That wasn’t the shocker—the shocker was where the house was located. It wasn’t in Cambridge, wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t even in Massachusetts. It was in Millbrook, New York, not far from Poughkeepsie, which wasn’t far from Beacon, the very town they’d escaped from in the first place. The irony was stupendous. Or no, it wasn’t irony—it was karma. If ever there was karma involved in their lives then this was it. “Can’t you see, Fitz?” she said when they’d got back to the motel after a raucous dinner with too much beer and too much pizza and everybody talking at once and jumping up and down to feed the jukebox until Corey fell asleep in his chair and the owner of the restaurant came out of the kitchen to hang the CLOSED sign conspicuously on the front door. “It’s meant to be.”

Fitz was drunk. He’d been drunk when she got back with the groceries four hours ago and he was drunk now. She was floating herself, not just on the beer and the gin and tonics, but also on the lighter-than-air euphoria of escape, the possibility of getting out from under all this burden she’d been bearing like a mule and starting a new life where she belonged, with the best and truest friends she’d ever known—her brothers and sisters—and in a place that would be like a permanent Mexico, Mexico transposed to the U.S.A., where nobody could be deported, ever. Fitz said, “I don’t know,” which was better than no, which was what she was afraid he was going to say.

The fact was, Harvard was dead for them now—Ken had emphasized that. The department had disavowed the Psilocybin Project and anybody associated with it or any other form of psychedelic research. They’d fired Dick, ostensibly because he’d given the drug to an undergraduate when he’d sworn that only grad students would be involved, but that was only the proximate cause—they’d got rid of him because he was associated with Tim and Tim was an embarrassment not only to the department but the university as a whole. The upshot was that if you wanted to complete your degree, you’d better toe the line, and if your thesis was in any way related to psychedelic research, you were out of luck. And, of course, all the projects of the inner circle fell into that category, including Fitz’s. Under first Tim, then Dick, he’d been developing a research project along the lines of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment, substituting music students for divinity students and the concert hall for the chapel, the thesis being that the drug would facilitate creativity, opening them up to what down through the centuries had been called divine inspiration, with or without the face of God.