He was right. He was always right. Her reaction was mild, to say the least. Within the hour she began to see colors in everything, an intensity of color she’d never dreamed was there, and things began to shimmer as if in a reflection off a wind-rippled pond, but it was pleasant, all pleasant, and more than that, beautiful beyond compare. At six, she insisted she was all right—and maybe she felt a little giggly, like a girl in a horde of girls at a school party, but that was all right too. “Are you sure, Fräulein?” he kept asking her when she told him she was perfectly capable of getting home under her own power and she kept saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” and giggling, and in the end—she was going to show him what she was made of—she wouldn’t even let him take her to the tram stop but managed everything on her own, even if the ticket taker’s face devolved into a clown’s mask and the woman behind her had a voice that came to her in the brightest colors, bright green, vernal green, banana yellow, a voice like a glade in the deepest jungle in a country far from her own. Then she was home and she was sitting down to the evening meal with her parents and her brothers and no one questioned her and no one knew that anything had changed at all. She didn’t see heaven, she didn’t see hell, there were no demons, there was no God, just . . . color, vivid jolting gorgeous color that took her up the stairs and into the enclosed nest of the bed in her room, where the ceiling came to life and all the stars burned right through the roof.

She took the drug twice more in the course of the next year and dutifully recorded her reactions, which were more or less the same each time and more or less pleasant—more pleasant than less, actually. Toward the end of that year she was in the grocer’s one evening when she ran into a boy from the neighborhood who’d been away in the army and just come home the day before. She hardly recognized him because he wasn’t a boy any longer but a man, and if he bore a resemblance to Herr Hofmann, if he was trim and neat in his uniform and wore wire-framed spectacles, all the better. Three months later he asked her to marry him and she gave her notice at Sandoz and never went back there again.

Part I: Cambridge, 1962

Part I

Cambridge, 1962

Chapter 1

1.