When he left, I spent half an hour trying to match up the pills on the internet. In the end, one seemed to be a weight-loss concoction -- a shiny appetite suppressant tablet that had poor reviews from dieters. The other was a drug to suppress arthritis, which bothered me a little more. But there was only one, and Dad took five at a time every week for his bad knees. His were a different make, but they were the same strength, so one tablet didn't seem to be wildly dangerous.
Alice wouldn't be home for the weekend, so it was just me closing up the house for the night. As I got my customary glass of water, I spotted the pills on the kitchen counter and impulsively swept them up and popped them into my mouth.
Apart from waking up to a long, drawn-out burp followed closely by an enormous fart that left me feeling like a deflated balloon and forced me to open the window, I felt okay. So I went back to sleep.
In the morning, my first thought when I awoke was, "Well, I made it through the night."
That thought pops up now and again as fellows my age keel over with heart attacks and are put to bed with a shovel. I decided to take another online look at those pills' ingredients and side effects, just in case I had to call Poisons Control.
The two-hour session I spent on the net was interesting. I started on the PC, then, when the paging seemed so slow -- despite the high-speed internet access I had for gaming -- I opened up the internet app on my phone. Finally, I fetched my wife's tablet as well, scanning all three screens almost simultaneously. My reading rate was incredible.
From my research on that subject, it turns out that reading speed is limited only by how quickly the brain can process an image. After all, when you see a page, everything is there in front of you as a picture -- every single word clear -- but you still move from word to word and read on only when your brain sends a signal that it has processed and stored the information. That's why speed readers sometimes go faster than their brains can manage and have to reread a section. It's also why we can get so completely lost in a story. When that happens, the brain works incredibly hard to interpret the information and send it to a mental image run by the imagination, which doesn't leave enough power to process peripheral distractions properly.
I read alternately from the PC, phone and tablet as if each glance was a frame in a movie reel. My fingers worked like I was sending morse code, and each frame froze in my mind. I went from reading about chemical compounds to researching how various compounds and molecules reacted with each other in different circumstances. When I stopped after an hour, I was exhausted and starving.
I worked out how the pills acted during a very substantial full English breakfast -- my appetite effectively demonstrating why the diet pill wasn't popular. The arthritis drug lowered autoimmunity slightly, as arthritis can be caused by an immune reaction to the body repairing itself. That opened the channel for the antidepressants in the diet pill to activate and stimulate the sections of the brain related to sight and processing images and memory.
Sean had been right. It was all true.
I took a nap for an hour, woke up fresh, and went back on the net, wandering as the will took me. I went from reading the history of my town to the geography of India, from local events to historical castles, basic economics to the rules of the stock market, and so much in between.
A massive lunch got me researching to understand my appetite, and I realised my brain was burning calories by the bucketful. However, food was relatively cheap, and with time available limited to two days, minutes were the real expense. I took several cuts out of the freezer to defrost.
Halfway through the afternoon, my phone pinged several times. I reluctantly checked it and found a couple of messages from Alice. She and Rhoda had pooled their money to buy an antique side-table they hoped to resell for a good profit but had wiped out their budget in the process, so they would be just wandering around window shopping until the following night's train home.
A picture was attached; a small, brown table with thin, overworked legs and a couple of drawers tucked away under the top. It looked antique. It also looked ugly as hell. It certainly looked out of place in the hotel room the two of them sharing, which appeared to be furnished with standard 'cheap-as-we-can-get' hotel furniture that looked worn and tatty. More interesting was the 19th-century town clock seen through the window and what looked like Morris dancers in the square in front of it.
Ah well, at least they would have some entertainment, although I doubted that Morris dancing -- men dressed as yokels with bells on their legs dancing in circles and seemingly threatening each other with sticks -- could be classed as entertainment. I snickered to myself.
As far as I could tell, they had yet to profit more than five per cent on anything they bought, but they really loved antiquing, and the two of them spent a weekend every couple of months buying tat and trying to resell it as treasure. I didn't mind, it gave me a weekend free of husband jobs, and the two of them were always excited and happy with the possibility that they might discover a lost Chippendale or Hepplewhite.
Shaking my head fondly at my wife's eternal hope, I researched her 'antique' table. I could flick through pages online in seconds and remember each one. I found a match and discovered it was likely worth around twenty pounds -- a 1970s knock-off of a cheap French style. An antique shop in another town was selling an identical one for thirty, including delivery costs. The sisters-in-law would be taking a significant loss on this one.
I sighed. The two of them loved their treasure hunting, but it seemed to cost way more than it brought in, and the trash they couldn't sell always ended up gracing our house. Then I brightened up. Making a mistake like that meant that Alice would soon try and make it up to me with plenty of loving, which was always a good thing. She'd be a little quiet and depressed for a while but then start to try and coax money out of me for their next weekend. Hell, I didn't mind too much. She could have taken up girl's nights out, and that I would have objected to, which would, in turn, have made for an unhappy wife. Antiquing with the sister-in-law was about as dangerous as a night at a Bingo hall.
I didn't mind subsidising her hobby to an extent and told her so from the start. But as she and Rhoda drove to-and-fro to the hundreds of tiny villages to see if they had any decent shops, I ended up with a massive fuel bill. When I objected, they worked out it would be cheaper for them to share a room at one of the inns in an area and use that as a base. One night became two every three months, and the pair of them were like happy hens with a clutch of chicks. Alan, my brother, was a bit of a tightwad and had moaned for a while, but Rhoda had seemingly made it worth it somehow, as he smiled a whole lot more and stopped grumbling about having to share costs. Of course, I couldn't guess how she made him that way. Right!
This gamble would cost the pair of them their weekend's four hundred pound budget for the dubious pleasure of window shopping and Morris dancing. I shook my head and laughed again.
I considered what to research next. If Sean was right, I had an evening and a day, and I didn't want to waste it. At the same time, my brain felt a little heavy, a little full. In the end, I grabbed my coat off the coat rack and went for a walk.
It was a cold, fresh day, and I was glad for the coat, repaying its warmth by distractedly throwing it back on the coat rack when I got home again. As always, it fell to the floor as soon as I let go. This always annoyed me because, as a coat rack, it made a fine brick. The hooks were too short, and coats always fell to the floor unless hung carefully.
I remembered seeing something very similar in my earlier search and wondered how much Alice could get for it if I put my foot down and insisted she get rid of it. Maybe she'd make a profit on this piece, which would be nice. Weirdly, when I got to the computer and started looking at more pictures of antiques, I couldn't really remember any details of the coat rack. I went back, stared at it for a while and then returned to my desk to try again.
Nothing.
I was devastated that the pills had worn off so quickly. I loved this self-education exercise, and the thought that I'd wasted so much of it by sleeping and eating left me disappointed.
I took a picture of the coat rack on my phone, deciding to prop it next to the monitor as a reference. But once I looked at the picture, I found that it was suddenly clear in my memory. Puzzled, I went and found a piece from their last weekend -- an oversized mug with a picture of the Royal Wedding on it. Like I said, low-quality tat. I turned my back and couldn't remember much detail apart from the faces. I used the phone camera, looked at the result, and that image also became crystal clear in my mind.
Interesting!
It seemed that pictures and scenes from real life were processed differently, or different brain parts handled the two. The medication hadn't prematurely worn off after all!
