She wasn’t really asking and she didn’t give him time to say yes or no or even get up to use the bathroom—she just rose from the couch with the comforter wrapped round her, drifted off to the kitchen and returned a moment later with two glasses of water and a bottle of the Czechoslovakian sacrament Dick had gone all the way to Canada and back to provide for them. Her eyeliner was blurred, her lipstick faded to pink. Her hair—she wore it like Joanie’s, like the folk singer’s—was a mess, shoved up in a tangle on one side, fallen loose to curtain her face on the other. As she came across the room to him he could see she was shivering—the house was freezing and what he had to do was get up and start the fire, make coffee, make sense of things, but before he could summon the volition she was handing him a glass of water and the pill bottle and settling back into the couch to study his face as if it were the text for the day.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s crazy. Shouldn’t we at least wait till tonight?”

In answer, she took the bottle back from him and shook two pills out into the palm of her hand, holding them there a moment so he could see them, register them, contemplate them—one for him, one for her. Was she trying to goad him? Challenge him? Make up his mind for him in an unrelievedly childish way, as if it were a dare? It was morning. It was cold. He didn’t want to launch himself on another trip, not on the contrails of the last one, and yet the way she offered it, her nonchalance, her certainty, gave him pause. They were on a mission here—he was on a mission—and what did he have to lose? It wasn’t as if he was going to spend the day typing up his notes or writing a book or comparing statistics on drug addiction in lab rats.

And yet, and yet . . .

That was when she showed him who she was. She wasn’t offering, she was taking. In that moment she clapped her hand to her mouth, snatched up her own glass of water and swallowed. Both pills. Both of them—and on top of what she’d taken the night before. The shock must have registered in his face because she gave him a long slow smile and said, “What?”

“But that—you took both of them. That’s five hundred mics.”

She shrugged, shivered again. “I want to see what Tim sees.”