smell of a flower.
What was the fucking point of shooting coke if he wasn’t going to get a proper rush? It was intolerable. Indignant and yet anxious about the consequences, Patrick took out the second syringe, sat down on the loo again, and rolled up his sleeve. The strange thing was that the rush seemed to be getting stronger, as if it had been dammed up against his shirt sleeve and had taken unusually long to reach his brain. In any case he was now committed to a second fix and, with a combination of bowel-loosening excitement and dread, he tried to put the spike back in exactly the same spot as before.
As he rolled down his sleeve this time, he realized that he had made a serious mistake. This was too much. Only far too much was enough. But this was more than enough.
Too overwhelmed to flush it out, he only managed to put the cap back on the precious new syringe and drop it on the floor. He slumped against the back wall of the cubicle, his head hanging to one side, gasping and wincing like an athlete who has just crossed the finishing line after losing a race, the prickle of fresh sweat breaking out all over the surface of his skin, and his eyes tightly closed while a rapid succession of scenes flashed across his inner vision: a bee crashing drunkenly into the pollen-laden pistils of a flower; fissures spreading over the concrete of a disintegrating dam; a long blade cutting strips of flesh from the body of a dead whale; a barrel of gouged-out eyes tumbling stickily between the cylinders of a wine press.
He forced his eyes open. His inner life was definitely in decline and it would be more cautious to go upstairs and face the confusing effects of other people than sink any further into this pool of discrete and violent imagery.
The aural hallucinations that afflicted Patrick as he groped his way along the wall towards the line of basins were not yet organized into words, but consisted of twisting strands of sound and an eerie sense of space, like amplified breathing.
He mopped his face and emptied the glass of bloody water down the drain. Remembering the second syringe, he quickly tried to clean it out, watching the reflection of the door in the mirror in case somebody came in. His hands shook so badly it was hard to hold the needle under the tap.