Free The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour

for more.
    Then it was my turn. “Here’s a little something I came across while you were away.” His eyes settled on me again. I read him Prince Andrei’s thoughts just seconds before a shell explodes in front of him in the Battle of Austerlitz:
    “Can this be death?” Prince Andrei wondered, with an utterly new, wistful feeling, looking at the grass. At the wormwood, and at the thread of smoke coiling from the rotating shell. “I can’t die, I don’t want to die, I love life, I love this grass and earth . . .”
    I looked up with an expression of anticipation and found my friend staring into the other room.
    “Just a moment,” he said, and went quickly into the kitchen. Sitting there, the book still open in my hands, I felt a sting of embarrassment, but also a sensation of having squandered something delicate. And with that came a sudden, unwelcome memory of an incident which had taken place a few years earlier in a bar on the island of Martinique. Lonely and a bit drunk one night, I struck up a conversation with a handful of French sailors—they were on shore leave—and in the course of events, more drinks, the evening getting later and later, I told them I was a “writer”; and to prove it (as if it needed proving) I produced from my shoulder bag a pristine edition of my very first novel, it had just been published, and began to show it around; and one of the sailors yanked the book from my hands and, standing on his tiptoes (the bar was crowded), began to read from the first chapter in a singsong voice with a heavy French accent. I snatched it back, but it was too late; the damage, the “sullying,” was done.
    Justin came back into the room, animated with relief. “I thought I lost it,” he said.
    Remembering that night in Martinique (you must protect the precious things in your life), I discreetly closed War and Peace and laid it on the table beside my chair. Justin appeared not to notice or, for that matter, to remember what we’d just been doing.
    Things moved forward, and near midnight he took me upstairs and showed me a machine gun he’d purchased through the mail. We went onto the second-floor patio. In the distance you could see a single pair of headlights moving across the darkness. A sky of needle-prick stars. The air warm and thicker than in the city, a smell that excites.
    Justin went to the end of the patio, shouldered the weapon and fired off a deafening round of automated fire into the lawn below. You could see lumps of grass and earth jumping up like hedgehogs. The air around us turned grey with smoke and the smell of cordite.
    “Those cocksuckers,” he said.
    I woke up the next morning in an airy room on the main floor. Outside my window was the driveway, behind it a field bespeckled with dandelions and daisies. The sun was high in the sky; noon maybe; bees hummed in the eavestrough. It had been years since I’d drunk hard liquor and when I sat up in bed, it was as though a tray of silverware slid forward inside my head and clanked against the front of my skull. I wondered fleetingly if I might have damaged my brain.
    I found Justin in the kitchen. He was seated at the table, chopping up a greyish powder with a razor blade. He looked grim, oddly purposeful.
    I picked up my copy of War and Peace from the table and was about to return it to my bag when he said, “Not now.” I put it down. After a moment I said, “What’s that?”
    “TCP.”
    I said, “What does that stand for?”
    He ignored the question.
    “Will it work for a hangover?” I asked cheerfully.
    A slight, ironic smile. “It’ll make you stupider, but it’s worth it.”
    Twenty minutes later, I lay in the dandelion field behind his house. Nauseated, sweating, a sense of iron dread, of a life misspent, clawing at my heart.
    “Have I taken something that might kill me?” I said.
    Justin sat beside me, chewing nonchalantly on a blade of grass. “What?” he said.
    “What is that stuff, that TCP?”
    He said,