I don’t know how long I was unconscious. My perplexed brain, lost in a cocoon of lollipop yarn filled with strange and hallucinatory scenes that alternated from disembodied frog legs dancing with an Adidas Tango ball to a headbutt from Zidane in the chest after an incendiary and hallucinatory quarrel over which subway line was the most effective to get us to the city center. The Eiffel Tower, Jean-Paul Sartre’s squinted eye, caught by Albert Camus in a high jump in a goalkeeper’s suit, had to slip quite out of its insensitive shell to accidentally touch the real world that still inevitably surrounded me.
Although my brain does it secretly, almost as if it needs an urgent dose of reality to counteract this cocktail of extravagant exotic intoxicating substances that has taken control of its cabin and, by default, its autonomy. But she wanted to do it carefully and subtly, like a mouse in the attic with rubber-soled shoes, without waking up my dark, drugged inner self. My brain regained some of the alert consciousness behind my back and I hardly noticed anything.
One of those jerky friezes of life that exist despite everything made me think that we had already arrived in Paris. The converted Transit van that my colleague “chartered” stopped at a traffic light. Through the window I could see the lattice iron tower, Domineering above us, casting a shadow.
I must have been brought back by the vile and sleepy tentacles of a sinister experimental mixture that my Colleague fed me, because time and space were absorbed by a destructive void of perception that would have made Kant’s wig tear. The next conscious sensation I felt was covered with a crust of desperate melancholy from an evil hangover. My tongue felt like a dried toad squatting in my mouth, and all I could try was what your tongue could be marinated in terribly strong alcohol and gasoline if you’re crazy or hungry enough for dinner. As I crawled out of the embryonic crust onto the muddy floor of a transit van, I felt it sway from side to side when I started to slow down. Now I knew where the gasoline was coming from: the inside of the van was tainted with thick, stinking diesel fumes, so palpable that they could be seen very well.
“Welcome to the land of the living, the Sleeping Monster,” Pete said, slapping me on the back with brotherly ferocity. He turned away from me and held out his hand in an expansive gesture that was stopped by his elbow crashing into the window. “Say hello To merry Paris, my friend!”
As my capacity for conscious intention and serious, concentrated reflection gradually and nauseatingly began to return, no longer feeling like the cerebral equivalent of a pin, while the blood was flowing back into a previously sitting leg, I tried to summon and gather my still fragmented abilities and my impertinent and capricious thoughts around a clear line of inquiry: To which my unequivocal answer should undoubtedly be that I see no method at all.
“Christ is on the wand,” he muttered, trying to get his sugar-burned tongue into working order. ”You must have your head like a football soaked in the rain from a 1950s pork bubble!”
“Oh, you mean Messi’s Magic Milk? Your Old man said he put the highest dose of this substance on you. To shut you up and shut you up. He said he knew that otherwise you would only moan – there was a dark, mocking expression on Pete’s face. He coughed, as it seemed to me, in a conspiratorial tone, and poked his thumb over his shoulder. “And you certainly wouldn’t approve of their inclusion.”
I followed the direction Pete’s thumb was pointing in. In the back of the “Transit” van, pressed closely against the double rear doors, three untidy men were sitting. They smiled shyly at me.
