He himself had been on the outside of all that, new to the program in September and one of the last of Tim’s advisees to resist taking that particular flight, and three days ago Tim had put it to him bluntly: “Listen, Fitz—can I call you Fitz or do we have to keep up with these Doctor/Mister games? Fitz, you’re going to have to decide if psychology is really for you, or even what century you’re living in, whether you’re going to be transactional and experiential or go the crusty old Freudian way—or what, play with Skinner’s white rats till you become expert in the psychology of rodents? Or pigeons, maybe pigeons is the way to go, operant conditioning, peck, peck, peck.”

They’d been alone in Tim’s office and Tim had got up to shut the door for privacy. There was a window, a filing cabinet, and just enough room for a desk and two chairs. Tim let a beat go by, then leaned back in his chair. “You don’t want to be a pecker, do you?”

Well, no, of course not, and he didn’t want to be hidebound or the brunt of a joke either, but he was reluctant—and beyond that, uneasy. He came from a long and undistinguished line of Irish drunks and he’d worked hard to get into the program, to get into Harvard, and he didn’t want to screw with that, didn’t want to have to worry about alcohol or this new miracle drug or anything else that could compromise what mattered above all else: the degree, the job, the house, a better life for Joanie and Corey. This was called ambition, class mobility, the American Dream, and he had it in spades. But Tim was persuasive, messianic even, and everyone in the inner circle had taken the drug—was taking it, regularly—and now, feeling left out, feeling pressured, he felt himself giving way.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of—you know that, right?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Then what’s the hang-up? This is nothing less than a revolution we’re talking about, Fitz. The first time I ate mushrooms, the real thing, obtained from a curandera in Mexico—you know what a curandera is?”

“A shaman?”

“Right, a shaman, and we’re talking a thousand years of history here, and you know what? I learned more about the mind in six or seven hours than in fifteen years as a psychologist. God’s truth. And what I’m telling you, Fitz, is that this is a tool we can’t afford to ignore, not as psychologists, not as human beings. You decide.” He tented the fingers of both hands in front of his face and peered through them. “Ball’s in your court, my friend.”

So here he was, and here was the ball, and he was stroking it back.