“All right, can you try to let that knowledge-drop saturate in you?” Ellen said.

“Um, yeah.”

“Cool, show me your ID and tell me the type of comfort you are in need of. The deal is that you can start with two weeks of micro-dosing capsules and one macro-dose if you share at least three visions, okay?”

Ellen seemed to know exactly what was needed.

She offered me a month’s worth of micro-dosing capsules designed to open the intuition, and added in a macro-dose. I wanted her to trip with us, but she made it clear that she had other things to do.

When Minna and I got in the car, I said, “Holy shit.”

“Right?”

“How did she get here?”

“She’s an ethnobotanist. She lives at the Rhiz-Port certain months and runs the L.A. dispensary in other months.”

Minna had also received a supply of mushrooms. The next morning, we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway and pulled off into a state park that overlooked the ocean. We spread out a camping blanket and put all of our snacks on top of it. Then we attributed our opening consciousness to indigenous elders, including Maria Sabina, the Mazatec shaman who had allowed an American banker to partake in the Velada ceremony and thus opened the door to Western consumption of psilocybin, and swallowed the macro-dose.

I closed my eyes. I saw visions—ancient patterns carved in stone and marble, vines wrapping through the center of the earth, distant planets turning in languorous rolls—but the visions were only the surface of the experience. Inside was the total melting of the small Pen into a world woven together by joy. When I opened my eyes, the colors of the dried grasses, the sky, and the distant water were beyond language; they called to me as I inverted further.

Minna and I said the usual phrases to each other:

“I can’t believe this,” while staring at our hands.

“Did you know, like, really know that everything is love?” while gazing at the sky.

“We are all tender filaments reaching out to the others,” while twirling in the middle of the afternoon.

I was still in my pajamas, petting Alice, whispering to her about the mysteries that I had encountered and that she knew well, as a succulent, when my phone rang. I didn’t usually answer it, but the day after the true meaning of existence revealed itself, I was unbothered by anyone’s demands at the other end.

Even Aiden’s.

“Hello?”

“Hey, man.” He sounded sad, but I couldn’t tell if he was sad, or if he just wasn’t as elated as I was.

“What’s going on?”

My reptilian brain was still calculating how much of a dick he was and how much he would gain from his new alliance.

The mushrooms whispered to me: No resentment, no animosity, no jealousy, just soft tendrils caressing.

“I miss you guys, you and Blithe. Do you want to come over next week?”